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https://civicas.net/eventscalendar/2018/3/13/engaging-the-entertainment-industry monthly 0.5 2018-02-13 https://civicas.net/eventscalendar/2018/4/12/founders-fair-2018 monthly 0.5 2018-02-12 https://civicas.net/eventscalendar/2018/5/18/2018-women-for-a-new-los-angeles-luncheon monthly 0.5 2018-01-29 https://civicas.net/eventscalendar/2018/8/30/9th-annual-women-in-green-forum monthly 0.5 2018-01-23 https://civicas.net/eventscalendar/2018/8/3/p3-water-summit monthly 0.5 2017-12-05 https://civicas.net/members-organizatoins daily 0.75 2020-04-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1504760862912-EPD2YFCLFBHM9PQ15GPK/flow+picture.JPG Previous Membership Directory - CYNTHIA HIRSCHHORN flowproject.la founder of flowproject.la, unycyn.com, Unycyn Civic Arts, thecurrent, Women's Civic Action Network, women4commonground.org, advisory board Action Civics LA, governing board ProCon.org, executive and governing board RiverLA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1504760862912-EPD2YFCLFBHM9PQ15GPK/flow+picture.JPG Previous Membership Directory - CYNTHIA HIRSCHHORN flowproject.la founder of flowproject.la, unycyn.com, Unycyn Civic Arts, thecurrent, Women's Civic Action Network, women4commonground.org, advisory board Action Civics LA, governing board ProCon.org, executive and governing board RiverLA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491858937230-DWUZI0T3B3U12RLQJ39X/55c3c00f32868f017b95d9d3_lacma.png Previous Membership Directory - CECE FEILER Co-Chair of LACMA Director's Circle UCLA Resnick NeuroPsychiatric Board , Jewish Federation Board, Chair Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California,Co-Chair LACMA Directors Circle https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491859028384-9OZPKED87WAR8A35BLZL/SGD0BQcM.jpg Previous Membership Directory - DEIRDRE RONEY Common Cause Content Provider https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491863199687-NGYMPTU9ZWI6B56ELZJ0/cropped-URDLogo2014v3mrgd1.jpg Previous Membership Directory - JEANINE CENTUORI urbanrockdesign.com UrbanRock Design and Agency for Civic Engagement / Woodbury University https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1582245464233-7J26UU97LIDZXGLHYPJJ/Cynthia.jpg Previous Membership Directory - Cynthia Hirschhorn Co-Chair of LACMA Director's Circle UCLA Resnick NeuroPsychiatric Board , Jewish Federation Board, Chair Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California,Co-Chair LACMA Directors Circle Email: mia@harvardwood.org What PERSONAL, PROFESSIONAL &/or PHILANTHROPIC SKILLS or RESOURCES would you like to list with the Civicas Network? Community outreach, fundraising, storytelling, writing & content creation Areas of Interest Education Youth Art & Culture What program, project, organization, or civic passion would you like to share with the Civicas Network? United Friends of the Children (supporting LA foster youth and former foster youth) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491862641348-HTVML8964C8GO615C508/logo-1.png Previous Membership Directory - LIZ ONDAATJE www.hrw.org Human Rights Watch, Overseas Development Institute, Fulbright Scholars Enrichment Program of Southern California https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491863419490-TEYEWVSIBBP9G3TSQLPL/ucla-script-main-11.jpg Previous Membership Directory - LESLIE FRAM www.uclabruins.com Mental Athletics Championships @ UCLA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491864912385-NEPMX1CW82N4R0TE51PO/afta_new_lowres_bluegray-2.jpg Previous Membership Directory - DANIELLE BRAZELL Americans for the Arts Board member Data Arts Board Member https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491865221079-5O5CCXNTP5U0ZO4FM46H/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAIdAAAAJGNjYjM5NDljLTk0MzYtNDAyMy04MTMwLWVlNTUxMDhhZDVkZA.png Previous Membership Directory - DENISE MCCAIN-THARNSTROM President and founder of Our Children LA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1489337143440-E7XOC9PB4RZHFV3Y1MSY/mfla-logo-updated.png Previous Membership Directory - DEIDRE LIND mayorsfundla.org The Mayor's Fund for Los Angeles is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving life for all Angelenos. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491865624918-N7YMUHC5KBGKS02QGDWQ/99u_IE90.jpg Previous Membership Directory - SARA QAZI Vice President, Wealth Management Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley We Are Enough, SheEO, The LAB, Kaine Leadership Council https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491866046949-CWIAP47G9UWG32WIBEUC/flyawayhomes_logo_v3_final-e1491795792143.jpg Previous Membership Directory - LAWRY MEISTER http://flyawayhomes.org FlyawayHomes, LLC https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491867199075-2K004UX174L2WVQ0KY29/main-logo.png Previous Membership Directory - JESSICA LEVINSON Loyola Law School Professor Los Angeles Ethics Commission President https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491867569533-LFT5OMMUQEH20MJN35KU/logo_int.gif Previous Membership Directory - TARYN FORDES Children's Defense Fund-CA UCLA Riordan Programs, Jumpstart, Encore, Organizing for Action https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491867758281-I4B2FWNW3532PDIBO151/LA84logo_lg5RBG.JPG Previous Membership Directory - RENATA SIRMIL LA84 Foundation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491867861348-GVGXBBQPYDRVDBUVK03S/Fotolia_76577231_Subscription_Monthly_M-1.jpg Previous Membership Directory - KATE ANDERSON Center for Strategic Public-Private Partnerships https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491868009110-QRKQ61XQJ4IUYHCJ578F/uta-b-384-o.png Previous Membership Directory - RENE JONES United Talent Agency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491868110809-IHAILV7DROHWUCZMHDUW/rsz_1everychildlogo.png Previous Membership Directory - ANNE YOUNGBLOOD Everychild Foundation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491868208866-SKRN5MMFQFEBDLLP4HD5/IpgHpetK.jpg Previous Membership Directory - SELETA REYNOLDS LADOT NACTO, WTS, UCLA, USC, Automobility LA, Silver Lake Forward https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491868895870-IV6BLIATD6ZMPJNFLJZN/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAkJAAAAJDRmNWVkNTU3LTMzYmItNGNiZS04Njc5LTJlODIzN2I1NWRiZQ.png Previous Membership Directory - WRENN CHAIS Board member of Aviva Family and Children's Services Of Counsel - Locke Lord LLP, CASA, KidSave, Zimmer Children's Museum, Just the Beginning (Summer Legal institute) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1491939881582-8MT4UY2VH6SZTU8L8W82/Document.jpeg Previous Membership Directory - SUZANNE ZIMMER Vice Chair Malibu Cultural Arts Commission Arts in Malibu; City of Hope ; Proclaim Justice; NRDC https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1500326671840-1KRM2S0V7CHT9GW994V9/SSzC11yC.jpg Previous Membership Directory - PHYLLIS KLEIN www.fanniemae.com Affordable Housing, Community Development, https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1500326853798-PAKHZJ9DB51ZGFDF4CIL/without+tagline+medium_0.jpg Previous Membership Directory - MARILYN WELLS https://www.socalgrantmakers.org A Psychologist and has worked with many nonprofit organizations. Resources: Democratic Committee members, SCG organizations and members. Interests: Ending Homelessness and violence against women and children, Children education https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1500327087621-29OREUZ57SSFJHOKAN35/NEA_20Seal.jpg Previous Membership Directory - SUZANNE ZIMMER http://www.nea.org Public Arts , N.E.A; Arts in Education; NRDC; https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1500327257083-WS2U6Q0ZIKTKWZWWXWR3/Red_Square_Logo_400x400.JPG Previous Membership Directory - SHEILA MCMULLIN http://www.mikvachallenge.org Youth leadership and civic engagement. Student voice development and amplification. 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Antonieta Arango Aramont Charitable Foundation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536079976418-B60H7272PPUX1R804KLO/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Antonieta Arango Aramont Charitable Foundation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080002181-GS96NX4F6RW143Q8096Y/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Amy Baer https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182215734-BNEPXWLZ20H9YB6NOLCJ/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+12.19.43+PM.png Membership Directory - Melissa Balaban IKAR https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182205038-I4S3JPLNWD2A8N8KL8J7/Screen+Shot+2018-06-15+at+10.38.04+AM.png Membership Directory - Marcia Berman Public Partnership Programs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080299962-DWJXPM3TK1MP2BRHU953/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Mitra Best https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182387747-4LYF1Z82BTJD48B4O2CM/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+12.38.05+PM.png Membership Directory - Sarah Bowman common sense media, family savvy https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182216063-XQR2WDSD6AS8UPJWYXJE/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+12.46.04+PM.png Membership Directory https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531157406190-PE4H5717OTOPSP565FL2/WGF-Logo.jpg Membership Directory - Katie Buckland https://www.wgfoundation.org/ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080032565-SY0FS3R7WGIZ78KN0IW4/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Mary J Chisholm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080481028-ZEE91MVRXI5WF3PP36DN/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Lisa Cohen Development and fundraising for educational institutions (Penn, Harvard, Harvard-Westlake), Today and Tomorrows Children's Fund at Mattel Children's Hospital, Board member of University Synaogue https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080550165-YQK2AJCDX1YFUCW5KU4P/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Katrin Czinger https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080573069-3OSVL0XX57NUO2Q9WIE0/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Anne Davis politics, workforce, skills gap issues https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080594973-WGMN0DH60GWK5RN0D92M/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Shari Davis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182211758-LBK13091LUZBF6W9IOXM/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+1.11.23+PM.png Membership Directory - Suzy Feldman Lionsgate TV https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080618793-5XSX14D4K0RPYVR0R8PK/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Susan Froomer https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080635904-J022NQ3XQRWHBLALJ0EL/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Susan Giesberg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536099599537-MG2R7VJH048I6NM1HP35/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Deborah Hakim https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536080651707-6Y6KH3I51D84J2GTC7J9/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Joan Harrison https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536099508619-NQTK4PNJ4K8JV6Z10ZCA/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Carol Hattler https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081238861-V26M3F9DFBXDYI3JX4S7/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Laura Hein https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529446735312-8VVW1NDT7AJ3RQNNJT8E/Screen+Shot+2018-06-19+at+3.18.36+PM.png Membership Directory - Cynthia Hirschhorn https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182213119-3I45HFR73P4VQCTVHZ5Y/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+12.48.43+PM.png Membership Directory - Jean Huang Board of Harriet Buhai Family Law Center https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1530039704903-KAOM31LP5K7B1M0S91MB/d174c2a85b91c0849a29d559c3b2c827.jpeg Membership Directory - Cyndi Hubach LA Food Policy Council, LA Community Garden Council, Silverlake Reservoir Conservancy https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536708282943-7YF60S5UNDP173NAX3A1/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Jeanne Huybrechts https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081254571-W3SQCM5C15XHWDQ9I95Q/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Nicola Kerner https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081271023-9XGN48FFB42I54T1R43B/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Blair Kohan https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081289392-CMZRHA0B88MRBCCAW3ZT/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Nina Kotick https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182215026-DR5F1KXE9Y7O79SI0MYP/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+12.31.42+PM.png Membership Directory - Cassandra Krause Independent schools, After-school, College access https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182226336-WSZE2CFOU1BSZ0F2TXES/Screen+Shot+2018-06-14+at+2.55.29+PM.png Membership Directory - Romi Lassally Ready to Succeed https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081316700-FU2P5N48ZG2ARO93BLFD/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Ellen Lipson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081343844-DT1F99CTWBU5N00H18IJ/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Molly Morgan https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182212394-TFTH6SQFAZYPZDFZ5WQL/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+12.56.21+PM.png Membership Directory - Nicole Mutchnik WPC (women's political committee) ADL, Planned Parenthood https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081364191-SJVE3U7UOE9B7JNMJXA5/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Jolie Nelson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081380985-UVNTUV6XHBK0B4Q5DATB/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Carrie Norton https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081395722-UHR0TET4AYGWHQ4IO6O2/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Megan O'Block https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081408915-15Q9LDZM1FV381FFGKDP/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Marilyn O'Toole https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081423169-F6JNYD4Q3D55VCJIEP29/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Deb Richard https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182207441-AV4P5D6361N6C9PZ7QHY/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+2.01.26+PM.png Membership Directory - Alicia Rockmore Spark Actions, A millennial platform to help progressives millennials engage in simple actions with impact https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531156525066-V0BJFQ19MKIK7AC3A44L/6f8354541ea18fac22344bcebca6a8af_400x400.jpeg Membership Directory - Tara Roth goldhirshfoundation.org https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182206204-9S0G7L05XOZYE2QQW0YX/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+2.22.54+PM.png Membership Directory - Priscilla Sands https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182212379-H0LU3MBICHNMZHRH0WQ2/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+1.00.20+PM.png Membership Directory - Amy Sloane-Pinel I engage closely with the following organizations on behalf of Meridian: World Economic Forum; Bretton Woods Committee; Atlantic Council; German Marshall Fund; Archery Foundation for Inclusive Entrepreneurship https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081437709-V7OD0MY5ZTI0EUNNTP6I/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Nancy Stephens https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182210883-TM96LFQBPVYTZCOCO0RW/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+1.18.43+PM.png Membership Directory - Jennifer Velaise Doyon Ltd. Alaska Native Corp., Foster Care Counts, Doyon Foundation, Pine Ridge Girls School https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1533166753222-X9WYUFE98JF691NW7RHE/Facing+History+and+Ourselves.png Membership Directory - Elizabeth Vogel https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182210203-G6JNP422DGP05KLUP6J3/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+1.23.27+PM.png Membership Directory - Mary Jane Wagle Communities in Schools of Los Angeles whose mission is to surround students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081483738-FRL9MSE4LRDVUGY1PG4E/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Jill Walsh https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182205094-NUEBMEIVJUNRD38B3ZPI/Screen+Shot+2018-06-14+at+3.05.28+PM.png Membership Directory - Leslie Weisberg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182204187-MVII1TI2FL5BZC7E5BXF/Screen+Shot+2018-06-15+at+11.28.59+AM.png Membership Directory - Marilyn Wells John and Marilyn Wells Family Foundation, Neighbors Lifting Neighbors Initiative https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081468701-RPQ1YLJ11DD0E6L7CNVT/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Deb Yang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1536081483738-FRL9MSE4LRDVUGY1PG4E/183382-004-8D595FA4.jpg Membership Directory - Caprice Young https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529182209151-GJU5EW7BCTDJUUZZR3VJ/Screen+Shot+2018-06-08+at+1.50.01+PM.png Membership Directory - Sarah Zurell Primary - Pavemint LLC -- help reduce the carbon footprint connected to searching for parking. Secondary - Can't Do Nothing, -- provide resources to refugees. https://civicas.net/civicas-events-for-home-page daily 0.75 2019-02-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449876004-6O8JL7KT2JBPEJYRAGN3/WCAN%2Bevent%2Bmedia%2B-%2B22.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449876004-6O8JL7KT2JBPEJYRAGN3/WCAN%2Bevent%2Bmedia%2B-%2B22.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449250124-90INNHSE13IR8GV4CB1U/WCAN%2Bevent%2Bmedia%2B-%2B11.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449184519-JK1R6GBRWYKN49AHK0CU/WCAN%2Bevent%2Bmedia%2B-%2B16.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449371931-ON9IS014PXPZEHJ0I5DQ/IMG_9549.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449324325-2F1AZ4PUKP8GUMTITYVJ/IMG_9537.JPG Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449155715-S7U2DUC9CDA4MDB7IQ4N/IMG_9517.JPG Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529450503709-HJCS9P8WJSWYBE9161R7/IMG_9516.JPG Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449305945-4QPTERIA30G09O6JXYP4/2018-3-8%2BCivicas%2Bforum%2B-%2B52.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449284267-QNM8PS4MM08WX017HPFO/2018-3-8%2BCivicas%2Bforum%2B-%2B23.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529449271321-GRV64B1QV6N61O9FHLQK/2018-3-8%2BCivicas%2Bforum%2B-%2B15.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529448990652-0W1VUSC87ZCT9ZVDSETN/2018-3-8%2BCivicas%2Bforum%2B-%2B15.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543531805876-5ZYVG7YQBNV69TX2CX8O/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+02.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532823950-J2T0DDTVAZSOEYJ83PXN/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+07.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532955928-RX0IKUFNZCNXLGB5PDGI/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+06.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532823716-1FG5ANYOY9U4GFSJSO45/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+09.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532828280-B2ECMW25YBD2YF4JQ1J0/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+17.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532830705-DRPTR9NFQVH0Q77KEQGJ/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+20.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532965954-HJ1SQZSPGKG3MCWVIIJI/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+21.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532966147-Z5VZO9LY0QI9A3S3PXZS/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+30.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532975745-KWZY4H7T7HGNUR9NIKEV/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+32.jpg Civicas events for home page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1543532976997-DN4Z9BPC4T0W7G7RFG7K/2018-10-20+LA+H20+Mountains+to+Sea+-+43.jpg Civicas events for home page https://civicas.net/community-1 daily 0.75 2018-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532620999412-G5Q7N0FQ7BNDXLEN99O5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.03.01+AM.png community - This Artist Is Fighting Gentrification With Murals https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532620999412-G5Q7N0FQ7BNDXLEN99O5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.03.01+AM.png community - This Artist Is Fighting Gentrification With Murals https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532620785259-WCXPWW51M9QX03EZHNNZ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+8.59.14+AM.png community - Fleeing War-Torn Homes for Crippling Rents—California Housing Costs Creating Harsh Reality for Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531867263326-XWHDTY2TPVWU097FTPIM/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+3.40.50+PM.png community - Take LACMA and Put It In South L.A.? Great Idea https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531867119956-N7KP6PAQ2HIALQST97K0/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+3.38.26+PM.png community - The Sensory City Philosopher https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531866976263-871K2YELEG7O5NQJB09X/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+3.35.18+PM.png community - What Cities Do Right to Integrate Immigrants, in 4 Charts https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531866808500-BLVLZVT00CRGJSOX07I9/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+3.33.06+PM.png community - Launderettes of London https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531866653455-094H4BBU6GYMJ741UJZK/merlin_141196293_7870dae8-5cc0-4ac9-ab52-e9a858028d03-superJumbo.jpg community - Lounge in Them. Dash Through Them. But Don’t Call Them Parks. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531866536348-VW9P5K2J4WKJM120I6PL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+3.28.12+PM.png community - How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531866360970-9TVP3YQ4LEUZ1ZCXXRYS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+3.25.08+PM.png community - Office and Residential Development Driving Revival of Midwest Downtowns https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531857521034-MCUTKGEVKAUAQ0TLHG1M/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+12.58.21+PM.png community - First of Garcetti-Backed Homeless Shelters Nears Opening, With a $700,000 Deck https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531857412897-T8SLPR5UXCHNYP3OWN4N/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+12.56.05+PM.png community - California Ghost Town Sells for $1.4 Million https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531759405782-7S1CCA9N9PS4GG8BGLCL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+9.43.11+AM.png community - Public Outcry Against Family Separation Is Working The Trump administration missed a crucial deadline for family reunification this week. On June 26, a federal judge ordered the government to reunite children under age 5 who had been separated from their parents after showing up at the border. The administration identified 75 children who were eligible, but the government didn’t manage to bring all of them back to their families. Trump officials expected 34 families to be reunited, but 17 still had pending background checks. 10 parents were in criminal custody and could be reunified with their children once released. Yet the government couldn’t find the parents of 20 of the children that were younger than 5. 12 had been deported, and eight were released in the United States. One parent and child who were separated might both be U.S. citizens. Officials are still trying to find the parent. This inefficient process doesn’t bode well for a deadline that’s coming up in two weeks, when the rest of the estimated 3,000 children who were separated must be reunited with their parents, according to the court’s demands. An exodus Meanwhile, court files documenting Trump’s family separation policy have been released as part of the State of Washington, et. al. v. Donald Trump lawsuit. The documents show the cruelty of the policy that punishes people who are already fleeing hardship. One immigrant mother who escaped domestic abuse in Guatemala said that officials told her that she would never see her daughter again. “I cannot express the pain and fear I felt at that point,” she said according to the documents. Another mother recalls ICE officials telling her, “‘Don’t you know that we hate you people? We don’t want you in our country.’” And a BuzzFeed investigation reveals inhumane treatment of pregnant women who are detained at the border, opening with a woman who miscarried while in detention. Officials refused to help her. “‘An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors,’” she told BuzzFeed. Effective outcry Because of intrepid investigative reporting, the public is becoming aware of the harm the Trump administration has caused by its harsh immigration policies. As the public stands up to speak out against these endeavors, the administration has also been forced to walk back their family separation policy. This outcry has ranged from people informally protesting Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she ate at a Mexican restaurant to the massive Families Belong Together marchesthat on took place June 30. Judicial advocates are also putting in the work. It’s because of various lawsuits that we know about the callousness which family separation is being carried out and that this reunification is happening in the first place. And these protests are only the beginning of the collective actions that push back against these policies that tear families apart. Learn more at GOOD https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531759096817-O1HXPFZCRHW72OO67BKU/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+9.34.23+AM.png community - Notice of Boil-Water Order Came Too Late, Many D.C. Residents Say Tens of thousands of people in the nation’s capital were warned against drinking their water Friday, prompting anger and confusion among D.C. residents who said they weren’t notified promptly of a potential contamination of the city’s water supply. D.C. Water continued to advise those in a wide swath of Northwest and Northeast Washington to boil their water until further notice. John Lisle, a spokesman for the agency, said the warning would probably not be lifted until Saturday at the earliest. Lisle said there have been no reports of sickened customers or other evidence that a temporary drop in water pressure in parts of the system had put District residents at risk. But he said the advisory to boil tap water would remain in effect until tests ruled out that bacteria or other contaminants were in the water supply. Despite the absence of immediate danger signs, some D.C. residents and public officials said they were worried about how the utility and District government had handled the notification process — with a drawn-out trickle of warnings, some issued in the middle of the night on Twitter, that did not directly reach some affected people until more than 12 hours after the problem was detected. The government’s competence in alerting residents of emergencies is especially important to residents of the District, a densely populated capital and potential target for terrorism. “We’re concerned, and I think a lot of people are actually furious, that there was not a real effort to notify thousands of people who were drinking the water when they got up in the morning, making coffee and giving their kids the water,” said Erik Olson of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Even mildly contaminated water that doesn’t harm healthy adults could be dangerous for others, such as infants, senior citizens and people with compromised immune systems, Olson said. “Clearly, there needs to be a better game plan to get the word out when there is a boil-water alert,” he said. Sasha Lezhnev, a 38-year-old Columbia Heights resident, said he got a call from D.C. Water at 8:30 a.m., about 12 hours after the malfunction and more than four hours after the utility put out a boil-water advisory on Twitter. Lezhnev said he and his wife give filtered tap water to their 9-month-old son, Leo, and could have given the baby contaminated water had they not already made baby formula. “It’s irresponsible that they only called me 12 hours after the problem occurred,” he said. Utility officials said they discovered at about 8:30 p.m. Thursday that a broken valve at the Bryant Street Pumping Station south of McMillan Reservoir had caused pressure in some pipes to drop. Low pressure creates a risk that contaminated groundwater can seep into the pipes, Lisle said. The valve was working properly again about an hour later. At 10:59 p.m., D.C. Water tweeted that a “temporary problem” at the pumping station had caused a drop in water pressure and stated, “More updates to follow.” Five hours later, as most of the city slept, the utility updated its website, sent emails to journalists and put out a tweet with a warning to boil water. Shortly after 4:30 a.m., the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency issued emails and text messages to 104,000 people who had signed up to receive alerts. By 6:40 a.m., some people were having problems accessing D.C. Water’s website, prompting the utility to advise customers to use a specific type of browser to view the site. “Our website seems to be loading on Chrome, but not Safari,” the utility tweeted. Lisle said robo-calls to customers began at about 6 a.m. Friday, but that the utility’s system can only make the calls over an extended period. Some customers reported not receiving calls until close to noon on Friday. “I don’t know the exact number of hours, but it would take a long time,” Lisle said of the robo-call technology. “It’s not a perfect system.” D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), who chairs the council’s Committee on Transportation and the Environment, sent a letter to D.C. Water General Manager David Gadis on Friday that said the episode had caused “extreme anxiety” among her constituents and that many said they learned of the warning to boil water only indirectly, and after they or their children had consumed tap water. “It seems the public was not informed in a timely manner,” Cheh wrote, adding a list of specific questions about the incident and the notification process. The office of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) defended the city’s handling of the water problem in a written statement. “As soon as D.C. Water made the determination that, as a precaution, they would issue a boil water alert for part of D.C., we began spreading the word through our own alert systems,” the mayor’s office said. By early Friday morning, “news about the boil alert was on the television, radio, online news and on social media,” the statement said. At a news conference Friday morning, Gadis said it had taken time for officials at the utility to determine who might be at risk and that they did not want to stir widespread panic. “We didn’t want to send an alarm to people who weren’t affected,” he said. D.C. Water initially said the warning applied to those who live within a large area across the top of the city, from midtown in the south to Military Road in the north and from Potomac Heights and Georgetown in the west to the eastern boundary of the District. That shifted by midday, when the utility issued a revised and interactive map, narrowing the affected areas to a band stretching from the Potomac shore, through parts of Georgetown and into Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights and then east through Edgewood and Brookland. The effects of the warning were widely felt at a time of year when water is in high demand across a sweltering city. D.C. officials said they closed 14 pools and 16 spray parks in the impacted areas. Warnings were put up at libraries not to drink from fountains. Water bottles were sent to summer schools and camp sites. Several major hospitals were in the areas covered by the alert. MedStar Washington Hospital Center spokeswoman So Young Pak said the hospital “either experienced low water pressure or lost water for about an hour to the building where Labor and Delivery is located.” She added, “We made bottled water available to our patients and staff.” MedStar Georgetown was delivering water bottles to its patients as employees took “extra steps before and after hand washing to ensure sterile hand hygiene,” Marianne Worley, a spokeswoman for the hospital, said in an email. The hospital also stopped serving coffee, tea and any other foods prepared or processed with water. Amy Goodwin, a spokeswoman for Children’s National Medical Center, said it closed ice machines and water stations and instructed patients and staff to use bottled water. Store shelves in supermarkets and drugstores in the affected areas were quickly emptied of water in various forms — flat, carbonated and flavored. Some bars and restaurants, meanwhile, appeared to take the disruption in stride. “We’re scrambling, but we’re opening,” said John Andrade, who owns four restaurants in the boil-water zone. He said workers at some of his restaurants — which include Meridian Pint, Brookland Pint, Rosario and Smoke & Barrel — had started boiling water for cooking and washing to get ready for the dinner crowds. A sign on the front door of Tryst, a cafe on 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan, warned patrons the restaurant couldn’t serve tea or coffee. “But hey,” it went on, “we still have booze!” Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531333211080-VAMTH6IXY39C4PTL73IL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.19.47+AM.png community - Texas Cities Exploring Creative Ways to Protect Residents from Deportation After a federal appeals court largely upheld the Texas ban on so-called sanctuary cities, Austin City Councilman Gregorio Casar and other city leaders quickly realized they had to get creative in order to shield undocumented immigrants from deportation. Texas Senate Bill 4, commonly referred to as the “show me your papers” law, allows police officers to check immigration status of those they arrest. The law has faced several legal challenges, but remains in effect. “We recognized that we need to go beyond the normal idea of a sanctuary city in Texas,” Casar says. In Austin, this has emerged in a set of recent city council resolutions that address racial disparities in law enforcement arrests and that target the way police officers interact with the immigrant community. Specifically, Austin City Council in mid-June gave unanimous approval for the city manager to work with Austin police to end what’s referred to as discretionary arrests, which occur when an officer decides to arrest a person for an offense that could have been handled by issuing a citation. The other policy calls for police officers to make sure that, if they ask anyone about their immigration status, they also inform them of their have a constitutional right to refuse to answer the question. This pair of resolutions has designated Austin as a “Freedom City,” which the American Civil Liberties Union describes as cities that not only push back against the Trump Administration’s deportation policies, but also take steps to protect others who may be unjustly targeted by the administration’s policies. In Austin, this approach is an intersectional one that blends the concerns of organizers advocating for immigrant rights and Black Lives Matter, Casar said. “This is really part of a national push to go beyond the sanctuary cities concept … (It) includes people that are part of the immigrant rights movement and the movement for black lives coming together against criminal justice reform,” Casar says. Across Texas, the Freedom City movement is picking up steam as Dallas city officials are exploring a similar approach. El Paso has also reportedly been looking into these policies. Sarah Johnson, director for Local Progress — a national network of elected officials — says she is seeing momentum for these kind of policies. “There is an interest from all of our members in Texas and in other states across the country in really pursuing the strongest possible policies to protect immigrants at this time,” Johnson says. Senate Bill 4, even before it took effect, has already negatively impacted the quality of life of immigrants across the state, officials say. “[Dallas residents] are frightened out of their minds,” says Dallas Councilman Philip Kingston who is exploring similar policies in his city. “We can show that domestic violence complaints are way down. We can show that overall calls to police are down.” “We have a definite reduction in the reporting of crime and the cooperation with police,” he says. Sophie Torres, with the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said this heightened fear of law enforcement has impacted the regular day-to-day routines of immigrants in Texas. “It’s that fear that Senate Bill 4 has brought on into the undocumented community that has affected the way they interact in the economy,” Torres says. Under Senate Bill 4, it was estimated that Texas was expected to lose about $220 million in state and local taxes and roughly $5 billion in gross domestic product, according to data compiled by the Reform Immigration for Texas Alliance, a group made up of dozens of state-based immigrant and civil rights groups. “They (immigrants) don’t want to be out as much,” Torres says. “They don’t want to go out to their local restaurant, convenience stores … because there is this heightened security and concern that if they do, they might get stopped. They might get asked for their papers.” Since 2017, Casar has been part of an organizing effort to ensure a statewide legal challenge against the law. Although a federal appeals court in March largely upheld the law, Casar said the court process taught him cities still have a say over how local police communicate with immigrants. “While the state acknowledged that police officers have to be allowed to say, ‘show me your papers,’ the state of Texas conceded that police officers cannot arrest someone for refusing proof of citizenship,” Casar says. “There were openings created by those legal proceedings to allow us to put together a package like this,” he says. And, while the court proceedings were in motion, Casar says the city was also “part of a broader conversation about police reform and criminal justice.” In 2017, black and Latino residents in Austin made up about 75 percent of those discretionary arrested for driving with an invalid license, despite comprising less than 45 percent of the city’s population, according to data presented by the city. Next City reached out to Austin police for comment but did not hear back. However, Ken Casaday, who heads the Austin Police Association, told the Los Angeles Times that although the police union was in support of reducing arrests, misleading data was presented to gather support for the resolutions. To Casar, these resolutions were a way to address police reform and deportation in one package. “Oftentimes those unnecessary arrests and non-violent misdemeanors could result with somebody winding up in the jail and being deported,” Casar says. Casar said both policies should be fully implemented by Sept. 1. In Dallas, Kingston expects such resolutions to be presented to the council toward the beginning of fall. The way Kingston sees it, the policy targeting police interaction with immigrants, “is a last ditch attempt to protect the rights of people who are here either seeking asylum, or working toward a long-term permanent residency.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531333334850-IWGHDGVWXQY27ZR5R0GD/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.21.58+AM.png community - How This Philadelphia Neighborhood Is Gentrifying without Displacement Fernhill Park is a green oasis at the far southwest corner of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. Most of the people who live in the homes surrounding the park are middle-class African-Americans. But on this particular dreary Saturday in May, the park’s only visitors are five white people who didn’t let a little rain stop them from having a few beers at Parks on Tap, a rolling beer garden that set up here for the week. These five had all moved into the neighborhood within the last five years, part of the latest batch of residents to make their way into Germantown, a neighborhood many other white Philadelphians still regard with wariness. Hilary Van Engle moved here shortly after graduating from Bryn Mawr College, because the housing stock had character she found lacking in South Philly, her original first choice. And she could afford it too. Her boyfriend, Kirk Draper, noted that another selling point was the amount of space they got for the price. Claudia Channing had several friends who lived in Mount Airy, the neighborhood next door. But houses up there were already out of her price range, so she chose Germantown. Heather Levi moved to Philly for a job, and knew someone who rented an apartment in this area. She has lived in several cities, but something about this one struck her as interesting: “I grew up in Boston. I lived in New York, I lived in Mexico City, I lived in the suburbs of Chicago,” Levi says. “But when I moved to Philadelphia, what I thought was, ‘This is the most integrated city I’ve ever seen.’ And people were like, ‘Philadelphia? Are you crazy?’ And then I realized it was because I [had] moved to Germantown.” Philadelphia overall is one of the country’s more diverse large cities: African-Americans make up 43 percent of the population; Caucasians account for 41 percent; and Asians and those who identify as other races make up about 6 percent each. The remainder consists of residents with mixed racial background. Among these demographics, those who identify as Hispanic or Latino (across all races) account for 12 percent of the city’s population. But the city’s various racial groups do not intermingle across Philadelphia’s 135 square miles in a gorgeous mosaic; instead, they live in a patchwork quilt of segregated neighborhoods. According to an index of segregation developed at Brown University’s American Communities Project, Philadelphia is the fourth most segregated city in the United States. Germantown is one of the few diverse patches in this quilt. Those outside Northwest Philadelphia tend to see the neighborhood as mostly poor, overwhelmingly African-American and plagued by crime and violence. Those who live there know differently, as do their neighbors in Mt. Airy, East Falls, Chestnut Hill and West Oak Lane. African-Americans do make up the great majority (about 80 percent) of Germantown residents, but a sizable portion of the neighborhood — about 15 percent — consists of Caucasians, based on census data from 2016. Asians account for a small (1.8 percent) but slowly rising share of the population, as do those of other races (1.2 percent), while the Latino share of the population has fallen slightly since 2010, to 2.9 percent. While the median household income for the zip code encompassing most of the neighborhood is just above $28,000 — a good bit below the citywide median of about $39,000 — the neighborhood has both pockets of deep poverty, especially in parts of East Germantown, and islands of middle-class comfort, including the area around Fernhill Park. There’s also a sprinkling of affluence: a little more than five percent of Germantown households have annual incomes of $125,000 or more. This particular demographic and economic mix, more eclectic than it might seem at first glance, is what the neighborhood’s established residents and many of its newer arrivals are mobilizing to preserve. WHYY reporter Annette John-Hall, in a recent article, referred to what’s happening on Germantown’s east side as “gentrification for black people by black people.” Yet on both the east and west sides, even those who have added a distinctly African-American accent to the process of renewal see a role for everyone — black, white, rich, poor — in rejuvenating the neighborhood. In particular, it’s the “and poor” part that sets Germantown’s renewal process apart from the way other neighborhoods have dealt with gentrification. Where anti-gentrification activists in Point Breeze have gone so far as to torch new homes under construction, and North-Central Philadelphia residents protest Temple University’s drive to turn their neighborhood into an extension of its campus, Germantowners rely mainly on the neighborhood’s homegrown resources to create what may well become one of the first income-diverse gentrified neighborhoods. BUILD STRONG COMMUNAL PLACES This unusual transformation effort shows itself most vividly in two of the neighborhood’s newest community gathering places. The owners of these businesses — one a noted African-American intellectual and social critic, the other a pair of white Northwest Philly natives with deep roots in community activism — share common goals and run their distinctive establishments in a similar fashion. The higher-profile of the two is Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee and Books. The higher profile comes partly from a location right on Germantown’s historic center, Market Square, and partly from its proprietor, Marc Lamont Hill. Hill, a Temple University professor, grew up in North and West Philly and lived in gentrifying Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for a while before returning to Philly to settle in Germantown, in 2005. Since the November 2017 opening of Uncle Bobbie’s, the stylish bookstore-café has been busy from dawn till dark, filled with people from almost all walks of life who come to enjoy its homey atmosphere — well, it’s homey if your home includes a library full of books. Hill says he chose to settle in Germantown because of both its diversity and its potential. His income enables him to live just about anywhere in Philadelphia or its suburbs — “I could have a luxury apartment downtown,” he says — but he wanted something else. Like a good barber. In determining whether a neighborhood was right, he says, “One good measure for me was, could I find a barbershop? If I’m in a neighborhood that’s too fancy, there’s no barbershop for me. But if I’m in a neighborhood where all the barbers are, I wouldn’t want to live there because I couldn’t find a coffee house or a bookstore.” Hill saw in Germantown a neighborhood capable of supporting all of these, and the patronage at Uncle Bobbie’s has borne him out. Just a few blocks away is another gathering place, one of those hidden gems Germantowners love to polish. The Germantown Espresso Bar opened in the early fall of 2017 on Maplewood Mall, an intimate commercial lane just off the neighborhood’s main shopping street. Proprietors Miles Butler and Jeff Podlogar have fashioned a small, two-story home into a cozy space for reading, working or socializing while sipping. Several local organizations that focus on social-justice issues gather regularly in an upstairs community meeting room. Unlike Hill, Butler wasn’t as concerned about finding a good barber. But what he saw in Germantown closely matched what Hill saw. “I grew up here,” Butler says. “I sang in the Keystone State Boychoir,” which rehearses at nearby First Presbyterian Church in Germantown. “My father taught lessons at Maplewood Music, and I used to run around Maplewood Mall. I fell in love with this neighborhood at a very early age.” After spending several years traveling and performing music across the country, he returned to Germantown with the idea of opening a coffee shop. “It felt good to be in the neighborhood,” he says, “and we didn’t have a coffee shop here.” Both shops make themselves open and welcoming to a broad cross-section of Germantowners. On the day I visited the Espresso Bar, an opening reception was winding down for Miles Conyers, a young African-American photographer whose works were on display in the shop. “While we’re very aware that we are two white men, we are for and by the community,” Butler says. “Having grown up here, I’m sensitive to the racial and class divisions in the community.” Hill shares that desire to create a place where all races and classes are welcome, but acknowledges that he hasn’t achieved his goal yet. “There’s a rehab two doors down from my shop,” says Hill. “[Rehab patients] walk by Uncle Bobbie’s and go to B&B [Breakfast and Lunch, a popular local restaurant two blocks north] to get their coffee, even though our small coffee, we sell it for the same price. The reason they do, quite frankly, is that it didn’t feel like [Uncle Bobbie’s] was welcoming to them. It didn’t feel right culturally, didn’t feel like it was where they should be.” He explained that he got the same sensation as a child when walking past West Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania campus, and acknowledged that the feeling of belonging was partly an individual choice. “But it’s the responsibility of the people at those institutions, in those spaces, to make them welcome to the extent that they want them to be,” he continues. “To me, the question is, How do I let them know that I do want them here? What can I do to make them want to be here, and be accountable to them, and service their needs in ways that affect them?” THE EVOLUTION OF GERMANTOWN’S ‘MIX’ “Germantown has been mixed for centuries,” Butler tells Next City. Although the demographic breakdown has changed over those centuries, his statement gets at a fundamental truth. William Penn was a Quaker who left England to establish an American colony that would be tolerant to all religious beliefs. In 1683, Penn sold land in his new colony to Francis Daniel Pastorius so that the German religious dissident could establish a settlement where his fellow Pietists, as well as Mennonites and Quakers, could practice their beliefs freely. That spirit of tolerance and dissent from orthodoxy continues to inform Germantowners’ attitudes today. But the trajectory of the neighborhood over the centuries has varied. The town Pastorius and his fellow Germans founded began as a linear settlement along an old Lenape trail the settlers called “the Great Road” — today’s Germantown Avenue. After the railroads reached Germantown in the mid-19th century, the neighborhood began to expand to the road’s east and west. Germantown’s west side quickly filled with stately homes for the well-to-do. Some popped up on the east side as well, but most of that area was developed to appeal to working-class families. These two groups of residents, both mostly white, coexisted until the late 1950s and early 1960s. At that point, in response to both a fresh influx of African-American migrants from the South and the construction of public housing in the neighborhood, real estate agents who were looking for a quick profit began to stoke racial fears; they sold cheap houses to black families in search of a decent home, then warned the white neighbors of an impending invasion to trigger panic selling. What made Germantown’s fate different from that of a number of similar neighborhoods in North Philadelphia was that not all the white people fled; a few hung on to their large homes on the neighborhood’s more affluent west side, and new white residents with a more countercultural sensibility reclaimed space that other fleeing whites had left. Ann Marie Doley was part of that latter group. She bought a house on Rockland Street in southwest Germantown in 1981, after the wave of panic selling had mostly run its course. Her block, she said, has been through ups and downs in the 37 years she’s lived here. Right now, her particular block is more down than up, thanks to what she terms an “overconcentration” of low- and no-income renters. The problem on her block, she said, is that the owners of its large, three-story homes bring in friends and relatives as tenants to help them defray expenses, overcrowding those homes as a result. Ann Marie’s block hasn’t yet seen a wave of renovation: according to Zillow estimates, most of the houses on West Rockland Street have values ranging from $7,000 to $75,000. But there are a few signs of change: Zillow values a renovated home that sold for about $42,000 this past January at $93,000, and a second rehabbed home on the block sold for $135,000 in 2010. At the neighborhood level, the story follows a similar arc. The Zillow Home Value Index estimates Germantown’s median house value as $227,000 as of May 2018. That’s about 54 percent above the citywide median of $147,800. The 30 percent increase in house values in Germantown since May 2010 closely tracks the 29 percent rise citywide over the same time span. Contrast that with house values that have zoomed upward over the same time span, in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods: in Francisville they’re up 58 percent, in Fishtown 84 percent. In Point Breeze, they have skyrocketed, rising 172 percent since May 2014, the earliest year for which Zillow provides May data for that neighborhood. (Median house values in all three of these neighborhoods are now higher than they are in Germantown; in 2010 or 2014, that was true only for Francisville.) But that doesn’t mean residents such as Doley don’t worry about what might happen. She does not oppose redevelopment but she does want it to be structured so that as few people as possible face displacement. “You can’t stop it, so you have to try to manage it,” she says. Besides, rising home values mean that low-income, African-American homeowners especially benefit: “They can get some equity, which has been denied them forever, right?” The continual influx of mostly white middle-class residents who find lots to like in Germantown as it is distinguishes this second-oldest neighborhood in today’s Philadelphia from the other mostly African-American neighborhoods that experienced disinvestment and white flight in the 1960s and 1970s. Their presence makes Germantown exceptional in a way that even famously integrated Mount Airy is not. By moving into a neighborhood where close to eight of every ten residents are African-American, and a plurality of those residents are low-income — 48 percent of Germantown households have incomes of $25,000 or less — they help make the neighborhood one of the more socioeconomically diverse in the city. The people who stuck with Germantown in the down years see this economic diversity as an asset to maintain, now that seeds of change are beginning to sprout in the form of new businesses and residential construction. And that includes most of the people who have been planting those seeds. CULTIVATE LOCAL DEVELOPERS One of the biggest seed planters is Ken Weinstein, the Mount Airy-based head of Northwest Philly’s largest real estate development firm. Weinstein’s firm, Philly Office Retail, specializes in restoration and adaptive reuse of the area’s rich stock of old buildings. And in a rapidly-spreading offshoot of his business, he enables a new generation of small-scale developers to follow in his footsteps. Bruce McCall, a 38-year-old Mount Airy native, was the first of this new generation to go through what became Jumpstart Germantown, a developers’ boot camp that has produced its own offshoots in two other Philadelphia neighborhoods, with more on the way. “Ken calls me a trendsetter,” he says. His story is similar to that of some 300 people who have gone through the Jumpstart training since the program began two and a half years ago. McCall met Weinstein when he attended a community meeting to discuss plans Weinstein had to purchase and rehabilitate the former Germantown YWCA. The meeting didn’t go too well for Weinstein, but it ended up being productive for McCall afterward. “After the meeting, I reached out and said, ‘Ken, I see they beat you up a little bit tonight, but I’m looking to be a developer in the area.’ And I had Germantown, Mt. Airy and West Oak Lane in my sights,” he says. McCall asked Weinstein if he would sit down and give him some pointers on the development business in exchange for his doing IT work for Weinstein. So McCall brought Weinstein’s website back online after it got hacked, and then the developer invited McCall to meet with him and another person who had expressed a similar interest in development. “When we started our meeting, we noticed he had a notepad,” says McCall. “So he was taking notes too, and we started wondering, ‘What exactly is it that you’re doing?’ He was thinking of starting Jumpstart Germantown from these meetings. So myself and Nancy Deephouse [became] the first two Jumpstart Germantown students.” McCall was already working on a house in West Oak Lane when he met Weinstein, and since going through Jumpstart, he has restored two more houses, one in Germantown and the other in Point Breeze. His experience with the Germantown house on West Coulter Street illustrates the neighborhood’s changing fortunes. “When we first did the numbers on it, we were thinking [we could get] $230,000 for it after the repairs,” he says. “And Ken was thinking $180,000. But it wound up going for $280,000, so there was an increase in just the first year.” McCall also notes that two brand-new houses are now under construction a block away from the one he renovated. “A lot of people don’t know this, but they’re going to go for $420,000.” That figure might cause Christian Heyer-Rivera some angst, for he would see it as a sign that the neighborhood is in danger of becoming too thoroughly middle-class. Heyer-Rivera moved to Germantown in 2004, while finishing a degree from what is now Palmer Theological Seminary. He and his wife had spent the previous two years in Mt. Airy and had fallen in love with the area, so when he was named director of Christian education at the racially integrated First Presbyterian, the couple immediately started looking for a home in the neighborhood. They settled near Greene Street and Washington Lane, just outside the Tulpehocken Station Historic District, one of three National Register historic districts in the neighborhood. Heyer-Rivera is up front about why he moved to Germantown: “I didn’t move here to be around a bunch of white people,” he tells Next City, elaborating further. “Other than politically, the neighborhood’s pretty diverse. Socioeconomically, racially, there’s a lot going on here. And I wanted to do ministry in a place that was contextually urban, and I wanted even more diversity than Mt. Airy had as far as economics were concerned.” “I made a commitment that I needed to have people around me who were different than me,” he says. “Germantown enticed me too because the population was that diverse. People thought differently, people had different experiences.” Too much upscaling of the neighborhood’s housing stock, he fears, would snuff all this out. But Weinstein believes the let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom approach to development that the Jumpstart program encourages will actually help prevent this from happening. “In Jumpstart, we talk about creating a healthy mix of market-rate and affordable housing,” he says. That’s one of the stated goals in our workbook. But just like the neighborhood, developers are not a homogeneous group. We have different goals and strategies, and that includes goals on rental rates” and house prices. “I always tell people in the training program to follow their passions. If their passion is historic preservation, they should do that. If they are interested in preserving affordable housing, they should pursue ways to create it.” Weinstein’s largest redevelopment project to date also reflects those mixed goals. Focused on Germantown’s southwest corner near SEPTA’s Wayne Junction regional rail station, the project — also called “Wayne Junction” — will take several abandoned and underutilized former industrial buildings and turn them into office space, new restaurants, and a mix of market-rate and affordable apartments. Enthusiasm for this project runs high in the neighborhood, something that couldn’t always be said about prior projects Weinstein has proposed. KEEP THE FOCUS ON AFFORDABLE HOUSING While everyone interviewed for this article shares a vision of a reinvigorated Germantown that is racially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse, most acknowledge that some obstacles remain in its path. One is the need to ensure that the affordable housing that gets built stays that way. Nora Lictash, the executive director of the Women’s Community Revitalization Project and a Germantown resident since 1971, has stepped in to provide that, with a 35-unit townhouse project on what’s currently vacant city-owned land near Wister Regional Rail station. “[The units] will start out as rentals, and the tenants will have the option to buy them,” she explains. “The land will be owned by the Community Justice Land Trust, so it will be affordable permanently. There will be equity that the owners will be able to draw out, and they will be able to pass the homes onto their children, but any buyers will have to meet income guidelines.” The project got a less-than-warm reception, however, when it was presented to neighbors on Germantown’s generally poorer east side, according to Emaleigh Doley, who attended the informational meetings. Emaleigh is one of Ann Marie Doley’s daughters and like her mother, still lives in Germantown. She is the commercial corridor manager at the Germantown United Community Development Corporation. “The neighbors [at the meeting] were predominantly low-income homeowners,” she says. “They felt their area couldn’t improve by adding more poor people to it.” Can this neighborhood successfully integrate the poor and the not-poor? Some census tract data suggests it might be possible. For instance, the blocks bordering Fernhill Park have median household incomes approaching $60,000 per year and homeownership rates between 66 and 88 percent. Walk two blocks from the park and those figures drop into the low-to-mid- 20s for income and from 25 to 35 percent for homeownership. And despite an influx of white residents, all of these blocks remain predominantly African-American. Institutions such as the Hansberry Community Garden also bring lower- and higher-income residents together in pursuit of common goals. Another hopeful sign is that most of the reinvestment is of local origin, exemplified by those Jumpstarters. And some residents do their best to make sure it stays that way. “A group of people came in to the shop a while back and said they weren’t developers but investors,” Butler says. “I try to be nice with everybody here, but if you’re coming into this neighborhood to figure out how to make money off the community, I’m not fine with that. I think they got the hint, and they departed.” Perhaps the most hopeful sign that everyone in Germantown might succeed at revitalizing the neighborhood while keeping it diverse on all fronts is that the pace of change has been gradual so far, and everyone understands what might come if that pace accelerates. This measured approach buys the neighborhood valuable time — time it can use to protect its interests. And maybe when that Parks on Tap beer garden rolls into Fernhill Park again, the scene will be one of a diverse array of residents enjoying Philadelphia’s most distinctive neighborhood on a bright sunny day. Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531333705857-MLCSQS39Q5H1AUZJNWFB/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.27.45+AM.png community - Abolishing a Water District isn't Easy — Even When it's Accused of Nepotism, Mismanagement and Delivering Brown Water For its litany of problems, it’s been hard to kill the tiny Sativa Los Angeles County Water District. It has survived scandals involving financial instability, nepotism, poor maintenance and mismanagement. Then in the last year, brown, smelly water started coming out of the taps — giving county and state officials what they believe is their best chance to close the embattled water district once and for all. But it won’t be easy. The first challenge is economic: Sativa delivers inexpensive water to 1,600 homes in Compton and Willowbrook — and finding a replacement has been hard. The second is legal: Laws intended to thwart government overreach make it difficult to close a district — even one as troubled as Sativa. Across California, there are about 3,000 water agencies, remnants of an archaic system that until about two decades ago allowed anyone with a water source that could serve 15 or more people to seek a permit to create a community water system. These districts began to flourish in the West in the late 19th century for drinking water and agricultural needs. Sativa was established in 1913. L.A. County residents receive drinking water from one of 220 community water systems. The population served per system ranges from the 25 customers of Winterhaven Mobile Estates in Antelope Valley to the 4 million customers of L.A. Department of Water and Power, according to a 2015 UCLA report. More than 130 water agencies in the county serve fewer than 10,000 people each, the UCLA report found. Sativa, like many small water districts, pumps groundwater locally and delivers it through pipes to customers’ homes. A 1965 court order granted the district free access to 474 acre-feet per year from the central groundwater basin, which stretches from east L.A. County to the San Gabriel Valley. Sativa can lease additional water as needed. Customers pay a flat rate of $65 a month, which brings in close to $1.3 million in revenue to Sativa Los Angeles County Water District. Residents of other parts of Compton who receive water through the city’s Municipal Water Department pay an average household bill of about $100 per month. But that cheap water comes at a cost. Sativa says it lacks the $2.7 million needed to install water meters on properties in its district or the estimated $10 million to $15 million needed to upgrade the 70-year-old pipes responsible for depositing manganese in drinking water, which can make faucets run brown. At a time when the state has pushed to consolidate smaller public water districts to pool resources and increase efficiency, oversight officials have repeatedly questioned Sativa’s economic feasibility. “In order to correct the deficiencies they have, they would have to raise water rates on their customers punitively,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. County supervisor who sat on the county oversight commission during both of the previous Sativa dissolution attempts. For customers living paycheck-to-paycheck in the largely black and Latino neighborhoods served by Sativa, “a huge hit on their water bill would be back-breaking,” Yaroslavsky added. “They shouldn’t have to shoulder that burden. The agency has failed them.” Sativa successfully fended off two previous attempts to dissolve the district by L.A. County’s Local Agency Formation Commission — the state-appointed body charged with monitoring special districts. Its 2005 effort showed that Sativa operated without a budget, an auditor or a general manager, but the water district was granted a second chance. Seven years later, a review revealed that then-board president Johnny Johnson had hired his wife and stepdaughter and that board members awarded themselves illegal Christmas bonuses. The board pushed back hard and LAFCO officials backed off. But with residents so outraged by poor drinking water, LAFCO is expected Wednesday to initiate its third attempt to dissolve Sativa. Anticipating that the process could drag into 2019 or beyond, Assemblyman Mike Gipson (D-Carson) introduced a bill that would allow the State Water Board to appoint an administrator to Sativa to manage operations during the dissolution process. If the bill swiftly makes it way through the legislature, Sativa could receive new leadership as early as September. “Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that Sativa cannot effectively manage on its own,” Gipson said. Closing a water district is rare. Paul Novak, executive officer of LAFCO, said the commission has dissolved two in recent years, but neither provided service to residents. Part of the challenge with getting rid of Sativa is that LAFCO would have to find a suitable replacement. As LAFCO sought alternatives in 2012, the nearby city of Compton was on the brink of bankruptcy and the Central Basin Municipal Water District was under fire for spending practices and engaged in a water fight. LAFCO decided that neither was a good fit. The five existing county waterworks districts are far from Sativa, so dissolving the district into their operations would offer little savings or economies of scale, Novak said. LAFCO lacks the authority to consolidate a public agency, like Sativa, with a private water company. But the State Water Resources Control Board can order such mergers, Novak said. He said LAFCO and the state board are exploring the option. But the biggest hurdle is a law designed to protect tiny agencies and the people they serve. A vote by LAFCO to dissolve a special district can trigger an election or be overturned. If 10% of either the roughly 2,500 registered voters or 1,800 landowners in the Sativa water district were to file written objections with LAFCO during a “protest period” of at least 30 days, then an election of registered voters must be held to confirm the commission’s decision, Novak said. If 50% of registered voters submitted objections in writing, then LAFCO approval of the dissolution would be overturned without an election. “Once a system is set up, it’s very, very difficult for the state or county to shut it down even if they have the mandatory authority,” said Greg Pierce, a UCLA researcher. “Because they get challenged legally and it can takes years and millions of dollars, so they have to move very slowly.” LAFCO commissioners felt in 2012 that they lacked the support of residents, who had reelected the same board despite controversies. They were concerned the board would successfully campaign to halt their dissolution efforts. “It is not for a lack of effort or a lack of will on LAFCO’s part,” Novak said. “It has largely been a concern about finding the appropriate agency to take over service and the concern about it being protested out.” But when residents started documenting brown water flowing from taps earlier this year, Novak said it shifted public opinion. Now, LAFCO thinks it has a greater chance than ever before to get rid of Sativa. Luis Landeros, Sativa’s board president, said the district has implemented a multi-year plan to tackle some deferred maintenance, which should fix the issue of brown water. He did not elaborate on the plan, but said the district needs financial assistance from the state and federal government and help from larger organizations, such as the Water Replenishment District, which manages groundwater in L.A. County, to make needed improvements. Sativa officials blame the discolored water on aging pipes, which they occasionally flush to remove lingering sediment. County officials say the brown water is safe to drink, but acknowledge it contains higher-than-normal levels of manganese. The state water board said the findings did not pose a health threat. Residents have reported rashes and stained clothing. Landeros, who sat on the board during the 2012 dissolution attempt, did not say whether he would wage a legal battle if oversight officials voted to close or merge the agency with a larger one. There are signs, however, the district will put up a fight. At a June 18 town hall meeting held to address the brown water, Sativa allegedly paid people to pose as protesters to defend the agency and hold signs that said “No Dissolution!! No Higher Rates!!” Though an event organizer told The Times the water district had hired him to find paid supporters, Sativa’s board and administrative manager, Maria Rachelle Garza, strongly denied any involvement. Days later, Garza was placed on leave. Compton resident Karen Lewis said her plans to cook a soul food dinner for Father’s Day were upended when discolored water began pouring from her faucet. “It has been a nightmare,” said Lewis, 67. “I’m the matriarch of my family and I can’t even have them over for the holiday dinners anymore.” Like many Sativa clients, Lewis believes her cries for clean water have gone unheard because the customer base largely consists of working-class black and Latino residents with little political sway. For now, Compton City Manager Cecil Rhambo has commissioned an analysis to determine the cost of absorbing the homes in the city that receive water from Sativa. But he said Compton is not in the financial position to take on the entire troubled district with its mounting costs and deferred maintenance. “There are just too many unknowns coupled with the known existing infrastructure needs,” Rhambo said. Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531333543754-QKCE8753ZXANBWBQFX79/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.25.21+AM.png community - ‘Climate Gentrification’ Will Deepen Urban Inequality It’s no surprise that a list of places most at risk from climate change and sea-level rise reads like a Who’s Who of global cities, since historically, many great cities have developed near oceans, natural harbors, or other bodies of water. Miami ranks first, New York comes second, and Tokyo, London, Shanghai, and Hong Kong all number among the top 20 at-risk cities in terms of total projected losses. Cities in the less developed and more rapidly urbanizing parts of the world, such as Ho Chi Minh City and Mumbai, may experience even more substantial losses as a percentage of their total economic output. Looking out to 2050, annual losses from flooding related to climate change and sea-level rise could increase to more than $60 billion a year. But global climate change poses another risk for cities: accelerated gentrification. That’s according to a new study by Jesse Keenan, Thomas Hill, and Anurag Gumber, all of Harvard University, that focuses on “climate gentrification.” While still emerging and not yet clearly defined, the theory of climate gentrification is based, the authors write, “on a simple proposition: [C]limate change impacts arguably make some property more or less valuable by virtue of its capacity to accommodate a certain density of human settlement and its associated infrastructure.” The implication is that such price volatility “is either a primary or a partial driver of the patterns of urban development that lead to displacement (and sometimes entrenchment) of existing populations consistent with conventional framings of gentrification.” The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, advances a simple “elevation hypothesis,” arguing that real estate at higher elevations in cities at risk for climate change and sea-level rise appreciates at a higher rate than elsewhere. It focuses on Greater Miami (defined as Miami-Dade County), the area of the country and of the world most at risk from climate change. The authors track the differential in values, between 1971 and 2017, of properties at different levels of elevation and risk from sea-level rise (based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey), while controlling for other factors. They draw from data on more than 800,000 property sales (from the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser’s Office), including information on property value, building size, year built, bed and bath counts, and tax-assessment values. The study finds considerable evidence of climate gentrification, and for the elevation hypothesis in particular. Properties at high elevations have experienced rising values, while those at lower elevations have declined in value. In fact, elevation had a positive effect on price appreciation in more than three-quarters of the properties and 24 of the 25 separate jurisdictions the authors examined. The study also found support for a secondary hypothesis, the “nuisance hypothesis,” which posits that price appreciation in lower-elevation places had not kept up with higher-elevation places since approximately 2000 due to nuisance flooding. Generally speaking, the areas that had the strongest regression coefficients—that is, the places where elevation best predicted the change in real estate prices—are all along the coast and at the highest risk of flooding, as the graphic below shows. They include Key Biscayne, Miami Beach, and a number of exclusive island enclaves, as well as Sunny Islands and Golden Beach to the north. But these positive associations spanned land-locked communities as well as coastal ones. In fact, more than half of the jurisdictions with positive correlations—13 out of 24—were landlocked. All of these have significant water exposure in the form of lakes and drainage canals. The largest jurisdiction in the sample, unincorporated Miami-Dade County, showed the lowest, but still positive, correlation. Climate gentrification typically occurs via three main pathways, according to the study. The first, and most common, is simply where investors start to shift capital to more elevated properties. (The authors dub this a “superior investment pathway.”) The second occurs when climate change raises the cost of living so that only the wealthiest households can afford to stay in place. This is a “cost-burden pathway.” Lower-income households are forced to move away as the escalating costs of insurance, property taxes, and repairs price them out. The third pathway is when the environment is reengineered to be more resilient. This is a “resilience investment pathway.” The researchers cite the example of Copenhagen: As some of its neighborhoods have been upgraded for resilience, more advantaged households have moved in, and less advantaged, lower-income households have been forced out. The study confirms an important, and under-emphasized, point about gentrification. It does not simply reflect the preferences and decisions of so-called gentrifiers. It is often the product of larger structural forces and major public investments. In Miami, the wealthy have long preferred the coasts. But as the risk of climate change grows, this will likely change, with the wealthy colonizing the higher, less flood-prone ground inland and especially in and around downtown. Indeed, as the study shows, it is the higher places—traditionally home to the less advantaged and the poor—that have seen the largest jumps in price appreciation. As water levels rise and flooding increases, Miami will segregate along new lines, with the poor pushed farther into the region’s hinterlands, or perhaps out of the region altogether—exacerbating the substantial spatial inequality that already defines the region. Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531333795761-TTTJU2CQEBX34WUETPAS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.29.30+AM.png community - 5-Point Agenda 1. SAVE MONEY The city of Los Angeles pays $100M a year in banking fees and interest. This could be reinvested into our communities instead of siphoned out by Wall Street. By depositing our public tax dollars into our a publicly owned and accountable financial institution, Angelenos would keep our money in Our City,creating credit from our own revenue, instead of giving that power to Wall Street to finance wars, pipelines, private prisons, among other socially and environmentally harmful projects. Nearly 50% of the cost of all infrastructure projects go towards paying bank interest and fees – if we fund public projects ourselves through a public bank, our we can half the cost of infrastructure, doubling our power to invest in our own communities. The Bank of North Dakota is the nation’s only state-owned and operated bank. It is also the most profitable bank in the United States. With a nearly 17% return on investment, the BND is more profitable than Goldman Sachs, with a better credit rating than JPMorgan Chase. It withstood the economic crash of 2008 because, unlike large private banks, the BND does not engage in high-risk financial schemes. Like the BND, a municipal bank for Los Angeles would be prohibited from unsafe and unsound banking practices. 2. COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT Private Wall Street banks are responsible for maintaining the stability of their bank system, our tax dollars are used to keep their doors open, instead of it being the other way around. With a public bank, we can focus on the long-term prosperity of our community through low-income housing, green energy infrastructure, co-ops, small businesses, etc. The city-owned Bank of Los Angeles would be a banker’s bank, partnering with local credit unions and community banks, guaranteeing their loans for locally-directed economic development, public works financing, and jobs creation. Fund local projects for low-income housing and neighborhood stabilization efforts by extending credit lines through the public bank’s loan portfolio. The public bank can directly loan money for housing projects below market interest rates; unlike private banks, they won’t be bound by a need to maximize profit margins. Low interest loans or interest free loans for students to invest in education and stimulate the economy. Support small businesses and cooperative ownership structures by increasing the lending capabilities of local credit unions and community banks. Finance transition towards decarbonization and renewable energy. The German Sparkassen public banking networks have funded over 70% of investments for renewable energy infrastructure. Renewables are now Germany’s top source of energy, with one-third of electricity derived from sources including wind and solar. 3. ETHICAL ALLOCATION OF MONEY The municipal public banking movement advocates for banks to be chartered with socially and environmentally responsible mandates. This includes a transparent Board of Directors and an anti-corruption ethos to ensure the bank operates under sustainable and ethical guidelines. The bank’s lending activities would be subject to strict evaluation to determine adherence to its principles and fulfillment of its public policy goals. 4. LOCAL SELF-DETERMINATION The City of Los Angeles pays $3.14B in debt services, which is the cost to borrow money; billions of dollars of our city’s interest payments are redirected into the coffers of Wall Street. A municipal public bank enables the people of the city to recapture public dollars and have a say over the financing of our own community. A chartered public bank maximizes public good within the community rather than maximizing profits globally. With municipal revenues and banking profits being returned to the public, the bank would issue loans to benefit the local economy, not private shareholders. 5. SERVE THE UNBANKED AND UNDERBANKED 3 out of 10 Angelenos do not have either access or adequate access to a checking or savings account and therefore cannot build credit, and are susceptible to theft, fraud, and the predatory practices of financial alternatives such as payday lenders or check cashers. A public bank would help meet the financial needs of the unbanked and underbanked population, largely comprised of minority, working-class communities and immigrant households. A public bank could also provide banking services to the massively growing and unbanked cannabis industry, bringing legitimacy to the finances of this sector. Learn more at Public Bank LA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531333990302-Q0KV7D8FWT1N7T4EVI0Q/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.32.46+AM.png community - Despite Trump's Crackdown, Americans are More Sympathetic to Immigrants, Poll Shows The share of Americans who would like to see fewer immigrants in the country has continued to decline despite President Trump's push to restrict both legal and illegal migration, a new poll showed Thursday. Large majorities also reject Trump's claims that immigrants commit more crimes and take jobs away from American workers, according to the survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. And, despite a series of highly publicized incidents in recent months in which people speaking languages other than English have come under verbal attack, the share of Americans who say they are “bothered” by immigrants speaking other languages has gone down. About three-quarters of Americans say they at least sometimes encounter immigrants who speak little or no English. The share reporting such encounters has more than doubled since the 1990s as immigrant populations have spread throughout the country. But the share of Americans who say they are bothered by such encounters has dropped from nearly 40% a decade ago to about 25% today, the poll showed. The survey provides the latest evidence that the bloc of voters who support further immigration restrictions remain a distinct minority in the U.S., albeit one with disproportionate clout given their sway within the Trump administration. Trump began his presidential campaign denouncing illegal immigration, but quickly began to back restrictions on legal immigration as well. He has pushed Congress to accept sharp new restrictions on legal immigration, so far to no avail. As recently as 2001, a majority of Americans said that they would like to see lower levels of legal immigration. But support for tighter immigration restrictions has steadily declined. Currently only about one-quarter of Americans take that position. By contrast, support for higher levels of immigration has gone from about one-tenth of Americans in the early 2000s to about one-third today, the poll showed. About four in 10 support keeping current levels. The biggest shift has taken place among Democrats, whose support for greater levels of legal immigration has shot up in the past three years, probably at least partly in reaction to Trump’s assaults on immigrants. About 40% of Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democrats said they favor increased immigration, and a similar share favor keeping current levels. Liberal Democrats and those younger than 50 show especially strong support for higher immigration levels, the poll showed. Even among Trump’s fellow Republicans, however, the restrictionist camp has lost ground. Support for cutting legal immigration has declined about 10 percentage points among Republicans and independents who lean toward the GOP over the past decade. Currently, about one in three on the Republican side support cutting legal immigration; about one in five support higher legal immigration levels and about four in 10 think the current levels are about right. Among Republicans, the restrictionist position gets its strongest support among people older than 50 and those without a college degree — both core constituencies for Trump. Even among those groups, however, majorities do not support cutting legal immigration. As Americans have shifted toward favoring higher levels of legal immigration, they also have grown less likely to favor punitive action against those who entered illegally. About two-thirds of Americans reject the idea that granting legal status to some immigrants who entered illegally is a “reward for doing something wrong.” The share who see legal status as a reward for wrongdoing has dropped in the past two years, especially among Democrats. Trump repeatedly has linked immigrants to crime. Most Americans disagree with that view, although Republicans divide closely. Asked if they believed immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally were more likely than U.S. citizens to commit serious crimes, about two-thirds of Americans said no. Democrats and independents who lean Democratic overwhelmingly rejected that view. Republicans were closely divided, with conservative Republicans agreeing by 47% to 40% and moderates disagreeing by 57% to 33%. Similarly, a large majority of Americans rejected the idea that immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally “mostly fill jobs that U.S. citizens would like.” About seven in 10 Americans said those immigrants “mostly fill jobs U.S. citizens do not want.” That majority was consistent across different ages, races and even across the partisan divide. Nearly seven in 10 American said they feel sympathetic toward people who entered the country illegally. A majority of those who identify themselves as conservative Republicans, however, say they feel unsympathetic. Republicans overall divide equally. The Pew survey was conducted by telephone, including cellphones and landlines, June 5-12 among 2,002 American adults. The margin of error is 2.6 percentage points in either direction for the full sample. Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531334098537-Q0IY6J69E7LE5TDT2TN3/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.34.38+AM.png community - When Pride Comes to Town By the end of June last year, Alabama resident Chad Peacock had traveled to LGBT Pride festivals in Huntsville, Montgomery, and Birmingham. He knew there were also parades in Tuscaloosa and Mobile. Soon he was wondering, why not have Pride at home in Auburn? Within a year’s time, he had set up a nonprofit group, built a volunteer structure, lobbied local politicians, and organized two days of events. And so, at the beginning of June this year, the sister cities of Auburn and Opelika hosted their first Pride weekend. “It was amazing, absolutely amazing,” says Peacock, 32, a banker with no previous activist experience. He recalled the response that he initially received in this Bible Belt state: “People said, ‘Are you sure you want to go down that road here?’ But if someone doesn’t stand up to make a change, things will never get better,” Peacock said. “It was important to me to have a festival and a parade. Because, to me, a festival celebrates Pride, but a parade celebrates community.” Eventually he got just that. The Pride on the Plains parade started at Opelika City Hall on Friday evening, June 1. Auburn hosted the festival in a park the next day. “There were so, so many people I’d never seen before. It’s almost like, where did you all come from?” Peacock said. “It almost felt like we weren’t sitting in a red state. And honestly, in Lee County, you can feel the atmosphere changing.” (It’s one of the counties that went for Trump in 2016, but swung to elect Democrat Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate over Republican Roy Moore last December.) A sampling of cities and towns holding their first Pride celebrations this year shows that the first-time experience can still be raw and uncertain, even as the mega-Prides taking place in New York City and San Francisco this weekend have become polished and predictable. In many smaller cities and towns, holding that first parade is less about making the scene than finding out what the scene really is: seeing a fuller complement of who’s in your tribe and where they come from. It’s experiencing a walk down your streets in a new way, learning which individuals and politicians are supportive; which businesses and institutions are receptive. It’s realizing that some familiar acquaintances are queer, too, or consider themselves allies. It’s observing the attitude of police officers, and maybe being surprised. It’s redrawing your mental map of the place where you live. “It’s the idea that I am on the street I regularly walk on, but I’m here as an openly gay person.” And in some ways, that’s how it’s always been. The first Pride marches took place at the end of June 1970, in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They commemorated the Stonewall uprising—the birth of the modern gay rights movement—which occurred at a Greenwich Village gay bar on June 28, 1969. Between then and now, Pride events have spread to an incredible number of places across America and the world—and that number is still growing. This June, for the first time, a gay Pride celebration came to the second-largest city in Illinois, the Chicago suburb of Aurora, on June 17. On June 9, the New York City suburb of Yonkers, itself the fourth-largest city in New York, held its first Pride festival. Much smaller Winchester, Virginia, population 27,000, will hold its first Pride on June 23rd, the same weekend as Sandusky, Ohio, a town on Lake Erie of about the same size. Meanwhile, Starkville, Mississippi, population 25,000, threw its inaugural Pride parade back in March, but not before drawing national attention for the city aldermen’s initial vote of opposition. Starkville, in fact, came up in Chad Peacock’s negotiations with Opelika. When he discussed a holdup in the permitting process with the mayor, Peacock reminded him of all the negative media attention the Mississippi town had received. When that had no effect, Peacock simply went to the city council and obtained the necessary approval for a road closure. After all, he’d already faced down a group of ministers months before in order to get a Pride on the Plains float in the annual Christmas parade. Participating in that parade “was probably one of the most powerful moments in my entire life,” Peacock said. “It really sent a message that you could be gay and still celebrate Christmas.” The next most powerful moment, Peacock said, was at Pride on the Plains when he saw, for the first time, numerous families comprised of gay parents with children mingling together, he said. “It was something that had never happened here, and here it was right in front of you.” His husband had worried about being personally at risk. Timothy Peacock was the very first person to open the parade, in costume as his drag character Imberli Vontrell. He feared being shot. Yet all was calm and peaceful. “That baffled me, because I was ready for something to happen. You just can’t do something like this in Alabama and not be ready for something to happen,” Chad Peacock said. It’s despite local conditions—or because of them—that queer folks and their allies often begin celebrating Pride right at home, even when celebrations in bigger cities are just a short drive away. It’s meaningful “that they can be there in this collective mass in these familiar places,” says Katherine McFarland Bruce, author of the bookPride Parades: How A Parade Changed the World. “It’s the idea that I am on the street I regularly walk on, but I’m here as an openly gay person,” said Bruce, citing the old slogan: “Out of the bars and into the streets.” Residents are asserting that they don’t need to leave their own community to be gay. Her studies of Pride in cities as different as Los Angeles and Fargo, Salt Lake City and Burlington, reveal different meanings in each place and time. In the 1980s, gay Pride events included the urgent politics of AIDS; in the aughts, marriage rights played an increased role. Opponents’ behaviors differ, too: Bruce found that in Western towns, folks tended not to protest a pride parade; in the South, they did. Pride parades occupy a unique civic role, she says, because political “asks” are not their primary reason for being. In one Southern town she studied, Bruce said the message was: “We want cultural respect. We want to be part of this culture, and demand that the culture treat us better.” That’s exactly why Alex Randall found himself at the first Pride parade ever held in the U.S. Virgin Islands on June 9. An American who has lived in the U.S. territory for more than 20 years, Randall attended the parade in Frederiksted, St. Croix, as a show of support for one of his children, a teenager who identifies as gender non-binary. The teenager went, too, as did an older sister. “I wanted to support my child,” Randall said, adding that the past school year presented one challenge after another. “It matters a lot to me that Lex know we stand with them. They know they can be whoever they want to be.” The event arrived amid threats of violence on social media. Randall said some protesters gathered in spots along the parade route, even trying to block it by piling up furniture. But police officers removed the furniture and the festivities took place amid high spirits and goodwill. “I was amazed at the overwhelming support. My take is the community is very supportive,” Randall said, adding that the small groups of protesters did not come off well, by comparison. “The paraders were awesome. I was like, these are the cool people here. This is who is on the right side.” The event reoriented his understanding of the hometown he loves. He learned that some acquaintances are gay, and that a number of businesses are owned or staffed by gay people. It also brought into relief the differences in attitude between the native majority of African descent, whose Christian beliefs often lead them to remain silent about or to oppose gay rights, versus the minority of newer white residents who tend toward liberal politics. Some Afro-Caribbean politicians participated, however, including U.S. Rep. Stacey Plaskett and candidate for governor Albert Bryan. Randall anticipates that the Pride parade will become an annual affair—but before that comes St. Croix’s premier annual celebration, the Christmas Festival (its answer to the pre-Lent Carnivals held elsewhere around the Caribbean). It looks like St. Croix is doing what Auburn did, in the reverse order. “Come Festival in St. Croix, there will be a LGBT presence,” he said. “That will be the next hurdle.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531334669551-S28L83ZE1YUZ7416DYWO/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.44.05+AM.png community - 20 Things Every City Can Do To Boost The Quality Of Public Life Urbanists have a new playbook: The Assembly Civic Design Guidelines, a new set of recommendations for the public realm published by the Center for Active Design (CfAD)—a nonprofit that promotes design solutions for improving public health—and the Knight Foundation. The CfAD’s recommendations might seem like old hat: plant trees, improve public transit, build more bike lanes. However, the report positions them as means to a specific end: a robust public life, which the organization defines as inspiring greater trust, participation, stewardship, and informed local voting. Plus, it has years of original research to back up the suggestions. “These days, America feels like an increasingly polarized place,” Suzanne Nienaber, partnerships director at the CfAD, tells Curbed. “People don’t trust the government, corporations, the media, even their neighbors. Assembly provides empirical evidence that the design and maintenance of our neighborhoods impact our feelings of trust. When we focus on the public spaces that we experience everyday, we can start re-building trust at the local level.” The CfAD and the Knight Foundation took a scientific approach to urban design and conducted surveys, field studies, data analysis, and historic research to learn if interventions like greenery, welcoming signage, and better maintenance could improve someone’s attitude about their local government. It also studied the things that made people have a low opinion about their city. For example, excessive litter diminished community pride by 10 percent, trust in police by five percent, and trust in local government by four percent. The CfAD reflected the Assembly Civic Engagement Survey (ACES) findings in its Assembly civic design guidelines. “Our research efforts generated a very exciting finding: that relatively minor design changes can lead to a measurable shift in civic perceptions,” Joanna Frank, president and CEO at the CfAD tells Curbed. “We also found that people have surprisingly similar responses to design changes, regardless of age, demographics, or socioeconomic status.” By implementing the recommendations in the report, the CfAD believes cities can make residents feel like they’re part of a collective identity; encourage regular use of public space that will lead to more interaction between people from different social and economic backgrounds; lead people to become stewards of and advocates for public community spaces; and encourage more participation in local elections. Here are 20 things cities can do to improve quality of life and help strengthen the bonds between residents. Read the full report and all of its recommendations on the Center for Active Design’s website. 1. Create a comprehensive pedestrian network that allows residents to walk anywhere in the community Why: “People living in more walkable neighborhoods tend to report a greater sense of community and stronger social networks. In addition, people who walk frequently tend to report higher levels of civic trust (4%) and participation (6%) compared to those who say they rarely walk.” 2. Provide sidewalk amenities such as benches, trees, and lighting to support pedestrian comfort Why: “Studies have found that people will typically not perceive a sidewalk on a high-speed, multi-lane road as walkable. On the other hand, a comfortable, tree-lined sidewalk along a bustling main street can entice pedestrian use.” The Porch, a pocket park near Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station transit hub, is an example of this approach in action. 3. Develop a network of safe, continuous bicycle lanes and related bicycle infrastructure Why: “Research suggests that social ties are weaker when public transit is difficult to access or when people commute by car.” 4. Enhance transit systems by increasing frequency of service, improving reliability, and making transit stops more comfortable and accessible Why: “Lengthy travel distances to polling stations and a lack of transportation options are both associated with lower voter turnout.” 5. Zone for a diverse mix of land uses across neighborhoods and within individual buildings Why: “Research indicates that people who live within walking distance of parks and retail are more likely to experience chance encounters with their neighbors, which have been shown to increase social connections and reinforce civic trust. Placing residential, commercial, and recreational spaces near each other (even in the same building or on the same parcel of land) can facilitate such encounters.” 6. Encourage economically diverse housing throughout the community Why: “A mix of market, affordable, and subsidized housing can help stabilize neighborhoods, support demographic and economic integration, and reduce areas of concentrated poverty.” 7. Clean up trash, increase garbage and recycling collection, increase street cleaning, upgrade trash and recycling receptacles Why: “Litter is associated with depleted civic trust.” 8. Clean up and use vacant lots Why: “ACES survey respondents who say there’s a community garden or public art in a vacant lot near their home report elevated measures of trust, participation, stewardship, and local voting.” 9. Design for children Why: “Civic trust tends to be lower when playgrounds, sports fields, bathrooms, and other amenities catering to children and families are in poor condition. On the other hand, improved children’s amenities can boost civic trust among all residents, even those who don’t have kids.” More on that here. 10. Require inclusion of trees and green space in all new developments and major renovations. Why: “A study in Baltimore found that neighborhoods with a higher density of tree canopy also have higher levels of social capital—meaning neighbors are more close-knit and more likely to trust each other.” 11. Encourage community gardens in existing public space and in larger residential developments Why: “Compared to non-gardeners, [community gardeners] demonstrate greater attachment to their local community. Gardens also serve as a space for intergenerational and intercultural engagement.” 12. Preserve and repurpose historic assets Why: “Historic buildings, public spaces, and local landmarks foster a rich sense of connection to place.” 13. Promote local food Why: “Farmers markets can support local agriculture, while periodic events can feature local community cuisines or restaurants. Many communities celebrate their historic food halls as a destination for locals and tourists.” Plus, food-oriented design can fight inequality. 14. Improve the “front porch” of civic buildings with modest enhancements like seating, lighting, or plants Why: “Such elements can make a public building feel more approachable and welcoming.” 15. Install positive signs that encourage visitors to enter public spaces and make use of amenities Why: “Signs in public spaces don’t always have to focus on rules. One ACES photo experiment was inspired by the City of Charlotte, which augmented traditional, rules-based signs in local parks (e.g. “No dogs off-leash”) with positive, ‘Can-do’ signs intended to spark a sense of fun and whimsy. Results indicate that positive signs in parks and outdoor spaces can increase measures of civic trust.” 16. Make navigation intuitive Why: “Effective wayfinding helps visitors navigate public spaces and buildings, facilitating participation in public life.” 17. Invest in public seating Why: “Seating can help make plazas more ‘visitable’ and draw users into the space. Benches are particularly important for supporting the needs of older adults, facilitating mobility throughout the community and creating places to observe and connect with others. Moreover, public seating has a positive impact on the liveliness of commercial streets.” 18. Illuminate buildings and public parks Why: The ACES survey found that people who use well-lit parks trusted their local government more, participated in local elections more, were more likely to be stewards of their neighborhood, and participated more in public life. Broken lights were associated with a 20% lower perception of neighborhood safety. 19. Hold Election Day festivals outside polling locations Why: “A study of 14 communities across the United States found that Election Day festivals offering free food and music create a more celebratory and social environment for voting and are associated with higher voter turnout.” 20. Reclaim underutilized infrastructure Why: “The history of urban development has left many cities with challenging physical barriers—elevated highways, rail lines, large industrial sites, or acres of underutilized parking. Such barriers have often disproportionately burdened low-income residents and communities of color.” Learn more at Curbed https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531334782883-FTDPWH63O5GVKK9ZYWX7/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.46.02+AM.png community - As Rural Towns Lose Population, They Can Learn To 'Shrink Smart' Just outside tiny Sheffield, Iowa, a modern steel and glass office building has sprung up next to a cornfield. Behind it, there's a plant that employs almost 700 workers making Sukup brand steel grain bins. The factory provides an economic anchor for Sheffield, population 1,125. Charles Sukup, the company's president, says that even though workers can be hard to come by, there are no plans to relocate. "Our philosophy is you bloom where you're planted," Sukup says with a smile. Many small towns would love to be in Sheffield's position, with a thriving factory providing good-paying jobs. And Sheffield has civic pride: the West Fork Wharf restaurant features tabletops cut out of the old high school gym floor, local memorabilia displays and sandwiches recalling sports rivalries. People are excited about the recently opened coffee shop in the old city hall building. But Sheffield is still a small, remote, rural town, and for all its blessings, it is nonetheless losing population. According to census estimates, the numbers slipped by about 4 percent between 2010 and 2016. Population loss like Sheffield's is happening in small towns across the U.S. "The big picture for all rural communities that don't have a connection to a growing metro area is that they are going to get smaller over time," says Kimberly Zarecor, associate professor of architecture at Iowa State University. Zarecor argues that towns like Sheffield shouldn't spend money trying to lure new residents to shore up their population numbers. She says instead, they should focus on making life better for the residents they still have. In fact, she's devoting a lot of her energy to the cause she calls "The Shrink Smart Project." It's an idea that dawned on Zarecor when she studied in Ostrava, a city in the Czech Republic that saw its coal and steel industry collapse 30 years ago, with the end of the Cold War. "Ostrava is a place that's shrinking, losing people, but it's still a place that people love to live in, are very loyal to," Zarecor says. "And it's also a place that outsiders look at and think, I don't want to be there." Sounds like any number of small America towns, right? Eva Spackova, an architecture professor at the Technical University of Ostrava, says her city embraced a paradigm shift when the bottom fell out of the local economy — one that's similar to the the change some parents make when the last kid leaves the house and they decide to downsize. "It's stupid to think about big family if your children don't live with you. But it's good to think about a nice home where your children can come sometime. This is the idea," Spackova says with a chuckle. By embracing the idea that it can both shrink and improve, Ostrava has cleaned up pollution and revitalized some of its older neighborhoods. The old, industrial city has reinvented itself as a cultural hotbed with avant-garde theater and events like Colours of Ostrava, an annual music festival held in an abandoned iron works. Kimberly Zarecor and her colleague at Iowa State, Dave Peters, want to bring that kind of thinking to rural America. Peters says they're conducting surveys to figure out how some remote small towns are already making residents' life better, even as their populations drain away. He says there are some standouts — such as Sac City, Iowa, whose population is estimated at 2,105 and falling. The numbers are down by a third since a farm equipment manufacturer closed its factory there in the 1980s. "Sac City is probably one of our best examples of Shrink Smart, in that the quality of the services, the quality of the government, the quality of the community, it's phenomenal," Peters says. Despite the decline in residents, Sac City, named for the Sac Indian tribe, teems with civic energy. The town boasts a hospital, a nice rec center, two pools, public schools, a library, robust day care, even a roadside attraction, the World's Largest Popcorn Ball — a confection that weighs more than 4.5 tons. The Sac City Community Foundation is thriving, and everyone on its board is involved in one of the half-dozen other charitable foundations operating in this tiny town, or in local government, or both. If the group decides to spend a few hundred dollars on a permanent bike pump along the trail in town, not only do they personally know the person in charge of the project and the other funders, but they most likely know the person who'll be installing the pump. Board member Steve Irwin says Sac City's "secret sauce" is people: super-involved citizens, willing to work together for the good of the town. "We always seem to have a champion for a project, somebody or some group that kind of takes the lead," Irwin says. Progress can still be slow and frustrating. Not all of the community-development projects work out, and with such a small population it's hard to attract new employers and jobs. Irwin freely admits that the town would prefer to grow instead of shrink, but in the meantime, he says leaders here have made progress on the quality-of-life fundamentals. "It's more about how the people feel about their town. Are they happy? Do they have a sense of community? Do they have the essentials of life? Do they have health care and recreation?" Irwin asks. Sac City's momentum got a huge — and rather startling — boost three years ago, when lifelong resident John Criss died. Criss ran the men's clothing store in Sac City, a business he took over from his father. He was a bachelor and left almost all of his estate, $5.7 million, to a fund to beautify the town. The signs of that work are all over Sac City. There's new landscaping with big limestone blocks; they spruced up the library, the cemetery and the rec center; installed new playground equipment and tennis courts and built a new community building, just for starters. Soon, statues will line Main Street, and decorative new street signs will pop up at almost every corner. The bequest came as a complete surprise, even to Renae Jacobsen, who Criss left in charge of the fund. "I think it was just his way of giving back to the town," Jacobsen says, sitting outside the new entryway to the rec center. "He probably saw that it needed some beautification, some work. Probably just didn't want to see it die out ... like so many small towns do." Global economic forces will likely keep grinding away at remote rural towns. But people in Sac City and other towns like it hope that by working collaboratively, they can improve quality of life little by little and keep making themselves better — if smaller — places to live. Learn more at NPR https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531334936947-OBVYVUV7Y0M24XS9O7Q7/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.48.35+AM.png community - My LA2050 Activation Challenge: It’s Time To Vote! Choose One Finalist In Each Goal Category. LA2050 is a community-guided initiative driving and tracking progress toward a shared vision for the future of Los Angeles. With the support of 30,000 Angelenos we’ve outlined an aspirational vision centered on five goals: to make Los Angeles the best place to learn, create, play, connect, and live by the year 2050. We’re also tracking our progress by evaluating 60+ metrics over time that assess how Los Angeles is faring. In 2013, we launched our first signature program, the My LA2050 Grants Challenge, to inspire action and move the needle on the goals and metrics. Through the grants challenge, 1100+ creative and innovative proposals were submitted to build a better LA. With the help of 200,000 individuals who voted on their favorite proposals, $4M in funds were granted to 42 organizations shaping a brighter future for Los Angeles. And now we want your help to take all of this work to the next level! We want you to help us answer: how can we engage 100,000 Angelenos to make measurable progress towards achieving our shared vision? About the My LA2050 Activation Challenge This is an open call for ideas to activate 100,000 Angelenos to make Los Angeles the best place to learn, create, play, connect, and live. A total of $1M will be awarded among five organizations—one per goal category—to implement their ideas to engage Angelenos. Each organization will receive a total of $200,000 over two years to support their efforts. The activations should aim to engage Angelenos to make a specific, tangible impact on one of the LA2050 goals and metricsby 2020. The activations can use a variety of engagement strategies to create progress, including but not limited to policy advocacy, community organizing, volunteering, buycotts/boycotts, digital activism, or use of civic tech. LA2050 will commit to a two-year partnership leveraging its resources, assets, and networks to help the activations succeed. Together, the winning organizations, LA2050, and Angelenos will produce five major wins for the region that will change the course of our future. LA2050 Partnership We want to work together! To partner, we plan to: Leverage the LA2050 community to support and participate in the activation Plan on planning public programming, including events, to connect our community to the activation Offer communications assistance to build awareness and thought-leadership, including authoring articles, op-eds, and blog posts Amplify messaging on social media and via the LA2050 newsletter to support the activations Design assets for materials Provide technical assistance, strategic input and guidance, and access to experts to incorporate insights on building successful activations Check out the LA2050 Finalists in each category: Connect, Play, Learn, Create and Live! Voting ends June 29, 2018. Vote Here! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531335066040-5ES4WHA1N592LNIQ1YIO/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.50.44+AM.png community - A Macy’s Goes From Mall Mainstay to Homeless Shelter ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Karleen Smith used to work at the Macy’s in Landmark Mall, putting price tags on summer dresses, housewares and the latest styles of shoes. On Saturday, Ms. Smith, 57, returned to her former store, not as an employer or a customer, but as a resident. The former Macy’s in this vacant shopping mall outside Washington has been transformed into a homeless shelter. “It’s weird to be moving into this building. I used to work here,” she said inside the shelter’s common room, which was once the men’s department. “It’s called survival.” As shopping malls struggle to survive in the era of Amazon, communities are looking for new uses for all the retail space. Some empty stores are finding another life as trampoline parks, offices, college classrooms and churches. At the vacant Macy’s in Alexandria, the Carpenter’s Shelter, a nonprofit group, moved into its temporary home last weekend, 15 months after the last shopper rang out. The former store now provides 60 beds, hot meals and showers for families and for single men and women who are having trouble finding a place to live in a city with a scarcity of affordable housing. The Macy’s logo and signature star are visible above the shelter’s entrance, while some of the floors are covered in the store’s faded carpet and white tiles. Toilets and sinks were pulled from a former Lord & Taylor and relocated to the shelter. The shelter takes up only a corner of the original Macy’s, which occupied two cavernous floors. A fire door at the back of the shelter leads to the rest of the dim store, where the perfume and jewelry counters are still intact and a giant Estee Lauder advertisement remains illuminated. The Landmark Mall was once at the vanguard of shopping. Opened in 1965, the mall housed the region’s most fashionable department stores, Hecht’s, Woodward & Lothrop and Sears & Roebuck. Boys came to buy their first suit at the haberdasher, and teenage girls could get their shoes dyed to match the color of their prom dress. Alexandria’s former mayor William D. Euille remembered playing the clarinet in the high school band at the mall’s opening ceremony. “It was the economic engine of the city,” he said. Landmark tried to adapt over the years. It began as an open-air shopping center and went through an overhaul in the 1980s to enclose the property. The department stores would change, reflecting the evolving retail landscape. Regional players were replaced by national chains like Lord & Taylor and Macy’s. Eventually, the mall succumbed to retail’s propensity to chase after newer, flashier spaces. Developers built larger malls with more upscale brands nearby in Pentagon City and Tysons Corner, siphoning customers away from Landmark. Landmark’s original anchor stores either have been bought out, went bankrupt or are clinging to life — like many in the retail business. Last year, 6,985 stores closed in the United States, a record number, according to Coresight Research, a retail analysis and advisory firm. This year, retailers are on a pace to close roughly 10,000 stores. In its final years of operation, the Landmark’s tenants included two dollar stores and a tax preparer. Only the Sears is still operating. A lone, blue inflatable figure dances on the store’s roof, beckoning shoppers. There had been plans to revamp the mall by returning it to its roots as an open-air shopping destination. But that proposal never got off the ground, after its former owner General Growth Properties filed for bankruptcy in 2009, and the mall was sold. Landmark’s current owner, the Howard Hughes Corporation, plans to tear down the mall and build a mixed-used space that could include offices, retail and other attractions that are still being finalized. It could take many more years to complete the planning, permitting and construction process for such a huge project. “It’s a great piece of real estate,” said Mark Bulmash, a senior vice president of development at Howard Hughes. The delay has created an opportunity for the Carpenter’s Shelter, which began housing the homeless in the basement of a local Catholic church in 1982. The group needed a temporary space while it constructs a permanent facility in a different part of Alexandria that will include 97 affordable rental housing units and a shelter. The mall was one of a few areas in Alexandria where zoning allowed for a shelter. After being approached by a member of the shelter’s board, Howard Hughes agreed to lease a portion of the former Macy’s to the shelter rent free through 2019 and advised on the construction. “They didn’t have to stick their neck out for this, but they did, and we are grateful,” said Shannon Steene, the shelter’s executive director. Saturday was move-in day for the residents. On a humid, hazy morning, residents loaded onto a chartered city bus at the old shelter and headed for the mall. Keith Ham, 43, who has been living the shelter for about three months, said his family did not believe where he was moving. “They say, ‘Macy’s at the mall?’” “And I say, ‘For real, Macy’s at the mall.’” Jahlil Commander, 16, dribbled a basketball outside the shelter’s front entrance and watched a movie crew set off a smoke machine in the parking lot. Some of the mall property is also being leased out to a production company filming a “Wonder Woman” sequel. Jahlil and his two brothers are sharing a windowless room at the shelter after their mother fell behind on rent. “We have a predicament,” their mother, Shannon Commander, said. “This is where we come to reset and figure things out.” Ms. Smith, the former Macy’s worker, rested on the floor of the common room under a frayed green blanket. Before coming to the shelter, Ms. Smith had been living in a car and showering in a recreation center. “I was tired,” she said. Ms. Smith, who worked at Macy’s as a seasonal hire during the holidays 10 years ago, remembers the store fondly. On a slow day, she would try on makeup at the cosmetics counter and spray herself with samples of perfume. She said she could never afford to buy anything of her own. “All I could do was admire it.” As Ms. Smith waited to move into her new room, the electricity cut out to a portion of the shelter and the staff set up battery powered camping lanterns to light the way for movers. Volunteers brought crockpots with taco makings for dinner and put together goody bags for the children staying there. The accommodations are sparse and some residents could not hide their disappointment that the bedrooms do not have windows. But 4-year-old Mikias Aiychew was so excited to see his new room at the shelter that he could hardly sit through their weekend Jehovah’s Witness gathering, his mother said. Dressed in a gray suit vest and small brown dress shoes, Mikias played with a plastic castle in the shelter’s new family room. A hand-painted sign on the wall quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can with what you have, where you are.” Learn more at NY Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531335205588-JBUY3JO5T4IC5A6NTI7U/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.52.37+AM.png community - ICE Came for a Tennessee Town’s Immigrants. The Town Fought Back. MORRISTOWN, Tenn. — One morning in April, federal immigration agents swept into a meatpacking plant in this northeastern Tennessee manufacturing town, launching one of the biggest workplace raids since President Trump took office with a pledge to crack down on illegal immigration. Dozens of panicked workers fled in every direction, some wedging themselves between beef carcasses or crouching under bloody butcher tables. About 100 workers, including at least one American citizen, were rounded up — every Latino employee at the plant, it turned out, save a man who had hidden in a freezer. The raid occurred in a state that is on the raw front lines of the immigration debate. Mr. Trump won 61 percent of the vote in Tennessee, and continues to enjoy wide popularity. The state’s rapidly growing immigrant population, now estimated to total more than 320,000, has become a favorite target of the Republican-controlled State Legislature. In 2017, Tennessee lawmakers passed the nation’s first law requiring stiffer sentences for defendants who are in the country illegally. In April, they passed a law requiring the police to help enforce immigration laws and making it illegal for local governments to adopt so-called sanctuary policies. But Morristown, a town of 30,000 northeast of Knoxville that was the boyhood home of Davy Crockett, has drawn migrant workers from Latin America since the early 1990s, when they first came to work on the region’s abundant tomato farms. As stepped-up security has made going back and forth across the border more difficult, many of these families have settled into the community, enrolled their kids in school, and joined churches where they have baptized their American-born children. So the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the Southeastern Provision plant outside the city and sent dozens of workers to out-of-state detention centers was the day people in Morristown began to ask questions many hadn’t thought through before — to the federal government, to the police, to their church leaders, to each other. Donations of food, clothing and toys for families of the workers streamed in at such volume there was a traffic jam to get into the parking lot of a church. Professors at the college extended a speaking invitation to a young man whose brother and uncle were detained in the raid. Schoolteachers cried as they tried to comfort students whose parents were suddenly gone. There was standing room only at a prayer vigil that drew about 1,000 people to a school gym. Here, based on interviews with dozens of workers and townspeople, and in their own words (some edited for length and clarity), is how it happened. The April 5 operation signaled a return to the high-profile immigration raids that last happened during the presidency of George W. Bush. President Barack Obama’s chief workplace enforcement tactic was to conduct payroll audits and impose fines on businesses found to employ unauthorized workers. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has vowed to quintuple worksite enforcement. Last week, ICE agents arrested 114 employees at two worksites operated by a gardening company in Ohio. All 97 workers taken into custody in the Tennessee raid now face deportation, though several have been released pending hearings. And much of the town is reeling. Up to 160 American-born children have a parent who could soon be ordered to leave the country; many families are relying on handouts. After the raid, immigrant advocates organized a peace march, and Nataly carried a sign bearing the image of her father, a native of Mexico who had been working in the United States without papers for 20 years before he was taken into custody at the meat plant that day. “We Miss You,” the sign read. “We need you by our side. You are the best father.” The Town Nestled between two mountain ranges and flanked by two large lakes, Morristown is the county seat and industrial hub of Hamblen County, where most of the plant workers’ families reside. The Latinos who arrived here, especially those who came after the late 1990s, were part of a swelling wave of migrants bypassing traditional gateway states like California and Texas to seek opportunity in the fast-growing South. Word reached their villages that jobs were plentiful. More recently, as with other places, Tennessee has been struggling with a meth and opioid epidemic. As drug abuse has sidelined many working-age American men and women, local employers have increasingly turned to immigrants. These days, Latinos make up about 11 percent of Hamblen County’s population and account for one of every four students in its public schools. Immigrants toil in meat, poultry and canning plants, as well as at automotive parts, plastics and other factories that dot the area. Not everyone in town has been welcoming, though. One theme many expressed: The workers were lawbreakers who got caught. In the parking lot of the local Walmart, where several people were talking about the raid at the meat plant, one woman said it could open up employment opportunities. But not everyone agreed with her. The Plant Undocumented workers from Mexico and Guatemala formed the backbone of the work force at Southeastern Provision, located 10 miles north of Morristown in the town of Bean Station. They killed, skinned, decapitated and cut up cattle whose parts were used for, among other things, oxtail soup and a cured meat snack exported to Africa. Immigrants were critical to the family-owned abattoir’s growth over the last decade. Many of those affected by the raid, fearing further action from the authorities, spoke on the condition that only their first names be used. With the $11.50 hourly wage that her husband, Tomas, made at the plant and the $9 she earns as a seamstress, Elisabeth and her family could afford the $700 rent for a house big enough to accommodate their six children, three from her previous marriage, and live a relatively stable life, she said. To be sure, the work was heavy, gory and low-paying. Day after day, the workers endured the smell of manure, blood and flesh. But Southeastern Provision offered a major advantage over other businesses: The management, several workers said, didn’t seem to expect them to bother with fake work authorization documents. Federal authorities said there was evidence that the company had run afoul of the law. In an affidavit, the Internal Revenue Service said the company had withdrawn millions of dollars in cash and told bank employees the money was needed to pay “Hispanics”— suggesting that the company knew it was hiring undocumented workers and evaded payment of federal employment taxes. An informant hired at the plant in 2017 told investigators that workers felt they couldn’t complain about poor working conditions because of their immigration status. Some had to work unpaid overtime, the informant reported. He said he saw others required to work with “extremely harsh” chemicals without protective eyewear. No charges have been filed against the company. A federal criminal investigation is ongoing, said Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman. The owner, James Brantley, said he couldn’t talk about the case. His lawyer, Norman McKellar, also declined to comment. “We are in a difficult situation,” he said. The Raid It was just after 9 a.m., about two hours after more than 100 workers had arrived for the 7 a.m. shift, when shouts of “inmigración, inmigración” rang out across the plant. Alma went numb. In the cutting line, another worker, Raymunda, put down the butcher’s knife she was holding and raced toward an exit. So did dozens of others, their blood-smeared smocks and protective aprons weighing them down. They soon realized that ICE agents, backed by state law enforcement, blocked every door. Agents cornered and grabbed workers, sometimes barking “Calma!” in Spanish to those who cried and screamed. Some workers reported that agents pointed guns at them to stop them from fleeing. “I stuck myself between the cows,” Raymunda said. It was to no avail. Within minutes, all the Latinos at the plant were rounded up, including at least one American citizen and several other people who had legal authorization to work. Immigrants who were lined up, many of them crying, tried to give the woman messages to pass to their loved ones, because they knew she was an American and, therefore, likely to be freed. In groups of about a dozen, according to several workers interviewed, Latinos were placed mainly in plastic handcuffs, escorted to white vans with tinted windows and transported to a National Guard Armory. A helicopter hovered above. Word began to spread that “la migra,” as ICE is known, was in the area. Panicked immigrants walked off the job at other companies in the region and frantically texted each other. Ms. Galvan described how she arrived to a crowd amassed behind yellow police tape surrounding the armory, as state troopers stood guard. Relatives of plant workers were crying and obsessively checking their cellphones for news. Inside, workers said they waited hours to be interviewed and fingerprinted by agents, a process delayed by computer glitches. When agents asked women who had young children to identify themselves, virtually every hand went up. By late afternoon, agents had released only a handful of people, mainly those in frail health or who had proven they had the legal right to work in the United States. In the evening, Johnny headed to the armory with his father and 7-year-old sister, Brittany, who was weeping. They brought insulin injections to be delivered to his mother, who is diabetic. Families were gathering in an elementary school across from the armory. By nightfall, about 100 people, including teachers, clergy, lawyers and other community members had assembled. Volunteers distributed pizza, tamales and drinks. As the night wore on, about 30 of the detainees, including Raymunda and Alma, were gradually released. A little after 1 a.m., the agents announced that no one else would be let go. Workers still in detention — 54 in all — were put on buses to Alabama and then Louisiana. The Church St. Patrick Catholic Church’s parish center was converted into a crisis response center. All day, people arrived with food, clothing, toys and supplies for the affected families. At one point, six trucks waited to unload donations. Volunteers, who showed up by the dozens, received color-coded tags: Yellow for teachers, white for lawyers, and pink for general helpers, who prepared meals in the kitchen, packed grocery bags and performed other tasks. Bleary-eyed immigrants packed the main room. In smaller rooms, teachers entertained children with stories while their parents received legal services. On Topix , a community website where comments are posted anonymously, one person asked, “Why does St. Patrick Catholic Church support law breakers?” Another person wrote, “This bust is legal, the people are illegals. Why the big sympathy case? I don’t get it.” Still, a couple of days later, “we had more volunteers than we knew what to do with. We had to turn people away,” Ms. Jacobs said. At a news conference, faith leaders and Elisabeth, surrounded by her sons, pleaded for the community to pray for the immigrants. Hundreds of children missed school after the raid. On the evening of April 7, about 120 teachers and school staff packed the church’s basement to talk about how to assist students. On a poster board, they scrawled their feelings. “I cried Thursday night wondering which of my students were without parents that night,” one teacher wrote. “I feel helpless,” wrote another. On Monday, three days after the raid, a prayer vigil at Hillcrest Elementary School drew nearly 1,000 people who sat in the bleachers, in folding chairs on the court and, when the chairs ran out, they stood along the walls. A 16-year-old named Ramon stood up to speak. Two nights later, St. Patrick Church’s center still brimmed with activity as immigrants and supporters gathered to make posters and banners for a procession through downtown Morristown. Ms. Smith brought her 8-year-old daughter, Laurel, figuring it was an important lesson. “This community is a snapshot of the dissonance of America on immigration,” Ms. Smith said. At Walters State Community College, instructors gathered in an auditorium to hear Jehova Arzola, 20, an engineering honors student whose brother and uncle were detained, describe his family’s ordeal. No one knew when, or if, they would see them again, he said. The Procession On Thursday, a week after the raid, about 300 people took to Morristown’s downtown streets in the evening to draw attention to the plight of the families. Some people, like Colin Loring and his partner, Margaret Durgin, drove for an hour to participate. “We are here to support our immigrant neighbors. The system needs to be fixed,” said Mr. Loring, who is retired from the United States Department of Agriculture. Ms. Durgin arrived with a $540 check to help the immigrants. Before setting out, a nun led the marchers, who wore white and clutched white flowers, in prayer. “We love Morristown. We are here to send a message of love and unity,” they chanted before heading down Main Street. Along the way, a driver shouted an expletive at the crowd from inside his brown truck and sped off. Pulling to the front of the line was Raymunda, her youngest children, Johnny, 15, and Brittany, 7, by her side. She said she had a notice to appear in court for deportation proceedings. Learn more at NY Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531335481060-N4FYTLPBKLHIK6RII3F5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.57.33+AM.png community - The Hidden Forces That Shape Cities Why is London’s public transit thriving while New York City’s is struggling? It might be tempting to ascribe the difference between the two cities as one of social and political culture—high European public spending versus American agnosticism about the state. According to Ricky Burdett, professor of urban studies at the London School of Economics and director of the LSE Cities research center, the real difference lies elsewhere—in the way the two cities governments are structured. Citylab caught up with Burdett in the run-up to his keynote addressat the reSITE 2018 ACCOMMODATE conference in Prague on June 14. (Like last year, CityLab is a media sponsor of this event.) He’ll be discussing LSE Cities’ latest research and the group’s upcoming book, Shaping Cities in an Urban Age, which is due to be launched this September at the Venice Biennale. The final installment of a de facto trilogy, the book showcases the latest research by the Urban Age, an international co-project examining the connection between the political and the social in today’s cities. In conversation, Burdett picked up on this knot of themes, emphasizing that time and again, a city’s growth or transformation is defined not necessarily by individual plans or leaders, but shaped by political and administrative institutions themselves. London and New York, for example, are broadly similar in population, educational base and GDP per head. But the two cities have been going in different directions on public transit progress. London’s governance has shifted since the office of the mayoralty was established in 2000, ending a strange interregnum stretching back to 1986 when no elected body or leader oversaw the city as a whole. Since 2000, London has introduced a congestion charge, created the highly successful Overground train network through a combination of renovation and new construction, and come close to completing the new Crossrail heavy rail link between Central London and its furthest flung eastern and western exurbs. It has also launched a bikeshare scheme and—belatedly—started creating a segregated bike lane network, extended the light rail system in its former docks, and created a successful streetcar line in the city’s southwest. During the same period, New York’s progress has been less positive, though it did open a modest extension to the Second Avenue subway and launch its own bikeshare (with somewhat fewer bikes than London). Transit ridership and service quality have been tumbling. The main factor powering this difference, according to Burdett, is that London Mayor Sadiq Khan has a big say in his city’s transit provision and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn’t. “The governor of New York State sitting 130-odd miles away up in Albany is responsible for New York City’s mass transit,” says Burdett. “The decisions of what to invest there have to be always compared to spending elsewhere in the state.” London’s great fortune is that, since 2000, the city’s mayor has been chair of Transport for London (TfL), the body overseeing all transit in the city. “I had no idea at the time how important that would be,” Burdett says. “It’s important because he can bang on the door of the Prime Minister and say, ‘If you want London to compete globally and bring jobs, then we really need money to build Crossrail.’” But just as London’s governance structure has helped it get the edge over New York City on public transit, it has also hindered it from successes elsewhere—notably with housing, over which its political brief is far more limited. Since 2000, rhetoric about increasing the volume of affordable housing has been a staple for three of London’s mayors. Much of this rhetoric has gone no further than that, says Burdett. “Too many designers think about the reality of the built environment at one moment in time—that you create an instant city.” “What Khan is saying now, and what [former mayors] Johnson and Livingstone also said, is that they would build affordable housing at a rate of 35 percent [as a proportion of all new builds],” he says. “If it's going to be done via the private sector, however, then it just won't happen. A developer’s instinct is to build as little affordable housing as possible to keep prices up.” London’s boroughs are trying to improve the affordable housing situation, but they don’t necessarily have the land to build on—and the state’s position as a major landowner has been substantially ceded to the private sector. Contrast this to Singapore, where 85 percent of residents live in state-built social housing. “Singapore, as a city-state, owns the land and builds housing through something called the Housing and Development Board. If you or I were living in Singapore we would be living in social housing—it’s just a different level of what social housing means.” The city-state’s substantial holdings and financial commitment to housing most of the population in state-built accommodation means it has been able to ensure a level of affordability and stability absent elsewhere. “You need the Singaporean way of saying, ‘We own the land, we will control supply and demand by building the housing stock.’ That generates a completely different approach to affordability.” Simply telling cities to “be more like Singapore” isn’t giving advice that’s necessarily easy to act on, of course. But the role of a research center like LSE Cities is to remind cities of options, not to enforce them. “Change may be difficult, but then that’s what politicians do” says Burdett. “Our project is to put these things on the table so that they don't just remain abstract and theoretical.” Urban planners and architects might be inclined to agree that decisions about the shape of a city are inherently political. But how can they engage with questions of governance when they have no control on that aspect of their commissions? It’s vital to “have evolution written into a city’s planning DNA,” Burdett suggests. “Too many designers think about the reality of the built environment at one moment in time—that you create an instant city.” But examples of successful from-scratch neighborhoods are rare, and even the ones deemed successful, such as at Canary Wharf, a business district constructed in London’s former docklands, lack the qualities that define other quarters of the city. “It’s all perfect, highly policed, very controlled—and alienating,” Burdett says. “Cities that work are much richer than that—they adapt. There’s a resilience, a grunginess that becomes attractive. Understanding that process of change is essential.” Neighborhoods that prove to be resilient in the face of change tend to have flexible spaces, both private and public, that adapt well to new uses. Thus, the (perhaps unintentionally) fluid planning of late 19th- and early 20th-century tenement districts such as, say, Manhattan’s Lower East Side or Berlin’s Kreuzberg, has enabled them to transform gradually from sites of light industry to highly desirable residential and commercial areas without entirely losing their mix or character. It’s by focusing on this that architects and designers can create spaces that don’t quickly become arid or obsolete, and that can weather shifts in governance. “You have to allow enough elbow room for things to actually happen. Neighborhoods that have remained open, literally—connected, porous—are the ones that are more likely to have that layering of complexity.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531335675819-R4DFUSLMHRAWET4PGRJB/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+12.00.38+PM.png community - Coal Miners' Fund Set For Deep Cuts As Black Lung Epidemic Grows A new government report says that the federal black lung trust fund that helps sick and dying coal miners pay living and medical expenses could incur a $15 billion deficit in the next 30 years. That's if a congressionally mandated funding cut occurs as planned at the end of the year. The cut in the funding formula comes as NPR has reported and government researchers have confirmed an epidemic of the most advanced stages of black lung, along with unprecedented clusters of the disease in the central Appalachian states of Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. The report from the Government Accountability Office reviewed the viability of the federal Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, which paid out $184 million in benefits in fiscal year 2017 to 25,700 coal miners suffering from the fatal mine dust disease and their dependents. A tax on coal companies supports the fund, but that tax is set for a 55 percent cut at the end of 2018, even as the fund's debt exceeds $4.3 billion and demand for benefits is expected to grow. "You have to address the fact that the serious forms of black lung appear to be increasing and that may put even more strain on the trust fund," says Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. "The last thing you want to do ... is to reduce the revenue," adds Scott, who requested the GAO report. "That will inevitably ... put pressure on the idea that we should reduce the little benefits that they have." Miners with certified cases of black lung receive $650 to $1,300 a month for living expenses. They also receive medical care directly related to their disease, which averaged $6,980 per miner last year. "We're dying off like crazy right now," says Sheralin Greene, 57, who mined coal underground for 20 years in Harlan County, Ky. Black lung has sapped her ability to walk around her small farm, do chores at home, or even sleep, without paralyzing coughing fits that last 15 minutes or more. She receives payments and medical care from the federal trust fund. "It's a terrible disease," Greene says, as tears glaze her eyes. "It affects your heart. It affects your family, your livelihood and everything." At the current rate, the coal tax collects more than enough money to cover miners' benefits — $450 million in FY 2017. But that wasn't always the case. The fund had to borrow money to pay for benefits in the past, and that, plus interest on the loans, has put the fund deep in debt. The only projection in the GAO report that results in zero debt, avoids borrowing more money for the fund decades into the future, and continues to pay benefits, requires a 25 percent spike in the coal tax, instead of cutting it as planned. Increasing the tax or even leaving the current rate in place would burden the coal industry, says Bruce Watzman, an executive at the National Mining Association. "The competition among fuels for electric generation is intense and a couple cents a kilowatt hour makes a difference in the fuel source that's generating the electricity," Watzman adds. Watzman favors congressional action that forgives some or all of the fund's debt. But even with full debt forgiveness, the GAO still projects a deficit of $2.3 billion in 2050. Forgiving the debt also shifts the costs of the black lung benefits program from coal companies to taxpayers, according to Treasury officials who were consulted by the GAO. They "noted that the costs associated with forgiving Trust Fund interest or debt would be borne by the general taxpayer since Treasury borrows from taxpayers to lend to the Trust Fund as needed," the report says. It's not our fault that we got this disease. We did keep the lights on ... We were just trying to help America. "Coal operators caused this problem, and they are the ones who should be responsible for funding the compensation these workers receive," says Cecil Roberts, international president of the United Mine Workers of America. Coal companies buy insurance or self-insure for black lung and are the first held responsible for payment when miners are awarded benefits. But industry bankruptcies and the failure to secure enough insurance had mining companies paying just 25 percent of black lung benefits in FY 2017. The Trust Fund, which kicks in when coal companies can't pay, paid 64 percent. The GAO's projections do not include the recent studies showing record-high rates of progressive massive fibrosis, the advanced stage of black lung, along with an increase in lung transplants due to black lung. A recent study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health noted that lung transplants cost on average $1 million each and the rate of transplants for miners with black lung has tripled. "It's not our fault that we got this disease," says former miner Sheralin Greene. "We did keep the lights on ... We were just trying to help America ... They better take care of the coal miners." Learn more at NPR https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531335779958-4ISRZ4LC54TYZN93LAUS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+12.02.32+PM.png community - The High Cost of Abandoned Property, and How Cities Can Push Back The vacant homes strewn across many U.S. cities create blighted gaps on the landscape. While empty reminders of past development may present community challenges, according to a new report, these properties can also be potential vehicles for change. “The Empty House Next Door,” a new report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy examining abandoned and unused properties, offers a deft accounting of the cost of these buildings on the surrounding areas. While they aren’t a new phenomenon, vacant buildings, especially in blocks or neighborhoods in legacy cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, have reached “epidemic level.” Compiled by urban scholar Alan Mallach, the report offers a sobering snapshot of just how widespread vacancy has become, especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession. “Hyper-vacancy,” defined as blocks and neighborhoods where vacant buildings and lots comprise 20 percent or more of the building stock and “define the character of the surrounding area,” has spread across many communities, especially formerly industrial and Rust Belt cities. By 2010, one out of every two census tracts in Cleveland could be considered hyper-vacant. Mallach considers the condition an epidemic, a multifaceted challenge for legacy cities. While most redevelopment plans and projects focus on addition—new housing, transportation, and public spaces—vacancy and hyper-vacancy require painful and costly subtraction. With vacant properties placing severe fiscal strain on cities, reducing property tax revenue while costing millions of dollars for policing, inspecting, cleaning, and in many cases, demolition, it’s a vast challenge that’s inspired creative policy solutions. The high cost of losing owners Vacant properties aren’t new. According to Mallach, the roots of today’s problem lie in the Great Recession and subsequent foreclosure crisis, in which many homeowners, especially lower-income residents, lost their homes. Combined with the declining population in legacy cities, vacancies have skyrocketed. There isn’t a single standard for measurement to calculate the scope of the issue, but some estimates suggest the number of unoccupied homes rose steeply between 2005 and 2010, from 9.5 million to 12 million. According to census figures, which measure “other vacant” units, defined as those neither on the market, held for future occupancy, nor used only seasonally, the number grew from 3.7 million in 2005 to 5.8 million in 2016. City surveys, which have often produced the most accurate results, also show a significant problem. Gary, Indiana’s Parcel Survey found 25,000 vacant homes or lots, covering 40 percent of the city’s parcels, and Philadelphia found 40,000 vacant lots with no known use. According to Detroit Future City, a local nonprofit, the city had more than 120,000 vacant lots in 2017. As of 2015, Detroit had 21 square miles of vacant lots, a land mass that, if combined and connected, would be roughly the size of the island of Manhattan. Seen as eyesores, public safety hazards, and crime magnets, abandoned houses represent a real financial drain on both neighbors and the city at large. Neighborhood fragmentation and community isolation—the sense no one cares, and thing aren’t getting better—are powerful side effects, though harder to quantify. But the true cost to cities has been examined in various studies, and it can be staggering. A study of vacant property in Toledo found that they cost the city $3.8 million annually in direct cost, as well as $2.7 million in lost tax revenues. But the impact they have on their surroundings was even more significant: $98.7 million in lost property value, and an estimated $2.68 million in lost property tax value due to the perceived decline in value from being near vacant buildings. These empty buildings are sinks for urban real estate value. Other studies reinforce these unfavorable conclusions. A study in Columbus, Ohio, found a vacant building on the block can reduce the value of nearby properties by 20 percent or more, while a 2010 Philadelphia study estimated that vacant properties result in $3.6 billion in reduced household wealth citywide due to the blighting impact on neighboring properties. How cities can fill in the holes Mallach’s analysis finds plenty of structural issues keeping cities and neighborhoods strewn with abandoned and vacant property, most notably the high legacy costs associated with empty homes and abandoned lots. But there have been some bright spots and innovative policy ideas that showcase the potential for rebuilding neighborhoods. Many cities, including Detroit and Cleveland, have focused on demolition programs and land banks to remove eyesores and put property back onto municipal tax rolls and into productive use. More than 150 land bank authorities have been established across the country, mostly in Ohio and Michigan. The Federal Hardest Hit Fund has been a great asset for knocking down and clearing out vacant homes. Some cities have formed more robust programs to rehabilitate and resell homes. In Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood, the Slavic Village Recovery Project (SVR) has turned vacant blocks into an asset, tearing down and transforming homes strategically to create affordable single-family homes that sell for $50,000 to $69,000 to buyers (without the use of public subsidies). The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation (YNDC), another Ohio organization, has created a similar program, cutting vacancies and selling dozens of newly restored homes. Other city agencies and local nonprofits have turned to greening these buildings and lots, creating urban farms, pocket parks, and community gardens. Philadelphia’s LandCare model has been held up as an affordable model for converting empty parcels into community green spots. By focusing on simple, inexpensive fixes—basic sodding, tree planting, and construction of rudimentary, split-rail fences—the group has upgraded and improved more than 7,000 lots. Creativity, not cost, can be the biggest barriers to change. Detroit Future City’s Field Guide for Working with Lots and Baltimore’s Green Pattern Book, design guides created by community advocates, have inspired groups across the country to recover and reimagine the possibilities of these blank spaces in the community canvas. Greening strategies often get held up as “consolation prizes” for disinvested neighborhoods, Mallach says, quoting a report from Detroit Future City. But that can be a dismissive way to look at how relatively low-cost fixes can be a financial boon for cities, and help turn land and lots from unproductive to active. “Open space is a solution for Detroit’s future,” the DFC report continues, “not an unwelcomed result of Detroit’s past.” Learn more at Curbed https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531341623815-XQZZYLHEF4122XN7BEAN/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+1.37.30+PM.png community - The Tech That’s Changing How Cities Help the Homeless Every day, a team of community health paramedics in Austin, Texas, fans out across the city to provide aid to the growing number of people on the streets. Finding the homeless isn’t always easy—Austin’s annual homeless census found that at any given time, more than 2,500 people are unsheltered; in a year, that number exceeds 7,000—and those are just the most obvious, countable cases. Harder still is finding their papers. “It’s a great anomaly to find someone who has all their identity documents,” said Jeremy Davis, an EMS with Austin’s community health paramedic program. “To get them properly connected to homeless services, you need their birth certificates, social security cards, health insurance records—all those are interdependent.” And often, Austin’s homeless don’t have any of them. Soon, though, that could change. In May, Austin began piloting a project to give the homeless a portable, digital identity, hosted on blockchain technology. It’s funded by a $100,000 grant to test the idea, and in the running for a $5 million program grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayor’s Challenge. For those whose lives are characterized by impermanence, the city hopes to provide a digital footprint in a system that will exist online—one that can’t be deleted, lost, or stolen. One that the individuals can control themselves, and that can be used by homelessness service workers to provide better, more informed aid. With homelessness on the rise in many U.S. cities, even counting and identifying this population can be a major challenge. That’s where a handful of new digital tools come into play, allowing cities to help the homeless control their information, enabling faster and more accurate counts of people on the street, and mapping where they are to ensure they have access to services. Efforts being piloted in Austin, Spokane, Houston, and elsewhere aim to equip local governments with the knowledge they need to address the challenges of homelessness in their communities. In Austin’s case, developers hope the blockchain concept can offer homeless residents a path off the streets. “We sort of take for granted this notion of identity,” said Tim Mercer, director of global health at Dell Medical School, which is partnering with the mayor’s office to integrate the blockchain product with medical services. Most people have physical copies of their drivers’ licenses or passports in their wallets or tucked away at home. But for those experiencing homelessness, documentation can be easily misplaced, weathered in the rain, stolen, or even lost during an arrest. Sometimes city agencies do street cleanups, picking up seemingly discarded papers and throwing them away. “When that stuff gets [lost], they just have to start over,” Mercer said. “They need to get a new ID and new birth certificate, which sets them back on their pathway to recovery, broadly defined.” Having identification doesn’t just provide proof of existence. You need Social Security cards, birth certificates, or drivers’ licenses (and often, all three) to get housing, to be seen in a health clinic, to sign up for food stamps, or to get disability services. Some jobs ask for photo IDs in the same breath as your resume. Most doctors need to know medication history before prescribing new pills. Social Security cards are free to replace, but new ones have to be mailed to a street address, and the Social Security Administration will only issue 3 new ones each year, and only 10 per lifetime. “If you lose your identity, it’s like you’re a ghost in the system,” said Mercer. And it’s hard for a ghost to navigate the bureaucracy. “At the end of the day, the burden falls on the patient who’s already totally overwhelmed by life.” That’s where blockchain—a technology known best for its association with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin—comes in. Hosting information “on the blockchain” just means it is incorruptible and easy to access, stored on a decentralized server. Instead of paper identification documents, personal records of Austin’s homeless will be encrypted and digitized. While city officials are the ones facilitating the recording of this information, individuals themselves will have access to their own records, and control over who can see it. In addition to being securely stored, identity records would also be verifiable, activated by homeless individuals on mobile phones using biometric data, passwords, or photo recognition. For those without SMS access, the portal will also be accessible online, through library portals. When a homeless service worker like Davis approaches someone on the street, he’d be able to find their identity records without having to bring them into an office and find a physical file folder. Transferring medical records between health care providers is already a complicated process, even for those with fastidious filing habits. But for the homeless, the stakes are fundamentally higher. “I sit in clinic and see my patients and I can access my own record system [of their past medical history], but I can’t access the mental health providers’ record system, and I can’t access the government databases that tell me when this person’s food stamps are going to expire,” Mercer said. “At the end of the day, the burden falls on the patient who’s already totally overwhelmed by life.” To shape the city’s design and implementation process, the team put together a test group of about 50 homeless individuals, and ran tests at “pop-up clinics” around the city. “Once the value starts to be seen, folks experiencing homelessness will seek us out,” Davis said. “Part of the hope is we’ll be able to start with the most easily identifiable individuals, gain their trust, improve the viability of project, and then info will spread through natural processes and then it’ll become a requested service.” While blockchain technology is inherently decentralized and less susceptible to manipulation, the collection of personal data opens up some privacy concerns. Medical information-sharing, especially, needs to be done delicately to abide by federal health privacy rules. And however helpful it might be for doctors to have access to medical records, it could be just as damaging in the hands of a potential employer or a housing approver. “I just see so much greater potential for good in information-sharing that I would hate for us as a society to prevent this kind of integration because we’re concerned about privacy,” Mercer said. “We can figure that out, and implement technological safeguards and policies.” Getting a better count It’s not just identity systems that need a technological upgrade. Figuring out how many people live on the streets is a massive undertaking each January, when communities across the U.S. embark on the annual Point In Time count of the homeless population. It’s a process that’s required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in order for cities to receive federal funding, and it’s intended to provide a snapshot of cities’ progress in fighting homelessness. Federal and local governments rely on these counts to understand the size of the problem, and to shape policies to address it. But the details are murky at best. “We start with the assumption that the unsheltered count is probably going to be an undercount,” said Steve Berg, the vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “How much of an undercount, it’s nearly impossible to say.” Volunteers conduct a Point In Time count. (Lynne Sladky/AP) Certain homeless groups like students and LGBT youth are especially hard to find, as are those who stay in motels or at someone’s house. The fact that the two-, sometimes three-day PIT counts are confined to certain areas, depending on how big the volunteer force is, means entire clusters of individuals can be left out of the count. And cities hope that by going digital, they can at least begin to tackle that problem. Since the counts began in 2005, the methodology hasn’t changed much: Paper forms in hand, volunteers set off into groups at night into different parts of the city, where they canvas alleyways and parking lots, under bridges and outside of storefronts, as well as inside shelters and temporary housing. In recent years, though, more cities are trading in pen and paper for smartphones and tablets, following in the footsteps of New York City; Aurora, Colorado; and Houston, Texas. During this year’s count in Spokane, Washington, as volunteers fanned out around downtown to survey the city’s homeless population, David Lewis watched from his office as dots filled a map on his computer screen. Each represented a member of one of America’s most vulnerable groups. Instead of waiting months for the numbers to come in, Lewis, the city’s head of homeless data systems, saw the big picture in real time. This year’s count marked the first time that Spokane tested the “Counting Us” app, which lets volunteers input survey answers via smartphones and send them straight to the command center. Companies like Simtech Solutions, developers of the Counting Us app, and Esri, which provides a similar service through its Survey123 platform, tout that the use of GIS technology allows volunteers to pinpoint the exact location the information is gathered, and in real time. “It would take us so much time to get to where we had meaningful data that the data itself wasn’t as useful as it could have been if we had it more readily available,” said Lewis, who has conducted Spokane’s PIT count with pen and paper for the past eight years. Since switching over to the Counting Us app in 2016, Houston has used the data to expand its search outside of major encampments to smaller clusters in and around the downtown area—something that Marc Eichenbaum, special assistant to the mayor for homeless initiatives, said couldn’t be done before, because data was sorted only through ZIP codes, and “neighborhoods are not done by ZIP codes,” he said. The GIS feature came in handy in this year’s count when volunteers alerted Ana Rausch, project manager for Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless, to two new encampments in the northeastern part of the city. She pulled up the map, and sure enough, saw two clusters of dots in those areas. Rausch said her group planned to send outreach teams there. In Spokane, since data can be analyzed in days rather than weeks or months, the city plans to conduct a second count this year. “We want to do a seasonally adjusted count, and see what sorts of variations there will be,” he said. “We have local policy experts, for instance, who tell us we should expect to see a bump in the youth count because that population travels in different circles and spends more time doubled up with friends during the colder months.” “The real question is, what do you do with that finer geographic information?” said Christine Jocoy, a geography professor at California State University, Long Beach. She’s long been a critic of PIT counts, telling CityLab in 2012 that with the “culture of quantification,” cities are spending too much time and resources counting the homeless and not enough on actually putting the results to good use. And while she agrees that going digital is a timesaver, Jocoy worries that cities are overpromising its potential. In talking with outreach workers, she found that many reported only subtle benefits.“The experienced outreach workers will often say, ‘Well, we really already know the general areas, so it’s not like we need the extra preciseness to help,’” she said. But Lewis said more precise information can only help. He planned to incorporate some of the data in Spokane’s official filing to HUD. Some of the data will also go into separate reports that any organization can access through the app. Officials in Houston hope to study the impacts of Hurricane Harvey—how many were left homeless by the storm, for example, and whether new hotspots have popped up as a result. “We can start looking for patterns, [and figure out] if they are in these locations because that’s where people became homeless, or because of external factors such as the availability of services or housing,” Eichenbaum said. Spokane worked with several local nonprofits to launch a project called Hope Works, which offers daytime employment opportunities for the homeless as an alternative to panhandling. That means mapping where panhandlers tend to hang out, and sending outreach workers to offer temporary job opportunities with the city. According to the website, folks who accept are given a free ride to the worksite and a stipend at the the end of the day, along with information about where to find additional services. In dealing with a population that moves around, Lewis said their services need to be mobile, too. “Transportation, quite frankly, is a barrier for a lot of people,” he said. “So we’re trying to meet people where they’re at instead of [operating] stationary buildings.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531342185337-N8UWDBLSQEXZUDEO00QE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+1.45.27+PM.png community - As Office Parks Empty, Towns Turn Vacancies Into Opportunities WAYNE, N.J. — Perched off a busy road in northern New Jersey with sweeping vistas of a vast reservoir sits a new relic of the suburban panorama: the international headquarters of Toys “R” Us slogging through its final days after the company announced that it would be shutting down for good. The decline of the toy giant prompted wistful recollections across the country of the increasingly bygone era of brick-and-mortar retail, but concern in this town quickly turned to the exoskeleton that the company leaves behind — a roughly 200-acre plot with multiple office buildings scattered across the land that once housed as many as 1,600 workers. While the worry locally is focused in part on what an extended vacancy might mean for the town’s tax base, the fate of the once thriving headquarters illustrates a much broader reality confronting many towns across America: the era of the suburban office parks is coming to an end. Outside Silicon Valley and other areas that have benefited from the technology boom, what were once the lifeblood of many suburbs have now become eyesores, forests of empty glass and concrete boxes that communities must figure out what to do with. Nowhere is the demise more keenly felt than in New Jersey, where the country’s first corporate campus was built in Murray Hill by AT&T Bell Labs in 1942. The state experienced perhaps the biggest building boom of office parks during the 1980s. “The model as it played out in New Jersey is now seemingly obsolete,” said Louise A. Mozingo, the chairwoman of the department of landscape architecture and environmental planning at University of California, Berkeley. Suburban office parks have lost their luster for a variety of reasons, including a growing preference among younger workers for life in more dynamic urban centers than in sometimes staid and sleepy suburbs. And the rapid pace of technological advancement has made the need for many clerical and processing jobs and the real estate to house those workers increasingly obsolete. But it was the recession and its aftermath that sounded the death knell for many suburban parks; New Jersey lost about 100,000 office-related jobs since 2008, according to James W. Hughes, a professor at Rutgers University. By 2010, the majority of the state’s suburban office inventory was between 20 and 30 years old, built during a much more primitive information technology era. “So, not only do we have a lot of obsolete space, but we also have workplace densification occurring at the same time,” said Mr. Hughes, referring to the move by many companies toward smaller, shared work spaces. “That’s the dilemma that really burst onto the scene maybe three years ago or four years ago.” In the 1980s, about 90 to 100 million square feet of suburban office space was built in New Jersey, accounting for 80 percent of the state’s inventory, Mr. Hughes said. By contrast, only 50 percent of the national suburban office inventory was built in the same period. New Jersey currently has over 6.5 million square feet of vacant office park space, according to CoStar, a commercial real estate company. In northern New Jersey, 23 percent of office space is listed as available, which includes vacant spaces and buildings that are emptying out as leases end, according to Newmark Knight Frank, a commercial real estate firm. But vacant office parks are important to municipal coffers because they remain on property tax rolls. Yet the longer they sit vacant, the faster their assessments plummet, forcing municipalities to find other sources of revenue and in some cases raise real estate taxes in a state that already has the country’s highest property taxes. In Roseland, about 11 percent of the town’s overall property tax base is vacant office space, according to data provided by Newmark Knight Frank. In Bridgewater, two office parks are responsible for more than $1.7 million in taxes. In Parsippany, four vacant buildings account for $1.8 million in taxes. In Warren, the former headquarters of Chubb Insurance pays over $1 million in taxes, but that is far less than when the property had a higher value. However, some municipalities are seeing opportunities in the vacant spaces. In some places the properties are being considered as a low-cost option to expand affordable housing, though that has proved somewhat controversial. Other municipalities are looking to reimagine the buildings with amenities to attract younger workers, including restaurants, banks, fitness centers and open-design offices all housed within a walkable or bikeable campus. “None of these millennials want to work in a corporate campus in western Morris County and have to commute long distances to meet their friends at a bar,’’ said Carl Goldberg, a developer who has been vocal about the redevelopment of office parks. “It’s just not the lifestyle that they’re interested in.” One model in the state has been particularly successful: the former Bell Labs building in Holmdel. Now called Bell Works, it is a two-million-square-foot, glass-encased behemoth with coffee shops, pop-up restaurants and a soon-to-be-completed wine bar and food hall on the first floor that is open to the public. Businesses occupy the rest of the space, with footprints as small as 350 square feet to as large as 350,000 square feet, and interest from companies has been high since the complex opened in 2013. While Bell Works does not have residences, condominiums are being built nearby by a different developer, and the office space has drawn workers from the surrounding area, including Asbury Park and Red Bank, who like the amenities and don’t want to commute to New York. And the building has become a bit of a downtown hub — the Holmdel Library is on the first floor, as are doctors offices, hair salons and a gym. “We coined a term for this: Metroburb,” said Ralph Zucker, the developer behind Bell Works. “They said it’s an insane idea, we wish it could work, its great, it’s what we need, but you’ll never pull it off. Once we started pulling it off, everybody jumped on board.” It has proved particularly appealing to tech companies that face the challenge of attracting a mostly younger work force to the suburbs. “You go out to the burbs and then, you may have a cafeteria, and you may have two or three options, but that’s it,” said Ken Wincko, the chief marketing officer at WorkWave, a software company and one of the original tenants of BellWorks, who commutes 45 minutes from Morristown. "Here, to be able to have a wide array of options, plus support from the community, you have everything that you need.” Other municipalities have tried to turn vacant office parks into residences in response to a longstanding court order to expand affordable housing in many New Jersey towns. But while the costs might be lower than building from scratch, the efforts in some cases has provoked a backlash. In Park Ridge, the former mayor, Terry Maguire, resigned amid a recall attempt after his attempts to turn the former roughly 37-acre Sony office park into affordable housing. In Montvale, Mayor Michael Ghassali described the battle he faced in trying to convert a vacant office park into affordable housing. “There were protests at every meeting, at the office, the council meetings, the phone calls, emails, there was not one person that was for it,” he said. “We voted on them three times. Twice was no, and then the third time is when the court said if you don’t do it, then we will make the decision for you.” As a result of the legal pressure, Mr. Ghassali has managed to carve out affordable housing, along with luxury condos, from some of the vacant office parks that are helping to plant the seeds for a new downtown. In Wayne, where the Toys “R” Us logo still welcomes passers-by to the campus, Mayor Christopher P. Vergano said he believed the site would prove desirable, though possibly as something far different. “I think there will be change,’’ he said, “only because we don’t see big corporate tenants buying 200-acre properties anymore.” Learn more at NY Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531342758233-AUMWUGDNMM8LZ3HGE80A/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+1.58.56+PM.png community - Is This Oakland Developer Building Sorely Needed Housing—or Dropping Gentrification Bombs? On a drizzly afternoon in March, Danny Haber is walking down 24th Street in West Oakland, giving a tour of two of his new apartment developments, when he pauses mid-step and turns to look over his shoulder. “You see that?” he says, a bit of edge to his voice. A car slows down as it drives past us. “It looks like Jonah’s car. Sometimes he just sits out here in that Volvo.” Jonah is Jonah Strauss, the 38-year-old founder of the Oakland Warehouse Coalition and Haber’s most vocal adversary. A former resident of the 24th Street building that Haber’s company, oWow, bought and is redeveloping into 16 apartments, Strauss has described Haber’s developments as “gentrification bombs.” “As if the subprime mortgage crisis wasn’t enough, you now have Danny Haber preying on the neighborhood,” he says. (As for whether Strauss was stalking Haber in his car, he says he wasn’t: “I have no desire to interact with him in person.”) The car having passed by, Haber continues his tour. “This was empty and blighted,” he says, pointing to a redbrick warehouse with a wood barrier surrounding it. On 23rd Street, construction crews are hammering away inside an adjacent 27,000-square-foot warehouse that used to be home to anarchist publisher AK Press. Dozens of apartments have been framed out with wood beams, and a large courtyard has been carved out of the building’s interior. In a twist on the current micro-apartment trend, Haber is dubbing these spaces in West Oakland “macro” units. At around 850 square feet apiece, they’ll be substantially larger than the usual 350-square-foot-and-below micros, with ultra-efficient layouts that somehow pack in three to four bedrooms, a full kitchen, and a living room. Prices will range from roughly $3,000 to $4,000 a month for the entire unit; a bedroom will go for $1,100 if the place is split between roommates (oWow is building an algorithm that will place applicants with compatible roommates based on data scraped from Facebook). In the Bay Area, almost all real estate developers can expect to face some opposition as they go about their complicated business. Community pushback is baked into the process. But Haber’s projects—there are currently six in the works in Oakland, mostly in former warehouse spaces—have made him more polarizing than most, because of both where he’s building them and how. Most of his macro-units are categorized as live-work spaces, which by city law allows him to move forward without the often-lengthy community-input period that would be required if they were simply residential. To his critics, Haber is exploiting a loophole in the building code for profit. Haber says he’s just innovating within the letter of the law. “Whenever you do something different or new,” he argues, “you’re going to have someone going after you.” That’s doubly true in a place as vulnerable and reactive as West Oakland. Though it’s smack-dab in the middle of one of the most expensive and highly regulated housing markets in the country, the area still has a Wild West feel to it. Longtime residents, many of them African American, have complained for years that authorities neglect the area. An entire community of artists, many of them white, have carved out giant live-work spaces as their homes, sometimes without permission. But lately, a post–Ghost Ship fire safety crackdown has threatened that way of life, as the city has started red-tagging warehouses deemed unfit for habitation, forcing residents out. All the while, rents and housing prices have skyrocketed, which has brought significant attention from developers. “People today are moving to Oakland,” Haber says flatly. So he, too, recently relocated the one-year-old oWow (the name, he says, was partly inspired by the rumored last words of Steve Jobs) from its previous home on a pier in San Francisco to a big office space above a vegetable stand in downtown Oakland. Haber says his macro-housing concept addresses the East Bay’s accelerating affordability crisis by serving a sector of the market that’s often overlooked: the middle class. With soaring construction and land costs, mid-price homes simply aren’t profitable to build, which is why most housing under construction today is one of two extremes: luxury homes for the wealthy or government-subsidized housing for the poor. Haber wants oWow to create housing for the so-called missing middle, especially the value-hungry millennial set. The company’s website places heavy emphasis on its roommate-matching service, which critics like Strauss point to as evidence that Haber’s housing is designed for affluent newcomers who will price out existing residents. But Haber says that his macro-apartments could also be a good option for families or people already living in the neighborhood, and that rents will end up being 40 to 50 percent less per bedroom than in typical market-rate buildings. Either way, turning warehouses that once housed starving artists into market-rate homes has not been an auspicious public relations move. Haber is either naïve or strategic enough to be the only developer willing to build this kind of housing in Oakland. His ability to take the heat could work to his distinct business advantage. But he may also be dangerously underestimating his opposition. In October, prompted by concerns brought up by Strauss’s Oakland Warehouse Coalition, the Oakland Planning Commission held an unusual hearing on the status of all six of Haber’s projects. In reality, it was a de facto trial on all things Danny Haber. For more than two hours, more than 50 speakers took turns at the microphone. Angry neighbors and other opponents brought up everything from his past as a landlord to accusations that he was exploiting Oakland’s black community support to make a profit. But about half the speakers defended Haber. C.B. Smith, an artist who lives near 1919 Market—a 63,000-square-foot, partially demolished warehouse that the city red-tagged in 2016 and that Haber subsequently bought—accused the developer of paying people from the neighborhood to speak on his behalf. (Haber denies this.) Strauss took to the podium toward the end of the hearing and told a story of an elderly resident at another Haber development who’d been roughed up by a contractor and told to leave, despite still residing in the building. “I urge you to stop all Danny Haber projects now,” he said. A Boston-born recording engineer who moved to the Bay in 2004, Strauss spent 11 years in a live-work loft, at 671 24th Street, until March 2015, when a fire broke out in the middle of the night, killing two of his neighbors and injuring several others. The city declared the building unfit for occupancy. Strauss says he and a roommate were each paying $875 per month for 2,400 square feet, which included a recording studio used by Strauss. Since the fire, Strauss says, he has bounced between five different “communal housing situations” but has struggled to find a place for his business. “There’s nowhere to go,” he says. Strauss founded the Oakland Warehouse Coalition after the Ghost Ship fire, in part to help tenants avoid unlawful evictions during Oakland’s warehouse crackdown. He has a strict philosophy that housing should not be a commodity and can recite passages from the city’s building code from memory. He admonishes me when I suggest that someone is living in a building illegally. “It’s ‘unpermitted occupancy,’” he says. Strauss says Haber has become his main developer target because “he’s the most egregious” and because he touched his life personally. “There are ripple effects of dropping a highly transient group of people in their 20s on the less melanated end of the spectrum into the neighborhood,” he says. But one such “melanated” person, Elaine Brown, a former Black Panther Party leader who is now an affordable housing developer, took the microphone at the October meeting in support of Haber: “Welcome to the world of black people, Jonah Strauss movement!” She went on to criticize Strauss’s battle to protect housing for artists. “They’re talking about a small little enclave and clique of people…. Black people need a place to live. We are 60 percent of the homeless in this city, and we’re looking to the Danny Habers of the world to help us to have someplace to live that is decent and indeed affordable.” A few tenants of the Travelers Hotel, a downtown Oakland SRO that Haber purchased, also spoke. One man said that he was offered a generous buyout and that he was treated fairly. Another said Haber made life miserable for those who refused to move out. Robert Salinas, a lawyer representing several former and current tenants, said that a wrongful eviction suit—one of several lawsuits Haber is facing—will go to trial in July if a settlement isn’t reached. The City of Oakland has since passed a temporary moratorium on similar SRO conversions. (Haber declined to comment on that project.) Haber says he’s learning from his mistakes as he goes, and that the plans for some of his most controversial projects have evolved as he’s gotten feedback from community members. “I wouldn’t know how dire the problem was if I hadn’t done projects like 1919 Market,” he says. “The problem is massive, and I just didn’t know that because it didn’t affect me personally.” Growing up on Long Island, Haber always wanted to be an entrepreneur. He attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he majored in real estate and urban land economics. While still a student, he launched an online alcohol-delivery service called Campus Drank, which racked up $400,000 in fines (later reduced to $3,000) for selling booze to minors. After graduating in 2010, he moved to Israel, where he cofounded an Arabic-language financial news website called Nuqudy (“E-Trade merges with the Wall Street Journal,” he says). He left after two years with his sights set on Palo Alto. “I had no friends there,” he says. “I just wanted to do another tech company.” Finding housing, of course, was his first challenge. After two months of sleeping on a couch, he eventually found a bedroom in a house that he shared with three roommates, a mismatched crew that he describes as a “hippie artist, a drug dealer, and a Silicon Valley guy.” Haber says another friend who worked in tech taught him to code in exchange for working out with him a few times a week at the local YMCA. He used his new coding skills to launch an apartment search website where house seekers could post what they were looking for and be contacted by interested landlords. One day while out getting coffee, he says, he had a chance run-in with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Haber mustered the courage to walk up and ask him for advice about his fledgling business idea. According to Haber, Cook listened. “He said, ‘Do you really believe in the idea? If not, life is too short,’” Haber says. So Haber abandoned the idea and moved to San Francisco. There, a project he did believe in—themed rental houses—eventually hatched. In 2012, Haber and Alon Gutman, a friend he’d met in Mountain View’s Hacker Dojo, launched the Negev, a company they named for the desert region in Israel. The Negev complexes (only one of which Haber still owns, down from a high of seven) can house up to 60 people and come with shared kitchens, coworking spaces, and dining and movie rooms. There are group-bonding activities like weekend hikes, yoga classes, and Sunday dinners. Housemates are grouped based on their personalities and interests, from “social geeks” to “sports and parties.” When I refer to them as tech-bro dorms, Haber corrects me: They are “themed group-living” homes (and they’re coed, although they skew heavily male). Residents pay between $1,100 and $1,900 a month for basic rooms, some of which stack roommates in bunk beds. Haber says he’s leaving the Negev behind so he can focus on oWow, but he wants to show me one of the complexes so he can talk about the evolution of his work. The idea for oWow, he says, came partly from learning that the Negev’s residents typically wanted to move in with smaller groups of friends after a couple years in a theme house. “Why not do the building they’re going to next?” he asks. On a recent weekday afternoon at the Negev house on SoMa’s Sixth Street, about 20 bikes are hanging from a wall in the main living room as a few roommates sit with laptops in the kitchen. In the basement, there’s a makeshift coworking space with a large whiteboard scrawled with phrases like “How do I measure success?” and “Sell partnerships.” The place has the mismatched furniture and last-night’s-beer smell of a frat house, albeit one where everyone listens to TED Talks in their downtime. A couple blocks away, Haber shows me another Negev house, on Folsom, that he says has a more “party” vibe. The living room and lobby area is filled with about a dozen slouchy black leather couches, a DJ booth, and a graffiti mural of San Francisco’s skyline. From the room next door, I can hear one resident bark at another, “You bastard! You got tickets to Burning Man!” Strauss says he suspects that Haber actually lives in Palo Alto. Haber denies it: He says he still lives in a room in one of the Negev theme houses. “People think I’m a billionaire with all the money in the world,” he says after giving me a ride to his office in his 1998 Mazda sedan, which has a cracked headlight and is littered with empty water bottles. Still, Haber’s company recently purchased the old Coast Sausage warehouse on Adeline Street in West Oakland, prompting a new round of pushback—this time from preservationists who want the neighborhood to remain a haven for industrial businesses, some of which are flourishing. Haber says he wants to turn the warehouse, abandoned since the 1990s, into live-work apartments with two- and three-bedroom units. “It’s a cool site that’s been empty for a long time,” he says. Jon Sarriugarte has run his blacksmithing operation out of a nearby warehouse for more than 20 years and hopes to block Haber’s plans, which haven’t yet been approved by the city. The blacksmith, who makes light fixtures for clients like Restoration Hardware, says his work requires a large warehouse space and an urban power grid. “I can’t just go to a farm to do this,” he says. “I need an industrial district in the city, and those are being encroached on.” Sarriugarte believes that plans to turn spaces like this into homes would eventually push his business out of the neighborhood, along with others like it. Haber counters that the units he’s planned for Adeline Street would have thick enough walls and big enough work areas that some industrial work, like welding, could take place there. Sarriugarte doesn’t take Haber at his word. He suggests instead that the developer build something similar elsewhere. “Let’s add this kind of density around BART stations,” he says. Haber’s nemesis, Jonah Strauss, isn’t even willing to give that much. He says he’d be satisfied only if Haber packed up and left town entirely. “Danny Haber preys on instability,” he says. “I’d like all of his projects to be halted.” In some ways, the animus between Haber and Strauss is a predictable conflict in a place where capitalist entrepreneurs and socialist activists both have passionate supporters. And both are, in their own ways, right. Historically, Oakland’s poorest communities have been victimized by all manner of unscrupulous housing regimes. But Oakland is also desperate for new homes, and Haber is trying to erect hundreds of such units in the kind of building environment that most other developers simply don’t have the stomach for. Haber admits that there are less contentious ways to make a buck. “There are easier industries where you don’t have to deal with the Jonah Strausses” is how he puts it. But “building housing feels like the ultimate entrepreneurial thing to do,” he says. “How do you turn something from nothing into something people like?” In West Oakland, at least, Haber is still working out the answer. Learn more at San Francisco Magazine https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531343063868-IBQBWTEJC3J5GKQUKD8K/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.03.56+PM.png community - What the Future of Affordable Housing Already Looks Like Affordable housing construction seems eternally scant in the U.S. If that ever changes, a new exhibit about the other side of the Atlantic Ocean has a few design ideas to share. “Social Housing: New European Projects,” on exhibit at the Center for Architecture until May 19, features new public housing in France, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the U.K. The projects show a range of ambition and intervention: Near Vienna’s Rudolf Bednar Park, Einszueins Architektur designed Wohnprojekt Wien, a co-housing building with gardens and a shared library. In Geneva, Jaccaud Zein Architects and Sergison Bates Architects designed a housing complex that lives within the city’s existing urban structures, carving courtyards out of alleyways. Paul Karakusevic, founder and partner of the U.K. firm Karakusevic Carson Architects, recently published a book about new, innovative social housing projects around which the exhibit is based. His firm’s specialization in social housing and its relationships with local housing councils trace back to the architect’s witnessing of what he felt were poor quality efforts in London during the 1960s and ‘70s. He was also deeply concerned by the lack of affordable housing more recently, and how little was being done about it. “Over the past 20-30 years in all the big cities, we’ve got a problem because no one’s been building or investing for such a long time,” Karakusevic says. At last, however, cities are starting to realize that their housing shortages are creating serious problems, and he has seen a slight widening of city housing budgets, particularly in London’s boroughs. Karakusevic finds Vienna particularly ambitious when it comes to social planning. Sixty percent of Viennese residents live in homes that are built, owned, or managed by local municipalities, and Karakusevic is impressed by the way the city and architecture firms pay special attention to creating spaces which foster community. Wohnprojekt Wien, for example, has large, communal kitchen spaces in addition to smaller kitchens within each unit. Karakusevic describes the project as “a utopia.” The 26 featured architecture firms in “Social Housing” focused on designing a neighborhood rather than a single structure. Each housing project was created with attention to railways, roads, and existing buildings as a way to preserve and augment the community. Some projects are also designed to be mixed-use, with schools, workrooms, and retail spaces built in or around the them. In Amsterdam’s Osdorp neighborhood, a housing project by Mecanoo includes a day-care center, community center, and sports hall, in addition to 51 apartments and 21 single-family homes. With housing regeneration plans, Karakusevic says, there are often fears that a lot of established residents will simply move if the construction drags on for too long. Renovations, like the one of Bois-le-Prêtre done by Frédéric Druot and Lacaton & Vassal in Paris, avoid this issue by focusing on smaller changes like bringing things up to code and updating the building’s facade. These were compromises Karakusevic calls a “sticking plaster” (or what Americans would call a “Band-Aid”). Height—or, rather, a lack thereof—is a striking feature in most of the projects, especially given the associations many Americans have with urban public housing. “I think that’s maybe an American thing,” notes Karakusevic. “Everyone says ‘Paul they’re so little!’” But he insists that the buildings still retain density, some with the capacity for up to 1,000 homes, and explains that most of the residents he worked with were staunchly against high-rises. “They don’t mind a mid-rise, 5-12 stories,” he said, “but they see high-rises associated with poor maintenance, lifts breaking down, and crime. They think if the council doesn’t maintain [the building] it’s not the end of the world because they’ll only have to walk down four floors, not 25.” Most of the mistrust of public housing, at least in London, Karakusevic said, stems from the fact that the majority of public housing built in the 1960s “wasn’t particularly well designed. It was built by private-sector contractors who were just putting things up in order to make the maximum amount of money on the back of the postwar housing crisis.” One of the most infamous examples isAylesbury Estate, which was built in the ‘60s and been used by British politicians as an embodiment of London’s socioeconomic problems (one leader called it “hell’s waiting room”). In Karakusevic’s experience, ceding control to the private sector is where a project’s bills start to add up. Even conservative politicians find it difficult to argue with the economics of letting local governments control their own housing projects, Karakusevic says. “They go, ‘Wow, if the council does it we get minimum 50 percent affordable housing. If the private sector does it we get 15.’” He wants to see federal governments give more financial power to city housing authorities. In London’s boroughs, for example, housing councils are hiring their own design teams to oversee everything but the construction. “Because the government has stayed in control, no one’s taking any profit out before we start,” he says, “unlike with private developers, where even not-for-profits are taking a slice out of the pie.” And, because local municipalities are so involved, it enables them to hold building contractors accountable. “If the public can build again—social housing, intermediate housing, discounted market rent, sale—then that’s another big delivery vehicle that will not necessarily compete with the private sector, just augment it,” Karakusevic says. But he does not want to sacrifice cost for quality. “Although there’s a crisis, and we need more housing, there’s no point building housing if it falls down or fails in 30 years,” he said. “Public housing should be seen as public infrastructure. Without investment in public infrastructure, your city starts to fail.” For their Kings Crescent project in Hackney, Karakusevic’s firm used high-quality bricks, and put in large windows and a roof deck. Kings Crescent is an ongoing project: residents in the first set of 79 homes moved in September 2017. The first phase has 50 percent of units available for private sale (which, Karakusevic says, helps subsidize the other buildings), retail, and new public space through the creation of courtyards. The buildings were designed to fit into the tonier surroundings of terraced and semi-detached housing. In the U.S., strides are being taken to create better public housing. South Bronx’s Arbor House is an example of recent, community-oriented, government-sponsored affordable housing, and New York City has created new design guidelines with the aim to create quantity with quality. For cities and architects who share in that goal, Europe is offering inspiration. “A lot of people think we’re crazy, to build this quality,” said Karakusevic. “But we say if you want good communities, and for people to take pride in their neighborhoods, you can’t shortchange people.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531343230837-FLP0H9ZA4ELWBP6QLUOQ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.06.45+PM.png community - Master Planning & P3 Financing the LA River Jack Baylis: Barbara, share the Mayor and City’s current vision for the LA River and the G2 parcel. Barbara Romero: Before I joined the Mayor’s Office, I worked at the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Authority. We were involved in projects all over the county: in Pacoima, the Tujunga Wash, Compton Creek, and the LA River. I loved my job, so I was torn about leaving to work for the city. But the mayor said, “I want you to do what you are doing at the MRCA, but at a broader scale for the city and the river. I want you to use your perspective as a kid who grew up in Boyle Heights, and who thought the river was an infrastructure barrier. Help me elevate the vision of what the river could mean, both for connecting communities and for using our water resources in a different way to create value.” Our vision at this point is to secure land along the river to provide opportunities to create the multi-layered value that cannot always be monetized. When I first arrived in the Mayor’s office, I was asked what our metrics for success would be. I said that unless we were able to secure this parcel of land that had been in the LA River vision for over 20 years, people would not think we were serious. We have now secured the G2 land for $60 million from Union Pacific. It took more than four years to acquire, but it created the platform for a multi-benefit project that cleans and captures water, and most importantly, connects the community. For me, G2 is the exemplar of what we want to do across the entire 32 miles of the river in the City of Los Angeles. We have a responsibility to get people to understand the value of our water system. The river is one vehicle to help people understand how we can become more sustainable as a city. We can use the river as a metaphor to achieve that goal. Jack Baylis: Dan, is the county in alignment with Mayor of LA’s vision for the river? Dan Lafferty: Many people don’t realize that housed within Public Works is the Los Angeles County Flood Control District. As Assistant Deputy Director of the county Department of Public Works, I’m also the Chief Planner for Flood Control. Our agency, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has the primary responsibility for operations and maintenance of the flood control right-of-way for the LA River. We did our last Master Plan in 1996 and are just beginning a revision to that process, which we expect to be completed by 2020. This plan will be, not just a compilation of all the plans that have been done since 1996, but also a vision for the entire corridor—both the right-of-way and the adjacent land. We will be soliciting input from the city of LA and the lower LA River municipalities. That effort will require a lot of collaborative input, and we are excited to help shepherd in a shared vision for the river, whatever it may be. Learn more at The Planning Report https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531343357848-JK828NGY4IE69MJWFRAO/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.08.58+PM.png community - Wave of Climate Migration Looms, but It “Doesn't Have to Be a Crisis” As the sea creeps steadily inland in countries such as Bangladesh, and as dwindling rains put already marginal farmland out of play in Ethiopia and other places, a wave of migration triggered by a changing climate is taking shape on the horizon. But most “climate migrants” will not be heading abroad to start new lives; instead they will settle elsewhere in their home countries. A new World Bank report released this week declares that if nothing is done to curb global warming and factor migration into development planning, by mid-century this internal population shift could involve more than 140 million people in three regions examined: sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia and Latin America. “Climate change is already a driver of internal migration, and it will become more so in the future,” says John Roome, senior director for climate change at The World Bank Group. The potential for such a surge in areas comprising 55 percent of the developing world’s population raises questions of environmental justice because those who have contributed least to global warming are forced to shoulder most of the burden. It is incumbent on developed countries like the U.S. to step up, says María Cristina García, a professor of American Studies at Cornell University who was not involved in the report. Developed countries can help by both working to limit greenhouse gas emissions and funding efforts to help developing nations plan for climate migration challenges, García says. Some people will need to migrate despite any measures that might be taken—but “this doesn’t have to be a crisis,” Roome says. Properly managed migration could even bring more economic opportunities to some poor communities, the World Bank report’s authors contend. But planning needs to start now. “THOSE PEOPLE DO NOT GET COUNTED” The study of climate migration is still relatively new, and projections of just how many people might be driven from their homes as the world warms are hard to pin down. Predictions of climate change impacts carry an inherent uncertainty, and the reasons people decide to migrate—or are forced to—are often complex. To get a clearer picture of how this story might unfold, the authors of the report modeled how slow-burn climate effects (such as coastal land lost to sea level rise, along with water scarcity and crop failure caused by changing rainfall and higher temperatures) affected population patterns in the three regions covered by the report. They focused on internal migration because most people pushed from home—whether for economic, climate-related or other reasons—are displaced within their own countries. The models looked at how populations might shift in the future if greenhouse gas emissions abate, and compared that scenario with what could happen if emissions continue on their current trajectory. The models also incorporated instances in which development planning alleviated economic inequality—and when that equality gap widened. When emissions were left to soar and development was left unequal, internal migration registered highest: an estimated 86 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in south Asia and 17 million in Latin America by 2050. But tackling either issue substantially reduced migration numbers to as few as 31 million across all three regions. Migration “hot spots”—places people are likely to leave, as well as their probable destinations—emerged in each region. “The impact of climate on migration is not uniform across countries or even within countries,” Roome says. For example, people may increasingly leave Ethiopia’s northern highlands, where agriculture depends on seasonal rains that are now unreliable. Others are likely to flee coastal areas in Bangladesh, where saltwater infiltrating the drinking supplies of 20 million people may already be causing an increase in diarrheal diseases. The report also found climate change could cause people to leave urban centers that have long attracted migrants drawn to the promise of better-paying jobs. Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, a sprawling city of more than 17 million people, is threatened by sea level rise and ever-higher storm surges; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital of three million, could see increasingly unreliable rains and thus an unstable water supply. The report’s overall findings are no surprise for researchers who have studied climate migration over the last decade or so, says García, who is writing a book on climate migration. Overall migration is usually associated with refugees fleeing to other countries in times of war or other crises, with the U.N. and other agencies keeping track of those pushed outside their own borders. But internal migration is less thoroughly tracked. “We just don’t have a lot of hard data” on it, says Alice Thomas, climate displacement program manager at the nonprofit Refugees International. “Often it just happens kind of slowly over time, and those people do not get counted. WHO BEARS THE BRUNT? The report’s authors caution that it is not meant to be a precise forecast, but rather a guide to what might happen and an aid to planning for a potential upheaval. This kind of modeling is useful “not because any one scenario is going to give us the answer” but because it illuminates the various forces influencing migration, says report co-author Alex De Sherbinin, deputy manager of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center at Columbia University. “It’s really about taking a longer-term view of the issue,” says report co-author Kanta Kumari Rigaud, a lead environmental specialist with the World Bank. For example, Kumari says countries can foster industries that are less subject to climate fluctuations in order to help communities adapt and prevent the need for people to leave. Ethiopia has done this, the report notes, by pushing to diversify its economy—three quarters of its population currently depends on agriculture but the government, with help from the World Bank, has implemented more sustainable land management. Various efforts to bolster the economy and reduce poverty have led to a $50-billion gain in gross domestic product over the last decade as well as higher school enrollment and improved sanitation. Governments can also step in earlier to provide support when population movements will eventually become unavoidable, the report suggests, instead of waiting until families have exhausted all their resources battling drought or rising seas. Social services could help line people up with jobs in more climatically stable areas, for example. This could raise the economic prospects for families and countries as a whole. “When it’s planned, it should be a win–win situation for everybody,” Thomas says. Of course, this kind of planning requires a dedicated effort—one that even developed nations like the U.S. have struggled to implement. Thomas notes thousands of people left Puerto Rico for the mainland after Hurricane Maria last fall, largely because they had so little support on the ground. “Even in wealthy countries we don’t have the right laws and policies in place,” Thomas says. “Those measures will take a long time to put in place.” But it is poorer countries “that are paying the price and have the populations that are being forced to suffer the most,” Thomas says. The U.S. and other wealthier nations have nominally committed to efforts, including the Green Climate Fund, to help developing countries study and plan for climate impacts. But many of the wealthier players have yet to fulfill their promises; the U.S., under the administration of Pres. Donald Trump, has balked at providing more money for such programs. Even if seriously concerted efforts are made to lower carbon dioxide emissions and promote more equitable development, millions will still be displaced because of the inevitable warming that is already baked in. The authors and other experts hope the new report will help spur action and research into the problem. “Hopefully,” Roome says, “this report can raise awareness of the issue and create a little bit of this political will.” Learn more at Scientific American https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531343647975-FN31KBLTH22GWH0SBOZ0/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.13.16+PM.png community - L.A. Lawmakers Pledge 222 Units for Homeless Residents in Each District The Los Angeles City Council pledged Tuesday to support a minimum number of housing units for homeless people in each of the districts they represent. Under the pledge, each council member will back the approval of at least 222 units of supportive housing in his or her district before July 1, 2020, including any units approved since last July. The City Council resolution is not binding, but lawmakers said it is important that they publicly make a shared commitment to build homeless housing across the sprawling city. LA Family Housing President and Chief Executive Stephanie Klasky-Gamer, whose group provides housing and homeless services, said "political will" can be one of the key obstacles to building supportive housing. "Your vote is a public statement that you are committed to being part of the solution," Klasky-Gamer told the council. More than a year ago, Los Angeles voters overwhelmingly approved a $1.2-billion bond to fund new housing with supportive services. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531332635569-5P04PD657QVYAT2ZHI95/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.10.12+AM.png community - Mayor Eric Garcetti Announces Plan For a Resilient Los Angeles LOS ANGELES —Mayor Eric Garcetti, in partnership with 100 Resilient Cities — Pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation (100RC), today released Los Angeles’ first citywide Resilience Strategy to help the City plan for the opportunities and challenges that the future is sure to bring. Mayor Garcetti also signed a historic executive directive that commits City departments to appoint Chief Resilience Officers who will take the lead in making Los Angeles stronger and safer. "Resilience is so much more than disaster preparedness; it is a value that guides everything we do in Los Angeles, because we know that today’s decisions shape the lives of our children and grandchildren,” said Mayor Garcetti. “We are grateful to 100 Resilient Cities for their support, and proud to lead with a forward-looking plan that will strengthen our infrastructure, protect our economy, make our institutions more inclusive, and create safer neighborhoods.” The Mayor’s Office developed the Los Angeles Resilience Strategy with the collaboration, financial, and technical support of 100RC, as well as community and expert input. The comprehensive plan features 96 immediate actions that give residents the tools to plan and prepare for inevitable shocks and stresses — from earthquakes and flooding to homelessness and climate change. Los Angeles joins the ranks of approximately 40 cities around the world, including Paris, New York, and Bangkok, that have implemented similar strategies. “Resilient Los Angeles is the culmination of a months-long process to cultivate partnerships and develop actions that increase Los Angeles’ resilience,” said Chief Resilience Officer Marissa Aho. “It is also the beginning of a greater citywide commitment to continue to collaborate, form new partnerships, and design new initiatives in a continuous process that will contribute to a safer and stronger Los Angeles.” “We congratulate Mayor Garcetti, CRO Aho, and the City of Los Angeles for taking this historic step toward creating a lasting resilient future,” said Michael Berkowitz, President of 100 Resilient Cities. “As an inaugural member of the 100RC network, Los Angeles continues to be a leader in resilience building, with urban solutions that can serve as a model for cities around the world. We are excited to continue the next stage of our partnership and to collaborate around implementation of this groundbreaking strategy.” Learn more at LA Mayor Website https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531332386653-4P4KELG9JW1ZOCBF171I/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+11.06.08+AM.png community - Bringing Wealth and Water to the City of Angels: Transforming Los Angeles’ Physical Landscape into an Anglo Vision 1908-1960 Los Angeles today continues to undergo massive land and city development to sustain and provide for the growing city. The city has become a multi-ethnic metropolis, housing and providing for diverse communities as it has since the beginning of development. The city resides between the Pacific Coast, Sierra Nevada, and San Gabriel mountains making it a prime region for real estate. Its desirable flat region is crucial in the construction of massive building projects. However, the landscape did not always prove prosperous for the Anglican community. Los Angeles’ geographical features and water supply were not always manageable and the Anglican communities that resided within suffered hardships for many generations. For almost a hundred years Mexicans who settled into Los Angeles prior to the Mexican American War adapted to the natural, physical landscape and the water supply it provided. However, when Anglo Americans came to the Los Angeles basin after California was declared a state in 1848, decades of physical landscape changes to the region’s coast and water supply began to transform the City of Angels according to an “Anglo Vision” at the social and human cost of the displaced and exploited indigenous and Mexican descent populations who resided there. There is an extensive amount of scholarship, current and past, that details Anglo alterations within the Los Angeles region’s communities and landscape in addition to the human and environmental cost that accompanied. However, there is little scholarship pertaining to the physical landscape changes Anglo Americans enforced that specifically affected the indigenous and Mexican descended communities within Los Angeles which is why my research provides historical significance. The scholarship in my research is diverse and comes from an array of academic and professional disciplines that strengthens and provides perceptive evidence to my paper. Many of my primary sources derive from city maps dating back to 1888 that display the evolution of physical landscape and community alterations as well as photographs and newspaper articles during the periods of reconstruction many of which, were supplied by the California State University, Dominguez Hills archives. In addition, sociologist John Walton’s Western Times and Water Warsincluded beneficial statistics, maps, newspaper articles, first-hand accounts and many additional resources that depicts the hardships indigenous and Mexican communities faced during the construction of the Owen’s River Valley Aqueduct. A collective of authors from scientific, ecological, biochemical, and geographic backgrounds included in the Historical Ecology and Landscape Change of the San Gabriel River and Floodplain SCCWRP Technical Report, provided insight into social, landscape and ecological effects of the Los Angeles Anglo Vision. Historians William Deverell, Blake Gumprecht and Greg Hise were also important contributors to my research. These authors focus on the social, political and economic impacts the Anglo Vision forced onto the Los Angeles region and its multiethnic communities. Literature prior to 1990 focuses on the Anglo point of view and Anglo successes in building the city of their dreams, which was not necessarily beneficial to my studies. The sources in my research were all published within the last twenty years, which substantiates the premise that the impact the Anglo vision had on ethnic communities and the landscape is a relatively recent historical research phenomenon. Los Angeles Communities Prior to Anglo Arrival In order to comprehend the dramatic social and cultural changes that the Los Angeles indigenous and Mexican communities endured during the years of Anglo transformation, it is important to recall the past communities of influence which can be found in author Blake Gumprecht’s The Los Angeles River: its life, death, and possible rebirth. According to Gumprecht, the first inhabitants of the region were the Tongva Indians. The Tongva Indians were hunters and gatherers who once inhabited the valleys and coastal plains of the Los Angeles region. The water supplied from the Los Angeles river and streams that birthed out of it, were crucial to their life and culture. The Tongva used the river to drink and bathe in the pools along its banks. The natural landscape provided them with animals to hunt, acorns and other native food sources, and materials to make their huts, clothing and tools.[1] The Tongva Indians adapted to and moved with the natural landscape and respected what it provided for them. The Tongva traveled according to the season to search for food and selected sites for their villages according to the location and sources of water, which provided all that the Tongva needed to survive. Because the Tongva understood the region’s waterways and their dangers, many settlements remained a safe distance from the region’s rivers and streams, on high ground. Gumprecht concludes that this understanding and syncretism to the Los Angeles landscape is apparent among the Tongva culture and was passed on to future generations and new inhabitants. In 1768, an expedition was ordered by the Spanish government to occupy Monterey, California. The expedition was led by Baja governor, Captain Gaspar de Portola. Two members of the expedition kept diaries of their experiences; Engineer Michael Costanso and Father Juan Crespi.[2] It is in these daily accounts, that the first sightings of the Los Angeles region are documented and recorded. As Father Juan Crespi noted while camping along the Los Angeles River, “It has good land for planting all kinds of grain and seeds, and is the most suitable site of all that we have seen for a mission, for it has all the requisites for a large settlement.”[3] Indeed, by 1781, colonial Spain, intrigued by the plentiful supply of water, established El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles. As the Spaniards settled into the Los Angeles region in 1781, they soon realized their agricultural dreamland was illusory. [4] The inability to control and effectively irrigate the water supply within the region led the Spaniards to adopt Tongva Indian agricultural labor skills and expertise of the region’s soil. In addition, the Spaniards also adopted the Tongva’s understanding of the irregularities of the rivers and streams. Along with their farm labor, the Indians were used to maintain the Pueblo’s water ditches.[5] The Spaniards continued adopting “primitive” traditions that proved vital within the Spanish outpost after the Mexican Revolution against Spain in 1821. With the forced labor of the region’s Indigenous community and adaptation of their geographical traditions, the Spaniards flourished and thrived within the Los Angeles basin for decades. According to Andrew Rolle’s book Los Angeles: From Pueblo to City of the Future, the era of the Californios evolved due to the distance and difficulty of communication between Mexico City and California in addition to strong local pride. [6] The open and available lands, in addition to the demand for labor and rancheros drew Mexican migrants north to “El Pueblo”.[7] Rolle claims the migrants not only introduced new Central Mexican species to the foreign lands, but also their traditions and relationships to nature. Coming from lands with tropical climates and good soil, the Mexican migrants were essentially forced to adopt old native traditions in order to survive in the region. The 2007 Historical Ecology and Landscape Change of the San Gabriel River and Floodplain SCCWRP technical report #499, from 1825 to about 1831, discusses the severe droughts the Los Angeles region suffered.[8] Indians who left Mission life served as laborers and ranch hands on the Californio estates and ranchos. The Californios learned a great deal from them about the Los Angeles province and volatile water sources. The elite Californios were vulnerable, and lacked the supplies and economic backing to produce an advanced system of irrigation. Thus, they depended on native labor and land knowledge for their success.[9] Despite Indian labor abuse, and cultural exclusion, the Spanish and Mexican generations continued local Indian traditions, knowledge and respect of the Los Angeles region. The Californio society was built on the experiences, successes and losses of those who came before them. The water continued to flow in its own directions while the developing communities adapted alongside. However, as noted by Rolle, everything changed after the Mexican-American War. In 1847 Los Angeles was occupied, and by 1848 California was officially a part of the United States quickly becoming an immigrant center.[10] “El Pueblo” was Americanized fairly quickly, and Anglos began to displace the region’s Mexican heritage. Ideologies would soon change from humans conforming to the land, to conforming the land for the Anglos. Anglo Los Angeles The discovery of gold near Sacramento in 1848 initiated the transformation of Los Angeles into a center for trade and materials, resulting in more southern Mexican migrants and curious Anglos migrating from the east. Eastern migration erupted exponentially after California officially became a state later that year. [11]In his book, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past, historian William Deverell claims that the end of the war between the Republic of Mexico and United States pressured not only the Manifest Destiny’s right for Anglo American expansion westward, but also the postulation that racial and national supremacy were in collusion.[12] In addition to the economic promises California provided, there were outward racial migration factors supported by Manifest Destiny that enticed Anglo migrants into the Los Angeles region. Deverell asserts that Manifest Destiny’s Anglican racial privilege and ethnocentrism promoted Anglo confidence to conquer and exploit “The City of Destiny.”[13] Another factor for Anglo migration into the Los Angeles region is mentioned in the Historical Ecology and Landscape Change of the San Gabriel River and Floodplain SCCWRP Technical report. According to the 2007 report, in 1851, The United States congress established the California Land Act, which set up a land commission to adjudicate between what was legitimate and illegitimate land claims in California. Proof of land ownership, was often difficult to attain due to different requirements under Mexican law. Ultimately, many rancheros were forced to sell all or most of their land to the U.S. government or Anglo migrants.[14] In addition to the discovery of gold and acquisition of land, the report claims that the completion of the Santa Fe Railroad was also an Anglo immigration pull factor to Southern California. At its completion in 1886, not only was Los Angeles officially opened to eastern and mid-west Anglo Americans, but to markets in the east as well. Due to increased railroad developments and connections, by the end of the decade, Los Angeles was connected and accessible to the entire country.[15] However, the newly arriving Anglo migrants to Los Angeles did not tolerate the “primitive” conditions that characterized the young Pueblo. Although many Mexican-Americans lost their lands after the war, their population in Southern California increased due to early industrialization in Los Angles and Anglo demands for cheap and knowledgeable labor in agriculture. As soon as Anglo Americans settled into the new frontier, their prospects for creating a more “developed” Anglo city became aggressively clear. In Whitewashed Adobe, Deverell confirms that Anglo society took over the Mexican pueblo almost instantly, and set out to create cultural and physical boundaries in order to contain its growing population. Deverell emphasizes that at this point, Mexican ethnicity coincided with class, guaranteeing Mexican presence in the bottommost ranks and cheapest wages of manual or agricultural labor.[16] Clashes of culture and cultural space were eminent and Anglos pressured to control not only those who resided in Los Angeles, but the physical landscape and water supply that had, for generations, disrupted agricultural and city developments. Anglo immigrants demanded better-constructed streets, sanitation, fire protection, police, schools, and most importantly, readily-accessible water piped directly to their homes.[17] Anglos wanted to conform the land and water to benefit their own economic, social, and political goals, and began formulating a plan to transform the city’s coast and water supply, a plan which was enacted at the expense of its Mexican American and indigenous populations. The Anglo vision and goals for Los Angeles outlined by Deverell in Whitewashed Adobe clearly defines the contrast between Indigenous and Mexican and Anglo values, and displacement and marginalization of Mexican Americans to make room for the Anglo vision. The swelling population created an increase in demand for water accessibility. According to the Historical Ecology and Landscape Change of the San Gabriel River and Floodplain SCCWRP Technical Report, Anglos pushed Mexican communities away from the prime residency near the river to the outskirts of Los Angeles and into the valleys. While the Los Angeles rail system provided accessibility for trade and immigration, due to the lack of understanding of the land, Anglo city planners and railroad companies built bridges over the unpredictable rivers of Los Angeles which created severe and deadly consequences during flood seasons. As cost of residency along the desired water source increased, it became available only for the wealthy Anglo settlers- another example of how ethnicity and class concurred within the Los Angeles Anglo frontier. Yet again, their decision to reside along the river without any knowledge of the land and its water supply would eventually doom Anglos and ultimately force them to seek help from those who best understood the landscape, Mexican-Americans.[18] In a climate marked by erratically extreme droughts or torrential rains and a rapidly growing population, control of the water supply and its threats became a top priority for Anglo city planners. As noted in the SCCWRP 2007 Technical Report Historical Ecology and Landscape Change of the San Gabriel River and Floodplain, 1861 was marked by heavy rainfall which flooded the San Gabriel River, forging new channels and washing away resident’s crops, livestock and homes. Two years later, a severe drought occurred, which dried up grasslands, starving cattle to death. Consequently, the new American Ranchers quickly went broke and were foreclosed upon.[19] In 1867, the climatic history of floods and droughts repeated once again altering the landscape and challenging communities.[20] For decades to come, Anglos came to realization that they held no power over the native landscape and climates of the Los Angeles region. As Anglos suffered economically, the push for landscape alterations was at the forefront of city developments. The Owens River Valley Aqueduct: 1908-1913 The first large-scale geographic alteration constructed and enforced by Anglo city officials was that of the Owens River Valley Aqueduct, which was completed in 1913. The Aqueduct was anticipated to bring in a substantial amount of water to the city of Los Angeles and sustain the growing population. John Walton’s Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California, provides an extensive outlook on how the construction of the Owens River Valley Aqueduct intensively affected indigenous populations of the region using historical statistics and censuses as evidence. Prior to 1885, The Owens River Valley’s population consisted of twelve percent of “indigenous Californios” and Mexican migrants. [21] Apache Mexican migrant Frank Olivas first settled into Los Angeles and shortly moved to the Valley where he became a packer and miner. In addition to the promises of mining riches, the massive farm lands also attracted Mexican migrants as well as other non-white inhabitants, who made up forty percent of the Owens River Valley population. [22] Anglo Americans flooded into the valley region based on their vision of American cultural promises of social mobility and the idea of frontier affluence. [23] Due to the Eurocentric views of the newly migrated Anglos, the valley fell victim to social divisions based not just gender, but on national origin and ethnicity as well. The social structure of the Owens River Valley affected the degrading class of the indigenous and Mexican populations that resided there prior to Anglo migration. Mexicans, the largest single ethnic group among miners, constituted one third of the mining population. The remaining indigenous community, the Paiutes, were predominantly farmers, sharing most of the farm land with white males, or laborers on farms where their expertise and methods proved successful and essential for survival. Many Paiutes assimilated into Anglo culture by attending school and supporting Anglo fashion as depicted in the image below. [24]A majority of the white settlers, if not owning land, learned the trade of coal mining quickly monopolized it.[25] The California Land Act in 1851, suggested by Walton, assisted white male farmers in owning most of the land which increased their status and wealth. The class situation in the valley would continue to diminish Mexican and indigenous reputations as the Anglo vision, backed by the Manifest Destiny, promoted their right of conquest and utopic society. [26] The social structure of the Owens River Valley affected the degrading class of the indigenous and Mexican populations that resided there prior to Anglo migration. Mexicans, the largest single ethnic group among miners, constituted one third of the mining population. The remaining indigenous community, the Paiutes, were predominantly farmers, sharing most of the farm land with white males, or laborers on farms where their expertise and methods proved successful and essential for survival. Many Paiutes assimilated into Anglo culture by attending school and supporting Anglo fashion as depicted in the image below. [24]A majority of the white settlers, if not owning land, learned the trade of coal mining quickly monopolized it.[25] The California Land Act in 1851, suggested by Walton, assisted white male farmers in owning most of the land which increased their status and wealth. The class situation in the valley would continue to diminish Mexican and indigenous reputations as the Anglo vision, backed by the Manifest Destiny, promoted their right of conquest and utopic society. [26] Class tensions and the protection of lands pushed indigenous Paiutes and White farmers into a period described as the “Indian Wars,” which spanned a period of forty years between 1870 and 1910. John Walton claims in his novel that during this period, as a method of social protests against class relations, arson became common. In addition, due to the lack of authoritative and government presence in the valley, the citizens of the Owens Valley region used their own forms of justice to settle quarrels, including arson.[27] Paiutes started fires on their employer’s farmlands, and Mexican miners burned workplaces and businesses while farmers constantly took revenge on each other over property disputes.[28] Many of the disputes between the classes erupted over arguments of water rights as well as expropriative interferences from Los Angeles. However, not long after the Indian Wars, citizens formed alliances from 1904 to 1928 to contest the local struggle against Los Angeles’s Anglo city elite’s ambitions to expand 240 miles north and acquire the rights to their lands and water supply.[29] The vision of Anglo urban progress would continue to confront the Mexican and Indigenous communities of the Owens River Valley as the desire to build channels to divert water into Los Angeles became the forefront of Anglo prospects. The Department of Water and Power led by chief engineer William Mulholland and Los Angeles business leaders believed the 240-mile Aqueduct would stimulate Los Angeles’s growing urban economy and be a source of employment for the region.[30] However much of the Aqueduct construction was made possible by mule and horse power and not employed citizens.[31] Author Les Standiford, who recently published a biography on William Mulholland’s master Aqueduct planning and construction in Water to the Angeles: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct and the Rise of Los Angeles, claimed that Mulholland asserted that the well-established communities in the Owens Valley region had no legal pueblo rights to the land and thus made it possible for him to enforce his vision and tear apart the communities in the underdeveloped valley that did not measure up to the fast, urban developing Los Angeles landscape.[32] This context is an example of how Mulholland’s city planning was visibly promoted by the Anglo vision and Anglo racial authoritative rights to the lands. Mulholland was one of many powerful, wealthy Anglo city developers in Los Angeles that since the established rights of Manifest Destiny, believed lands in the west were reserved for white males. Many farmers and ranchers, willingly sold part or all of their land in 1908 to the city of Los Angeles when construction for the Aqueduct began. [33] Indigenous Paiute lands were endowed with water rights under federal law and deemed agriculturally valueless to Los Angeles Anglo elites.[34] In 1902 and 1912, separate federal grants set aside 69,000 acres of land for Paiute home relocation sites north of the town of Bishop.[35] Paiutes suffered the most from the city’s expropriation and economic collapse. The Indigenous community of the Paiutes who once had eighty-three percent employment in 1880, were only thirty-one percent employed by 1930. Out of the thirty Paiutes that still owned land in the valley, nineteen sold, five leased, and just four maintained land ownerships. In addition, farm labor, the principal source of Indigenous employment, essentially disappeared under the Los Angeles water-conserving lease arrangements. Anglicans viewed the Paiutes of the region to be a nuisance, “bad publicity” and a future problem for city developments. This racial and class deprivation along with displacement deriving from the Anglo vision became an occurring trend for Mexican Americans and other ethnic communities within Los Angeles. John Walton’s Western Times and Water Wars includes the United States Senate committee DWP official statement in 1932 to support this argument, “The majority of the Indians are destitute, primarily from the lack of a local labor market…a large number of them do not have home-site allotments and are objects of charity…to correct this condition it is suggested that the Indians be moved from the Owens Valley to new locations”[36] The Owen’s River Valley Aqueduct was a natural geographic landscape alteration that brought in massive amounts of water to the city of Los Angeles at the ultimate cost of the indigenous residents and farmers who fell victim to a Eurocentric class system, economic depression and displacement. The Mexican miners and settlers of the region were somewhat more tolerant to the Anglican settlers than the indigenous settlers of the valley. In his book, Walton declares that Mexicans easily integrated within the Owen Valley’s white society, which romanticized their culture and ceremonial celebrations such as Mexican Independence Day for touristic values. Mexican miners were acknowledged by white society as experts in their trade which was essential to the Anglo economy and prosperity.[37] The Mexican communities, as emphasized by Walton, “enjoyed the tolerance and fellowship of white society, lending a kind of cosmopolitanism to their segregated communities and providing a buffer with Indian society through Hispanic marriages in both directions.”[38] Mexican Americans and Indigenous communities of the region were treated with racial abuse and suffered under the Anglo class system and city development. The Owens River Valley Aqueduct project is an example of Indigenous and Mexican American displacement as a consequence of the Anglo vision. The second alteration to Los Angeles’ geographic features to support the Anglo vision included in my research, is that of Deadman’s Island (Pictured above). Named by the Spaniards La Isla de los Muertos and later Americanized to Deadman’s Island according to the Los Angeles Corral’s Westerners Brand Book supplied by the California State University Dominguez Hills Archives, was an approximately eight hundred feet long, two hundred and fifty feet wide and over sixty feet high island stationed in the inner harbor of San Pedro Bay. The island would disappear not long after Anglo immigration into the region. The prominent natural landscape feature holding rich history for generations of Tongva, Spanish and Mexican residents was destroyed to achieve the Anglo vision of Los Angeles. La Isle De Los Muertos did not fail to live up to its name however. From 1810-1850 the island served as a cemetery to shelter the dead from pillaging coyotes. [39] Legends claim that Spanish vessels buried unwanted crew members on the island. Legends also assert that men were stranded on the island and died from hunger. A Los Angeles Times article from 1914 titled, “California Landmark to be Obliterated”, claims that when the island removal construction began, ten skeletal remains were found buried on the island: a lost sailor, an English sea captain, five Marine’s crew, two passengers from an 1851 Panamanian ship, and one female named Mrs. Parker, the wife of Capitan Parker of the Schooner Laura Bevian.[40] In addition to being a symbol of the taking of California and major revolutionary battles in the 1840’s, the island also has rare paleontological significance as well. [41] Nevertheless, the positioning of the island itself within the harbor was dangerous as many ships, underestimating the island’s size, crashed into the monumental landmark. Deadman’s island came under attack from Anglo revitalization targets. Legendary to the Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican communities, Deadman’s Island was a danger and threat to Anglo economic prospects and trade. [42] As Mexicans saw the removal of the island to be a loss of tradition and value, the Anglo community initially saw it for its potential touristic value. In 1891, the San Pedro Times pleaded for the island’s conservation. Anglo conservationists proclaimed, “In the near future, owing to the new railroad interest heading this way, San Pedro will enter a new era of prosperity. Visitors will flock here, as well as commerce and so place will have more charm for the tourists, than to land on, and to examine, this old, historic island. It really would not be out of place to have a neat monument placed on top of the island in memory of the ones who were buried there in the years gone by, no doubt, United States Soldiers. Let us urge this matter, and try to save what is left of the old island, ere it too, be washed away and lost in the depths of the sea.”[43] The argument deemed valid to city officials, and the island served as a tourist and advertisement object until its demolition in 1929. After the U.S. government exhumed skeletal remains, the island was covered with billboards promoting hotels, banks and more as seen in the postcard below.[44] Learn more at The Toro Historical Review https://civicas.net/culture-1 daily 0.75 2024-08-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532621523064-7JH8OOO6ZOMY27B9XTYO/Screen-Shot-2018-03-15-at-7.33.42-PM-1024x1024.png culture - ‘This Letter Is Illegal’: Jailed Turkish Artist Zehra Doğan Snuck Banksy a Heart-Wrenching Thank You Note From Her Cell https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532621523064-7JH8OOO6ZOMY27B9XTYO/Screen-Shot-2018-03-15-at-7.33.42-PM-1024x1024.png culture - ‘This Letter Is Illegal’: Jailed Turkish Artist Zehra Doğan Snuck Banksy a Heart-Wrenching Thank You Note From Her Cell https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532621417595-7PGO9LMPS4MF7KSO86M2/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.10.01+AM.png culture - Pussy Riot Members Get 15 Days in Jail and a 3-Year Ban From Sporting Events After Protesting at the World Cup Final https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532621341028-YAIT1EKJ9A3RI6FOODS6/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.08.16+AM.png culture - WePlay Live Aims to Bring a Video Game Theater and Event Space to the Arts District https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531857976685-FYMNVEYS67A1MFFWD8X8/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+1.05.42+PM.png culture - ‘There is Room for Everyone’: 14 Film Critics on Making Media More Inclusive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531760504246-KTX2AB62AFD4X07UNXCT/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+10.01.26+AM.png culture - The Emmys will be Full of Color, as Cultural Diversity Distinguishes Major Categories Even as race continues to be one of the most divisive issues in the country, the celebration of cultural diversity is a dominant theme across the 70th Emmy Award nominations. Performers of color and series produced and written by minorities scored numerous nominations Thursday. “Atlanta,” “black-ish,” “This Is Us” and “Westworld” are among the series receiving big nods that spotlight minorities in major creative and acting roles. Hollywood has been rocked in recent years by controversies over the lack of awards recognition for people of color. But the stream of performers, producers and writers of color receiving Emmy nominations indicate that the Television Academy at least is placing a greater premium on honoring projects with diverse cultural perspectives. One of the series leading the way is “Atlanta,” from Donald Glover. Season 2 of the quirky, groundbreaking show was nominated for comedy series, while Glover received nods for lead actor, directing and writing. (He also received a nomination for guest-hosting “Saturday Night Live”). The FX series also scored nominations for supporting actor Brian Tyree Henry and supporting actress Zazie Beetz. Glover made history last year when he became the first African American to win an Emmy for comedy direction. “Atlanta” will face off in the comedy category against ABC’s “black-ish,” which appears to have replaced ABC’S “Modern Family” as a network Emmy favorite. African American stars Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross were recognized in the lead actor and actress category, respectively. While Anderson and Glover will face off for the second time in in two years in the category, one of Ross’ rivals will be black actress and comic Issa Rae, a first-time nominee for her HBO show, “Insecure.” NBC’s “This Is Us,” the show about a multicultural family that premiered to huge critical acclaim last year, received its second nomination for drama series. Sterling K. Brown, who won lead actor in a drama series last year for the show, is nominated again; he’ll compete against Jeffrey Wright (“Westworld”). Other nominees in the category include Jason Bateman (“Ozark”), Ed Harris (“Westworld”) and Matthew Rhys (“The Americans”). Another high profile nominee is Sandra Oh of “Killing Eve,” who is the first Asian actress to be nominated in the lead actress in a drama category. Antonio Banderas received a nomination for lead actor in a limited series or movie for his portrayal of the iconic artist Pablo Picasso in NatGeo’s “Genius: Picasso.” Regina King, who won two consecutive Emmys for supporting actress in a limited series or movie for ABC’s anthology “American Crime,” has landed again in the category with Netflix’s “Seven Seconds,” in which she plays the anguished mother of a young boy who is killed in a mysterious auto accident. In the supporting actor in a comedy category, Henry of “Atlanta” will compete against Kenan Thompson (“Saturday Night Live”) and Tony Shalhoub of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Other prominent nominees of color include John Legend (lead actor in a limited series or movie for “Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert”), Thandie Newton (supporting actress in a drama for “Westworld”) and Leslie Jones (supporting actress in a comedy for “Saturday Night Live”). Legend’s nomination puts him in the running for the coveted EGOT — he’s already won multiple Grammys, an Oscar (for “Selma”) and a Tony (for “Jitney”). Learn more at the LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531760468659-Q86QCO4R04KHX8OFXKC0/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+9.59.36+AM.png culture - In an Effort to Diversify Museum Staffs, a New Program Offers Paid Internships at Museums Across the US The Association of Art Museum Directors has launched a new paid internship program for minority college students. It’s designed to help bring some much-needed diversity to museum staffs across the country, whose demographics are overwhelmingly white. “Museums will be able to serve their communities more effectively when their leadership reflects the diversity of those communities,” Christine Anagnos, the AAMD’s executive director, told artnet News. According to a 2015 study from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Alliance of Museums, nonwhite people account for only 28 percent of all American museum employees, and just 16 percent of positions “most closely associated with the intellectual and educational mission,” such as curators, conservators, educators, and leadership. “Research has consistently shown that fewer than 20 percent of art museum leadership positions are held by people of Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native American, or multiracial backgrounds,” Anagnos said in a statement. “One reason for this disparity is the limitations on access, and another is a limitation on resources. By providing paid summer internships to students who want to explore a career in art museums, we can begin to address these challenges and cultivate the next generation of art museum professionals.” The program’s pilot year will select 10 students and provide each with a stipend of $6,300 for a 12-week internship. Participants will also work with a mentor who can provide career guidance and be assigned a specific project to work on for the duration of the program. The internships are scheduled to begin in late spring 2019. Participating students will also have the opportunity to attend two museum conferences, including the AAMD’s fall and winter conference, with expenses covered by the organization. The initiative is a useful corollary to a grant program launched by the Ford Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation last year, which is providing $3 million to 22 institutions across the US with the goal of filling 30 percent of mid- and senior-level curatorial and management positions at US art museums with staffers from historically under-represented populations by 2025. The AAMD program works at the other end of the pipeline, boosting people at the earliest stage of their careers. The AAMD has invited its 242 member museums in the US, Canada, and Mexico to apply to be host institutions, with a deadline of September 13. Ten museums will be selected for the pilot year. The initiative is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. We talked to Anagnos about the necessity of the program, how it will work, and who will benefit from it. What are the goals of the AAMD’s new internship initiative? This program creates a pathway for successfully growing the percentage of minorities in the arts over time, by introducing students from a range of underrepresented backgrounds to the types of jobs and skills needed in the field, and thus supporting their education and career planning. Moreover, by connecting them with leaders in the museum field, we will help them develop the professional network that can also be so crucial to a successful career. Why do paid internships, specifically, help students of minority backgrounds? It is pretty simple: unpaid internships make the pathway to museum employment less accessible to candidates without the resources to accept unpaid work. What kind of students will this program be a good fit for, and what kind of projects do you expect interns will work on? We intentionally did not limit this program to a specific area of the museum. Art museums offer entry points into a host of different departments from finance and development to marketing, education and curatorial. We felt it was important to encourage individuals with experiences and expertise that are not typically associated with museum studies or art history degrees. This may mean that the candidate has a different perspective and view—but in order to be a diverse institution, you need to accept diverse views. Learn more at artnet https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344050989-9EVWVAIKD59F56X5CM9W/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.20.26+PM.png culture - The New Sounds of Protest: Political Music in the Age of Trump — in Los Angeles and Beyond Music has always been political, be it the debate over decency inspired by Elvis Presley’s hip shaking, Woody Guthrie pasting the message “this machine kills fascists” on his guitar or even, long before “Hamilton,” a century-old opera that about Native American life. Today, amid a tense and divisive political climate, the sound of resistance has as much to do with inclusion as with strict opposition. In art — and in policy — the line between the personal and the political feels increasingly blurred, as made clear by the #MeToo movement and heated discussions over immigration rights, sexual harassment and gender and racial equality. Some artists are raising a fist while others are looking for empathy, but it’s all in the name of building a community. Here, in this series of stories, The New Sounds of Protest, The Times offers a look how varying artists are making sense of life in 2018. —Todd Martens, Pop Music Editor In today's divisive political climate, pop artists are shaping the new sound of protest music By Mikael Wood One of the most effective protest songs of 2018 doesn’t mention Donald Trump by name. It doesn’t push back directly against one of his controversial policies, nor does it question the means by which he was elected president. It doesn’t refer to government at all, really, unless you count an image of Uncle Sam kissing a man. The song is “Americans,” the final track on Janelle Monáe’s album “Dirty Computer,” and what it does is argue that the promise of this country is still something to get excited about — and still something to fight for. READ MORE Kamasi Washington's ‘Heaven and Earth’ proves jazz's vitality and political power By August Brown Saxophonist Kamasi Washington helped pioneer an L.A. scene that freely melds free jazz with hip-hop and Afro-centric spirituality. Jazz has always been radical in its deconstructions of form and forceful assertions of black identity. Washington notes that his new album is political music, even at its most oblique, in the sense that it taps into and tries to understand the primal forces that animate our attitudes and choices. The current political climate is “a cyclical thing that’s happened before and it will continue to happen until we change our approach,” he said. “I’m looking beyond the problem and looking to the cause.” READ MORE L.A. rapper JPEGMAFIA lashes out at the right and the 'fake-woke' left. Just don't call it 'trolling' In the pantheon of current Republican government figures that Air Force veteran and hip-hop artist JPEGMAFIA despises (and it’s pretty much all of them), Rudy Giuliani holds a near and dear place in his loathing. The 28-year-old rapper (born Barrington Hendricks) was raised in New York before decamping to Baltimore and now Los Angeles, and memories of the former mayor’s policies still boil Hendricks’ blood. READ MORE ‘I can’t stay completely silent’: Jason Isbell looks inward in examining a ‘White Man’s World’ By Randy Lewis Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell grew up in Green Hills, Ala., often hearing sentiments coming from his radio extolling the virtues of the good old days, of small-town America, of times that seemed simpler and happier through the rear-view mirror of history. He took a different tack while writing songs for his acclaimed 2017 album “The Nashville Sound.” Several songs broached topics that are exceptionally touchy for many in country’s predominantly white, rural audience, and even more fearsome for radio programmers who try to avoid controversy at all costs. The most noteworthy may have been “White Man’s World,” in which Isbell didn’t overtly rail against perceived injustices. Instead, he raised questions about his own life experience, about the privileges he’s enjoyed, where those privileges came from and who paid what price to create them. READ MORE California Sounds: L.A. artists rage and wrestle with politics and policy in the age of Trump By Randall Roberts Kendrick Lamar and YG are two of the best known contemporary Los Angeles music artists speaking out on social issues, but they’re part of a string of incendiary songs lobbed the administration’s way. Other local artists making political music in their own unique ways include Dead Sara, Nik Frietas, Niña Dioz featuring Lido and Ceci Bastida, and Charles Lloyd and the Marvels featuring Lucinda Williams. READ MORE Beyond outrage: Australia's Stella Donnelly mixes the personal and political with humor By Todd Martens Tense times call for tense songs, and Stella Donnelly has a few. See “Boys Will Be Boys.” The single, which introduced the Australian artist to the pop world, goes deep on rape culture with verses that begin by documenting an individual story, in this case one belonging to Donnelly’s friend, and then widen out to encompass victim-blaming and the lifelong effects of trauma. As one may imagine, it’s an intense listen. “Try playing it,” Donnelly said while in Los Angeles recently. READ MORE To Hurray for the Riff Raff's Alynda Segarra, the personal is political By Randy Lewis Given her tumultuous history, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra probably couldn’t be an apolitical musician even if she wanted to. Which she admittedly doesn’t. To the 32-year-old artist, speaking out with her music is as much a part of her DNA as her Puerto Rican heritage and her ingrained affection for New York and New Orleans. READ MORE Review: Before ‘Hamilton,’ 100 years of American music theater and how it’s told the story of who we are By Mark Swed “Hamilton” didn’t come out of nowhere. For the last century, American music theater has been struggling with how exactly to represent our national character on stage, and with who we are. It’s a long story. Consider that a remarkable centennial few are paying attention to is the premiere of the first meaningful American opera to have any real national success: The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “Shanewis (or The Robin Woman).” The 1918 opera is about a Native American singer who leaves her reservation in Oklahoma to study voice with a Santa Monica socialite at a “bungalow by the sea” (I’m not making this up). READ MORE Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531347367552-K25ANGFC3Y545D8JEXXF/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+3.05.12+PM.png culture - In a Divisive Political Climate, E3 Shows That Maybe Video Games Had It Right All Along Death, mayhem and promises of “badass demons”: The video-game marketing extravaganza that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been striking some familiar chords in the run-up to its Tuesday opening. But even this escapist-celebrating medium, it seems, can’t avoid the realities of life in 2018. Amid the bombast and teasers for games that are months or years away from release, audiences in pre-show sessions across Los Angeles last weekend previewed a quiet game that aims to meditate on crippling depression and suicidal thoughts. There was also a fast-paced and fervent war game that slows down to illustrate the horrors of battle on families and communities, and the latest installment of a Nazi-battling shoot-’em-up that pits two women leading a resistance against a world of white supremacy. While the game industry has often been accused of lacking subtlety, today’s world beyond gaming is one increasingly built for bluntness. At roughly the same time Sunday evening that actor Robert De Niro was denouncing President Trump with an expletive at the Tony Awards, a gaming executive was on stage using the same curse word about Nazis. When E3 shifted last year from an industry-only gathering to one that sold some 15,000 of 60,000-plus slots to the ticket-buying public, its focus shifted too. Media-trained spokespeople still will be demonstrating carefully choreographed snippets of games inside the Los Angeles Convention Center, while next door at L.A. Live a series of talks dubbed the E3 Coliseum will illustrate the industry’s pop culture reach as well as more serious aspects of games. A smattering of the games at E3, whether intentional or not, increasingly reflect our often divisive, confusing and stressful political and social climate. “Sea of Solitude,” for instance, tackles paralyzing loneliness and depression by putting players in control of a young woman named Kay, who sees herself turning into an unrecognizable monster in her darkest moments. The game from Cornelia Geppert is being developed by Berlin studio Jo-Mei Games and will be published next year by Electronic Arts, a company best known of late for its “Battlefield” and “Star Wars” games. “It’s everywhere, this topic,” said Geppert. “Four or five years ago, a lot of things came together. Friends were struggling with really major depression, and I had certain incidents in my family and then more famous people started to commit suicide.” She credits creating the metaphorical game as helping her conquer her own insecurities and exhaustion that resulted from going out in public. “I talked with one good friend who had major depression and she told me when she was really down she felt like a bad person,” Geppert said. “Of course, if you have this darkness inside — anger and all this stuff — and you imagine it all burst out, how would you imagine it? A monster. This was a natural way to imagine how all the dark feelings and dark things you had in your head turned to the outside.” It’s one of the many games garnering attention at this year’s E3, including such hotly anticipated blockbuster games as Sony’s sequel to “The Last of Us,” Nintendo’s latest entry in its “Super Smash Bros.” franchise and From Software’s just-announced “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,” a darkly mysterious adventure set in 1500s Japan. Adding a bit of seriousness to E3 isn’t a shift that happened in a vacuum. Independent developers such as Geppert have for years brought more thoughtful experiences to the game world. Yet today, when a war can feel one misguided presidential tweet away from occurring, the post-apocalyptic fantasy of many a major E3 game doesn’t feel so absurd. Bethesda’s “Wolfenstein: Youngblood,” the upcoming game in a franchise set in an alternate timeline in which the Axis powers prevailed in WWII, fast-forwards to 1980, bringing its Nazi imagery uncomfortably close to present-day hate speech. In turn, “Youngblood” may appear less like a dark twist on a history that never happened and more like a game that exposes beliefs that have inspired acts of horrific violence. Centering the game on two female protagonists adds to its political power, not only by having women battle a group with expressively regressive views on femininity, but also by ushering in more gender diversity to a medium that has long lacked it — and a community that doesn’t always handle it with grace. Dice’s “Battlefield 5,” for instance, recently came under attack by some fans online for daring to put a woman combatant on the cover of its WWII game. The company’s creative director Lars Gustavsson over the weekend stressed the need for games to reflect the diversity of their creators and the audience that plays them, and the studio also doubled-down on its mission. New clips of one of “Battlefield’s” single-player vignettes revealed an emphasis on a young, female Norwegian soldier. Elsewhere, Ubisoft’s sequel to “The Division” shifted its images of near-future terrorist-induced mass hysteria from New York to Washington, D.C. Even the post-nuclear landscapes of the “Fallout” series have been transformed in its newest game to a more recognizable West Virginia. Games whose violence once felt exaggerated now almost seem ripped from the headlines. When asked if games should address the real world, Mike Nichols, chief marketing officer for Microsoft Studios, said, “Of course, you can have some [games] that are just puzzles and some that are fantasies … but to a lot of us it’s a form of storytelling, one where you can immerse yourself in this world and make choices.” Large publishers have long emphasized that their games were solely about play — not politics — and no doubt throughout the course of E3 many developers will shy away from questions about real-life concerns. But the answers are in the games themselves as the line between fact and pixel-based fiction is more blurred than ever. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344151417-X2DBXRYSL0SIO32C8MO9/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.22.19+PM.png culture - This Intricate Dream City Is Congolese Artist Bodys Isek Kingelez’s Most Ambitious Work. Here’s What It Means “City Dreams,” the lovely retrospective devoted to Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez, is currently winning raves at the Museum of Modern Art. But the joys of Kingelez’s work are in the details, so I thought I might focus, here, on just one work: Ville Fantôme (1996), his model of a festive imagined city of shining office towers, colorful pavilions, orderly highways, parks, and rivers. Here it is: Ville Fantôme was the most ambitious work ever produced by the Kinshasa-based Kingelez (1948-2015), who described himself as “a designer, an architect, a sculptor, engineer, artist.” In the late ’80s, he gained widespread acclaim for his unique style of “extrêmes maquettes,” sculptural imaginings of buildings, at once meticulously conceived and fantastical, visions of a paradisiacal architecture he believed could heal the world. “I’m dreaming cities of peace,” he explained. “I’d like to help the Earth above all.” The building below, one of many in Ville Fantôme’s dreamy cityscape, gives a sense of the pyrotechnics he could pack into one imagined building: a blue central tower attached to two wings that resemble, well, actual wings, inexplicably scalloped and inexplicably suspended in the air, a mix of modernist folly, space craft, and bat. It’s such a wild and fully imagined bit of fantasy architecture that you almost miss the strangely indeterminate scale: the divisions of windows in the wings would seem to indicate that it was five stories, max; the grid in the main tower would suggest 16. It is actually not clear how the interior space would fit together, practically. Throughout Kingelez’s cities, consistent scale seems hard to pin down even as it all meshes together into a seamless fabric, giving the whole thing a subtly dream-like air. Part of what makes Kingelez’s architecture so charming is the contrast between grandiose vision and handmade character. He worked with simple materials: cardboard, knife, glue, and whatever bits and pieces he could come up with for accents. The point, however, was generally not to highlight humble materials—the catalogue reminds us that, in the Congo, cardboard was actually “exotic, expensive, and imported.” Kingelez was always trying for a precious look. In Ville Fantôme, even when the maquettes are accented with clearly found objects you get the feeling that Kingelez is using them because their forms simply worked with his preferred style of imaginary ornamentation. The repeated pushpin turrets and the scalloped medallion of the bottle cap crowning this tower are a case in point: Ville Fantôme came at an important time in Kingelez’s career. His big break had come in 1989, when French curator André Magnin included several of his individual works in “Magiciens de la Terre,” a hotly debated, closely watched show at Paris’s Pompidou Center that attempted to open the Western museum world to a global perspective. This international exposure gave Kingelez an expanded audience and validation of his vision. In its wake, he felt empowered to scale up his ambition, welding individual maquettes together into mini cities, peaking with this, his largest. Given this background, it is no coincidence that Ville Fantôme is a city pointedly international in orientation, an aerotropolis with an airport laid out on a separate island to one side. The city itself is something like a World’s Fair—or one of the international art biennials where Kingelez’s art became a staple in the ’90s—representing countries from all over. A train station declares itself “Vietnam Station;” a purple man-made lake is designated “Norvege” (Norway); a glittering office tower, sited next to the Town Council (“Conseil de Ville”), is claimed for “Canada”. A hierarchy exists within this miniature utopia, roughly following the perceived hierarchy of the economic order in 1996. Multiple structures are labeled “USA”—including the city’s most imposing skyscraper. Kingelez appears to have had an interesting mental relationship to the United States. On one hand, he seems to have imagined it as the land whose taste for architectural spectacle matched his own—the ’80s and ’90s were peak vogue for architectural postmodernism, which resonates with the Congolese artist’s imaginary architecture, where ornament overwhelms function. But Kingalez also had a truly remarkable belief in the world-historical status of his own vision, and seems also to have seen the US as a kind of personal rival. “He believed that the Americans had plundered all his ideas, all the great American architects had plundered all his ideas,” Magnin relates of one of his meeting with the artist in Kinshasa. “He told me a hundred times, ‘Bloody America, they stole all my ideas!’” Perhaps this imagined rivalry explains an odd detail of the otherwise harmonious Ville Fantôme: atop the USA tower, there is an American flag—but it flies upside-down, as if Kingelez is declaring that he is both claiming and reversing its power. On the other hand, the countries of Africa or, indeed, the Congo itself, are not given much prominence in Kingelez’s cosmopolitan vision. No doubt this reflected the reality of the artist’s actual position. “I am like a stranger in Congo, where I have never been recognized,” Kingelez lamented. “It’s mostly foreigners who commission my work.” But the absence is striking here in that he had commenced his artistic career, in 1980, with a sculptural group, Kinshasa: Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité Africaine, paying homage to the post-colonial ambitions of his homeland and Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s policy of “authenticité” (“authenticity”), meant to tear off the yoke of Western cultural imperialism. Sixteen years after that work, the Mobutu regime’s grandiose building schemes and promises of renewal had definitively descended into kleptocracy. By 1996, the year Ville Fantôme was made, the country was mired in economic chaos and civil unrest; Mobutu would fall the following year. Kingelez’s vision, it seems, had turned both outwards and inwards. “There is no police force in this city, to protect the city, there are no soldiers to defend it, no doctors to heal the sick,” he explained of Ville Fantôme. “It’s a peaceful city where everybody is free. It’s a city that breathes nothing but joy, the beauty of life. It’s a melting pot of all the races in the world. Here you live in a paradise, just like heaven.” It is, in other words, a world removed from any of the problems of his actual present. Indeed, there’s precious little evidence of any real people in his vision. Here as elsewhere, there aren’t even any private residences in Kingelez’s world, let alone slums. There are some cars on the highways—but very few. It all evokes a world of uncluttered freedom, but also a world that is too good for all but a chosen few. (Ville Fantôme, after all, means “Ghost Town.”) The ground of this city oscillates between earnest markers of infrastructure (roads, rivers, medians, etc.) and festive patterns. It’s not always clear how they fit together or which is which. “[H]e imbued the works with the immediacy of thought—but they don’t have the perfection that thoughts have,” architect and Kingelez admirer David Adjaye writes in the catalogue. “Rather, they reflect distortions in the way the mind deals with images. Mental images are not precise: they are fleeting systems, with only sparks of thought.” This is a city that would be at once a paradise and completely perplexing to live in. A glittering red and blue tower at one corner of the city is deposited in the middle of what appears to be a park and a lake, even as its neighboring trio of pavilions appear wreathed with inexplicable aerial roads. This ambiguity of Ville Fantôme as a model city indifferent to the needs of any of its imagined inhabitants is mirrored by an ambiguity of this artwork as a sculpture in actual space: How are you supposed to view it? Its jewel-box intricacies are fully realized on the level of individual model buildings, but the scale of the work as an ensemble means that you can’t get in to appreciate them. For whom are the details intended? (This dilemma is only partly solved by the MoMA installation device, conceived by artist Carsten Höller, of installing a mirror on the ceiling above it.) The answer is clear. Kingelez saw his vision as divinely inspired, and even called himself a “small god.” It is the impossible god’s-eye view of Kingelez that makes sense of the city. As he did often throughout his work, the artist prominently inserted his own name into Ville Fantôme. In this case, the gesture is particularly striking, because “Bodys” is given more or less the same status, atop a building, as the names of any of the nation states that are saluted elsewhere in his city. This is a vision that insists on being taken seriously as reality even as it refuses to conform to reality. Ego and infrastructure are one. That meshing is what makes a work like Ville Fantôme, and Kingelez’s work in general, feel so pleasantly optimistic. It also lends it, when you really look, a note of wistfulness—the kind of ache that you associate with waking up from a beautiful, impossible dream. “Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, through January 1, 2019. Learn more at artnet https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344244975-GV13GKJD1VOD9OO4C243/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.23.49+PM.png culture - Can Artists Do Anything to Prevent Climate Change? Miami Beach Has Recruited One to Find Out Can an artist help tackle one of the biggest problems facing mankind? Miami Beach certainly thinks so. One of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to the effects of climate change, the metropolis has launched an innovative artist residency that aims to recruit an artist to help address rising sea levels. For one year, the artist will be embedded with the city as it works to develop a plan to respond to the rising tides. In Miami Beach, climate change isn’t just a nerve-wracking impending problem—it’s a reality. Sea level rise has tripled over the past decade and the city has resorted to importing sand in order to restore its rapidly eroding coastline. In 2015, Miami Beach committed to investing $500 million to raise roads and install pumps to protect the island and its residents. The city’s Bass Museum has already altered its collecting strategy to focus on more durable objects in lieu of delicate, humidity-sensitive works on paper and photographs. So why ask an artist to help address this very urgent problem? “I’ve always found it ingenious how artists think about not only physical projects, but also things such as policy decisions and ways to inform the way the public engages and thinks as well,” Miami Beach cultural affairs manager Brandi Reddick told artnet News. After putting out an open call to artists that drew more than 100 proposals from around the world, the city chose a local resident, Puerto Rican-born, South Florida native Misael Soto, to fill the slot. Over the next twelve months, he will attend meetings with city officials, provide input, and create art that seeks to bring the community into the process of addressing climate change. “It really seemed tailor-made for me,” said Soto, who just wrapped up his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was particularly intrigued by “the ability to get into the city government on the municipal level and interacting directly as opposed to from afar.” The new residency is the brainchild of the Art Center of South Florida, which has been offering artist residencies for the past 37 years, in conjunction with the city of Miami Beach. “There really isn’t any other program like this that I know of,” Soto noted. Art Center president and CEO Dennis Scholl told artnet News that with the help of the Knight Foundation, “we were able to create a residency that would bring an artist to South Beach and embed him or her in city government. In this case, the city liked the idea so much that they were willing to have the artist embedded in the resiliency department of the city of Miami Beach.” Resiliency, he added, is “code word for the things that concern us here… South Beach is ground zero for rising sea levels.” According to an initial post about the residency, the program offers a $25,000 stipend, housing, and a maximum of $7,500 for production. Soto isn’t the only artist to embed himself in a municipal government. New York City, for example, offers artist residencies in departments as diverse as the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Probation. Meanwhile, other institutions have recognized artists’ potential for thinking creatively about climate change. Justin Guariglia, for example, has ridden aboard expeditions with NASA as they track the sinking ice sheets over Greenland. Scientists hope he can help them better visualize the topography of Greenland’s ocean floor. For his part, Soto is well positioned to join Miami’s fight against the rising tides. He already has experience making art on the city’s shoreline. This past November, he created Flood Relief at Miami’s Museum Park, adjacent to the Pérez Art Museum. The week-long installation employed numerous gas-powered pumps to Sisyphean effect: They created a continuous cycle of water pumping out and then funneling back into Biscayne Bay. Stripped of their original purpose, they “essentially become fountains,” the artist explained. Soto’s other major projects—installed in Florida and other East Coast locations—include Beach Towel (2011–12) and Picnic Blanket (2012), for which he created giant versions of the titular objects and turned them into sites where guests could play games, eat, and gather. The projects aimed to change the way beach- and park-goers think about the space they occupy, he said. Soto’s residency began in Miami Beach a few weeks ago with meetings with various stakeholders. The particular projects he will focus on likely won’t be finalized until the fall. “Don’t ask me what he’s going to do, because I don’t know,” Scholl said. Soto says he is aiming to identify three or four sites across Miami Beach and spend a few months at each site “in a kind of shifting installation that plays with these signifiers of public works improvement.” Scholl said he would like to see more cities give “artists a seat at the table” to help solve big problems creatively. Though in this case, that table won’t stay in one place—it will be roving around the city for the next year. “This isn’t a residency where you’re locked in a studio with a blank canvas for 12 months,” Scholl said. Learn more at artnet https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344358579-NEFC5W768478EUDWPDT9/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.25.36+PM.png culture - People Across the Globe Want Their Cultural Heritage Back. Canada May Offer a Blueprint for How to Get There On a recent visit to an Indigenous cultural center in Nova Scotia, Canadian politician Bill Casey found himself admiring an intricately embroidered robe. He was surprised to hear from a curator that what he was looking at was not the real thing, but a replica. Held behind glass at the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre near Truro, Nova Scotia, the stunning 19th-century Mi’kmaq regalia was a convincing facsimile of the original. The real regalia, however, is currently tucked away in a drawer at a museum in Melbourne, Australia. Millbrook’s Mi’kmaq First Nation have been fighting to reclaim this unique piece of heritage for a decade. Their plight is familiar to many Indigenous communities in Canada and beyond. But now, for the first time, an unprecedented groundswell of support is growing to buttress their efforts. A Global Shift The push for restitution in Canada comes at a moment when long-held assumptions about the rightful ownership of cultural heritage are coming under renewed scrutiny worldwide. In Europe, French President Emmanuel Macron has promised to make restitution of French-owned African heritage a priority over the next five years, while Germany recently published guidelines on how to handle its own massive collections of colonial-era artifacts. But former European colonies like Canada find themselves in a categorically different position. The so-called source communities asking for restitution are not an ocean away, but squarely within their own borders. Meanwhile, some of the contested items are held by foreign countries, creating a diplomatic and bureaucratic obstacle course. Arguably even more painful, other objects are in the collections of Canadian museums—visible but still out of reach for Indigenous communities. Casey, who is a member of Canada’s federal parliament and represents Millbrook, was deeply affected by his visit to the cultural center. Since then, he has set out to help create a national strategy to help Indigenous peoples get their objects back, both from foreign nations and institutions within Canada’s own borders. This February, he introduced a bill called the Aboriginal Cultural Property Repatriation Act (also known as Bill C-391) that aims to clear a smoother path for repatriation. The bill was unanimously voted forward through two rounds, most recently on June 7. Now, it will go to a Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for further study. There is still a long way to go before it becomes law, but it’s off to a promising start. Parliament will debate the bill this autumn. “From talking with many Indigenous stakeholders, I know that this strategy that would obtain artifacts being held in foreign museums and bring them back to Canada is long overdue,” Casey said after the vote in early June in the House of Commons. “For many Indigenous communities, the ceremonial artifacts that were removed by explorers over the centuries are a keenly missed part of their cultural heritage and identity.” A Surprise Bill When news first broke about Bill C-391 earlier this year, it caught several in the museum world off guard. “This bill, C-391, frankly came as a total surprise to us,” said John McAvity, the executive director and CEO of the Canadian Museums Association, which advocates for the museum sector in Canada. “It’s a well-meaning piece of legislation, but not really necessary as Canadian museums have been repatriating artifacts for over 35 years.” Indeed, museums including Chicago’s Field Museum and the BC Royal Museum in Canada have repatriated objects to Canadian Indigenous communities over the years. But the new bill seeks to establish a national support system to make these requests more feasible for Indigenous communities, in part by providing funding for the transfer and storage of objects. McAvity says he supports the bill overall and believes it will empower communities to gain access to their own cultural heritage. But he also points out the need for certain amendments. For one, he notes, human remains are not currently included in the list of qualifying objects, even though they are very often a top priority for repatriation. Where Did the Artifacts Go? So how, exactly, did Indigenous cultural property end up leaving the hands of its creators and landing in museums? While some objects may have been legitimately purchased or donated, others are alleged to have been illegitimately confiscated by Canadian officials. From 1885 to 1951, the federal government banned potlach ceremonies—rituals practiced by Indigenous people in the Northwest to mark important events—in an effort to compel Indigenous people to assimilate and restrict their cultural expression. In the case of the notorious Cranmer potlach in 1921, officials arrested 45 potlach participants and swept up many important cultural objects in the process. Over the years, artifacts from these ceremonies, including ritual clothing and dancing masks, ended up in museums including the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. “These important cultural objects were taken or stolen under our colonial regime’s disguise of superiority of ‘cultural preservation,'” a spokesman for Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly told CBC in response to Casey’s legislation. Despite a growing willingness to address the issue, however, deep divisions about restitution remain, and a number of highly contested requests remain unresolved. The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh holds the human remains of the last two members of Canada’s Beothuk tribe, APTN News reported last December. Though the Beothuk slowly died out following European colonization, other local Indigenous community members in the region have been actively trying in vain to reclaim the remains. National Museums Scotland, which now oversees the collection, has said it would only consider a request from Canada’s federal government. Finally, Canada submitted an “official” request in 2016, but the matter remains unresolved. As of this writing, the remains of Demasdui and her husband, a chief named Nonosabasut, as well as 10 burial items removed from graves, remain stored in the Scottish capital. The Scottish Museums Association has argued against restitution, in part because there are no living Beothuk descendants. A Long Road McAvity, the Canadian Museums Association director, remembers when he first heard the word “cultural repatriation.” It was at a Canadian museums conference on the West Coast in the 1970s. “A lone woman from the Haida Nation stood up and talked about repatriation,” he recalled. The room fell silent. “Most of us had never heard the word or concept before. It was a defining moment for me.” Much has changed since then. The current conversation is part of a much broader discussion in Canada about the federal government’s need to make amends to Indigenous communities. In 2008, Canada established the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, in 2015, released 94 calls to action to bring restorative justice to Indigenous peoples. From the 1880s to the end of the 20th century, the Canadian government operated a brutal residential school system that separated Indigenous children from their parents for extended periods and sought to “‘kill the Indian in the child,'” as Canada’s former Prime Minister Stephen Harper put it in an official apology in 2008. A call to action targeted at museums seeking a national review of current policies and practices to determine their compliance with the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; In response, the Canadian Museums Association initiated a 15-member working group this May with key members from its national museums and Indigenous cultural institutions. “What we’re dealing with is one of the steps in reconciliation of the residential school experience and all of the ways in which heritage and knowledge were denied to Indigenous communities, or how the transmission of culture and traditional knowledge from generation to generation was interrupted. That is really the heart of this whole discussion,” says Sarah Pash, the executive director at Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute and a member of the working group who also sits on the Canadian Museums Association’s board. Over the next three years, the task force will tackle a range of Indigenous art-related issues, including restitution. Casey’s bill is also on the table for consideration. “For years, restitution was a no-no word in the museum language,” says McAvity. “This is changing fast, and it is about time for this new reality.” A New Conversation Emerges In recent years, Canadian museums have been working increasingly closely with Indigenous communities. But Pash says institutions must be careful to let Indigenous people take the lead on restitution-related matters, particularly in cases where their elders have specialized knowledge that can help retrace objects’ lost ownership histories. Advocates argue that one of the most important parts of the bill is the proposed financial support that would enable communities to establish storage facilities or cultural institutions to house their own artifacts. McAvity notes that in that past, some communities have opted not to pursue restitution simply because they were unable to safely preserve the objects. Still, others worry that increased funding could turn the current stream of repatriation requests into a flood. If the bill were to pass, would Canada’s museums end up empty? No, says McAvity. On the contrary, the law would likely result in the creation of more museums—ones run by Indigenous communities who have expertise in their own histories. “Our treasures are family,” the artist and educator Lou-ann Ika’wega Neel, who has recently been appointed a repatriation specialist at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, tells artnet News. “To know that our family is being stored away in museum cases or in basements or attics in far away lands has always been heartbreaking.” (The Royal Museum, for one, owns several objects that were confiscated from potlach ceremonies in the early 20th century.) In her new role, Neel has developed an intriguing idea. She suggests that Indigenous Nations artists create replicas of cultural objects for Canadian museums as the originals are returned to their respective communities. “These replicas could remain with museums along with much more information, so they can continue to serve as educational tools for people of all cultures,” Neel says. “[Visitors] will know that we are not a dead or dying culture. We are still here.” In recent months, the Australian ambassador to Canada, Natasha Smith, has reached out to Casey, the Canadian politician, about the contested Mi’kmaq regalia that inspired his new bill. The Millbrook cultural center is now in active discussions with Australia and the First Nations museum there where it is being currently stored; The goal is to establish a plan to repatriate the robe as soon as possible. “This is not a country-to-country negotiation, it is a First Nation-to-First Nation negotiation, and they are 15,000 km apart,” says Casey. “When the Ambassador contacted me, she pointed out, ‘How could we ask other countries to repatriate, if we’re not prepared to also do the same?’ I was floored. Already, this has had an impact.” Learn more at artnet https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344452812-FPHFJ8ALCYVNZ834GTLE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.27.10+PM.png culture - Banksy Takes Aim at France’s Callous Response to the Refugee Crisis With Poignant Murals in Paris Banksy may be visiting the City of Lights, but he didn’t come for romance. Aiming at France’s refugee crisis, the anonymous British street artist appears to have targeted Paris with at least three murals and several of his signature rats in various locations. It is the first time the artist has hit the French capital with his brand of social and political commentary. Appropriately enough, the first of the new works was discovered by Parisians on World Refugee Day, June 20, near the Porte de la Chapelle metro station in the North of Paris, where the city’s refugee reception center “La Bulle” (The Bubble) was once situated. The center provided housing for between 2,000 and 3,000 refugees until French president Emmanuel Macron closed it last year. The migrants living there were bussed to temporary shelters elsewhere, but many are now reportedly sleeping on the streets of Paris. In the past three years, nearly 40 makeshift refugee camps in the capital have been razed to the ground by French authorities. Similar to his 2008 work Go Flock Yourself, Banksy’s new mural shows a young girl spray-painting a flowery pink wallpaper pattern over a swastika on the street, beautifying the dismal area next to her sleeping bag and teddy bear. The work could be interpreted as a comment on anti-immigrant policies and the rise of the far right, as well as a reference to the very real situation of young migrants living on the streets. Another mural purportedly by the artist takes aim at the French establishment. Found in the city center, it depicts a besuited businessman offering a bone to a hungry-looking three-legged dog, the front leg of which appears to have been recently cut off. The man is concealing a handsaw behind his back, which he presumably used to saw off the dog’s leg, before distracting the animal with a bone. A third work elsewhere in the city references Jacques-Louis David’s Napolean Crossing the Alps. Instead of Bonaparte, however, Banksy’s rider looks almost comical: A red cape blows back over the rider, covering their face, suggesting perhaps that the country’s leadership is blind. The red cape might also reference the country’s so-called “Burka Ban,” which was introduced by the French government in 2010. The law prohibited the covering of the face in public, including with religious garments such as the full burka or niqabs worn by some female Muslims. One commentator on Instagram placed the two works side by side, writing: “The blind leading the country!” Banksy also stenciled his signature rats in different places around the city. The artist’s rats were influenced by the Parisian street artist Blek Le Rat and are widely interpreted to be stand-ins for the ordinary working class people of the world. The rats interact with the local environment, such as building façades and graffiti. Some reference the pivotal May 1968 period of civil unrest that began with student protests and eventually ended up grinding the country’s economy to a halt. In one piece discovered on the Left Bank of the Seine near the Sorbonne University, a rat sits beneath the words “May 1968.” The number eight is turned on its side, perhaps signaling the decline of the city’s revolutionary spirit. The number also resembles Disney-esque mouse ears, as the rat below sports Minnie Mouse’s polka-dot bow. (Disneyland Paris is one of the city’s biggest employers.) In another work, a rat sits astride a champagne cork as it rockets into the atmosphere, and elsewhere a rat appears to be plotting to blow up a billboard. Banksy, who usually claims his works on his website, has not yet confirmed that the new Paris works were indeed painted by him, and none of the works are signed. artnet News has reached out to the artist’s handling and authentication company Pest Control but had not received a response by press time. It wouldn’t be the first time the artist has taken on issues related to the treatment of refugees. In 2015, he took his paint to the port city of Calais, the home of the notorious “Jungle” refugee camp that has since been razed by authorities. There the artist pained a mural reminding authorities that the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs came from a family of Syrian migrants. In another Calais mural, he referenced The Raft of the Medusa by the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault, alluding to the fate of the hundreds of thousands of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel to reach the United Kingdom. More recently, in 2017, the artist created an anti-Brexit mural on the British side of the Channel at Dover. Learn more at artnet https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344650972-EYNCLZVOXSDI95V7NU42/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.30.32+PM.png culture - Melania Trump Wore a Jacket Saying ‘I Really Don’t Care’ on Her Way to Texas Shelters WASHINGTON — Melania Trump visited immigrant children in a Texas border town on Thursday, and by the time the first lady left, she had made headlines for another reason. As the temperature climbed to 80 degrees at Joint Base Andrews near Washington, Mrs. Trump boarded her plane wearing an olive green coat that read, in white capital letters, “I really don’t care. Do U?” For the second time since her husband took office — and the second time on a trip to Texas — Mrs. Trump had made an unusual choice. It was a move reminiscent of her decision last year to wear stilettos to a hurricane relief zone. One common reaction to the jacket was bafflement: What was she thinking? No, really, what was she thinking? Mrs. Trump is a former model with a keen understanding of her own image. She never makes an accidental fashion choice. Right? When asked about the choice — apparently a $39 jacket from the fast-fashion brand Zara — her office quickly responded. “It’s a jacket,” Mrs. Trump’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said Thursday in a statement to reporters. “There was no hidden message. After today’s important visit to Texas, I hope this isn’t what the media is going to choose to focus on.” During Mrs. Trump’s 75-minute visit to the Upbring New Hope Children’s Shelter in McAllen, Tex., she met with dozens of children as well as the people who are educating them and supervising their care. She asked officials questions about children’s well-being. She told the children to value friendship over all else. “Good luck,” the first lady told them. The children applauded her as she left. It was a striking re-emergence for Mrs. Trump, who underwent a procedure in May to treat a benign kidney condition and spent several weeks out of the public eye. Her trip on Thursday was a headfirst dive into the roiling debate over the Trump administration’s hard-line approach to immigration hours after her husband declared “we’ll send them the hell back” at a campaign rally. She is the first member of the Trump family to visit the border with Mexico since a national debate broke out over the administration’s separation policy. The outcry led the president to reverse course under political pressure and sign an executive order on Wednesday to end the policy. More than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents so far, and thousands of families are likely to remain fractured. “I’m here to learn about your facility,” Mrs. Trump told a group of officials at the center. She added that she wanted to offer “help to these children to reunite with their families as quickly as possible.” The first lady interacted with dozens of the center’s 55 children, visiting three classrooms, according to a small group of reporters who accompanied her on the trip. Mrs. Trump, who recently started Be Best, a platform centered around the betterment of children’s lives, asked her aides to organize the trip after seeing photographs and video of separated families, and hearing audio of children crying in the centers, Ms. Grisham said. “She’s seen the images,” Ms. Grisham told reporters. “She’s heard the recordings. She was on top of the situation before any of that came out. She was concerned about it.” Mrs. Trump, who traveled to Texas with Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, was also scheduled to visit the Ursula Border Patrol Processing Center, which had became a particular subject of scrutiny this week after a government video emerged showing families sitting in cages clutching mylar blankets. But her visit had to be cut short because of bad weather. A senior administration official, who insisted on anonymity, told reporters on the first lady’s plane that only six of the New Hope facility’s 55 children had been separated from their parents, and the rest arrived as unaccompanied minors. At the facility, officials told the first lady that the separated children could speak to their parents twice a week. Mrs. Trump also asked about the condition of the children when they arrived: “So when the children come here, what kind of stage, you know, physical and the mental stage” are they in when “they come here?” She was told by an official that children often arrive distraught, but soon settle in. “It’s a process, yes,” Mrs. Trump replied. “But I’ve heard they’re very happy. They love to study. They love to go school.” In recent days, according to her office, Mrs. Trump was upset by news reports about families being separated at the border and helped persuade President Trump to take action to stop it. Amid the din of voices who tried to persuade him to change his mind — including members of Congress and his oldest daughter — the first lady’s concern seemed to stand out. “My wife feels very strongly about it,” Mr. Trump said as he signed an executive order on Wednesday to stop the separations. But Mr. Trump, who faced a growing outcry from the public and from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, did not say whether her urging had swayed his decision. In any case, Mrs. Trump had planned the trip before the president signed the order: “I don’t know what she knew” about the timing, Ms. Grisham said. “She knew what she wanted to do, and she told us.” Learn more at NY Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344741947-CO7ICEEKEZDIAJ618GUK/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.32.00+PM.png culture - What the Dismantling of the Berlin Wall Can Teach Us as Trump Tries to Build His Wall In 1962, two men from East Berlin attempted a daring escape to the West. Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik were young — all of 18. On Aug. 17, the pair slipped away from their construction jobs during their lunch break and made their way to the border, hiding in an old factory near the Checkpoint Charlie crossing of the Berlin Wall, which had been erected only the year before. Around 2 p.m., they slipped out an open window into the barbed wire-filled no man’s land alongside the wall. They then made a run for it. Kulbeik managed to scramble over the wall, then still a crude barrier not much taller than a man. Fechter did not. An East German guard shot him before he could make the climb. His body fell to the East, but was visible in the West, from the windows of buildings close to the wall. He cried for help, but no guards or medics came. In full view of the world, he bled to death. On the Western side of the wall, a crowd of hundreds gathered and chanted “murderers” at the East German guards. The security zone in which he died became known as the “death strip.” After Fechter’s killing, it seemed beyond the realm of imagination that the Berlin Wall could ever come down. Yet, less than three decades later, it did: In November 1989, after a member of the East German Politburo announced that restrictions on travel would be lifted, East Germans flooded the border, and joined by West Berliners on the other side, tore the wall apart with whatever tools they could find. Within months, this seemingly intractable political barrier had crumbled. By the following year, Germany was one again. The wall and its physical and political aftermath are at the heart of one of the most captivating pavilions at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, on view through Nov. 25. In keeping with the biennale’s “Freespace” theme, “Unbuilding Walls,” as Germany’s exhibition is titled, charts the ways in which architects and urbanists have sought to weave back together East and West since 1989 — both physically and psychologically. Step into the German pavilion and you are greeted by a grim black wall bisecting the room before you. Walk farther into the space, however, and the wall appears to fragment. The long, black barrier, it turns out, isn’t solid. It is a series of unconnected vertical slabs, laid out at different depths, that provide a passing illusion of fortitude. It could not be more sculptural. It also could not be a more propitious time for this show. This year, Feb. 5 marked the day that the wall had been gone as long as it had been up — 10,316 days. The wall, as the curators note in a related essay, “represented not only the division of a city and the division of an entire country” but also became a symbol of “state repression, forcible separation, autocratic despotism and the inhuman potential of political ideology.” Moreover, the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall and its attendant Cold War legacies highlights the construction of walls elsewhere — such as the “big, fat, beautiful wall” President Trump wants for the U.S.-Mexico border — and points to a future in which those walls may be no more. Architect Lars Krückeberg is a founder of the Berlin-based design studio Graftand served as a curator of the exhibition. He says that growing up in Germany — in the West — the wall seemed like it would always be a part of the landscape. “If you had asked me in Germany, even half a year before it did, will that wall come down?” he says. “I would have have said, ‘No. It can’t come down.’ And a lot of people would have said that.” Today, tourists flood sites such as Checkpoint Charlie, the wall’s most recognizable crossing point, to have their pictures taken with actors in military costume. Walls that go up, one day come down. Krückeberg organized the exhibition with his fellow Graft founders Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit, in collaboration with Marianne Birthler, a human rights advocate who served on a commission that investigated the crimes of the Stasi, the East German secret police. “There have been many stories in exhibitions about the wall,” Krückeberg says of the impetus for the show. “But there have been no exhibitions that look at the space around it — a space that could be very deep.” Together, the curators have put together a dense but fascinating show — with an essential (and blessedly well-written) catalog that looks at the urban and rural sites occupied by the Berlin Wall before, during and after its existence. As part of this, they recount riveting bits of the Berlin Wall’s urban history. The wall, for example, cut indiscriminately across existing rail lines, but subterranean rails were left untouched. This meant that West Berlin underground lines regularly crossed into Eastern territory as part of their daily routes. To observe the political boundaries, however, Western trains didn’t stop in on the Eastern side, resulting in a number of ghost stations. Except for one: Friedrichstrasse, which served as an official border crossing, and which was dubbed the “Palace of Tears,” since it’s where easterners said goodbye to friends and family heading back to the West. There is the long history of Potsdamer Platz, a busy intersection of traffic and trams — once home to Europe’s first traffic lights — that was bombed to rubble during World War II and was later unsympathetically divided by the wall. And there was the Gothic Revival church from the 19th century that was blown up in 1985 because it had the misfortune of being in the middle of the death strip. (At this spot now stands the Chapel of Reconciliation, designed by Sassenroth & Reitermann, that is built on the foundations of the earlier church.) “Unbuilding Walls” reviews the myriad architecture and urbanism projects that have arisen as a reaction to the Berlin Wall — such as the Band des Bundes, a strip of federal buildings designed by German architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank that seem to strap together East and West like the buckle of a belt. The show also reviews the parks and monuments that incorporate elements of the wall as a nod to historical memory and the many that do not — such as an apartment complex by Italian postmodernist Aldo Rossi. His ebullient Schützenstrasse Quarter complex, built on the site of the former death strip, completely overwrites the area’s deadly history. Most significantly, “Unbuilding Walls” looks at the ways in which the country has attempted to weave itself back together socially and culturally since the end of the Cold War. This reunification has not been an equal proposition. In her catalog essay, Birthler notes the disparities faced by those in the former East Germany, who on average earn less and wield far less power socially and politically. “Two of the 13 ministers of the German government in 2017 came from the East,” she notes. “Only three of the 60 state secretaries originate from the East. Of the 190 board seats of stock companies, just three are occupied by East Germans.” This has led to a lopsided cultural representation as well. In a separate essay, cultural journalist Michael Pilz notes that the West doesn’t always show much regard for the East’s architectural history. Socialist Modernist buildings have been demolished or ill-preserved — such as the Ahornblatt, the so-called maple-leaf restaurant from the 1970s known for its swooping five-point canopy. It was torn down to make way for a hotel and shopping mall. Other key sites have been reborn as luxury car dealerships or tourist viewing platforms — generally with little acknowledgement of what they once signified. “Buildings are not just aesthetic compositions or profitable investments,” writes Pilz. They are “monuments.” And “those who tear them down erase entire biographies.” Nearly three decades after it came down, the Berlin Wall still casts a long shadow. “Some people thought, ‘Let’s just heal the city. Let’s erase traces of the wall and it’ll be fine,’” Krückeberg says. “If you say that, you are lying to yourself. “You can’t just divide things. If you do, you’re cutting through tissue — and you damage and you hurt and you scar. We know that from Berlin.” What makes the exhibition relevant beyond the German context is the ways in which it connects with other political scenarios. “Unbuilding Walls” features video testimonials gathered by the architects at border walls around the world — North and South Korea, Israel and Palestine, the U.S. and Mexico. In these testimonials, residents of those nations reflect on what border walls mean and how they have affected their lives. It’s a piece that ties in nicely with a project by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, on view at the U.S. pavilion nearby, that makes a case for viewing the U.S.-Mexico border not as a dividing line but as a holistic ecological region. In one of the videos, a man named José Efraín from Tijuana is asked how long he thinks the U.S. border wall may ultimately last. “I can’t be sure,” he responds. “As you see in Berlin, where they took down that wall — here, we can do the same thing, and we could just not have a border.” The hardened U.S.-Mexico border may seem like a permanent part of life in North America. But Krückeberg says making those assumptions can be foolhardy. “That’s the lesson of the Berlin Wall. Each wall is temporary. There is a time it will come down.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344872313-IIY91XOYJMB3UBLDH788/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.33.58+PM.png culture - New York City Launches ‘She Built NYC’ Commission for Public Art on Women’s History New York City today announced She Built NYC, a new initiative to commission a public monument or artwork on city property with a focus on women’s history. The program—which was inaugurated by the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Cultural Affairs—follows recommendations from the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, a commission initiated “to expand the stories, histories, and narratives represented on public property in New York.” As a press release for She Built NYC stated, “These representations have historically failed to reflect the multiplicity of people that have contributed to the city throughout history.” With a goal to correct for the past, the Department of Cultural Affairs has committed up to $10 million for new monuments and works. Anyone can nominate women or historical events for consideration at the website for Women.nyc; the deadline for suggestions is August 1. After reviewing the nominations, an advisory panel will consult with the Department of Cultural Affairs on the subject of a monument and an artist to create it, to be announced in January. The new initiative follows increasing protest among New Yorkers over representational imbalance within public works. As noted in a 2017 Gothamist report on the subject, “In Central Park, the most-visited urban park in the country, there are 23 historical male statues, but the sole female representations are either fictional characters, like Alice and Mother Goose, or nameless props, like nymphs and angels.” Earlier this year, a statue dedicated in 1894 in Harlem was removed in the wake of protests over its subject: J. Marion Sims, a doctor whose work drew in part on experiments on enslaved black women. Learn more at ARTNEWS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531344999381-9UJQ30ME3XEO97NL12I5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.36.12+PM.png culture - Surviving As A Single-Player In Video Game's Multiplayer World When the Electronic Entertainment Expo took over downtown Los Angeles last week, there was talk of new technologies as well as hints of a “next generation” of consoles. Yet the most striking moment during the weeklong celebration of gaming was something far more simple: a kiss. An unexpectedly intimate and warmly optimistic scene — one complete with honest and awkward dialogue — launched Sony's presentation of "The Last of Us Part 2." The scene of a kiss between two women made the argument that good ol’ fashioned storytelling still tops slick gameplay and larger-than-life digital effects At E3, "The Last of Us Part 2" was an outlier, and not just because it emphasized teen romance — and, to be sure, lots of intense violence. "The Last of Us Part 2" stands out as a single-player game in an increasingly multiplayer world. Big-budget games today are going communal. And with Epic Games recently unveiling that more than 125 million people have played “Fortnite,” who can blame them? A longstanding single-player franchise such as “Fallout” announced its upcoming “Fallout 76” would be a multiplayer experience. BioWare, known best for single-player narratives such as “Dragon Age” and “Mass Affect,” is embracing social with its upcoming shooter “Anthem.” Treyarch stated that its newest “Call of Duty” title would go without a single-player campaign. Other games, such as Rare’s pirate adventure “Sea of Thieves” for Xbox One, is geared toward social play, to the point that its single-player experience is barely playable. Ubisoft’s own upcoming pirate title, “Skull and Bones,” is also going the multiplayer route, and last year, Electronic Arts shuttered a “Star Wars” title from celebrated game storyteller Amy Hennig of “Uncharted” fame to “pivot” away from “a story-based, linear adventure game.” Which leads to this question: What’s the future for the introverted player, the one who doesn’t want to game with strangers and whose friends don’t have the latest consoles? Are those of us who want to dig in with a game in the solitary way we devour a book or binge watch a series slowly being phased out? “That conversation is scary,” said Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, currently overseeing production of “The Last of Us Part 2. “It’s scary because those are my favorite kinds of games, and if there’s fewer people making those games? That’s one of the reasons I joined the industry.” The kiss in “The Last of Us Part 2” was effective because it felt directed — that is, it was carefully written and staged by artists who want players to discover a rather specific story. Such is a key benefit of the single-player experience. Co-writer of the game Halley Gross said “The Last of Us Part 2” provided her an opportunity to go deep on the lasting effects of trauma, especially as it pertains to a young woman. “It is this hostile environment; it is this place where there are no rules,” she said. “When you have to fight for your life everyday, and you can’t go to therapy and you can’t get help, how do you deal with that and how does that corrupt you? Or save you?” There are benefits to the single-player games beyond just thoughtful character development and a heavy narrative focus. Combat and action can feel more personally choreographed in ways that fit the story. In “The Last of Us Part 2,” fight scenes feel claustrophobic. In FromSoftware’s “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,” set in a fantastical take on feudal Japan, the studio’s marketing manager, Yasuhiro Kitao, said via a translator that adding options for another player would essentially mean having to create more generic enemies that could be scaled to multiple skill-sets at once. In a game such as “Fortnite,” chaos and humor rule. The wild anything-goes matches result in a vastly unpredictable game where spontaneity and competition matter significantly more than story. That’s expected, as the game must be designed to support the whims of dozens of strangers. Multiplayer inherently changes the tone of a game, one that can give it more of a sport-like feel. “Speaking personally, and ensuring I’ll never work again, I’m a single-player story guy,” said veteran developer Warren Spector (“Epic Mickey,” “Deus Ex”). “I think interactive storytelling is really fascinating. Virtual socializing is less interesting to me than establishing a connection with a game. For me, games are a dialogue between the developer and the player, and not necessarily 16 players out there in the world.” What’s changing, however, is the quest by developers to bring narrative-rich experiences into the multiplayer universe. A franchise such as “Destiny” is designed essentially to last forever, creating an immersive universe rather than a beginning-middle-end. This solves one inherent problem of a single-player game: People purchase it once and then stop spending money. BioWare’s sci-fi space gunner “Anthem” looks to go after a similar market, as it’s emphasizing cooperative gameplay in a setting in which missions could be added over a number of years. In theory, this allows developers to create multiple revenue streams for a single game, either via micro-transitions, subscriptions or world-building expansion packs. The challenges: making the narrative feel more guided and controlled than so-called environmental storytelling usually allows and trying to ensure that everyone plays along nicely. Though my time with the game at E3 was limited, I was often using my jetpack to soar among the forest-like planet in the opposite (read: wrong) direction of everyone else on my team. BioWare’s general manager, Casey Hudson, tried to assuage my concern, saying that the game would be friendly. “Anthem,” he said, will encourage mentor-mentee relationships. “Anyone can play with any level, and when you’re a higher level, there are bonuses for playing with people who are at a lower level and helping them out,” he said. “It’s a mentor system, including helping people through the first levels of the game.” When the topic of single-player games entering endangered species status comes up, most every developer — including the industry’s own trade body, the Electronic Software Assn. — says a variation of the same thing: Look at Bethesda. The studio last year launched a slightly tongue-in-cheek campaign dubbed “Save Player 1,” noting that while gaming is “often about social interaction,” sometimes one needs some personal space. Yet Bethesda this year took the single-player-focused “Fallout” series and turned it into a multiplayer experience with the upcoming “Fallout 76.” “The stuff we’ve traditionally done, it’s good to say, ‘You’re the hero, the world is here for you and we’ve designed it all around maximizing your personal experience. We’re the dungeon master. Trust us,’” said Bethesda executive and “Fallout” architect Todd Howard, who added that even in traditionally single-player games, the studio has been thinking of ways to facilitate more interaction among friends, even if it’s as simple as sharing a photo. Yet in “Fallout 76,” every human in the game will be controlled by another human. Traditionally, in the game’s violent post-apocalyptic world, even the non-player-controlled characters are regularly despicable. Won’t turning their digital brains over to humans simply create a more inhospitable, anarchic experience? Howard said Bethesda is thinking hard about preventing strangers from ruining someone’s game in “Fallout 76.” Don’t, he said, expect to see my digital character just randomly shot in the head by some unseen foe. “That’s very hard for them to do,” he said. “They offer you a challenge. It’s like if someone walks up to you into a bar and slaps you. ‘Do you want to fight?’ You can be like, ‘That’s kind of annoying. I’m just going to walk away.’ That’s the vibe we want. “We want to incentive it,” Howard continued. “Imagine the guy slaps you, and then someone walks up to you and says, ‘I’ll give you $1,000 if you fight that guy.’ The game incentives you to fight. It’s the same way we would design an entertaining encounter, but [we’re having] the game design give the player those tools to design those entertaining encounters themselves.” Right. But what if I still trust, say, Howard to give me the best experience rather than strangers I encounter in a virtual world? For example, after the reaction to “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” I shudder at what any “Star Wars” fan would do if given Lucasfilm’s tools. If I long ago decided “World of Warcraft” wasn’t my style of gaming, shouldn’t today’s multiplayer obsession frighten me? When it comes to big budget mainstream games, that answer remains unclear. “This is not some flag that says, ‘This is the future of everything,’” said Howard, trying to reassure me. But even Spector, that self-described “single-player story guy,” said multiplayer offers some irresistible problems designers have yet to solve, and I should expect plenty in the years ahead to give it their best shot. “I’ve spent my entire career trying to re-create the feeling I got when I played ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ with my friends, where there was six of us telling stories with each other,” he said. “It’s a really interesting problem. How do you take an electronic game and let six players tell a story to each other? From an intellectual standpoint, I find that really interesting. I find that kind of cooperative storytelling a really interesting challenge, and I’d like to tackle that someday. “I’m a single-player story guy not so much because I’m a single-player guy,” he added, “but because I’m a story guy.” And for now, I want my stories dictated by storytellers and not my niece and nephew who just got a new game console. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531345272031-YMOP8MAXYLODNGXG0KV5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.39.51+PM.png culture - Ann Philbin And The Art Of The Provocative Are Thriving At The Hammer Museum In the 1980s, when the art world was struggling to distill the pain and loss of the AIDS epidemic, Ann Philbin, a young curator with an avant-garde eye and an activist’s edge, walked into a New York gallery and came upon a simple and searing work: A white, scoured sink by sculptor Robert Gober. “It took my breath away,” said Philbin, who watched many friends die of a disease that swept through the East Village and inspired gay artists like Gober to respond. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I have no idea what it means, but for me that sink had all the beauty and pathos of what we were living through in that moment, and what we were living through was horrifying.’” That reckoning spoke not only to Philbin’s aesthetic but to a provocative instinct that art should define its era, challenge its politics and resonate with a truth that can startle and illuminate. Her 19 years as director of the UCLA Hammer Museum have personified that credo, turning the institution into one of nation’s most enticing and risk-taking ventures, exhibiting not only contemporary and conceptual art, but holding hundreds of programs a year on topics including racism, civil disobedience, feminism, clean energy and talking sex with Dita Von Teese. “When I came here,” said Philbin, who left the Drawing Center in New York to move to the Hammer, “L.A. was considered not at all an interesting city for art. But in these two decades, it has become the red hot center, arguably in the world. Artists are moving here from Berlin, South America, a lot from Europe. The environment here is not about making money, it’s about making art.” Trim and mercurial, Philbin, who once clashed with billionaire Eli Broad over funding and turned away potential board members who didn’t share her progressive inclinations, runs on self-assurance and charm. She looks right at you, as if perhaps you’re a painting or video installation to be politely scrutinized, and then, if all goes well, conspired with. She is at ease in the penthouses of donors and the cluttered studio apartments of unknown artists, looking for that revelatory find that will celebrate Los Angeles’ ascension. The Hammer’s current ‘Made in L.A. 2018’ biennial exhibition features 33 artists from ethnicities that reflect the city’s diversity. It is a signature show that, like many at the institution, highlights new and under-recognized local artists. Throughout her career, Philbin, who started out as a painter, has focused on artists ahead of boards of directors, donors, collectors, the public and other complicated whims and egos that are at once a distraction and necessity for an institution to thrive. “I started with artists and it took a long time for people to notice anything was happening here,” said Philbin, whose operating budget has jumped from $5 million to $25 million since 1999. “But it gave us credibility with the artists. Only in the last six years has the general public finally noticed. We’re still building our audience. Sometimes I say more people in Berlin know who we are than in Westwood.” Andrea Bowers, whose work is often politically charged, praised the Hammer last year for hanging her 50-foot mural depicting banks, including one of the museum’s donors (Wells Fargo), that were funding the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, which runs through the Standing Rock Native American reservation. “Annie has amazing courage to do projects that other institutions might not do,” said Bowers. “The reason LA has evolved into one of the major art cities in the world has a lot to do with her tenure.” But Philbin fears that the city’s allure for artists — many of whom studied at local schools -- is now threatened by rising rents and creeping gentrification, factors that in other cities, notably New York and San Francisco, pushed artists away. The pressure is likely to intensify as Southern California becomes attractive to the tech industry, a shift that could recast the region’s character and culture. “Real estate prices are something that’s now talked about all the time. You can feel it changing. It’s a big concern for artists,” said Philbin. She added that in San Francisco, the tech industry was estranged from the local art scene. “They were in their own little bubble,” she said of tech companies. “You can’t old hold it (development) back. You can’t stop it. But you can do it differently. I hope they understand what it means to be a citizen. If so, we have the potential to alter this landscape in the most exciting way.” Philbin is fierce about the duties of citizenship and the cachet of brand, turning a university museum into a world-class institution, one that has received two recent donations totaling $50 million to underpin a $180-million campaign for renovations, endowment, exhibitions and gallery expansion. “We’re going for big game,” she said. “Our exhibition partners are MOMA, the MET, the Tate, the Whitney.” That sense of prowess and singularity — the museum’s affiliation with the university is not readily apparent on its website — has at times agitated some at UCLA, though Philbin says, “it’s not an issue today.” The Hammer’s autonomy grew out of legal disputes and financial maneuverings in the 1990s when UCLA took over what was then the Armand Hammer Museum, founded by the CEO of Occidental Petroleum to house his art collection. Brett Steele, dean of UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture and a member of the Hammer board, said there is no tension between the Hammer and the university, adding that the museum’s degree of independence “is something we talk about.” Philbin followed the “strength of her convictions in building this museum into what it has become,” said board chairwoman Marcy Carsey, a television producer who donated $20 million last year to the Hammer. “Sometimes she stood up to very powerful people and put her job on the line.” One of those times came shortly after Philbin arrived at the Hammer and learned that then-board member Eli Broad wanted to divert millions of dollars from the sale of a museum-owned scientific drawing by Leonardo da Vinci to start what became the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center at UCLA. Philbin helped block Broad’s attempt, a telling move against one of the city’s most powerful arts patrons. That early encounter appears not to have damaged their relationship. When asked about the matter, Philbin said, “Eli and I had a disagreement in the past, but we’re friends now.” Broad, who can be temperamental when his plans are challenged, called Philbin “a determined, smart leader who has shown remarkable vision,” adding, “Los Angeles is fortunate to have her.” On a recent morning, Philbin, a photographer in tow, walked through the annual Kids’ Art Museum Project (K.A.M.P.) fundraiser in the Hammer courtyard. Children painted, weaved, drew and built Legos alongside artists including skateboarder Chad Muska and architect Kulapat Yantrasast. The event raised about $200,000 and provided a glimpse of the celebrity (Bill Hader and Jimmy Kimmel read children’s stories), wealth (Chanel and diamonds) and talent (painter Rosson Crow oversaw the collage table) that fuels the LA art scene. Philbin did tricks with a magician who held a deck of Tiffany & Co. playing cards. The metaphor, though happenstance, was evident: Philbin has navigated the delicate and at times ego-fueled intersection between wealth and art for years, most visibly at the annual museum’s Gala, with a guest list that ranges from Sarah Jessica Parker to architect Frank Gehry. The event raised $2.4 million last year. To the consternation of some artists and curators, she has invited celebrities to have a hand in exhibitions. Steve Martin, an intrepid collector, curated a show by Canadian artist Lawren Harris. Will Ferrell and Joel McHale starred in a short video to explain the works in the “Stories of Almost Everyone,” a recent exhibition about how we interpret art objects. Philbin thought Ferrell and McHale would add an everyman sense of humor to a show that featured folded socks and piled letters and was inscrutable to many. The video had more than 850,000 views on YouTube and Facebook. “This was a little controversial because the curators said, ‘You’re making fun of the art.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m trying to find a way where people can find comfort with their discomfort about this work,” said Philbin, adding that one artist refused to be in the video. “One of the works of art was a pillow that had only been slept on by acrobats. I’m sorry, but if we cannot make fun of ourselves. If we cannot make fun of that then we’re just….” The daughter of an artist and a lawyer who worked in President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Philbin gets along well with her board (“their job is to support us, not lead us”) and is freer to explore her tastes than directors at many other institutions. It would be hard to imagine the leadership turmoil at MOCA — director Philippe Vergne’s contract will not be renewed next year – plaguing the Hammer. This has allowed her to concentrate on exhibitions like “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985”, a recent acclaimed show that featured artists who fought racism, misogyny and political oppression. “Our public programs are unabashedly progressive in their viewpoints,” said Philbin, who is married to Cynthia Wornham, a senior vice president at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “I have a couple of Republicans on my board, but they’re good Republicans [she laughed], and they probably mostly agree with the point of view we’re putting out there. Many other museums couldn’t get away with that. There are people on their boards who are very partisan. Democrats and Republicans and people who are very wealthy who have very strong points of view about immigration and this and that.” Philbin received a master’s degree in museum studies/arts administration from New York University. She remembers the days of Reaganomics, AIDS memorials in Greenwich Village, and when Cindy Sherman worked was a receptionist at Artists Space. And though she is now building a vibrant art scene that reflects Los Angeles, like many in her world, she wants the recognition of New York’s cultural media and established order. The art world may be shifting west, but the perception remains that much of its influence is in the east. She is in some ways is reminiscent of Deborah Borda, who left her post as head of the New York Philharmonic and took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2000. Borda put aside East Coast conventions and, along with conductor Gustavo Dudamel, built one of the most innovative orchestras in the world. So much so that the struggling New York Philharmonic lured her back last year to infuse it with her marketing skills and adventurousness. “I’m still a New Yorker at heart,” said Philbin. “But risk and experimentation are much more embraced in L.A.” On a May afternoon, Philbin, dressed in ivory-colored pants and a jacket, walked amid pieces being installed for the “Made in L.A. 2018” show, which encompasses topics ranging from climate change to social justice that reflect our unsettled times. They include works by Luchita Hurtado, a 97-year-old Venezuelan-born painter whose images turn the body into landscapes, and Charles Long, a slight man in a black T-shirt who stood next to a sculpture that could be viewed as either the base of a cut-down tree or a severed penis. “This is the room where patriarchy ends,” Long said with a laugh. “I like it,” Philbin said. The unexpected, a place where imagination finds spark and voice, a style all its own, that’s what she saw in Gober’s sink during the AIDS crisis. And it defined her many-years quest to meet Lee Bontecou, a sculptor popular in the 1960s who retreated from the public eye to make art in a barn deep in Pennsylvania. Philbin was determined to bring Bontecou’s new works to the Hammer. “I had been writing Lee for 10 years. She never responded,” said Philbin. Her break came when Elizabeth Smith, a curator at MOCA, made contact with Bontecou. “So we made this pilgrimage to Pennsylvania. I literally fainted. When she opened the barn doors, I had to sit down and put my head between my legs. The work was phenomenal, and she was doing it in total isolation. It was like it was being seen for the first time. The show opened at Hammer in 2003 and went on to MOMA.” She paused while recounting the story, lingering over the memory of that sublime instant when barn doors swung toward the light. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531345514529-47OIB9HVPTAZW9M1JPPX/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.44.45+PM.png culture - Black Fathers Share Their Fears and Hopes for Their Sons in America Today My son Langston came into the house visibly angry. His jaw was clenched, and his eyes were red and narrowed. “What’s wrong?” I quickly asked. “I was just trying to park and get to work,” he said. Last summer, Langston was an intern for a progressive organization in New Jersey. They had been lobbying at the capitol in Trenton that day. He left home hoping they could make a difference. But as he attempted to park at the statehouse, a police officer stopped him and roughly told him to park elsewhere. As Langston searched for a different spot, another officer stopped him, drilled him with questions and told him to find somewhere else to park. He stood still in the kitchen, not really looking at me as he spoke. And then, “I got stopped again, Dad. Again! And the cop asked me, ‘Who is your P.O.?’ And I said, ‘What’s a P.O.?’ and the cop yelled, ‘Parole officer!’ I was in a suit, Dad! A suit!” A single tear fell down his face. This was the latest in a string of incidents. As father and son, we’d had “the talk.” Not the one about sex that all parents have. The one about being black in America. He had told me of his encounters with the police before. I longed to protect him. But here he was in front of me again, 21 years of age, full of rage. I felt helpless as a father. I shouted, “F-ck!” and poured us a stiff drink. I didn’t know what else to do. I am sure I am not alone. Black fathers throughout this country struggle to raise their sons in a world where they seemingly have bull’s-eyes on their backs. We work hard at striking the delicate balance between unconditional love and providing the discipline our sons and daughters will need to survive in America. We watch them as they take their first steps. Teach them how to ride their bicycles without training wheels. We attend their basketball games. Tend to their scratches and bruises. Argue and fight with them when they become teenagers. Worry about their choices and their futures. We do so while much of the country–well, much of white America–believes we are absent from our children’s lives. The stereotype of the absent black father has masqueraded as common sense, even if the data suggest otherwise. Josh Levs’ 2015 book, All In, showed that the majority of black men do live with their children. A 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that black fathers are more likely than their white and Hispanic counterparts to bathe, read to, talk with and review homework with their children on a daily basis. Of course, there are black men who have turned their backs on their children. But they are no different than other men who have done the same. Dame Drummer, 40 Damon, 10 Oakland, Calif. I know that I have a special boy. But my reality as a father is, one day, this 10-year-old could not come home—at the hands of foolishness or hatred or misunderstanding. And if I can give him anything, I would just say, “Take your life one day at a time, man. Don’t let this world suck you into it with the illusions of happiness and the illusions of self-worth. Be your own man. Make your own mind. Have your own decisions. And above all, don’t be afraid of anything.” The persistence of the stereotype, however, sheds light on the context within which we must raise our children–especially our sons. They will grow up, and we must raise them in a world that has a host of assumptions about who they are and what they are capable of. I remember my own father, a hard man who weathered brutal Mississippi summers to deliver mail, telling me, “I am not here to be your friend. I have to prepare you for the world out there, and it ain’t a friendly place.” As if raising children isn’t hard enough, we have to do so with the added burden of preparing them for a racist world. That fact alone often interrupts intimacies. It can make private, black spaces hard and sometimes appear unloving. We comfort our sons when their hearts are broken. Encourage them after a crushing defeat. Criticize their lack of effort. Prod them to do better in school. We urge them to dream big–but with the refrain that, if they are going to achieve their dreams, they will have to be twice as good and work twice as hard as everyone else. And there it is: even in the most intimate moments, black fathers have to remind their children that this world is not organized in their favor. Ruddy Roye’s photographs offer a glimpse into those interrupted intimacies. With these images, “we see the disparate range of the relationships between fathers and sons,” Roye told me. Throughout, we see fathers pulling their sons close: their arms draped around them, the boys snuggled tight, trying to approximate a space of safety. But these images are haunted by the reality of what lies beyond the reach of our arms. My son came home angry and in tears. Thank God he came home. Think about the blank stare of Trayvon Martin’s dad or the rage in the eyes of Michael Brown Sr., or listen to the unimaginable grief of Alton Sterling’s son as he wept for his late father. Black fathers are here. Roye’s photographs bear witness to that fact. We are trying desperately to raise our children, to shower them with love, to allow them to dream big–and to keep them alive. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Interviews have been edited and condensed. Fredrico Don Broom, 41 Vincent, 7, in lap Diego, 12 Catonsville, Md. I teach my sons that when life gets hard, never give up. There was a time when I was going to lose it all. It was on Father’s Day. I work as an engineer, in my father’s footsteps. I got a call from my job: to come in, stabilize the boiler room. Before I could leave, one of the stabilizer tanks exploded. I got cracked across the head. I was out for 2½ years. I sold everything I had just to keep a roof over our heads. To keep things afloat, I started my own business. It’s always good to show a physical example of strength, determination and the willingness to never give up. Remi Bereola, 38 Kaden, 4 Oakland, Calif. Every day, we talk about how our day was and about being a leader and a good listener and a good helper. His school is African-centered and teaches the greatness of precolonial kings and kingdoms, rather than him learning about slavery as if that were our first entry point into history. My father is Nigerian, so we make sure that’s a part of his understanding of who he is-that when he enters in the room, he has that greatness that he carries within him. Shaykh Abdur Rashied, 70 Malcolm Matthews, 20 Chicago I realized at an early age that he was a very spiritual guy. But he had his own mind. He would have to learn just from observing me. We used to bowl, and people said, “I didn’t know Muslims had fun?” He was taking all this in—how people responded to us, respected us. Also, my wife was a [gang] violence interrupter, so he and his siblings knew what was happening in the community and were aware of certain things not to be involved in. He saw the distinction between right and wrong. Kamau Preston, 39 Dayne, 12 New York City I cannot protect my son. I cannot protect my daughter. When a black teen does something, [it’s] “We’re gonna teach him a lesson.” And when a white teen does something, it’s “Oh, he’s a kid. It’s a phase.” The first time I spoke to him about this, he was about 10. And his response to me was, “Dad, I’m half-white.” And I was like, “I get that. But in everybody else’s world, you’re not. They think you’re black.” He’s having a hard time having to compute that. Victor P. Mason, 62 Christopher Mason, 35 Jackson, Miss. I’m sheriff of Hinds County. When I became an officer in law enforcement in the early ’80s, I knew how the environment was here, so I didn’t want my son to be a victim. I wanted him to be a vessel. I was very protective of [my sons], but I let them get their knees skinned. I would take him to the funeral home. I would let him see bodies in the back that were shot up because guys were trying to commit crimes, and let him know this was just one-way; there are consequences. Jesse Starr III, 50 Jesse Starr IV, 28 Jackson, Miss. To raise a black man in this society, I was fortunate enough to be able to be raised around a father that was in the workforce, and he was a teacher. So I saw a work ethic early. And then I have a bloodline of just hustlers and entrepreneurs, so that just gave me the work ethic to know that you’ve got to have your own business. So my son picked that up. You’d make two dollars, you turn it into four. All black men in America and beyond need to have their own business. James Gaither, 48 Elijah, 5, in lap Jasir, 8 Gwynn Oak, Md. Unfortunately about a year, year-and-a-half ago, I had a talk with my then-, what, six-year-old about police. And that police are supposed to be good people. Unfortunately, as human beings, all of them aren’t good people. So when you deal with them, you have to be somewhat more docile. Because I want you to come home safe. Because I don’t want you to be the next news clip of a young kid shot playing with something that looked like something that they thought was a gun. Because the cop was scared, racist, confused or whatever. Because he said you were combative, you didn’t listen or whatever reason that came up. And that’s a fear that I felt like I never should have had to have. And that’s always been around. Vincent Wade Jenkins, 58 Vincent Wade Knight, 26 Jackson, Miss. I won’t say nothing to him that ain’t going to be beneficial for him. I don’t just say any kind of sh-t to him. I say some sh-t that I know he needs, you know what I’m saying? And whether he listens or not, fine. But I come to find out, he listens to everything I say. Anthony Hamblin, 48 Amear, 5 Louisville, Ky. He’s very observant about things. He will see something and say, “Hey Daddy, can I do that?” I explained to him, “Just because you see an adult do it, doesn’t make it right.” I just hope that I can prepare him, because it’s a mean world. He wants to know my phone number, so we go over my phone number every day, just in case he might need to call me. That’s something that we’re working on. And his name. We gotta get his name right, and his letters. We really haven’t had a rough talk about his identity. We haven’t got on that yet. Learn more at TIME https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531345657014-WD0HO98CCY0LCM2LMUDK/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+2.47.01+PM.png culture - Ireland’s National Museum Is Collecting Protest Art Made During the Historic Abortion Referendum Institutions have begun preserving the art created by people on both sides of the Irish abortion debate, which led to the historic referendum on May 25 and the landslide vote to repeal the country’s abortion ban. Brenda Malone, a curator at the National Museum of Ireland, was quick to use social media to appeal to people to preserve banners in particular. Malone tells artnet News that on her wish list is a knitted one with the words “Repeal the 8th” on top of a red heart, which became one of the defining and contentious images of the campaign. This particular repeal banner was inspired by a mural by the street artist Maser on Dublin’s Project Arts Centre wall, which went viral when the center was forced to paint over it, not once but twice. The second cover-up led to a protest in the street and on social media. Only this time the center cleverly subverted the ban by leaving a tiny part of the edge of the love heart visible. Alongside the concealed work a pointed slogan was added saying: “You can paint over a mural but you can’t paint over an issue.” First created by Maser in 2016 at the start of the campaign to allow abortion, it was painted over after Dublin Council objected to it on the grounds that it needed planning permission as it was a “political advertisement.” Cian O’Brien, the artistic director of the Project Arts Centre, says: “We discovered that during the course of the referendum there was a planning loophole.” So, the mural went up again only for the center to receive another letter, this time from the Charity Regulator, saying the work violated its charitable purpose. “Art is not a charitable purpose,” O’Brien discovered. “They applied a very strict reading of the law.” “I’m leaving the shadow of it there for the moment,” he says, partly because the center is currently showing Jesse Jones’s Tremble Tremble, a feminist take on women’s oppression, by the male-dominated judiciary in particular. Jones’s installation, which is on show through July 18, made its debut in Ireland’s pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. “Legally, to be honest, I don’t think we have to paint over it.” The center is also selling limited-edition prints of the mural fragment. Brenda Malone says that she was “impressed but not surprised” at the level of creativity stirred up by the abortion referendum debate. “There were some really imaginative, quirky, witty, and strong banners on the streets that I’m trying to get hold of for the collection.” Malone’s full remit is curator of Ireland’s military history, transport, flags and banners. “I’ve kind of sidelined World War I at the moment,” she admits, to make sure the banners on the “no” and the “yes” sides of the debate to relax the country’s hard-line abortion laws are collected and preserved. “There is a real community acknowledgement that this was an important moment in Ireland’s history that needs to be recorded by the national institutions,” she says. “I haven’t seen this before,” she says, adding that the last time the public felt so strongly about the need to record their stories was after the Easter Rising of 1916 and War of Independence. Learn more at Artnet https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531347522659-IXMMAZX14RZSZUEANIYJ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+3.18.00+PM.png culture - What Will Art Look Like in 100 Years? We Asked 16 Contemporary Artists to Predict the Future It’s an understatement to say that a lot can change in 100 years. A century ago, Europe was just limping out of World War I, and the anarchic seeds of Modernism were spreading throughout a traumatized world. A century from today is hard to envision.But that hasn’t stopped some artists from trying. In 2014, the Scottish artist Katie Peterson launched the Future Library, which commissions one writer each year to contribute a text that will remain unpublished until 2114. The writings will be printed on paper supplied by lumber from a forest she planted four years ago just outside Oslo. More recently, LOUIS XIII Cognac partnered with pop star Pharrell Williams to write a song that would be released in 100 years. The musician and sometimes-curator created a solitary recording printed on water-soluble clay and stored in a state-of-the-art safe that is only destructible when submerged in water. The idea? Unless mankind reverses the depredations of climate change, the recording, titled “100 Years, The Song We’ll Only Hear If We Care,” might be destroyed before it is ever heard. The future may be bright, it may be dire, but it remains to be shaped by ideas yet unthought. In the spirit of looking forward to the uncertain world 100 years hence, we asked a broad range of artists, from Michelle Grabner to Doug Aitken to Nick Cave, to predict what the world—and art—will look like in a century. Carla Gannis To imagine art in 100 years, I’ve taken a cue from Marge Piercy’s 1976 speculative fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time (and yes, perhaps I’m hedging my bets too). Piercy’s protagonist Connie travels to two future 2137s, one where the environment has stabilized, racial and sexual equality have been achieved, and technology is “organically” interwoven into all life on the planet. The other future is far bleaker. Human dignity, clean air, and autonomous thought are commodities only available to the mega-mega-mega-rich. So here goes: Scenario 02 Humans and machines live in harmony in the year 2118. After decades of living underground due to the bio hazardous fall out of the GR8 W@R of 2089, the machines have recently stabilized the environment and humans have emerged from their subterranean bunkers, bursting with creative verve. Plein-Air VRainting is all the rage. Every human is an interdataplinary artist now, since machines have proven to operate the government and economy more efficiently. Most refer to the Earth as the Art World now, and robots are keenly invested in universal art care for all humans; buying, trading, and selling art via a DNA blockchain system. Interestingly, a radical group of bio-genetically “dehanced” individuals, calling themselves les Fauves deux points zéro, have begun to garner attention. Painting on cave walls, with berries, roots and leaves, they produce strange images of space aliens and unidentified flying objects. Doug Aitken I think art is moving in a direction where it will become increasingly de-material. Art in 100 years will be about complete connectivity and dialogue with the viewer with less and less of the detached formalism we see in art now. Art will take us to the edge of the horizon and question what is beyond. Art will seamlessly live both in the fast-flowing river of images and information and in the slow moving desire for true and unrepeatable personal experience. We are only beginning to understand how technology is changing the human experience… we are scratching the surface. Creating images is perhaps an existential way of our society reminding us we are actually here on earth, and actually exist in living flesh and blood. It seems at times like life is the film… and we are all in it together, while at the same time each of us is directing our own live version. In art, as we move forward, I think the viewer’s role will change and be less passive. There will be new forms of artworks that are living and continuously changing and artworks that will be more experiential. We will not see art as something that passively hangs on a wall. Art will be a seamless part of our lives, not a decoration in our lives. Because the media revolution of the internet serves economic and not cultural ends, as the sociologist Jürgen Habermas continues to remind us, it is likely that the literal object and subject of art will be subsumed into an evolving economy of digital networks. Whatever form art takes, we will not encounter it for long, as our attention will certainly be evermore commercialized. Elmgreen & Dragset In 100 years, our current global economic system will most likely have been exchanged with other formats of wealth distribution following the collapse of capitalism, and an art market as we know it today will no longer exist. However, that doesn’t mean that free and individual artistic expressions will have vanished, but that both artists’ practices and art institutions might have undergone radical changes in relation to their cultural functions within society. When it comes to the mediation of art, new generations will certainly have learned to filter the overload of information in more selective ways and will therefore have also become more immune to media-hyped cultural tendencies and mass hysteria. Old-school media, such as painting or sculpture, have often been declared “dead”, only to show their renewed strength and relevance less than a decade later. With an increased digitization of our everyday realities, the need for artistic materiality will become even more urgent in order to remind ourselves that we are physical beings. Ebony G. Patterson Hopefully art will reflect more truth. It will be more inclusive and reflect the truth of ALL of US and OUR HISTORIES. Justin Brice Guariglia Art that rises to the great ecological challenges of today will be crucial for our survival as a species. In a recent issue of the journal NATURE, scientists showed that there is a 96 percent chance of a whopping 5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise by the year 2100. That kind of rise in the earth’s temperature is catastrophic for virtually all life on earth, making climate change the moral imperative of our time. Artists have not only the unique ability, but I would argue the responsibility, to give us new languages and tools to be able to better understand the world around us, which can help us solve these great existential problems. This puts tremendous pressure on artists to help society reimagine the future. I believe art as a social practice, where artists are invested in the great problems of today, will thrive in the immediate and long term future. At the same time, AI will leave many people jobless. Forced to accept life in all it’s meaninglessness, art for art sake will flourish as a way humans will fill the “void of time” machines create. Jacolby Satterwhite Architecture and Design probably will prevail as a fine art because of the urgency to survive Climate Change …. that is, if we are still here. Luke DuBois Learn more at artnet https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531347634014-48T2139WNR2RHOI1UHMI/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+3.20.12+PM.png culture - Poetry Is Making A Big Comeback In The U.S., Survey Results Reveal In half a decade, the number of U.S. adults who are reading poetry has nearly doubled. That's according to the results of a new survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, which announced Thursday that "as a share of the total U.S. adult population, this poetry readership is the highest on record over a 15-year period." The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, a collaboration between the NEA and the Census Bureau, found that 11.7 percent of the U.S. adult population in 2017 — or about 28 million people — had read poetry in the last year. Which admittedly may not seem like much on the surface — until it's compared with the 6.7 percent found during the last survey period, in 2012. To find a comparable interest in poetry, you have to reach back to 2002, when the number of adults reading poetry narrowly cleared the 12 percent threshold. The survey showed sharp increases in readership across the board — but especially among women, minorities and adults with only some college education. "These increases definitely reflect what we've been witnessing over in our corner of the office," NEA's director of literature, Amy Stolls, said in revealing the results. "I suspect social media has had an influence, as well as other robust outreach activities and efforts," she added, referring to many of the agency's programs and fellowships to boost readers and writers. Whatever the reason may be, the bottom line spells positive things for poets and their readers, who have been fairly starved for this kind of good news of late. As Quartz notes, prior to 2017, "the portion of the total population reading poetry had been in steady decline since 1992." And there's more to come: The NEA promised to unveil full results from the survey "over the next several months." Learn more at NPR https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531347758700-STDLGV017K3N70ANXXOD/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+3.22.21+PM.png culture - MIT Creates Psychopath AI By Making It Look At A Reddit Forum Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have truly created a monster. A team of researchers who specialize in the darker side of artificial intelligence made news again this week for their latest creation: “Norman,” a machine-learning bot that “sees death in whatever image it looks at,” its creators told HuffPost. Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan wanted to prove that an artificial intelligence algorithm would be influenced by the kind of content fed to it. So they made Norman, named for “Psycho” character Norman Bates, and had it read image captions from a Reddit forum that features disturbing footage of people dying. (We don’t need to promote it here.) “Due to ethical and technical concerns and the graphic content of the videos, we only utilized captions of the images, rather than using the actual images that contain the death of real people.” the scientists said in an email. The team then showed Norman randomly generated inkblots and compared the way it captioned the images to the captions created by a standard AI. For instance, where a standard AI sees, “A black and white photo of a small bird,” Norman sees, “Man gets pulled into dough machine.” Here are some of the inkblots shown to Norman and the eerie results. When asked why they would create such a thing, the MIT researchers erupted in chilling laughter as lightning struck in the distance. That didn’t happen of course, but they did give a valid reason for this project. “The data you use to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behavior,” the researchers said. “So when we talk about AI algorithms being biased or unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it.” The same MIT lab previously created other creepy bots, including Shelley, which helps write horror stories, and the Nightmare Machine, which generates scary imagery. In the future, when Norman and his kin do take over, we hope they will remember this article ― and its author ― with fondness. Learn more at HuffPost https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531347846126-8KWIKT8L7L30NB3DGLMD/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+3.23.47+PM.png culture - 'Made In L.A. 2018': Why The Hammer Biennial Is The Right Show For Disturbing Times The UCLA Hammer Museum’s much-anticipated biennial survey of new art produced in the city has just opened its fourth iteration. “Made in L.A. 2018” is the best one yet. Part of the reason comes from simple, dramatic contrast. Since the show’s last outing in 2016, American society has been plunged into a period of destructive nastiness and malice. Art is inherently its opposite. Artists have been responding. These 33 — up from 26 last time — were chosen with a keen attention to the resonance of their work within our socially disturbed time. Rather than art with partisan political agendas, Hammer curators Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale have chosen smart work that, for the most part, feels acutely attuned to our beleaguered moment. Emblematic is the big mural that wraps the stairwell at the museum’s front entry. At first look, you might not notice how. In a palette of breezy pastels and tertiary hues, Eamon Ore-Giron painted hard-edge, geometric shapes that seem to fuse landscape elements represented as natural, industrial and schematic. In one lovely mural passage, a precision sequence of disks that evokes factory mass-production within a diagrammatic modern setting also conjures the phases of the moon. Muralism has a long and venerable history in Los Angeles, home to landmark examples from the 1930s by David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. (The latter’s fiery “Prometheus” at Pomona College, an explosive burst of Expressionist fervor, is the first modern fresco in the United States.) Mexican muralism banished tasteful public decorum for blunt social agitation, essential to its Great Depression era. Ore-Giron’s impressive mural interrupts that venerable tradition, responding to its public purpose and commitment in a novel way. The sleek formal rhythms of the Hammer mural are neither monolithic nor combative. Instead, they look to South America and Concrete art, with its cross-fertilization of imported European and indigenous modernisms. The forms draw on diverse pictorial legacies — say, a Uruguayan abstractionist like Joaquín Torres-Garcia and a Swiss one like Max Bill or a Russian like El Lissitzky. Apparent influences also include commercial graphic design, the flat and patterned color of Peruvian painter (and occasional muralist) Josué Sánchez Cerron and the aural syncopation of folk and popular music. Right now, in the face of America’s reactionary narrow-mindedness, the work’s insistent cross-cultural heterogeneity feels joyfully subversive. One response to a divisive power that clamors for building walls is to refuse by orchestrating artistic border crossings. The refined comeliness of Ore-Giron’s painting is one seductive method. Narrative is another. Daniel Joseph Martinez traveled the length of the old Berlin Wall, which once kept Soviet-dominated East Germans from emigrating to democratic West Germany. He photographed himself at 80 spots holding aloft processional banners adorned with the face of Ulrike Meinhof, the Red Army Faction militant, shown at different stages of life — schoolgirl, ingénue, slain terrorist. Martinez’s large-scale photographs are printed in luxurious silvery grays, nodding toward Gerhard Richter’s great 1988 painting cycle on the brutal Baader-Meinhof gang, as the RAF was also known. The Berlin Wall is long gone, but the indelible memory of the cruelty and persecution that it represented and enforced inevitably invokes the Trump administration’s incessant mantra of building a border wall between Mexico and the United States. Martinez, who is Mexican American, has fashioned a Meinhof processional placard that recalls Catholic saint-banners, which derive from the military standards once carried into battle. Rather than triumphant, these photographs seem to propose that cruel division only serves to create martyrs. Ore-Giron’s abstract painting and Martinez’s representational photographs occupy very different points on the show’s broad spectrum, but both refer back to the alarming social context to which the 2018 biennial is attuned. The only political position staked out is for commitment to deep cultural awareness — to acknowledging that artists are citizens too. As always, the biennial emphasizes emerging and established but often lesser-known artists. These 33 range in age from 29 to 97 — the youngest (textile artist Diedrick Brackens) born in the immediate aftermath of the Reagan Revolution’s rightward jolt, the oldest (painter Luchita Hurtado) in the wake of the blistering brutalities of the First World War. Just five were born in Los Angeles, while eight are foreign-born. Urbanism’s vigorous cosmopolitanism stands front and center. Video installations are prominent (there are nine), partly reflecting the easy accessibility now of inexpensive digital equipment. Subjects and formats could not be more diverse. Among the strongest are Gelare Khoshgozaran’s quasi-documentary rumination on the strange, pseudo-Middle East towns erected in the California desert as test sites for U.S. military maneuvers; Neha Choksi’s achingly poetic, four-channel lamentation for the ongoing, perhaps irreversible degradation of Mother Earth (and a yearning to escape it); and, a wicked satire of self-improvement rituals for women who, in Freud’s foolish but pervasive misconception, are inherently lacking, by the team of Jade Gordon and Megan Whitmarsh. Among the elegiac “Found Fragments” of lost life in James Benning’s installation is a ravishing, wall-projected video image of a sun-dappled forest, shot after a devastating recent wildfire. The landscape image, almost completely still, becomes a nearly abstract meditation on life-cycles and the mutability of fearsome tragedy and exquisite beauty. Dance is seamlessly integrated into a line of six wall-mounted flat-screen video monitors by choreographer Flora Wiegmann. A virtual mural of shifting viewpoints, it exploits camera-work as bodily movement matching that of the depicted dancers. The two-dimensional screens compose a visual field corresponding to the amorphous white space through which the dancers move. All that is solid melts into an aesthetic sensation of pixilation. Including Ore-Giron, half a dozen compelling painters are here. The complex, hands-on demands of painting perhaps stand as an indicator of a continuing reaction to today’s gauzy, enveloping digital ether. John Houck began as a photographer, but now he is composing abstractions in which camerawork and painting masquerade as one another. The illusions in two-dimensional imagery are contradicted by flat surfaces that he’s folded, spindled and otherwise mutilated. Similarly, several of Linda Stark’s textured relief paintings fuse female body parts and floral motifs within a physically mottled surface that looks like synthetic skin. A witty self-portrait focuses just above watery eyes onto her forehead, its “third eye” a picture of her cat inside a pink aura. No iconic pussy hat is shown, but as an image of wisdom implanted squarely in the forehead of a deity, the marvelously eccentric picture is a delight. Seven lovely Surrealist landscape paintings from the 1970s by Hurtado seem informed by outer-space exploration. A circle of cloud-filled sky surrounded by voluptuous brown hills inverts the famous Apollo 17 photograph of Earth as a “big blue marble” floating through space. Here, it’s a void in the Earth that becomes an erotically suggestive spatial atmosphere. A charming grunge imbues Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s clotted pictures — a toppled Confederate statue crumpled like a corpse; a crude man anxiously reading a love letter; smokers indulging their simple, deadly pleasure while idling in a car parked in a trash-filled alley; and, a tightly clustered crowd drowning in a turbulent sea, unable to grasp a nearby lifeline, its arabesque almost decoratively baroque. The quirky paintings, touchingly civilized, are a gentle but firm avowal of humanity during extraordinarily trying times. Finally, Christina Quarles paints trompe l’oeil paintings onto flower-bedecked “wallpaper” that she has also made, interrupting domestic space with knockout images of nude women entwined with their own and each other’s bodies, pushing against physical norms. Barely out of art school, she hasn’t shown much in L.A., so Quarles ranks as perhaps the biennial’s most exciting discovery. Also impressive is Lauren Halsey’s “The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture),” an imposing square room built of faux-marble walls cobbled together from ordinary gypsum, cardboard and off-white acrylic paint. In this white cube, humility equals grandeur. As with Halsey’s current fine installation downtown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which spins off the Classical motif of Plato’s Cave, this piece also looks to an ancient source — the Egyptian form of a cenotaph, or empty tomb. The list etched into interior walls includes Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and Philando Castile, plus dozens of unfamiliar names. A war memorial for 90 bodies buried elsewhere, the monument gathers shades. At the other end of the spectrum, grim humor marks Charles Long’s installation, titled “paradigm lost,” which mixes sculpture and painting. Clusters of tree stumps appear both petrified and phallic. They are cleverly infused with sly visual references to a Surrealist and Expressionist pantheon of male artists — Munch’s face screams, Dali’s watches droop, Brancusi’s torso is another stump, Giacometti’s lopsided chariot would only run in circles. Within Long’s ruined art-forest, nature and culture pass into history. It’s a sobering sight, until an odd and pleasant realization arises: One-third of the artists in the splendid “Made in L.A. 2018” are men, two-thirds are women. Not so long ago, a ratio of women far outnumbering men in a survey exhibition would have been a topic of stunned and enthusiastic comment. Now it’s just a number. Women have long outnumbered men in the artist ranks, but institutions have been a drag on reality. Progress has finally been made! A quiet revolution has happened, with its own profound resonance amid today’s social strife. ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ‘Made in L.A. 2018’ Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood When: Through Sept. 2; closed Mondays Information: (310) 443-7000, www.hammer.ucla.edu Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531347925517-O7S55IWX2B1KHJNXFYYU/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+3.25.06+PM.png culture - Chester Artists Revitalizing Corridor On Their Own Terms In a maker space with hand tools and power tools neatly sorted and hanging on the walls, opposite a row of work tables covered in sawdust and dreams, Devon Walls tells me about growing up right here, in Chester, Pennsylvania. “I come from an artist family,” says Walls. “I grew up with our living room being our theater, our stage, the place where we painted and built stuff, block parties where kids had to make the games, painting, building, and sculpting. Art was just a part of it, part of everything.” Tiny Chester, population around 34,000, is technically the oldest city in Pennsylvania, established by Swedish colonizers on Lenape land in 1644. William Penn himself, namesake founder of Pennsylvania, wouldn’t arrive in the area until 1682, shortly afterward establishing the city of Philadelphia, a few miles upstream on the Delaware River. Chester would peak in the 1950s, when the city served as a hub for shipbuilding and car manufacturing, home to some 66,000 residents. Then, as now, Chester was between 75 and 80 percent black. While still small in the 1950s, it was enough to support a thriving arts community, led by William Dandridge, who was called “the Father of Arts and Culture in the City of Chester,” upon his passing in 2014. To Walls, Dandridge was Uncle Bill. “My uncle’s vision was to create a cultural arts corridor, right here,” says Walls. “He was an activist as well. He once got arrested right here on this block during the civil rights era, fighting for equality. The stuff that he wanted to get finished, he had other fights he had to fight first.” Slowly, and under the radar — much like the city that he still calls home — Walls has spent the last decade or so bringing that vision to life on a stretch of Chester’s Avenue of the States, a once mostly vacant corridor, save for a few discount retail and drug stores (the kind that sold drugs that were 20 years old, Walls says). Walls has methodically acquired ownership interests in a growing number of properties along the corridor, including the MJ Freed Performing Arts Theater, which has an attached dance studio, an art gallery, a coffee shop, and the maker space. And he’s been recruiting local entrepreneurs to fill storefronts in other buildings with tenants who reflect not only his uncle’s vision, but the vision of a group of contemporary Chester artists who have stuck it out over years, remaining steadfast in their commitment to the city and to working with each other as an informal collective. “We don’t always agree right away on how to do things,” says Walls. “Some folks want to put in hookah lounges, but we’re not playing that. It’s a fight we’re willing to fight because having kids do workshops here, the last thing we want is kids looking across the street and people are smoking pipes. It kinda contradicts the healthy lifestyle we’re also trying to promote.” The careful curation of business partners goes beyond whom the group has invited onto the corridor. With Walls at the helm, the group has also carefully selected the investors from whom they have accepted capital. “Our thing, my thing will forever be local ownership,” Walls says. “So when you start putting too much out there and you get too many people in it, the ownership leaves from being local, from the artists. I wanted to make sure we kept local ownership at the forefront of what was going on.” So far, the select few investors that have made it past Walls’ gatekeeping happen to all be small private foundations, all three so far with strong ties to the Philadelphia region. Their investments — equity or loans, not grants — have helped Walls and the artists secure and begin to make improvements to some of the properties, including the MJ Freed theater as well as a formerly blighted 40,000 square-foot warehouse that will soon be renovated into studios, offices and convening space for 20 Chester artists. “There’s been [other investors] that I turned down, I cursed out, I kicked out the door. It’s been a lot of people,” says Walls. “I like the group that we’ve worked with so far. They made me feel comfortable enough … We’re like family.” STEPPING INTO A VACUUM For decades, foundations have used loans and other types of investments for charitable purposes. The Ford Foundation was the first to take this approach, making the first of what it called “program-related investments” in 1968. The following year, the Tax Reform Act of 1969 included a tweak to the U.S. Tax Code that recognized program-related investments as part of the five percent of a foundation’s asset value that each private foundation must disburse every year for charitable purposes in order to remain tax-exempt. Large, well-endowed foundations would eventually follow suit with program-related investments, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation, among others. (The Ford and Kresge Foundations provide grant funding to Next City.) From their very beginning at the Ford Foundation in 1968, program-related investments from foundations have helped finance affordable housing, small business lending for women- and minority-owned businesses, conservation or parks development, and other purposes under the various and shifting program areas of large foundations. For decades, only larger foundations could afford the lawyers, accountants and other professionals required to properly assess the financial soundness (not to mention potential impact) of potential program-related investments. Because of those constraints, by 2003, only 134 out of 66,000-plus foundations made any program-related investments in that year. But something intriguing has happened in the foundation world. As the broader U.S. financial system has become more and more concentrated over time, foundations have become less concentrated, at least at the aggregate level of analysis. In 2003, more than 66,000 foundations existed in the U.S. holding nearly $477 billion in assets; in 2014, the most recent year available from The Foundation Center, more than 86,000 foundations held $865 billion in assets. By contrast, the U.S. had more than 14,000 banks in the mid-1980s; only around 5,000 banks are still in business today. As Next City has previously reported, the smaller foundations are now getting into program-related investing. These are the kinds of small foundations that have historically been focused on grantmaking for after-school school programs, museums, higher education, medical research, or human services like food pantries or domestic violence survivor counseling. Smaller foundations are getting into the lending and investing game, especially when it comes to place-based investments, like Chester’s arts corridor revitalization. The story of Devon Walls and Chester’s artist-led revitalization illustrates how smaller foundations, both new and old, might be ideally positioned to step into the vacuum left behind by a financial system that has become ever more distant from people and places like Chester’s artist community. They might even be able to build a new bridge between the two. BECOMING THE WING MAN Chuck Lacy is president of the Barred Rock Fund, a small private foundation he co-founded in 2001, along with Judy Wicks and Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s fame — Lacy was formerly chief operating officer of the ice cream company under Cohen). Wicks, founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, is a local Philly-area icon, as the founder of White Dog Café, the restaurant that birthed the modern day local foods movement. Instead of making grants, Barred Rock Fund uses program-related investing to operate more like a venture capital fund, making investments in ventures intended to create jobs and opportunity in historically under-invested places. In 2015, flush with cash after Lacy sold off some previous assets, Barred Rock Fund was looking to make its next investment. “Judy and I were out exploring and looking for something to do in the Philadelphia area,” Lacy says. They cast a wide net, Lacy says. In the fall of 2015, Wicks and Lacy made a stop at Widener University, in Chester, where Walls was doing an artist residency, supported by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. “We went to the Small Business Administration program at Widener, to see if they had any ideas, and when we showed up we discovered we were expected to give a talk,” says Lacy. “Devon was there, and he invited us to come downtown.” Downtown they went, to the Avenue of the States corridor, where Walls had already spent years quietly setting up lease-to-purchase agreements with longtime property owners along the street. He’d been funding the agreements mostly out of his own earnings from selling artwork, doing set design and construction all over the country, and the small amount of overhead available from grants received to do arts programming and creative placemaking work like Chester Made — also funded by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. On that first trip to the Avenue of the States, Lacy noticed a poster on the MJ Freed Theater for a children’s Halloween party the following Saturday. “I went back, without telling Devon I was coming,” says Lacy. “It was supposed to start at six o’clock. I got there at 5:30 and it seemed like nothing was going on. At six o’clock, the grate came up, and all of a sudden families started showing up and kids started going in. I went in and there was all this theater smoke, kids painting pumpkins, and Devon and his friends put on a children’s play. It was just fantastic. That’s when I got hooked. I wanted to see if it was for real, and it was.” Walls and Barred Rock Fund created a new business partnership, New Day Chester Inc., to later buy the theater building and other buildings, including the future artists’ warehouse. They intentionally set up Walls as the two-thirds majority owner of the venture. “The way I see it is, our involvement has brought things along quicker, but what happened was going to happen anyway,” Lacy says. “What we bring is a little bit of the resources and connections that would be commonplace in a wealthier community.” A typical venture capital fund expects to push startup companies to grow fast and eventually “go public,” selling shares on the stock market and earning the fund ten times or a hundred times back what it invested. The Barred Rock Fund has worked out a different venture capital model. “I’m really a wingman here,” says Lacy, who typically travels down from his Vermont base to spend one or two days a week in Chester. “My goal is to create the conditions under which Devon and other people from Chester can buy us out.” The approach and the philosophy are what finally won over Walls. “This was a change, it was a conversation with Chuck and others about a faster way to get it done,” he says. “Sometimes doing it the slow way like I do, it still costs you in the long run. Having someone that was willing to loan that money to get stuff done at a faster pace, it was inviting and I opened up to the idea.” New Day Chester, Inc., is Barred Rock Fund’s eighth investment. Out of the others, Lacy says there are two with whom the fund has been invested for 15 years and counting, and the founders of those ventures have been gradually buying out Barred Rock Fund’s ownership shares in their companies. After Barred Rock Fund’s initial investment in New Day Chester, the Untours Foundation, based in nearby Media, Pa., and the Barra Foundation, based in Wayne, Pa., have also invested or made loans to the new business partnership. “I’ve never had a credit card. Taking on loans like that was scary to me,” says Walls. “Even when I talked to other people from the community, it’s scary. We’re talking about a community where most people don’t have stuff, so when you start talking about taking out a $250,000 loan to build something, and you’re now indebted for that, it was different.” It was different, too, for the Barra Foundation, founded in 1963. The $250,000 loan to build out the 40,000 square-foot warehouse was the foundation’s first program-related investment. A FAMILY JOURNEY BEGINS “We started this journey as an organization in 2015,” says Kristina “Tina” Wahl, president of the Barra Foundation, with a full-time staff of three, herself included. At the time, Wahl had participated in the Mission Investors Exchange, which, in addition to providing research on the subject, functions as a sort of support group for people and institutions with a lot of money and an interest in investing it intentionally to address social issues. The idea to do so came up at the next board meeting of the Barra Foundation. “We’re dealing with very seasoned investment professionals on our board’s investment committee,” explains Wahl. “It takes time to socialize this idea, learn about it, understand it, and make sure it’s in line with your goals and your mission.” The foundation held its following fall board meeting at the offices of Reinvestment Fund, a federally certified community development financial institution with a three-decade track record of making investments for community development purposes like affordable housing and job creation around Greater Philadelphia and all over the United States. At the Barra Foundation board meeting, staff members of Reinvestment Fund gave presentations about their work and lessons learned. “Having the board hear directly from experts in the field, rather than translating through us, was a really important step,” says Wahl. The foundation went on to start talking about program-related investments with current and previous grantees. The Barra Foundation had previously supported arts programming under Walls’ leadership, under the Boundaries & Bridgesprogram. Many of the activities of that program took place right on Avenue of the States, in the spaces Walls and his fellow artists were quietly acquiring and building. When Barra came around talking about making some program-related investments, New Day Chester and its artist warehouse project provided the perfect opportunity. “Devon owning two-thirds of the company was important for us,” says Wahl. “For us, that was a creative opportunity that was in line with our thinking around innovation, to model that behavior for other investors, even beyond foundations.” The foundation said yes to the New Day Chester loan in September 2016. Wahl hopes that, in addition to building out the warehouse space and turning it into a source of revenue for New Day Chester, the loan will also help the entity establish a track record of timely payments over the five-year term of the loan, positioning them eventually to access conventional financing if they so choose. Walls has bigger plans ahead, including rehabbing the vacant, out-of-repair apartments above many of the storefronts along the Avenue of the States corridor, to provide affordable housing for artists and others from Chester. “I think our vision is bigger than the capital that we had, says Walls. “We are in a community where banks don’t want to loan money, insurance companies didn’t even want to insure the properties, a redlined community where most of the wealth that was here moved out to the suburbs … I don’t think $250,000 would do it all, but I think it would get us to the point where we can gain more capital to do more, so definitely.” The city is starting to pop up on the radar. DTLR, a national urban sneaker powerhouse, took over an existing sneaker store anchoring a corner location along the Avenue of the States corridor. Around the corner from the corridor, a new hotel is under construction — the owner of which Walls says came up to introduce himself and say thanks for the work he was doing to revitalize the area. “Having that kind of attention and to see that other people are popping up businesses because of what you’re doing, it says a lot,” says Walls. “And it wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t have those partnerships with the Judys and Chucks and Tinas.” At the same time, more attention on Chester means even more than just the weight of history on Walls’ broad shoulders. “I can’t make a lot of mistakes when we’re building something like this,” says Walls. “We’ve got one shot at it. We’ve got one shot and twenty developers waiting on the sidelines who might say well they tried but now let’s just go in there and snatch up everything.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531348188435-WLD632W6GKYTE2L9VNGF/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+3.28.23+PM.png culture - BTS Just Took K-pop to No. 1 — and Not By Diluting Its Adventurous Music Clearly, some members of BTS were more interested in the puppies than others. In a fifth-floor meeting room at the sleek InterContinental hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the seven young men who make up this South Korean boy band — RM, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, Jin and Jungkook, each as handsome and stylishly dressed as the next — were gathered on a recent afternoon to shoot a video for Buzzfeed’s meant-to-go-viral “plays with puppies” series, in which an entertainer answers questions submitted by fans as he or she … well, you can put it together. RM, the group’s unofficial frontman, knelt eagerly to scoop up one of the fuzzy creatures, while J-Hope showed his excitement by singing the chorus from Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” albeit with a key lyrical adjustment: “Puppy, puppy, puppy / Oh!” Yet Suga, glued to his phone during a break near the end of a long day of interviews, appeared less smitten — at least until Buzzfeed’s cameras started rolling. Then he put down the phone and cranked up the enthusiasm required of an international pop group determined to break America. Fortunately for Suga and his bandmates, work like this is paying off. This week BTS’ latest album, “Love Yourself: Tear,” entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1 — a first for an act from the busy K-pop scene brought to the attention of many American listeners when Psy’s song “Gangnam Style” took off on YouTube in 2012. The group’s elaborately choreographed performance on this month’s Billboard Music Awards (where BTS won the prize for top social artist for the second year in a row) was among the show’s most discussed moments online. And tickets for the outfit’s fall tour — scheduled to stop for four sold-out concerts in September at Staples Center — are going for more than $1,000 each on the secondary market. Indeed, BTS has gotten so popular in the U.S. that journalists at the InterContinental were asked not to reveal their whereabouts on social media for fear that word might spread and lead fans to descend on the hotel. What’s remarkable about this crossover success is that it hasn’t come at a creative price; there’s no feeling of compromise to the vivid “Love Yourself: Tear,” BTS’ sixth full-length release since emerging in 2013 from the highly industrialized K-pop scene based in Seoul. Sung mostly in Korean, the album emphasizes the precise and adventurous production that K-pop listeners expect as it jumps from swinging R&B to surging club music to rowdy hip-hop to the dramatic rap-rock balladry of the disc’s first single, “Fake Love,” which as a non-English-language tune just followed “Despacito” into the upper reaches of the Hot 100. Curious fans — and with BTS, there’s really no other kind — will discover in “Love Yourself’s” liner notes that the group sought help from Stateside hitmakers such as Ali Tamposi, who’s written for Bieber and Cardi B, and the superstar DJ Steve Aoki. But as with “Despacito,” the embrace of the music in this country seems to say more about a broadening of American taste than it does about BTS’ willingness to dilute its message (even as the group doggedly courts an audience here). Seated around a large table after the puppies had been taken away, the members were quick to acknowledge the influence that American boy bands like the Backstreet Boys had on BTS’ catchy songs about romance and heartbreak. Now, though, they see themselves as “re-exporting” their distinct sound, as RM put it through an interpreter, “to the rest of the world where we had initially drawn much of our inspiration.” Asked if they ever felt pressured to sing in English, Suga said he’d tried it on a recent solo mixtape and found that it made a “better conduit” for certain “emotions or sensibilities.” Yet RM, who switches in conversation between Korean and English, said he suspects that most BTS fans “won’t like that much if we sing in other languages.” Korean lyrics, he added, are a core feature of the group’s music, which its ultra-devoted fans have in turn “made as part of their identity.” You get a sense from sitting in a room with BTS — not to mention its dozen or so handlers — of how carefully the band manages that connection with its base. As the members spoke with me, several people with cameras roved around us, apparently documenting the interview for potential content to serve up later; another woman seemed to be transcribing everything the group said, perhaps in case somebody said something worth tweeting to BTS’ 15 million followers. That digital engagement is necessary, of course, for an act that so far hasn’t scored much U.S. radio play. But it’s also in keeping with a super-strategic K-pop scene that overall can make the American music business look haphazard. When I asked whether the knowledge that BTS would be playing to a bigger audience this time had affected the design of the new album, the members nodded in seeming recognition of the idea that “Love Yourself: Tear” would introduce many listeners to the band. Still, “we want to show ourselves in increments,” Jungkook said through the interpreter. “There are a lot of things that we want to show people, and if you try to show everything about us in a single album, it’s a burden for us — and it’s a lot for people to handle and accept.” RM said he wanted the album to reflect “the current condition of us — how we feel right now — because, you know, things have really changed from 2013.” Does that seem like an eternity ago? Everyone answered yes at the same time, though Jin said he hadn’t forgotten anything from the band’s early days, when they lived together in one house — “one room, basically” — and ate the same food every day “because we didn’t have any money back then.” Things are definitely better now, they all agreed, even if more and more of their days are filled with encounters with people who want a piece of BTS. The endless promotion can be tiring, RM admitted. “But I think the fact that we are making our fans happy removes a lot of that fatigue for us.” The fans “made all this possible,” he went on. “When we forget that, it all ends.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531348298651-UL5X5IVNW51YYO1BPT73/Screen+Shot+2018-07-11+at+3.31.17+PM.png culture - The War Childhood Museum Shares Stories Of Kids Growing Up Under Seige WHITE BALLET SLIPPERS SYMBOLIZE CHILDHOOD FOR MELA SOFTIC. She grew up during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. Her memories of youth are those of war. “Dancing was something that helped me survive [the] war,” said Softic, who was 8 years old when the war broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 1992. The Bosnian war was one of several conflicts in the 1990s that shook the region during the breakup of Yugoslavia. During the siege, the Bosnian Serb army encircled the city, targeting civilians, and for years citizens of Sarajevo lived in fear. Thousands of children were killed and many more were robbed of a normal childhood. Many children, like Softic, spent their formative years in a state of fear and deprivation, dreaming of chocolate, fresh fruit, and other luxuries stolen by the circumstances, often cowering in cellars during shelling. The generation raised in the Bosnia war were forced to grow up prematurely. But this was not an anomaly. Today, this is a reality for children in conflict zones all over the world, and those who survive the violence often suffer from health and psychological problems long after the conflict ends. Children of conflict ACCORDING TO UNICEF, ONE IN NINE CHILDREN LIVE IN CONFLICT ZONES. Those under the age of five are twice as likely to die from preventable diseases. “No one thinks about what it is like to be a child during war [and] what it is like to grow up during war,” Softic said. In Sarajevo, a 29-year-old author is shedding new light on the world of children in conflict with a unique project. Jasminko Halilovic, who made Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2018, was just 4 years old when the war broke out. In an effort to create a memorial of his own experience, and those of other children affected by the siege, he decided to start collecting testimonies. The War Childhood Museum (WCM) in Sarajevo opened in January 2017. It was initially dedicated to telling the stories of children during the war in Bosnia. It is now in the process of expanding to tell the stories of children affected by war around the world, including those from more recent conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. The museum collects personal objects and oral testimonies in order to tell the story of wartime childhood. Softic’s pair of white ballet slippers is one of 4,000 items donated to the museum by Bosnians. The collection features a bulletproof vest, a half-finished letter, and pieces of a destroyed playground, among other sentimental artifacts. Although the WCM has only been in operation for a year, the museum is part of a larger project started by Halilovic. He contacted hundreds of people who were young during the Bosnian war and asked them to answer the question, “What was a war childhood for you?” via text message, in 160 characters or less. He collected more than 1,000 responses, which he compiled in the book “War Childhood: Sarajevo 1992–1995.” The book’s success inspired him to found the museum. “This museum, a least for me, is a fourth [quarter] of my life. It is the most important thing I ever worked on, and it will remain the most important thing I’ve done in my life,” said Halilovic. Global memory THE WCM HAS COLLABORATED WITH OVER 300 INDIVIDUALS to collect stories and mementos from the war in Bosnia. Each object tells a unique story about the children affected by violence. The museum plans to continue to collect the stories of those affected by the conflict, “We will continue collecting objects from those who were in Sarajevo during the armed conflict, however, we are collecting objects and stories from people from all around the country, no matter where in BiH they were,” said Almedina Lozic, the collection and content manager. The museum has a great significance to those who have contributed, but the intimacy of the experience is not lost on others. Sharing experiences ALTHOUGH BOSNIAN CHILDREN ARE CURRENTLY THE CENTRAL FOCUS OF THE MUSEUM IN SARAJEVO, Lozic says that “with time we will include more and more objects and stories from other countries.” Each new exhibition is set to feature a few personal objects and stories collected from children in different areas of armed conflict. In April, the exhibit will rotate the items on display and include one item from a Syrian child refugee in Lebanon. Four organizations, Basmeh & Zeitooneh, Sadalsuud Foundation, From Syria with Love, and Sawa Foundation, have partnered with the WCM, and together they will launch a traveling exhibition this year containing around 40 objects and stories. The exhibition will start in Sarajevo and travel across Europe, ending in Beirut, where the children and their families will get a chance to see their items and stories on display. The museum has already collected 80 objects. We hope that our exhibition … will contribute to understanding of what these refugees went through. One donated item is a drawing of an aircraft. A boy drew it when he left Syria at age 2. Although he does not remember drawing it, his family does, and often reminds him of his reasons for drawing it. He wanted to use the aircraft to fly over Syria and see what the country looks like. “We hope that our exhibition, when we tour it around European cities and countries … will contribute to understanding of what these refugees went through, what brings them there, why they are there, and how the mutual trust can be established based on understanding their experiences,” said Halilovic. The WCM staff plans to use the same model for an exhibition on children affected by conflict in the Ukraine. This will exhibition will start in 2019. The WCM aims to use the new exhibitions to build on its growing international recognition. On December 5, 2017, the museum was awarded the prestigious 2018 Council of Europe Museum Prize by the Culture Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). “Sometimes it’s difficult to use all the opportunities that we have because we have many invitations for exhibitions for different collaborations but we need to pick priorities,” said Halilovic. Students from the George Washington Museum Studies Department have been hired for the summer to work on a temporary exhibition, by the WCM in Washington D.C., dedicated to children across the world who lived through conflict or experienced it secondhand. THE WCM IS ALSO ESTABLISHING A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES to manage the educational projects and the exhibition in the United States. Alexandra Hartley, education materials developer at the WCM and a history teacher from the United States, has introduced a curriculum entitled “War Childhood” for primary school children in the school district where she teaches in Ithaca, New York. She uses material from the WCM, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and “Zlata’s Diary” – the account of the so-called “Anne Frank of Bosnia.” Through education, Halilovic hopes to raise awareness regarding issues that stem from childhood interrupted by conflict. In addition, the museum managers plan to develop curricula to educate students of all ages. Although the war in Bosnia ended in 1995, conflict continues to disrupt and dominate the course of children’s lives around the globe. For Softic, the WCM project has a compelling message for the world. “The collection in this museum is from Bosnia, but the museum does not only focus on Bosnia. It is focused on war childhood anywhere in the world,” she says. “The point of this museum is to just stop wars. See what you are doing to your kids. Just stop all wars.” Learn more at GOOD https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531415840999-TWPBT1LNF26HAX8FNRHJ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.13.33+AM.png culture - The Robot’s Hand? How Scientists Cracked the Code for Getting Humans to Appreciate Computer-Made Art “Empathy is the new black,” someone said to me recently, referring to the trend in recent years to blame many of humanity’s most pressing problems on the depletion of empathy in today’s tech-mediated culture. The phenomenon has reached the art world, too, perhaps most notably in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s decision to open the world’s first Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts with a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It makes sense given that empathy is an idea that first got its start in the study of art. Nineteenth-century theorists described empathy as the way our body mirrors movements in the external world. When the aesthetic philosopher Theodor Lipps watched a dance performance, he said he felt his body “striving and performing” with the dancers. Even with static works of art, observers “move in and with the forms” in such a way that triggers “muscular empathy,” wrote the German philosopher Robert Vischer, More recent studies have shown that works of art with implied gestures, such as Lucio Fontana‘s slashed canvases, increased activity in viewers’ motor and premotor cortices. “This ability to have the movements and experiences of the artists projected into our minds and bodies triggers an empathic response in the observer,” write the co-authors of a new paper in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, which looks at how our empathic responses to art are evolving in the age of artificial intelligence. The study, “Putting the art in artificial: Aesthetic responses to computer-generated art,” asks whether viewers consider art, once considered a uniquely human activity, to be more or less valuable when it’s made by machines. Previous research has found that observers tend to value the intentions of the artist more than a work’s subjective appearance. The qualities in a work most likely to be assessed are its uniqueness and whether it involved a high degree of physical contact with the artist. In keeping with these findings, the new study concluded that art generated by computers was ranked lower in aesthetic value than work made by people. But there’s also a surprising twist. Viewers tend to elevate machine-made art when that machine is a robot, particularly an anthropomorphic robot, suggesting that humanoid embodiment may be the key to embracing a human-like mind. For the study, the researchers borrowed artist Patrick Tresset’s robotic installation 5 Robots Named Paul, which he showed at the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels in 2015. The machines consist of webcams that take photos of sitters while a planar arm draws with a Biro pen. Human-like figures are mounted to desks, reminiscent of students in a figure-drawing class, and enact life-like movements. They seem to look at the sitter and scan their face as the arm follows along, though in reality, they are purely decorative: The drawing results from a single photo taken at the start of the session. The researchers tested three different conditions: Some participants were in the room as the robots drew, others were only shown the drawings and told that robots had created them, and others saw the drawings but received no information about how they were made. The participants were then asked to fill out a questionnaire about the drawings. The results found that those participants who saw the robot artists at work had more positive appraisals of the drawings. They appreciated them more than the drawings that were only said to be done by robots and more than those made by unknown artists. “This is the first study to demonstrate [that] the anthropomorphism of an agent impacts positively on aesthetic appraisal,” the authors write. “[I]ncreasing the anthropomorphic qualities of robotic and computational art will increase societal engagement and likely decrease hostility toward future manifestations of artistic AI.” Translation: Making a computer look more human will make people more receptive to its art. Paradoxically then, when it comes to the art of artificial intelligence, it may be the body that matters more than the brain. Learn more at Artnews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531415931170-PMRDT56ALZOP1PN8P6JS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.18.32+AM.png culture - Musicians, Athletes, and Activists are Gathering for a 10-Day Festival for Mental Health May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and celebrities, artists, athletes, and activists are coming together in L.A. for a major event in support of the cause. Launching with a rally on May 19, the 10-day We Rise event has some pretty A-list collaborators involved, and they’ll be working with activists and health and wellness providers on a series of panel conversations, frank discussions, film screenings, and opportunities to participate in activities and art. From the ground up, We Rise has been constructed to be an inclusive and safe place. Backed by the County of Los Angeles and state mental health authorities, it’s intended to create a more positive conversation around mental health. “This May, in honor of this important national month of awareness around mental health, we are demanding more from our government and from each other,” said Yosi Sergant, one of the event organizers and owner of the social justice-oriented marketing firm TaskForce. “At We Rise, we will be coming together as a community of artists, activists, and community members to create a healthier and more just society.” The base of operations for We Rise is an art space in Chinatown, which will be outfitted with original work by over 100 different artists, including Chelsea Wong, Guillermo Bert, and Shepard Fairey. Inside, there will be daily talks and events that tackle various issues under the mental health umbrella. Expert-guided sessions cover everything from acknowledging and de-stigmatizing mental health concerns, the community impacts of mass incarceration, displacement, and suicide, and even combating online trolls and bullies. Sunday’s Mind, Body, and Sports Field Day on the outside stage brings out most of the participating athletes, like Kobe Bryant, Jay Ajayi, gymnast Shawn Johnson, and even recent Olympic-medal-winning bobsledder Aja Evans, for a day of family-friendly games and play, and there are free yoga classes for adults and children. Young people are a special focus throughout We Rise, but particularly at the Teen Town Hall, which provides a space to openly discuss well being and identity. And in “Survival Guide to Adulting,” a workshop that even some of us post-teens might do well to attend, speakers will offer strategies for coping with stress, responsibility, relationships, and social media-induced FOMO. Creativity and fun are forms of mental health self-care too, so they’ve built in sessions for guided art-making, dance parties, poetry readings, and musical performances, which are open to all. Performers at the opening rally include Ty Dolla $ign, YG, Vic Mensa, and Common, and the Jabbawockeez dance troupe will lead a class on May 27. WE RISE runs May 19 to 28, with a full schedule of events available online. All events are located at 1726 N. Spring Street and are free to attend. Learn more at Los Angeles Magazine https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416008330-GWVV1A9TA2P1ZU8JS8PN/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.19.55+AM.png culture - Arts Industries Add $764 Billion Per Year to the US Economy, Says a Landmark New Study The arts contribute more than you might expect to the US economy, says a new joint report from the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts. The arts generate $763.6 billion per year, or 4.2 percent of the GDP, according to the study, which presents statistics gathered between 1998 and 2015. The US also exported $20 billion more in art than it imported, providing a positive trade balance. All told, the 4.9 million people employed in America’s creative industries earned $372 billion in total compensation for 2015. “The robust data present in the [report] show through hard evidence how and where arts and culture contribute value to the economies of communities throughout the nation,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu in a statement. “The data confirm that the arts play a meaningful role in our daily lives, including through the jobs we have, the products we purchase, and the experiences we share.” Adjusted for inflation, economic activity related to arts and culture increased 4.9 percent nationwide in 2015, and 2.6 percent on average between 2012 and 2015. Meanwhile, 45 states and the District of Columbia saw growth in the arts and cultural industries in 2015. Here are a few more compelling facts highlighted in the report: Washington and Utah have the country’s fastest-growing arts economies. Between 2012 and 2015, they both averaged above seven percent in their annual growth rates. Arts industries add four times as much money to the country’s economy than agriculture, and $200 billion more than transportation or warehousing. When it comes to building new arts facilities, Georgia is ahead of the curve, with a 37.1 percent average increase in cultural construction between 2012 and 2015. Bolstered by the Smithsonian and other federal museums and monuments, arts and culture make up 8.4 percent ($10.2 billion) of the GDP of Washington, DC—more than any individual state. Among the states, the arts account for the largest share of Washington’s economy: 7.9 percent, or $35.6 billion. On the strength of film and television production, California’s art economy brings in the most money among the states, with $174.6 billion, for an even seven percent overall. New York ranks second in both categories, with the arts bringing in $114.1 billion, or 7.8 percent of its economy. The state’s 462,584 arts workers earned a collective $46.7 billion in 2015. Delaware relies the least on the arts, which make up just 1.3 percent of the state’s economy, or $900 million. Museums added $5.3 billion to the US economy in 2015, while fine arts schools generated $3.4 billion. Independent artists, writers, and performers contributed $22 billion. Fine arts education services are on the rise, with a 2.4 percent increase in 2015, following 5.1 percent growth the previous year. Americans spent $1 billion more than projected on tickets for performing arts events in 2015, or $31.6 billion overall. Learn more at artnet news https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416089228-FBQETH66GBRB5LPBZ8TX/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.21.10+AM.png culture - Free to Express: Meet the Artists of Cuba In order to talk about social issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, or the lack of free speech in Cuba, one must find creative ways of doing so, or risk the chance of being labeled as counterrevolutionary. However, there are some artists who are willing to take this risk, such as creating a virtual museum dedicated to Cuba’s relationship with dissidence or directing plays that address civil rights. Conversely, there are some filmmakers who are simply working to preserve Cuba’s diverse racial history and oral tradition, while also paving the way for future filmmakers and storytellers. Meet four Cuban artists who are working to showcase different narratives within Cuba’s history: Adonis Milán, 24, is the theater director for Perséfone Theater in which he uses the stage to navigate the themes of womanhood, death, and physical and psychological maladies. Despite being censored and detained by Cuban officials for his involvement in the promotion of a more democratic Cuba, Milán uses the theater to navigate certain truths that are often silenced in Cuba. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, 30, visual artist and Yanelys Núñez Leyva, 28, journalist and art historian, are currently working together on a project titled, “The Museum of Cuban Dissidence,” which showcases exhibits and projects by other artist-activists both on the island and who have been exiled. The Museum finds its base virtually, allowing those around the world to participate and take note of Cuba’s long-standing history of political dissidents. Additionally, the pair are working with others on the island to create creative discourse on topics such as women’s and LGBTQ rights. Gloria Roland Casamayor, 64, is a filmmaker and documentarian. She is also the second Afro-Cuban woman to work with the Institute of Cuban Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). Her work tends to focus on memories, acknowledging Cuba’s Black history and Cuba’s relationship with other countries in the Caribbean, often preserving stories that are usually shared through the oral tradition. Learn more at Pulitzer Center https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416172449-1K981XV9WFSH9IDZLJC5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.22.37+AM.png culture - Who's in Charge of the Augmented City? I’m sitting at New York University (NYU), in a Brooklyn Tandon School of Engineering building with wires sprawling across my body while I stare at a 98-inch TV screen. Glasses with inward-facing cameras are tracking my pupils; plaster wrapped around my finger is measuring my perspiration; cheek pads are monitoring whether or not I’m smiling; another device looks at my heart-rate; and an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset—a contraption with wet squidgy nodes on the end of prongs, similar to a head massager—monitors my brain activity. All while my face is being filmed. The researchers want to quantifiably measure my response and stress levels to two slightly different virtual environments. On the screen I am looking at a basic scene created in Google SketchUp. Mock-ups of an existing NYU building are identical minus a couple of minor differences: one has wider windows and lighter wall colors. Within the two environments I have to navigate my way up a set of stairs onto a mezzanine level, open a door, switch on a thermostat, and return. Hardly thrilling (that’s the point), but Semiha Ergan, an assistant professor at NYU, is keen to see if the architectural theory behind such rudimentary design aspects is true and can quantitatively measure how much of a difference there is. Though the researchers couldn’t disclose the architecture firms actively interested in this research, I was told that a few well-known “three-letter” firms were keeping a close eye on things. As you might have guessed, Ergan’s hypothesis was right. In the supposedly less stressful environment that had wider windows, I perspired less, my heart-rate was lower, and my facial expressions along with the EEG monitoring also indicated lower stress levels. The ramifications of this research pertain not only to virtual reality (VR) but augmented reality (AR) services, in which computer-generated visuals are superimposed on a tech user's view of the real world. Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416276880-VEEZFMEU43DSSKM60LPW/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.24.17+AM.png culture - Do You Understand Crypto? CityLab tests your grasp of our virtual currency-filled future. Last week, Wired reported that the infrastructure security firm Radifirm had identified the world’s first known “crypto-jacking” of an industrial control system: A hacker had evaded security scanners to install malware on a European water utility company’s network. For months, the malware had been running quietly in the background, allowing the hacker to harvest the digital currency Monero. Using small amounts of otherwise wasted processing power isn’t fundamentally destructive, but “it still wears on and degrades processors over time,” writes Wired’s Lily Hay Newman. When a hacker crypto-jacks a cellphone, that’s inconvenient for an individual. But when the processor they’re degrading runs a water system or power grid, that might be catastrophic. Radifirm caught the breach well before a problem arose, but attacks like this might increase in frequency. Demand for cryptocurrency continues to grow, and values, while volatile, are high. So, how worried should we be about this? Here’s a (really) quick primer on what exactly we’re talking about. As financial advisers are happy to tell you, cryptocurrency is, essentially, nothingness: an entire financial system based on what people are willing to pay for pretend digital “coins.” And blockchain (the underlying technology that supports bitcoin, and many other cryptocurrencies) is very nearly the most boring thing in the world: a decentralized, online database that’s ostensibly safer and less corruptible than others. Nevertheless, both terms have recently been applied to almost every conceivable product, industry, or human endeavor in an effort to attract funders, grab media attention, or just jazz them up. If you slap “The Blockchain” on your news startup, maybe you can resuscitate local news. Post all your content on the new blockchain-secured website Po.et and it’ll never be taken down by a disgruntled publisher-billionaire. Affix “crypto” on municipal bonds and suddenly everyone wants to support affordable housing. What’s next, a Japanese pop band dressed up as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple called “Virtual Currency Girls”? (Oh, word, they exist. Their first single is called “The Moon, Virtual Currencies, and Me.” It’s … sort of good!) Read more at Citylab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531858310338-2A0ILUXL7LNE3Q4BYEES/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+1.11.30+PM.png culture - Who Said Art Was Fun? This Year’s Liverpool Biennial Is a Tearjerking Journey Through Europe’s Dark, Violent Past https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532621596906-XIKEI4VK5XZVS6ZQQ25R/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.12.56+AM.png culture - Japanese Art Collective TeamLab Is Bringing Its High-Tech Immersive Art Experiences to New York https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/5b467433575d1f24585df1de/5b59f3191ae6cf39d3a18fc7/1724964756251/ culture - Japanese Art Collective TeamLab Is Bringing Its High-Tech Immersive Art Experiences to New York https://civicas.net/media-1 daily 0.75 2018-07-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531869651785-CULMVL7CBXYK40PTLLJ4/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.20.27+PM.png media - Map: LA’s Strange and Wonderful Lost Amusement Parks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531869651785-CULMVL7CBXYK40PTLLJ4/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.20.27+PM.png media - Map: LA’s Strange and Wonderful Lost Amusement Parks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531869536391-FN7ZEI0GXUKL3TNANVY8/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.18.34+PM.png media - Nextdoor Is Betting a Social Network Can Still Be a Platform for Politics https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531458011290-42CWHPFQV5QGRZ6I2CJG/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+9.59.55+PM.png media - How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley Into a Free-Speech Circus One afternoon last fall, I sat in the Free Speech Movement Café, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, drinking a fair-trade, shade-grown coffee. Students at nearby tables chatted in Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and English; next to me, a student alternated between reading a battered copy of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Camus, and checking Facebook on her phone. “This café,” a placard read, “is an educational reminder for the community that the campus freedoms we take for granted did not always exist, and, in the democratic tradition, had to be fought for.” In the fall of 1964, left-wing students at U.C. Berkeley demanded the right to hand out antiwar literature on Sproul Plaza, the red brick agora at the center of the campus. The administration refused, citing rules against the use of school property for external organizing. The students’ struggle, which became known as the Free Speech Movement, consumed the university’s attention for much of the academic year, and made minor national celebrities of the movement’s undergraduate leaders—especially Mario Savio, who was rakish enough to be a countercultural icon and articulate enough to be interviewed on television. Joan Baez went to Berkeley to show support for the students, singing “We Shall Overcome” from the steps of Sproul Hall. In the end, the students won, and some of them went on to join the next generation of professors and university administrators. “Freedom of speech,” Mario Savio once said, “is the thing that marks us as just below the angels.” Fifty-three years later, the mood on campus was distinctly less celestial. Like the agitation throughout the country, the agitation at Berkeley had many long-roiling causes, but its proximate cause was easy to identify: a right-wing professional irritant named Milo Yiannopoulos. A former Breitbart editor and a self-proclaimed “Internet supervillain,” he was known less for his arguments than for his combative one-liners and protean, peroxide-blond hair. Another word for “Internet supervillain” is “troll,” and, whenever too many news cycles passed without any mention of him, Yiannopoulos showed up somewhere unexpected, such as the White House press briefing room or a left-leaning college campus, hoping to provoke a reaction. In the process, he convinced his supporters that he should be a poster child for campus free speech, a principle that is universally lauded in theory but vexingly thorny in practice. In the 2017-18 academic year, Politico reported, an unusually large number of universities struggled “to balance their commitment to free speech—which has been challenged by alt-right supporters of President Donald Trump—with campus safety.” One expert on campus life called this “the No. 1 topic of the year.” Many college administrators were forced to devote their scarce time and money to securing on-campus venues for pugnacious right-wing speakers such as Ann Coulter and David Horowitz; arch-conservative policy entrepreneurs such as Heather Mac Donald and Charles Murray; and avowed racists such as Richard Spencer. These are names that a lot of Americans would prefer to forget. All of these figures hold views that are divisive, or worse. Yet this is precisely what makes them useful test cases. The Supreme Court’s most important First Amendment opinions often concern the lowliest forms of human expression: a burning cross, a homophobic slur, a “bong hits 4 jesus” banner. Yiannopoulos, who claims to disdain identity politics but rarely forgoes an opportunity to call attention to his sexual orientation, spent much of 2016 and the early part of 2017 on what he called the Dangerous Faggot Tour, visiting dozens of colleges across the country. Each stop was part Trump rally, part standup show, part PowerPoint deck, and part bigoted rant. At U.C. Santa Barbara, a group of young men wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats carried Yiannopoulos into the venue on a litter; he then delivered, in a genteel Oxbridge accent, a lecture called “Feminism Is Cancer.” At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he projected a photo of a transgender student, subjecting her to public mockery. “It’s just a man in a dress, isn’t it?” he said. The last stop on his tour, on February 1, 2017, was U.C. Berkeley, the nation’s preëminent public university, in one of its most proudly left-leaning cities. A week before Yiannopoulos’s arrival, the U.C. system had reaffirmed its promise to protect undocumented students from arrest and deportation. In response, Yiannopoulos called for Berkeley’s administrators to be criminally prosecuted. There were rumors that he planned to name undocumented students from the stage, alerting Immigration and Customs Enforcement to their presence. There was little that administrators could do. At a public institution, cancelling a speech because of what the speaker might say is called prior restraint, and the courts have generally deemed it unconstitutional. On the afternoon of the event, fifteen hundred protesters amassed on Sproul Plaza. Some called themselves Antifa, for “anti-Fascist,” a loose collective of far-left vigilantes who draw inspiration from the European anarchist tradition. A few protesters, wearing black clothing and bandannas or masks over their faces, hurled metal police barricades through a plate-glass window of Berkeley’s student center; someone set fire to a lighting rig, and flames leaped several stories into the air. A Berkeley student, wearing a red hat that said “Make Bitcoin Great Again,” was interviewed by a local news crew as the mayhem escalated behind her. “I’m looking to just make a statement by being here, and I think the protesters are doing the same,” she said. “And props to them, for the ones who are doing it nonviolently.” Moments later, a masked protester ran up and pepper-sprayed her in the face. Police evacuated Yiannopoulos from campus before he could speak. The next morning, the riot was the lead story on “Fox & Friends.” The show’s most prominent fan, Donald Trump, who had been President for less than two weeks, tweeted, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - no federal funds?” The whole spectacle was such a boon to Yiannopoulos’s brand that some left-wing conspiracy theorists wondered whether he had hired the masked protesters himself. Spring came, and then summer. The annual Berkeley Kite Festival took place at the marina. Biologists from Berkeley published a paper in Science explaining how chickens grow feathers. Yiannopoulos wrote a book that included some of the zingers he’d trotted out at his college talks, and it reached No. 2 on the Times nonfiction best-seller list. Carol Christ, a scholar of Victorian literature and a former president of Smith College, took office as Berkeley’s new chancellor. She had been a Berkeley professor for many years, beginning in 1970—close enough to the Free Speech Movement to be touched by its spirit. A few days into the fall semester, she announced that a student group had invited Yiannopoulos back to Berkeley, and that she intended to let him speak. Citing the Bill of Rights and John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” she declared that her first academic year as chancellor would be “a free speech year.” “We would be providing students with a less valuable education,” Christ wrote, “if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous.” The homage was surely unintentional, but “Dangerous” happened to be the title of Yiannopoulos’s book. Whether a sophist like Milo Yiannopoulos may speak at a public university like Berkeley is less a question of what the law is than of what the law should be. The Supreme Court has been consistent, during the past half century or so, in its broad interpretation of the First Amendment. “Speech can’t be prevented simply because it’s offensive, even if it’s very deeply offensive,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law and the co-author of a book called “Free Speech on Campus,” told me one morning in his office. He grimaced sympathetically as he talked, like a doctor delivering bad news. “I would argue that it’s generally a good idea to protect speech we don’t like, even when we’re not legally obligated to do so, but in this case we are.” Voltaire, anti-Semite and sage of the Enlightenment, is credited with the aphorism “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Chemerinsky, arguably the foremost First Amendment scholar in the country, believes, in the Voltairean tradition, that free speech is the bedrock of a free society. I asked him about the Antifa activists who had vowed to shut down Yiannopoulos’s events by any means necessary. “Violence is never protected by the Constitution,” he said. “And preventing the speech of others, even by using one’s own speech, is called the heckler’s veto, and it is not protected, either.” On talk radio and social media, many free-speech advocates lack Chemerinsky’s judiciousness. Some answer every challenge with a recitation of the First Amendment, as if its forty-five words were a magic spell that could settle any debate. Free-speech skeptics on the left can be equally predisposed to bad-faith arguments—misreading or ignoring the Constitution, dismissing the concept of free speech as inherently racist, or simply bypassing discourse and setting public property on fire. There are better arguments. “No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,” john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me. “What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.” Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. “I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,” he said. “My family was not pleased with me, but I said, ‘Look, they have First Amendment rights, too.’ So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?” Yiannopoulos and many of his defenders like to call themselves free-speech absolutists, but this is hyperbole. No one actually believes that all forms of expression are protected by the First Amendment. False advertising, child pornography, blackmail—all are speech, all are illegal. You’re not allowed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, make a “true threat,” or incite imminent violence. These are all exceptions to the First Amendment that the Supreme Court has made—made up, really—over time. The boundaries can and do shift. In 1940, a New Hampshire man was jailed for calling a city marshal “a damned Fascist.” The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, ruling that the words were not protected by the First Amendment, because they were “fighting words,” which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Are some of Yiannopoulos’s antics—say, his attempts to intimidate undocumented and transgender students—closer to fighting words than to intellectual discourse? Maybe. But the fighting-words doctrine has fallen out of favor with the courts. In 2006, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed a soldier’s funeral, carrying signs that read “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “You’re going to Hell.” Even factoring in almost seven decades of epithet inflation, this would seem more injurious than “damned Fascist.” And yet the Supreme Court ruled that the signs were protected by the First Amendment. In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. “These days, we’d say, ‘That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,’ ” powell said. “But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was ‘Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.’ ” He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. “The knee-jerk response is ‘Nothing we can do, it’s speech.’ ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ ‘What harm? It’s just words.’ That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.” In the media, and on his Facebook and Instagram feeds, Yiannopoulos tirelessly promoted his return to Berkeley. Instead of a mere lecture, he envisioned “a huge, multi-day event” called Milo’s Free Speech Week. A video had recently come to light in which he’d made some deeply ill-advised comments about pederasty. Afterward, he’d been widely condemned on both the left and the right. He seemed to hope that his Berkeley appearance would restore him to mainstream relevance, and perhaps marketability. He posted a schedule, at FreeSpeechWeek.com, that culminated in the presentation of the first annual Mario Savio Award for Free Speech. (Savio died in 1996; his son Daniel told the Guardian that Yiannopoulos’s appropriation of his father’s legacy was “some kind of sick joke.”) When Yiannopoulos spoke privately to his influential friends on the far right, he often said, “This will be our Woodstock.” He released a list of more than twenty speakers, which included many of the usual free-speech warriors and also some surprising names, such as the secretive military-security magnate Erik Prince. In addition to Yiannopoulos, the four headliners would be Ann Coulter; Pamela Geller, a virulently Islamophobic blogger from Long Island; Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist and vigilante journalist; and Steve Bannon, newly fired from his job as Trump’s chief strategist. To build anticipation, Yiannopoulos’s team made promotional videos about each headliner, in the style of an action-movie trailer. “Bannon Infiltrates Berkeley,” less than thirty seconds long, has been viewed more than thirty thousand times. Mindful of the potential for violence, some students requested a robust police presence; others suggested that more police on campus would make them feel less safe, not more; still others demanded that the university cancel Free Speech Week. More than a hundred and fifty Berkeley faculty members and graduate students signed an open letter calling for a campus-wide boycott. Christ told me that she never considered cancelling the event. “The reputational cost would simply be too high,” she said. Reputational cost is impossible to quantify, but the literal cost to U.C. Berkeley, in security fees alone, was likely to exceed a million dollars. The university had a budget deficit of more than a hundred million dollars, with less funding coming from the state in recent years. “Would I rather devote our precious resources to more class sections, overdue building repairs, or many other things we badly need?” Christ continued. “Absolutely. But we have to make this work.” Others on campus speculated that Yiannopoulos’s real goal was to force a government-subsidized institution to expend as many resources as possible. On FreeSpeechWeek.com, there were T-shirts for sale reading “Defund Berkeley.” Traditionally, outside speakers don’t have unilateral power to schedule their own events on college campuses—like vampires, they have to be invited in—and Yiannopoulos was the guest of a conservative student organization called the Berkeley Patriot. “We don’t want to seem like we support someone like Milo, because we don’t,” Pranav Jandhyala, one of the Patriot students, told the DailyCal, the campus newspaper. “We’re simply inviting him because free speech is protected.” As the ostensible organizers of the event, the students had to sign contracts and waivers, assuming significant legal risk. At the time, the Berkeley Patriot had existed for only a few months. It had between five and twenty active members, depending on the definition of “active.” For a while, the administration and the Patriot students worked well together. “We’re treating them the way we’d treat any other students who are taking on something difficult and need our support,” Dan Mogulof, the assistant vice-chancellor for public affairs, told me. “We want to be sure that they don’t feel unsafe or marginalized.” Then things began to fall apart. The university set several deadlines, and, amid negotiations over contracts, the Patriot students missed them all. It also became clear that Yiannopoulos’s lineup was not a list of confirmed speakers but a wish list. “Contrary to news reports, I have not been contacted about participating in Free Speech Week,” Heather Mac Donald tweeted. Erik Prince told The Atlantic that his presence on the list was “a typo.” Bannon said nothing publicly, but several people told me that he was scheduled to be in China that week. “I would never under any circumstances appear at an event that included Milo Yiannopoulos,” Charles Murray told The Chronicle of Higher Education. Asked why, Murray responded, “Because he is a despicable asshole.” Carol Christ told me, “The metaphor I’ve been thinking about a lot is that of an object and its shadow. At first, I was imagining a conventional lecture: the lecture is the object; the digital recording is its shadow.” We were sitting in her office, which she hadn’t had time to finish unpacking. Several copies of the Norton Critical Edition of “The Mill on the Floss,” which she had edited, remained in a cardboard box on the floor. “By contrast,” she continued, “when I consider Milo’s—I’ll use the word ‘event,’ although I’m not sure that that’s exactly the right word—it’s becoming clearer that he’s actually trying to plant a narrative, a trail of impressions and images, that lives primarily in the digital world, and that we, this physical campus, are merely the shadow.” Yiannopoulos is not the only orator who has figured out that a speaking gig at a public university, especially in the face of fierce ideological opposition, is an easy way to attract an audience. “My college tour began after the victory by Donald Trump,” Richard Spencer, a proponent of “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” said in a recent YouTube video. “I loved it. I thought it was a great success, and so did most everyone else.” Such speakers often portray themselves as soldiers for free speech, but more often they use the First Amendment as a convenient shield. One fall afternoon at Berkeley, outside the Free Speech Movement Café, several undergraduates gathered in a semicircle around an oversized poster, Sharpies in hand, doing what their liberal-arts curriculum had trained them to do: dissecting a text. “This is so full of fallacies, I just assumed it was by a student,” one of them said. In fact, it was a transcription of a lecture that the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro had delivered on campus the previous week. A former Breitbart editor, he now runs a site called the Daily Wire and hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the most popular right-wing podcast in the country. A first-year student with pink highlights in her hair pointed to one sentence: “The Constitution was not written by a bunch of people who speak Korean.” It was one step in Shapiro’s argument that there was no systemic racism in the United States. “As an Asian-American, I feel personally attacked,” she said, adding, “I’m, like, half joking.” Another sentence on the poster read, “Income inequality is not the big problem; nobody rich is making you poor.” Above the latter clause, a student had written, in blue, “False premise, no one suggests that.” Another student wrote, in red, “Read Marx plz.” Shapiro tries to appeal to both the pro-Trump and the anti-Trump factions of the Republican base, spitting out indignant syllogisms in a rapid nasal delivery that sounds like a podcast played at double speed. He had reserved a lecture hall on Sproul Plaza, and a thousand protesters showed up outside the venue. Compared with Yiannopoulos’s appearance, there were far more police, and they were far more aggressive. They arrested nine protesters and confiscated a few sticks and other potential weapons. There was no violence—at least, not of the physical variety. “Speech is violent, we will not be silent!” a group of students, standing outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, chanted. Later, I asked Viana Roland, a political-science student who had joined the chant, what she’d meant. Roland is from Santa Maria, a farm town several hours south of Berkeley. “Folks in my family pick strawberries, and some of them are undocumented,” she said. “Shapiro says that systemic racism is a myth. That is an apologetics for white supremacy, an ideology with a long legacy of violence.” Because she was an Afro-Latina, she said, “that violence might be an abstraction to some people, but it’s not abstract to me.” I asked john powell what he thought about the rhetorical tactic of conflating speech with bodily harm. “Consider the classic liberal justification for free speech,” he said. “ ‘Your right to throw punches ends at the tip of my nose.’ This is taken to mean that speech can never cause any kind of injury. But we have learned a lot about the brain that John Stuart Mill didn’t know. So these students are asking, ‘Given what we now know about stereotype threat and trauma and P.T.S.D., where is the tip of our nose, exactly?’ ” Adam Jadhav, a Ph.D. student in Berkeley’s geography department, has little patience for the classic liberal approach. While lecturing in a course called Global Environmental Politics, he projected a slide arguing that Yiannopoulos’s event was “not about robust exchange of ideas” but “about a shadowy political element weaponizing a narrow interpretation of the First Amendment.” A conservative student took a photo, in which Jadhav is clearly identifiable; someone sent it to Yiannopoulos, who shared it on Instagram. “Idiots in the comments were calling me a fat slob because I didn’t tuck in my shirt,” Jadhav told me at a taquería a couple of blocks from campus. “I was, like, dude, come on, it’s a kurta.” Jadhav has thick-framed glasses, a small hoop earring, and a tattoo of a parrot on his forearm. The parrot, in a speech bubble, quotes Marx: “The point, however, is to change it!” “It” refers to the world. Marx was expressing his exasperation with armchair philosophers who are all talk and no action. “I consider myself an activist, not just an academic,” Jadhav continued, ordering a beer. “I align myself with Antifa, although that term is sometimes misunderstood. I’m not Black Bloc”—the masked, black-clad contingent that uses violence. “Most of us, percentage-wise, are not Black Bloc. I do, however, think it’s important to stand up against hypernationalism and Fascism in all its forms. That might entail breaking unjust laws, but that’s how progress has always been made.” After Jadhav’s picture circulated online, Christ wrote him a warm e-mail expressing her sympathy. He thanked her, but urged her to “control the narrative” when it came to Yiannopoulos. “What I meant was: Let’s not get played,” Jadhav said. “He’s coming here to make people afraid, and to milk us for attention.” There were real victims of government overreach—dozens of protesters rounded up in mass arrests at Trump’s Inauguration; Desiree Fairooz, an activist who was arrested for laughing during the confirmation hearing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—but Yiannopoulos, who has never been jailed or injured at his speeches, wasn’t one of them. Recently, on Fox News, Ben Shapiro said, “Everything has been deemed hate speech on campus. . . . There is a big part of the left—and it’s growing—that says that it is incumbent to protect the campus from ideas that are dissenting.” This premise has become commonplace, even among liberals, but the evidence is mixed. One study, from 2015, did find that forty per cent of millennials, a greater proportion than in any other age group, would want the government to be able to censor speech that is “offensive to minority groups.” But another study, conducted the following year, found that only twenty-two per cent of college students wanted universities to ban offensive speech—a lower proportion than in the rest of the American adult population. In March, a political scientist named Jeffrey Sachs analyzed the most recent data, broken down by age. In conclusion, he tweeted, “There is no campus free speech crisis, the kids are all right, those that say otherwise have lost all perspective, and the real crisis may be elsewhere.” It was a bright Friday morning, and Dan Mogulof, the Berkeley public-affairs administrator, was speed-walking to California Hall, a Beaux-Arts building where the chancellor and other top administrators have their offices. In theory, Free Speech Week was to begin in forty-eight hours. But, Mogulof had told me, “No speakers have been confirmed, no venues have been confirmed, no one on Milo’s team will answer simple questions.” Margo Bennett, the chief of campus police, said that “pretty much everything we know about Milo’s plans, at this point, we’re getting from his Instagram.” At the entrance to California Hall, Mogulof took a call on his cell phone. His eyebrows shot up, and he pumped his fist like a golfer sinking a long putt. Then he hung up and paced the corridors, popping in through various doors and interrupting meetings. “Sorry, friends, but it’s rare that I get to bring good news,” he said to a roomful of deans and assistant chancellors. “I’m just now—as in, right now—learning that a Berkeley Patriot student is telling local media that the event is off.” College administrators across the country were watching Free Speech Week closely. Richard Spencer was scheduled to speak soon at the University of Florida, and Charles Murray had been invited to the University of Colorado in Boulder. Officials from both schools were embedded with Berkeley’s administrators, Mogulof said, “to observe—see what works, see what doesn’t—and apply those lessons when it’s their turn in the hot seat.” Mogulof hurried to Sproul Plaza, where he had called a press conference for print and TV reporters, both local and national. “I just texted someone from the Patriot,” one reporter said to another. “I asked if Free Speech Week was cancelled, and the response was ‘LOL, unclear.’ So that’s my headline, I guess: ‘LOL, Unclear.’ ” As Mogulof spoke to the reporters, an undergraduate sociology student walked by, holding an iced coffee and a Rice Krispies Treats wrapper. She shouted a question at Mogulof: “Students have a right to go to their classes and feel safe in their classrooms, and you’re ready to compromise that for, like, the First Amendment that you’re trying to uplift?” “Your concerns are right on the money,” Mogulof said. The student was not satisfied. She continued to ask questions, using her phone to film the interaction. As she talked, a few of the TV cameras swung toward her. “Please do not take video of me!” she said, holding up her phone like a talisman. “Um, it’s a press conference,” one of the camera operators said. A newspaper reporter said, “How’s that for free speech?” That night, I called Yiannopoulos and asked him where he was. “I’ve landed in San Francisco, but my specific location is top secret, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m not even telling dear friends, much less the press. For security reasons. I’m sure you understand.” It took me twenty minutes to discover his secret location, and another forty-five minutes to get there by bart. It was a chain hotel situated between a strip mall and an eight-lane highway, in the commuter suburb of Walnut Creek. I found Yiannopoulos and his entourage in a “Grill & Lounge” area decorated in at least five clashing shades of taupe. Yiannopoulos greeted me with a kiss on the cheek, as though he had no memory of our earlier conversation. “Normally, we stay at places that are far, far posher than this,” he said. “If you follow my Instagram, you know that already. But I’m afraid this trip had to be thrown together at the last minute. For security reasons, you understand.” Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon were no-shows. Joining Yiannopoulos were a few of his employees and the two remaining headliners, Pamela Geller and Mike Cernovich. “I’ll do anything for Milo,” Geller said, sipping a cocktail. “He and I are the same piece of kishke, as my grandmother used to say.” Her persona is reminiscent of late-career Joan Rivers, but with more splenetic bigotry and fewer punch lines. “If Milo doesn’t have freedom of speech, nobody does,” she went on. “Besides, his company’s publishing my next book, so it’s good cross-promotion.” “Milo, what’s the deal tomorrow, man?” Cernovich said. “Are we speaking on campus? Off campus? What the fuck is going on?” “O.K., so this hasn’t been announced yet, but we’re giving a big press conference on Treasure Island,” Yiannopoulos said. “I’m going to make my entrance by speedboat, with a camera trailing me on a drone, and we’re going to be live-streaming it all on Facebook.” “I don’t do boats,” Geller said. “I projectile-vomit. But I love it for you, Milo, it’s a fabulous idea. I predict two hundred and fifty thousand viewers watching that live stream, at least.” “I’ll be wearing this gorgeous Balmain overcoat—I’ll show you—with this huge fur collar,” Yiannopoulos said. Geller and Cernovich changed the subject to Internet censorship. “They kicked me off Google AdSense,” Geller said. “I was making six figures a year from that. You can’t even share my links on Pinterest now! I’m ‘inappropriate content.’ ” Yiannopoulos looked bored. “You guys are so selfish,” he said. “We used to be talking about me.” He turned to his stylist, a glassy-eyed, wisp-thin man, and whispered, “Go get the coat.” They continued hashing out plans. “So we’ll walk in with you, through the streets of downtown Berkeley,” Cernovich said. “If there’s a screaming Antifa crowd, and if I maybe have to street-fight my way in and break a few noses in self-defense, that’s all good optics for me.” “Maybe we should line up on the Sproul steps,” Yiannopoulos said, “surrounded by Berkeley students wearing ‘Defund Berkeley’ T-shirts.” “Why don’t we march in with our arms linked together, like the Martin Luther King people, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’?” Cernovich said. “We’ll do our thing, and then at some point the protests will turn violent,” Yiannopoulos said. “That will become the focus, and then we can just get ourselves out of there.” He reclined in his chair and smiled. “It’s all coming together,” he said. The stylist came back with the coat, and Yiannopoulos squealed. “Pamela, is this coat to die for or what?” he said. “Oh, my God, Milo, I’m dying,” Geller said. “It’s sick.” He put the coat on and turned around, again and again, examining his reflection in the darkened glass of a window. “It’s fabulous,” Geller said. “It’s sick. I hate you.” There was no speedboat, no drone footage, no press conference on Treasure Island. Yiannopoulos, live-streaming on Facebook from his hotel room, delivered what he called a press conference, although the only questions came from online commenters. He invited Christ “to participate in a debate with me.” Later, when I asked her whether she would consider accepting his offer, she laughed. The next day, police escorted Yiannopoulos, Geller, and Cernovich onto Sproul Plaza through a back entrance. The plaza was ringed by police in riot gear; helicopters thumped overhead; snipers were visible on the rooftops. A crowd of supporters and protesters gathered outside the barricades, waiting to be let in. Yiannopoulos was not allowed onto the Sproul Hall steps. Instead, he stood on a concrete landing nearby, facing about thirty people. “I am here, in the name of Mario Savio, to make you stop!” one protester shouted. Yiannopoulos addressed his audience. “I invite you to join me for a moment, on your knees, to pray,” he said. “Pray for each other, for the fortitude and strength to carry on, to fight for free speech in the face of overwhelming odds.” He knelt and clasped his hands. Few joined him. Geller tried to lead the crowd in a rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” but, beyond those three words, nobody could remember the rest of the song. After about fifteen minutes, Yiannopoulos took a couple of selfies and left. No arrests were made, and no violence was reported. “I don’t even know if this is gonna make it to air tonight,” a local TV reporter said. As his caravan left town, Yiannopoulos live-streamed from the back seat of an S.U.V. “We don’t care if the police are throttling access to make sure there’s only thirty people there,” Yiannopoulos said. “None of that stuff is gonna deter us, because we don’t crave acceptance and publicity the way liberals do. We just want to be left alone.” I watched the stream with Mogulof, who was eating a York Peppermint Patty. “So I guess that was the most expensive photo op in Berkeley’s history, huh?” he said. The day after his fifteen-minute Free Speech Week, Yiannopoulos left for Hawaii, and Berkeley tried, warily, to return to normal. In a classroom at the law school, john powell was teaching a seminar on civil rights. One student asked whether something like the intentional infliction of emotional distress, a concept from tort law, might be extended to free-speech cases. “It’s an interesting question,” powell said. “Why do we think, for example, that burning a cross is injurious? It’s just a symbol. And yet even Clarence Thomas, who is rarely sympathetic to such arguments, recognizes that the symbol itself is emotionally injurious.” They discussed Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case upholding a Louisiana law that segregated railcars by race. “The petitioner argued that segregation ‘stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,’ ” powell said. “But the Court rejected that and said, in effect, ‘If you feel stigmatized, it’s just in your mind.’ ” That changed in 1954, when the Court issued its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. “They finally found that segregation was, in fact, inherently harmful,” powell said. “And what was the harm? The Court was very explicit: it’s psychological harm.” He paused, arching an eyebrow slightly. “This means that there is precedent for weighing psychological injury as a real concern.” Later that fall, Judith Butler, the cultural theorist and Berkeley professor, spoke at a forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic Senate. “If free speech does take precedence over every other constitutional principle and every other community principle, then perhaps we should no longer claim to be weighing or balancing competing principles or values,” Butler said. “We should perhaps frankly admit that we have agreed in advance to have our community sundered, racial and sexual minorities demeaned, the dignity of trans people denied, that we are, in effect, willing to be wrecked by this principle of free speech.” Butler’s partner, the political philosopher and Berkeley professor Wendy Brown, was teaching a course called Introduction to Political Theory. “It was an amazing experience to be discussing Mill while all this stuff was blowing up around us,” she said. “It’s one thing for a student to feel that, through the free exchange of ideas, ‘the truth will out.’ It’s another thing to defend that position while Milo is staging his political theatre outside your window.” Shortly before winter break, Carol Christ recorded a YouTube video. “In many ways, it was a classic Berkeley semester,” she said, “as we dealt with complex, controversial issues that played out across the campus and the country.” A Berkeley student recorded a parody, holding a mug of tea and wearing a Carol Christ costume consisting of a gray wig and a sweater cape. In a chipper voice, she spoke of “a classic Berkeley semester” in which “Nazis frolicked across the campus”—a result, the Christ impersonator said, “of my neoliberal, Fascist-aligned white feminism.” She topped off her tea with a generous pour of whiskey. Some speakers began to lose their taste for on-campus provocation. In March, Richard Spencer appeared at Michigan State University. Two dozen protesters and counterprotesters were arrested outside the venue—the Pavilion for Agriculture and Livestock Education—and Spencer ended up speaking to a near-empty hall. Afterward, he posted a video. “I really hate to say this, and I definitely hesitate to say this,” he said, “but Antifa is winning.” The last time I checked, the only content on FreeSpeechWeek.com was a photo of Yiannopoulos and the words “milo will return to berkeley in spring 2018.” I texted Yiannopoulos, who had recently been shilling dietary supplements from the InfoWars studio, in Texas, to ask whether this was true. “Yes I am going back to Berkeley,” he responded. “Working it out with the students now.” No one at U.C. Berkeley had heard about any such plans. Still, conservative speech at Berkeley continued in Yiannopoulos’s absence. In April, Charlie Kirk, the executive director of the national conservative student group Turning Point U.S.A. and a friend of Donald Trump, Jr., announced that he would give a talk at Berkeley. He tweeted: My message will be quite clear: Open borders are inhumane We must build a militarized wall There are only 2 genders Berkeley should be defunded. Speaking alongside Kirk was Turning Point’s communications director, Candace Owens, a vitriolic young conservative with a knack for creating viral moments. Before she went by her own name, Owens was a YouTuber who called herself Red Pill Black, a reference to the fact that she was an African-American who had “escaped the Democrat plantation.” Near the beginning of the talk, two hecklers stood up, and one of them shouted, “These aren’t ideas, this is Fascism.” They were ejected, and the audience cheered. “Antifa, if you really take a look at their platform . . . they seem to be the ones that are the white supremacists,” Owens said. “They feel like their ideas are so supreme to everybody else’s that they have the right to boycott, to be violent.” Four days after the panel, Kanye West tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” followed by several tweets in which he expressed his “love” for Donald Trump. Despite widespread bewilderment and outrage, West refused to back down, insisting that his views were not about politics per se but about the higher principle of untrammelled expression. “Love who you want to love,” West tweeted. “That’s free thought.” In late May, Congress held a hearing on “Challenges to the Freedom of Speech on College Campuses.” One of the witnesses was Bret Weinstein, a biologist who, until recently, taught at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. Last year, after he wrote a controversial e-mail, students protested and demanded that he be fired. Amid growing unrest on campus, a group of students posted a photo of themselves wielding baseball bats. Weinstein sued the college, alleging that it had failed to protect him from “threats of physical violence,” and left his teaching job. The college admitted no wrongdoing, but settled for half a million dollars. At the congressional hearing, Weinstein was introduced with the title Professor-in-Exile. “The First Amendment is simply not sufficient to protect the free exchange of ideas,” he said. Near the end of the school year, I met Erwin Chemerinsky, the law-school dean, at a coffee shop in downtown Berkeley. “There is no guarantee that the marketplace of ideas will lead to truth, and that’s obviously a big problem,” he said. He is a Voltairean, not a Panglossian. Nonetheless, he continued, “My distrust of government is so great that I can’t think of a way to address that problem without making it worse.” Later, I talked to john powell. “There are any number of areas—gay rights, animal rights, housing—where legal reformers have set out to change the law,” he said. “If our speech laws looked more like Canada’s, would that be the end of democracy as we know it?” Classes were over. The year of free speech, for all practical purposes, had come to a close. Outside California Hall, next to the Free Speech Bikeway, a grounds crew was spreading cedar mulch on the flower beds. The plate-glass window on Sproul Plaza had been replaced; nearby, seniors were putting on their caps and gowns and posing for photos. A shin-high self-driving robot scooted across the plaza with a sticker on its flank (“How’s my programming?”). In 2014, at a teach-in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Wendy Brown spoke against trigger warnings and in favor of exposing students to new ideas. “When we demand, from the right or the left, that universities be cleansed of what’s disturbing,” she said, “we are complicit with the neoliberal destruction of the university.” Back then, Milo Yiannopoulos was still an obscure opinion journalist, and Donald Trump was still a reality-show magnate. “I haven’t radically shifted my position, but it’s fair to say that I’ve shifted my emphasis,” Brown told me. “I’ve become newly attuned to how free speech can be used as cover for larger political projects that have little to do with airing ideas.” Carol Christ told me that the events of the past academic year hadn’t changed her faith in the First Amendment, but that they had made her wonder how an eighteenth-century text should be interpreted in the twenty-first century. “Speech is fundamentally different in the digital context,” she said. “I don’t think the law, or the country, has even started to catch up with that yet.” The University of California had done everything within its legal power to let Yiannopoulos speak without allowing him to hijack Berkeley’s campus. It was a qualified success that came at a steep price, in marred campus morale and in dollars—nearly three million, all told. “These aren’t easy problems,” Brown told me. “But I don’t think it’s beyond us to say, on the one hand, that everyone has a right to express their views, and, on the other hand, that a political provocateur may not use a university campus as his personal playground, especially if it bankrupts the university. At some point, when some enormous amount of money has been spent, it has to be possible to say, O.K. Enough.” ♦ Learn more at The New Yorker https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531458200608-WDRX7H8T17CLFO9U83I0/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.03.04+PM.png media - In California, Journalists Lean on Student Reporters for Education Coverage IT WAS EARLY JUNE WHEN THE LEGENDARY CONGRESSMAN John Lewis cancelled his scheduled commencement address at the University of California, San Diego. Lewis had backed out in a show of solidarity with a union strike involving UC workers just two weeks before graduation. Gary Robbins, a science and technology reporter at the San Diego Union Tribune was juggling three stories that afternoon, but found time to cover the news anyways. Robbins is not a higher-education reporter, but his work places him on UCSD and other research university campuses in the area frequently. Without a dedicated higher-education reporter at the daily paper, the 40-year veteran has become the paper’s de facto correspondent, filing higher-education stories when he can find the time. Robbins says he might have missed the Lewis story were it not for a tip he got from a student reporter. All over the country, daily newspapers and metro sections have thinned as revenue streams have dried up. For the education beat, this has left journalists responsible for covering impossibly large areas—and more reliant on college newspapers. The burden is especially potent in California, home to a three-tiered public university system that represents a massive chunk of the state budget and includes California State University–the largest in the US—as well as the 10-campus University of California system and a host of public community colleges. Gabriel Schneider, a recent graduate of UCSD and founder of the independent student news outlet, The Triton, broke the news and then gave Robbins a heads up, who later wrote a story of his own including comment from a Triton staff member. For Robbins, higher education is a kind of “subbeat,” one that he has to cherry-pick ideas from. “I’m not on campus everyday to find stories,” he notes. But Schneider and other student reporters like him are, and their coverage is increasingly vital. “They’re essential. They don’t have formal training, but they keep banging on doors and asking the right people the right things, so sometimes when stories surface it comes up first from student reporting,” says Robbins. Robbins maintains contact with editors at the Triton and at The Guardian, another independent UCSD student newspaper, and he’s in touch with student reporters at nearby San Diego State University. Those relationships help him keep tabs on developing stories on campus in a way that might otherwise be impossible. And when newsworthy things happen on campus that have implications beyond the college gates, student journalists offer local reporters a starting point–and sometimes a directory–for potential sources. Last year, The Triton covered protests from some student groups after the Dalai Lama was invited to speak on campus. Schneider says soon after, reporters from The New York Times were on campus to cover the controversy–and they linked back to their story. In January, as the national conversation around immigration and the future of young undocumented immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program raged, a UCSD student with DACA made a wrong turn and accidentally crossed the Mexican border. He was detained while trying to re-enter. Schneider covered the news for the Triton before the local daily picked up the story. (He was eventually released.) Earlier this year the Triton ran a story about a university professor who publicly denigrated a student who transferred from a community college that was later covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education. In California, the presence of higher-education reporters varies widely. Outlets like CalMatters, KQED, inewsource, and Voice of San Diego have education reporters covering the state with a focus on both K-12 and higher education matters. Often this work is investigative and infrequent. Outlets like EdSource cover education exclusively. (Two higher-education reporters are stationed in Los Angeles.) Teresa Watanabe, the Los Angeles Times’s higher-education reporter covers the University of California system extensively (another reporter previously focused on the California State system, but the position is currently vacant). She says she makes a point of keeping track of what student journalists are covering, and has picked up stories from them in the past, including this story about a UC Berkeley student who ran for a student senate seat as a squirrel–and won. It was first covered by The Daily Californian, the campus’s student newspaper. Megan Burks, the sole education reporter at KPBS in San Diego, covers a whopping 42 K-12 districts, about eight community colleges, and four major universities. She hasn’t collaborated with student journalists, but says they’re often “a step or several” ahead of her when she starts digging into a higher-education story. And student reporters have appeared on the station’s midday show to talk about stories that they weren’t able to assign a staffer to, says Burks. “I’m the only education reporter at my station. I’m taking more of a global view as opposed to tracking the progress of student fee increases or a referendum,” she says. She uses student newspapers most often, she says, when “I start digging and looking for a way to localize [a story] or I’ve heard rumblings and start googling to see where the sources would be, usually the first hits [are] student newspapers.” In the Bay Area, local reporters at places like the East Bay Expressand the San Francisco Chronicle work to dig into higher-education news–and major stories such as the free speech debate routinely attract national interest. But Suhauna Hussian, a former editor at UC Berkeley’s The Daily Californian, worries that smaller—but equally important—stories are slipping through the cracks. “There is no shortage of stories that need telling, even at a place like UC Berkeley that receives so much scrutiny from national media,” says Hussain. She offered instances of sexual misconduct in university Greek life as an example. “The Daily Californian broke a story about the UC Berkeley chapter of Sigma Chi: Leadership knew about repeated allegations of drugging and sexual assault and didn’t take action until the newspaper made inquiries about the allegations,” says Hussain in an email. But Hussain says the capacity of a student newsroom to build institutional knowledge and cultivate sources is hard given the turnover baked into their four-year college experience. Local reporters are better positioned to do long-term reporting. Local media also benefits from student reporters in their internship programs as they look for ways to supplement higher-ed coverage. At KPCC, education editor Maura Walz constantly grapples with how best to focus her reporters’ energies across such a large swath of the state; there is one higher-ed reporter focused primarily on undercovered community colleges and first-generation students. Walz follows several student newspapers on Twitter, and says having student interns around the office helps keep them tuned into what’s happening on campus. “We have had student reporters on our air before…A lot of times, the student press has been helpful in breaking news situations,” says Walz, offering reports of an active shooter on UCLA’s campus as an example where the student press helped them stay on top of a fast moving story. “Having the reporters featured on our talk shows is a really good middle ground where [we’re] crediting reporting to them and they are getting the experience of being on air,” says Walz. This kind of symbiotic relationship is promising. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently expanded a training program for college journalists intended to equip them with stronger reporting skills in areas like the Freedom of Information Act and Title IX. Walz, the editor at KPCC, worries that limited resources create a situation in which professional journalists bogged down by large coverage areas and a nuanced beat potentially miss opportunities to do meaningful accountability reporting in the public interest. “I get worried we are not thinking about how much public money is being spent by the University of California system and [whether it] is being spent efficiently or well,” says Walz. “Are we not being good at holding these institutions accountable because we are focused on other things?” Student reporters also say the presence of professional reporters on their campuses legitimizes their efforts to do solid reporting on the stories that are within their capability, in the face of university administrators who are sometimes reluctant to take them seriously. “Nationally, there is a crisis with reporters being called ‘fake news’ and being told we don’t want you here, and I see that replicated on campus,” says Schneider. “A huge [issue] is that we don’t have a lawyer. We file public records requests and when they deny them and say they’re out of scope, we can’t sue. When we want to fight for something, we just can’t.” Schneider believes the guaranteed turnover of university newspaper staffs, and their status as students, encourages university administrators to treat their requests less seriously. In one meeting with the UCSD chancellor’s administration, Schneider adds, an official asked plainly: Why do we need to support student newspapers? As the professional reporting corps steels itself against similar antagonisms, one reason to support student papers is the amount that they contribute to important, local reporting. Learn more at Columbia Journalism Review https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531458295323-UMJ0J50CHAONBW52618V/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.04.41+PM.png media - Life After Tronc: Norman Pearlstine’s Plans for the LA Times ON THE DAY I INTERVIEWED Norman Pearlstine at the Los Angeles Times, tourists kept wandering into the cool, marbled lobby to inquire about taking the building tour. The security guard politely told them—on four separate occasions in a span of 30 minutes—that there are no more guided walks through the imposing Art Deco building that has served as the newspaper’s home since 1935. The last tour was given on June 15. The tourists wandered around the lobby’s massive globe to peer at busts of the paper’s founding family, the Chandlers, and snap photos before moving on. Upstairs there are empty cardboard boxes stacked in the newsroom, as reporters, editors, and staff prepare to leave this building and, they hope, a tumultuous 19-year period wherein owners in Chicago dramatically cut the paper’s staff and ambitions. The paper’s new local owner, billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, pledges to breathe new life into the paper and plans to relocate the LA Times next month to a new headquarters 20 miles southwest, in El Segundo, an airport-adjacent beach city. On June 18, the paper’s sale to Soon-Shiong became final—a shift so recent that former Editor in Chief Jim Kirk, who served under tronc (or Tribune, in redux), could still be spotted strolling the halls when I visited to interview Pearlstine on Monday. Pearlstine, the LA Times’s new executive editor, sat down with CJR on his fourth official day on the job to discuss his vision for the newspaper. At the moment, Pearlstine—who has held leadership positions at the Wall Street Journal and Time Inc., among other outlets—says he is laying plans for a fresh generation of leadership at the Times, determining shifts in coverage, and developing a working relationship with the paper’s new union. Throughout the interview Pearlstine spoke with the guarded curiosity of a reporter who has just begun digging into what promises to be a really good story. He won’t overpromise, but doesn’t believe he’ll under-deliver—the goods are there. Pearlstine is in an exploratory phase and faces formidable challenges such as restaffing a Washington bureau that many veteran journalists fledunder threat of closure from previous owners, in a time when covering the president presents unprecedented challenges. “Those are serious losses and I wish that we hadn’t lost them, but I’ve been really encouraged by the people who’ve reached out to me just in the last week since the announcement. And if we can deliver on some of those, we’ll be fine,” Pearlstine says. In Los Angeles, Pearlstine sees fresh opportunity to beef up investigative coverage—not only in coverage of business and the entertainment industry—but in unlikely fodder like food and arts, and sports, especially as the city prepares to host the Olympics, the World Cup, and serve as home to a bevy of pro and college sports teams. The freshly unionized newsroom was openly gleeful to seeformer owners tronc go, but Pearlstine doesn’t disparage past leadership. Necessary changes will take some time, he says, before promising to move as fast as possible. Our conversation is edited for length and clarity. Let’s start with an elephant in the room. You retired last year from Time, Inc after serving as chief content officer. [New York Times Executive Editor] Dean Baquet is 61. [Washington Post Executive Editor] Marty Baron is 63. What went into the decision of coming out of retirement at age 75 to run a sort-of-struggling newspaper? I was given an opportunity to do it and I consider myself fortunate to have that opportunity. I spent a lot of my life doing things that, it turns out, are somewhat relevant to being here. What began as a consulting relationship with Dr. Soon-Shiong, to think about a model for editorial—well, the more we got into it the more we thought that there was benefit in trying to figure out the place first before we figured out the next generation of leadership. When he asked me if I’d be willing to do it, I was delighted to have the opportunity. Dr. Soon-Shiong is openly ambitious. He wants to compete with The Washington Post and The New York Times. What do you believe you can accomplish within your first year in this role? What are your goals? I might put some conditions on that question of competing. There are certain stories that we definitely need to be competitive on. The goal is for us to be perceived as a world-class journalistic enterprise, doing what makes the most sense for our current audience and the audience we aspire to serve. In some cases, that will make us directly competitive with other big national and international publications, and in other places I think we want to call our shots to really set an agenda in the places where we’re particularly well-equipped to do it. You need some sense of how quickly you can move, but I have not wanted to be tied into a specific date in terms of accomplishments. At this point, I’m still trying to figure out what are the assets currently in place and how are they being deployed. It’s a very talented staff. Frankly, more talented than I had thought from the outside looking in, solely because—I mean most of the headlines about the Los Angeles Times in recent years have been about turmoil, about cost cutting, about attrition and departures. In fact, it has an amazing alumni society. But the big surprise to me is just how much talent there is in the building. The first [priority] is to assess the talent that is here and make sure that we’re fully utilizing and taking advantage of some really smart people who may not have felt that they were either being listened to or that they had opportunity to take on more authority or responsibility. A second is to try to figure out what we need to do to fill in the holes to buttress that, given the ambitions that Dr. Soon-Shiong has talked about. And then, certainly over a period of time, we have to begin thinking about a next generation of leadership. As much as I would love to be the person responsible for a 10-year turnaround at the Los Angeles Times, I don’t think it’s probably good for the organization and probably not good for me either to think in those terms. It’s no surprise that—really going back to last August when so many people at the top of the masthead were let go—a lot of people put their resumes out on the street and some of them have resulted in offers, some people have left. Some people, I think, were on the verge of leaving and they are at least willing to give us a chance to prove that we’re not just all talk. They’ve had a lot of talk over the years so it’s understandable if people were skeptical but in that first year certainly there’s some very important vacancies that we need to fill. Beyond that, I think there’s some very important coverage areas that we have to address. Part of it is: What do we do just to get the current operation running better? And then: What are the new things that you want to do where we have a lot of catch up? Media faces a challenge in covering the president now, and you had the winning quote on Reliable Sources recently when you said “Trump’s cocaine is media.” I’d love you to expand on that a little bit more. Well, he’s a very interesting and complicated guy, I’ve known him a long time. He’s very much an instinctual creature. When I said that I think media is his cocaine, I just mean that he loves press attention. He may love railing against the press; he’s railed against the press a lot, long before this. I can’t tell you how many letters I’ve gotten with that gold leaf on it and that big signature. He’ll get mad and he’ll ban CNN from something or The New York Times, but he’s given Maggie Haberman some good interviews for all the complaints about the New York Times. Were I more delicate, I guess I would have said it’s a symbiotic relationship or something like that. But, yeah, it is his cocaine. He may love railing against the press; he’s railed against the press a lot, long before this. I can’t tell you how many letters I’ve gotten with that gold leaf on it and that big signature. If you go back and read The Art of the Deal, right after the preface, that first chapter he talks about truthful hyperbole, and about the fact that he thinks it’s really important to say whatever comes into his head that he thinks advantages him. I think engagement is really essential and you have to you have to keep trying to cover him and his administration as best you can, on your terms when you can. Sometimes you’ll have to do it on his terms. We don’t have the luxury of saying we’re going to skip this story. To the degree you can, especially with a limited staff, you want to dig into the issues of substance where there are very real changes taking place that show the power of the chief executive and where it can be implemented. As important as those stories are, understanding the 32 lawsuits that the state of California has brought against the EPA is pretty important for our audience as well. We need to make sure that we’re understanding some of those very real changes that are taking place. The culture war that is being waged right now seems to be waged against California in many ways. Well, and New York as well. Yes, and New York, the so-called coastal elite— Some states ran very heavily against him— Sure, but there’s a taco truck on my corner here in LA. I think there’s a particularly hard slant against any place that has a lot of immigrants, and we are a majority-minority city. What will the Times do to cover communities that might feel antagonized or threatened right now? Well, those are communities we need to cover in any case. Given the immigrant population of this state, we need to be all over stories involving immigration. And we need to understand, if you will, the ways in which these immigrant populations do and don’t want coverage of the countries where many people were born or where their parents were born. So, the Mexican elections are a very big story here in [their] own right. Mexico versus Korea in a World Cup game at 8am may be peculiar to us in terms of its importance, but I think given the nature of this population—and I would include in that the fact that there’s still a significant number of voters who would consider themselves part of the Trump base in one way or another—that it’s dangerous to generalize about the state. Fair enough. I’d like to look inward at the Times newsroom for a second. I think a question that your staffers would want me to ask is: After years of cuts and layoffs, can you offer any assurance that layoffs are on hold, at least for the time being? There may be individual cases where you’re taking a look and saying, “Well do we need as much emphasis here and can we emphasize more there?” Those kinds of things go on in the everyday running of any newsroom. I have not heard of any desire for any cuts or further layoffs. I don’t want to ever say “never” on something like this because I don’t know. I mean, I’ve only been in the office really four days so it’s a little hard to give you definitive answers on these things. We are doing a careful analysis of what everybody on staff is doing and whether this is the best use of our resources. I have not been involved in and I haven’t really had a chance to figure out the implications of a large part of the workforce now being represented by a union. We have to understand just what does it mean, before you have a contract, in terms of what you can and can’t do. That’s not to suggest any flags there, it’s just that I don’t know. When you were at the Wall Street Journal, the Journal was a union shop, right? It was, but its name—it was called the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees—may give you some notion of how strong the union was. I was the union representative in Detroit when I was at an early stage in my career. I remember writing the union bylaws at one point but that was a long time ago. I’ve been in management too many decades to assert any claims there, but yes, there was a union, and they subsequently became part of CWA, I think, as the guild is now. And then Time, Inc. had a union as well. So you’re used to negotiating and collective bargaining, as management. Yes, absolutely. I ask because the union really seemed to turn off tronc. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the specifics just because I haven’t been involved, but the union vote was an expression of very deep concerns on the part of a lot of people who work here. And whether there was a union or not, you have to take those concerns seriously. I’ve met—not in a formal session, but informally—with a number of people who have been identified with the union movement, and I think that there is a lot of sincerity in their concerns and we should be prepared to take them seriously. I don’t consider the existence of a union itself as any bar to having good relations with the people who work here. The union vote was an expression of very deep concerns on the part of a lot of people who work here. And whether there was a union or not, you have to take those concerns seriously. It seems to be a very optimistic time for the paper. How do you plan to keep that good will going and turn the page? I can’t stress enough the value of having the opportunity to listen to people and to try to get some bottom-up thinking in terms of what we’re doing. It is terrific to have an owner for whom a diverse workforce and a diverse workplace is important. It’s fabulous to have an owner who despite his own personal success still views himself as kind of an underdog who is willing to confront the establishment, whether it’s in medicine or in anyplace else. And who’s a great listener. I’ve learned a lot from him in the period I’ve spent with him. So I think it’s especially important, given the tumult of the last few years, that we will listen carefully and then try to respond to the best ideas that we hear. I think there’s also a need to recognize that a lot of the difficulties here are difficulties that our entire industry has gone through and that I think Pat is right to want to run it as a business. But we then have to acknowledge that it’s a tough business. We’re not the only ones who’ve gone through huge staff reductions. They might have been handled better, but the disruption in our industry is something you know you [at CJR] have devoted whole issues to. And we’re as much a part of that as anybody else. But sometimes you just need a little time to figure things out. Journalists are an impatient bunch. Hey! But also, the extraordinary thing has been how many people have stuck it out, have hung in with no real rational expectation something like this would happen. And I’m grateful they have. I mean, I tried to talk [award-winning columnist] Steve Lopez out of coming here, and gave him all the good reasons why he shouldn’t be here, and I’m so glad he is. I had hired him to Time out of the [Philadelphia] Inquirer. He was working for me when my old friend John Carroll stole him from me. And I was trying to tell Steve why he shouldn’t come to LA and why it was a terrible place for him to try to write his column. Now I’m glad he’s here. International news is one of Dr. Soon-Shiong’s interests. The Times currently has bureaus in Johannesburg, Mexico City, Mumbai and Beijing. This morning’s World section had reports from Beirut, Jerusalem and Istanbul, but everyone is listed as a “special correspondent.” So you’re getting original reporting freelance, much of it very excellent. But is there anything that you want to do to try and focus international coverage more, or to staff some of these people? I think there are certain places where we might want to put more emphasis, and I haven’t worked that out completely. But given our prominence as part of the Pacific Rim, with as big a Korean American population as we have and with all the stories emanating now, you know, should you have somebody in Seoul? You know,Barbara Demick is as smart about Korea as anybody but she’s in New York right now. You can look at the whole Asian region and, with very large populations here from the Philippines, from Vietnam, from South Asia, you could imagine having someone there. The Russia story is an important one, and right now we don’t have anyone in London or on the continent. And if we don’t replace the person who just left Johannesburg for Beijing, then no one in Africa. If you have to set priorities, it’s hard to say where you go. But I think that Asia and Latin America remain critically important. We have some national beats that we ought to be looking hard at, as well. Given how important the immigration story is, we’ve got a reporter in Houston but no one between Houston and Los Angeles. Do you need Phoenix? We aspire to cover California and the West Coast. We have no one in Seattle right now, and we’re not as strong in Northern California as you’d expect. I say this without having any real sense of how quickly and how broadly we’re going to be hiring, because I think until we figure out what we’ve got, that’s tough to say. For instance the San Diego Union-Tribune has a very strong reporter based in Tijuana. Can we make more use of her work when we’re talking about immigration? That’s a very real question to ask. And are there other examples like that? The gender story became very big in the past year, not only through the lens of entertainment coverage with Harvey Weinstein, but also in terms of coverage decisions. The New York Times hired a gender editor for the first time last year. And The Washington Post has relaunched the Lily, US women’s first newspaper. Do you think that there is an opportunity there for doing more coverage for and of women? Well, certainly the story is extraordinary. And so then the question is how do you best cover it. I think it can lead a way to coverage that you otherwise might not get, and it probably adds to a voice in the newsroom that pushes back against intrinsic bias on the part of many of us. That sort of keeps you straight. But I guess I’d want to be satisfied that that’s the only way we can get the coverage. And compared to what? I’ve been asking people to give me their list of if they had their druthers, you know, what they would add and [laughs] it’s a pretty formidable list. I don’t want to in any way suggest that this is unimportant, it’s just really a question of what’s the best way for this organization. Fair enough. Here’s another question. You guys have this big move to the west side. In LA, the west side tends to be whiter, wealthier— Correct. And certainly a good part of your readership. But I think the East Side and other neighborhoods have long complained that they don’t get very good coverage, that they deserve more, particularly and more broadly Latino and black communities. How do you maintain a presence? Well, first of all, we are keeping a presence downtown. We will have an office with several dozen seats in it, and I would expect we’d probably have a pretty senior editor here responsible for it. Secondly, without taking away from the importance of physical location of where your desk is, it’s more important to talk about where your reporters are. We have a few people who are doing some extraordinary work, [such as] Esmeralda Bermudez’s piece last week about bringing up a trilingual child. That was fantastic. It was really quite a terrific piece that just said a whole lot about the world that she lives in. You know, Hector Becerra, who is the city editor, his father came here in the trunk of a car. He grew up in Boyle Heights and he is a mentor to a number of young reporters on the Metro desk, for whom this is a really important story. And I think that the difficulty with Los Angeles is just that it’s just such a complicated [place]. I mean, it’s a complicated government structure with a city government and a county government and so the city police get a tremendous amount of coverage, and the sheriffs office much less. Yet when you look at where police brutality cases have been over the last couple decades, you know, it would argue that the sheriff’s office probably ought to get more coverage than the LAPD. It’s not just East LA that complains. When Marty Baron ran the Orange County edition of the Los Angeles Times, that had 200 reporters. I don’t know what we have now; it’s probably about five or something. There were zone editions that I remember from the Valley, from the west side, from Torrance, Carson, Long Beach. There was a San Diego edition that was never a great commercial success but that was part of the ambition of the place. I think that how you cover these local communities, especially in an age where increasingly the product is going to be a digital one, is interesting. How do you keep your brand on mobile? How do you create an app that that makes you feel like you’re part of this community if you’re living in Echo Park or in Highland Park or something? These are issues that go beyond where the newsroom is. I do know that there’s some tremendous upside in better local coverage if we figure out how to do it. I mean, you look at Hearst’s record over the last seven years of increased profits and revenues from their newspapers and you know that there are things you can do locally that haven’t been done. Disney coverage has been a subject of controversy, with former editor Lewis D’Vorkin somewhat infamously coming to blows with the newsroom on it. I wasn’t here at the time, and I’ve never had a conversation with anyone at Disney about anything, so I don’t want to prejudge anything. I think on the basis of what I read, it looked like very solid coverage to me. Now, did we do everything we could have done to try to get their cooperation on a piece like that? I have no idea. Maybe this is just what happens when you write a tough piece. I haven’t dug into it—I haven’t taken 60 seconds to go backward just because there’s so much stuff ahead that I’m looking at. But I would hope that you could do tough aggressive skeptical coverage of your largest institutions with a level of mutual respect—where even if they hate a piece, you continue to be talking to each other. And if that doesn’t work, you have to at least ask the question whether it’s them or it’s you. Any last things to add about your ambitions for this paper? At the risk of being too aggressive in my flattery of the owner, what excited me and made me want to come on board was an understanding of the depth of his commitment to wanting to make this just a great paper and to invest resources in ways that make that possible. Whenever somebody comes to a field like media from another place, you always want to make sure they fully understand what they’ve gotten involved in. His ability to both operate at 50,000 feet and then, somewhat annoyingly, to be very granular in his sort of deconstruction of everything from staffing to beats and so forth has just been remarkable. Learn more at Columbia Journalism Review https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531458440567-3HKTP200DPB9PMA6JC7Q/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.07.04+PM.png media - “The Russians Play Hard”: Inside Russia’s Attempt to Hack 2018—and 2020 Alight breeze was rustling along Connecticut Avenue when I arrived at an unmemorable bar in Washington, D.C., and plopped down across from a former federal intelligence official. It had been an exhausting day. For decades, I’ve covered the goings-on and machinations within Silicon Valley, but these days the biggest technology story is occurring at the heart of the nation’s capital. I’d already met with current and former intelligence and security officials in federal buildings along the lush Capitol grounds, researchers from think tanks in bespoke coffee shops near Dupont Circle, and, now, in a dark bar not too far from the National Mall. Each spoke articulately and cogently about the threats posed to the 2018 midterms by Russia. I’ve been reporting cyber-security and hacking for well over a decade, and even unearthed some truly scary stuff—like the chilling manifest destiny of fake news—in the process. But what I learned that day, and particularly in that bar, scared the shit out of me. On the televisions hanging above the bar played a commercial for Uber—an apology from the company’s new C.E.O. for the actions of its previous C.E.O. As the news came back on, we made swamp small talk. Would the Democrats retake the house? Would Donald Trump win re-election in 2020? Or would his chaotic presidency all come crashing down far, far sooner? The former official simply shook his head side to side. “Russia is going to do everything it can to ensure that doesn’t happen,” he said. “They’ll hack the voting booths, if they haven’t already; they’ll quadruple their efforts on social media; they’ll do things we”—he pointed to me, then himself —“haven’t even thought of yet.” When I asked what we can do to stop them, he said, as if imitating the voice-over for a horror-movie trailer, “These are all things that have been in the works since the day Trump won two years ago.” So what exactly is Russia planning for the upcoming election? The correct question, a half dozen security experts and former and current government officials have told me, is what are they not planning? These people all said that 2018 will likely be a testing ground for 2020. Many of the tactics that Russia experiments with could (and likely will) be enacted on a much larger scale two years from now. Some of these strategies and maneuvers appear grounded in reality, while others seem speculative, but all have the same sinister goal of breaking the system—by cleaving our polity, distracting us with feuds large and small—by sowing discord through technology platforms and services. “Having the U.S. at war with itself is giving Russia credit internationally,” explained Andrew Weiss, the vice president for research on Russia for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting that we as a country are more divided on almost every issue than at any other time in history. “[Russia is] not the creator of this problem, but they have exploited it. Just creating mistrust, and throwing a question mark over the legitimacy of our government, is a pretty big prize for Russia.” In the coming months, these experts told me, Russian operatives will likely start creating fake Facebook groups (if they haven’t already)—some that slam to the left, others that lean as far right as humanly possible—that will argue with one another, and help us do the same; there will be accounts on social media that use Cambridge Analytica-style targeting to serve up ads, and a barrage of cleverly designed and perfectly disguised bots on Twitter. All stuff we’ve seen already, but with much more advanced algorithms and snakier and more aggressive tactics. (This time, for example, fake video and audio will start circulating through the social stratosphere, all with the intended purpose of trying to make real news seem fake, and fake news seem real.) As we’ve seen with the various e-mails posted on WikiLeaks—ranging from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the D.C.C.C. to the countless hacking attempts around the world that preceded the French national election—any modern candidate should expect that their e-mails, text messages, and personal social-media data are hacked and published. At least any candidate that Russia wants to harm. Robby Mook, Clinton’s former campaign manager, told me in an interview on my podcast last week that even the slightest action by Russia can have outsized consequences. Recalling the repercussions of the John Podesta e-mail saga, Mook warned that simply hacking someone’s e-mails, text messages, or other private content—even if they are not salacious—can spread like a plague on social media; before long, the truth and fake content blurs together, and you have a coagulated version of fake truth. Social media allows Russia and other adversarial governments the ability to take something so small, and make it tantamount to any scandal on Earth. “Little, tiny embers become infernos in a way that no technology has ever enabled in history,” a tech entrepreneur lamented recently. And then there will be new tactics. More than one expert told me that Russia will try to go after actual voting booths in smaller, more contentious districts across the country. The world we live in so intertwined with technology that you could imagine Russian hackers disrupting how we even get to the polls on Election Day. Ride-sharing services could be hacked. We’ve already seen instances of hackers faking transit problems on mapping apps, like Waze, to send people in the wrong direction, or away from a certain street. Perhaps most terrifying of all, one former official told me, are the possibilities arising from Russia’s alleged 2015 cyber-attack on Kiev’s power grid, which plunged the city into darkness. The moment I heard this, I ordered another drink. On some level, the dystopian horror that technology poses to our democracy is effectively limitless. At the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas last year, white-hat hackers (the good kind) demonstrated that it takes about 90 minutes to hack into a voting booth. Some voting booths still operate using an old version of Windows XP, and people can easily get in using Wi-Fi systems. Over the years, there have been countless instances of hackers easily penetrating voting booths. Earlier this year, election officials admitted that Russians actually did infiltrate some of the U.S. election systems in 2016. Jeanette Manfra, the head of cyber-security at the Department of Homeland Security, told NBC News, “We saw a targeting of 21 states, and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated.” Another official admitted that, “2016 was a wake-up call, and now it’s incumbent upon states and the feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again.” Of course, the one person who possesses the most power to prevent this from recurring—our president—may be the one who stands to benefit the most in the first place. With their man already in the Oval Office, Mook suggested that Russia’s goal in 2018 will similarly be to “sow discord.” It’s an elegant way of saying that they just want to start trouble and see what happens. And there are no consequences for them doing it. (If anything, Vladimir Putin is praised more by Trump.) Since Trump’s election, Mook explained, there have been several congressional hearings that have detailed how Russian operatives have fanned both sides of the flames during almost every major event in the last few years: Charlottesville, the Las Vegas shooting, Parkland, even infiltrating Bernie Sanderssupporters’ Facebook groups. Just this past week, as America boiledover the White House’s abominable policy to separate children and parents at the border, the Russians were hard at work stoking the flames with a flamethrower. Weiss echoed this, noting that the discord existed in America before the Russians stepped in—they just helped exacerbate it with tech. “There’s the old saying by Napoleon [along the lines of], ‘When your enemy is making a big mistake, don’t interrupt them,’” Weiss said. “This has been the most successful covert operation in reported history.” In some ways, there are almost too many holes to plug to stop the Russians from causing massive harm in the coming elections. Mook suggested that concerns about voting-booth safety were just one tiny part of the problem. “Our election system goes far beyond machines. We have voter-registration databases,” he said. “We have e-poll books—the actual devices used to look you up when you come in to vote. We have the results reporting system. We have the Web sites that host those results.” Imagine, for a brief, terrifying moment, that the Web sites and reporting systems (the methodologies that are the backbone of how news organizations report election results in real time) are hacked, and Trump is briefly marked as the winner before the election is accurately called for his opponent? Trump and his surrogates would seize on such a moment like piranhas to blood. “I think [Russia] will do anything they can to help Donald Trump win re-election,” Mook concluded, “but there greater interest is to sow doubt in the election process in general—and doubt in democracy.” (As Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan note, Moscow’s continued covert efforts to interfere in our elections should be the most urgent issue before Trump when he meets with Vladimir Putin next month—a confrontation that is hard to imagine for a president who has deliberately ignored the issue when he wasn’t outright encouraging it.) Russia and Putin want to drive a wedge deeper and deeper into the United States, pitting Americans against Americans, breaking the system from within, and helping us destroy ourselves. As one researcher said to me recently, if there’s one thing that Russia and the Democrats agree on, it’s that Trump is an idiot, and he’s so self-obsessed that he’ll always put himself before American democracy, and, in turn, weaken it. Trump is also playing to the same drum as the Russians, only louder. Over the past two years, Trump has been trying to make the public believe that everything about our democracy is corrupt—but not for the reasons you might think. First, it was Washington in general. (“Drain the swamp!”) Then, when the polls predicted his loss, it was the entire electoral system, which was “rigged.” (After he won the electoral vote, but lost the popular vote, there were magically between 3 million and 5 million people who, he lied, voted illegally.) Now, in anticipation of the Mueller Report, Trump has gone after the F.B.I. with the goal of discrediting them when the report finally does come out. Trump’s attacks on these institutions, and his unrelenting blitz on the media, are an attempt to make Americans distrust what journalists and cable outlets say, especially when it’s the truth. What more could the Russians ask for? Last year, shortly after Trump started to settle into his new job, mysterious things began to happen to some of Putin’s critics. The Russian ambassador to Sudan suddenly had a heart attack in his swimming pool; another Russian politician, who had fled the country after publicly denouncing the country’s actions in Ukraine, was gunned down in front of a hotel; soon, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, India, and Greece died of a heart attack, too. And then there were the string of officials, and Putin critics, who mysteriously “fell” from their balcony or roof. One politician was killed in a Dupont Circle hotel room, not far from the bar where I met the former federal official who warned of what was to come. Over the years, approximately a half dozen Russian journalists have been murdered and abducted while doing their jobs. Each time “accidents” happen, Russia denies any involvement, calling allegations that these were Putin-backed “absurd.” And so while none of this is new, I had to ask Weiss—who formally covered Russia for the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, advising both presidents about Russia—if we should worry that Putin could cross a line from digital to physical. Weiss didn’t say yes, but he also didn’t say no. “I don’t know what is possible,” he told me. “I think what we’ve seen so far is that all powers of imagination are possible when it comes to dealing with Russia. The Russians play hard. They play this game really ruthlessly.” The day after my terrifying discussions in that dark bar, I had time to kill before heading to a meeting at the United States Senate building, so I decided to walk to try to clear my head. No matter how many times you do it, it’s an incredibly sobering experience to go past those massive buildings that house our government. The Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice all stand momentous and stoic. They present themselves as edifices capable of withstanding anything—anything at all. Yet I found myself sitting across from the most impressive building of them all, the United States Capitol, and wondering if these institutions can withstand Trump, and, in turn, Russia. The answer, it seems, is right there in front of us. Russia and Trump want us to hate each other. They want us fighting on Twitter. Spewing vitriol. Telling our neighbors to go fuck themselves. Fighting on Facebook. If that continues to happen, they win, and we all—all!—lose. The only way to beat Russia is the only way that America can survive itself. Learn more at Vanity Fair https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531458519269-7G27RWAM1IO9M5WYFMRE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.08.12+PM.png media - These Parents Hoped to Raise $1,500 For Separated Migrant Families. They Raised $12 Million and Counting. It began with the smallest possible quantity of optimism, which turns out to be $1,500. Charlotte and Dave Willner had seen the pictures of migrant children crying at the border. One in particular reminded them of their own 2-year-old daughter. The San Francisco area couple had heard — as much of the United States had by now — that President Trump’s administration has begun jailing migrant parents caught crossing the border and sending their children to shelters. The president’s chief of staff has called the new “zero-tolerance” policy a deterrent against illegal immigration. But the Willners had also learned that a lump of cash might thwart the government’s plans. Just like arrested Americans, detained migrant parents can often post bond and simply walk out of jail. They can then, presumably, collect their children from government custody and live in the United States until their court hearings, which are often months away. Or they could, if they had the money. Bonds for detained migrants typically range from hundreds to many thousands of dollars — amounts that might as well be in the billions for families that arrive here with next to nothing, and have whatever they brought with them confiscated by Border Patrol. So the Willners created a Facebook fundraiser over the weekend to raise $1,500 — enough to free a single migrant parent with a relatively low bond. “It was the closest thing we could do to hugging that kid,” Dave Willner told the Mercury News. Five days later, the Willners have raised more than $12 million and climbing — overflowing all previous optimism. “We can confirm this is one of the largest fundraisers we’ve ever seen on Facebook,” Roya Winner, a spokeswoman for the social media giant, told The Washington Post, back when the amount was less than $4 million. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is among the nearly 200,000 people who had contributed by Wednesday morning. Private donors have matched more than $250,00o of the total, but the Willners said the average donation is just $40. The money has come from Americans disaffected with their government, immigrants who remember their own journeys, and sympathizers from Canada to Switzerland and beyond. “That clear moral commonality is what will sustain us,” Charlotte Willner wrote on Facebook on the first night of the campaign. “It transcends almost everything. It is an enduring sense of what America ought to be about.” Or as Joanna Leah Kaylor of Mammoth Lakes, Calif., put it when she threw in her contribution: “Children are children and need our help.” In more ways than one, the surge has overwhelmed the Texas nonprofit that will receive the money, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES). With donations pouring in at $4,000 a minute at one point, the nonprofit has already taken in twice as much cash as it raised in all of 2016, according to its public financial records. It plans to use the money not only to bond parents out of immigration jails but also to provide lawyers to the parents and children as they fight in court to stay together and stay in the United States. “We’ve been occasionally crying around the office all day when we check the fundraising totals,” RAICES wrote on Facebook. “This is such a profound rejection of the cruel policies of this administration. Take heart.” It’s also a profound change of fortune for a nonprofit that just weeks earlier was at a bleak point in its three-decade history. RAICES provides free or low-cost lawyers to immigrants and refugees in Texas, where nearly 1,500 detained children are being held in a converted Walmart while their parents are imprisoned elsewhere. Three weeks ago, as news of the child detentions was beginning to reach public consciousness, RAICES announced that “the Trump administration is ending funding for representing thousands of released unaccompanied children.” While the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Washington Post, employees at nonprofits besides RAICES confirmed that the agency ended a grant program last month that paid for some detained migrant children to have lawyers while in government custody. “We were going to be able to finish out our cases but not accept new cases,” said Jenny Hixon, RAICES’s development director. She said the lost money was estimated to blow a $300,000 hole in the nonprofit’s budget next year, which would mean fewer lawyers for the families. “For our attorneys, the worst thing in the world is not being able to take a case,” Hixon said. But that was before the viral fundraiser. “This is our entire annual budget in several days,” Hixon said. “And it’s not just the funding. We’re getting literally thousands of people contacting us, wanting to volunteer. Many are like, ‘I’ll come to Texas.’” Though RAICES served 7,000 family members in detention last year, Hixon said, the nonprofit’s administrative staff is threadbare. “We really only have attorneys, and then me,” she said. She is now racing to contact other nonprofits so she can put the money to use when the fundraiser ends and Facebook releases the full amount in mid-July. “We’re ramping up our representation of the parents,” Hixon said. “We’re hiring more legal point-people who try to get the families back in communication with each other. We’re launching a nationwide network of people to provide support to people after they are released from detention, because as you can see, this is traumatizing.” The plan is to locate every separated migrant family in the United States, get them lawyers and, when possible, get them out of federal detention — parents and children alike. RAICES is even setting up a network of therapists and psychologists, expecting — as pediatricians do — that many children will emerge from their detention with PTSD, toxic stress and other aftereffects of the separation. It will be a long road, but now there’s enough money to hope for an end. Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531458593045-K9KBGSOCG5NL5B6EXVYS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.09.40+PM.png media - California Couple Raises Over $4 Million in Facebook Fundraiser For Immigrant Families A Facebook fundraiser is set to raise $5 million in under five days in response to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration and the separation of thousands of children from their families at the border. Charlotte and Dave Willner started their fundraising campaign after seeing the viral image of a two-year-old girl crying as her mother, an asylum seeker from Honduras, was being searched and detained at the US-Mexico border. The initial goal of $1,500 was meant to help cover bond fees for the one person, but it rapidly grew in scale. “We are collectively revulsed at what’s happening to immigrant families on our southern border. In times when we often think that the news can’t possibly get worse, it does,” Charlotte Willner wrote on the fundraiser’s description. The fundraiser went viral, just like the photo that inspired it, with $4,000 being donated every minute as of Tuesday morning. With the outpouring of support, the couple decided to change the fundraiser’s focus and donate the money to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas nonprofit that provides affordable legal services to refugees and immigrants. In April, the Trump administration directed the US Attorney’s offices to criminally prosecute all adult migrants who attempt to cross the southwest border illegally. Any children accompanying them are then forcibly separated from their parent. This new policy sends these adult migrants to federal jail, instead of immigration detention, where children cannot be held. Over 2,000 migrant children have been separated from their families since the policy was put in place. Learn more at Verge https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531516910967-2AM89KJEYPQJAYILT9W2/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.21.31+PM.png media - Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong on the 4th Industrial Revolution & Los Angeles Leadership Role The 2018 Select LA Investment Summit, organized by the World Trade Center-Los Angeles, brought executives from more than 25 countries together to discuss the potential of the region for innovation and economic development. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder of NantWorks and the new owner of the Los Angeles Times, addressed the summit and noted that Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to combine its current public and private leadership of 21st Century mobility, technology, clean energy, bioscience, climate action, and goods movement to create the next global industrial revolution. TPR is pleased to present an excerpt of Dr. Soon-Shiong's remarks. Stephen Cheung: Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is a physician, surgeon, scientist, inventor, technologist, and philanthropist who has devoted his career to translating science into medical innovations with local impact. He currently serves as chairman and CEO of NantWorks, a company devoted to the transformation of healthcare and utilizing artificial intelligence to win the war against cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. In 2016, Dr. Soon-Shiong announced the formation of Cancer Breakthroughs 2020, a comprehensive collaboration of researchers, insurers, academic institutions, and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the potential of combination immunotherapy in the treatment of cancer. He also serves in various academic capacities at UCLA, Imperial College of London, UCLA Wireless Health Institute, and California NanoSystems Institute. Many of you know that Los Angeles has one of the most diverse populations in the world. We have more than 140 nationalities represented right here in the Los Angeles region, and we speak more than 224 different languages. And many affiliations claim Dr. Soon-Shiong to be one of their own. Dr. Soon-Shiong was born in South Africa, and our South African friends are proud to have one of their own so well received in LA. As a first-generation Asian-American myself, my friends are delighted to see a fellow Asian-American as a key transformative figure for the region. Since he obtained his Master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, our Canadian friends are claiming Dr. Soon-Shiong; and since he’s a member of the Board of Councilors at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, our friends at USC claim him as a Trojan. Not to be outdone, it’s fair to call Dr. Soon-Shiong a Bruin. But most importantly—especially considering his role as the new owner of the L.A. Times—I think we can all agree that Dr. Soon-Shiong is an Angeleno through and through. Patrick Soon-Shiong: I’m truly excited to be able to present today what we’ve been quietly doing since 2008. I’m honored today to tell you what nanotech has been about for the last decade. From now to 2028 Olympics, we will implement this vision. I came to this city in 1980—38 years ago—and I think my work is a testament to the fact that as long as you dream, collaborate, and implement the greatest talent—and there’s great talent in this city, in universities, sports, medicine, healthcare, and technology—it is truly limitless what you can do. In 2008 and 2010, when I sold both of my biotech companies, we decided that we would harness this talent and devote these energies into what I call the fourth industrial revolution. What I mean by that is that there is truly a way to converge biology, medicine, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, physics, and technology. In fact, we are actually already in this fourth industrial revolution; we just don’t know it. And if we in this most amazing city can exploit that, we will lead California and the nation—and frankly, I think we will provide open exploration to the globe. You probably know us [NantHealth and other Nant companies] as a company focusing on cancer. However, in the context of researching cancer, we discovered that the artificial intelligence infrastructure that we’ve been developing could also address the next catastrophe that is going to hit us: climate change. We saw a very real opportunity to harness the power of the sun, air, and water to completely change how we derive, store, and use energy. So, on our campuses in Culver City, El Segundo, and Phoenix, we quietly began taking advantage of that power. Our work on renewable low-cost energy, called a zinc-air battery, now has provided power to four million people around the world for the last five years. Using the ability of a hydrogen fuel cell that harnesses the power of the sun and water to create hydrogen, this reduces the carbon footprint. The ability to create a water production [with zero processes] allows us to grow food in a different way. We have the ability to forever change how motors behave, by removing the gas and creating new electric high-torque motors. And finally: Where I come from—being Chinese and living under the rule of South African apartheid—I understand that without freedom of speech and speaking truth to power, nothing else actually matters. We needed to establish a forum, not only to empower the underserved and the underdogs, but also for those of us working in the fourth industrial revolution to share amongst ourselves and with the rest of the nation and the world. This has been our mission; now I’m going to share with you exactly how we’ve gone about that. The Nant Key Initiatives can be broken into three buckets. As part of our work on catastrophic life-threatening diseases, I’m going to Chicago to announce the first true cancer vaccine. We can quite literally decode the genome in your body, put it into an adenovirus, and inject it subcutaneously—like a flu shot—and drive out cancer. We have built something called a natural killer cell that we can drill down in unlimited supply and grow and engineer it to drive out your cancer without high-risk chemotherapy. We also have a renewable energy program with multiple programs in motion: the zinc-air battery and the hydrogen fuel cell with high-torque motors, which give us the ability to change transportation. Finally, one of the most important opportunities is in artificial intelligence and machine learning. I think, from an anthropological perspective, humanity is at an inflection point—with the social network, and the idea of what is news—what is real news, what is fake news—how do we manipulate human beings—and the use of artificial intelligence. There is a true dark side to technology. The idea we are going to take artificial intelligence that we have on machines that do machine learnings and create connectivity and create a social network of safe, true information, and also to engage the millennials with sports and e-sports and engagement vehicles. These are the three vehicles we are executing. With regard to the cancer program, this is the natural killer cell we’ve engineered. It’s a breast cancer cell and it has gone after this breast cancer cell and literally will devour the cell through a blood transfusion. We’ve now built an unlimited supply of these natural killer cells that we can take from your tumor and an old tissue and derive through artificial intelligence the sequence, and drive the sequence either into an adenovirus or the natural killer cell, and that will drive the vaccine. What you and I have in our bodies today I call our first responders. You all have a natural killer cell in your body. I don’t want to alarm you, but each of one of you, as you’re developing stem cells, in order to survive, your body needs to build these stem cells. There’s a mathematical error that happens in every stem cell—billions of them—and the reason people do not have cancer is this first responder in your body called the natural killer cell that is killing it, until the tumor decides how to put that natural killer cell to sleep. We’ve now figured out a way to grow this unlimited supply of this natural killer cell and then take that and engineer that and then add that to this adenovirus of this gene and this now becomes the future of cancer care. Imagine going to Wal-Mart and getting a flu shot—for cancer. That is actually not unrealistic. And with that system of this cartoon? Your DNA signature is your drug. The drug is then placed into a system of vectors to treat cancer. Let me turn to energy storage and the opportunity to create this zinc-air battery. This is the holy grail. You and I live on zinc; that is how we make insulin. You and I live on zinc-air; that is how air goes through the lungs. Imagine then taking this biological system into an anode and a cathode, and merely using oxygen to store energy. While people have been focusing on the generation energy with lithium-ion—and we all know the dangers and the cost of lithium—if you could break $100 per kilowatt hours for a battery, you’d change the world. I predict that within 12 months, we will break $100 per kilowatt hour. And if that is the case, then what happens is that zinc-air batteries will be the support services and replace generators, lead-acid. And I’ll give you a little secret: The L.A. Times buildings will be running on zinc-air batteries. What’s happened is we’ve now deployed these grid applications, and remarkably now, 100 rural villages have installed these off-the-grid renewable power solutions in all of Indonesia. Here’s an island completely running with no grid—no other power—on these zinc-air batteries. They’re intelligent batteries; we can tell by the minute which battery and which cell is activated or deactivated. 120,000 cells have been produced to date with 3,000 systems installed globally. What’s exciting to me is that 4 million people are now covered with 3,000 metric tons of CO2 reduction. What’s next is another very exciting technology. Through machine vision, we’ve developed a technique that we call edge detection, where we can recognize through a computer the edges of mobile systems like solar panels. Imagine taking these solar panels and through the power of the sun to focus their source of power to a single beam and generating heat to the point of the power of the sun and truly creating reverse combustion, meaning taking H20 and breaking it down into hydrogen and oxygen and then from the hydrogen generating hydrogen fuel. I don’t think people recognize that today, the way petroleum is generated or natural gas is taken is making burnt CO2 thrown into the air so that you can get hydrogen from the heat to purify your petroleum. This would be another breakthrough and the opportunity to create more hydrogen fuel cells. Water reduction as some of you know is now possible and changing farming. The opportunity then to change the world, both on diseases and climate and energy. Finally, the opportunity now is to take this asset—the L.A. Times, the San Diego Tribune, and the California News Group—and integrate it with next-generation technology, like Zoom video conferencing. Imagine that you could download an app similar to the L.A. Times app, and press a button to see an on-call doctor at any time. Imagine that you had the ability to interact with anybody anywhere, or have access to livestreaming of any event. That’s what we’re going to try and release for you. I think this is an opportunity to truly change how we present media, and that studio where I was this morning with some of the moguls of entertainment in the industry to take this 360-degree green stage and create an entertainment through LA. Don’t get mad at me, but there was not enough space on the two LA soccer teams. Soon, I will be the majority owner of D.C. United. The reason this is exciting is that we can interconnect D.C. and Los Angeles. Between D.C. and Los Angeles, we can truly become the voice of the nation to the world. With that, I want to thank you for allowing me to review what we’ve been doing. I truly believe we are in the fourth industrial revolution and this is the greatest city in the world and in the United States and I’m proud to be an Angeleno. Learn more at The Planning Report https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531517032157-N7CSOO0HDUZCB3ASROII/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.23.36+PM.png media - New Los Angeles Times Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong Names Veteran Journalist Norman Pearlstine Executive Editor The Los Angeles Times has a new owner, a new editor and, after years of upheaval, a new path forward. On the day that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong completed his $500-million purchase of the 136-year-old newspaper, the L.A. biotech billionaire announced he was naming veteran journalist Norman Pearlstine as its executive editor. Pearlstine has spent 50 years in journalism helping shape some of the nation’s most prominent publications — including Time Inc. magazines, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and Forbes. It was the first major move by Soon-Shiong, who also bought the San Diego Union-Tribune, Spanish-language Hoy and several community papers from Chicago newspaper company Tronc. During the last two months, Pearlstine, 75, has served as an advisor to Soon-Shiong, charged with creating a transition plan for The Times. He will now execute that plan. “Not only does he have amazing experience with the full knowledge of how a newsroom runs — but he’s amazingly modern and forward-looking,” Soon-Shiong said. “There’s no agenda, other than to make this the best journalistic institution. We’re lucky to be able to capture him.” Pearlstine becomes The Times’ fourth top editor in less than a year and its 18th since the paper began publishing in 1881. He succeeds Jim Kirk, a Chicago newsman whose nearly 10-month tenure came during a period of corporate dysfunction that culminated with the sale of The Times. Rather than accept a smaller role, Kirk decided to leave the paper. Soon-Shiong and Pearlstine were greeted Monday by a jubilant crowd of employees who squeezed into the center of the newsroom for an hourlong town hall meeting. There, the new leadership fielded questions and shared their vision for The Times. “Let’s put Tronc in the trunk and we’re done,” Soon-Shiong said to cheers and applause. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to work at the L.A. Times,” Pearlstine said, recalling how he had applied for a job decades earlier. “Thank you, Pat…. Better late than never.” The change comes at a challenging time for print publications. “We need to figure out the new business model,” Soon-Shiong said. “The interest of the reader is more important than the interest of the advertiser. That may be heresy because advertising still is the source of our revenue but it is a complex new dance in this new business model.” Soon-Shiong, acknowledging his competitive nature, said he is determined to get The Times into the national conversation, which will require beefing up the newsroom. Pearlstine told the staff that “it’s really on me” to come up with a staffing and hiring plan to present to Soon-Shiong. But he also has cautioned against trying to emulate other publications, saying: “It would be a huge mistake to try to be a clone of any East Coast paper.” Pearlstine’s appointment came as a surprise to some, particularly because many figured he had retired after he left Time Inc. last year. “I’m astonished — but not surprised,” said Walter Isaacson, a former Time magazine editor who now teaches at Tulane University. “This guy has a passion for journalism and an instinct for what’s interesting — and a true boyishness for making people realize that journalism is a noble profession.” Marcus Brauchli, a former Washington Post editor who now runs investment firm North Base Media, agreed. “The new owner could not have chosen a more stabilizing presence,” he said, noting that Pearlstine also will serve The Times well because he has spent the last few years getting immersed in the latest trends shaping digital media. That’s how Pearlstine and Soon-Shiong met. In 2013, Pearlstine, then chief content officer of Time Inc., was intrigued by Soon-Shiong’s efforts to develop artificial intelligence that would make newspaper reading a more interactive experience. He flew to California to check out the work but it wasn’t ready to be deployed commercially. After Soon-Shiong announced his purchase of The Times in February, Pearlstine quickly reached out and soon flew to Los Angeles for a meeting. He joined as a consultant in April, with marching orders to identify and recruit top editors. Soon-Shiong has aimed high. He offered two L.A. Times alums — Marty Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, and Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times — the top job “knowing that it was a long shot.” He even invited Baquet to his Brentwood home, which has a private basketball court. “I let him shoot a few shots to see if I could convince him,” Soon-Shiong said. “I said we’ll play HORSE and if I win, you’re gonna have to stay.” Other top prospects were hesitant to join The Times with its revolving door of managers. “To anyone from the outside looking in, there has just been a lot of turmoil,” Pearlstine said, noting that part of his challenge is to prove “that the turmoil is behind us.” Pearlstine advised Soon-Shiong against rushing one of his most important decisions. “We thought that there was risk in trying to fill that job before we had a clear understanding of the staff … and a clear understanding of what the mission was,” Pearlstine said. They discussed an interim role but quickly dismissed that idea. “We’ve had enough interims,” Soon-Shiong said. “He’ll be here as long as he wants.” Still, at 75, Pearlstine acknowledges that he might be in the job only a year or two. “I’m realistic that one of the most important things I can do is to find my successor,” he said. “I think we will have a better idea of what the next generation of leadership is after we have done some more work and, frankly, after we have done some more listening.” Soon-Shiong also announced that Chris Argentieri, currently the general manager of The Times, will become chief operating officer of California Times, the new corporate moniker for the group of publications that Soon-Shiong acquired. Jeffrey Light will remain publisher and editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Although Monday was his first day on the job, Pearlstine in 2005 played a role in an effort to disentangle The Times from Tribune Co. He arranged a meeting between the late John Carroll, then the paper’s top editor, and Los Angeles power broker Eli Broad to see whether Broad would be interested in buying the paper. The billionaire philanthropist later joined investor Ron Burkle in a bid that was rejected. The following year, Carroll gave a speech at an industry conference in which he provided a blueprint to save The Times. The key ingredients were local and private stewards. “One of the great things that comes with Patrick’s ownership, with local ownership and a willingness to invest, is that it brings a period of stability,” Pearlstine said in an interview. “I’m lucky as hell to have this opportunity, and I feel confident that this is somewhere I think I can be helpful.… This remains an extraordinary place.” One immediate task will be calming staff members, who since April have been worried about the looming move out of their historic Art Deco building in downtown Los Angeles, where the newspaper has been based since 1935. The new headquarters in El Segundo will worsen the commutes for many, a hardship Soon-Shiong acknowledged. But he said The Times needs a modern home. He is developing a campus on 10 acres near Los Angeles International Airport, which will include an event center with an auditorium, a studio for podcasts and videos, and a museum on the history of The Times. He would like to host events, such as the paper’s annual Food Bowl and Festival of Books, there. Pearlstine is energized by his new task. He has lost 50 pounds in the last year and has taken up boxing. He plans to find an apartment in the greater Los Angeles area, perhaps close to El Segundo. He said his wife, Jane Boon, an industrial engineer, will divide her time between Los Angeles, New York and Vancouver, Canada. She is a native of Canada. Pearlstine, who grew up in a small town outside Philadelphia, has been a fixture in New York media circles, where he is known for his intelligence, sharp wit and longevity in a business that tends to wear people out. “He’s an absolutely first-rate journalist,” Brauchli said. His long career has not been without controversy. In 2005, while serving as editor in chief of Time Inc., he was harshly criticized for turning over subpoenaed notes of reporter Matthew Cooper to a federal grand jury hearing evidence into the identification of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Pearlstine defended the action, saying that Time Inc. had spent millions of dollars fighting the special counsel in the matter and “lost every round.” The Supreme Court had refused to hear the case. Pearlstine later said that it was his most difficult decision in his career as an editor. He started in journalism in 1967 as a copy boy at the New York Times, a few months after earning his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to the Wall Street Journal in 1968, where he worked for the next decade, including a stint in Los Angeles and in Asia, where he launched the paper’s Asia edition. He became executive editor of Forbes magazine in 1978, a job he held for two years. But, in 1980, he returned to the Journal and served as managing editor from 1983 to 1991 and then as executive editor for a year. After leaving the Journal in 1992, he worked to launch the magazine SmartMoney for Dow Jones & Co. and Hearst Corp. He became editor in chief at Time Inc. in 1995, overseeing such publications as Time, People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly. That job brought him frequently to L.A. When he left in 2005, Time Inc. boasted more than 150 magazine titles. He then spent five years as chief content officer for Bloomberg and served as chairman of Bloomberg Businessweek after the company acquired that magazine. He returned to Time Inc. in 2013 as chief content officer and was promoted to vice chairman in 2016. He retired last year as the company, reeling from a loss of subscribers and advertisers, prepared for a sale. At The Times, Pearlstine will be looking to rebuild the newsroom and restore the organization’s reputation. He replaces Kirk, who came onboard last August, when Tronc sacked four top editors. Kirk led the newsroom until November, when Lewis D’Vorkin was brought in from Forbes. D’Vorkin’s three-month tenure was disastrous, marked by clashes with staff and a vote by the newsroom to unionize, the first time in the paper’s 136 years. Tronc bounced D’Vorkin and, in late January, Kirk became editor in chief. About 10 days later, Tronc announced its deal to sell the California News Group to Soon-Shiong. Tronc will soon return to its former name of Tribune Publishing, two people close to the company said Monday. Pearlstine said he invited Kirk to stay in another capacity, but Kirk declined. "It's unfortunate but I understand that new ownership wants to go in a different direction,” Kirk said. “I’ve had a terrific but short run…. We've done some great work, I'm happy about that.” The newsroom took on a party atmosphere throughout Monday. Midafternoon, more than 100 journalists toasted the newspaper's new era in front of a banner with three crossed-out Tronc logos. Amid the festive sounds of champagne bottles being uncorked, Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime Metro reporter Bettina Boxall described the paper's nearly two-decade-long Chicago ownership as the “20-year war.” “Here’s to the toughest newsroom in the whole business. Here’s to the Los Angeles Times,” Boxall said as the newsroom erupted in cheers. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531517148588-DV75RHTZ3J5TH40K8Y1Y/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.25.30+PM.png media - Propaganda Expert Analyzes Trump's Video to Kim Jong Un Kevin Kosar, a propaganda expert, gives his analysis of the video President Trump had made for his summit with Kim Jong Un. Watch Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531517292332-Z98MHD87W4VS6KSCJ5SL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.27.53+PM.png media - Reporters Thought This Video Was North Korea Propaganda. It Came From the White House. Reporters crowded into a Singapore auditorium Tuesday, expecting President Trump to walk out and announce the results of his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Suddenly, two huge screens on either side of the empty podium came to life. Soaring music boomed over the speakers, and the reporters were bombarded with a montage portraying North Korea as some sort of paradise. Golden sunrises, gleaming skylines and high-speed trains. Children skipping through Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang. North Korean flags fluttering between images of Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal and the Lincoln Memorial. In a split-screen shot, Kim Jong Un waved to an adoring crowd while President Trump stood beside him with his thumb in the air. The pair appeared over and over again, like running mates in a campaign video. The film went on like this for more than four minutes, with brief interludes of missiles, soldiers and warships interrupting the pageantry. Some journalists, unable to understand the Korean-language narration, assumed they were watching one of Pyongyang’s infamous propaganda films. “What country are we in?” asked a reporter from the filing center. But then the video looped, playing this time in English. And then Trump walked onto the stage and confirmed what some had already realized. The film was not North Korean propaganda. It had been made in America, by or on the orders of his White House, for the benefit of Kim. “I hope you liked it,” Trump told the reporters. “I thought it was good. I thought it was interesting enough to show. ... And I think he loved it.” The crowd sounded skeptical. Some wondered if Trump had not, in fact, just provided U.S.-sanctioned propaganda to one of the country’s oldest adversaries. But as the president explained it, the video was more like an elevator pitch. It was the type of glitzy production that Trump might have once used to persuade investors to finance his hotels, and now hoped could persuade one of the most repressive regimes in the world to disarm its nuclear weapons and end nearly 70 years of international isolation and militant hostility to the United States. On Tuesday evening, Trump tweeted a link to the video, for all to see. The nearly five-minute movie even has its own Hollywood-style vanity logo: “A Destiny Pictures Production,” though a film company by the same name in Los Angeles denied any involvement in making it, and the White House has not yet responded to questions about it. “Of those alive today, only a small number will leave a lasting impact,” the narrator said near the beginning, as alternating shots of Trump, Kim and North Korean pageantry flashed on the screen. “And only a very few will make decisions or take actions to renew their homeland, or change the course of history.” The message was clear: Kim had a decision to make. Then the film progressed from grim black-and-white shots of the United States’s 1950s-era war with North Korea into a montage of rose-colored parades and gold-tinted clouds. “The past doesn’t have to be the future,” the narrator said. “What if a people that share a common and rich heritage can find a common future?” The same technique repeated even more dramatically a minute later in the film, when the footage seemed to melt into a horror montage of war planes and missiles bearing down on North Korean cities — much like the apocalyptic propaganda videos Pyongyang had produced just a few months ago, when Kim and Trump sounded as if they were on the brink of nuclear war. But in Trump’s film, the destruction rewound itself. The missiles flew back into to their launchers, and a science fiction-like version of North Korea took its place — one of crane-dotted skylines, crowded highways, computerized factories and drones, all presided over by a waving, grinning Kim, accompanied always by Trump. “Two men; two leaders; one destiny.” “You can have medical breakthroughs, an abundance of resources, innovative technology and new discoveries,” the narrator said, the footage more and more resembling a Hollywood movie trailer as it built to its finale: “Featuring President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un in a meeting to remake history,” the narrator concluded, as Korean words flashed on a black background: “It is going to become a reality?” The reporters had many questions. “Do you now see Kim Jong Un as an equal?” asked a Time magazine correspondent. “In what way?” Trump asked. “You just showed a video that showed you and Kim Jong Un on equal footing, and discussing the future of the country.” The president may have misunderstood the question, as he referred in his answer to his closed-door talks and a few carefully negotiated photo ops with Kim — not the U.S.-made video that presented the totalitarian autocrat as a hero. “If I have to say I’m sitting on a stage with Chairman Kim and that gets us to save 30 million lives — it could be more than that — I’m willing to sit on a stage, I’m willing to travel to Singapore, very proudly,” Trump said. “Are you concerned the video you just showed could be used by Kim as propaganda, to show him as ... ” Trump cut the question off. “No, I’m not concerned at all. We can use that video for other countries.” The president was more talkative when discussing how Kim had reacted to the video, which Trump had presumably played for him during a brief, private meeting hours earlier. “We didn’t have a big screen like you have the luxury of having,” Trump said. “We didn’t need it, because we had it on cassette, uh, an iPad. “And they played it. About eight of their representatives were watching it, and I thought they were fascinated by it. I thought it was well done. I showed it to you because that’s the future. I mean, that could very well be the future. And the other alternative is just not a very good alternative. It’s just not good.” International reviews of the video were decidedly mixed. “Schlocky” — Vanity Fair. “Odd.” — The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “One observer dismissed it as ‘a word salad topped with gratuitous appeasement of a monstrous regime,’ " the South China Morning Post reported. The Daily Mail noted that as the narrator described North Korea’s glorious future of technology and international investment, the video showed stock footage of the Miami Beach shoreline, not far from a Trump-owned hotel. The Spectator called the whole sequence “real estate politik” — which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “The text reads like some godawful martial-arts movie trailer crossed with a corporate advertisement for an ambitious construction project,” Freddy Gray wrote for the British newspaper. “But clearly, in some peculiar way, it works.” The president acknowledged that some of the film’s imagery may seem far-fetched. North Korea is mired in poverty, internationally isolated, and has been mismanaged for decades by a family of dictators — Kim, his father and grandfather. “That was done at the highest level of future development,” Trump told the reporters in Singapore, as if he had just offered Kim a multitiered vacation package. “I told him, you may not want this. You may want to do a much smaller version. ... You may not want that, with the trains and everything.” He waved his hands. “You know, with super everything, to the top. It’s going to be up to them." And then, in his usual style, Trump was thinking out loud about the “great condos” that might one day be built on the “great beaches” of North Korea. “I explained it,” he said. “You could have the best hotels in the world. Think of it from the real estate perspective.” As the screens above Trump emphasized, he certainly had. Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531517572178-4KDXE69397YSCBEAS8MO/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.32.35+PM.png media - L.A. Digital Media Firm Attn: Expands From Bite-Sized Videos To TV Specials After the February high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., digital media company Attn: teamed with ABC News and Freeform to air an hourlong documentary that followed the teen survivors as "they turned their unimaginable grief and fear into action during the weeks after the attack." "For Our Lives: Parkland" included coverage of national walkouts and protests as well as explainers that broke down complex topics such as gun laws and semiautomatic weapons into bite-sized segments. The special, which aired last month, represented a big step for the L.A.-based start-up known for popular online videos that usually explore social and political themes in under three minutes. Following the motto of "content everywhere," Attn: is turning its social media model into serialized content and hourlong TV specials with major networks. Its short videos draw 500 million views a month across various platforms, making it attractive to networks and studios eager to reach younger viewers who are bypassing cable TV and increasingly turning to their phones for entertainment and news. "Our biggest competitive advantage is we have a built-in audience," said Matthew Segal, co-founder of Attn:. "We can prove the efficacy of our formats first, and then, when we're talking to a network, we're able to show that it already works." To handle the growing volume of TV work, Attn: recently moved out of its cramped offices on Melrose to a 15,500-square-foot spread on Hollywood's Seward Street. The company, which has 130 employees, plans to hire 100 more workers in the next year. Attn: — the unusual name is a play on the abbreviated form of "attention" — was founded by Matthew Segal and Jarrett Moreno in 2014. The pair previously ran OurTime.org, a nonprofit organization focused on registering young Americans to vote. "When we asked people the biggest reason they didn't vote, they always said they didn't understand why they should," Segal, 32, said. "We decided we could have a bigger impact through media and storytelling." Though they eschew political alignment, progressive ideals are in their DNA. One of Attn:'s videos, "Dads and moms should share parenting roles," questions gender responsibilities in under two minutes. "Toilet paper isn't our only option" makes a case for conservation in 74 seconds. Combined, those videos boast more than 100 million views on Facebook. The messages are wrapped in accessible packages of animation, entertainment and celebrity appearances. One video features Snoop Dogg rolling a blunt as he says, "If you want your marijuana to be legal, then you got to vote in this election." Attn: aims to catch people in their transitional moments — on a bus or waiting in line for coffee — and also when they sit to watch television. The company raised around $24 million through two rounds of fundraising, with principal investors including Evolution Media Capital, Marc Rowan, Paul Wachter and Main Street Advisors. The new Hollywood headquarters has all the makings of a "cool" company. In one hallway, a wooden bookshelf rotates to reveal a secret speakeasy lounge. An orange slide offers an alternative to the stairs. The extra space is needed to handle upcoming TV projects. The company is developing an animated series with Ellen DeGeneres that explores cultural issues of the day. The series will be featured on DeGeneres' talk show in addition to Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Also in the works is a scripted series with YouTuber and comedian Lilly Singh that uses sketch comedy to examine topical themes. And Paramount Television is working with Attn: to turn its popular "America Versus" web series, which compares political, social and cultural differences between the U.S. and other countries, into a TV show. The 60 or so videos in the series — ranging from Sweden's trash system to comparisons of public restrooms in the U.S. and Japan — have drawn around 800 million views over the last 18 months and caught the eye of Paramount Television President Amy Powell. "I loved the idea of the global conversation being truly global and looking at how we as Americans compare and contrast to the rest of the world," Powell said. "This show attacks that head on." Powell was drawn to the show's authentic storytellers and its built-in audience, a demographic that she says is largely underserved. "As we look at the show's specific reach, it's young and social by nature," Powell said. "They don't want to be spoken down to. They want to be served information that's real and authentic, and Attn: has proven they're capable of doing that." The average American adult reportedly spends 10 hours a day looking at a screen, which means the market is ever-expanding — as is the competition. Websites like NowThis and Upworthy have developed strong social media followings. Bigger name bands such as BuzzFeed and Vice have similarly developed production deals and, in the case of the latter, a cable channel. Executives declined to disclose their finances but said Attn: is close to being profitable and that revenue has grown 200% annually since 2016. About 40% of its revenue comes from branded content, 30% from licensing its original content and 30% from consulting services. "We'd like for original content to take up a bigger percentage, but we don't want it to overpower the others," said Moreno, 31. "We have a diversified business model and plan to stay well-rounded." He and Segal acknowledge the challenge of translating short videos into longer programming. However, they're quick to argue that making a 90-second video can sometimes be just as daunting as a 20-minute piece. "Starting with short form made us better storytellers because it made us selective about what entertains people," Segal said. "Now, we have to figure out what pulls them in and holds their attention for longer periods of time." Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531517656721-QSNYASML87739LRW90C8/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.34.01+PM.png media - California Senate Votes to Restore Net Neutrality The California Senate voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that would reinstate the net neutrality regulations repealed by the Federal Communications Commission in December. The bill, S.B. 822, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), was introduced in March and passed through three committees, all along party-lines. The bill was approved 23–12 and will now head to the state Assembly. “Under President Obama, our country was moving in the right direction on guaranteeing an open internet, but the Trump-led FCC pulled the rug out from under the American people by repealing net neutrality protections,” Wiener said in a statement last month after the bill passed its final committee vote. After the FCC moved to eliminate net neutrality rules, states began implementing their own measures. In January, over 20 attorneys general sued the commission before the order was even published. Some governors attempted to use executive orders, while others worked with legislators. California’s bill to restore protections in the state is one of the toughest responses to the FCC’s rollback. The bill would reinstate rules similar to those in the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. It forbids ISPs from throttling or blocking online content and requires them to treat all internet traffic equally. But the bill also takes the original rules further by specifically banning providers from participating in some types of “zero-rating” programs, in which certain favored content doesn’t contribute to monthly data caps. The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a statement on Tuesday that called the bill “a gold standard for states looking to protect net neutrality.” Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who spearheaded the Obama-era regulations, supports the bill. In March, he wrote a letter to the California Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee with two other former chairmen approving of the measure. “These protections are essential to our economy and democracy. SB 822 steps in to protect Californians and their economy by comprehensively restoring the protections put in place in the 2015 net neutrality order,” the chairmen said. If the bill goes on to pass in the Assembly, providers will no longer be able to obtain government contracts in the state of California without obeying the regulations. “A GOLD STANDARD” After receiving final approval last month from the Office of Management and Budget, the federal net neutrality rules are set to end on June 11th, leaving states to legislate their own protections. California would be the third state to pass a net neutrality law, following Washington and Oregon. “In California, we can lead the effort to clean up this mess and implement comprehensive, thorough internet protections that put California internet users and consumers first,” Wiener said. Learn more at The Verge https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531517739024-XBWSK2FK57D14VNMOXBE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.35.24+PM.png media - The Hidden Costs of Losing Your City's Newspaper When local newspapers shut their doors, communities lose out. People and their stories can’t find coverage. Politicos take liberties when it’s nobody’s job to hold them accountable. What the public doesn’t know winds up hurting them. The city feels poorer, politically and culturally. According to a new working paper, local news deserts lose out financially, too. Cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals, say researchers who tracked the decline of local news outlets between 1996 and 2015. Disruptions in local news coverage are soon followed by higher long-term borrowing costs for cities. Costs for bonds can rise as much as 11 basis points after the closure of a local newspaper—a finding that can’t be attributed to other underlying economic conditions, the authors say. Those civic watchdogs make a difference to the bottom line. Paul Gao, an associate professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame and one of the paper’s authors, was inspired to look into the issue after an episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” about the news industry. “He was focused on two things: consolidation of national news media and closure of local news media. John Oliver’s show really gave us the prompt for the phenomenon, and we started thinking about it from an economist’s point of view.” The survey covers some 1,596 English-language newspapers serving 1,266 counties in the U.S. over the study period. This paper excludes counties without any daily local newspaper (1,863 in all). Across the relevant counties, the study finds 296 newspaper “exits”—which refers to a local paper closing down or being absorbed by another outlet, or publishing fewer than four days a week, or merging to form a new newspaper. Depressingly, the paper finds that news shrinkage is a nationwide phenomenon. Discounting the media-rich counties, which could absorb the hit of a lost daily—as well as the places that added a newspaper (they exist!)—a total of 204 counties saw a decrease in local coverage to two or fewer daily newspapers. By examining local municipal bond data for these counties, the researchers were able to suss out a relationship between local newspaper closures and public finance outcomes. In the three years following a newspaper closure, the costs for municipal bonds and revenue bonds increased for these cities. That’s likely the result of losing the investigative services those ink-stained wretches once provided. “You can actually see the financial consequences that have to be borne by local citizens as a result of newspaper closures.” “There are already papers that show that there are political consequences, or political outcomes, when local newspapers close,” says co-author Chang Lee, assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But that’s not really a direct impact on local residents. We wanted to show that, if you look at the municipal bond market, you can actually see the financial consequences that have to be borne by local citizens as a result of newspaper closures.” Think of a municipal bond’s offering yield as the interest rate that municipalities pay for borrowing money in the bond market, Gao says. High offering yields mean that a city or county has to promise to pay more in coupons (semiannual payments to bondholders) or more principal for whatever the city is borrowing. Secondary yields, on the other hand, are the interest rates for bonds as they trade in the market: more of a proxy or indicated rate of a city’s financial wellbeing. Without investigative daily reporters around to call bullshit on city hall, three years after a newspaper closes, that city or county’s municipal bond offering yields increased on average by 5.5 basis points, while bond yields in the secondary market increased by 6.4 basis points—statistically significant effects. Rate hikes are even more pronounced for revenue bonds, and they run higher all around in states with low internet usage and poor governance. Here’s a tidy explanation from the paper for the relationship between hard-nosed local reporters and revenue bonds: Revenue bonds are commonly issued to finance local projects such as schools and hospitals, and are backed by the revenues generated by those projects. General obligation bonds, on the other hand, are typically used to finance public works projects such as roadways and parks, and are backed by local taxes and fees. Revenue bonds should be subject to greater scrutiny because of the free cash flows that those projects generate, and these bonds are rarely regulated by the state government. A local newspaper provides an ideal monitoring agent for these revenue-generating projects, as mismanaged projects can be exposed by investigative reporters employed by the local newspaper. When a newspaper closes, this monitoring mechanism also ceases to exist, leading to a greater risk that the cash flows generated by these projects will be mismanaged. The Rocky Mountain News, for example, won four Pulitzer Prizes in the 2000s before it closed at the end of that decade. The paper was known for its investigative reporting, especially with regard to local government deals surrounding the Denver International Airport. Three years after that paper shuttered, the median yield spread for new local municipal bonds increased by 5.3 basis points. In the meantime, the Denver Post has been subject to devastating budget cuts. One key task for the researchers was to establish that higher bond costs were the result of a decline in local investigative reporting—and not, say, crumbling economic conditions. They addressed this concern in a number of ways. First, to keep things local, they excluded state bonds from their analysis. Second, in order to compare apples with apples, they looked at the difference in borrowing costs between a county that lost its fishwrap with a similarly sized and scaled neighboring county—a control—that didn’t. “There could be an underlying economic state that drives both variables, the newspaper closure and borrowing costs,” says Dermot Murphy, the paper’s third author, also at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “That’s where we have to get a little bit more sophisticated with our tests, to establish the causal connection from newspaper closures to borrowing costs.” Gao, Lee, and Murphy also looked at Craigslist as an indicator. A harbinger of doom for newsprint media, Craigslist’s arrival in a city could spell disaster for smaller regional newspapers, as residents moved from selling their junk or searching for roommates in paid classifieds to online (and other advertisers left with them). For counties within 30 miles of a city where Craigslist opened up shop, the probability of newspaper closure increased by 9.6 percent. Similarly, outside the central Craigslist hubs (think Boston or San Francisco), municipal bond costs rose, too. The team presented its findings at the Society for Financial Studies Cavalcade at Yale University earlier in May, and it’s the subject of a discussion at the Brookings Institution in July. (The paper has yet to be published.) It joins a growing body of research examining the wide-ranging impacts of local-news desertification, from heightened susceptibility to post-truth politics to alarming gaps in our national surveillance of infectious diseases. >For fans of local newspapers, the outlook isn’t rosy. As important as local investigative reporting may be to local capital markets, the researchers don’t expect local newspapers to rebound on their own—even though it might cost taxpayers a lot more in the long run to lose a local daily than it would to subscribe to one. “Our analysis suggests that newspaper companies, or the information they provide, is a public good and it’s worth providing,” Lee says. “But if we don’t finance it, no one will produce it.” Learn more at City Lab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531517817171-BX8OO8TH7W8G9R4RQ61H/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.36.40+PM.png media - We Read Every One of the 3,517 Facebook Ads Bought by Russians. Here's What We Found. The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race. The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election. While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community. The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election. USA TODAY NETWORK reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post. Among the findings: Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions — a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device. At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups. Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related spots rose to 400. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017. Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush. Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who published some of the first scientific analysis of social media influence campaigns during the election, said the ads show that the Russians are attempting to destabilize Western Democracy by targeting extreme identity groups. “Effective polarization can happen when you’re promoting the idea that, ‘I like my group, but I don’t like the other group’ and pushing distance between the two extreme sides,” Kim said. “And we know the Russians targeted extremes and then came back with different negative messages that might not be aimed at converting voters, but suppressing turnout and undermining the democratic process.” The most prominent ad — with 1.3 million impressions and 73,000 clicks — illustrates how the influence campaign was executed. A Facebook page called “Back the Badge” landed on Oct. 19, 2016, following a summer that saw more than 100 Black Lives Matter protests, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests in August and protests over the police shootings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa and Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte. The information analyzed by the USA TODAY NETWORK shows the Internet Research Agency paid 110,058 rubles, or $1,785, for the Facebook spot. It targeted 20- to 65-year-olds interested in law enforcement who had already liked pages such as “The Thin Blue,” “Police Wives Unite” and the “Officer Down Memorial Page.” The very next day, the influence operation paid for an ad depicting two black brothers handcuffed in Colorado for “driving while black.” That ad targeted people interested in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X and black history. Within minutes, the Russian company targeted the same group with an ad that said “police brutality has been the most recurring issue over the last several years.” USC professor Nick Cull, author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency, says the ad campaign is reminiscent of tactics employed during the Soviet era. His book explored how the KGB tried to disrupt the Los Angeles Olympics by faking propaganda from the KKK threatening black athletes. "Soviet news media always played up U.S. racism, exaggerating the levels of hatred even beyond the horrific levels of the reality in the 1950s," Cull wrote in an email. "It was one reason Eisenhower decided to move on civil rights." Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the minority leader of the House Intelligence Committee, said he made the ads available to the public so that academics could study both the intention and breadth of the targeting. “These ads broadly sought to pit one American against another by exploiting faults in our society or race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other deeply cynical thoughts,” Schiff said in an interview with USA TODAY NETWORK. “Americans should take away that the Russians perceive these divisions as vulnerabilities and to a degree can be exploited by a sophisticated campaign.” A federal grand jury in February indicted 13 individuals accused of working for the Internet Research Agency to produce the ads. The charges related to meddling in the 2016 election, the only election interference case Mueller's office has filed so far. The indictment included emails from the Russian company's employees that left no doubt that their objectives were “to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” This effort “included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton,” the indictment states. Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined comment on the ads this week. An attorney for two of the companies indicted by Mueller did not respond to a request for comment. One of the companies, Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, entered a not-guilty plea on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. The USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found that Russians effort first used a raft of viral memes referencing banal American pop culture, like Spongebob Squarepants and Pokémon, apparently to build support behind legitimate-looking connections before deploying the racially tinged spots. Hundreds of ads mixed race and policing, with many mimicking Black Lives Matter activists that melded real news events with accusations of abuse by white officers. That type of subversion only hurts legitimate efforts to calm tensions over policing and hate crimes, said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. Johnson said the Russian ads likely helped to fuel “hateful, xenophobic rhetoric” throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. “When you’re stoking fear to get a negative action directed at a targeted population based on race, and when a foreign nation uses that fear to subvert and undermine democracy, that’s become a serious problem,” Johnson said. “It’s a warning for technology companies and corporations that private citizens have entrusted with their privacy to receive factual information.” It’s hard to measure precise impact of the campaign targeting police and their families, but it certainly didn’t help, said Jim Pasco, senior adviser to the president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union. "There is absolutely no doubt that these ad placements further inflamed tensions in already volatile and already sensitive situations at critical times," Pasco said. The tech tools have changed, but the themes of disruption have not, said Bret Schafer of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks activity of Russia-linked social media bots and trolls. Social media is an effective way to target wedge issues because of the ability to micro-target ads, sending messages to confederate flag supporters at the same time as Black Lives Matter sympathizers to stoke divisions, he said. “They are stirring up the racial pot, while then trying to connect with minority groups and saying, 'Look at how racist the content is online.' They don’t really have to do that because the content online is racist without the Russians, to be very clear,” Schafer said. He added that it's hard to measure how effective the campaigns were in general. Some of the ads "completely bombed," based on interactions. But stoking racial fears and tensions was often effective. "Some of the most racist ads put out got the highest levels of engagement,” Schafer said. “It seems that when their messaging went to the extreme on some of these issues, it actually landed the hardest punch. “If they hit 10% of the time, it's still effective for them,” Schafer said. Learn more at USA Today https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531518370993-CJ0L4FSQL3LA3BPMPUDE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.45.50+PM.png media - The Era of Fake Video Begins In a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world the carnal figures look like those actresses, and the faces in the videos are indeed their own. Everything south of the neck, however, belongs to different women. An artificial intelligence has almost seamlessly stitched the familiar visages into pornographic scenes, one face swapped for another. The genre is one of the cruelest, most invasive forms of identity theft invented in the internet era. At the core of the cruelty is the acuity of the technology: A casual observer can’t easily detect the hoax. This development, which has been the subject of much hand-wringing in the tech press, is the work of a programmer who goes by the nom de hack “deepfakes.” And it is merely a beta version of a much more ambitious project. One of deepfakes’s compatriots told Vice’s Motherboard site in January that he intends to democratize this work. He wants to refine the process, further automating it, which would allow anyone to transpose the disembodied head of a crush or an ex or a co-worker into an extant pornographic clip with just a few simple steps. No technical knowledge would be required. And because academic and commercial labs are developing even more-sophisticated tools for non-pornographic purposes—algorithms that map facial expressions and mimic voices with precision—the sordid fakes will soon acquire even greater verisimilitude. The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell. Mass manipulation, from clickbait to Russian bots to the addictive trickery that governs Facebook’s News Feed, is the currency of the medium. It has always been a place where identity is terrifyingly slippery, where anonymity breeds coarseness and confusion, where crooks can filch the very contours of selfhood. In this respect, the rise of deepfakes is the culmination of the internet’s history to date—and probably only a low-grade version of what’s to come. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that reality is one of the few words that means nothing without quotation marks. He was sardonically making a basic point about relative perceptions: When you and I look at the same object, how do you really know that we see the same thing? Still, institutions (media, government, academia) have helped people coalesce around a consensus—rooted in a faith in reason and empiricism—about how to describe the world, albeit a fragile consensus that has been unraveling in recent years. Social media have helped bring on a new era, enabling individuated encounters with the news that confirm biases and sieve out contravening facts. The current president has further hastened the arrival of a world beyond truth, providing the imprimatur of the highest office to falsehood and conspiracy. But soon this may seem an age of innocence. We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us. Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality. We cling to reality today, crave it even. We still very much live in Abraham Zapruder’s world. That is, we venerate the sort of raw footage exemplified by the 8 mm home movie of John F. Kennedy’s assassination that the Dallas clothier captured by happenstance. Unedited video has acquired an outsize authority in our culture. That’s because the public has developed a blinding, irrational cynicism toward reporting and other material that the media have handled and processed—an overreaction to a century of advertising, propaganda, and hyperbolic TV news. The essayist David Shields calls our voraciousness for the unvarnished “reality hunger.” Scandalous behavior stirs mass outrage most reliably when it is “caught on tape.” Such video has played a decisive role in shaping the past two U.S. presidential elections. In 2012, a bartender at a Florida fund-raiser for Mitt Romney surreptitiously hit record on his camera while the candidate denounced “47 percent” of Americans—Obama supporters all—as enfeebled dependents of the federal government. A strong case can be made that this furtively captured clip doomed his chance of becoming president. The remarks almost certainly would not have registered with such force if they’d merely been scribbled down and written up by a reporter. The video—with its indirect camera angle and clink of ambient cutlery and waiters passing by with folded napkins—was far more potent. All of its trappings testified to its unassailable origins. Donald Trump, improbably, recovered from the Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women, but that tape aroused the public’s passions and conscience like nothing else in the 2016 presidential race. Video has likewise provided the proximate trigger for many other recent social conflagrations. It took extended surveillance footage of the NFL running back Ray Rice dragging his unconscious wife from a hotel elevator to elicit a meaningful response to domestic violence from the league, despite a long history of abuse by players. Then there was the 2016 killing of Philando Castile by a Minnesota police officer, streamed to Facebook by his girlfriend. All the reports in the world, no matter the overwhelming statistics and shattering anecdotes, had failed to provoke outrage over police brutality. But the terrifying broadcast of his animalistic demise in his Oldsmobile rumbled the public and led politicians, and even a few hard-line conservative commentators, to finally acknowledge the sort of abuse they had long neglected. That all takes us to the nub of the problem. It’s natural to trust one’s own senses, to believe what one sees—a hardwired tendency that the coming age of manipulated video will exploit. Consider recent flash points in what the University of Michigan’s Aviv Ovadya calls the “infopocalypse”—and imagine just how much worse they would have been with manipulated video. Take Pizzagate, and then add concocted footage of John Podesta leering at a child, or worse. Falsehoods will suddenly acquire a whole new, explosive emotional intensity. But the problem isn’t just the proliferation of falsehoods. Fabricated videos will create new and understandable suspicions about everything we watch. Politicians and publicists will exploit those doubts. When captured in a moment of wrongdoing, a culprit will simply declare the visual evidence a malicious concoction. The president, reportedly, has already pioneered this tactic: Even though he initially conceded the authenticity of the Access Hollywood video, he now privately casts doubt on whether the voice on the tape is his own. In other words, manipulated video will ultimately destroy faith in our strongest remaining tether to the idea of common reality. As Ian Goodfellow, a scientist at Google, told MIT Technology Review, “It’s been a little bit of a fluke, historically, that we’re able to rely on videos as evidence that something really happened.” The collapse of reality isn’t an unintended consequence of artificial intelligence. It’s long been an objective—or at least a dalliance—of some of technology’s most storied architects. In many ways, Silicon Valley’s narrative begins in the early 1960s with the International Foundation for Advanced Study, not far from the legendary engineering labs clumped around Stanford. The foundation specialized in experiments with LSD. Some of the techies working in the neighborhood couldn’t resist taking a mind-bending trip themselves, undoubtedly in the name of science. These developers wanted to create machines that could transform consciousness in much the same way that drugs did. Computers would also rip a hole in reality, leading humanity away from the quotidian, gray-flannel banality of Leave It to Beaver America and toward a far groovier, more holistic state of mind. Steve Jobs described LSD as “one of the two or three most important” experiences of his life. Fake-but-realistic video clips are not the end point of the flight from reality that technologists would have us take. The apotheosis of this vision is virtual reality. VR’s fundamental purpose is to create a comprehensive illusion of being in another place. With its goggles and gloves, it sets out to trick our senses and subvert our perceptions. Video games began the process of transporting players into an alternate world, injecting them into another narrative. But while games can be quite addictive, they aren’t yet fully immersive. VR has the potential to more completely transport—we will see what our avatars see and feel what they feel. Several decades ago, after giving the nascent technology a try, the psychedelic pamphleteer Timothy Leary reportedly called it “the new LSD.” Life could be more interesting in virtual realities as the technology emerges from its infancy; the possibilities for creation might be extended and enhanced in wondrous ways. But if the hype around VR eventually pans out, then, like the personal computer or social media, it will grow into a massive industry, intent on addicting consumers for the sake of its own profit, and possibly dominated by just one or two exceptionally powerful companies. (Facebook’s investments in VR, with its purchase of the start-up Oculus, is hardly reassuring.) The ability to manipulate consumers will grow because VR definitionally creates confusion about what is real. Designers of VR have described some consumers as having such strong emotional responses to a terrifying experience that they rip off those chunky goggles to escape. Studies have already shown how VR can be used to influence the behavior of users after they return to the physical world, making them either more or less inclined to altruistic behaviors. Researchers in Germany who have attempted to codify ethics for VR have warned that its “comprehensive character” introduces “opportunities for new and especially powerful forms of both mental and behavioral manipulation, especially when commercial, political, religious, or governmental interests are behind the creation and maintenance of the virtual worlds.” As the VR pioneer Jaron Lanier writes in his recently published memoir, “Never has a medium been so potent for beauty and so vulnerable to creepiness. Virtual reality will test us. It will amplify our character more than other media ever have.” Perhaps society will find ways to cope with these changes. Maybe we’ll learn the skepticism required to navigate them. Thus far, however, human beings have displayed a near-infinite susceptibility to getting duped and conned—falling easily into worlds congenial to their own beliefs or self-image, regardless of how eccentric or flat-out wrong those beliefs may be. Governments have been slow to respond to the social challenges that new technologies create, and might rather avoid this one. The question of deciding what constitutes reality isn’t just epistemological; it is political and would involve declaring certain deeply held beliefs specious. Few individuals will have the time or perhaps the capacity to sort elaborate fabulation from truth. Our best hope may be outsourcing the problem, restoring cultural authority to trusted validators with training and knowledge: newspapers, universities. Perhaps big technology companies will understand this crisis and assume this role, too. Since they control the most-important access points to news and information, they could most easily squash manipulated videos, for instance. But to play this role, they would have to accept certain responsibilities that they have so far largely resisted. In 2016, as Russia used Facebook to influence the American presidential election, Elon Musk confessed his understanding of human life. He talked about a theory, derived from an Oxford philosopher, that is fashionable in his milieu. The idea holds that we’re actually living in a computer simulation, as if we’re already characters in a science-fiction movie or a video game. He told a conference, “The odds that we’re in ‘base reality’ is one in billions.” If the leaders of the industry that presides over our information and hopes to shape our future can’t even concede the existence of reality, then we have little hope of salvaging it. Learn more at The Atlantic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531518493027-Y0COXF93OY76K5QBXMKS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.47.45+PM.png media - As Malaysia Moves to Ban ‘Fake News,’ Worries About Who Decides the Truth KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — In highway billboards and radio announcements, the government of Malaysia is warning of a new enemy: “fake news.” On Monday, the lower house of Parliament passed a bill outlawing fake news, the first measure of its kind in the world. The proposal, which allows for up to six years in prison for publishing or circulating misleading information, is expected to pass the Senate this week and to come into effect soon after. The legislation would punish not only those who are behind fake news but also anyone who maliciously spreads such material. Online service providers would be responsible for third-party content, and anyone could lodge a complaint. As long as Malaysia or Malaysians are affected, fake news generated outside the country is also subject to prosecution. What qualifies as fake news, however, is ill defined. Ultimately, the government would be given broad latitude to decide what constitutes fact in Malaysia. “Fake news has become a global phenomenon, but Malaysia is at the tip of the spear in trying to fight it with an anti-fake news law,” said Fadhlullah Suhaimi Abdul Malek, a senior official with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission. “When the American president made ‘fake news’ into a buzzword, the world woke up.” But members of Malaysia’s political opposition say the legislation is intended to stifle free speech ahead of elections that are widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Najib Razak, who has been tainted by a scandal involving billions of dollars that were diverted from Malaysia’s state investment fund. “Instead of a proper investigation into what happened, we have a ministry of truth being created,” said Nurul Izzah Anwar, a lawmaker from the People’s Justice Party and the daughter of the jailed opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. Learn more at the New York Times https://civicas.net/economics-1 daily 0.75 2018-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532621956538-XRSSYC71Z8WHZLDDLSSW/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.18.45+AM.png economics - Developer Tests a New Way to Fund Housing for the Homeless: Private Financing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532621956538-XRSSYC71Z8WHZLDDLSSW/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.18.45+AM.png economics - Developer Tests a New Way to Fund Housing for the Homeless: Private Financing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531868618170-680V6WF0OFCZKI7S6XO1/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.03.11+PM.png economics - The $247 Trillion Global Debt Bomb https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416397837-OVWX26QUTZQBDHFMNBRJ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.26.15+AM.png economics - The Rise of ‘Urban Tech’ The terms high-tech and venture capital conjure images of industries such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. But the fact of the matter is that cities and urbanism represent the biggest new tech sector of all, what I like to call “urban tech.” Some of the most important tech companies of the past decade essentially work on and in cities. Uber and Airbnb are probably the best-known. They are two of the select companies that tech industry analyst Scott Galloway believes may be able to join or compete with the “Big Four” at the upper reaches of the tech stratosphere: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook. But they are far from the whole ball game. Uber, along with Lyft, has defined the huge space of urban mobility, which now includes a raft of other companies, including numerous bike- and scooter-sharing startups, such as Lime and Bird. Airbnb, of course, helped to define the room-sharing market. Then there is WeWork, which dominates co-working and has emerged as one of the most powerful real estate companies in the world. Waze and other mapping startups provide information about how a city is organized, and real-time updates on its functioning. There is a multitude of companies operating in fields like real estate analytics, construction tech, and “smart” infrastructure (the latter group includes Spot Hero, a parking-tech company, and Enevo, a Finnish company that creates monitoring systems for urban waste). There is also a huge market in delivery startups, such as Instacart, Deliveroo (based in the U.K.), and Delivery Hero (based in Germany). Urban-tech startups are some of the very largest venture-capital investments. Uber has attracted some $16 billion in venture capital, and Lyft, Airbnb, and WeWork have drawn between $4 and $5 billion each. Compare this to Twitter, the fantastically popular social media company, which secured $1.5 billion in VC funding. A number of companies are explicitly addressing city-building and the urban tech space broadly. Perhaps the best known of these is Sidewalk Labs, the Alphabet (or Google) spinoff, which aims to build a new tech-enabled neighborhood on Toronto’s waterfront. Y Combinator, the very successful Silicon Valley accelerator created by venture capitalist Paul Graham, has also developed an interest in cities and urbanism with its New Cities program. UrbanUS is a fund that supports urban-tech startups and recently launched the accelerator URBAN-X. And the private-equity investor Jeff Vinik has created an urban-tech vertical at his venture-capital investment arm, Dreamit Ventures. To get a handle on the scale and scope of the urban-tech space, Patrick Adler, my colleague at the Martin Prosperity Institute, and I used data from CB Insights on ventures that had both received investment during the period 2016-2018 and disclosed the amount. We defined urban tech as encompassing six broad industry sectors: co-living and co-working; mobility; delivery; smart cities; construction tech; and real estate tech. This is the first phase of a much larger project. Although our analysis remains provisional, we believe it generates some illustrative findings and trends. Urban-tech investment totaled more than $75 billion over this three-year period, representing roughly 17 percent of all global venture-capital investment. Between 2016 and 2017, urban-tech investment more than doubled—from less than $20 billion to $44 billion—as its share of global venture investment surged from 13 percent to 22 percent. Urban tech may well be the largest sector for venture capital investment, attracting considerably more funding than pharma and biotech ($16 billion in 2017) or artificial intelligence ($12 billion in 2017). The largest sector of urban tech is mobile tech, which includes behemoths like Uber, Lyft, and Didi Chuxing, and has generated more than $40 billion in venture investment between 2016 and 2018—more than 60 percent of all urban-tech investment. The United States is the dominant player in urban tech, with more than 45 percent of all venture-capital investment in this sector. China comes next with roughly a third (although China has far fewer urban-tech startups than the U.S., 200 versus nearly 800). Singapore is third, with almost 6 percent of investment, followed by India (4 percent), and the UK and Germany (roughly 2 percent each). South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, France, the Netherlands, and Canada round out the top 10 with about half a percent each. But startups and venture capital are incredibly spiky—geographically clustered in a relatively small number of global cities. The San Francisco Bay Area leads with roughly 30 percent of all global venture-capital investment in urban tech. Beijing follows close behind with 26 percent of funding. New York City is third, with 10 percent, followed by Shanghai, with nearly 7 percent. (That said, San Francisco and New York have produced far more urban-tech startups than Shanghai and Beijing.) Singapore has 6 percent of all investment, trailed by Bangalore, Los Angeles, Berlin, and London, the only other global cities to attract more than 2 percent of global urban-tech investment. Other cities that are generating reasonable numbers of urban-tech startups include Seoul, Chicago, Dubai, Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, Boston, and Toronto, although none of them accounts for more than 1 percent of total investment. This global group of cities that are key players in urban tech suggests that the “rise of the rest” is not occurring inside the United States but outside it, especially in China’s two largest cities. The rise of urban tech reflects the growing role of cities and urbanism in the global economy. Cities have become the basic platforms for global innovation and economic growth, supplanting the corporation as the fundamental organizing unit of the contemporary economy. But in this regard, cities remain terribly inefficient. They are indeed the last great frontier of inefficiency in capitalism. A century or so ago, agriculture underwent a transformation. In 1900, more than half of U.S. workers worked in agriculture. Today, after huge leaps in agricultural technology and management, less than 1 percent of the workforce does. Farms have become incredibly efficient enterprises, with advanced technology and self-driving tractors. Likewise, in 1950, more than half of the American workforce labored in manufacturing. Now only about 5 or 6 percent of the workforce is engaged in a direct production occupation. Factories are highly automated, managed on the principles of lean production, and can run 24-7 with little waste. Contrast that to cities, where offices and homes sit vacant much of the time, where cars sit idle, and where congestion is rampant. The third great economic transformation, which we are going through today, is a shift to a knowledge economy that is concentrated and based on cities. Just as farms and factories of previous epochs were optimized for efficiency, the offices, apartments, cars, and other elements of cities that sit unused much of the time will be adapted for greater productivity. This is the nexus for the rise of urban tech, which is unleashing a new round of creative destruction on cities. Like previous economic transformations, the rise of urban tech and the emergence of the city as the primary platform for economic organization will not be without growing pains. It will be up to urban leaders and the struggles of workers and citizens to channel this transformation in a democratic way, so that it respects the needs of all city dwellers and creates prosperity for all. Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416497321-4K0RTXBF94ISCVQJJAXN/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.28.00+AM.png economics - Hook Local Startups, Not the HQ2 Whale Readers of CityLab have likely seen numerous arguments condemning the competition among North American cities to land the second Amazon headquarters. Urban policy experts are nearly unanimous in their opprobrium for the HQ2 selection process and their skepticism that the “winning” city will reap the rewards of economic growth and job creation that Amazon has promised. (And even if it does, the price tag for accommodating HQ2 may negate or severely diminish any fiscal benefit.) For cities eager to lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth, what are better options? Can any single development gambit generate such a windfall of new jobs? Yes, but it will not happen through a development strategy based on luring outside corporations with taxpayer incentives. Rather, this kind of big bang is far more likely to happen when a homegrown local startup gets acquired or goes public, transforming early employees and investors into millionaires. These beneficiaries can become invaluable mentors and investors for a succeeding generation of local startups; many may use their earnings to become entrepreneurs themselves. A major business acquisition or IPO—not the HQ2 charade—is the kind of jackpot that economic developers should pursue. I have seen how the effects of such a big bang rippled through the Washington, D.C., region, where I live. During the 1990’s AmericaOnline (AOL), then based in Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia, dominated the dial-up consumer internet market. AOL was valued at $125 billion when it merged with Time Warner in 2000, a transaction that made many executives and employees very wealthy. City leaders are wise to stay close to startups that are starting to scale. That merger was not ultimately successful, but the imprimatur of AOL remains visible across D.C.’s business landscape two decades later. Along with several AOL alumni, company CEO Steve Case went on to found Revolution, a Washington, D.C.-based venture firm with hundreds of millions in capital that has made numerous investments into local startups like Optoro. Case also founded Revolution Health, which employed hundreds of people in the early 2000’s, including Tim O’Shaughnessy, the future co-founder of e-coupon company LivingSocial, which at its peak was valued over $1 billion. O’Shaughnessy now makes venture investments as president of DC-based Graham Holdings, while LivingSocial alumni have founded local startups such as Framebridge and Galley. All of this activity loops back to one company: AOL and its merger with Time Warner. Or jump to a city on the other side of the coast: Seattle. In his book The New Geography of Jobs, economist Enrico Moretti notes that in the 1970’s, Seattle was a struggling industrial city whose fortunes were closely tied to that of its major employer, the aerospace firm Boeing, which had downsized dramatically during that decade. But in 1979, the region became the beneficiary of what may have been the most consequential business relocation of all time: Microsoft’s move from Albuquerque to Bellevue at a time when the company employed just a couple dozen people. (Note that Microsoft received no public incentives to induce its move, and I’ve found no evidence that economic development officials took particular note of it). Microsoft thrived in the early days of personal computing, going public in 1986. Since then, its employees have founded a slew of companies that are today at the center of Seattle’s thriving tech scene, from Zillow to Inrix to Vulcan Capital. These sorts of economic big bangs can happen anywhere, not just on the coasts. Just last December, Birmingham-based e-delivery startup Shipt was acquired by Target for $550 million. Shipt was founded by a Birmingham entrepreneur who managed a local team of over 200 and raised capital from Alabama investors—all of whom got a windfall. Birmingham is poised to reap the benefits of the Shipt acquisition for many years to come, including a bevy of new mentors and investors supporting a new generation of startups. So what is the lesson for your town’s economic development boosters? City leaders are wise to stay close to startups that are starting to scale, meeting with them regularly, congratulating them on raising a new round of capital, and solving whatever issues arise regarding regulation, workforce, or infrastructure. Once a company has hundreds of employees, it’s likely that other states will dangle big checks in exchange for relocation. A company whose leaders and employees feel tied to its community is less likely to be tempted to jump ship. And if an incentive battle does break out, the city where the startup is based will enjoy home court advantage, with employees already settled into their homes and commutes and their children enrolled into local schools. Meeting and maintaining relationships with fast-growing startups may seem obvious, but in my experience economic development leaders are often unaware which local companies have raised the most venture capital—an obvious indicator of future growth. Last fall, 238 cities invested countless staff hours putting together proposals for Amazon, hoping to prevail in an economic development competition so intense and expensive it has earned comparisons to the Olympics. Most cities have been quiet about what it cost to draft their HQ2 proposals, but not all. Virginia Beach, for example, spent $100,000, not including staff hours that could have gone toward other projects. But what if cities like Virginia Beach had instead invested those resources into outreach to learn about their five fastest-growing local startups and solve their most pressing challenges? Regulations could have been streamlined, new community college courses created, and zoning requirements tweaked—at a fraction of the cost of a corporate relocation incentive package. And the cities’ time and money would have been much more likely to spark an economic big bang than the frivolous pursuit of HQ2. Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416704395-8N2ZOAK3LKWL8F5LV8ZS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.31.26+AM.png economics - Say Hello to Full Employment This morning, the Labor Department announced that the national unemployment rate ticked up to 4 percent in June for good reasons, as hundreds of thousands more Americans sought work. For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job. That has raised hopes that wage growth might finally begin to pick up, with employers bidding more to attract new workers and offering raises to retain their existing staff. Full employment—that magical economic state, in which everyone who wants work has it, and at a good wage too—finally seems to be near. In much of Iowa, it already is. Out of every 100 people who want a job, 98 or 99 have one. The rate of wage growth has doubled of late, and businesses are scrambling to find workers. “It does feel like things are a little different in the last year,” Elisabeth Buck, the president of the United Way of Central Iowa, told me. “Businesses are getting a little desperate.” In that, Des Moines and the surrounding area stand as an example of what might be coming for the national economy, both good and bad. Full employment has a remarkable way of improving the lives of low-wage workers and drawing new individuals into the labor force. But it also exposes the scars that even a very hot economy is unable to heal. Around the country, and especially in central Iowa, the low unemployment rate has slowly but surely tipped the balance of power away from employers and towards workers, who here in the Hawkeye State have been able to demand higher wages, better working conditions, more generous benefits, training programs, and myriad other perks. “From a per-capita [population] perspective, we are the fastest-growing metro in the entire Midwest,” said Mary Bontrager, an executive at the Greater Des Moines Partnership, a regional economic-development group. “In terms of GDP, we’re outpacing every other Midwestern metropolitan area.” Competition for workers has gone crazy, Joe McConville, who co-owns a popular chain of made-from-scratch pizza restaurants, told me. “At almost every restaurant that I’ve worked at, you always had a stack of applications waiting,” he said. “You’d call somebody up and half the time they’re still looking for an extra job. That’s not happening anymore.” He said he faced a “black hole” in terms of finding more experienced twenty-something employees, and that to compete he has paid out higher wages and added vacation days. More than that, Iowa’s tight labor market has forced employers to offer training, reach out to new populations of workers, and accept applications from workers they might not have before—expanding and up-skilling the labor pool as a whole as a result. “Their attitude really seems to be changing,” said Soneeta Mangra-Dutcher of Central Iowa Works, a workforce-development nonprofit. “They are looking at populations differently, who they should be looking at when they have jobs to fill, or people being screened out for things that really don’t have an effect on the job.” Among those seeing more success getting hired are the formerly incarcerated. When the jobless rate is high, most businesses refuse to look at applications from individuals who have spent time in prison—even for non-violent offenses, or for incidents that might have occurred years and years earlier. That was what Clifford Salmond found after being released a few years ago. “I couldn’t find a decent job because of my background and my past. I’ve had alcohol problems, drug problems, incarceration problems,” he told me while he ate breakfast at a local McDonald’s. “Once I got that behind me, I still found finding employment pretty hard.” He found work washing dishes, but became unemployed again after the restaurant he was working at closed down. But his daughter connected him with a training program, which he completed. In time, that led to a position at a factory in Des Moines. “I take the raw rubber and I break it down,” he explained. “I send it over to be [combined] in a machine with fabric. That leaves the machine, and goes to the tire builders, and they build the tire.” He said the work was hot, dirty, and physically exhausting, but still that he loved the job, where he now earns $21 an hour, as well as health benefits. Younger and older workers have also found more success, labor experts in central Iowa said. Businesses are accepting applications from high-schoolers and retirees who want to come back to work — and are providing on-site education and accommodations like flexible schedules too. Mollie Frideres is the human-resources director at Green Hills Retirement Community in Ames, just north of Des Moines. The company normally hires a number of Iowa State students interested in healthcare, she told me. But of late, it has found that the good economy has meant fewer undergrads need a job. It has raised wages, but still found itself short. Thus, it has started a program with the local high school, Frideres said, training the workers the business needs. The teenagers require a little more hand-holding, given that they are less experienced and perhaps a little less mature than college kids, Frideres told me. “We are in the process of developing some classes or training programs on social skills or soft skills for them,” she said. “You know: What is professionalism? What are our expectations?” But they had filled the gap, she said. “The unemployment rate is really not a number that says we’re doing super great.” Younger workers with more or harder barriers to the workforce were finding more luck, too. “What I’ve seen in the past two years is employers really forcing—and I really mean it when I use that word—forcing themselves to be more nimble,” said Laurie Phelan, who heads Iowa Jobs for America’s Graduates, or iJAG. It is an initiative that seeks to prevent drop-outs and help students transition to work, aimed at kids who have grown up in poverty. She said businesses were more willing “to grow their diversity IQ, and to look at their expectations for education and their willingness to spend time in mentoring and shepherding this new young workforce into their world.” Refugee and immigrant workers—including those with literacy or language challenges, or a lack of credentials—were also getting drawn in and picked up. “A little over a year ago, I hired a woman that focuses on this kind of high-touch service,” Bontrager told me. “She has 40-some clients we’re working with, specifically on helping them work through some of their barriers, whether that's going back and recertifying in something [here in the United States], or working on the language skills, or working on how to present themselves—their resumes, how to interview. All of those kinds of things. Companies are really being very receptive to taking a little more time, if you will, in the hiring process.” The fierce competition for hiring has led to both a drop in the unemployment rate and a rebound in the prime-age employment-to-population ratio in Iowa. It has also raised the specter of labor shortages, with businesses simply unable to find experienced workers to fill their positions. “There are not a lot of welders sitting around looking for work. The construction trades, the roofers, the framers, the dry-wallers,” said Dan Culhane, the president of the Ames Chamber of Commerce. “Those are [workforce] challenges that Ames and Story County and Des Moines face.” Some analysts have started warning about the same issue happening nationally, in some cases in pretty overwrought terms. The “number one problem [for businesses] is finding qualified workers,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said in a statement this week. “At the current pace of job growth, if sustained, this problem is set to get much worse. These labor shortages will only intensify across all industries and company sizes.” Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions—not an unwillingness of workers to switch industries or improve their skills for a job. The trucking industry is instructive here: Trade groups have argued that it is facing a shortfall of 51,000 workers, yet businesses have not yet shown much willingness to cut hours, boost pay, and improve conditions to lure workers in. Indeed, across the economy, companies have shown a remarkable unwillingness to boost wages, with growth barely keeping pace with inflation even as the unemployment rate has dropped to 4 percent. Low wages continue to be an extraordinary problem preventing workers from connecting with a good job and keeping potential employees on the sidelines—in Iowa and across the country. “Even though we’re such a low unemployment state, we are also low-wage state,” Buck of the United Way said. “People think that when you have a state or a community that has low unemployment, that everyone's doing great. That is not the case. We still have about 34 percent of central Iowans who are not making enough to be financially self-sufficient.” The state has relatively low housing costs, unlike in many big cities and coastal areas. But the steep and rising cost of child care has proven particularly daunting to young workers, single mothers, and families with multiple kids, experts said. “There are are a couple of companies here that do have child care on site, though I don’t think it’s easy to get your kids in there,” said Julie Fugenschuh, the executive director of Project IOWA, a training initiative for local workers. (That is where Salmond found his leg-up into the jobs market.) “But there’s still this cliff, around $13 or $15. If you are making less than that, you can’t take a job. And we are not seeing too many companies go over it.” Plus, though central Iowa’s low jobless rate has helped workers of color, less-educated workers, younger workers, and others who face discrimination in the labor market, it remains true that it is the best-off that have done the best. Growth and low unemployment are not a cure for inequality, and it would take years and years and years of full employment to restore financial security to the middle class and to boost the fortunes of the poor. “There are many people who are working multiple jobs and are still living in poverty here,” Fugenschuh told me. “The unemployment rate is really not a number that says we’re doing super great.” That is even more true for the economy as a whole, with hundreds of thousands of workers still choosing not to join the labor force and wages still flat—as the White House has kicked off a trade war and interest rates have started to rise, no less. Full employment stands to help, but only in time. Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416812882-FREOSQ46J5S45JWGO3MQ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.33.17+AM.png economics - Local Dollars Funding Local D.C. Sustainable Energy Contractors and Workers Humberto Garces was a third-year medical student when, in 2000, he and his brother were forced to flee Colombia. “I was shot the same day that my father was assassinated,” says Garces, whose father was a journalist and union leader in Colombia. Garces was shot five times and spent about six months in the hospital recovering. “I couldn’t walk for about a year. As soon as I could walk, I came here to the States,” says Garces. He and his younger brother came to Washington, D.C., where a friend studying at Howard University took them in. The two started building bridges between Latino and African-American communities and, with the help of local church members, they launched a landscaping company. That eventually led them into home repair work. In 2011, Garces struck out on his own, founding Green Construction Services Group. “I decided that the vision of the company was to start implementing environmental and sustainable energy programs,” says Garces. “We as human beings have to understand that we have to take care of the planet.” He attributes his interest in the environment to the time he spent as a youth in the Colombian countryside. Garces landed his first contract on an energy efficiency project with the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility earlier this year, after a workshop hosted by the nonprofit tasked by the District’s Department of Energy and Environment to implement its energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. “I’ve been working for the government for the last 14 years, but not as a contractor directly, as a sub-contractor,” says Garces. “This is the first project that I have ever been a contractor directly with the government, which makes me very happy because there wasn’t a lot of paperwork. It was simple for an immigrant and a small-business owner like I am.” Garces is just one beneficiary of economic development work by the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility, which gets its funding via a surcharge on all electric and natural gas utility ratepayers in the District. The nonprofit has spurred the creation of more than 500 jobs in the District since launching in 2011. More than 70 percent of the District’s carbon emissions come from its built environment. Since its inception, the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility has prevented the emissions of 3.8 million metric tons of carbon — the equivalent of taking more than 830,000 cars off the road for one year. As Garces’ story conveys, the nonprofit is also invested in generating economic opportunity for the District. “A lot of the contractors that we were working with seven or eight years ago were small Mom and Pop shops,” says Ted Trabue, executive director of the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility. Now, he says, those businesses are larger with greater capacity to provide services and hire other local D.C. residents. “Our budget is about $20 million a year, so they know they can count on a large amount of money being spent in the energy efficiency space to meet the demands and to meet the workloads that we’re putting on them,” Trabue says. In addition to workshops for resident D.C. contractors like Garces, the nonprofit also offers training for the people those contractors hire. “It’s the people who are being trained to work inside of the buildings as building operators who are making sure that the heating systems and air conditioning systems in these buildings are operating at maximum efficiency,” Trabue says. “We’re training more people to do all of these things, bringing people into the green economy and helping people get jobs in this new workspace.” The nonprofit offers ten weeks of basic training and then selects candidates for a four-month, paid externship with an employer such as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority. The program has a 95 percent job placement rate, Trabue says, and it helps the nonprofit reach its annual mandate of creating 88 full-time jobs for Washington, DC residents. “There are no other programs that we’ve found in the country that are combining energy efficiency goals and social equity goals,” Trabue says. “Not only are we pursuing energy efficiency and installing renewables, but we are also combining that with social equity work of working with low-income communities.” Twenty percent of the D.C Sustainable Energy Utility’s budget goes to low-income households, working with local contractors and generating local revenue, according to Trabue. “The D.C. Sustainable Energy program is one of the most effective I have ever participated in,” adds Garces. “[The program] is trying to encourage people to reduce energy consumption. and it’s also bringing opportunities to small businesses like mine that don’t have opportunities in other arenas because of all the competition.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531416919158-0SOM9TZXXCUASV6S0JS1/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.35.01+AM.png economics - Why the ‘Greening’ of Vacant Land Is a Smart Long-Term Investment in Cities Vacant and abandoned properties are a familiar part of the American landscape, from the boarded row house in North Philadelphia to the empty factory in Detroit to the collapsing farmhouse in rural Kansas. These structures can devastate the neighborhood, undermine the neighbors’ quality of life, diminish the value of nearby properties, and reduce local tax revenue. Yet vacant properties can also become community assets. Thousands of vacant commercial and industrial buildings have been converted to apartments and condominiums, and vacant lots have found new lives as community gardens and parks. Perhaps the most significant vacant property strategy to emerge over the past decade is what has come to be known as “greening” vacant lots: putting them to such environmentally friendly uses as community gardens, vineyards, and tree farms. It’s not a fundamentally new idea. European allotment gardens — small plots for people living in high-density urban areas to cultivate — go back to the 19th century and are still widespread there. In the United States, the lineage of community gardens goes back to the “Victory Gardens” of World War II, if not earlier. Today’s approach to community greening may not be new, but it is very different. While food security and recreation, which were uppermost in the minds of 19th-century European advocates of allotment gardens, still matter, today’s explicit connection between urban greening and the strategic reuse of vacant properties represents a new and significant departure from previous thinking. IMAGINING LAND USES BEYOND COMMUNITY GARDENS As vacant lots proliferated in older American cities in the 1980s and 1990s, community gardening was actively promoted by community organizations and agricultural groups and often encouraged by local officials as a temporary use for properties awaiting redevelopment. Community gardens, however, while valuable and productive, depend on a critical mass of neighborhood residents eager to till the soil, something that is both uncertain and fluctuating over time. With vacant lots continuing to proliferate, particularly in legacy cities, people needed to find other ways to use lots. A critical step in moving from community gardens to a broader approach to greening vacant lots was the collaboration between Cleveland Neighborhood Progress (CNP), a citywide nonprofit intermediary, and Kent State University School of Architecture’s Cleveland Design Collaborative under the creative leadership of CNP’s Bobbi Reichtell and Kent State’s Terry Schwarz. This partnership provided Cleveland’s officials, nonprofits, and community leaders with a vision of how the city’s thousands of acres of vacant land could become an asset for their city’s future. One part of this effort was the publication of the Cleveland Vacant Land Reuse Pattern Book, a catalog of alternative green uses for vacant land with information on the costs and the materials needed to carry out each alternative. In 2009, using the options in the Pattern Book, CNP and the City of Cleveland initiated Re-Imagining Cleveland, a competitive vacant land reuse grant program, to empower neighborhood residents and other community stakeholders to turn vacant land bank property into community assets and pilot projects. With $500,000 in grant funds, they awarded small grants to 56 projects on nearly 15 acres, including environmentally oriented projects such as pocket parks, rain gardens, and agricultural projects including gardens, orchards, and vineyards. More recently, both Detroit and Baltimore have created even more detailed pattern books for reusing vacant land. Detroit Future City’s Field Guide for Working with Lots and Baltimore’s Green Pattern Book, created in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, are invaluable resources for community organizations and activists not only in those two cities, but in any city in the United States. Cleveland was not alone in exploring the potential of vacant lots. A second pioneering city was Philadelphia, where the nearly 200-year-old Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) took the leading role. Although PHS had supported community gardens in Philadelphia since the 1970s, in recent years their efforts have broadened to encompass a comprehensive and multifaceted citywide greening strategy. Two Philadelphia initiatives, one led by PHS, are particularly worth noting. The PHS LandCare program recognizes that while vacant lots in legacy cities greatly outnumber the organizations or individuals willing or able to turn them into gardens, vineyards, or parks, allowing those lots to remain derelict condemns their surroundings to continued blight. To address this, PHS developed an inexpensive, low-maintenance approach to vacant lots that involves only basic sodding, tree planting, and erection of simple split-rail fencing on the lot. Today, PHS, with support from the city of Philadelphia, has installed and maintains LandCare treatments on more than 7,000 vacant lots across the city. A second Philadelphia initiative addresses a concern shared by nearly all older American cities: combined sewer overflow (CSO) in sewerage systems where the same system handles both sanitary and stormwater flows. At times of heavy rainfall, sewer flows overwhelm the system’s capacity, leading to discharges of untreated or partially treated sewerage into rivers and lakes. CSO is a major source of water pollution in violation of the Clean Water Act, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has aggressively pressed cities to comply with the act. Until recently, compliance was considered achievable by spending billions of dollars to build either separated sewer systems or massive underground tunnels and holding tanks. Facing this problem, cities realized that their vacant land inventories offered an alternative. Instead of using the traditional method of channeling stormwater runoff into the sewers, the water could be channeled toward green spaces, where it could gradually filter through the ground and refill the aquifers under the city. Such a strategy would be far better environmentally and would also reduce the need for massive holding tanks and allow cities to comply with EPA requirements at lower cost. Philadelphia was the first city in the United States to turn the idea into a reality by developing a detailed plan and a 25-year implementation strategy, which was approved by the EPA in 2012. As described on the city’s Green City, Clean Waters website: We’re recreating the living landscapes that once slowed, filtered, and consumed rainfall by adding green to our streets, sidewalks, roofs, schools, parks, parking lots, and more—any impermeable surface that’s currently funneling stormwater into our sewers and waterways is fair game for greening. It’s going to take decades of work, but when it’s all done, we’ll have reduced the stormwater pollution entering our waterways by a stunning 85 percent (emphasis in original). The city estimates that implementing this greening strategy will save Philadelphia $5.6 billion, compared to complying with EPA mandates through conventional engineering solutions. Similar efforts are now underway elsewhere, including Milwaukee, Syracuse, Cleveland, and Detroit. The strategies pioneered in Cleveland and Philadelphia have been embraced by hundreds of towns and cities across the United States, while research has identified clear benefits from greening in the form of improved health, healthier food, lower crime and higher property values. Unresolved questions remain, however, including the most fundamental — is this a long-term strategy for legacy cities or only a transitional effort? If the latter, what is the expected outcome? THE RESOURCE CHALLENGES OF VACANT-LOT GREENING In the few years since the start of Philadelphia’s and Cleveland’s pioneering efforts, greening has begun to come of age as a multifaceted response to using vacant land to improve residents’ quality of life. Many cities, though, have barely scratched the surface; thousands of lots remain untreated and are at best intermittently mowed and cleaned. Looking to the future, two distinct, but closely related obstacles stand in the way of building sustainable greening efforts in legacy cities. The first problem is lack of resources. Although the cost of greening or maintaining any individual lot is modest, the vast number of vacant lots in legacy cities means that the total cost can easily become substantial. The Cuyahoga County Land Bank spent $2.23 million from 2011 to 2015 simply to clean and mow the vacant lots it created through demolition. The cost to turn each vacant lot into a garden, a park, or a vineyard under the Re-Imagining Cleveland grant program typically ran between $3,000 and $6,000 — not much, but substantial if multiplied by the number of lots awaiting greening in the typical legacy city. Cleveland is having difficulty raising enough funds to expand their program. Philadelphia devotes more public resources than almost any other city to greening, and yet the great majority of vacant lots in that city are still waiting their turn. In contrast to economic development projects, greening projects rarely yield direct cash returns and the benefits of increased property values, improved health, or reduced crime tend to be reflected indirectly if at all in municipal balance sheets. Long-term sustainability of greening projects is another challenge. Maintaining attractive green spaces can be labor-intensive: While many neighborhood-based greening projects last for years, others tend to fade away as the individuals who provided the initial impetus move away or on to other things. Many neighborhoods even lack the critical mass of concerned neighbors to get greening projects started in the first place. This is part of the reason that cities have begun selling side lots to individual homeowners, even while recognizing that these programs may have uncertain long-term outcomes. By the fall of 2017, the Detroit Land Bank had sold off more than 8,000 parcels to adjacent homeowners as side lots. Cities have realized that to succeed, a greening infrastructure needs to be put in place to support the hundreds of individuals and groups that create and maintain green spaces around the city. Even in cities with strong support systems like Philadelphia and Baltimore, resources are limited and far more lots remain untouched than greened, while far too many cities lack even a basic citywide greening infrastructure. Underlying these issues of cost and maintenance is a larger question: Should greening be seen as a short-term transitional activity or a long-term use of urban land? Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore have lost population for many decades and despite regrowth in some areas, they have no realistic prospect of regaining their peak population in the foreseeable future. Still, many local officials and others continue to see greening as, at most, a short-term interim step until “a more desirable type of investment presents itself, such as [the] construction of a new home,” as one Ohio land bank official put it. From that perspective, many public officials view committing formerly developed urban land to permanent green uses that lead neither to new construction nor to population regrowth as the equivalent of relegating the land to nonuse. As a result, greening is often undervalued compared to other forms of public investment. Large inventories of vacant land, however, will be a long-term reality in all but a handful of America’s legacy cities. Thus, viewing greening as no more than a short-term strategy handicaps the efforts of cities to rebuild their quality of life and ultimately their economy and market strength. At the same time, certain areas in each city have the potential for short- or medium-term regrowth. Planners in legacy cities need to assess which areas have the most potential for regrowth and ensure that vacant land in those areas is available for growth. They should also establish sound ground rules for long-term greening in other areas, recognizing that becoming a greener city can be a powerful impetus for economic and social revitalization. A LONG-TERM STRATEGY FOR REUSE In cities with few vacant lots where vacancy may be a temporary phenomenon, greening may be a short-term or transitional use. In others, greening should be viewed as a long-term strategy. As a recent report from Detroit Future City put it, “Too often, open space is thought of as a ‘consolation prize’ for disinvested neighborhoods that do not have the market to attract traditional brick-and-mortar development. Open space is a solution for Detroit’s future, not an unwelcomed result of Detroit’s past.” Cities need to evaluate to what extent — by looking at market conditions, financial realities, demographic data, and economic trends — their vacant lots, both present and projected, can be reused for development within 10 to 15 years. If the answer is, as it often will be, that many lots will not be developed, that city should begin to plan for long-term green reuse, making what DFC calls a “green culture shift.” That demands thinking creatively about how long-term greening can be accomplished — reflecting the unique character of each area — and building the support system and infrastructure to ensure that green uses remain sustainable for the future. Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531417077398-RETYD4AY8S4Y2PKKLMTR/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.37.35+AM.png economics - California Public Banking Alliance Who we are The California Public Banking Alliance (CPBA) is a coalition of public banking activists in California working to create socially and environmentally responsible city and regional public banks. Public banking serves as a powerful tool to keep taxpayer dollars in local communities. It is time to take power back from Wall Street banks, and reinvest in Main Street. It is time to fundamentally change how money flows through our local economies and start empowering our communities from the ground up. We must change from a model of financial stripmining and extraction, to one of sustainable growth and regeneration. Charter With a bank operating for the people instead of private shareholders, the flow of capital can better reflect the values of our local communities. This can be ensured by creating public banking charters based on a framework of responsibility, transparency and accountability. People's Banks Through locally controlled public banks, chartered with socially and environmentally responsible mandates, we can build a public banking model to become a nationwide network of People’s Banks, 100% responsive to the needs of our local communities. Save Money The banks would in turn provide credit to fund public infrastructure projects and reinvest in local communities, while simultaneously reducing expenses previously incurred from extractive private banks. Community The municipal bank model holds the potential to improve many areas that directly impact our communities including: low-income housing, small business development, infrastructure and energy, and serving the needs of unbanked and underbanked populations. Learn more at California Public Banking Alliance https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531417183116-UA4EA1MJGJYSDNDDOJTY/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.39.22+AM.png economics - Alliance Cities Our objective is to develop a network of public banks in California– local, ethical, and accountable to the people. Each public bank will follow socially responsible investment guidelines and support the economic development of their region. Learn more at California Public Banking Alliance https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531417308201-VWAEOZS6T9E8OXG1X53Q/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.41.28+AM.png economics - Public Banking Will Be on the Ballot in L.A. this Fall The Los Angeles City Council is moving forward with a proposed ballot measure that would ask voters this fall whether they want to create a publicly owned bank. In a unanimous vote, council members on Tuesday, June 26, gave the go-ahead to begin the process of adding a measure on the November 2018 ballot that would amend city charter in order to create a city-owned bank. The city’s code currently prohibits it from entering into a “purely commercial venture,” unless it’s approved by voters. To advocates, this move is a historic one that can set the tone for other public banking movements happening across the nation. “The outcome will reflect the pulse of the national movement,” says Trinity Tran with the Public Bank LA campaign. In New York City, dozens of residents and community organizers in early June gathered in front of the New York Stock Exchange to launch the Public Bank NYC Coalition, a group calling for the creation of a New York City-owned bank. Oakland and San Francisco are exploring the idea. New Jersey and Michigan are also considering setting up state-owned banks. A city- or state-owned bank would, for example, hold tax dollars and other fees or income for local or state governments. The Bank of North Dakota, created in 1919, holds all state government deposits and some local government deposits. Instead of competing with other banks for loans, it primarily makes participation loans — lending alongside other banks that don’t have the cash on hand to meet the credit needs of their clients. The model has allowed North Dakota to strengthen its local banks, resulting in having the highest number of banks per capita than any other state, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “We would have more autonomy and more say in how our city resources are invested. San Francisco is one of the hottest real estate markets in the world but we’ve got an affordability crisis. Why are we not investing our dollars to solve that?” San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Malia Cohen told Next City. “What I’m also envisioning is how a municipal bank could better support small businesses, financing small businesses run by minorities, women, veterans — those who don’t have access to the same level of capital.” In L.A., the city government has been exploring the creation of a public bank since Council President Herb Wesson spoke of the idea in a July 2017 speech detailing his priorities for his final term. Wesson said municipally owned banks can help develop affordable housing and handle the money flowing from the newly legal recreational marijuana market. It has quickly picked up momentum with city officials and Public Bank LA advocates working hand-in-hand. The Public Bank LA campaign is part of part of Revolution LA, the organization that also ran Divest LA, which pressured the city to stop doing business with Wells Fargo, reported to hold more than $40 million in securities for the city. Divest LA urged Los Angeles city elected officials to divorce the city from Wells Fargo over the bank’s phony accounts scandal and support of the Dakota Access Pipeline. In April of this year, the Los Angeles County Democratic Party in a resolutionsupported the creation of state-chartered public banks. And just this month, Public Bank LA helped launch the California Public Banking Alliance, a coalition of organizers in cities across the state including Los Angeles, Oakland, Santa Rosa, and Santa Barbara. L.A. advocates envision a city-owned bank that would accept city deposits and also manage the purchasing needs the city requires. It would make loans to the city and to other sectors of the local economy, as well as investments in community banks or even credit unions. The Bank of North Dakota, until recently the only state-owned bank in the U.S., holds around $249 million in shares of local banks around that state. However, obstacles remain for the city of L.A. A city report in February listed a number of challenges Los Angeles would have to overcome in order to create a public bank. A big hurdle would be coming up with a substantial amount of capital to start a bank, the report said. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for example, estimated that a public bank for the State of Massachusetts would need $3.6 billion in start-up capital, according to the report. For now, Public Bank LA will be focusing on educating voters on the issue and “galvanizing support from stakeholders in the community, including grassroots groups, students, community leaders, and labor,” Tran says. “We need to mobilize for a critical mass of support, to ensure a majority win in November.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531417426943-CTEUO43RZU15NUUJW3W6/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.43.24+AM.png economics - Trump Tax Cuts Carry a Big Price Tag: Huge Debt and Risk of Another Financial Crisis, Budget Office Warns The tax cuts championed by President Trump are helping push the nation toward an unprecedented level of debt, heightening the risk of another financial crisis, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The budget office’s annual look at the government’s long-term financial outlook paints a grim picture, projecting soaring deficits in the coming years, with debt ultimately peaking at more than 152% of the nation’s gross domestic product. “The prospect of large and growing debt poses substantial risks for the nation and presents policy makers with significant challenges,” Keith Hall, director of the budget office, said in a statement. The federal debt currently stands at about $15 trillion, or 78% of the size of U.S. economy. If current trends continue, it will roughly equal the size of the economy within a decade, the budget office said. The last time the debt burden hit that level was just after World War II. The biggest problem in the coming decade stems from last year’s tax cut. It is estimated to increase the deficit by more than $2.3 trillion over the decade. And that’s under an optimistic scenario. Under the tax law, individual income tax rates are slated to increase sharply at the end of the decade, while corporate taxes remain low. If Congress allows that individual tax hike to take effect, the tax cut’s long-term impact on the debt will begin to fade after the next 10 years. But if Congress balks at that big tax increase — many members of Congress already have said they want to make the individual cuts permanent — the red ink would be even worse than projected, the budget office said. The budget office did not offer a specific projection of the more pessimistic scenario, but the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, crunched the numbers and found that if the individual cuts were kept in place, federal debt would be twice the size of the nation’s economy, and annual deficits would exceed 13% of the GDP over the next 30 years. The impact of the tax cut comes on top of a preexisting problem — the spiraling price of providing subsidized healthcare and Social Security for the huge baby boom generation as it moves into retirement, the budget office said. Most of the rest of government spending is projected to decline, relative to the size of the economy, the report said. The one big exception is interest payments, which will rise as the debt increases. Debt at the level the U.S. is currently piling up could have serious consequences, the budget office warns. The high level of red ink increases the likelihood of a fiscal crisis, threatens to reduce the income of average Americans, and gives lawmakers limited options to deal with big events that require a government response, such as another deep recession. Rising debt also threatens to weaken the global power of the United States as it increasingly depends on foreign investors to lend money to the Treasury, the report noted. What makes the rapidly increasing debt particularly striking is that it’s happening at a time when the U.S. is at peace and the economy is booming. The previous high point for the debt came when the nation was deep in the red from the effort to win the world war and the public works projects implemented in response to the Depression. More recently, the U.S. plunged back into a high debt to combat the Great Recession, when Congress passed major spending increases to pull the nation out of it. But Washington not only failed to wipe out the red ink when the economy rebounded, after a few years of progress in President Obama’s second term, the government under Trump has reversed course, moving toward even higher debt levels. Many economists feel that borrowing money to cope with an emergency of that sort makes sense — ultimately, the country emerges better off. But a big increase in the debt in the absence of any such emergency is more problematic and illustrates how the country’s intractable deadlock over taxes and government spending has led to a result — rising debt — that both parties claim to oppose. For the next decade, the national debt is projected to surge, bringing the nation into uncharted territory unless the government adopts far-reaching policy shifts that could include deep cuts in spending on entitlement programs or significant tax increases. The report lays out precisely what it would cost to keep the long-term debt from soaring. To bring the red ink down to the historical average level, taxes would need to increase 17% -- $2,000 per household -- or government spending would need to be cut by 15%. Over the last 50 years, federal debt has average about 41% of the gross domestic product. Just keeping the federal debt at its current, historically high level would require increasing taxes by 11% — $1,300 per household — or cutting spending by 10%. The heavy level of debt is already taking a toll on taxpayers. The report projects that government borrowing costs are on track to exceed the amount the government spends each year on Social Security. One of the biggest problems posed by rising debt levels is the way it handcuffs the government’s ability to respond to emergencies, the report notes. Lawmakers had flexibility to respond to the Great Recession because the federal debt at that time was below 40% of the GDP — nearly half what it is now. “If another recession or fiscal crisis occurred and federal debt was at its current level or higher, the government might have a more difficult time implementing similar costly actions in response,” the report warned. Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531417761104-7Z8CIM0U29QCM9AZQVS5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.48.56+AM.png economics - Moving Community Foundation Dollars from Wall Street to Main Street On an average day at Self-Help Federal Credit Union’s branch in Fresno, Calif., ten or so people come in to sign up as new members, and around 20 people submit applications for home mortgages, car loans, small business loans or personal emergency loans (for as little as $500). Since opening in August 2015, this one branch has made more than 1,000 loans and counting. But these aren’t just any borrowers. At this branch, 70 percent of borrowers come from low-income households, and 91 percent are people of color. Branch Manager Rosa Pereirra has witnessed those borrowers reclaim power over their financial lives in ways that still surprise her, even after 28 years in banking. “Some of the folks coming in making $12.50 an hour, they’ve got $15,000 in their savings account,” says Pereirra. “I make a good living, but I don’t have $15,000 in my savings account.” These borrowers and this branch are the exceptions and not, unfortunately, the rule. In the state of California alone, payday lenders make billions of dollars in payday loans per year, earning hundreds of millions in interest and fees — all largely targeted at low-income households and communities of color. California-licensed payday lenders earned $458.5 million in fees on payday loans in 2016, according to the latest annual report from the state’s Department of Business Oversight. Nearly 75 percent of those earnings, $343 million, came from customers who took out seven or more payday loans. Some 77 percent of payday loan borrowers in California earn less than $40,000 a year — and payday lenders are more likely to set up shop in predominantly black or Latino neighborhoods, according to a separate study from the same department. Self-Help’s Fresno branch, in the overwhelmingly Latino southeast part of the city, was the Federal Credit Union’s first “de novo” (the banking term for new) branch in the state. (Self-Help, based in North Carolina, had earlier merged with several other struggling credit unions in California.) Pereirra leaped at the chance to take on a leadership role at Self-Help, a financial institution created in 1980 to serve the underserved. She had 28 years of experience in community banking and credit unions in Fresno, as well as ten years of experience serving on the board of directors of a local food bank. “Not to put other banks down,” she says, “But for the first time in my career, I really feel like I’m helping people.” Pereirra realizes that other banks are still an important part of her work today, at a credit union branch that’s not yet three years old. As nonprofit organizations, credit unions can’t raise capital from traditional investors, so one of the biggest early sources of cash for a new credit union branch are other, larger banks and credit unions. Central Valley Community Bank, Fresno First Bank, and Educational Employees Credit Union (where Pereirra used to work) all have deposits at Pereirra’s branch. “They understand we’re not in competition for the same people,” says Pereirra. Those big early deposits provide a source of cash to begin making loans, a necessary step for the branch to generate income. It’s especially important to get deposits from outside of your core market when your core market consists of underserved, low-income households and entrepreneurs who don’t have large deposits to start with. So imagine Pereirra’s excitement last October, when, after a few months of conversations and standard financial due diligence, the Fresno-based Central Valley Community Foundation announced it was depositing $2.6 million into Self-Help Federal Credit Union’s Fresno branch, instantly making the community foundation the branch’s largest single depositor and growing the branch’s deposit base from $9.7 million to $12.3 million. Pereirra describes the $2.6 million as the equivalent to 20 home mortgages or 175 car loans. Since October, her branch has already made another $2.6 million in loans across its portfolio, she says. Central Valley Community Foundation’s deposit is just one example of a growing trend, where community foundations venture beyond grantmaking to realize the difference they can make by moving the cash in their coffers out of Wall Street and into investments that support the same communities that give these foundations their names — and their dollars. “This deposit, it’s not just going to help people now, it’s going to help people for years to come,” says Pereirra. “In families that I’ve touched, you have generations of non-homeownership, then all of a sudden you have one person buy a house, and it seems that the rest of the family starts to buy a home. It happens a lot in our low-income families. Once they buy a house, it makes a ripple effect with the rest of the family members.” KEEP INVESTMENT DOLLARS CLOSE TO HOME As of 2017, community foundations across the United States held more than $91 billion in assets, according to the latest available data from the Foundation Center, which surveys and monitors public, private and community foundations. That same year, community foundations took in another $9.7 billion, and gave out $8.3 billion in grants. It’s not uncommon for community foundation assets to grow every year. Community foundations bring in money from a variety of different sources. Some of it comes from galas, celebrity golf outings or other fundraising events. Some comes from corporate giving programs, when companies match employee donations. Some gets bequeathed in a person’s last will and testament. And about a quarter of community foundation assets comes in the form of donor-advised funds. Donor-advised funds are a financial instrument for people who want to take advantage of the charitable deduction on their federal income taxes, but don’t necessarily have the time to pick a specific charity to receive those funds. If you put the money you earmarked for donation in a DAF, you can take the charitable deduction on your federal income taxes for that year. Then at a later date, you can direct that donation to the charity or charities of your choice. Some people just give instructions to their donor-advised fund manager, such as “give my money away to arts and music education” or “give out grants to help beautify parks.” Some just let the fund manager decide what to do with it. Donor-advised funds have become increasingly popular by themselves, and community foundations aren’t the only ones offering donor-advised funds as a service to those who can afford them. In 2016, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, a donor-advised fund managed by Fidelity Investments, knocked off United Way as the largest annual recipient of philanthropic donations. As of 2016, donor-advised funds held $85.15 billion in assets, growing ten percent from the year before, according to the National Philanthropic Trust’s annual donor-advised fund market report. There were 284,965 donor-advised funds as of that year, up 6.9 percent from the year before. Also in 2016, $23.27 billion went into donor-advised funds, and $15.75 billion was granted out from donor-advised funds. But where do the dollars go in between being gifted to a community foundation and being granted out later? The short answer is Wall Street, to big investment houses whose responsibility is to maximize the financial return on those assets, even though the owners of those assets can’t take them back without paying a penalty and taxes on those funds. In maximizing the financial return, donor-advised fund clients should later have more funds to give away. As Fidelity Charitable’s website reads: “Your donation is also invested based on your preferences, so it has the potential to grow, tax-free, while you’re deciding which charities to support.” Some community foundation money does end up in community banks — in addition to the deposit it made into Self-Help Federal Credit Union, Central Valley Community Foundation also maintains its operating account at Central Valley Community Bank. But as with other community foundations, the bulk of Central Valley Community Foundation’s assets are managed by more traditional investment houses that invest those funds in stocks, bonds and other assets around the world. All across the country, however, there’s been an uptick in the number of community foundations that are moving money out of big investment houses and into more local investment options. As Next City reported previously, the Chicago Community Trust created the “Benefit Chicago” fund to pool its assets (including those from donor-advised funds) with assets from the MacArthur Foundation and invest that pool, totaling $100 million, into projects that benefit low- and moderate-income communities in and around Chicago. In Grand Rapids, the city with the largest wealth inequality in Michigan, the Grand Rapids Community Foundation provided a $200,000 loan to a new loan fund that focuses on entrepreneurs who have been excluded from small business lending because of their income, net worth and other factors that often align with racial disparities. In the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers partnered with Enterprise Community Loan Fund to create the “Our Region, Your Investment” initiative, which provides loans to support tenants in purchasing their own affordable buildings in D.C., preventing those buildings from being sold to market-rate developers, most likely leading to displacement. In Philadelphia, earlier this year, The Philadelphia Foundation partnered with Reinvestment Fund to create the PhilaImpact Fund, a commitment to invest $30 million in community foundation assets into neighborhood development projects that support regional growth and local initiatives benefiting low- and moderate-income households throughout Greater Philadelphia. “We have had donors come to us saying they wished there were more opportunities for this,” says Mark Froehlich, chief financial officer at The Philadelphia Foundation. “Foundations hold so many assets that have yet to be tapped for this type of work.” MAKE THE LAWS WORK FOR YOU, OVER TIME People often give money to and through community foundations because they love the places they call home, and community foundations have oriented their entire operations around that premise. “As a community foundation, we’re inherently place-based in our mission,” says Froehlich. “We put so much effort into making sure we’re spending those grant dollars well, that we’re supporting the region, making strategic decisions, but we understand there is so much more we can do with [the rest] that’s invested.” But as much sense as it makes for community foundations to invest more of their assets into the communities after which they’re named, it’s not so simple in practice. The laws, regulations and informal customs governing community foundations are similar to those found in private foundations established by wealthy families or university endowments. Those laws, regulations and customs all typically require that the entity managing the philanthropic assets invest those assets responsibly, with a focus on optimizing financial return. It’s a concept known in shorthand as “fiduciary responsibility;” the idea is that following these protocols maximizes the amount that can be disbursed in grants every year. The board of directors at each foundation has the final say when it comes to fiduciary responsibility. “We still have a fiduciary responsibility, so it was a board conversation and a board decision to open the account [at Self-Help Federal Credit Union] and make it available for the purposes that it’s available for,” says Elliott Balch, chief operating officer at Central Valley Community Foundation. Time has been a key factor in moving more community foundation assets into more place-based investments. Time to educate board members and encourage them to learn about the potential to use both the grantmaking and investment sides of the community foundation to make a difference. And, even more crucially, time for entities like Self-Help Federal Credit Union or Reinvestment Fund to reach a point in their own life cycles that they’re positioned to pass the “smell test” of a community foundation board looking to judge the safety of its investment. If you went back to 1980, when Self-Help was founded in North Carolina, many fewer organizations had committed to the specific mission to invest in historically marginalized communities. Those that did were generally very tiny — a credit union here, a community bank there. Reinvestment Fund wasn’t even founded until 1985, originally known as the Delaware Valley Community Reinvestment Fund. Organizations like Self-Help or Reinvestment Fund would start to make real headway in the mid-1990s, thanks to a few key policy changes. One was the 1994 creation of the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, or CDFI Fund, an arm of the U.S. Treasury that provides grants and other financial support to federally-certified community development financial institutions (CDFIs). One of the requirements for federal CDFI certification is that the entity, whether a bank, credit union, loan fund or venture fund, must have 60 percent of its lending, investments and other business in low-to-moderate income census tracts. Self-Help and Reinvestment Fund became two of the first federally-certified CDFIs. Another key policy tweak was the new rules under the Community Reinvestment Act, put in place in 1995. The new rules emphasized that banks could meet their obligations under the Act by investing in or lending to federally-certified CDFIs. With the CDFI Fund and the new Community Reinvestment Rules in place, federally-certified CDFIs started gaining traction all around the country. There are more than a thousand of them today, in all fifty states plus Puerto Rico and American Samoa. More importantly, some CDFIs, like Self-Help and Reinvestment Fund, started to grow larger. Bigger balance sheets and long-term track records of success are key to securing an investment commitment from a community foundation board. Today, Reinvestment Fund has around $465 million in assets, having loaned or invested over $2 billion cumulatively since 1985. While it’s now financing projects all over the country, Reinvestment Fund remains committed to its home city: out of $203 million in new loans made in 2017, $62 million went to projects in and around Philadelphia. On top of all that, Reinvestment Fund is one of six CDFIs with a rating from S&P — the same ratings agency that Wall Street investors use to assess the risk of investing in corporations or state and local bonds. With an “AA” rating, Reinvestment Fund is rated as a safer investment than bonds issued by the states of Illinois, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Kansas, Connecticut, California, New Jersey or Kentucky. Reinvestment Fund became one of the first CDFIs to use that rating to raise money Wall-Street style, going through a successful $50-million bond issuance last year, raising capital from mutual funds and pension funds the way corporations do. “I’ve spoken with other chief financial officers, who have said it can be difficult to get approval for an investment fund like this,” says Froehlich. “Reinvestment Fund made my job easy, being so good at what they do, having that rating, having done a public bond issuance.” Self-Help Credit Union in North Carolina and Self-Help Federal Credit Union (which has branches in California, Illinois, Wisconsin and Florida) hold more than $2.5 billion in assets combined. Self-Help has never lost a single dollar of any depositor since it was founded in 1980. Being a credit union also means being a regulated financial institution — the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) regulates credit unions across the United States. In the same way the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) safeguards banks, the National Credit Union Administration insures credit union depositors up to $250,000. In order to protect itself from having to pay out too much in insurance claims, the NCUA closely watches credit union bottom lines, seeking to prevent failure; the FDIC follows a similar protocol. Given this backdrop, it was relatively easy for Central Valley Community Foundation to move some assets into a money-market account at the Fresno branch of Self-Help Federal Credit Union. The first $2.6 million was the easiest — that money came from donors who aren’t as concerned with growing their philanthropic assets over time through investing. Now that the community foundation has an established Self-Help money-market account, they can offer new donors the opportunity to have funds deposited into that account before granting them out later, and they can approach existing donors to see if they’d be interested in transferring previously donated dollars into the account. “It was not a difficult conversation with the board,” says Balch. “For us, this is part of a range of investment options we offer our donors. From that perspective as a board member it’s not difficult as long as we are disclosing information, being transparent about providing options.” PITCH THE MISSION TO INVESTORS Even with a track record of success over time, it’s not automatic that place-based foundations will suddenly start pouring money into mission-driven financial institutions with a focus on place-based investments. It has also taken resources — people, to be specific. Every year, in places like San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture or big hotels in Chicago or New York, people with an interest in using finance and investing to address social issues — often calling themselves impact investors — gather to discuss their latest projects and pat each other on the back for a job well-done. Over the past two years, one of the regular faces at these conference halls and cocktail hours has been Annie McShiras, who also works at Self-Help Federal Credit Union. The credit union hired McShiras to work the crowd at these conferences and cocktail parties, securing investments for their money market account or certificate of deposits. At times, it’s a frustrating job; most self-proclaimed impact investors gravitate to newer, sexier-sounding ventures such as a more efficient solar panel or an easier way to purify drinking water. But McShiras has found traction among a subset of those who come to these conferences and cocktail hours — community foundations. “More and more we’re seeing community foundations pay attention to the ways that their investments are having an impact on the communities where they work,” says McShiras. “We’re seeing a shift in terms of those foundations wanting to align their investments with their values, and start making more impact investments or socially responsible investments with money that would normally be utilized for market-based investments.” Just last year, in addition to the Central Valley Community Foundation’s $2.6-million deposit, McShiras scored an $8-million deposit for Self-Help from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest community foundation in the United States (which currently faces its own #MeToo revelations). Generally, McShiras begins conversations with community foundations that may already support the credit union’s free tax-preparation services, or its financial coaching and financial empowerment programs. Foundation grants may also support zero-interest loans for renewing DACA work/education permits, which cost $495; or for subsidizing naturalization fees, which, according to Pereirra, currently run around $1,000. Community foundations may already support downpayment assistance for homes, directly or indirectly connected to the credit union. McShiras describes her approach this way. “Often [we] say, ‘we’re so happy to be working with you on the grant side of things, I want to draw your attention as well to this program we have called Mission-Supportive Deposits, where you can support the work that we do and make a good return on your cash savings by investing in our credit union through one of our cash investment options.’” For foundations in the same community as one of the branches they invest with, such as the Central Valley or Silicon Valley Community Foundations, it’s easy to become a member organization and open up a deposit account. For those not based in a community where there’s a branch, it’s a bit more complicated. “Also, because we’re a credit union, a member-owned financial institution, and we’re not paying outside shareholders, we actually pay a pretty decent return on our savings products that often beat out what some of those same investors are getting from big banks on long-term certificates of deposit or money-market accounts,” McShiras adds. For bigger deposits that go well beyond the $250,000 deposit insurance limit, one key learning experience has been to understand the questions that community foundation boards may have about the relative risk of making a deposit larger than the insured amount. As McShiras notes, being a regulated financial institution means being a safer investment than almost any stock or bond — just because they focus on the most vulnerable populations doesn’t mean they’re taking irresponsible chances, like a subprime mortgage lender. For 38 years, Fresno’s Self-Help branch has focused on how to make responsible loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers. The credit union’s delinquency rate, or the percentage of loans that are late or behind on payments, is just 0.86 percent, McShiras says. Other impressive numbers include the $2.5 billion in assets and 130,000 members across five states on both coasts and the Midwest. “All of these reasons have helped make the case for investors like Central Valley Community Foundation to feel assured they’re making a safe investment above our insurance limit,” says McShiras. Her job, while still frustrating at times, is getting easier. “Initially it was a series of questions we were getting from investors about what our risk profile is,” says McShiras. “Now, I make a proactive case.” FOCUS ON WHAT MATTERS A while back, Balch tells me, a Fresno merchant left Central Valley Community Foundation a few hundred thousand dollars in cash after he died. “He was a big parks advocate when he was alive,” Balch says. That money has turned into dollars to rally voters around a local ballot measure, scheduled for later this year, to increase funding for parks in Fresno through a sales tax. “It’s a few hundred thousand dollars we’re putting in, but we’re hoping over 30 years that it becomes a billion dollars of investment in the fabric of our community — parks, art, trails, after-school programs,” Balch says. “Where before we were making grants of five or ten thousand dollars for parks programs and music programs, we’re trying to turn that into a return thousands of times over.” The foundation’s Self-Help investment fits right into that vision, according to Balch. The loans that Self-Help makes — for a family’s first home, or for a car that gets a parent to a better job to pay the mortgage — help to ensure that the people who will vote for that ballot initiative can actually benefit from the parks it would help build, as would subsequent generations of their families. “What Self-Help is doing is providing maybe a family’s first access to decent credit for a reasonable home loan or car loan that’s not usurious,” Balch says. “And that home, when they’re not worried about having to move, that [becomes] a base of stability for that family’s kids, that’s going to take the parents’ minds off where are we going to live next week and put it on how do I read to my kid and make sure they’re getting their homework done. The kid can focus on getting some homework done. When we’re thinking about one generation to the next, those are the key moments.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531418131957-ZTYDRY0MVRRHE9EFMJEN/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.55.15+AM.png economics - For a Day, I Was One of the Millions of Americans Without a Bank Account. It Was Humbling. Two and a half miles of walking, two failed attempts to cash a $15 check, one toy left behind at a checkout counter and $14 in fees for financial transactions that ordinarily wouldn’t cost me a dime. That was my tally after a recent, frustrating morning in Hollywood spent standing in lines, filling out forms and wondering if I’d have enough money or time to get it all done. The exercise wasn’t for fun. Rather, I was participating in a sort of financial scavenger hunt that aims to replicate how life works for the millions of Americans — about a quarter of all households — who either don’t have bank accounts or still rely on storefront check cashers, payday lenders and prepaid debit cards to manage their money. The event, called FinX — as in “financial experience” — was held this month during an annual conference organized by the Center for Financial Services Innovation and attended by executives from banks, credit unions and financial technology firms, as well as consumer advocates and even federal regulators. The nonprofit think tank, backed by charitable foundations and major banks, advocates for better financial products, especially for Americans on the fringes of the financial system. It hopes the exercise can teach just how expensive and time-consuming it can be to manage money for consumers who are known as the unbanked or underbanked. “The basic idea is, for as long as we’ve been doing this and as dismal as the facts about American financial health are, we still talk to people who really don’t get it,” said Jennifer Tescher, founder and chief executive of CFSI. “Everyone walks away with the same reaction: that this is intensely frustrating, it's more expensive than it should be and they can’t believe millions of Americans have to deal with this.” About 27% of U.S. households are either unbanked or underbanked, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Despite economic growth and the proliferation of online services that have made it easier than ever to open and access bank accounts, those figures have remained little changed since the FDIC started tracking them in 2009. What’s more, those households — which are more likely to be poor, less-educated, young, black or Latino — pay a lot for their financial services. CFSI estimated Americans spend more than $100 billion every year for products or services such as payday loans and check cashing, as well as overdraft fees, effectively a penalty for being short on cash. On June 6, other participants and I gathered in a conference room at the Loews Hollywood Hotel at the Hollywood & Highland shopping center and were put in groups of three or four. Each team was assigned a different L.A. neighborhood and asked to complete several transactions, including cashing a few checks, getting a debit card, asking about a loan and buying a small gift. There was an extra catch: It all had to be done in about two hours, a time limit many of us thought was generous given our own experiences with financial products. I was teamed up with Ray Chay, director of operations at a high-interest consumer lending company, and Sybil Mulokwa, a manager at a company that develops software for small banks and credit unions. Though all three of us work in finance to a degree — I primarily cover finance for The Times — none of us have much experience using the kind of alternative financial services we’d need to get from our list. We all have bank accounts, we all have savings and we all manage our money online. For FinX, we tried to pretend that wasn’t the case. We were assigned to an area close to the hotel and started out thinking we’d be able to cruise through our to-do list with time and money to spare. “There was a general sense of optimism — misguided optimism,” Mulokwa said. In the end we got through only about half our tasks and still blew past our deadline. Even if we’d had more time, we wouldn’t have had enough cash to finish. “There’s a lot of fees associated with all these services,” Chay said. “And it’s all for stuff I don’t think about at all.” Our first stop was on Sunset Boulevard at a Money Mart, an outlet that cashes checks, makes loans and offers Western Union money transfers. We started with our checks — a payroll check for $70 made out to Chay and a $15 personal check made out to me. Chay and I had to create accounts with Money Mart, so we each provided a driver’s license, address, phone number and thumbprint. Chay’s payroll check was processed relatively quickly, but it cost more than we’d expected. He had called another check-cashing shop, which quoted him a fee of 2.25% of the face value of a payroll check. That would have been $1.58 for his check. But most shops also charge a minimum fee. In Money Mart’s case, it was $3, meaning we paid more than 4% of the check’s face value. Money Mart charges substantially more to cash personal checks: 12% of the face value, with the same $3 minimum. For my $15 check, that fee would amount to 20% of the face value. But Money Mart wouldn’t cash it. The check, written from a Chase checking account, had only the name of the account holder — no phone number or address. The clerk, who asked not to be identified, asked if I had a phone number for the check writer. I didn’t. A few minutes later, the clerk returned to tell me she couldn’t cash the check. We’d have to try somewhere else. Before leaving, we tried to cross a few more items off our list. We bought a $20 money order, for a fee of $1.29. We also asked the clerk if we could get a $500 loan — we weren’t going to borrow money, we just needed to ask — and were told we couldn’t borrow that amount. We’d have to borrow much less or much more. Money Mart offers payday loans, which under California law max out at $255 with a $45 fee. It also offers installment loans, which are larger and are paid off over months or years. But, as with many subprime lenders in California, the smallest installment loan Money Mart offers is $2,500 — at an interest rate of either 139.9% or 224.9%, according to a form taped to the bulletproof teller window. Loans smaller than $2,500 can charge interest of no more than about 30% under California law. But there’s no limit on interest rates for larger loans, so many subprime lenders simply don’t offer anything below $2,500. “I was like, ‘This is highway robbery,’” Mulokwa told me a few days later. “Still, right now, I’m stunned.” We left Money Mart at 9:50 a.m., having spent nearly 40 minutes there and accomplishing fewer tasks than we’d hoped. At our next stop, too, we’d lose precious time. We headed for a Walgreens, where we’d try to buy a prepaid debit card — often the only type of noncash payment available without a bank account — and make some purchases. We found the rack of prepaid debit cards and started to compare prices and fees of the five or six different offerings. Chay had researched prepaid cards on our walk and found an American Express prepaid card with low fees and good reviews, but it wasn’t available at Walgreens and we weren’t in a position to spend more time shopping around. We settled on the option with the lowest purchase price, a $1.95 card from Green Dot, a Pasadena company that was a pioneer in the prepaid card industry. After choosing our card, we picked out gifts for a fictitious niece: Silly String, a knockoff Beanie Baby and a can of “noise putty,” which together should have cost a little less than our limit of $15. We grabbed a bottle of water and some gummy bears — buying snacks was on our list, too — and headed for the cash register. First we bought the debit card and gave the Walgreens checker $20 to load onto it, then tried to purchase the rest of our stuff. But the card wouldn’t work. The checker explained that we needed to activate the card. To do that we’d need to wait at least 15 minutes. It was already 10:25. We had less than an hour to go, and would spend a quarter of an hour waiting to be able to use our money. Yes, we could have used cash. But what if we wanted to buy something online?And 15 minutes isn’t that long, but we’d later learn that other FinX teams had to wait an hour or more to activate some cards. With a few minutes to kill, we left our snacks and toys at Walgreens and headed across the street to a Bank of America branch, where we’d check off a few more goals: asking about a checking account, a savings account and a $500 loan. A teller said we could open accounts but would have to pay a monthly fee of $8 on either type unless we met minimum balance requirements or set up direct deposit. Bank of America doesn’t offer personal loans, the teller said, but we could apply for a credit card and might even get a same-day approval if we qualify. If we have bad credit — or no credit history, more typical of the unbanked — we could apply for a secured credit card, which comes with a higher interest rate and would require us to make a security deposit of at least $300. In either case, if we needed money today, we’d be out of luck: We’d have to wait at least a few days for the card to arrive in the mail. “You need money or time to do these things, and we have neither,” Mulokwa said before we left. We activated our debit card and went back to Walgreens, but realized we weren’t going to have enough money on our card to make all of our purchases. The debit card cost only $1.95, but it also had a $7.95 monthly fee — charged the first time you make a purchase. So instead of $20 to work with, we really had $12.05. We left the noise putty behind, paid for the rest and headed out. “Leaving the toy behind, that felt like a real trade-off,” Chay told me later. From Walgreens, we headed for Continental Currency Services, another check-cashing shop. It was already past 11 a.m., and we were supposed to be back to the hotel by 11:15. We stood in line for a few minutes, all of us noting that the shop not only cashes checks and offers Western Union money transfers, but also sells lotto tickets, both from behind the teller windows and from a vending machine in the lobby. When I made it to the window, the teller took one look at my check, asked if I had a number for the check writer and, when I told her I didn’t, said she couldn’t cash it. Without that $15, all we had was 48 cents on a debit card and not quite $24 in cash — not enough to send a $30 money transfer, one of the remaining items on our list. And we’d run out of time for a few more goals, including reloading our prepaid debit card and visiting a pawn shop to see what we could get in exchange for a watch. We headed back to Hollywood & Highland, knowing we’d be back late. For Chay, the biggest lesson was that his customers — who are typically in some kind of financial bind — may be just as pressed for time as they are for cash. “The customer I serve spends a lot of time, potentially in their off time after work or on the weekends, trying to accomplish these tasks,” he said. “Maybe the best thing I can do is to take as little of their time as necessary.” Chay said he'd like his co-workers to go through FinX themselves. The program is a fixture at CFSI's annual conference, but the group also offers to run FinX for companies that want insight into this side of the financial world. Mulokwa, too, said she has a new appreciation for the “time tax” of all these services, but her biggest takeaway from FinX is that she doesn’t know enough about how underbanked consumers live their lives. “We haven’t really taken the time to immerse ourselves in that world,” she said. “And we need to learn before we go build. We’re going to talk to users who are in these situations and spend time observing them. That’s all I’ve thought about.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531418228199-GJPOYBKXEMJ7TPDQDZ13/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.56.52+AM.png economics - Bricks-and-Mortar Retailers Get a Boost From Supreme Court Decision Favoring Online Sales Taxes Walmart Inc. has been aggressively building up its e-commerce site in the last two years as the nation’s largest retailer challenges online giant Amazon.com Inc. and other internet mass merchants. But Walmart still operates 4,761 Walmart stores and 597 Sam’s Clubs stores in the United States that are susceptible to being undercut on price by online rivals that in some cases legally don’t have to collect sales tax. That’s why Walmart cheered when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that states and localities may require the collection of sales taxes on all purchases over the internet — whether they have a physical presence in the region or not. The ruling in effect standardized the basic sales-tax rules for traditional physical retailers and online stores. “We applaud the Supreme Court for closing a loophole that has existed for over two decades and produced an uneven playing field for Main Street businesses,” Walmart said. “Local communities are also the winners because they will now be able to collect sales-tax dollars owed and needed to fund public services,” the chain said. Other bricks-and-mortar retailers joined Walmart in welcoming the decision on grounds that the ruling brings a level of fairness to the marketplace, where physical stores aren’t placed at a competitive disadvantage simply because they must add sales tax to products as required by law. The tax discrepancy is just one reason why dozens of retailers, facing an onslaught of competition from Amazon and other online stores, have folded, filed for bankruptcy or scaled back their operations in the last two years. They include Toys R Us Inc., Sports Authority Inc. and Gymboree Corp., and their troubles have resulted in hundreds of store closures and gaping holes in many U.S. shopping centers. Indeed, S&P Global Ratings said the Supreme Court ruling “may also help local retail malls avoid a competitive disadvantage, potentially supporting local government assessed values and downtown commercial cores.” “Today’s decision is a positive step toward creating a level playing field for retailers,” Tom McGee, president of the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group, said in a statement. With the ruling, physical retail stores have one less reason to cite for their financial problems, said Edward Yruma, an analyst with KeyBanc Capital Markets. “They have, in some ways, been hiding behind excuses like a tax differential,” Yruma said, noting that many consumers now prefer online shopping as much for convenience as for price. U.S. consumers in the future might see a higher tab for goods bought on the internet as a sales tax becomes more uniform for online merchants. Amazon, for example, now collects sales taxes across the country in states that have a sales tax and where Amazon has a physical presence with distribution centers or other facilities, such as California. Until Thursday’s ruling, that physical presence was a key criterion for collecting a sales tax. “Amazon had pretty much decided to start charging, collecting and remitting sales tax for those jurisdictions that imposed a sales tax,” said Gregg Wind, a partner at the accounting firm Kallman, Thompson & Logan in Los Angeles. But a sales tax often was not collected on purchases made from third-party sellers that appear on Amazon's website, and critics contended that gave the web platform a price edge over other retailers that are required to collect a sales tax. The ruling will have a major effect on Amazon’s third-party sellers, who will now have to calculate sales taxes from locality to locality for each transaction. Those third-party sales account for about half of Amazon’s total sales, according to S&P Global Ratings. “This is not good for small businesses” operating online, said Mark Faggiano, chief executive of TaxJar, a Boston company that helps e-commerce sellers manage sales taxes. “It’s a huge burden.” Amazon offers sellers software that helps them calculate sales taxes for each customer depending on their location. But Faggiano said the software helps those sellers remit the collected taxes to government agencies in only three states: Washington, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. The effect of the ruling “is likely going to be substantial” on internet firms, said Jeffrey LeSage, Americas vice chairman for taxes at the audit and tax advisory firm KPMG. “Businesses will now need to prepare to closely examine and retrofit their operations to determine where they have to collect tax, whether their goods are taxable, and how they are going to handle the new tax computation, filing and remittance obligations,” LeSage said in a statement. Regardless, the high court’s ruling is unlikely to put Amazon — which had sales of $178 billion last year — at much of a disadvantage, said Tuna Amobi, an analyst at CFRA Research. “We see a relatively limited exposure” for Amazon, “which already collects a sizable amount of sales taxes across many states where it qualifies as taxable due to its sufficiently large physical presence,” Amobi said in a note to clients. Amazon, he added, “is unlikely to cede a meaningful portion of its market share to traditional retailers as a result of the ruling, which could leave smaller online retailers more exposed.” Amazon’s shares slipped $19.86, or 1.1%, to $1,730.22 on Thursday, while EBay fell $1.25, or 3.2%, to $38.01 and Walmart edged up 60 cents, or 0.7%, to $84.21. The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in November it estimated that state and local governments could have gained as much as $13 billion in 2017 “if states were given authority to require sales tax collection from all remote sellers.” The ruling might create more legal questions as states pass their own statutes to raise more of that online tax revenue, said Bruce Ely, a tax attorney at the law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings. In addition, the ruling might spur Congress to pass a law setting federal standards for all retail tax collections. Walmart said it expects to “work with Congress and state legislatures to help ensure a level playing field exists for all retailers.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531418332549-SJHMS7A44IFDM89TUFJZ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.58.35+AM.png economics - The Tax on Black and Brown Customers When Dealing With Community Banks On May 24, a multi-racial gaggle of Congress members wriggled for prime positioning around Donald Trump as he prepared to sign the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act into law. The bill considerably scales back the Dodd-Frank Act reforms passed in 2010 in response to the financial crash and was passed with the votes of 33 Democrats in the House and 17 in the Senate. It essentially frees small community banks and credit unions from many of the Dodd-Frank regulations, including reporting requirements that would help identify racially discriminatory banking practices. “By liberating small banks from excessive bureaucracy,” said Trump at the signing, “we are unleashing the economic potential of our people.” It also unleashes a greater potential for small banks to financially burden people of color and people with low incomes. Under Dodd-Frank, banks large and small were subjected to stricter regulatory monitoring, but the new law exempts small banks from much of that oversight. During the Occupy Wall Street protests, many activists pushed for people to close their accounts at large, corporate banks and to, instead, open accounts in smaller community banks and credit unions, under the premise that they are less prone to exploitative banking practices. That reputation is not well deserved, though, according to a study released today on the “Racialized Costs of Banking” by the D.C.-based think tank New America. Analyzing data collected from surveys from over 1,300 financial institutions, the study finds that community banks—or “Main St. banks,” as they’re identified in the report—also discriminate against black and Latinx customers, particularly when it comes to the fees associated with opening, maintaining, and closing checking accounts. Not only that, but the relationship-based character that neighborhood banks often sell themselves on—where bank staff use discretionary power to assess or waive fees and penalties based on their relationship with the customer—has been a driving force for discrimination at the teller window. For example, the study finds that overdraft fees are higher in banks located in predominantly black and Latinx neighborhoods when compared with the overdraft fees assessed in white communities. Not only that, but banks in black and Latinx neighborhoods are more likely to use credit-screening agencies for opening accounts than they are in white neighborhoods. Other findings from the report: Banks in predominantly African-American neighborhoods require higher opening deposit charges for starting a basic checking account. The average minimum balance needed to maintain a checking account without incurring fees is $625.50 in majority-white neighborhoods. In Latinx neighborhoods, it’s $748.80. In black neighborhoods it’s $870.50. In some non-white neighborhoods it’s $957.10. Because of racial wealth and income gaps in the U.S., people of color end up needing to deposit a higher percentage of their paychecks into their checking accounts to avoid fees or closure. African Americans and Latinx Americans usually have to deposit 6 percent of their take-home checks, on average. For whites banking, that amount is only 3 percent of their checks. There is essentially a tax on being black and brown when banking in America no matter the size of the financial institution. Segregation only exacerbates that tax, according to the study. We know that in cities like Atlanta, segregation allows for shady payday loan and check-cashing counters to be concentrated in black neighborhoods. These maps created for a prior New America study on where financial institutions are located, show what that looks like in other cities. The red dots in the first map are alternative services like check-cashing counters, the shading in the second two maps shows where minority and low-income residents are concentrated. According to the “Racialized Costs of Banking” study, segregation also ends up costing people of color when they use the traditional banks in their neighborhoods. For black people, that means paying, on average, $190 more in costs and fees for maintaining checking accounts than do whites. Latinx pay an average of $262 more in costs when banking. These are not marginal expenses, especially for those on the lower ends of the payscale who have far less disposable income to work with. As the study’s authors write, “These practices powerfully illustrate how banks can engage in racially discriminatory practices that effectively siphon wealth out of communities of color through the very financial products and services that are considered to be tools for wealth and investment.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531418405140-LV0JRZIC5TB2LTMF0CS9/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+10.59.51+AM.png economics - Why Do Cities Want Their Own Cryptocurrencies? Coming soon to Slovenia: a brand new city that runs completely on cryptocurrency. If all goes according to plan, BTC City will rise from the ashes of a former commercial shopping district in the country’s capital of Lubljana, offering wallet-less shoppers and wide-eyed tech enthusiasts a chance to engage in a more modern brand of conspicuous consumption. Every store in the 1.5 million-square-foot plot will stop accepting cash and start accepting crypto. It’s a big deal for the small, former Yugoslav country. But it’s small potatoes compared to some other municipal efforts to wade into the world of digital financial systems. BTC City’s aim is to get people to use the dozens of digital currencies that already exist. Elsewhere, cities are vying to create new ones from scratch. The list of cities experimenting with cryptocurrencies is diverse, and so are their goals. Dubai launched emCash in 2017 to flex its high-tech prowess as a “smart city.” Berkeley, California, is exploring a city-branded cryptocurrency effort to fund municipal bonds, making up for inadequate outside investment. Cities in Venezuela are bartering with Petros in a desperate—and questionable—attempt to raise funds amid the country’s economic crisis. And Seoul’s mayor has floated the idea of creating S-coins to fund social welfare programs for the sake of efficiency and advancing technology. What’s less clear, though, is how exactly a city-specific cryptocurrency would work—and what cryptocurrencies can do for a city that cash can’t. Why go crypto? The first thing to understand is that there’s a major distinction between government-backed cryptocurrency and the more well-known financial instruments like Bitcoin or Ripple. Those virtual currencies are essentially “built by air, and backed by air,” said Sheila Warren, project head of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies at the World Economic Forum. In other words, their value is determined by the complicated coding it takes to mine them, in the case of Bitcoin, and how much people are willing to pay for them. When a city launches its own cryptocurrency, however, the digital tokens are likely backed by some sort of city asset. Most local cryptocurrencies aren’t trying to disrupt money. They’re just opening up more (and more efficient) avenues for citizens to invest in their cities and buy goods. In turn, they aim to create more ways for cities to fund projects they previously couldn’t afford. Berkeley’s cryptocurrency, for example, is meant to offer citizens an easier way to buy municipal bonds, which could help the city build affordable housing, rebuild transit systems, and support social services. “At some point in history we had to invent municipal bonds, and now we’re just taking it to the next level.” It’s still in its proposal and development stages, but if implemented, it would be “like a non-profit, special-purpose vehicle, meant to fund social good,” Berkeley Vice Mayor Ben Bartlett told CityLab in February. Instead of selling bonds to underwriters, who resell them to brokers and institutions at mounting prices, the government would sell bonds directly to citizens, who would essentially crowdfund each one. It’s a cheaper and easier system than traditional municipal bonds, and less volatile than traditional cryptocurrencies: The tokens would be digitized and blockchain-based, but they’d act as a security, not as a speculation tool. “This proposal is an important step in taking power from Wall Street and giving it back to the people,” Bartlett said in a press release in April. A cheaper way in It’s that spirit of accessibility that many crypto-advocates highlight. “If you tokenize these bonds, then it’s possible for the average person to make a small investment,” said Campbell Harvey, a finance professor who teaches cryptocurrency at Duke University. An actual bond may be issued at thousands, even millions, of dollars, which is out of reach for most of the community—and the process of buying one is cumbersome. By switching to a tokenized system, a college student who cares about poverty in the city can buy $20 worth, knowing his contribution is going toward, say, an affordable housing project. He can then use his tokens on other city goods, like transit rides or groceries, or he can hold on to them as an investment. “So he’s able to enter the game with the amount of disposable cash he’s got,” Harvey said. “It essentially brings people that wouldn't usually be investors into the market.” Warren sees this as just the next logical step in the future of city financing. “At some point in history we had to invent municipal bonds, and now we’re just taking it to the next level,” she said. What cities like Berkeley are doing is taking a well-known system that people are comfortable with and securitizing it, or backing the bond with a new kind of currency. After Bartlett formally proposed developing a “blockchain-based micro-bond” at an April city council meeting, five out of nine city council members expressed support, which means Bartlett is moving forward with designing an implementation plan. Other hypotheticals have been floated, too. Prosperous cities could back their currencies with property values, as Fouad Khan, an associate editor at Springer Nature, imagines in his vision of an “NYCToken.” Each digital token could be worth the market value of 1 square centimeter of New York real estate. At a current cost per square foot of around $1,500, that’s about $1.60 per token. “If it’s valuable to live in the city, then the currency would be valuable,” said Khan, who has previously been a consultant for the World Bank. After all, the primary investors in a city-based cryptocurrency should be the citizens who want to buy into their city, Khan said. “Every time the price of currency goes up, not only are they getting more services, but they’re also getting a better living experience for themselves,” he said. Dubai’s emCash is a different animal altogether, more akin to Slovenia’s BTC mall than Berkeley’s crypto-funded social investment plan. The city’s goal is to transition into a cashless society, giving residents the ability to buy goods with emCash just as easily as they’d use cash or, say, ApplePay. Trading one kind of money for another may seem superfluous, but if the ultimate goal is to become completely “smart,” Warren said, hosting even the smallest transactions on a city-backed blockchain brings the city one step closer. What could go wrong? There are unique drawbacks to each city’s methods of leaning away from traditional money. In developing a cryptocurrency that acts as an investment vehicle, cities are creating the potential for another bubble, experts say. “You’re going to have trillions and trillions of dollars coming in that are, maybe in the short term, great for [your city],” Khan said. “But at the same time, that’s a lot of money coming in that’s being diverted from other places.” As Bitcoin investors (and armchair speculators) have seen, cryptocurrencies can be extremely volatile. Once the novelty and excitement has worn off, investors could engage in a digital run on the bank, or there might just be fewer interested ones down the line. There’s always the possibility for panics, Warren said. But traditional financial institutions have safeguards to keep that from happening, and future crypto-cities others could implement similar ones to make their currencies less risky. Then there’s the security concern. Cities that want to launch their own cryptocurrency will need have a better grasp on blockchain and cybersecurity—which, as CityLab has reported before, isn’t often the case. “If it’s not secure, then it’s going to be hacked,” said Harvey. “There’s a lot of variables here in terms of how [cities] set up their blockchain, but essentially think of somebody going in and stealing the tokens, creating transactions for residents who don’t know their tokens are being taken, and then dumped.” Berkeley’s city council, for example, is teaming up with UC Berkeley’s Blockchain Lab, as well as an online municipal finance group, to develop their plan. Of course, all this effort is moot if cities can’t get their residents to trust cryptocurrencies. Harvey thinks that shouldn’t be difficult, given how quickly interest has grown. Colleges are now teaching blockchain—Harvey’s own class jumped from a few dozen students to more than 200 over the last four years. And cryptocurrency has come a long way since its early days. “These cryptos have a different reputation now, and people are very open to the blockchain idea,” he said. “There’s a lot of hype, and a lot of positive PR.” Warren is more skeptical, arguing that there’s still a good amount of anxiety around cryptocurrency, making it a double-edged sword. “There is quite likely a class of person who would go forward with it because they’re attracted to the idea that it is innovative,” she said. Certain cities are more adept to experiment, and better-suited to support their own financial markets. New York and California, for example, are brimming with tech geeks and hedge fund managers who are savvy (and wealthy) enough to invest. Likewise, their cities are trustworthy (and prosperous) enough to be good bets. But a growing economic polarization along geographic lines means effective local currencies could simply end up helping rich cities get richer, leaving their smaller counterparts behind. And even within cities, the new investment model could unwittingly exacerbate inequality: in the process of funding projects that help disenfranchised communities like the homeless, cities create wealth for the wealthy. “At this point I tend to be in favor of any solution that’s going to alleviate the plight of the most vulnerable,” Warren said. “But I do think over time we have to think about what it means if we’re really creating and adding to stratification of society through the processes we’re using to alleviate those issues.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531418626030-TWTJH63758HRT4CJVIHL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.03.24+AM.png economics - Minimum Wages Can't Pay for a 2-Bedroom Apartment Anywhere For most Americans, access to decent, affordable rental housing remains cruelly beyond reach. Only in 22 counties in the United States is a one-bedroom home affordable to someone working 40 hours per week at federal minimum wage. That’s from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) report, which outlines the mismatch between wages and rent every year. For people earning minimum wage, the situation is untenable. At $7.25 an hour, they would need to put in roughly 122 hours per week, every week of the year—or magically, work 3 full-time jobs—to afford a two-bedroom home at the national average fair market rent; for a one-bedroom, they would need to put in 99-hour weeks, or the equivalent of two and a half full-time jobs. (Fair Market Rent is an annually updated government estimate, typically the 40th percentile of the gross rent in an area.) But this isn’t just a problem for the poor. NLIHC estimates that the average renter’s hourly wage in the United States is $16.88. The average renter in each county makes enough to afford a two-bedroom in only 11 percent of U.S. counties, and a one-bedroom, in only 43 percent. The national “housing wage” in 2018 is $22.10 for a modest two-bedroom rental home and $17.90 for a one-bedroom, the report estimates. (That’s how much an average renter in the U.S. would need to make to afford a modest apartment at fair market rent, without paying more than 30 percent of their income towards housing.)* Of course, there's widespread geographical discrepancy in rents and wages across the country. You'd need to earn $60.02 to reasonably afford a two-bedroom in San Francisco, California, but in Little Rock, Arkansas, it's about $15.60. Still, in not a single state, city, or county can someone earning federal or state minimum wage for a 40-hour work week afford to rent a two-bedroom home at fair market rent. NLIHC’s first map below shows the wages a person would have to make to afford a two-bedroom in each state. (Keep in mind: HUD’s Fair Market Rents, when aggregated across an entire state, may obscure highs and lows in local markets.) The second map shows which counties a person on minimum wage would have to work more than 80 hours a week—double the standard workweek—to afford a measly one bedroom. Here, the variation within a single state is more evident: It’s notable that in all of the 22 counties where a one-bedroom is affordable, that minimum wage is set higher than the national minimum of $7.25. Still, raising wages alone cannot dissolve this mismatch. The incredible shortfall in affordable units remains the more stubborn, intractable problem. The rental demand has been swelling, in particular since the Great Recession, and the supply hasn’t kept up. What’s more: While including 10-15 percent affordable housing in a new development can yield profits, the new units created in the last decade or so have overwhelmingly catered to the rich. Between 2005 and 2015, apartments costing $2,000 and more increased by 97 percent, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies; Meanwhile, those under $800 decreased by 2 percent. The most vulnerable renters are languishing in dire need, largely overlooked by the market. Ushering in an an era of affordability, therefore, hinges on government subsidies—and on that front, things aren’t looking so good either. Even though Congress bumped up the 2018 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget by a little, the additional funds still fall way below the 2010 levels: And the future looks even bleaker. The Trump administration has proposed massive cuts to subsidized housing programs. HUD Secretary Ben Carson has taken it even further. In an attempt to promote “self-sufficiency,” he has backed a bill that raises rents for households getting housing assistance and tacks on mandatory work requirements. A recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found that low-income renters would have to pay roughly 20 percent more if the bill were to be passed. Via the Associated Press: That rent increase is about six times greater than the growth in average hourly earnings, putting the poorest workers at an increased risk of homelessness because wages simply haven’t kept pace with housing expenses. Whether or not this bill goes through (and it’s very possible that it won’t) it’s clear that the affordable housing crisis is at risk of escalating—at least till it becomes a real political issue. 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Already, there have been some fintech projects challenging the traditional financial methods, such as in the case of Nexo.io, which is providing crypto backed loans, and many more like it are pushing back the boundaries between finance and technology. Another project created to challenge the traditional financial system is Kora, a blockchain supported infrastructure created for the purpose of the increasing financial inclusion of the under-banked regions around the world. According to World Bank Group (WBG), financial inclusion is vital for reducing extreme poverty and to boost prosperity amongst the unbanked. According to a report from WBG, there are over 2 billion unbanked people all over the world. That is 2 billion or more people excluded from the potential value creation that could be gotten from financial inclusion. This exclusion is traced to the inaccessibility of the traditional financial system into the unbanked regions, communities, or remote settlements. The majority of the unbanked population dwell in remote regions around the world, regions with low “economic input”. Hence, an understanding of the motive of the traditional financial system in reaching out to the unbanked is needed to see why blockchain backed technologies can overcome these. Why Kora? Built on the blockchain technology, Kora’s infrastructure is designed to provide necessary financial inclusion in products and services to the over 2 billion underbanked people in the world. Already, it has started its first User Testing Program in Nigeria and will launch their beta in Ghana in July 2018. According to the CEO of Kora Dickson Nsofor: “…the Kora Network uses blockchain technology as an immutable trust engine, increasing transparency and creating a reliable record of business activities, proving them a more stable investment opportunity to stakeholders. By opening up access to more investment capital and resources to better manage their finances, these communities have the chance to better plan their business activities, returning greater profit and gaining a fair share in the wealth they create.” Kora Network principles of operation are based around low cost, universal access and a commitment to engaging with existing communities. On top of this, Kora will also be able to provide an authenticated identification process. Lack of documentation and the ability to prove one’s identity is something which holds back traditional financial institutions from serving the unbanked. Kora, using an internet service model, also overcomes many of the infrastructural barriers placed in the way of established banks and lenders. In other words, they do not have to build branches. Kora customers will have access to secure storage for their funds, the ability to transfer money between accounts, and it will provide a low-cost marketplace for retailers and other businesses to operate in. It services will be available and accessible in areas will little or no internet connection via the SMS/USSD protocol, while its mobile app can be accessed in areas which are served by mobile internet. Kora’s Edge The striking point of this project is the use of SMS/USSD for transactional purposes. Already, it has been established that most remote areas of the world, Africa to be exact, are shut out of the internet disruption and opportunities due to a lack of cell towers. Traditional financial houses are reluctant to invest heavily in areas with little or no return. Kora will provide the infrastructure for such services in the remotest parts of Africa and subsequently, other parts of the world, those both with and without internet connectivity. Kora’s blockchain is capable of storing identity and transactions while running software modules and connects to other blockchains as well. It uses Tendermint DPoS as a consensus algorithm which allows for scalability while maintaining decentralisation. Just recently, Kora got an early investor, Aeternity Ventures, with a shared vision of building a global financial infrastructure that fuels economic growth. Kora hopes to put an end to extreme poverty in the most remote regions of the world. With the use of blockchain as a social and financial tool, it hopes to lend a helping hand, empower and as well as increase the financial status of the underbanked. Learn more at marketmogul https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531418846135-L5K3ZTJDKJG2IGUZMJIU/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.07.04+AM.png economics - Art Is Becoming a Financial Product, and Blockchain Is Making It Happen In recent years, there has been plenty of talk of the “financialization” of art. As prices soar to new levels and digital technology opens new markets, that talk is getting louder. Last month in London, DACS, Britain’s leading artists’ rights management organization, unveiled “The Art Market 2.0” to lawmakers in the House of Commons. A report by academics at the Alan Turing Institute in London and Oxford University, it envisioned how blockchain technology might “change the balance of economic power in the art market” and “integrate art into the financial sector.” A financialized Art Market 2.0 would lead to an “explosion of liquidity and value,” according to the report. A day later at the London Business School’s 10th Art Investment Conference, held at Phillips auction house, there were, as usual, sessions discussing the performance of art as a financial asset class. This year, however, the event focused on whether “new technologies can make art a better investment.” “It’s not Wall Street,” Alain Servais, a Belgian collector, former investment banker and one of the speakers at the conference, said in an interview. “I don’t think art can be considered as an asset class.” He pointed to the art market’s lack of liquidity and regulation and to the ability of trade insiders to control the prices of certain highly collectible names. “These are wealthy people’s toys,” he said. But to what extent has the art market been “financialized,” in the way that a Wall Street investor would recognize? The lack of liquidity and regulation, together with opacity, volatility, high transaction costs, cyclical trading patterns and a relatively small scale, has long been among the reasons institutional investment houses have shied away from the art market. But wealthy individuals from the world of finance are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about art as a way to increase their capital. “Much of today’s most dynamic wealth creation comes from hedge funds, private equity and real estate,” said Evan Beard, a national art services executive at U.S. Trust, a wealth management unit of Bank of America. “None of our clients are buying art for investment. But they’re savvy with credit, and art is a capital asset.” Mr. Beard said that Bank of America has about $6.5 billion of art-secured loans on its books and that clients have used much of this liquidity to capitalize their businesses. Last year in the United States, the art-secured lending market grew 13.3 percent to an estimated $17 billion to $20 billion, according to the 2017 Deloitte Art & Finance Report. The market is dominated by the major investment banks, which charge lower interest rates for their loans than specialist lenders that securitize loans solely against art. And then there is the money that savvy financier-collectors can make out of auction guarantees. Mr. Beard said that more than 10 of his wealthy clients routinely guarantee works at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips. They take the risk of being the only bidder and owning the artwork in return for a fee or a percentage of the “overage” if the bidding exceeds an agreed-upon price. “They’ll guarantee three paintings in a season they’d like to buy and will be happy to own one of them if the overage on the others gives them a good discount,” Mr. Beard said. At the latest biannual season of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art auctions in New York, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips took in about $2 billion, a 25 percent increase over the equivalent sales the previous May. Most of the more expensive lots had been certain to find buyers courtesy of these opaque arrangements with third-party guarantors, which blur the boundaries between private and public sales. Among the works sold were paintings by Amedeo Modigliani and Andy Warhol that fetched $157.2 million and $37 million, respectively. Artnet News pointed out that Christie’s website published the price of Andy Warhol’s 1963 “Double Elvis [Ferus Type]” as $38 million with fees, rather than the $37 million that was announced to the media. That $1 million discrepancy reflected the fee earned by the undisclosed third party, who earned more from the transaction than the seller. That was the casino magnate Steve Wynn, who had bought the painting in 2012 for $37 million. The rewards for saying “bid” into a telephone can be even more spectacular. Thomas Danziger, a New York attorney who represents clients active in the top end of the international art market, estimates that whoever guaranteed Leonardo’s $450.3 million “Salvator Mundi” could have earned between $80 million and $100 million. On the other hand, as Mr. Danziger points out, guarantors who end up buying a work are left wondering if the lot has been overvalued. The Modigliani nude that sold last month, for example, was knocked down to a single bid of $157.2 million from its guarantor. “Guarantees used to be a gentlemen’s club, but now they’re greatly extended,” Mr. Danziger said. “Auctions have become a public forum for private transactions,” he added, referring to how it has become routine for at least a third of lots at evening contemporary sales to have been “presold” to external guarantors. With plentiful liquidity available from the major banks, and millions to be made from auction guarantees, wealthy collectors can make art a lucrative asset without having to go anywhere near the art finance industry. Yet companies continue to come up with ideas to financialize art. Later this month, the Singapore-based Maecenas, which gave a presentation at the Art Investment Conference in London, will unveil a “decentralized art gallery” (the works are scattered, but exhibited together online) that “democratizes” investment in art, according to its website. One of several start-ups that have explored the idea of “fractionalizing” art, Maecenas will divide 49 percent of the value of an artwork into shares, which can then be bought and sold on the company’s blockchain trading platform. Shares will initially be priced at $10,000 each, according to Miguel Neumann, one of the company’s founding partners, who comes from an investment banking background. The first artwork, Andy Warhol’s 1980 silk-screen painting “14 Small Electric Chairs Reversal Series,” will be supplied by Dadiani Fine Art, based in the Mayfair district of London. The gallery, which offers a commercial mix of contemporary and older British, American and Russian art, gained notoriety when it became the first in the city to accept payments in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. (The Warhol will be valued at 4.2 million pounds, or about $5.6 million.) It remains to be seen how many investors will want to speculate in shares derived from works owned by galleries and collectors. The art market, after all, despite its shortcomings, is still democratic enough that people can buy and actually own works for less than $10,000 that turn out to be good investments. But there are also people, such as Duncan MacDonald-Korth, one of the co-authors of the DACS “Art Market 2.0” report, who remain convinced that the technological integrity of blockchain will eventually transform the art market. “The stakes are getting so high,” Mr. MacDonald-Korth said in a telephone interview, referring to the skyrocketing amounts being paid for trophy works of art. “The higher the values get, the more incentive there will be for the market to be properly financialized.” He envisages a large-scale trading platform on which investment banks and hedge funds will be able to trade fractions of art in digital currency. “We’re in a special moment in the economics of the art market.” What this moment will mean for art itself is anyone’s guess. Learn more at NY Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531419009475-8XJRGLPN7UFQEKRHKKNS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.09.51+AM.png economics - How Culture Shapes Economic Development One of the big questions in urbanism is the degree to which culture shapes economic development. Traditionally, it was thought that culture follows from economic development: The more developed and affluent that a city becomes, the more money that it has to spend creating art galleries, museums, concert halls, and other cultural venues. But my own writing on the creative class and a large number of other studies argue that culture acts as a key factor in economic development by helping attract talented, ambitious people to cities. Others go further, contending that arts and culture are large industries that act as direct inputs into development. A new paper takes a deep dive into the connection between culture and economic development in New York and London. The paper, written by a team of scientists from Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, and published in the journal Frontiers in Physics, looks at the ways in which culture and cultural capital interact with economic factors (such as changes in median income and house prices) to shape urban economic development. And because urban economic development and culture are increasingly seen to be associated with rising gentrification and deepening inequality, it also looks at the effects of cultural capital on housing prices and housing affordability in these cities. To do this, the researchers tracked roughly 1.5 million photographic images of the venues and events that comprise the cultural capital of both New York and London. Their study breaks down cultural capital into nine categories: advertising and marketing; architecture; crafts; design (product, graphic, and fashion); film (TV, video, radio, and photography); IT software and computer services; publishing; museums, galleries, and libraries; and music, performing, and visual arts. The study gauges the effects of these types of cultural capital on both median income, house prices, and composite indexes of urban development in London’s 33 boroughs and 60 of New York’s 71 community districts over the period 2007 to 2014, which spans the Great Recession and its recovery. The overarching takeaway is that culture or cultural capital plays a key role, operating alongside more traditional economic factors, in shaping urban development. Culture and neighborhood development The graphs below show the role of cultural capital and economic capital in urban development in London and New York neighborhoods, respectively. The study finds that both these types of capital have a role in urban development and the improvement of neighborhoods. In the graphs below, each dot corresponds to a neighborhood, and its position on the graph is determined by the two values of capital for that specific neighborhood. The size of the dot reflects a positive change in development; larger, darker dots show greater levels of change. Cultural capital plays a strong role, alongside economic factors, in neighborhoods in the upper right-hand quadrant of these graphs. In London, this quadrant includes the neighborhoods of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, and the City of London; in New York, Greenwich Village, Midtown, and Brooklyn Heights. Cultural capital plays an even larger role than economic factors in neighborhoods in the lower right-hand quadrant of the graphs: Camden, Islington, and Hackney in London; the Lower East Side, Bushwick, and East Harlem in New York. But do certain types of culture and certain forms of cultural capital matter to neighborhood development? To get at this, the study examines the specific types of cultural capital that influenced the development of particular neighborhoods. Performance arts are prominent in the central areas of both cities, while architecture is important in both central and peripheral areas. East London tends to specialize in design, while in West London, marketing dominates alongside performing arts. The next set of charts tracks the effects of both cultural specialization and cultural diversity on neighborhood development. The color of the dots reflects the corresponding location’s cultural specialization, and the size of the dots reflects the neighborhood’s cultural diversity. Across both London and New York, higher levels of neighborhood development are associated with cultural diversity as well as cultural capital. The neighborhoods with the highest levels of development tend to specialize in performing arts. In London, higher levels of urban development are also associated with the design and publishing industries. Culture and housing prices From Spike Lee’s anti-gentrification rants to David Byrnes’ complaintthat New York City has been usurped by the top 1 percent, arts and culture have come to be seen as triggers of gentrification and rising housing prices. The graphs below show the close relationship between cultural capital and housing prices across neighborhoods in New York and London, although cultural capital appears to play an even greater role in London’s housing prices than in New York’s. All of the specific types of cultural capital are associated with housing price increases, though the associations are again closer across the board in London than New York. “[E]ven though several economic and geographical factors impact house prices—such as property type or size,” the authors write, “cultural capital alone holds a considerable explanatory power.” Linear regression results for housing price z-scores across neighborhoods over the period 2010–2015. The regression line is shown in red and the shaded area around it represents the limits of the 95% confidence interval. (Hristova, Aiello, Quercia/Frontiers in Physics) Ultimately, the study finds that cultural capital has been a significant factor in the development of urban neighborhoods in the superstar cities of London and New York, both during and after the Great Recession. Culture is not a mere afterthought or an add-on, but a key contributor to urban economic growth. But in fueling neighborhood growth and development, it has also played a role in rising housing prices, contributing to gentrification. Culture, then, is bound up with the New Urban Crisis—a crisis of development and success—which is making our largest and most dynamic cities more expensive and less affordable, and in doing so, threatens the very economic, racial, and cultural diversity which has fueled their cultural creativity in the first place. But it’s also important not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. The solution is not less culture or less development, but ensuring that the cultural revitalization and redevelopment of our cities and neighborhoods can be channeled in more inclusive ways that benefit all urbanites. 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Earlier last month, CoinDesk reported that the company is working with the U.S. sausage maker Johnsonville, as well as Naturipe Farms and Maple Leaf, to pilot a project that tracks the origin of food products across the supply chain as a part of its Farm to Consumer initiative. In addition to its co-innovation program, SAP has also announced it is forming a blockchain consortium, members of which are entitled to use tech developed by the group. Notable firms in the consortium currently include HP Enterprise, Intel and UPS. The work marks SAP as the latest tech giant that has rolled out a platform for blockchain application development, following similar works done by Microsoft, IBM and China's Baidu and Tencent. Learn more at Coindesk https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531419178179-AIIHHCW0BLMJ89IM71LP/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.12.40+AM.png economics - California Senate Forwards Bill To Create State Bank for Marijuana The California Senate approved a bill on Wednesday that would create a state bank for marijuana businesses. The measure, Senate Bill 930 (SB 930), received bipartisan support from senators, who voted 29-6 in favor of the legislation. Strict federal regulations make it difficult or impossible for most cannabis firms to make use of traditional banking services. As a result, even legal cannabis companies must do business largely in cash. The vast amounts of currency present both logistical and security challenges to the industry. Under SB 930, the state would establish a special charter bank that could issue checks for use by account holders. Businesses could use the checks to pay rent, state and local taxes and fees, and to reimburse California vendors for goods and services. Account holders could also purchase state and local bonds and other debt instruments with the checks. Sen. Bob Hertzberg, a Democrat from Van Nuys, introduced SB 930, and said in a release that California’s fledgling cannabis economy needs the special bank in order to operate safely and efficiently. The new bank would also increase security at marijuana dispensaries and other businesses, where stockpiles of cash can be a tempting target for thieves. “The status quo for our growing legal cannabis industry is unsustainable,” said Hertzberg. “It’s not only impractical from an accounting perspective, but it also presents a tremendous public safety problem. This bill takes a limited approach to provide all parties with a safe and reliable way to move forward on this urgent issue.” New Bank Will Be Separate from Federal Financial System Hertzberg believes that the federal government will eventually grant the cannabis industry access to the traditional banking system. But until then, the special bank will be able to offer limited services outside of the federal regulatory framework. “We’re not using the federal system, we’re not using the federal wire,” Hertzberg told local media. “This is a short-term creative approach to deal with this extraordinary problem.” But some expenses, including payments to suppliers outside California, won’t qualify for payment through the cannabis bank. Katie Hanzlik, Sen. Hertzberg’s Press Secretary, told High Times that businesses would also not be able to pay their employees with checks from the bank. “That money would be subject to the federal payroll tax, which would then put it on the radar of the federal government,” she said. “The limited scope of the bill, and of the uses for the checks, was specially designed so that it is a closed loop system that will reassure cannabis companies and banks that they will not have to worry about federal interference.” State Board of Equalization Member and Democratic candidate for state treasurer Fiona Ma also supports SB 930. She said that the bill would benefit both cannabis businesses and the people of the state. “California can’t wait to take action,” said Ma. “With secure banking for cannabis through SB 930, the industry will benefit, the state will get a revenue boost, and pot cash will get off our streets.” SB 930 now heads to the State Assembly where it will be referred to committee for consideration. Learn more at High Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531419276306-TJOA8KCYQ08EENS93AT8/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.14.15+AM.png economics - Could Blockchain Have Solved the Mystery of the Romaine Lettuce E. Coli Outbreak? Not long ago, Yiannas, who guards the integrity of food in Walmart's $280-billion grocery empire, would have brushed off the notion of an instantly "knowable" and verifiable food chain as fantasy. He heard about it two years ago, when Walmart was about to open a food safety institute in China, where 10 years ago a baby formula adulteration scandal sickened 54,000 babies. "Up until that point I only knew that it was the technology behind bitcoin," Yiannas said. "I will tell you I was a bit of a skeptic, just like many people are about the technology." Blockchain, for all its cloak-and-dagger associations, is basically a democratized accounting system made possible by advances in data encryption. Rather than storing proprietary data behind traditional security walls, companies contribute encrypted blocks of data to a "distributed" ledger that can be monitored and verified by each farmer, packer, shipper, distributor, wholesaler and retailer of produce. No one can make a change without everyone knowing, and agreeing to it. "If I want to change something or fudge something on my version of the ledger, I then have to share it with everybody else and they all have to agree to that," Yiannas said. "You can't have two separate sets of books. It's one set of books that everyone sees." As it stands, no one can see the entire path from farm to fork. Each time a food-borne illness breaks out — which tends to happen around 900 times a year — investigators have to work their way backward, one link at a time, from victims to fields, tracing multiple paths across separate companies and sometimes across international borders. "It's very linear, but the food system as we know is not very linear," Yiannas said. That linear approach can cost lives and waste billions of dollars in healthcare costs, lost work hours, and trashed food every year, health officials and analysts say. Food-borne illnesses can cost the economy $152 billion a year, with tainted produce responsible for a quarter of that damage, according to a Pew Charitable Trust study. Take mangoes. The increasingly popular fruit grows on small farms scattered across Latin America, and can harbor listeria, a bacterium that kills 260 people per year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two years ago, Yiannas told his staff to trace a packet of sliced mango from a Walmart aisle the traditional way. "I looked at my clock and wrote down the time and date, and I timed them," he said. "It took them six days, 18 hours and 26 minutes." Under a week is considered fast by the current link-by-link method known as "one up, one back" tracking, said Yiannas, who previously headed Walt Disney World's health and safety program. Walmart has a sophisticated tracking system for its part of the supply line. Beyond the walls of Walmart's distribution centers, though, record-keeping can get hazy. "Believe it or not, it's still largely done on paper," Yiannas said. "It's done many different ways by many different actors." It took a month to build the blockchain network, which depends on cooperative partners agreeing on what information to contribute. By then, Yiannas felt confident enough to pull off the test live, at a stockholder meeting last summer. "It wasn't staged," he said. "We had a backup in case the technology failed." It worked — they mapped the mango supply line in 2.2 seconds. The next day, Walmart started contacting suppliers. "I think we're onto something here," Yiannas told them. Driscoll's berries was among the first companies to join Walmart's blockchain pilot, along with Nestle, Danone, Unilever and others. Based in Watsonville, Calif., Driscoll's grows berries in nearly two dozen countries, making it by far the biggest berry supplier worldwide. Almost immediately, Driscoll's saw a lot more than food safety in blockchain. A fully built-out ledger could one day get berries to shelves faster, figure out what varieties last longest, trim waste and even pay suppliers more quickly, the company believes. "We want to drill down and continuously improve and understand: If we fell flat somewhere, why? Or if we did really well somewhere else, why? And then constantly refine our operations to be better," said Tim Jackson, the company's vice president of food safety and compliance. Driscoll's also foresees a day when consumers could tap into some of that information. In the case of the romaine outbreak, consumers complained that they had no idea how to find out if they were buying lettuce from Yuma (although, if you eat romaine in early spring, there's a 90% chance it came from the desert valleys straddling the lower Colorado River, from Yuma into California's Imperial Valley). "To say to consumers that you shouldn't be consuming romaine lettuce if it came from the Yuma area and yet that information at the point of consumption or the point of purchase isn't readily available or obvious to the consumer, then that's a problem," said Stephen Ostroff, deputy commissioner for food and veterinary medicine at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Blockchain, first developed in the 1990s, was considered some dark art in the world of cryptocurrency in 2010, when Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, the first major overhaul of the nation's deeply fragmented food safety regulation since the 1930s. The law required the FDA to identify high-risk foods and require companies to keep better records of them. The agency has yet to write those rules — and they have been further delayed by the Trump administration's wholesale rollback of regulation. "Seven years after the enactment of FSMA, the FDA has yet to carry out Congress's mandate to create a list of high-risk foods and issue a proposed rule for enhanced recordkeeping," a coalition of food safety advocates said in a letter to the agency last week. The groups noted that leafy greens were responsible for more cases of E. coli illness than any other produce — a general category that accounted for half or more of the outbreaks of listeria, E. coli and salmonella, and a third of the campylobacter outbreaks reported from 2009 to 2013. Ostroff said implementing the remaining FSMA regulations "would help, but it wouldn't necessarily solve the problem" presented by such a broad outbreak. "At each point of that supply chain, you potentially are looking at hundreds and hundreds of records," he said. "Many of those records are stored and available in different ways, ranging from very sophisticated electronic systems ... to hand-written records. And they're in different formats." Meanwhile, the offending lettuce is gone — consumed, or long ago tossed away after its 21-day shelf life expired, the FDA has said. No more lettuce is being grown in Yuma, either, according to the FDA, which cited industry sources. "Even as we were hearing about these cases, the product that they actually consumed either in their home or in a restaurant wasn't available for us to test," Ostroff said. Yiannas believes blockchain could have led investigators to likely culprits long before the lettuce vanished. "Walmart is not chasing blockchain because it's a new fad or it's a shiny coin," Yiannas said. "The romaine incident is a perfect example of a real-world scenario where if tools were available it might be managed a bit more effectively." Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531419380408-3VA5811KVLWR4CML8XNP/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.16.02+AM.png economics - The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy 1. The Aristocracy Is Dead … For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan. Only much later in life did I learn that the stories about the Colonel and his tangles with titans fell far short of the truth. At the end of each week, we would return to our place. My reality was the aggressively middle-class world of 1960s and ’70s U.S. military bases and the communities around them. Life was good there, too, but the pizza came from a box, and it was Lucky Charms for breakfast. Our glory peaked on the day my parents came home with a new Volkswagen camper bus. As I got older, the holiday pomp of patriotic luncheons and bridge-playing rituals came to seem faintly ridiculous and even offensive, like an endless birthday party for people whose chief accomplishment in life was just showing up. I belonged to a new generation that believed in getting ahead through merit, and we defined merit in a straightforward way: test scores, grades, competitive résumé-stuffing, supremacy in board games and pickup basketball, and, of course, working for our keep. For me that meant taking on chores for the neighbors, punching the clock at a local fast-food restaurant, and collecting scholarships to get through college and graduate school. I came into many advantages by birth, but money was not among them. The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. I’ve joined a new aristocracy now, even if we still call ourselves meritocratic winners. If you are a typical reader of The Atlantic, you may well be a member too. (And if you’re not a member, my hope is that you will find the story of this new class even more interesting—if also more alarming.) To be sure, there is a lot to admire about my new group, which I’ll call—for reasons you’ll soon see—the 9.9 percent. We’ve dropped the old dress codes, put our faith in facts, and are (somewhat) more varied in skin tone and ethnicity. People like me, who have waning memories of life in an earlier ruling caste, are the exception, not the rule. By any sociological or financial measure, it’s good to be us. It’s even better to be our kids. In our health, family life, friendship networks, and level of education, not to mention money, we are crushing the competition below. But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into. The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end. 2. The Discreet Charm of the 9.9 Percent Let’s talk first about money—even if money is only one part of what makes the new aristocrats special. There is a familiar story about rising inequality in the United States, and its stock characters are well known. The villains are the fossil-fueled plutocrat, the Wall Street fat cat, the callow tech bro, and the rest of the so-called top 1 percent. The good guys are the 99 percent, otherwise known as “the people” or “the middle class.” The arc of the narrative is simple: Once we were equal, but now we are divided. The story has a grain of truth to it. But it gets the characters and the plot wrong in basic ways. It is in fact the top 0.1 percent who have been the big winners in the growing concentration of wealth over the past half century. According to the UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the 160,000 or so households in that group held 22 percent of America’s wealth in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1963. If you’re looking for the kind of money that can buy elections, you’ll find it inside the top 0.1 percent alone. Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose. In between the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent is a group that has been doing just fine. It has held on to its share of a growing pie decade after decade. And as a group, it owns substantially more wealth than do the other two combined. In the tale of three classes (see Figure 1), it is represented by the gold line floating high and steady while the other two duke it out. You’ll find the new aristocracy there. We are the 9.9 percent. So what kind of characters are we, the 9.9 percent? We are mostly not like those flamboyant political manipulators from the 0.1 percent. We’re a well-behaved, flannel-suited crowd of lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid-level investment bankers, M.B.A.s with opaque job titles, and assorted other professionals—the kind of people you might invite to dinner. In fact, we’re so self-effacing, we deny our own existence. We keep insisting that we’re “middle class.” As of 2016, it took $1.2 million in net worth to make it into the 9.9 percent; $2.4 million to reach the group’s median; and $10 million to get into the top 0.9 percent. (And if you’re not there yet, relax: Our club is open to people who are on the right track and have the right attitude.) “We are the 99 percent” sounds righteous, but it’s a slogan, not an analysis. The families at our end of the spectrum wouldn’t know what to do with a pitchfork. We are also mostly, but not entirely, white. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, African Americans represent 1.9 percent of the top 10th of households in wealth; Hispanics, 2.4 percent; and all other minorities, including Asian and multiracial individuals, 8.8 percent—even though those groups together account for 35 percent of the total population. One of the hazards of life in the 9.9 percent is that our necks get stuck in the upward position. We gaze upon the 0.1 percent with a mixture of awe, envy, and eagerness to obey. As a consequence, we are missing the other big story of our time. We have left the 90 percent in the dust—and we’ve been quietly tossing down roadblocks behind us to make sure that they never catch up. Let’s suppose that you start off right in the middle of the American wealth distribution. How high would you have to jump to make it into the 9.9 percent? In financial terms, the measurement is easy and the trend is unmistakable. In 1963, you would have needed to multiply your wealth six times. By 2016, you would have needed to leap twice as high—increasing your wealth 12-fold—to scrape into our group. If you boldly aspired to reach the middle of our group rather than its lower edge, you’d have needed to multiply your wealth by a factor of 25. On this measure, the 2010s look much like the 1920s. If you are starting at the median for people of color, you’ll want to practice your financial pole-vaulting. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated that, setting aside money invested in “durable goods” such as furniture and a family car, the median black family had net wealth of $1,700 in 2013, and the median Latino family had $2,000, compared with $116,800 for the median white family. A 2015 study in Boston found that the wealth of the median white family there was $247,500, while the wealth of the median African American family was $8. That is not a typo. That’s two grande cappuccinos. That and another 300,000 cups of coffee will get you into the 9.9 percent. None of this matters, you will often hear, because in the United States everyone has an opportunity to make the leap: Mobility justifies inequality. As a matter of principle, this isn’t true. In the United States, it also turns out not to be true as a factual matter. Contrary to popular myth, economic mobility in the land of opportunity is not high, and it’s going down. Imagine yourself on the socioeconomic ladder with one end of a rubber band around your ankle and the other around your parents’ rung. The strength of the rubber determines how hard it is for you to escape the rung on which you were born. If your parents are high on the ladder, the band will pull you up should you fall; if they are low, it will drag you down when you start to rise. Economists represent this concept with a number they call “intergenerational earnings elasticity,” or IGE, which measures how much of a child’s deviation from average income can be accounted for by the parents’ income. An IGE of zero means that there’s no relationship at all between parents’ income and that of their offspring. An IGE of one says that the destiny of a child is to end up right where she came into the world. According to Miles Corak, an economics professor at the City University of New York, half a century ago IGE in America was less than 0.3. Today, it is about 0.5. In America, the game is half over once you’ve selected your parents. IGE is now higher here than in almost every other developed economy. On this measure of economic mobility, the United States is more like Chile or Argentina than Japan or Germany. The story becomes even more disconcerting when you see just where on the ladder the tightest rubber bands are located. Canada, for example, has an IGE of about half that of the U.S. Yet from the middle rungs of the two countries’ income ladders, offspring move up or down through the nearby deciles at the same respectable pace. The difference is in what happens at the extremes. In the United States, it’s the children of the bottom decile and, above all, the top decile—the 9.9 percent—who settle down nearest to their starting point. Here in the land of opportunity, the taller the tree, the closer the apple falls. All of this analysis of wealth percentiles, to be clear, provides only a rough start in understanding America’s evolving class system. People move in and out of wealth categories all the time without necessarily changing social class, and they may belong to a different class in their own eyes than they do in others’. Yet even if the trends in the monetary statistics are imperfect illustrations of a deeper process, they are nonetheless registering something of the extraordinary transformation that’s taking place in our society. A few years ago, Alan Krueger, an economist and a former chairman of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, was reviewing the international mobility data when he caught a glimpse of the fundamental process underlying our present moment. Rising immobility and rising inequality aren’t like two pieces of driftwood that happen to have shown up on the beach at the same time, he noted. They wash up together on every shore. Across countries, the higher the inequality, the higher the IGE (see Figure 2). It’s as if human societies have a natural tendency to separate, and then, once the classes are far enough apart, to crystallize. Economists are prudent creatures, and they’ll look up from a graph like that and remind you that it shows only correlation, not causation. That’s a convenient hedge for those of us at the top because it keeps alive one of the founding myths of America’s meritocracy: that our success has nothing to do with other people’s failure. It’s a pleasant idea. But around the world and throughout history, the wealthy have advanced the crystallization process in a straightforward way. They have taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls. Throughout history, moreover, one social group above all others has assumed responsibility for maintaining and defending these walls. Its members used to be called aristocrats. Now we’re the 9.9 percent. The main difference is that we have figured out how to use the pretense of being part of the middle as one of our strategies for remaining on top. Krueger liked the graph shown in Figure 2 so much that he decided to give it a name: the Great Gatsby Curve. It’s a good choice, and it resonates strongly with me. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about the breakdown of the American dream is set in 1922, or right around the time that my great-grandfather was secretly siphoning money from Standard Oil and putting it into a shell company in Canada. It was published in 1925, just as special counsel was turning up evidence that bonds from that company had found their way into the hands of the secretary of the interior. Its author was drinking his way through the cafés of Paris just as Colonel Robert W. Stewart was running away from subpoenas to testify before the United States Senate about his role in the Teapot Dome scandal. We are only now closing in on the peak of inequality that his generation achieved, in 1928. I’m sure they thought it would go on forever, too. 3. The Origin of a Species Money can’t buy you class, or so my grandmother used to say. But it can buy a private detective. Grandmother was a Kentucky debutante and sometime fashion model (kind of like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, weirdly enough), so she knew what to do when her eldest son announced his intention to marry a woman from Spain. A gumshoe promptly reported back that the prospective bride’s family made a living selling newspapers on the streets of Barcelona. Grandmother instituted an immediate and total communications embargo. In fact, my mother’s family owned and operated a large paper-goods factory. When children came, Grandmother at last relented. Determined to do the right thing, she arranged for the new family, then on military assignment in Hawaii, to be inscribed in the New York Social Register. Sociologists would say, in their dry language, that my grandmother was a zealous manager of the family’s social capital—and she wasn’t about to let some Spanish street urchin run away with it. She did have a point, even if her facts were wrong. Money may be the measure of wealth, but it is far from the only form of it. Family, friends, social networks, personal health, culture, education, and even location are all ways of being rich, too. These nonfinancial forms of wealth, as it turns out, aren’t simply perks of membership in our aristocracy. They define us. We are the people of good family, good health, good schools, good neighborhoods, and good jobs. We may want to call ourselves the “5Gs” rather than the 9.9 percent. We are so far from the not-so-good people on all of these dimensions, we are beginning to resemble a new species. And, just as in Grandmother’s day, the process of speciation begins with a love story—or, if you prefer, sexual selection. The polite term for the process is assortative mating. The phrase is sometimes used to suggest that this is another of the wonders of the internet age, where popcorn at last meets butter and Yankees fan finds Yankees fan. In fact, the frenzy of assortative mating today results from a truth that would have been generally acknowledged by the heroines of any Jane Austen novel: Rising inequality decreases the number of suitably wealthy mates even as it increases the reward for finding one and the penalty for failing to do so. According to one study, the last time marriage partners sorted themselves by educational status as much as they do now was in the 1920s. For most of us, the process is happily invisible. You meet someone under a tree on an exclusive campus or during orientation at a high-powered professional firm, and before you know it, you’re twice as rich. But sometimes—Grandmother understood this well—extra measures are called for. That’s where our new technology puts bumbling society detectives to shame. Ivy Leaguers looking to mate with their equals can apply to join a dating service called the League. It’s selective, naturally: Only 20 to 30 percent of New York applicants get in. It’s sometimes called “Tinder for the elites.” It is misleading to think that assortative mating is symmetrical, as in city mouse marries city mouse and country mouse marries country mouse. A better summary of the data would be: Rich mouse finds love, and poor mouse gets screwed. It turns out—who knew?—that people who are struggling to keep it all together have a harder time hanging on to their partner. According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common. The rate of single parenting is in turn the single most significant predictor of social immobility across counties, according to a study led by the Stanford economist Raj Chetty. None of which is to suggest that individuals are wrong to seek a suitable partner and make a beautiful family. People should—and presumably always will—pursue happiness in this way. It’s one of the delusions of our meritocratic class, however, to assume that if our actions are individually blameless, then the sum of our actions will be good for society. We may have studied Shakespeare on the way to law school, but we have little sense for the tragic possibilities of life. The fact of the matter is that we have silently and collectively opted for inequality, and this is what inequality does. It turns marriage into a luxury good, and a stable family life into a privilege that the moneyed elite can pass along to their children. How do we think that’s going to work out? This divergence of families by class is just one part of a process that is creating two distinct forms of life in our society. Stop in at your local yoga studio or SoulCycle class, and you’ll notice that the same process is now inscribing itself in our own bodies. In 19th-century England, the rich really were different. They didn’t just have more money; they were taller—a lot taller. According to a study colorfully titled “On English Pygmies and Giants,” 16-year-old boys from the upper classes towered a remarkable 8.6 inches, on average, over their undernourished, lower-class countrymen. We are reproducing the same kind of division via a different set of dimensions. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and liver disease are all two to three times more common in individuals who have a family income of less than $35,000 than in those who have a family income greater than $100,000. Among low-educated, middle-aged whites, the death rate in the United States—alone in the developed world—increased in the first decade and a half of the 21st century. Driving the trend is the rapid growth in what the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair”—suicides and alcohol- and drug-related deaths. The sociological data are not remotely ambiguous on any aspect of this growing divide. We 9.9 percenters live in safer neighborhoods, go to better schools, have shorter commutes, receive higher-quality health care, and, when circumstances require, serve time in better prisons. We also have more friends—the kind of friends who will introduce us to new clients or line up great internships for our kids. These special forms of wealth offer the further advantages that they are both harder to emulate and safer to brag about than high income alone. Our class walks around in the jeans and T‑shirts inherited from our supposedly humble beginnings. We prefer to signal our status by talking about our organically nourished bodies, the awe-inspiring feats of our offspring, and the ecological correctness of our neighborhoods. We have figured out how to launder our money through higher virtues. Most important of all, we have learned how to pass all of these advantages down to our children. In America today, the single best predictor of whether an individual will get married, stay married, pursue advanced education, live in a good neighborhood, have an extensive social network, and experience good health is the performance of his or her parents on those same metrics. We’re leaving the 90 percent and their offspring far behind in a cloud of debts and bad life choices that they somehow can’t stop themselves from making. We tend to overlook the fact that parenting is more expensive and motherhood more hazardous in the United States than in any other developed country, that campaigns against family planning and reproductive rights are an assault on the families of the bottom 90 percent, and that law-and-order politics serves to keep even more of them down. We prefer to interpret their relative poverty as vice: Why can’t they get their act together? New forms of life necessarily give rise to new and distinct forms of consciousness. If you doubt this, you clearly haven’t been reading the “personal and household services” ads on Monster.com. At the time of this writing, the section for my town of Brookline, Massachusetts, featured one placed by a “busy professional couple” seeking a “Part Time Nanny.” The nanny (or manny—the ad scrupulously avoids committing to gender) is to be “bright, loving, and energetic”; “friendly, intelligent, and professional”; and “a very good communicator, both written and verbal.” She (on balance of probability) will “assist with the care and development” of two children and will be “responsible for all aspects of the children’s needs,” including bathing, dressing, feeding, and taking the young things to and from school and activities. That’s why a “college degree in early childhood education” is “a plus.” In short, Nanny is to have every attribute one would want in a terrific, professional, college-educated parent. Except, of course, the part about being an actual professional, college-educated parent. There is no chance that Nanny will trade places with our busy 5G couple. She “must know the proper etiquette in a professionally run household” and be prepared to “accommodate changing circumstances.” She is required to have “5+ years experience as a Nanny,” which makes it unlikely that she’ll have had time to get the law degree that would put her on the other side of the bargain. All of Nanny’s skills, education, experience, and professionalism will land her a job that is “Part Time.” The ad is written in flawless, 21st-century business-speak, but what it is really seeking is a governess—that exquisitely contradictory figure in Victorian literature who is both indistinguishable in all outward respects from the upper class and yet emphatically not a member of it. Nanny’s best bet for moving up in the world is probably to follow the example of Jane Eyre and run off with the lord (or lady) of the manor. If you look beyond the characters in this unwritten novel about Nanny and her 5G masters, you’ll see a familiar shape looming on the horizon. The Gatsby Curve has managed to reproduce itself in social, physiological, and cultural capital. Put more accurately: There is only one curve, but it operates through a multiplicity of forms of wealth. Rising inequality does not follow from a hidden law of economics, as the otherwise insightful Thomas Piketty suggested when he claimed that the historical rate of return on capital exceeds the historical rate of growth in the economy. Inequality necessarily entrenches itself through other, nonfinancial, intrinsically invidious forms of wealth and power. We use these other forms of capital to project our advantages into life itself. We look down from our higher virtues in the same way the English upper class looked down from its taller bodies, as if the distinction between superior and inferior were an artifact of nature. That’s what aristocrats do. 4. The Privilege of an Education My 16-year-old daughter is sitting on a couch, talking with a stranger about her dreams for the future. We’re here, ominously enough, because, she says, “all my friends are doing it.” For a moment, I wonder whether we have unintentionally signed up for some kind of therapy. The professional woman in the smart-casual suit throws me a pointed glance and says, “It’s normal to be anxious at a time like this.” She really does see herself as a therapist of sorts. But she does not yet seem to know that the source of my anxiety is the idea of shelling out for a $12,000 “base package” of college-counseling services whose chief purpose is apparently to reduce my anxiety. Determined to get something out of this trial counseling session, I push for recommendations on summer activities. We leave with a tip on a 10-day “cultural tour” of France for high schoolers. In the college-application business, that’s what’s known as an “enrichment experience.” When we get home, I look it up. The price of enrichment: $11,000 for the 10 days. That’s when I hear the legend of the SAT whisperer. If you happen to ride through the yellow-brown valleys of the California coast, past the designer homes that sprout wherever tech unicorns sprinkle their golden stock offerings, you might come across him. His high-school classmates still remember him, almost four decades later, as one of the child wonders of the age. Back then, he and his equally precocious siblings showed off their preternatural verbal and musical talents on a local television program. Now his clients fly him around the state for test-prep sessions with their 16-year-olds. You can hire him for $750, plus transportation, per two-hour weekend session. (There is a weekday discount.) Some of his clients book him every week for a year. Affirmative-action programs are to some degree an extension of the system of wealth preservation. They indulge rich people in the belief that their college is open to all. At this point, I’m wondering whether life was easier in the old days, when you could buy a spot in the elite university of your choice with cold cash. Then I remind myself that Grandfather lasted only one year at Yale. In those days, the Ivies kicked you out if you weren’t ready for action. Today, you have to self-combust in a newsworthy way before they show you the door. Inevitably, I begin rehearsing the speech for my daughter. It’s perfectly possible to lead a meaningful life without passing through a name-brand college, I’m going to say. We love you for who you are. We’re not like those tacky strivers who want a back-windshield sticker to testify to our superior parenting skills. And why would you want to be an investment banker or a corporate lawyer anyway? But I refrain from giving the speech, knowing full well that it will light up her parental-bullshit detector like a pair of khakis on fire. The skin colors of the nation’s elite student bodies are more varied now, as are their genders, but their financial bones have calcified over the past 30 years. In 1985, 54 percent of students at the 250 most selective colleges came from families in the bottom three quartiles of the income distribution. A similar review of the class of 2010 put that figure at just 33 percent. According to a 2017 study, 38 elite colleges—among them five of the Ivies—had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent. In his 2014 book, Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale, summed up the situation nicely: “Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary.” The wealthy can also draw on a variety of affirmative-action programs designed just for them. As Daniel Golden points out in The Price of Admission, legacy-admissions policies reward those applicants with the foresight to choose parents who attended the university in question. Athletic recruiting, on balance and contrary to the popular wisdom, also favors the wealthy, whose children pursue lacrosse, squash, fencing, and the other cost-intensive sports at which private schools and elite public schools excel. And, at least among members of the 0.1 percent, the old-school method of simply handing over some of Daddy’s cash has been making a comeback. (Witness Jared Kushner, Harvard graduate.) The mother lode of all affirmative-action programs for the wealthy, of course, remains the private school. Only 2.2 percent of the nation’s students graduate from nonsectarian private high schools, and yet these graduates account for 26 percent of students at Harvard and 28 percent of students at Princeton. The other affirmative-action programs, the kind aimed at diversifying the look of the student body, are no doubt well intended. But they are to some degree merely an extension of this system of wealth preservation. Their function, at least in part, is to indulge rich people in the belief that their college is open to all on the basis of merit. The plummeting admission rates of the very top schools nonetheless leave many of the children of the 9.9 percent facing long odds. But not to worry, junior 9.9 percenters! We’ve created a new range of elite colleges just for you. Thanks to ambitious university administrators and the ever-expanding rankings machine at U.S. News & World Report, 50 colleges are now as selective as Princeton was in 1980, when I applied. The colleges seem to think that piling up rejections makes them special. In fact, it just means that they have collectively opted to deploy their massive, tax-subsidized endowments to replicate privilege rather than fulfill their duty to produce an educated public. The only thing going up as fast as the rejection rates at selective colleges is the astounding price of tuition. Measured relative to the national median salary, tuition and fees at top colleges more than tripled from 1963 to 2013. Throw in the counselors, the whisperers, the violin lessons, the private schools, and the cost of arranging for Junior to save a village in Micronesia, and it adds up. To be fair, financial aid closes the gap for many families and keeps the average cost of college from growing as fast as the sticker price. But that still leaves a question: Why are the wealthy so keen to buy their way in? The short answer, of course, is that it’s worth it. In the United States, the premium that college graduates earn over their non-college-educated peers in young adulthood exceeds 70 percent. The return on education is 50 percent higher than what it was in 1950, and is significantly higher than the rate in every other developed country. In Norway and Denmark, the college premium is less than 20 percent; in Japan, it is less than 30 percent; in France and Germany, it’s about 40 percent. All of this comes before considering the all-consuming difference between “good” schools and the rest. Ten years after starting college, according to data from the Department of Education, the top decile of earners from all schools had a median salary of $68,000. But the top decile from the 10 highest-earning colleges raked in $220,000—make that $250,000 for No. 1, Harvard—and the top decile at the next 30 colleges took home $157,000. (Not surprisingly, the top 10 had an average acceptance rate of 9 percent, and the next 30 were at 19 percent.) It is entirely possible to get a good education at the many schools that don’t count as “good” in our brand-obsessed system. But the “bad” ones really are bad for you. For those who made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, our society offers a kind of virtual education system. It has places that look like colleges—but aren’t really. It has debt—and that, unfortunately, is real. The people who enter into this class hologram do not collect a college premium; they wind up in something more like indentured servitude. So what is the real source of this premium for a “good education” that we all seem to crave? One of the stories we tell ourselves is that the premium is the reward for the knowledge and skills the education provides us. Another, usually unfurled after a round of drinks, is that the premium is a reward for the superior cranial endowments we possessed before setting foot on campus. We are, as some sociologists have delicately put it, a “cognitive elite.” Behind both of these stories lies one of the founding myths of our meritocracy. One way or the other, we tell ourselves, the rising education premium is a direct function of the rising value of meritorious people in a modern economy. That is, not only do the meritorious get ahead, but the rewards we receive are in direct proportion to our merit. But the fact is that degree holders earn so much more than the rest not primarily because they are better at their job, but because they mostly take different categories of jobs. Well over half of Ivy League graduates, for instance, typically go straight into one of four career tracks that are generally reserved for the well educated: finance, management consulting, medicine, or law. To keep it simple, let’s just say that there are two types of occupations in the world: those whose members have collective influence in setting their own pay, and those whose members must face the music on their own. It’s better to be a member of the first group. Not surprisingly, that is where you will find the college crowd. Why do america’s doctors make twice as much as those of other wealthy countries? Given that the United States has placed dead last five times running in the Commonwealth Fund’s ranking of health-care systems in high-income countries, it’s hard to argue that they are twice as gifted at saving lives. Dean Baker, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has a more plausible suggestion: “When economists like me look at medicine in America—whether we lean left or right politically—we see something that looks an awful lot like a cartel.” Through their influence on the number of slots at medical schools, the availability of residencies, the licensing of foreign-trained doctors, and the role of nurse practitioners, physicians’ organizations can effectively limit the competition their own members face—and that is exactly what they do. Lawyers (or at least a certain elite subset of them) have apparently learned to play the same game. Even after the collapse of the so-called law-school bubble, America’s lawyers are No. 1 in international salary rankings and earn more than twice as much, on average, as their wig-toting British colleagues. The University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson, writing for Forbes in 2016, offered a blunt assessment: “The American Bar Association operates a state-approved cartel.” Similar occupational licensing schemes provide shelter for the meritorious in a variety of other sectors. The policy researchers Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles detail the mechanisms in The Captured Economy. Dentists’ offices, for example, have a glass ceiling that limits what dental hygienists can do without supervision, keeping their bosses in the 9.9 percent. Copyright and patent laws prop up profits and salaries in the education-heavy pharmaceutical, software, and entertainment sectors. These arrangements are trifles, however, compared with what’s on offer in tech and finance, two of the most powerful sectors of the economy. By now we’re thankfully done with the tech-sector fairy tales in which whip-smart cowboys innovate the heck out of a stodgy status quo. The reality is that five monster companies—you know the names—are worth about $3.5 trillion combined, and represent more than 40 percent of the market capital on the nasdaq stock exchange. Much of the rest of the technology sector consists of virtual entities waiting patiently to feed themselves to these beasts. Let’s face it: This is Monopoly money with a smiley emoji. Our society figured out some time ago how to deal with companies that attempt to corner the market on viscous substances like oil. We don’t yet know what to do with the monopolies that arise out of networks and scale effects in the information marketplace. Until we do, the excess profits will stick to those who manage to get closest to the information honeypot. You can be sure that these people will have a great deal of merit. The candy-hurling godfather of today’s meritocratic class, of course, is the financial-services industry. Americans now turn over $1 of every $12 in GDP to the financial sector; in the 1950s, the bankers were content to keep only $1 out of $40. The game is more sophisticated than a two-fisted money grab, but its essence was made obvious during the 2008 financial crisis. The public underwrites the risks; the financial gurus take a seat at the casino; and it’s heads they win, tails we lose. The financial system we now have is not a product of nature. It has been engineered, over decades, by powerful bankers, for their own benefit and for that of their posterity. Who is not in on the game? Auto workers, for example. Caregivers. Retail workers. Furniture makers. Food workers. The wages of American manufacturing and service workers consistently hover in the middle of international rankings. The exceptionalism of American compensation rates comes to an end in the kinds of work that do not require a college degree. You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market. It’s thuggish and anti-modern. Imagine if workers hired consultants and “compensation committees,” consisting of their peers at other companies, to recommend how much they should be paid. The result would be—well, we know what it would be, because that’s what CEOs do. It isn’t a coincidence that the education premium surged during the same years that membership in trade unions collapsed. In 1954, 28 percent of all workers were members of trade unions, but by 2017 that figure was down to 11 percent. Education—the thing itself, not the degree—is always good. A genuine education opens minds and makes good citizens. It ought to be pursued for the sake of society. In our unbalanced system, however, education has been reduced to a private good, justifiable only by the increments in graduates’ paychecks. Instead of uniting and enriching us, it divides and impoverishes. Which is really just a way of saying that our worthy ideals of educational opportunity are ultimately no match for the tidal force of the Gatsby Curve. The metric that has tracked the rising college premium with the greatest precision is—that’s right—intergenerational earnings elasticity, or IGE. Across countries, the same correlation obtains: the higher the college premium, the lower the social mobility. As I’m angling all the angles for my daughter’s college applications—the counselor is out, and the SAT whisperer was never going to happen—I realize why this delusion of merit is so hard to shake. If I—I mean, she—can pull this off, well, there’s the proof that we deserve it! If the system can be gamed, well then, our ability to game the system has become the new test of merit. So go ahead and replace the SATs with shuffleboard on the high seas, or whatever you want. Who can doubt that we’d master that game, too? How quickly would we convince ourselves of our absolute entitlement to the riches that flow directly and tangibly from our shuffling talent? How soon before we perfected the art of raising shuffleboard wizards? Would any of us notice or care which way the ship was heading? Let’s suppose that some of us do look up. We see the iceberg. Will that induce us to diminish our exertions in supreme child-rearing? The grim truth is that, as long as good parenting and good citizenship are in conflict, we’re just going to pack a few more violins for the trip. 5. The Invisible Hand of Government As far as Grandfather was concerned, the assault on the productive classes began long before the New Deal. It all started in 1913, with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. In case you’ve forgotten, that amendment granted the federal government the power to levy a direct personal-income tax. It also happens that ratification took place just a few months after Grandfather was born, which made sense to me in a strange way. By far the largest part of his lifetime income was attributable to his birth. Grandfather was a stockbroker for a time. I eventually figured out that he mostly traded his own portfolio and bought a seat at the stock exchange for the purpose. Politics was a hobby, too. At one point, he announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Connecticut. (It wasn’t clear whether anybody outside the clubhouse heard him.) What he really liked to do was fly. The memories that mattered most to him were his years of service as a transport pilot during World War II. Or the time he and Grandmother took to the Midwestern skies in a barnstorming plane. My grandparents never lost faith in the limitless possibilities of a life free from government. But in their last years, as the reserves passed down from the Colonel ran low, they became pretty diligent about collecting their Social Security and Medicare benefits. There is a page in the book of American political thought—Grandfather knew it by heart—that says we must choose between government and freedom. But if you read it twice, you’ll see that what it really offers is a choice between government you can see and government you can’t. Aristocrats always prefer the invisible kind of government. It leaves them free to exercise their privileges. We in the 9.9 percent have mastered the art of getting the government to work for us even while complaining loudly that it’s working for those other people. Consider, for starters, the greatly exaggerated reports of our tax burdens. On guest panels this past holiday season, apologists for the latest round of upwardly aimed tax cuts offered versions of Mitt Romney’s claim that the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax in a typical year have “no skin in the game.” Baloney. Sure, the federal individual-income tax, which raised $1.6 trillion last year, remains progressive. But the $1.2 trillion raised by the payroll tax hits all workers—but not investors, such as Romney—and it hits those making lower incomes at a higher rate, thanks to a cap on the amount of income subject to the tax. Then there’s the $2.3 trillion raised by state and local governments, much of it collected through regressive sales and property taxes. The poorest quintile of Americans pays more than twice the rate of state taxes as the top 1 percent does, and about half again what the top 10 percent pays. Our false protests about paying all the taxes, however, sound like songs of innocence compared with our mastery of the art of having the taxes returned to us. The income-tax system that so offended my grandfather has had the unintended effect of creating a highly discreet category of government expenditures. They’re called “tax breaks,” but it’s better to think of them as handouts that spare the government the inconvenience of collecting the money in the first place. In theory, tax expenditures can be used to support any number of worthy social purposes, and a few of them, such as the earned income-tax credit, do actually go to those with a lower income. But more commonly, because their value is usually a function of the amount of money individuals have in the first place, and those individuals’ marginal tax rates, the benefits flow uphill. Let us count our blessings: Every year, the federal government doles out tax expenditures through deductions for retirement savings (worth $137 billion in 2013); employer-sponsored health plans ($250 billion); mortgage-interest payments ($70 billion); and, sweetest of all, income from watching the value of your home, stock portfolio, and private-equity partnerships grow ($161 billion). In total, federal tax expenditures exceeded $900 billion in 2013. That’s more than the cost of Medicare, more than the cost of Medicaid, more than the cost of all other federal safety-net programs put together. And—such is the beauty of the system—51 percent of those handouts went to the top quintile of earners, and 39 percent to the top decile. The best thing about this program of reverse taxation, as far as the 9.9 percent are concerned, is that the bottom 90 percent haven’t got a clue. The working classes get riled up when they see someone at the grocery store flipping out their food stamps to buy a T-bone. They have no idea that a nice family on the other side of town is walking away with $100,000 for flipping their house. But wait, there’s more! Let’s not forget about the kids. If the secrets of a nation’s soul may be read from its tax code, then our nation must be in love with the children of rich people. The 2017 tax law raises the amount of money that married couples can pass along to their heirs tax-free from a very generous $11 million to a magnificent $22 million. Correction: It’s not merely tax-free; it’s tax-subsidized. The unrealized tax liability on the appreciation of the house you bought 40 years ago, or on the stock portfolio that has been gathering moths—all of that disappears when you pass the gains along to the kids. Those foregone taxes cost the United States Treasury $43 billion in 2013 alone—about three times the amount spent on the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Grandfather’s father, the Colonel, died in 1947, when the maximum estate-tax rate was a now-unheard-of 77 percent. When the remainder was divvied up among four siblings, Grandfather had barely enough to pay for the Bentley and keep up with dues at the necessary clubs. The government made sure that I would grow up in the middle class. And for that I will always be grateful. 6. The Gilded Zip Code From my Brookline home, it’s a pleasant, 10-minute walk to get a haircut. Along the way, you pass immense elm trees and brochure-ready homes beaming in their reclaimed Victorian glory. Apart from a landscaper or two, you are unlikely to spot a human being in this wilderness of oversize closets, wood-paneled living rooms, and Sub-Zero refrigerators. If you do run into a neighbor, you might have a conversation like this: “Our kitchen remodel went way over budget. We had to fight just to get the tile guy to show up!” “I know! We ate Thai takeout for a month because the gas guy’s car kept breaking down!” You arrive at the Supercuts fresh from your stroll, but the nice lady who cuts your hair is looking stressed. You’ll discover that she commutes an hour through jammed highways to work. The gas guy does, too, and the tile guy comes in from another state. None of them can afford to live around here. The rent is too damn high. From 1980 to 2016, home values in Boston multiplied 7.6 times. When you take account of inflation, they generated a return of 157 percent to their owners. San Francisco returned 162 percent in real terms over the same period; New York, 115 percent; and Los Angeles, 114 percent. If you happen to live in a neighborhood like mine, you are surrounded by people who consider themselves to be real-estate geniuses. (That’s one reason we can afford to make so many mistakes in the home-renovation department.) If you live in St. Louis (3 percent) or Detroit (minus 16 percent), on the other hand, you weren’t so smart. In 1980, a house in St. Louis would trade for a decent studio apartment in Manhattan. Today that house will buy an 80-square-foot bathroom in the Big Apple. The returns on (the right kind of) real estate have been so extraordinary that, according to some economists, real estate alone may account for essentially all of the increase in wealth concentration over the past half century. It’s not surprising that the values are up in the major cities: These are the gold mines of our new economy. Yet there is a paradox. The rent is so high that people—notably people in the middle class—are leaving town rather than working the mines. From 2000 to 2009, the San Francisco Bay Area had some of the highest salaries in the nation, and yet it lost 350,000 residents to lower-paying regions. Across the United States, the journalist and economist Ryan Avent writes in The Gated City, “the best opportunities are found in one place, and for some reason most Americans are opting to live in another.” According to estimates from the economists Enrico Moretti and Chang-Tai Hsieh, the migration away from the productive centers of New York, San Francisco, and San Jose alone lopped 9.7 percent off total U.S. growth from 1964 to 2009. It is well known by now that the immediate cause of the insanity is the unimaginable pettiness of backyard politics. Local zoning regulation imposes excessive restrictions on housing development and drives up prices. What is less well understood is how central the process of depopulating the economic core of the nation is to the intertwined stories of rising inequality and falling social mobility. Real-estate inflation has brought with it a commensurate increase in economic segregation. Every hill and dale in the land now has an imaginary gate, and it tells you up front exactly how much money you need to stay there overnight. Educational segregation has accelerated even more. In my suburb of Boston, 53 percent of adults have a graduate degree. In the suburb just south, that figure is 9 percent. This economic and educational sorting of neighborhoods is often represented as a matter of personal preference, as in red people like to hang with red, and blue with blue. In reality, it’s about the consolidation of wealth in all its forms, starting, of course, with money. Gilded zip codes are located next to giant cash machines: a too-big-to-fail bank, a friendly tech monopoly, and so on. Local governments, which collected a record $523 billion in property taxes in 2016, make sure that much of the money stays close to home. But proximity to economic power isn’t just a means of hoarding the pennies; it’s a force of natural selection. Gilded zip codes deliver higher life expectancy, more-useful social networks, and lower crime rates. Lengthy commutes, by contrast, cause obesity, neck pain, stress, insomnia, loneliness, and divorce, as Annie Lowrey reported in Slate. One study found that a commute of 45 minutes or longer by one spouse increased the chance of divorce by 40 percent. Nowhere are the mechanics of the growing geographic divide more evident than in the system of primary and secondary education. Public schools were born amid hopes of opportunity for all; the best of them have now been effectively reprivatized to better serve the upper classes. According to a widely used school-ranking service, out of more than 5,000 public elementary schools in California, the top 11 are located in Palo Alto. They’re free and open to the public. All you have to do is move into a town where the median home value is $3,211,100. Scarsdale, New York, looks like a steal in comparison: The public high schools in that area funnel dozens of graduates to Ivy League colleges every year, and yet the median home value is a mere $1,403,600. Racial segregation has declined with the rise of economic segregation. We in the 9.9 percent are proud of that. What better proof that we care only about merit? But we don’t really want too much proof. Beyond a certain threshold—5 percent minority or 20 percent, it varies according to the mood of the region—neighborhoods suddenly go completely black or brown. It is disturbing, but perhaps not surprising, to find that social mobility is lower in regions with high levels of racial segregation. The fascinating revelation in the data, however, is that the damage isn’t limited to the obvious victims. According to Raj Chetty’s research team, “There is evidence that higher racial segregation is associated with lower social mobility for white people.” The relationship doesn’t hold in every zone of the country, to be sure, and is undoubtedly the statistical reflection of a more complex set of social mechanisms. But it points to a truth that America’s 19th-century slaveholders understood very well: Dividing by color remains an effective way to keep all colors of the 90 percent in their place. With localized wealth comes localized political power, and not just of the kind that shows up in voting booths. Which brings us back to the depopulation paradox. Given the social and cultural capital that flows through wealthy neighborhoods, is it any wonder that we can defend our turf in the zoning wars? We have lots of ways to make that sound public-spirited. It’s all about saving the local environment, preserving the historic character of the neighborhood, and avoiding overcrowding. In reality, it’s about hoarding power and opportunity inside the walls of our own castles. This is what aristocracies do. Zip code is who we are. It defines our style, announces our values, establishes our status, preserves our wealth, and allows us to pass it along to our children. It’s also slowly strangling our economy and killing our democracy. It is the brick-and-mortar version of the Gatsby Curve. The traditional story of economic growth in America has been one of arriving, building, inviting friends, and building some more. The story we’re writing looks more like one of slamming doors shut behind us and slowly suffocating under a mass of commercial-grade kitchen appliances. 7. Our Blind Spot In my family, Aunt Sarah was the true believer. According to her version of reality, the family name was handed down straight from the ancient kings of Scotland. Great-great-something-grandfather William Stewart, a soldier in the Continental Army, was seated at the right hand of George Washington. And Sarah herself was somehow descended from “Pocahontas’s sister.” The stories never made much sense. But that didn’t stop Sarah from believing in them. My family had to be special for a reason. The 9.9 percent are different. We don’t delude ourselves about the ancient sources of our privilege. That’s because, unlike Aunt Sarah and her imaginary princesses, we’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t have any privilege at all. Consider the reception that at least some members of our tribe have offered to those who have foolishly dared to draw attention to our advantages. Last year, when the Brookings Institution researcher Richard V. Reeves, following up on his book Dream Hoarders, told the readers of The New York Times to “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich,” many of those readers accused him of engaging in “class warfare,” of writing “a meaningless article,” and of being “rife with guilt.” In her incisive portrait of my people, Uneasy Street, the sociologist Rachel Sherman documents the syndrome. A number among us, when reminded of our privilege, respond with a counternarrative that generally goes like this: I was born in the street. I earned everything all by myself. I barely get by on my $250,000 salary. You should see the other parents at our kids’ private school. In part what we have here is a listening problem. Americans have trouble telling the difference between a social critique and a personal insult. Thus, a writer points to a broad social problem with complex origins, and the reader responds with, “What, you want to punish me for my success?” In part, too, we’re seeing some garden-variety self-centeredness, enabled by the usual cognitive lapses. Human beings are very good at keeping track of their own struggles; they are less likely to know that individuals on the other side of town are working two minimum-wage jobs to stay afloat, not watching Simpsons reruns all day. Human beings have a simple explanation for their victories: I did it. They easily forget the people who handed them the crayon and set them up for success. Human beings of the 9.9 percent variety also routinely conflate the stress of status competition with the stress of survival. No, failing to get your kid into Stanford is not a life-altering calamity. The recency of it all may likewise play a role in our failure to recognize our growing privileges. It has taken less than one lifetime for the (never fully formed) meritocracy to evolve into a (fledgling) aristocracy. Class accretes faster than we think. It’s our awareness that lags, trapping us within the assumptions into which we were born. And yet, even allowing for these all-too-human failures of cognition, the cries of anguish that echo across the soccer fields at the mere suggestion of unearned privilege are too persistent to ignore. Fact-challenged though they may be, they speak to a certain, deeper truth about life in the 9.9 percent. What they are really telling us is that being an aristocrat is not quite what it is cracked up to be. A strange truth about the Gatsby Curve is that even as it locks in our privileges, it doesn’t seem to make things all that much easier. I know it wasn’t all that easy growing up in the Colonel’s household, for example. The story that Grandfather repeated more than any other was the one where, following some teenage misdemeanor of his, his father, the 250-pound, 6-foot-something onetime Rough Rider, smacked him so hard that he sailed clear across the room and landed flat on the floor. Everything—anything—seemed to make the Colonel angry. Jay Gatsby might have understood. Life in West Egg is never as serene as it seems. The Princeton man—that idle prince of leisure who coasts from prep school to a life of ease—is an invention of our lowborn ancestors. It’s what they thought they saw when they were looking up. West Eggers understand very well that a bad move or an unlucky break (or three or four) can lead to a steep descent. We know just how expensive it is to live there, yet living off the island is unthinkable. We have intuited one of the fundamental paradoxes of life on the Gatsby Curve: The greater the inequality, the less your money buys. We feel in our bones that class works only for itself; that every individual is dispensable; that some of us will be discarded and replaced with fresh blood. This insecurity of privilege only grows as the chasm beneath the privileged class expands. It is the restless engine that drives us to invest still more time and energy in the walls that will keep us safe by keeping others out. Perhaps the best evidence for the power of an aristocracy is the degree of resentment it provokes. By that measure, the 9.9 percent are doing pretty well indeed. Here’s another fact of life in West Egg: Someone is always above you. In Gatsby’s case, it was the old-money people of East Egg. In the Colonel’s case, it was John D. Rockefeller Jr. You’re always trying to please them, and they’re always ready to pull the plug. The source of the trouble, considered more deeply, is that we have traded rights for privileges. We’re willing to strip everyone, including ourselves, of the universal right to a good education, adequate health care, adequate representation in the workplace, genuinely equal opportunities, because we think we can win the game. But who, really, in the end, is going to win this slippery game of escalating privileges? Under the circumstances, delusions are understandable. But that doesn’t make them salutary, as Aunt Sarah discovered too late. Even as the last few pennies of the Colonel’s buck trickled down to my father’s generation, she still had the big visions that corresponded to her version of the family mythology. Convinced that she had inherited a head for business, she bet her penny on the dot-com bubble. In her final working years, she donned a red-and-black uniform and served burgers at a Wendy’s in the vicinity of Jacksonville, Florida. 8. The Politics of Resentment The political theology of the meritocracy has no room for resentment. We are taught to run the competition of life with our eyes on the clock and not on one another, as if we were each alone. If someone scores a powerboat on the Long Island waterways, so much the better for her. The losers will just smile and try harder next time. In the real world, we humans are always looking from side to side. We are intensely conscious of what other people are thinking and doing, and conscious to the point of preoccupation with what they think about us. Our status is visible only through its reflection in the eyes of others. Perhaps the best evidence for the power of an aristocracy is to be found in the degree of resentment it provokes. By that measure, the 9.9 percent are doing pretty well indeed. The surest sign of an increase in resentment is a rise in political division and instability. We’re positively acing that test. You can read all about it in the headlines of the past two years. The 2016 presidential election marked a decisive moment in the history of resentment in the United States. In the person of Donald Trump, resentment entered the White House. It rode in on the back of an alliance between a tiny subset of super-wealthy 0.1 percenters (not all of them necessarily American) and a large number of 90 percenters who stand for pretty much everything the 9.9 percent are not. According to exit polls by CNN and Pew, Trump won white voters by about 20 percent. But these weren’t just any old whites (though they were old, too). The first thing to know about the substantial majority of them is that they weren’t the winners in the new economy. To be sure, for the most part they weren’t poor either. But they did have reason to feel judged by the market—and found wanting. The counties that supported Hillary Clinton represented an astonishing 64 percent of the GDP, while Trump counties accounted for a mere 36 percent. Aaron Terrazas, a senior economist at Zillow, found that the median home value in Clinton counties was $250,000, while the median in Trump counties was $154,000. When you adjust for inflation, Clinton counties enjoyed real-estate price appreciation of 27 percent from January 2000 to October 2016; Trump counties got only a 6 percent bump. The residents of Trump country were also the losers in the war on human health. According to Shannon Monnat, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse, the Rust Belt counties that put the anti-government-health-care candidate over the top were those that lost the most people in recent years to deaths of despair—those due to alcohol, drugs, and suicide. To make all of America as great as Trump country, you would have to torch about a quarter of total GDP, wipe a similar proportion of the nation’s housing stock into the sea, and lose a few years in life expectancy. There’s a reason why one of Trump’s favorite words is unfair. That’s the only word resentment wants to hear. Even so, the distinguishing feature of Trump’s (white) voters wasn’t their income but their education, or lack thereof. Pew’s latest analysis indicates that Trump lost college-educated white voters by a humiliating 17 percent margin. But he got revenge with non-college-educated whites, whom he captured by a stomping 36 percent margin. According to an analysis by Nate Silver, the 50 most educated counties in the nation surged to Clinton: In 2012, Obama had won them by a mere 17 percentage points; Clinton took them by 26 points. The 50 least educated counties moved in the opposite direction; whereas Obama had lost them by 19 points, Clinton lost them by 31. Majority-minority counties split the same way: The more educated moved toward Clinton, and the less educated toward Trump. The historian Richard Hofstadter drew attention to Anti-intellectualism in American Life in 1963; Susan Jacoby warned in 2008 about The Age of American Unreason; and Tom Nichols announced The Death of Expertise in 2017. In Trump, the age of unreason has at last found its hero. The “self-made man” is always the idol of those who aren’t quite making it. He is the sacred embodiment of the American dream, the guy who answers to nobody, the poor man’s idea of a rich man. It’s the educated phonies this group can’t stand. With his utter lack of policy knowledge and belligerent commitment to maintaining his ignorance, Trump is the perfect representative for a population whose idea of good governance is just to scramble the eggheads. When reason becomes the enemy of the common man, the common man becomes the enemy of reason. Did I mention that the common man is white? That brings us to the other side of American-style resentment. You kick down, and then you close ranks around an imaginary tribe. The problem, you say, is the moochers, the snakes, the handout queens; the solution is the flag and the religion of your (white) ancestors. According to a survey by the political scientist Brian Schaffner, Trump crushed it among voters who “strongly disagree” that “white people have advantages because of the color of their skin,” as well as among those who “strongly agree” that “women seek to gain power over men.” It’s worth adding that these responses measure not racism or sexism directly, but rather resentment. They’re good for picking out the kind of people who will vehemently insist that they are the least racist or sexist person you have ever met, even as they vote for a flagrant racist and an accused sexual predator. No one is born resentful. As mass phenomena, racism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, narcissism, irrationalism, and all other variants of resentment are as expensive to produce as they are deadly to democratic politics. Only long hours of television programming, intelligently manipulated social-media feeds, and expensively sustained information bubbles can actualize the unhappy dispositions of humanity to the point where they may be fruitfully manipulated for political gain. Racism in particular is not just a legacy of the past, as many Americans would like to believe; it also must be constantly reinvented for the present. Mass incarceration, fearmongering, and segregation are not just the results of prejudice, but also the means of reproducing it. The raging polarization of American political life is not the consequence of bad manners or a lack of mutual understanding. It is just the loud aftermath of escalating inequality. It could not have happened without the 0.1 percent (or, rather, an aggressive subset of its members). Wealth always preserves itself by dividing the opposition. The Gatsby Curve does not merely cause barriers to be built on the ground; it mandates the construction of walls that run through other people’s minds. But that is not to let the 9.9 percent off the hook. We may not be the ones funding the race-baiting, but we are the ones hoarding the opportunities of daily life. We are the staff that runs the machine that funnels resources from the 90 percent to the 0.1 percent. We’ve been happy to take our cut of the spoils. We’ve looked on with smug disdain as our labors have brought forth a population prone to resentment and ripe for manipulation. We should be prepared to embrace the consequences. The first important thing to know about these consequences is the most obvious: Resentment is a solution to nothing. It isn’t a program of reform. It isn’t “populism.” It is an affliction of democracy, not an instance of it. The politics of resentment is a means of increasing inequality, not reducing it. Every policy change that has waded out of the Trump administration’s baffling morass of incompetence makes this clear. The new tax law; the executive actions on the environment and telecommunications, and on financial-services regulation; the judicial appointments of conservative ideologues—all will have the effect of keeping the 90 percent toiling in the foothills of merit for many years to come. The second thing to know is that we are next in line for the chopping block. As the population of the resentful expands, the circle of joy near the top gets smaller. The people riding popular rage to glory eventually realize that we are less useful to them as servants of the economic machine than we are as model enemies of the people. The anti-blue-state provisions of the recent tax law have miffed some members of the 9.9 percent, but they’re just a taste of the bad things that happen to people like us as the politics of resentment unfolds. The past year provides ample confirmation of the third and most important consequence of the process: instability. Unreasonable people also tend to be ungovernable. I won’t belabor the point. Just try doing a frequency search on the phrase constitutional crisis over the past five years. That’s the thing about the Gatsby Curve. You think it’s locking all of your gains in place. But the crystallization process actually has the effect of making the whole system more brittle. If you look again at history, you can get a sense of how the process usually ends. 9. How Aristocracies Fall For months, Colonel Robert W. Stewart dodged the subpoenas. He was in Mexico or South America, undertaking business negotiations so sensitive that revealing his precise location would jeopardize the national interest, or so said his lawyer. Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana at last dragged the lawyer to the stand and presented him with clippings from the gossip columns of the Havana newspapers, complete with incriminating photographs. The Colonel, always known to appreciate a good horse, was apparently quite the fixture at the Jockey Club. His smile had also flashed for the cameras at an impressive round of luncheons and dinners, and an evening ball at the Havana Yacht Club. When the senators finally roped the Colonel in for questioning about those shell-company bonds that had spread like bedbugs through the political ecosystem, he let them know just who was in charge. “I do not think that the line of interrogation by this committee is within the jurisdiction of the committee under the laws of the United States,” he declared. Even so, he added, as if proffering a favor, he did not “personally receive any of these bonds.” Which was not, on any ordinary construction of the English language, true. The twilight of the fabled Stewart dynasty was not glorious. A fancy lawyer got the Colonel “aquibbled” from charges of contempt, as one journalist sneered, but Rockefeller Jr. wasn’t ready to forgive him the public-relations fiasco. After an epic but futile battle for the hearts of shareholders, the Colonel hung up his spurs and retreated for life to the family compound in Nantucket. None of which changed the reality that the Teapot Dome scandal, with its bribes and kickbacks and sweetheart deals for rich oilmen, made plain. Under the immense pressure of the Gatsby Curve, American democracy was on the ropes. The people in charge were the people with the money. Ultimately, what the moneymen of the 1920s wanted is what moneymen always want. And their servants delivered. The Calvin Coolidge administration passed a huge tax cut in 1926, making sure that everyone could go home with his winnings. The rich seemed to think they had nothing else to worry about—until October 1929. Where were the 90 percent during these acts of plunder? An appreciable number of them could be found at Ku Klux Klan rallies. And as far as the most vocal (though not necessarily the largest) part of the 90 percent was concerned, America’s biggest problems were all due to the mooching hordes of immigrants. You know, the immigrants whose grandchildren have come to believe that America’s biggest problems now are all due to the mooching hordes of immigrants. The toxic wave of wealth concentration that arose in the Gilded Age and crested in the 1920s finally crashed on the shoals of depression and war. Today we like to think that the social-welfare programs that were planted by the New Deal and that blossomed in the postwar era were the principal drivers of a new equality. But the truth is that those efforts belong more to the category of effects than causes. Death and destruction were the real agents of change. The financial collapse knocked the wealthy back several steps, and war empowered labor—above all working women. That gilded, roaring surge of destruction was by no means the first such destabilizing wave of inequality to sweep through American history. In the first half of the 19th century, the largest single industry in the United States, measured in terms of both market capital and employment, was the enslavement (and the breeding for enslavement) of human beings. Over the course of the period, the industry became concentrated to the point where fewer than 4,000 families (roughly 0.1 percent of the households in the nation) owned about a quarter of this “human capital,” and another 390,000 (call it the 9.9 percent, give or take a few points) owned all of the rest. The slaveholding elite were vastly more educated, healthier, and had much better table manners than the overwhelming majority of their fellow white people, never mind the people they enslaved. They dominated not only the government of the nation, but also its media, culture, and religion. Their votaries in the pulpits and the news networks were so successful in demonstrating the sanctity and beneficence of the slave system that millions of impoverished white people with no enslaved people to call their own conceived of it as an honor to lay down their life in the system’s defense. That wave ended with 620,000 military deaths, and a lot of property damage. It did level the playing field in the American South for a time—though the process began to reverse itself all too swiftly. The United States, to be clear, is hardly the most egregious offender in the annals of human inequality. The European nations from which the colonists of North America emigrated had known a degree of inequality and instability that Americans would take more than a century to replicate. Whether in ancient Rome or the Near East, Asia or South America, the plot remains the same. In The Great Leveler, the historian Walter Scheidel makes a disturbingly good case that inequality has reliably ended only in catastrophic violence: wars, revolutions, the collapse of states, or plagues and other disasters. It’s a depressing theory. Now that a third wave of American inequality appears to be cresting, how much do we want to bet that it’s not true? The belief in our own novelty is one of the defining characteristics of our class. It mostly means that we don’t know our predecessors very well. I had long assumed that the Colonel was descended from a long line of colonels, each passing down his immense sense of entitlement to the next. Aunt Sarah’s propaganda was more effective than I knew. Robert W. Stewart was born in 1866 on a small farm in Iowa and raised on the early mornings and long hours of what Paul Henry Giddens, a historian of Standard Oil of Indiana, politely describes as “very modest circumstances.” The neighbors, seeing that the rough-cut teenager had something special, pitched in to send him to tiny Coe College, in the meatpacking town of Cedar Rapids. It would be hard not to believe that the urgent need to win at everything was already driving the train when the scholarship boy arrived at Yale Law School a few years later. The flashbulbs at the Havana Yacht Club captured a pose that was perhaps first glimpsed in a scratchy mirror somewhere in the silent plains of the Midwest. 10. The Choice I like to think that the ending of The Great Gatsby is too down-beat. Even if we are doomed to row our boats ceaselessly back into the past, how do we know which part of the past that will be? History shows us a number of aristocracies that have made good choices. The 9.9 percenters of ancient Athens held off the dead tide of the Gatsby Curve for a time, even if democracy wasn’t quite the right word for their system of government. America’s first generation of revolutionaries was mostly 9.9 percenters, and yet they turned their backs on the man at the very top in order to create a government of, by, and for the people. The best revolutions do not start at the bottom; they are the work of the upper-middle class. These exceptions are rare, to be sure, and yet they are the story of the modern world. In total population, average life expectancy, material wealth, artistic expression, rates of violence, and almost every other measure that matters for the quality of human life, the modern world is a dramatically different place than anything that came before. Historians offer many complicated explanations for this happy turn in human events—the steam engine, microbes, the weather—but a simple answer precedes them all: equality. The history of the modern world is the unfolding of the idea at the vital center of the American Revolution. The defining challenge of our time is to renew the promise of American democracy by reversing the calcifying effects of accelerating inequality. As long as inequality rules, reason will be absent from our politics; without reason, none of our other issues can be solved. It’s a world-historical problem. But the solutions that have been put forward so far are, for the most part, shoebox in size. Well-meaning meritocrats have proposed new and better tests for admitting people into their jewel-encrusted classrooms. Fine—but we aren’t going to beat back the Gatsby Curve by tweaking the formulas for excluding people from fancy universities. Policy wonks have taken aim at the more-egregious tax-code handouts, such as the mortgage-interest deduction and college-savings plans. Good—and then what? Conservatives continue to recycle the characterological solutions, like celebrating traditional marriage or bringing back that old-time religion. Sure—reforging familial and community bonds is a worthy goal. But talking up those virtues won’t save any families from the withering pressures of a rigged economy. Meanwhile, coffee-shop radicals say they want a revolution. They don’t seem to appreciate that the only simple solutions are the incredibly violent and destructive ones. The American idea has always been a guide star, not a policy program, much less a reality. The rights of human beings never have been and never could be permanently established in a handful of phrases or old declarations. They are always rushing to catch up to the world that we inhabit. In our world, now, we need to understand that access to the means of sustaining good health, the opportunity to learn from the wisdom accumulated in our culture, and the expectation that one may do so in a decent home and neighborhood are not privileges to be reserved for the few who have learned to game the system. They are rights that follow from the same source as those that an earlier generation called life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yes, the kind of change that really matters is going to require action from the federal government. That which creates monopoly power can also destroy it; that which allows money into politics can also take it out; that which has transferred power from labor to capital can transfer it back. Change also needs to happen at the state and local levels. How else are we going to open up our neighborhoods and restore the public character of education? It’s going to take something from each of us, too, and perhaps especially from those who happen to be the momentary winners of this cycle in the game. We need to peel our eyes away from the mirror of our own success and think about what we can do in our everyday lives for the people who aren’t our neighbors. We should be fighting for opportunities for other people’s children as if the future of our own children depended on it. It probably does. Learn more at The Atlantic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531419543184-U35GL1XD965RQFV1Q2DQ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.18.31+AM.png economics - November Water Bond Promises $8.7 Billion Towards Securing California’s Future California voters are being presented with two upcoming water bond propositions in the June and November elections. In June, Prop 68 will present voters with a $4 billion Parks and Water Bond, and in November the Water Supply and Water Quality bond will present voters with an $8.7 billion bond. Recently, VX News sat down with Gerald Meral, official proponent of the November Water Bond and director of the California Water Program at the Natural Heritage Institute. Meral, who has previously directed the Planning and Conservation League and served as a Deputy Secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, provided an overview of the types of drinking water, ecosystem restoration, and sustainable groundwater projects the November bond would fund. Recently, the $8.9 billion water bond that you’ve been instrumental in crafting was certified for the November ballot. If passed, what would that measure fund? Jerry Meral: The bond funds state drinking water, which is a huge statewide need, and safe wastewater disposal, which is a big priority in disadvantaged communities. Some categories are what you would conventionally expect: wastewater recycling, de-salting of groundwater, water conservation, and watershed restoration. There are a total of 100 funding categories for water items in the measure. "There is no daylight between what we are doing and what the governor has said needs to be done. This bond is the funding the governor needs to implement his Water Action Plan." - Gerald Meral The bond also funds implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, a landmark bill that the state passed several years ago but hasn’t yet been fully implemented. It partly funds the repair of the Oroville Dam, which was a huge public safety problem, and the repair of the Friant-Kern Canal, which is a key water delivery element for more than a million acres of the best farmland in the world. One interesting feature of the bond is its attention to Salton Sea. I daresay the Salton Sea is the single greatest threat to air quality in the United States. It’s got to be solved. This bond provides half of the funding needed for the state plan for this problem; the other half is in Prop 68, which is on the June ballot. Given that bond measures are crafted by their sponsors, rather than through legislative process, share the stakeholders who have been involved in this effort aimed at the November ballot. This measure was a very broad effort that took more than two years to put together. Conservation groups were instrumental in the first draft, and it reflects their work and their priorities. We worked very closely with California agriculture. A lot of commodity groups were involved in this—fresh fruit, rice, cotton, citrus, and so on. They have a lot to say about water management. We also worked closely with the Association of California Water Agencies and many of their member agencies, like the Friant Water Authority, Northern California Water Association, and Southern California Water Coalition, as well as with fish and wildlife groups, like Ducks Unlimited and the California Waterfowl Association. You noted that on California’s June ballot is another water-related funding measure, Prop 68. What does Prop 68 fund, and what distinguishes it from your water bond going before the voters in November? We certainly endorse Prop 68; it’s a good measure. Like our November measure, it funds safe drinking water, flood control, the Salton Sea plan, and water recycling. But it’s important to note that in every one of those categories, our research has shown that the need is substantially greater than these two measures combined. One difference between our measures is that Prop 68’s strongest emphasis is parks. It has around $1 billion for various water purposes. Initiatives like ours are subject to the single-subject rule, so our $9 billion measure is entirely for water. However, two things are not in our measure. One is funding for the Delta Tunnels project, which we deemed too controversial. Also, we did not include surface storage projects. Proposition 1 from 2014 had $2.7 billion for storage projects, and that process is still ongoing, so we did not want to compete with it. Does your water bond align with the investment goals included in the governor’s Water Action Plan? Have you collaborated with water leaders in the state administration and Legislature on the bond’s provisions and priorities? We have compared our measure to the governor’s Water Action Plan, and it’s fair to say that they are virtually homologous; there is no daylight between what we are doing and what the governor has said needs to be done. This bond is the funding the governor needs to implement his Water Action Plan. He has not taken a position, and the state agencies have followed his lead. However, I will say that we did not ignore communicating with the state agencies, and they gave us guidance as to what they needed to ensure that we were doing the right thing. You referenced earlier that implementing California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is new to local governance. How is SGMA changing water management, and how might the water bond facilitate such change? SGMA was a landmark bill for California; really, we are just catching up to other Western states. The goal is to preserve groundwater at a relatively stable level, and to not let it degrade in quality. This is a big challenge for California, as we have a state overdraft of more than 2 million acre-feet a year. That’s huge. We need to do much better about recharging groundwater. Southern California is a leader in this, but a lot of the state needs to catch up. Facilities and pipelines need to be built to move floodwater to places where it can percolate into the ground. Quality remediation needs to be done to make groundwater more usable. To some extent, we’re also going to have to take land out of production. Of course, our goal is to minimize that impact by doing everything else we can first. But even if we do everything we need to, still, it won’t be possible over the long term to irrigate as much land as we do today. Elaborate on the significant investments planned to address the multi-decade challenges arising from the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is a wastewater sink. It was created when the Colorado River was accidentally diverted into that huge basin, and it’s kept alive by wastewater coming from the fields of the Imperial Irrigation District and the Coachella Valley Water District. The Metropolitan Water District and San Diego County Water Authority have made deals with the Imperial and Coachella water districts to conserve water. They have done a lot: using drip irrigation, storing water when it’s not needed, and so on. That’s a good thing—we want to conserve water—but it also means less water is going to the Salton Sea, and so the sea is drying up. It’s losing its ability to produce fish and its value as a wildlife habitat is diminishing. That’s bad enough, but equally importantly, as the sea dries, the lakebed is being exposed. This is the largest lake in Southern California, and once exposed, it will blow dust of biblical proportions south into El Centro, Imperial, and Mexico, and sometimes north into Palm Springs, Riverside, and all the way to Ventura County. It will be like the Owens Dry Lake before Los Angeles spent $2 billion to mitigate the impacts. This is a huge state priority. It just has to be solved. Since the drought captured the consciousness of California voters, water management has been a priority of Governor Brown’s and subject of great interest for legislators and voters. Currently, Senator Bob Hertzberg is sponsoring SB 231, a Prop 218 fix that relates to water infrastructure, and LA County has proposed a parcel tax for the November ballot to fund stormwater management. In your opinion, will voters have the appetite to support both of these water measures? I think the public is responsive to these needs. Proposition 1, a water bond the governor sponsored about four years ago, was approved by 67 percent of the voters and went through the Legislature almost unanimously. It passed even in areas like the Central Valley and the mountains where normally bonds don’t do very well. Another recent example is Measure AA, which was a parcel tax measure to restore wetlands in the Bay Area two years ago. That passed with a 70 percent margin, which is almost unbelievable considering that people were voting to tax themselves. For this measure, our polling shows well over 60 percent voter support. I think the voters get it. They may not know where their water comes from, or understand all the water problems in the state, but they do understand that it’s a dry state and that the water has to be brought in from a long way away. Given all the bonds and taxes the public will be asked to vote on this spring and fall, do you expect voters to prioritize issues like housing, air quality, climate change mitigation, and water infrastructure? If so, how highly ranked is water? Looking over previous bond acts going back to 1970, there’s not a lot of evidence that voters feel the need to prioritize. Generally speaking, if the economy is good, and people like the purpose, very few bonds fail. When it does happen, it tends to be because people don’t feel that the purpose of the bond is relevant to them or worth spending money on. Is there any downside in relying heavily on bond measures to fund the state’s water infrastructure and climate adaptation needs? This challenge is ancient. The problem is that government needs to spend money on the urgent needs we have right now—year-to-year funding of schools, for example. And yet, we also have to invest in infrastructure. The way the state does that is through bond acts. Water, parks, and rail—all the hard infrastructure projects are funded by bonds or special dedicated taxes. Unfortunately, the amount that California spends on infrastructure outside of bonds has gone down. The state simply tends to spend on what they have to do this year, as opposed to building for the future. But without investment, our state’s infrastructure will collapse. How can we build for the future if we don’t have the right roads, schools, and water systems—all the things that Governor Pat Brown thought were so important? On the November ballot with your water bond is the election of a new slate of state office holders. Does it matter much for water infrastructure who is selected to serve for the next four years? Fortunately, when it comes to this year’s bond measures, the voters set those priorities, and it will simply be the job of whoever is elected governor to implement those priorities. But if the water measures pass by a good margin, it will send a message to state leaders that voters think infrastructure is important, and that maybe they should consider investing more of the state’s general fund in infrastructure. I’m hoping that our electeds will be educated by the voters this November. Learn more at VerdeXchange https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531420226889-52K36LGD60SWFNOTM0J9/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.24.41+AM.png economics - Gov. Jerry Brown Offers Part of a Historic Budget Bonanza to Help Ease California's Homelessness Crisis Even in the wake of previous tax windfalls, Gov. Jerry Brown's announcement on Friday was breathtaking: The state has collected an unexpected $9 billion in tax revenue in recent months, $3 billion more in cash than projected in January. The money is the latest installment in a fiscal winning streak of historic proportions in California. And, as in previous years, the governor's newly revised budget seeks to divvy it up on either short-term spending or long-term savings by putting it into government reserves. "This is a time to save for our future, not to make pricey promises we can't keep," Brown said. "I've said it before and I'll say it again: Let's not blow it now." Brown's most significant proposal for spending the cash may be a $359-million boost to ease the state's burgeoning homelessness crisis. The governor's proposal also embraces a plan to put a $2-billion bond for homeless housing on November's statewide ballot. The budget plan adds $312 million for mental health programs. The infusion of cash to help the homeless is one of only a few new proposals in the $199.2-billion spending plan, a revision of Brown's original proposal to the Legislature in January. As was the case then, the governor continues to believe the lion's share of the tax windfall should be socked away in the state's rainy-day fund. "I'll be very cautious in this year's budget," he told reporters at the state Capitol on Friday. Brown's plan calls for topping off the reserve account at $13.8 billion by next summer, the largest in state history. Under the provisions of a 2014 ballot measure approved by voters, the fund can grow to no more than 10% of projected general fund revenues. That law also requires some of the early money be spent on repaying government debts. A portion of the extra cash would go toward a new $1-billion effort to reduce the backlog of delayed maintenance in state departments and agencies. Almost one-third of the money would pay for projects on community college campuses, state prisons and aging river levees. In addition, the University of California and California State University systems would each receive $100 million for maintenance needs. Brown also fired a warning shot to UC and CSU leaders in his budget. Should either college system raise tuition in the coming school year, he proposed a cap on state scholarship funds. That support, money for the Cal Grant and Middle-Class Scholarship programs, would otherwise rise automatically to meet student financial needs. UC leaders delayed action on a tuition hike while they awaited action on a state budget. Cal State officials have said they will not raise tuition next year. As in previous years, a key debate point over the next few weeks is likely to be how to categorize much of the unexpected cash. Brown has consistently argued the windfalls should be considered temporary, and thus not used to pay for ongoing state services. Legislative Democrats have largely acceded to those demands, thereby narrowing the number of social services programs that can be boosted. Those agreements have left some programs at or near recession-era levels. The governor insists that his administration has made significant strides toward helping Californians who live in poverty, including creating a tax credit for the working poor in 2015 and gradual increases in the state's minimum wage. And yet lawmakers, in budget committee hearings through the winter and spring, heard from scores of advocates who pleaded for additional funds to boost subsidized child care and cash grants for the aged and disabled. Democrats in both the Senate and Assembly are expected to insist on more long-term funding for CalWORKS, the state's welfare assistance program, as they begin negotiations with Brown over the next few weeks. The governor acknowledged "there will be some back and forth" in those private conversations, though he insisted there's no way to match dollars with demands. "If you take all these needs, and there are a lot of them, it's endless," he said. The new focus on homelessness is intended to help cities and counties that are struggling to address the steady stream of adults and families living on the streets. A federal study concludes that more than 130,000 residents of the state are homeless, a 14% increase in the last year alone. Legislators have expressed particular frustration that a $2-billion bond to help pay for additional housing, agreed to by the governor and lawmakers in 2016, has been tied up in court and remains unspent. Brown is now supporting a bill by Sen. Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) to have voters sign off on the housing bond instead of waiting for a court decision. A two-thirds supermajority of lawmakers will have to agree for the bond measure to reach the ballot. The slow pace of spending on homelessness efforts is one reason for calls earlier this year from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and mayors from the state's 10 other largest cities to spend $1.5 billion from the budget surplus to help local governments address the problem. State senators also have put forward a plan to spend $2 billion of the surplus on low-income housing development, with half that amount earmarked for homelessness programs. Of the $359 million for homelessness efforts in the governor's proposal, the state would provide $250 million in grants to cities and counties that have declared homelessness emergencies. The remaining amount is for spending increases to existing state health, emergency and social service programs designed to help homeless domestic violence victims, the mentally ill and poor senior citizens. Garcetti and the other mayors praised the governor for his proposal but indicated they would be seeking more money. "I look forward to working with the governor, the Legislature and mayors across California to make certain that there are enough dollars to make meaningful and lasting strides toward ending the moral and humanitarian crisis on our streets," Garcetti said in a statement. Several of the candidates vying to succeed Brown as governor were critical of the state's response thus far to the homelessness crisis in a televised debate on Tuesday. "What lacks is leadership in this state," said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the front-runner in the race. Brown said Friday that he welcomes additional action from whoever his successor might be. "I think that's a good challenge," he said of Newsom's critique. "That will take leadership because it's going to require changes in the laws that currently exist." In a nod to last year's deadly wildfires up and down the state, Brown's new budget also adds nearly $100 million to the budget for fire prevention. The state would increase controlled burns and boost education and training programs in fire-prone areas. California environmental officials said Thursday that the money is needed because the state's forests are facing "a catastrophic shift" toward increased risk of major events. "Science tells us that these trends will only be exacerbated by climate change," California Secretary for Natural Resources John Laird said. California's K-12 schools and community colleges would continue to receive the largest share of tax dollars under the budget proposal, with a $2.8-billion boost compared with earlier projections. Spending is estimated to be close to $4,600 more per student than seven years ago, during the budget's bleak times. While experts have pointed out that both the state and the nation are overdue for an economic course correction that would slow the rate of tax collections, California's fiscal watchers see multiple reasons for three consecutive years of better-than-expected revenue collections. There's also the temporary surcharge on high-income earners that California voters approved in 2012 and extended in 2016. Stock market strength has again produced sizable capital gains for the state's most wealthy, one of the primary drivers of income tax revenue. Brown remarked on Friday that as few as 15,000 tax filers in the state provide one-quarter of the income taxes collected. When the fortunes of those Californians suffer, so does the state budget. "Life is very giddy at the peak," the governor told reporters. "But I'm not giddy." Brown's revised budget plan marks the traditional beginning for a month's worth of intense budget negotiations with legislative leaders. By law, the Legislature must send him a spending plan no later than June 15 — a deadline routinely ignored for most of the modern era, but strictly adhered to since voters approved a 2010 ballot measure that garnishes legislators' pay for every day a budget is late in arriving on the governor's desk. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531420401000-VD0GDI8KM3YTQ1BCBVT5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.32.38+AM.png economics - Berkeley Is Turning to the Blockchain for City Funding In an effort to reduce their reliance on federal and state funding, the City of Berkeley is turning to a surprising source: cryptocurrency. The idea is to leverage the blockchain — the technology that makes bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies possible — to spur private, crowdfunded investment in affordable housing and other local projects. Led by Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín and City Councilmember Ben Bartlett, the city is partnering with University of California Berkeley’s Blockchain Lab and finance technology company Neighborly to create a “tokenized municipal bond offering.” The offering will allow individuals to buy Berkeley’s cryptocurrency to fund city-issued municipal bonds. The money raised will pay for things such as affordable housing, homeless shelters, ambulances, street trees, even a community theater. Coin owners will potentially be able to spend the cryptocurrency at some Berkeley businesses. As with any municipal bond, investors who get in on the offering will earn a small return on their investment over time as the city pays them back with interest. The idea grew out of concern over the impact corporate tax cuts (not to mention threats to cut funding to sanctuary cities) would have on their ability to address their affordable housing and homelessness crises. With lower corporate tax rates, corporations have less incentive to buy low income housing tax credits, a key source of affordable housing funding. In addition, big banks raised interest rates on loans to local governments in the wake of the tax cuts. “We have over a thousand homeless people in Berkeley and expect that to grow by a factor of five,” says Bartlett. “We knew we needed to find a way to fund these things. This need is going to grow and it’s already a disaster that’s affecting our moral and physical integrity as a city.” Beyond that, Bartlett says conventional municipal bonds are expensive, slow and have lots of red tape for investors, making it hard for individuals to invest in them at all, let alone in the small denominations most people might have to invest. With their idea, bonds could be smaller and be issued more quickly. Neighborly was launched to do just that — to allow individuals to crowdfund municipal bonds. Austin issued a bond on the platform to pay for historic preservation. Cambridge, Mass., used it to fund schools and utility infrastructure. Berkeley’s idea operates on a similar principle, but will use the blockchain technology to improve security and transparency, factors they hope will help spur investment (and provides a bit of flashy tech-factor that Bay Area residents might find appealing). “You conceive of an idea, get the costs ready, push it out to the community, they can buy it right away,” Bartlett explains. “It’s more flexible. It doesn’t have to be a $100 million bond for a sewer. It could be smaller projects and with the lower denomination ability…It’s projected to be 50 percent less expensive to the issuer [than conventional municipal bonds].” In simplified terms, a blockchain is a database stored concurrently on a peer-to-peer network of computers, making it less vulnerable than storing everything on a central server. Each copy of the database serves as a permanently available public record of every transaction on the blockchain. The technology keeps every copy of the database updated as people buy and exchange each “coin.” “It’s immutable. It’s transparent. There might be fewer concerns about misappropriation of funds,” explains Stacie Olivares-Castain, who recently became state of California’s first ever senior advisor for impact investments and blockchain. Olivares-Castain says she is encouraged by Berkeley’s experiment. “It’s very, very early, but what we’re starting to see is the blockchain can be used to improve a sense of individual agency and create more opportunity. The Neighborly model is a very interesting partnership. I think it could be used by other communities, too…Through the blockchain, there’s more democratization of access to capital.” There are plenty of criticisms of cryptocurrency — coin wallets getting hacked, the wild fluctuation of currency value, the absurd amount of energy bitcoin “miners” consume to run their computers as they continually search for new bitcoin tokens produced somewhat randomly by digital algorithm. Bartlett says none of those issues apply to Berkeley’s project. There will be no coin “mining” for Berkeley’s coins, so the city’s coins “won’t be a tool for speculation. It has a set rate of return at darn near public rates,” he explains. There are still plenty of details to work out in the plan, but the city is aiming to launch its tokenized municipal bond offering in May. Bartlett says he’s already fielding calls about it from cities in the U.S. and abroad and is confident that there’s a future for their approach to city funding. “Digitization, crowdfunding—these are just social impact bonds for the next generation,” he says. “For cities to survive this escalating disinvestment in the public trust, we’re going to have to start thinking outside the box and creating our own resources.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531420505528-01A4XTCS411D8FZ2Q9FF/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.34.47+AM.png economics - How Blockchain Technology Could Make Zoning Work for People Picture this: A developer owns a plot of land in a gentrifying neighborhood. Under current zoning codes, and with current market incentives, the best bang they could get for their buck is to build high-rise luxury apartments. But this neighborhood doesn’t need luxury apartments. It needs a supermarket, and affordable housing for current, low-income residents. The existing zoning code isn’t designed to consider those needs. It just states that this plot is zoned residential. Now, a group of researchers are working on a vision for a new type of zoning and a different incentive system that might be able to respond more dynamically to communities’ needs — using machine-learning algorithms, big data, and blockchain, the same technology underlying Bitcoin. Under their system, someone would take an inventory of that same hypothetical neighborhood’s current housing stock, mobility patterns, demographics, amenities, energy consumption, and other factors. Then a simulation model would propose solutions to maximize residents’ wellbeing, using tokens — think cryptocurrency — as a new system of exchange. So, for example, if the goal is to protect residents from displacement, the algorithm might value longevity: Anyone who has lived in the neighborhood for over 10 years gets a token. That same developer could still build, but they might be required to rent or sell only to holders of this particular token. Community members would have a say in what the algorithm values. Maybe people with vital professions like school teacher might also qualify for the hypothetical housing token. “It’s not a simple subsidy, it’s subtler than that,” says John Henry Clippinger, one of the brains behind the proposal. “You’re moving beyond market economics into a different kind of economics. This is real value generation that is not appreciated in the market, but it will be reflected in the scarcity and availability of this token.” Clippinger was formerly a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and is now a cofounder of Swytch, where he’s developing a token that incentivizes renewable energy production. He’s working with Kent Larson, a principal research scientist at the MIT Media Lab’s City Science group. They’re far from the first to recognize the limits of the dominant zoning model, which designates different geographic areas for different land uses, like retail or light industrial. Jane Jacobs blamed such codes for lifeless neighborhoods, pointless sprawl, and growing inequality. Cities are already experimenting with other models, like performance zoning, incentive zoning, and form-based codes. Larson and Clippinger’s vision shares some commonalities with both performance and incentive zoning. Like the former, it’s intended to make zoning more sensitive to outcomes, like whether or not a new project creates jobs or improves street life. Like the latter, it tries to set up a new system of incentives for developers and other urban players, so that the bottom line isn’t the bottom line. “It’s very difficult to get developers to do something other than a traditional business model. Keeping it static and just based upon returns on investment and square footage is not the way to do it,” says Clippinger. What really sets their proposal apart, though, is the technology. At MIT, Larson heads a project called CityScope, where he develops more dynamic urban planning tools. He and his researchers have designed interactive scale models to help the mayor of Hamburg, Germany, for example, as he figures out how to settle 80,000 refugees without creating segregated ghettos. Using optically tagged Lego bricks, augmented reality, and algorithms that draw on troves of data about housing, mobility, and land use, the mayor and neighborhood stakeholders were able to move potential housing units around an interactive map of the city and see the cascading effects. In this video, Larson demonstrates a similar model of Cambridge, which can show how people of different incomes interact, or don’t — and how mixing affordable housing throughout a district, rather than clustering it together, can increase integration. The goal is “evidence-based design and decision-making” that looks at every project, every parcel, in context. CityScope is already working with Barcelona to implement some of these ideas in their 22@Innovation District, and with South Korea, as that country develops entirely new cities from scratch. But the idea of algorithms and machine learning shaping our cities worries many. Solomon Greene is a land use lawyer, urban planner, and senior fellow at the Urban Institute, whose research focuses on how housing, land use, and technology can be used to create more equitable cities. When TechCrunch wrote about Clippinger and Larson’s proposal, Greene got a lot of emails about it. “I definitely think the idea of creating new mechanisms to have zoning be more flexible, more responsive to real-time needs, I think there’s an element of that that has value,” he says. In some ways, he sees the proposal as just a “technology-enhanced version of an old idea”: that people vote with their feet, and will leave a neighborhood if it lacks the amenities they want and need. Thus, local governments should think about zoning and other incentives to attract those amenities. What concerned Greene, though, was the imagined city dwellers in that article. Though Larson and Clippinger believe this type of zoning could make housing more affordable, the article seemed more concerned with the needs of the “knowledge economy worker” — hardly a city’s most vulnerable residents. “I think starting with that as your paradigmatic audience or who you are trying to satisfy is really problematic,” he says. Think about the example of the school teacher who gets a token to qualify for subsidized housing in a neighborhood. Clippinger says the community would have input on what types of professions and other social qualities the system would value, but Greene is concerned with who in the community would give that input? What about the unemployed? What happens if the results turn out to be wildly disparate based on race and class? “Against the backdrop of structural racism, structural inequality, you’re going to amplify past inequities [within] the algorithm,” he says. Greene also wonders where people would turn if a system like this failed to achieve equitable results. “Machine learning and artificial intelligence could actually make it harder to hold public decision-makers to account. Because they could always say, ‘it’s the algorithm,’ as opposed to having a public person you could vote out of office,” says Greene. Clippinger knows there’s a need for protections in a system like this. But, he says, “The problem with the guards is the guards get captured. How hackable is democracy? It’s amazingly hackable.” In other words, he does harbor suspicions of a centralized point of control in making these decisions. Clippinger says this is not zoning by Google. There would be no one tech giant controlling all of this information, but rather a system of randomization, peer-to-peer governance, and other protections. On the website for the Token Commons Foundation, a group that advocates for protocol around crypto-tokens, Clippinger writes about mathematics as “the sole and intrinsically verifiable authority that cannot be manipulated nor subverted. … [M]ath combined with digital crypto-currencies provides a practical opportunity for providing something that has been missing throughout human history, a provable, incorruptible token of universal value exchange and trust.” Whether or not this all sounds like a tech dystopia depends on where you’re standing. “This is not a top-down, all-seeing system, this is dynamic, changing, and people-centric,” says Clippinger. Yet so far, the idea has primarily been tested in innovation districts and new cities being built more or less from scratch, in which governments are able to exert a lot of top-down planning control. Either way, Clippinger says planners need to embrace technology in city building. He doesn’t want cities to look like Silicon Valley, or San Francisco, but, he says, “this is the problem, people equate technology with a particular ideology. So if you’re tech-oriented, [and] see solutions technologically, it means you’re a Silicon Valley type.” Rather, he holds up Barcelona, known for its thriving public life and concern for the commons, as an example of the healthy, future-oriented city. He says Barcelona is currently engaged in conversations about decentralized data ownership, and implementing many other ideas Clippinger would like to see spread. According to Clippinger, that’s what it will take to find out whether this is an achievable utopia. “We need to see it succeed somewhere,” he says. Learn more at NextCity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531420610828-CEP0VL7TZ1IE6QTE6KYR/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.36.35+AM.png economics - Why Business Needs To Get Serious About Water Scarcity Water scarcity is potentially one of the biggest problems facing humanity in the next several decades. Communities and countries around the world already face shortages, some of them severe. Governments are tasked with the challenge of ensuring access to water for their citizens. Institutions such as the United Nations consider access to clean water a human right, for example. But access to water is also a problem for businesses, which may find themselves in ever greater competition for a finite resource as growing populations increasingly drain reservoirs and rivers. Companies and investors are taking action to hedge against the business risks associated with water scarcity and spur investments in new technologies. Some available approaches, such as desalination and water recycling, show promise. But desalination has been criticized for its historically intensive energy requirements and for potential effects on the environment. And water recycled from the bathroom to the kitchen sink, though safe, conjures deeply unpalatable images for many would-be consumers. Billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates famously drank a glass of water made from specially processed sewage to convince detractors that the water is as safe and tasty as any from a branded bottle. There are myriad ways to invest in water, including investment funds; start-ups that are developing new technologies, from extraction to metering and management; and global corporations taking water scarcity seriously. The important thing to remember is just how vital water is for virtually every aspect of human existence and activity, said Will Sarni, a consultant and entrepreneur who specializes in water. "There is increasing demand for this finite resource and this finite resource is essential to life, but also to economic development and business growth," Sarni said. "You can't generate thermo-electric power without water. You can't grow crops. You can't have manufacturing." Learn more at CNBC https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531420695986-4O65ZAR1R9SXMU78LSHZ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.37.55+AM.png economics - Is Monetizing Waste The Secret To Ending Plastic Pollution? David Katz is founder and CEO of the Plastic Bank, a company that aims to stop plastic pollution by turning waste into currency. In areas with official stores, collectors can turn in plastic waste and receive cash or credit to an online account, which can then be used to purchase everything from insurance and phones to cooking fuel and stoves. We talked with Katz about why making plastic valuable can help stop it from entering the ocean while also reducing poverty. There are many companies and organizations working to end pollution and poverty. What makes the Plastic Bank different? It’s estimated that there are over 150 million tons of plastic in the ocean, with a garbage truck of plastic entering the ocean every minute. There isn’t a single solution, and I think it's important to communicate that we need an army of people to solve this issue. What makes us unique is that we recognize the value in the 8.3 trillion kilos of plastic that's ever been produced, almost all of it still here as waste. It’s difficult to estimate, but well under 500 billion could alleviate all forms of poverty around the world. And if we take that 8.3 trillion kilos of plastic at roughly 50 cents per kilo, we're unleashing a 4 trillion-dollar market opportunity for the world. How do you put a value on plastic waste? We give plastic value by using it as money. Our collection centers accept it as a currency in return for goods and services, and we sell that as a raw material into manufacturing, closing the loop in the circular economy. I like to talk about this parable of acres of diamonds. If you're walking over diamonds, and there's no bank, no store, nothing you can do with them, they stay on the ground as rocks. We give value to plastic and get if off the ground by accepting it as a form of currency. Once we do that it's not litter. It's cash. No one throws cash on the ground. Why does this model work? Our model works because we don't differ from the traditional recycling industry. In fact, we want to be world’s largest recycling company. What makes us unique is we're recycling for the masses, cutting out the middleman and ensuring the poor make the most. Additionally, when plastic is of value and being collected, it’s easier to recycle, because it doesn't collect the waste and degrade like it traditionally would sitting in the canals or entering the ocean and floating back to shore. There is demand for our product because we have our own category, Social Plastic, which is certified to have been contributed or sourced directly from the Plastic Bank. We’ve already partnered with several companies; Marks & Spencer, Henkel, Shell. Our customers are most enlivened by knowing that it is not just recycled material. That it's a material with value that is transferred through lives. Additionally, we are a for-profit business. We are focused on profitability and providing our product at the lowest possible cost, period. Non-profits deplete money as slowly as possible. For-profits multiply the same pool of money as quickly as possible. It’s been proven that for-profit has the greatest opportunity for impact. Both good and bad, by the way. But put to the force of good, it's unlimited. Where are you located and what are plans for expansion? We’ve been operating successfully in Haiti since 2015, and even have collection locations in schools so people can pay for their tuition directly. We expanded to the Philippines in 2016 and one of our global partners, Shell Energy, has a thousand stores at gas stations in the country that now also function as Plastic Bank collection locations. Staff have been hired for an expansion into Brazil and a philanthropist is sponsoring our entry into Indonesia. Plans are also in the works for Ethiopia and the horn of Africa, as well as India. We’re growing exponentially. We probably get ten to twenty requests a day from people around the world asking for us to come into their community. There is a strong demand because we are a conduit for change. We’ve created an application so that anyone in the world can create their own recycling infrastructure wherever they are. They just need a collector, a redemption location, a collection location, a recycler, and a courier. Five simple easy components to create. We just need to oversee a few things and have someone in the country to authenticate the social nature, making sure children are not employed and things like that. But we provide a very simple way for anyone in the world to create a social plastic ecosystem. What is your end goal? Our goal is to monetize waste. To create a globally recognizable, tradeable currency for the planet. We need to eliminate the word waste, waste pickers, those things. We are creating an ecosystem that will ignite a social plastic revolution, that unites and enrolls humanity for local action that creates global impact. Learn more at UN Environment https://civicas.net/environment-2 daily 0.75 2018-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622291940-U581ITI7O02ERASMYFWK/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.24.39+AM.png environment - Harnessing Natural Gas To Harvest Water From The Air Might Solve 2 Big Problems At Once https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622291940-U581ITI7O02ERASMYFWK/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.24.39+AM.png environment - Harnessing Natural Gas To Harvest Water From The Air Might Solve 2 Big Problems At Once https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622226006-UHJGKDWLDLM88MJZ9JIO/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.23.32+AM.png environment - Virtual Reality Mapping Of Ancient Nature Reveals How Climate Change Affects Us All https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531868938310-VSQ55LCJ8ARTHCU1KMS8/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.08.37+PM.png environment - California Is Preparing for Extreme Weather. It’s Time to Plant Some Trees. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531868797193-DB47HUOGYLDG5Y13ZXM1/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.05.41+PM.png environment - Trump Says Environmental Regulations Tank The Economy. California Is Proving Him Wrong. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/5b47a8da03ce64097aa95af8/5b47a96d562fa712365d4fb9/1531423085496/ environment https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531423086424-AYFQ79ZPIN31H9K7EW31/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.17.46+PM.png environment - Cheap Sensors Are Democratizing Air-Quality Data Until she moved to Fresno, California in 2003, Janet DietzKamei had never experienced asthma. But after just a few years in a city notorious for its filthy air—the American Lung Association lists it in the five worst U.S. cities for air quality—DietzKamei found herself in the emergency room struggling to breathe. She soon started staying inside on days when the air was thick with smog from nearby industry or traffic, and would check the local air-quality alerts every morning. But even that wasn’t enough—sometimes on days deemed safe by the air-quality index, she’d find herself gasping for breath. If it’s bad, she said, “I just can’t breathe outside. Nothing is absorbed; I simply can’t breathe the air.” Now 73, DietzKamei is coming off the first winter in years when she didn’t get sick at all. It’s all, she said, because of a $250 air sensor she put in her backyard, which sends her up-to-the-minute readings of pollution just outside her house, a more personalized and specific reading than she could get from the state’s stationary monitors miles away. DietzKamei’s monitor, made by PurpleAir, is part of a network across California’s San Joaquin Valley, run in part by the Central California Environmental Justice Network. By putting monitors in backyards and around schools, the group is hoping to see what the area’s biomass plants and the dozens of trucks that rumble through are pumping into the lungs of disadvantaged residents. Measuring air quality has been the purview of state environmental regulators, who rely on monitors approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that cost tens of thousands of dollars. That data is used to send out bad-air alerts (the green, orange, and red warning days) and for regulatory purposes. But these readings show only a narrow slice of the air, based on a handful of monitors that may not be placed where the worst pollution is. Advances in technology have produced smaller sensors as cheap as $250, meaning that environmental activists, community groups, and curious citizens can map out air pollution around their schools, parks, or backyards. This could eventually reshape air-pollution regulation, with previously unmeasured areas gathering data on air they say could violate federal health standards. In western Colorado, the environmental group Citizens for Clean Air has put up two dozen low-cost monitors around Grand Junction to supplement the two state-run monitors in the Grand Valley. In a region grappling with wildfire smoke, increased truck traffic, and natural-gas pollution, activists say a stronger web of monitors is necessary to prove to the state that more attention needs to be paid to them. “The state does what they can with what they have to work with,” said Karen Sjoberg, the group’s leader. “They’ve got monitors in the best locations they can and they’ll do studies on that, but we need low-cost versions where we live.” Even in large cities, which tend to get more attention because of their higher populations, low-cost sensors are being used to glean localized air-quality data. In addition to Fresno, take Salt Lake City, where pollution is a fact of life: The city sits in a basin, and wintertime inversions trap a thick coat of visible smog over the city for days at a time. Shea Wickelson, a high-school chemistry teacher at the Salt Lake Center for Science Education, said students begin thinking about pollution when recess is canceled on bad smog days. “If you’re having that experience from elementary school, you’re very aware of air quality,” Wickelson said. “Students are coming up with questions like, ‘How is the air quality inside versus outside?,’ or ‘How does premium fuel compare to regular fuel?,’ or ‘How is the air around a school bus?’” Answering those questions hasn’t been easy, but a partnership with the University of Utah has helped. The AirU program has students building their own particulate-matter sensors, starting with toy blocks, a cheap Arduino computer board, and a photo resistor that scatters light to detect particles of pollution. Students can use the tissue-box-sized monitors for science-fair projects, but they’ve also created a data-rich map of pollution around the city. “Our lower-income areas have not always been very well represented, because people have other concerns than thinking of how to monitor air quality,” said Kerry Kelly, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Utah who oversees the program. “We’re getting real-time maps of the city’s microclimates. As this valley develops, this can help you manage where you’re putting things like schools.” Similarly, in Denver, Google has worked with Aclima to put the company’s low-cost sensors on street view cars to map pollution around the city. The new generation of monitors is made possible by advances in laser technology. Monitors can capture air through a fan, then use a laser to count the number and size of particles in the air. Adrian Dybwad, the founder of PurpleAir, said he first started tinkering with air sensors to see what his family was breathing from a nearby gravel pit in Salt Lake City. An infrared sensor from the internet was too dependent on temperature, but he tested a modified laser sensor he got online against official regulatory monitors and found a 95 percent correlation. After initially giving the monitors away, Dybwad’s company has now sold hundreds around the country, resulting in a real-time nationwide map on the company’s website. “We call it high-resolution air sensing,” Dybwad said. “Having the ability to know what’s in your air, it gives people peace of mind.” The technology works well for particulates, the pollution that can come from dust, smoke, and diesel exhaust and can lodge in the lungs and bloodstream. Ozone pollution, or ground-level smog, requires more complex readings on temperature, humidity, and gas makeup, which is a barrier to higher-quality and low-cost monitors for all pollutants. “We’re getting real-time maps of the city’s microclimates. As this valley develops, this can help you manage where you’re putting things like schools.” As would be expected, accuracy is a challenge—the monitors require calibration, can be affected by temperatures, and may be susceptible to, say, a backyard barbecue or a bug that flies into the sensor. They’re not precise enough for regulatory purposes, and some states have warned citizens against calling in with outrageously high readings that are most likely a glitch. That said, some state agencies have embraced the low-cost brands. Colorado recently deployed some PurpleAir monitors to communities threatened by wildfires in the southwest of the state, a way to see where smoke was traveling so they could warn residents. The EPA has been running trials for wearable sensors and an air monitor that could be installed in a park bench, to put it closer to roads and parks. As hardware continues to get smaller and battery life advances, some are even looking toward a future where monitors are stitched into clothing or clipped onto a jacket for a minute-by-minute reading. Kelly, the University of Utah professor, said the possibilities for wearable sensors could be endless. “Think of a crossing guard, or someone in a woodworking shop—we can understand their exposure and maybe find ways to minimize it,” she said. “If you’re an asthmatic, this can change your behavior. There’s so much information we can find.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531423147424-U5RU49X4OULNLV88U1KV/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.18.54+PM.png environment - Gunfire, Clashes Amid Iran Protests Over Water Scarcity DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Gunfire erupted as Iranian security forces confronted protesters early Sunday amid demonstrations over water scarcity in the country's south, violence that authorities said wounded at least 11 people, mostly police. The protests around Khorramshahr, some 650 kilometers (400 miles) southwest of Tehran, come as residents of the predominantly Arab city near the border with Iraq complain of salty, muddy water coming out of their taps amid a yearslong drought. The unrest there only compounds the wider unease felt across Iran as it faces an economic crisis sparked by President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw America from Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers. Protests began in Khorramshahr, Abadan and other areas of Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province on Friday. The demonstrations initially were peaceful, with protesters chanting in both Arabic and Farsi. But late Saturday and into early Sunday morning, protesters began throwing stones and confronting security forces in Khorramshahr, according to widely shared online videos. State television aired images of rocks and broken glass covering sidewalks, as well as smashed ATMs. Women and children fled as gunfire echoed. Heavy machine gun fire could be heard in one video showing demonstrators dragging away a man who couldn't walk. Another video appeared to show a man carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle on the back of a motorcycle near protesters. State TV reported Sunday afternoon that "peace had returned" to Khorramshahr and an unspecified number of protesters had been arrested. It said some demonstrators carried firearms during the unrest. It's unclear what sparked the violence. Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli told journalists Sunday there had been no deaths. A deputy to Fazli later said the violence wounded one civilian and 10 police officers, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency. "Such protests are directed by the propaganda of opportunists from places and people that are recognized by us as foes," Fazli said. "You observe how they are fueling such incidents in the foreign media and in the cyberspace these days." Khorramshahr and the wider Khuzestan province have seen pipeline bombings by Arab separatists in the past. Tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers were killed in the province during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Exacerbating that unrest is the drought. The Iran Meteorological Organization estimates 97 percent of the country faced some form of drought. Analysts also blame government mismanagement for diverting water away from some farmers in favor of others. "Although Iran has a history of drought, over the last decade, Iran has experienced its most prolonged, extensive and severe drought in over 30 years," said a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency. Some 230 people were poisoned in Khuzestan province after a 20-hour water outage in Ramhormoz county led to drinking water not being chlorinated, the semi-official Fars news agency reported Sunday. The protests did not appear to be linked to the poisoning. The protests overnight came after three days of demonstrations last week in Tehran, including protesters confronting police outside parliament and officers firing tear gas at the demonstrators. The rallies led to the temporary closure of the city's Grand Bazaar. The anger is fueled by the Iranian rial plunging to 90,000 to the dollar — double the government rate of 42,000 — as people watch their savings dwindle and shopkeepers hold onto some goods, uncertain of their true value. Similar economic protests roiled Iran and spread to some 75 cities and towns at the end of last year, becoming the largest demonstrations in the country since the months-long rallies following the 2009 disputed presidential election. At least 25 people were killed and nearly 5,000 arrested during the protests in late December and early January, which took place largely in Iran's provinces rather than the capital. The economic crisis has been fueled by Trump's May 8 decision to pull the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal and restore sanctions. International firms that made billion-dollar deals with Iran largely have pulled out of them, while the U.S. now is demanding its allies stop buying Iranian oil. Iran's first Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri on Sunday mocked the U.S. for "begging the Saudis" to increase oil production to drive down rising global oil prices. Trump claimed Saturday that Saudi Arabia might increase its production by some 2 million barrels of oil a day after a call with King Salman. Saudi Arabia later acknowledged the call, but did not mention Trump's 2-million-barrel claim. "If any country attempts to take Iran's place in the oil market in this battle, we will consider it a big treachery to the Iranian nation and the world community and they will surely pay for this betrayal someday," Jahangiri said, without elaborating. Learn more US News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531423221791-EUQIRDW3YDK4LPW2DBMZ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.20.06+PM.png environment - Nestlé Granted Three-Year Permit to Keep Piping Water Out of California National Forest Nestlé’s special-use permit allows the company to use its pipelines, horizontal wells and water collection tunnels in the mountains north of San Bernardino. District Ranger Joe Rechsteiner said in a statement that the decision ensures “the water withdrawal and conveyance infrastructure is under a current permit, and it provides for protection of forest resources.” The permit comes with new conditions, including a requirement that the company take less water if necessary to maintain “minimum flows” of surface water. The Forest Service said the watershed’s health is now rated as “impaired” and that water extraction will be allowed “when there is water available consistent with the forest’s Land Management Plan.” The agency said that the company has 60 days to accept the terms of the permit, and that the three-year period will provide time to conduct more studies to “inform a longer-term decision.” Nestlé acquired the operation in 1992, and has been paying $624 per year to the Forest Service for the permit. In 2016, Nestlé piped 32 million gallons of water from its sources in the national forest. The Forest Service says its permit fees aren’t based on the volume of water it removes, but rather on the market value of using national forest lands. The agency said the initial fee for the new permit will be about $2,050 per year. Nestlé's opponents have urged federal officials to shut down the company’s pipeline, arguing the siphoning of water harms spring-fed Strawberry Creek and the wildlife that depends on it. Nestlé denies causing harm to the environment and has insisted it’s entitled to keep using the lucrative namesake source of Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water. The company collects water using a system of 10 gravity-fed boreholes and two water tunnels drilled deep into the mountainside. The water flows downhill through a 4.5-mile steel pipeline to a roadside tank, where it’s pumped into tanker trucks and hauled to a bottling plant. Alix Dunn, a spokesperson for Nestlé Waters North America, said the company “appreciates the time and effort the U.S. Forest Service dedicated to this decision regarding the permit renewal process at Arrowhead Springs.” “We will carefully review the specifics of the decision, and will continue to comply with all permit requirements,” Dunn said in a statement, adding that the company has cooperated with the agency by providing dozens of environmental studies and reports. Nestlé SA, headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland, is the world's largest food company, and its Paris-based subsidiary Nestlé Waters is the world’s largest water bottling company. Nestlé Waters North America is the biggest bottled water company in the United States. Water from Arrowhead Springs was first bottled for sale more than a century ago. It’s named after the famed arrowhead-shaped natural rock formation on a mountainside north of San Bernardino and the springs near it — both hot and cold. The hot springs were once the central attraction of a glamorous resort, which closed in the late 1950s and now stands vacant at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains. The wells and water pipelines on the mountainside have been authorized under various permits since 1929. Forest Service officials have said Nestlé’s most recent 1978 permit, which was issued to predecessor Arrowhead Puritas Waters Inc., remained in effect while they reviewed the company’s renewal application. In 2016, the Forest Service had released a proposal to issue Nestlé a longer five-year permit. The agency said the new three-year permit may be extended for two one-year periods — if that time is needed for additional studies. The decision was announced three weeks after environmental groups reached a settlement with the Forest Service in their legal fight over the permit. In the settlement, the groups agreed to drop their appeal and the agency agreed to issue a decision within 30 days. The three groups — including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Story of Stuff Project and the Courage Campaign Institute — sued in 2015, accusing the Forest Service of violating the law by allowing the company to continue drawing water from the national forest. They’ve argued that the taking of water threatens a sensitive habitat and rare species ranging from mountain yellow-legged frogs to birds such as Southwestern willow flycatchers. A federal judge sided with the Forest Service in 2016, ruling that the existing permit was still valid because in 1987 the company's predecessor requested a permit renewal and didn’t receive a response. Nestlé says it has valid water rights in the national forest. But starting in 2015, critics filed several complaints with California’s State Water Resources Control Board questioning the company’s water rights claims. State officials conducted a 20-month investigation and concluded in December that the company doesn’t seem to have valid rights for much of the water it’s been drawing from the forest north of San Bernardino. Nestlé disputed the findings, arguing in a written response in February that it has rights to take at least 88 million gallons each year – nearly three times as much as the amount that ran through its pipes in 2016. State officials have said they’re studying comments that have been submitted in response to their investigation, and they may revise their report based on those comments. The Forest Service said its decision “leaves any issue concerning the extent of Nestlé’s water rights to the State Water Resources Control Board,” which has authority over questions of water rights. Nestlé’s opponents had been hoping for a different decision from the federal government. "We're disappointed with the Forest Service's decision to issue a new permit, particularly in light of the ongoing investigation by the State Water Board into Nestlé's shaky claim to a water right,” Michael O'Heaney, executive director of The Story of Stuff Project. “While we need time to more fully understand the decision, in the days ahead we will certainly be studying our options for ensuring that the public's natural resources are protected." Rechsteiner explained his decision in a 33-page memo, saying there are no “extraordinary circumstances” that would warrant additional analysis through an environmental assessment. In a seven-page appendix, he outlined an “adaptive management plan” that would require the company to reduce water extraction if necessary to maintain the flow of surface water downhill from Nestlé’s water sources. The company had previously proposed voluntary measures, but Rechsteiner decided on mandatory conditions. He wrote that Nestlé will be required to carry out additional environmental and hydrologic studies, and to take less water “if monitoring shows that water extraction is impacting surface water flow.” “The initial studies provided by the permittee suggest that water extraction is reducing surface flow in Strawberry Creek. The effect of this flow reduction has not been thoroughly studied,” Rechsteiner said. He said the company’s studies and field work by government officials “have demonstrated that the current water extraction is drying up surface water resources (springs and streams).” The company will be required to study other sites in adjacent watershed for comparison, he wrote, “to determine what conditions would exist in Strawberry Creek without water extraction.” The Forest Service is asking the company to submit a study plan, which may involve “suspending extraction for set time periods to evaluate any changes in streamflow.” Last October, Desert Sun journalists visited Strawberry Creek to investigate how Nestlé’s use of water may be affecting the watershed. At a fork in the creek, the eastern branch was a free-flowing stream, but the western fork — downhill from Nestlé’s boreholes and water tunnels — was just a trickle, forming a series of shallow puddles hidden in a thicket of trees and bushes. Under the new permit, the company will be required to monitor the streamflow downstream from its water sources and install “shut-off valves or other flow control devices.” The extraction of water “will only be authorized when it is demonstrated by the user, and/or agreed to by the Forest Service, that the water extracted is excess to the current and reasonably foreseeable future needs of forest resources,” Rechsteiner wrote. The Forest Service received more than 40,000 comments from the public on the permit renewal proposal. Some people voiced concerns that if Nestlé is tasked with carrying out studies, the findings may be biased. Responding to that point, Rechsteiner said although Nestlé will pay to conduct the studies, as is typical, “the qualifications of the scientists and resource specialists completing the work will be reviewed and approved by Forest Service staff,” and the studies will be independently reviewed. The company will be required maintain “minimum flows” in two locations near the springs and boreholes: 20 gallons-per-minute in one spot and about 6 gallons-per-minute in another. “Nestlé must manage extraction to maintain those minimum flows,” the agency said. “If the initial actions do not maintain minimum flows, all extraction must cease until flows reach minimum levels required to meet hydrological and biological concerns.” Some of the activists who’ve been pressing to shut down Nestlé’s pipeline said the measures seem insufficient. “This new permit will allow Nestlé to continue draining this fragile watershed without adequate resource protections,” said Lisa Belenky, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Forest Service downplayed information about the damage Nestlé’s bottled-water operation is already doing and failed to do a robust environmental analysis, as the law requires. It doesn’t appear that the limited mitigation measures are adequate to prevent Nestlé from destroying plants and wildlife that have relied on Strawberry Creek for thousands of years.” Learn more at Desert Sun https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531423349464-N0CH90GYH7E8KP4PUHRJ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.21.57+PM.png environment - IOC and C40 to Partner on Climate Transition C40 and the IOC plan to work with interested cities, candidate cities and host cities of the Olympic Games to help them achieve their sustainability objectives, which will further contribute to their regions’ broader climate initiatives. The IOC’s Sustainability Strategy, which is one of the pillars of the IOC’s strategic roadmap, Olympic Agenda 2020, concentrates on five focus areas, one of which is climate. “Given that the next four editions of the Olympic Games will be held in significant cities that are part of the C40 network, this collaboration was a natural and fantastic opportunity,” said HSH Prince Albert II. “Our goal is to make the Olympic Games best fit the long-term needs and objectives of the host cities. That includes incorporating sustainability in all aspects of planning for and delivering the Olympic Games. By signing this MOU, we will be able to better assist current and future host cities of the Olympic Games in achieving their climate change goals by utilising the expertise and experience of the C40, and for both parties to showcase related initiatives and results.” The host cities for the next three Olympic Games – Tokyo (in 2020), Paris (in 2024) and Los Angeles (in 2028) – are members of the C40 Steering Committee. The host of the next Olympic Winter Games, Beijing (in 2022), is also a key member of the C40 network, which groups together 96 cities committed to leading the way towards a healthier and more sustainable future. “Hosting the Olympic Games is a unique privilege for any city, and provides an amazing opportunity to accelerate the climate and air quality initiatives that mayors need to implement for the future of their citizens,” said Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris and Chair of C40. “This partnership between the IOC and C40, two organisations with a long experience of showcasing cities, will ensure the Olympic Games and climate transition go hand in hand in securing a sustainable future for everyone.” “The Olympic and Paralympic Games are one of the world’s largest sports events. Sport has the power to change the world,” said Yuriko Koike, Governor of Tokyo. “Tokyo, as the host city of the Olympic Games 2020, will play the role responsibly. We will work with the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee to demonstrate to the world that Tokyo works integrally on the environmental, social and economic aspects of 21st-century sustainable development, contributing to the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Agenda.” “Los Angeles is where the world comes to compete, and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games are an opportunity to showcase our city’s sustainable values,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. “Climate change knows no boundaries, and only through global cooperation can we overcome this global challenge. Working together, the IOC and C40 can use the Olympic moment to help our planet heal and our people grow.” Learn more at Olympic.org https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531423744535-K77S2KCHZ7SK22PGH8G6/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.25.42+PM.png environment - Warned 30 Years Ago, Global Warming ‘Is In Our Living Room’ SALIDA, Colo. (AP) — We were warned. On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn’t approaching — it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was “the opening salvo of the age of climate change.” Thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small — some obvious, others less conspicuous. Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage. Over 30 years — the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations — the world’s annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more — nearly 1.6 degrees. “The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that we’re no longer thinking just about the future,” said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Climate change is here, it’s now and it’s hitting us hard from all sides.” Warming hasn’t been just global, it’s been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states — NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather — has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined. The effects have been felt in cities from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the yearly average temperature rose 2.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to Yakima, Washington, where the thermometer jumped a tad more. In the middle, Des Moines, Iowa, warmed by 3.3 degrees since 1988. South central Colorado, the climate division just outside Salida, has warmed 2.3 degrees on average since 1988, among the warmest divisions in the contiguous United States. When she was a little girl 30 years ago, winery marketing chief Jessica Shook used to cross country ski from her Salida doorstep in winter. It was that cold and there was that much snow. Now, she has to drive about 50 miles for snow that’s not on mountain tops, she said. “T-shirt weather in January, that never used to happen when I was a child,” Shook said. When Buel Mattix bought his heating and cooling system company 15 years ago in Salida, he had maybe four air conditioning jobs a year. Now he’s got a waiting list of 10 to 15 air conditioning jobs long and may not get to all of them. And then there’s the effect on wildfires. Veteran Salida firefighter Mike Sugaski used to think a fire of 10,000 acres was big. Now he fights fires 10 times as large. “You kind of keep saying ‘How can they get much worse?’ But they do,” said Sugaski, who was riding his mountain bike on what usually are ski trails in January this year. In fact, wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago. The statistics tracking climate change since 1988 are almost numbing. North America and Europe have warmed 1.89 degrees — more than any other continent. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern, the land faster than the ocean. Across the United States, temperature increases were most evident at night and in summer and fall. Heat rose at a higher rate in the North than the South. Since 1988, daily heat records have been broken more than 2.3 million times at weather stations across the nation, half a million times more than cold records were broken. Doreen Pollack fled Chicago cold for Phoenix more than two decades ago, but in the past 30 years night time summer heat has increased almost 3.3 degrees there. She said when the power goes out, it gets unbearable, adding: “Be careful what you ask for.” The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming. Clara Deser, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that when dealing with 30-year time periods in smaller regions than continents or the globe as a whole, it would be unwise to say all the warming is man-made. Her studies show that in some places in North America — though not most — natural weather variability could account for as much as half of local warming. But when you look at the globe as a whole, especially since 1970, nearly all the warming is man-made, said Zeke Hausfather of the independent science group Berkeley Earth. Without extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, he said, the Earth would be slightly cooling from a weakening sun. Numerous scientific studies and government reports calculate that greenhouse gases in the big picture account for more than 90 percent of post-industrial Earth’s warming. “It would take centuries to a millennium to accomplish that kind of change with natural causes. This, in that context, is a dizzying pace,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Since the 1800s scientists have demonstrated that certain gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap heat from the sun like a blanket. Human activities such as burning of coal, oil and gasoline are releasing more of those gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. U.S. and international science reports say that more than 90 percent of the warming that has happened since 1950 is man-made. Others cautioned that what might seem to be small increases in temperature should not be taken lightly. “One or two degrees may not sound like much, but raising your thermostat by just that amount will make a noticeable effect on your comfort,” said Deke Arndt, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief in Asheville, North Carolina, which has warmed nearly 1.8 degrees in 30 years. Arndt said average temperatures don’t tell the entire story: “It’s the extremes that these changes bring.” The nation’s extreme weather — flood-inducing downpours, extended droughts, heat waves and bitter cold and snow — has doubled in 30 years, according to a federal index. The Northeast’s extreme rainfall has more than doubled. Brockton, Massachusetts, had only one day with at least four inches of rain from 1957 to 1988, but a dozen of them in the 30 years since, according to NOAA records. Ellicott City, Maryland, just had its second thousand-year flood in little less than two years. And the summer’s named Atlantic storms? On average, the first one now forms nearly a month earlier than it did in 1988, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. The 14 costliest hurricanes in American history, adjusted for inflation, have hit since 1988, reflecting both growing coastal development and a span that included the most intense Atlantic storms on record. “The collective damage done by Atlantic hurricanes in 2017 was well more than half of the entire budget of our Department of Defense,” said MIT’s Kerry Emanuel. Climate scientists point to the Arctic as the place where climate change is most noticeable with dramatic sea ice loss, a melting Greenland ice sheet, receding glaciers and thawing permafrost. The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world. Alaska’s annual average temperature has warmed 2.4 degrees since 1988 and 5.4 degrees in the winter. Since 1988, Utqiagvik (oot-GAR’-vik), Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, has warmed more than 6 degrees yearly and more than 9 degrees in winter. “The temperature change is noticeable. Our ground is thawing,” said Mike Aamodt, 73, the city’s former acting mayor. He had to move his own cabins at least four times because of coastal erosion and thawing ground due to global warming. “We live the climate change.” The amount of Arctic sea ice in September, when it shrinks the most, fell by nearly one third since 1988. It is disappearing 50 years faster than scientists predicted, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “There is a new Arctic now because the Arctic ocean is now navigable” at times in the summer, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The vast majority of glaciers around the world have shrunk. A NASA satellite that measures shifts in gravity calculated that Earth’s glaciers lost 279 billion tons of ice — nearly 67 trillion gallons of water — from 2002 to 2017. In 1986, the Begich Boggs visitor center at Alaska’s Chugach National Forest opened to highlight the Portage glacier. But the glacier keeps shrinking. “You absolutely cannot see it from the visitor center and you haven’t in the last 15 or so years,” said climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica have also shriveled, melting about 455 billion tons of ice into water, according to the NASA satellite. That’s enough to cover the state of Georgia in water nearly 9 feet deep. And it is enough — coupled with all the other melting ice — to raise the level of the seas. Overall, NASA satellites have shown three inches of sea level rise (75 millimeters) in just the past 25 years. With more than 70 percent of the Earth covered by oceans, a 3-inch increase means about 6,500 cubic miles (27,150 cubic km) of extra water. That’s enough to cover the entire United States with water about 9 feet deep. It’s a fitting metaphor for climate change, say scientists: We’re in deep, and getting deeper. “Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance,” NOAA’s Arndt said. “The train is in our living room now.” Learn more at Associated Press https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531424321789-A5QLSRNOF78XU8U00AQU/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.35.11+PM.png environment - Artist Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun Is Teaming Up With Ikea on a New Line of Solar-Powered Products Olafur Eliasson‘s Little Sun has big plans. The Danish-Icelandic artist and co-founder of the social enterprise has teamed up with Swedish furniture giant Ikea to research and develop a new line of solar-powered products for the home. News of the partnership comes as something of a surprise for the boutique operation. After all, Little Sun, which Eliasson co-founded with the engineer Frederik Ottesen, rolled out its first product just five years ago: a bright yellow, solar-power torch which sold for $30 at Art Basel Miami Beach back in 2013. Since then, Little Sun has gone on to develop a solar-powered table lamp and a mobile phone charger aimed at the millions of people who live off the grid. Ikea, meanwhile, boasts some 300 stores in 40 countries and millions of on-grid customers around the world. The Swedish company’s juggernaut size—and the product expertise that girds it—is exactly what made a partnership appealing. “I was keen to use the scale and the knowledge Ikea has on product development to create a relationship with Little Sun,” Eliasson tells artnet News. “Little Sun is primarily working with off-grid solutions and it’s about people at the very bottom of the pyramid who do not have access to clean energy. But Little Sun is also about learning how to have a relationship with sustainable energy in the so-called on-grid world.” Eliasson says that research and development on new products will begin right away. “We have not established exactly what Little Sun can develop with Ikea. We are starting the design process next week,” he says. But he anticipates “a small range of objects that are inspired by solar power or use it like Little Sun itself.” According to the artist, Ikea approached Little Sun, in part, because the company saw potential in developing solar-powered devices for the home but also because it was interested in the Little Sun ethos of sustainability. “I have followed the investment Ikea has made in sustainable products and recycling materials,” he says. “I hope to see a collaboration where that can be pushed even further.” Eliasson’s own longstanding work in Ethiopia also played a role in attracting Ikea’s interest. “Ikea was curious that I teach at the university in Addis Ababa,” he says. The company is keen to get to know young artists and designers in Ethiopia and possibly develop other products with them, according to the artist. Eliasson praised the work of the Ikea Foundation, a charity which helps children living in poverty gain better access to education, healthcare, and housing. He is also interested in how a company set up in a remote part of Sweden in 1947 became such a big design company and a leader in what it calls “design democratization.” Of course, he is also a longstanding customer. The artist may typically make his own furniture, but he admits he’s bought plenty of Ikea’s kitchen products. “Growing up in Copenhagen you cannot avoid having a relationship with Ikea,” he says. “It is simply a part of everything.” Learn more at artnet https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531424530735-YC3FZC8TEQ1S4ACPH7XQ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.41.53+PM.png environment - Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks Put Thousands of Lives at Risk, Harvard Analysis Finds Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own numbers, two Harvard scientists have calculated that 80,000 more lives will be lost per decade if President Donald Trump's administration fulfills its plans to roll back clean air and water protections. The researchers, terming their tally "an extremely conservative estimate," also estimated that the repeal of regulations will lead to respiratory problems for more than 1 million people. Their essay was published Tuesday in the authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association. "We felt it was important to take a comprehensive view," said Francesca Dominici, a biostatistician and co-director of the Data Science Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "Some people, when looking at one specific repealing of a rule, might not think it's important. We wanted to put some numbers on the whole systematic repeal of rule after rule." She and David Cutler, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, drew their calculation from the health risk assessments that the EPA conducted during the Obama administration when determining the impact of rules it proposed. Last week, the Trump administration signaled it plans to overhaul the way that those cost-benefit studies are conducted. The agency is taking comments for the next 30 days on its plan, which has the potential to reduce the weight given to human health and climate benefits. Dominici and Cutler decried creating greater risks to the public's health for the benefit of "a relatively few well-connected companies." "The effects of the Trump administration's policies seem clear, even through the haze they will create," they wrote. Pruitt's EPA Challenging the Assessments The EPA dismissed the article because it was not peer-reviewed but appeared instead in the JAMA Forum, where researchers offer perspectives. "This is not a scientific article, it's a political article," the EPA said in response to InsideClimate News' request for comment. But Dominici noted that she and Cutler pulled the numbers directly from the EPA risk assessments that had been developed for each of the rules they analyzed. "The EPA numbers themselves all rely on peer-reviewed science," Dominici said. The EPA numbers, in fact, are being challenged and in some cases scaled back by the Trump administration as it seeks to revoke or replace Obama-era rules. But these moves face numerous legal challenges, and the agency will have to show that it has not acted arbitrarily or capriciously to pass muster in the courts. It's hard to argue against the ample evidence that if air quality standards are relaxed, the health of those who breathe the air will suffer. The same goes for standards for water, pesticides, toxic waste and so on. Runaway climate change, too, would present a wide range of public health risks. One Rollback, Majority of Respiratory Illnesses The largest and most immediate health consequences are likely to come through erosion of air quality, Cutler and Domenici wrote. They included in their calculation the repeal of President Barack Obama's signature climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan, as well as the rollback of vehicle fuel economy standards and Trump's tariffs on solar power components from abroad. About 90 percent of the increase in respiratory ailments can be attributed to one deregulatory move—the effort to re-open a loophole that allowed trucks that don't comply with pollution rules to remain on the road, the authors found. Public health scientists have been raising increasing alarms as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has advanced Trump's deregulatory agenda. They have protested Pruitt's move to bar government-funded scientists from sitting on the agency's Science Advisory Board, and nearly 1,000 scientists signed a letter opposing Pruitt's plan to place restrictions on the EPA's use of science. Pruitt's 'Secret Science' Plan Targets Health Data In their JAMA essay, Dominici and Cutler singled out the move to curb agency use of science as one of the most potentially consequential, because Pruitt is targeting epidemiological studies of human subjects. Although Pruitt calls this a move for greater "transparency," Dominici said it would in fact bar EPA consideration of precisely the kinds of studies that formed the basis of the calculations that she and Cutler did. "They are attacking the science because the science is what is putting the number of deaths where they are," she said. "It's a tactic to discredit the science, so that health impact analysis will not be able to be done any more." The EPA, which received more than 150,000 public comments in 30 days on its proposal to restrict agency science, has extended the comment periodon that proposal through August. The agency also has set a July 17 hearing in Washington, D.C., on the plan. Learn more at Inside Climate News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531424804845-0GQUDY2ZJ6FT4RQHOP5M/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.46.28+PM.png environment - Mayors Of Cities Under Climate Change Threats Are Stepping Up To Take Action CALIFORNIA, TO HURRICANE HARVEY IN HOUSTON, AND HISTORIC FLOODING AND WINTER STORMS IN BOSTON, cities across the U.S. are on the frontlines of climate change impacts. But they are also at the forefront of climate solutions. A network of over 400 cities representing nearly 70 million Americans – the Climate Mayors network – is working collectively to advance climate initiatives even as the federal government takes a back seat. “A year ago, when the president pulled out of the Paris Agreement, what he didn’t realize was he was lighting a fire under America’s mayors,” Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh said during a recent Mayors Climate Summit held at Boston University. Washington D.C. may want to say climate change isn’t real, but we know it is, and you’re facing it every day. The summit brought together 25 mayors from cities around the country and abroad to share best practices and discuss how municipalities are moving forward on addressing the existential threat of climate change. Despite the current state of climate denial gripping the federal government, the mayors at the summit spoke of the urgency of the climate crisis, referencing impacts already occurring in their cities. “In Houston, we have to face the reality of climate change, when you’re dealing with three 500-year floods in three years … We don’t have a choice,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. “If we don’t move with a sense of urgency, then our cities will suffer.” No nation individually or even several nations working collectively can solve this problem for us. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy addressed the summit, speaking of cities’ refusal to accept climate denial. “Washington D.C. may want to say climate change isn’t real, but we know it is, and you’re facing it every day,” she said. Climate denial, she quipped, is “sticking your head in the sand and guess what’s out there exposed – your butt! So we have to go kick a few butts of those who have their heads in the sand.” Cities are already doing this, from setting clean energy and carbon reduction targets, to planning for resiliency, to working collectively with businesses and other municipalities to implement solutions. Going renewable Many cities are pledging to reduce emissions and get to 100% renewable energy. Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski said her city has a goal of 100% renewable energy for electricity by 2032, and has also committed to reduce carbon emissions 80% by 2040. Other cities are striving for carbon neutrality. Boston launched its Carbon Free Boston initiative in 2017, and Los Angeles just announced its plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 at the climate summit. The Republican-controlled city of Carmel, Indiana, even passed a carbon neutral resolution in recent months. Green electricity Cities are coming together for a collective purchasing of renewable energy. Boston is leading a new initiative challenging cities to evaluate opportunities for sourcing more green electricity by 2040. “Today I’m proud to announce a historic initiative that could create green jobs, cut emissions and help us meet the goals of the Paris Agreement after all. We can prove to the president that renewable energy can power America,” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said during the opening of the climate summit. The Request for Information (RFI) will compile the energy demand data across participating U.S. cities and ask renewable energy developers for price estimates for projects that would meet their collective energy demand. “If successful, this will save cities, including Boston, millions of dollars,” said Mayor Walsh. Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Orlando have already signed on. Local resilience Since local communities are on the frontlines of climate impacts, planning for adaptation and resilience is key. Mayor Walsh mentioned several resiliency initiatives underway in Boston, including a seawall in East Boston, raising streets in Charlestown, and reconstructing parks in the North End. “The resiliency issue in particular requires a lot of planning,” said Bud Ris of Boston’s Green Ribbon Commission, a group that has worked extensively on the city’s Climate Ready Boston plan. “What is needed going forward is a really concerted effort for the private sector and the public sector to work together on the finance strategy to implement the solutions.” In Houston, the City Council recently approved a new building standard for elevating buildings located in floodplains. The city is looking into other resiliency efforts as well. “We have to rise to the occasion from a local level to put in place mitigation and resiliency steps that will reduce our future costs,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. Public-private partnerships Another key strategy for cities is working collaboratively and forming partnerships with the private sector. “In Kansas City, public-private partnerships are huge in our smart connected cities effort,” said Kansas City Mayor Sly Jones, referring to the Smart City program that includes improvements like more efficient and sustainable transportation and infrastructure. If we don’t move with a sense of urgency, then our cities will suffer. Salt Lake City is working with the utility company Rocky Mountain Power to bring more clean energy to the city, while other municipalities have partnered with GE Solar for a collective purchasing of large-scale solar projects. Cities are also working with one another to leverage resources and share ideas. The Climate Mayors network is central to this strategy. Last year the Climate Mayors, led by the City of Los Angeles, issued an Electric Vehicle Request for Information (EV RFI) with 30 other cities in efforts to aggregate municipal demand of electric vehicles across the country. The new Renewable Energy RFI follows this successful model. THESE ARE JUST SOME OF THE WAYS CITIES ARE LEADING THE CHARGE on confronting the climate crisis. “The innovation that will be generated largely in cities, that’s where the solutions will be found, that’s where the industries and jobs of tomorrow will emerge,” said Don Iveson, mayor of Edmonton, Alberta. “No nation individually or even several nations working collectively can solve this problem for us,” added former Secretary of State John Kerry. “This has to happen from the grassroots up.” Learn more at GOOD https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531424892985-FBLC6A5NII2JCZXVNQKZ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.47.58+PM.png environment - Antarctic Ice Loss Has Tripled In A Decade. If That Continues, We Are In Serious Trouble. Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday. The melt rate has tripled in the past decade, the study concluded. If the acceleration continues, some of scientists’ worst fears about rising oceans could be realized, leaving low-lying cities and communities with less time to prepare than they had hoped. The result also reinforces that nations have a short window — perhaps no more than a decade — to cut greenhouse-gas emissions if they hope to avert some of the worst consequences of climate change. Antarctica, the planet’s largest ice sheet, lost 219 billion tons of ice annually from 2012 through 2017 — approximately triple the 73 billion-ton melt rate of a decade ago, the scientists concluded. From 1992 through 1997, Antarctica lost 49 billion tons of ice annually. The study is the product of a large group of Antarctic experts who collectively reviewed 24 recent measurements of Antarctic ice loss, reconciling their differences to produce the most definitive figures yet on changes in Antarctica. Their results — known formally as the “Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise” (IMBIE) — were published Wednesday in the journal Nature. “We took all the estimates across all the different techniques, and we got this consensus,” said Isabella Velicogna, an Antarctic expert at the University of California at Irvine and one of the many authors from institutions in 14 countries. The lead authors was Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds in England and Erik Ivins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The detailed record shows an acceleration, starting around 2002,” Beata Csatho, one of the study authors and a glaciologist at the University at Buffalo, said in an email. Csatho noted that comparing the first and last five-year periods in the record reveals an even steeper acceleration. “Actually, if you compare 1997-2002 to 2012-2017, the increase is even larger, a factor of more than 5!!” she wrote. For the total period from 1992 through the present, the ice sheet has lost nearly 3 trillion tons of ice, equating to just less than 8 millimeters of sea-level rise. Forty percent of that loss has occurred in the past five years. The rapid, recent changes are almost entirely driven by the West Antarctic ice sheet, which scientists have long viewed as an Achilles’ heel. It is known to be losing ice rapidly because it is being melted from below by warm ocean waters, a process that is rendering its largest glaciers unstable. West Antarctica lost 159 billion tons of ice a year from 2012 through 2017, compared with 65 billion tons from 2002 through 2007. The growth is largely attributable to just two huge glaciers: Pine Island and Thwaites. The latter is increasingly being viewed as posing a potential planetary emergency because of its enormous size and its role as a gateway that could allow the ocean to someday access the entirety of West Antarctica, turning the marine-based ice sheet into a new sea. Pine Island is now losing about 45 billion tons per year, and Thwaites is losing 50 billion. Both numbers are higher than the annual losses for any other glacier in the world. “The increasing mass loss that they’re finding is really worrying, particularly looking at the West Antarctic, the area that’s changing most rapidly,” said Christine Dow, a glaciologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who was not involved in the research. “And it’s the area that we’re most worried about, because it’s below sea level.” “If you start removing mass from there, you can have a very large-scale evacuation of ice into the ocean and significant sea-level rise,” Dow said. Dow is the lead author of a just-published study outlining one process that could be driving, and could worsen, some of Antarctica’s ice losses. She and her co-authors found that at numerous major glaciers including Pine Island, warm ocean waters are helping to carve out deep crevasses underneath the floating ice shelves that brace these glaciers in place. The shelves then tend to crack at these thinned-out points and break off large pieces, weakening their ability to hold back the flow of glacial ice into the ocean. “Anywhere you have thinner ice, it’s going to be weaker,” Dow said. In addition to West Antarctica, another increase in ice losses in the past decade came from the smaller glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsula, which are also melting rapidly but contain less potential to raise the sea level. The largest part of the continent, East Antarctica, has remained more stable and did not contribute much melt to the ocean during the period of study, the assessment says. However, in the past five years, it too has begun to lose ice, perhaps as much as 28 billion tons per year, although the uncertainty surrounding this number remains high. What’s happening in East Antarctica is important because it has, by far, the most ice to give, being capable of raising sea levels by well over 100 feet. A single East Antarctic glacier, Totten, has the potential to unleash as much total sea-level rise as the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, or more. “We cannot count on East Antarctica to be the quiet player, and we start to observe change there in some sectors that have potential, and they’re vulnerable,” Velicogna said. Scientists have previously raised fears about a scenario in which ice loss from Antarctica takes on an explosive rate. In a controversial 2016 study, former NASA scientist James Hansen and a team of colleagues, including Velicogna, found that Earth’s sea level could rise above one meter (or 3.3 feet) within 50 years if polar ice-sheet loss doubles every 10 years. A tripling every decade, were it to continue, would reach that volume of sea level rise even sooner. There is no proof the current rate of change in Antarctica will continue. Scientists can’t see the future, but they do fear continuing and even worsening losses. “I don’t know if it’s going to keep exactly tripling, but I think it has a lot of potential to keep significantly increasing,” Velicogna said. The changes will not be steady, in any case, said Knut Christianson, an Antarctic researcher at the University of Washington. “We will not necessarily see solely rapid retreat,” Christianson in an email, noting that as glaciers such as Pine Island retreat down a submarine, downhill slope, they will sometimes encounter bumps that slow their movement. So we should expect “periods of stability interspersed with rapid retreat,” he said. Under high greenhouse-gas emissions, the worst-case projections of sea-level rise eventually reach over a centimeter each year, said Rob DeConto, an Antarctic expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who was not involved in the new study. We’re nowhere near that point yet. “We’re still talking about roughly a half a millimeter per year,” DeConto said. “That isn’t going to sound horribly unmanageable. But remember for the Northern Hemisphere, for North America, the fact that the location in West Antarctica is where the action is amplifies that rate of sea-level rise by up to about an additional 25 percent in a city like Boston or New York.” That’s because as Antarctica’s mass shrinks, the ice sheet’s gravitational pull on the ocean relaxes somewhat, and the seas travel back across the globe to pile up far away — with U.S. coasts being one prime destination. Whether Antarctic mass loss keeps worsening depends on choices made today, argued DeConto, who co-authored a separate paper in this week’s Nature outlining two visions of Antarctica in 2070. Continuing high emissions could deliver massive sea-level rise — but strong compliance with the Paris climate agreement, while unable to stop changes happening now, could help to control how much they worsen. “The kinds of changes that we see today, if they were not to increase much more . . . then maybe we’re talking about something that is manageable for coastal stakeholders,” DeConto said. Or alternatively, he continued, Antarctica could drive faster changes, ones that “begin to exceed what we’re going to be able to cope with.” Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531424979248-1ON8FWYRUI1NL7MF5TL4/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.49.23+PM.png environment - LA Is Doing Water Better Than Your City. Yes, That LA. THE FRANTIC PHONE calls to the Community Water Center began in the summer of 2014. In the 7,000-strong unincorporated community of East Porterville, nestled against California's Sierra Nevada mountains, homeowners' wells were failing amid a historic drought. Folks were hauling water from their workplaces or from agricultural wells. Parents were sending their kids to shower at the local high school. Residents with still-functional wells were snaking hoses over fences to nourish their neighbors. "People were in dire straits. They were desperate," says Ryan Jensen of the Central Valley's Community Water Center. "Elderly people or people battling chronic illnesses that need water to be able to deal with their health issues had no access to it. There was just absolute desperation." In total, the wells at 300 properties had failed. So a local nonprofit distributed 275-gallon tanks and officials trucked in water. That didn't cut it. On account of being unincorporated, East Porterville only had a handful of buildings connected to the water system in Porterville proper. So beginning in August 2016, workers hurried to connect 750 homes, the last of which tapped into Porterville this past February. East Porterville's situation is extreme, but it is not an outlier. If anything, it is a harbinger. "It was only an outlier in the concentration and sheer number of people who lived in a very small area that were affected by this," Jensen says. "There's approximately 300 communities in the state of California and more than a million residents who don't have reliable access to safe drinking water, and that's not even counting people who are on domestic wells." California is in trouble. Computer models show that with climate change will come harsher droughts and less frequent, yet more powerful storms. The state is not ready for this new reality, but one city south of Porterville could teach California how to survive desiccation: Los Angeles. That is not a typo. Agreed, Los Angeles doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation as a responsible consumer of water. After all, in the early 1900s it drained Owens Lake, 200 miles away, materializing a dust bowl in its place and giving local residents the old ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. These days, it imports the vast majority of its water from Northern California and the Colorado River to the east at a cost of hundreds of millions a year. But Los Angeles is in the midst of an aqueous awakening, setting an ambitious goal to cut its reliance on imported water in half by 2025 by following an increasingly urgent rule of good water policy: diversification. In a nutshell, that means getting your water from a range of sources—rain capture, aquifers, wells, desalination, even right out of the air. A study from UCLA earlier this year even said the city could feasibly reach 100 percent locally sourced water. To do it, the city is diving into a series of high- and low-tech campaigns that could transform Los Angeles into a model city for water management. Again, not a typo. Water Begins With Dirt Art Castro of the LA Department of Water and Power stands atop his city's future: the San Fernando aquifer, which sprawls for 175 square miles. It is, essentially, a giant underground water tank that can provide some 28 billion gallons of water. (Usage fluctuates from month to month and year to year, but in July 2017, Angelenos consumed 102 gallons a day per capita.) Behind Castro, tractors push massive amounts of dirt. Dirt to the left, dirt to the right. In fact, this place is nothing but dirt, which is weird considering it's just 25 miles north of downtown LA. This should be concrete. Maybe a condo complex or two. Concrete, though, is the enemy of Los Angeles' future. Back when the city sprouted, designers laid it out to channel stormwater away as quickly as possible. City Planning 101. SoCal's notorious downpours and flash floods were a menace. There were properties and human lives to consider, after all. "Now there's been there's been a shift in that thinking," Castro says. "Now we see stormwater as an asset." The answer is this rare empty plot of land, the 150-acre Tujunga Spreading Grounds, laid out in 1930 and preserved as open space to this day. Stormwater flows in, gathering in giant basins and slowly percolating into the dirt and, eventually, the aquifer. When these crews are done excavating 1.9 million cubic yards of soil to consolidate 19 basins into 9 deeper basins (fewer berms = more surface area for soakage), enough water will be captured each year to hydrate an average of 50,000 households. Sure, the LADWP serves more than 4 million customers, so it's but a drip. But the Tujunga Spreading Grounds are just the start. A mile and a half away in a frenetic LA street is a beautified median—some nice little trees, shrubs, and dirt, with a walking path meandering through—that doubles as a spreading ground in miniature. Stormwater from the neighborhood flows here and soaks into the ground, instead of flowing to the sea. It may only collect enough for 150 households, but that ain't bad for a single median. And the thing about medians is, LA has a few of them: The city can duplicate this project wherever the soils are permeable enough to accept water. A storm that dumps 1 inch of rain will deposit over 8 billion gallons of water on Los Angeles. (The LADWP supplies about 160 billion gallons a year.) Of course, you're not going to collect all the stormwater that falls on Los Angeles, but catchment projects like the Tujunga spreading grounds and green medians can grab a fraction that would otherwise drain to the sea. And grab the city must. Climate change will not be kind to Southern California. "More droughts, more floods, and more warm temperatures all will result in more water when we don't want it, and less water when we do," says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. Which means that when Los Angeles gets those rare deluges, it needs to somehow get that water into that aquifer, where it can be drawn on in times of want. "We understand that we're sitting on a gold mine," Castro says. Water, Water, Everywhere Not every city is so geologically fortunate, though. A hundred miles south of Los Angeles is the coastal city of Carlsbad, near San Diego. Just off the beach, up a well-manicured hill, sits a nondescript building—not the kind of place you'd think would suck in 100 million gallons of seawater and turn it into 50 million gallons of fresh drinking water every day. But step inside the Carlsbad Desalination Plant and the scale becomes clear: row after row of stacked tubes loaded with membranes poked full of minuscule holes. Pump saltwater through these at a staggering 900 pounds per square inch (for reference, the air in your car tire is around 30 psi) and you can filter out viruses, bacteria, and, of course, salt. This is known as reverse osmosis. Unlike Los Angeles, San Diego isn't sitting on an aquifer goldmine, says Jessica Jones, director of communications for Poseidon Water, which operates the plant. "So we have very few local supplies. Having such a high dependence on imported supplies makes a project like this perfect for this county, because we'll always need it." For this county being the operative phrase. Desalination has been around for decades, yet hasn't really taken off—for good reason. Pumping millions of gallons of water at 900 psi isn't exactly energy efficient, though that's changing with new technologies. At this plant, they use exchangers that recycle pressure that would otherwise be lost, and they claim it has reduced the energy consumption of the reverse osmosis process by half. San Diego knows full well it has a water diversity problem. Almost all its water comes from Northern California and the Colorado River. Problem is, eight other states get a taste of the Colorado before California. "We're at the end of a very long straw," Jones says. Desalination is still expensive, yes. But for San Diego, it could well be a critical fallback if, say, an earthquake cuts off the supply of imported water. That said, desalination ain't for everyone. Where plenty of rain falls, there's not much of a case for spending money to tap into the sea. Still, relying on a single source of water is extremely perilous. "Diversification is important for water management in the same way that it's important for your financial portfolio," says Kiparsky, of the Wheeler Water Institute. If you bet all your money on one company and that company craters, you're broke. Spread your money around, though, and you can ride out the rough times. Same goes for water: Los Angeles is betting big on catchment, and San Diego diversified its portfolio with desalination. At no small expense, sure, but in the end San Diego has better prepared itself for an uncertain future. Back up in Los Angeles, they're taking another, more … contentious step to prepare themselves for that uncertainty: recycled toilet water. Waste Not, Want Not For a facility that processes the wastewater of 4.5 million people, the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant doesn't smell nearly as bad as you'd expect. Until, that is, you start making your way to the headworks, where giant mechanized rakes scoop out inorganic material—cloth and such. The stench is eye-wateringly spectacular. After scooping, Hyperion further refines most of the water until it's safe to pump 5 miles out to sea. Around 40 million gallons a day, however, flow down the road to the Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility, where a complex filtering system turns the fairly-clean-but-nowhere-near-drinkable stuff into water so pure, it'll make you very, very sick if you drink enough of it. (More on that in a moment.) That level of purity is the result of the very same process that turns seawater fresh down in Carlsbad: reverse osmosis. The water is pumped through membranes, which sort out nasties like viruses and the many pharmaceuticals that come out with urine. It's even blasted with UV light to make sure nothing biological gets through. The end product is very nearly pure hydrogen and oxygen, which would actually end up leaching minerals out of pipes, not to mention the human body. "If you were to drink enough of that water, it could pull calcium from your bones," says Christiana Daisy, operations manager at West Basin Municipal Water District, which runs the facility. So they actually have to add minerals back in. For now, the purified water doesn't go into customers' taps. Instead, it's injected into the ground to act as a kind of barrier between seawater and fresh groundwater. But the idea is to one day recycle wastewater and put it right back into the system. The industry is moving cautiously, though, given what you might call a considerable "ick" factor for the public. But hell, if Texas can go toilet to tap, why can't California? Here's the thing, though: You've been drinking recycled wastewater this whole time. "Somebody upstream of you is using the water, treating it, and then discharging it back," says USC engineer Amy Childress, who specializes in the membranes that make desalination and wastewater treatment possible. "And then that water is treated again and used as drinking water." Are reverse osmosis processes like desalination and wastewater treatment still expensive? Sure. But they rely on technology, and technology generally improves. Membranes will get more efficient, and prices will fall. That'll help more communities diversify their water portfolios. Which is an immediate, not future, concern. "Fresh" water isn't always as fresh as you're expecting it to be. "There are a lot of places in the US that people wouldn't think have issues with water supply—the East Coast for example," Childress says. "In places where we weren't considering desalination in the past, even if it's just brackish groundwater, we're now maybe needing to desalinate." This could grow increasingly relevant as rising seas begin to infiltrate supplies of fresh groundwater. But maybe pulling water from the ground isn't the only way to go about this—perhaps you can pull it from the air too. Nets in Chile, for instance, collect fog as drinking water, though the efficiency is only 2 percent, max. But MIT researchers recently developed a system that ionizes fog droplets, making them attracted to mesh, thus raising the efficiency to 99 percent. And over at UC Berkeley, engineers have concocted a fancy sponge-like material that collects moisture from cool desert air at night and releases it as drinking water when things heat up during the day. All well and good, but technology will only get us so far. We can't just engineer our way out of this one. "It's got to be a conservation mind-set," Childress says. "We have to start valuing water more." Lessons From the State of Plenty This is bigger than Los Angeles. This is about fundamentally changing humanity's perverse relationship with water. You don't appreciate water, because no one in the developed world really does, save for the residents of East Porterville, which very nearly withered and fell from the vine that is bountiful California. "Ultimately, if things were to get far worse, I think we could see this happening in bigger cities," says Jensen of the Community Water Center. "But I think the bigger, more likely problem is that wide swaths of ruralCalifornia may have to pack up and move." Not everyone is as lucky as Los Angeles, with its piles of money and sprawling aquifer, or San Diego, with its piles of money and desalination plant. In the developed and developing worlds alike, those without the means or conditions to diversify their water sources face peril. Water wars will rage, and communities will perish. Those communities fortunate enough to be able to engineer their way toward water security damn well better start thinking about it. Take it from La La Land: It's never too late to change. Learn more at WIRED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531425233862-OU4ZJKPDD0CAEWWYZP8P/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.51.49+PM.png environment - Solar Technology Can Now Power Your Roads — And Your Clothes Our world is currently powered by human-generated electricity. And while it doesn’t seem like we’re going to run out of electricity any time soon, that doesn’t mean it’s a sustainable resource. Power plants emit pollution into the air on a daily basis, meaning that generating electricity is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Solar energy is working to combat that. The idea is simple: Use a natural resource — the sun — for electricity instead of nonrenewable resources. Other than pointing out the occasional set of solar panels on the roof of a mansion, a lot of us are pretty unaware of the advancements solar energy has made in the last few years. Here are two recently emergent solar-based technologies: Solar-Powered Roads TOKYO HAS RECENTLY ANNOUNCED PLANS to build solar roads to help make their 2020 Olympics into an eco-friendly event. These experimental roadways are made with load-bearing solar panels that are covered in a special resin, according to the Independent. Cars can drive on these durable roads while the panels generate electricity for adjacent communities. Japan’s solar road was installed in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, in May 2018. The shop’s manager has high hopes for the development: “The solar road system can generate 16,145 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, covering about 9% of the entire electricity that the store consumes.” And in China – the world’s leading solar energy producer — a photovoltaic expressway recently promised a new future for clean energy (until thieves stole one of the panels, that is). Last year, solar-powered pavement technology was also tested out along Route 66. If roadways using solar-powered technology catch on, it could help encourage clean energy use in the U.S. In fact, the Jefferson City News Tribune reports that the LED-embedded solar panels along the famed highway “will be used to generate electricity for the Route 66 Welcome Center.” According to Solar Roadway, the company behind this technology, the solar-powered pavement along Route 66 can generate clean energy and also has thermal LED bulbs that can melt snow during winter. Wearable Solar WEARABLE SOLAR GOES FAR BEYOND solar-powered watches. In 2016, the textiles industry discovered that solar panels can be stitched into panels of fabric. Solar textiles can not only increase the renewable energy that’s collected, they can also increase the number of solar devices in your home. For example, these solar textiles can be stitched into curtains, tablecloths, and even car upholstery, allowing heated seats to be powered by renewable energy. Solar innovation isn’t going anywhere. Within just the last few years, we’ve made solar a seamless part of everyday life, literally weaving it into the clothes on our backs. Learn more at GOOD https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531425614474-IFHY5W9FQTQIKJ5PF6PO/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.59.32+PM.png environment - D.C. Cemetery Finds New Life As Stormwater Retention Model In early 2015, Pope Francis released his encyclical on the environment, Laudato sí. In it, the pontiff argues that, regardless of religious faith, “the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.” The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has taken this call to heart. On May 7, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, D.C., offered a blessing at the District’s Mt. Olivet Cemetery, which dates back to 1858. That blessing was directed at the new, green infrastructure that has eliminated some of the cemetery’s impervious surfaces, making it a friendlier receptacle for rainwater. The changes also help reduce an annual fee of nearly $140,000 associated with water run-off, or $25.18 for every 1000 square feet of impervious cover. Impervious surfaces make won’t allow water to pass through them. Concrete, asphalt and metal structures can end up creating steams of water that rush into urban drainage systems and then overload water treatment plants. If that happens, the excess water simply gets flushed directly into local water ways, complete with whatever bacteria, pollutants, trash and sediment it happens to pick up along the way. Untreated stormwater run-off has contributed to creating a critical situation in the Chesapeake Bay, which has been grappling with pollution issues for years. Chieko Noguchi, spokesperson for the Archdiocese, explained some of the changes made in Mt. Olivet Cemetery to make it more absorbent: “Unused access roads were replaced with water-filtering bio-retention cells, and in some cases, wide roads were narrowed down to one-lane roads.” Prior to the modifications, the cemetery had 437,000 square feet of impervious surfaces. Noguchi says that 18,000 square feet have been removed so far. The more sophisticated water-retention structures are also being helped by newly planted flower beds, shrubs and trees. “Because it was in a cemetery, we also wanted to make sure that none of the burial sites were disturbed,” says Noguchi And, it was also very important to us that any of the construction work would happen around any already-scheduled burials, and we didn’t want it to impede with anyone coming to visit their loved ones in the cemetery.” To finance the landscaping changes to Mt. Olivet, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., worked with District Stormwater LLC, a new investment fund jointly managed by NatureVest, the investment arm of The Nature Conservancy, and Encourage Capital, an investment firm that specializes in investing capital to address social and environmental issues. The fund itself received $1.7 million in seed capital from Prudential, the insurance and financial services giant. Instead of making the Archdiocese repay District Stormwater LLC for financing the stormwater retention work, the fund will seek repayment from a whole new market — from the sale of stormwater retention credits. In 2013, the Washington, D.C. Department of Energy and the Environmentlaunched new rules that govern how new properties — or old ones undergoing significant remodeling — deal with stormwater. The new rules create tradeable stormwater retention credits, enabling developers to comply with the more stringent stormwater retention rules while also generating investment capital for stormwater retention projects. If a property doesn’t meet its new stormwater retention volume requirements, developers can choose to make improvements to satisfy those requirements, or if the cost of those improvements is too much, they can purchase stormwater retention credits from those who can make such investments at other locations, such as the Archdiocese of Washington D.C With its green lawns and trees but also plenty of access roads across vast acreage, not to mention its proximity to the Anacostia River, Mt. Olivet Cemetery presented an opportunity for a test case. It was The Nature Conservancy that approached the Archdiocese with a proposal to identify and finance stormwater retention improvements. After making the improvements, generating stormwater retention credits for the Archdiocese, the credits can then be sold on the stormwater retention credit market to repay the up-front investment from District Stormwater LLC. “[The new stormwater credit market] is great because it provides an opportunity to bring in new sources of funding to do conservation projects and also show that you can use private equity [to finance] conservation outcomes,” says Kahlil Kettering, The Nature Convervancy’s Urban Conservation Director. “It’s a new way to bring different partners to the table.” As a “sunset cemetery” that will soon reach capacity and will remain a sanctified space, Kettering saw a key opening for long-term stormwater retention improvements at Mt. Olivet — there isn’t open land that could be threatened by sale to developers who would replace it with impervious surface. “We know whatever we do there will be there for a very long time and will have a huge benefit for our rivers in D.C.,” says Kettering. Noguchi also adds that as part of the Catholic Church, the Archdiocese will also have opportunities to share information and encourage similar stormwater retention improvements on church property across the country. “We’re doing something unique and innovative to deal with something that the secular world is deeply engaged in,” says Noguchi. Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531425763398-KIPMVBTRTDNIWCVB7ACS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.02.21+PM.png environment - The Big One Could Leave 250,000-400,000 Quake Refugees in California. Where Will They Go? When a catastrophic earthquake hits California, buildings will topple and potentially hundreds could be killed. But what gets less attention is the wrenching aftermath of such a huge temblor, which could leave whole neighborhoods torched by fires uninhabitable and hundreds of thousands of people without a home. Officials are grappling with where all these quake refugees would go. In the San Francisco Bay Area, more than 400,000 could be displaced in a magnitude 7 earthquake on the Hayward fault, which directly runs underneath cities like Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward and Fremont, said Ken Hudnut, the U.S. Geological Survey’s science advisor for risk reduction. And it’s possible that more than 250,000 people in Southern California could be forced out of their homes after a major earthquake on the San Andreas fault, Hudnut said. Not everyone will need to stay in public shelters — many will stay with relatives, friends and hotels. Still, more than 175,000 people may have no other choice than stay at a public shelter in Southern California, which could be could be challenged with acute shortages of food, water and medicine, according to ShakeOut, a USGS report simulating a major Southern California earthquake. And in the Bay Area, so many buildings built under minimal codes could be so damaged many may be forced to move away “for at least several months, and possibly permanently” due to the region’s housing shortage, according to a separate USGS report on a hypothetical Northern California earthquake, called HayWired. “So many people will be displaced they won’t be able to stay within the metro area,” Keith Porter, a University of Colorado Boulder professor and chief engineer of the USGS earthquake reports, said of a major Bay Area earthquake. “So they’ll move away, just like they moved away from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.” Arizona recently took a major step in dealing with this question. Officials in May launched a full-scale exercise that simulated a mass exodus of 400,000 evacuees from Southern California. The drill gave emergency workers a chance to consider how they would respond to the many elements of the disaster: providing food and shelter, helping unaccompanied minors, assisting in family reunification, and dealing with the transportation and resource hurdles. The exercise was aimed at beginning to think about how to deal with such a refugee crisis, though experts in California said it’s unlikely that many people would end up in Arizona. It may actually be quite difficult to leave California after an earthquake moves one side of the San Andreas past the other by as much as 30 feet — severing routes to Phoenix on Interstate 10 in the Coachella Valley and Las Vegas on Interstate 15 at the Cajon Pass. Also complicating problems would be a widespread lack of power, thwarting the ability of motorists to refuel. “If you choose to go, it’s going to be difficult to do so. It’s a pretty hot desert between you and Phoenix,” seismologist Lucy Jones said. In the hypothetical magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault, many people living in eastern L.A. County, Riverside, San Bernardino and the desert cities of the Coachella Valley will likely leave for less affected areas. But even within Southern California, it’ll be hard to move around. Streets will be clogged with debris; traffic lights won’t work; bridges will be damaged, the USGS says. Experts said it probably won’t be necessary for quake refugees to go all the way to Arizona or Nevada. Even if a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hits the southern San Andreas, areas farther away from the fault will still be habitable, such as Orange, Ventura and San Diego counties, Jones said. “There’s going to be a lot of Southern California that’s not going to be devastated,” Jones said. Which areas are most affected depends on which fault ruptures. A magnitude 7.5 earthquake on the Puente Hills thrust fault directly underneath downtown Los Angeles would be catastrophic there, but would leave Riverside in comparatively better shape. Experts say it would be much better to shelter in place at home. Owners can take steps to do so by retrofitting older houses or apartments now at risk for sliding off its foundation or collapsing in an earthquake. Residents can prepare by storing water, food, medicine and other supplies to sustain themselves for, ideally, two weeks, or at least a minimum of 72 hours. A gallon of water per day per person is recommended. Unfortunately, most Californians don’t bother to be prepared, and a failure to stock up on something as basic as drinking water could lead residents to leave even if their home is structurally sound. “It’s clear the public doesn’t think about these things,” Hudnut said. “I’d rather be one of those people who doesn’t have to go and has more water stored.” But a big wild card that would push someone to flee are fires following an earthquake, with shattered pipes expected to hamper firefighting. Most hydrants in the East Bay will be dry in a magnitude 7 earthquake on the Hayward fault, according to an estimate by Charles Scawthorn, a risk consultant to the USGS, helping to allow fires to burn a building floor area equal to 52,000 single-family homes; in Southern California, it’s possible the equivalent of 133,000 single-family homes will be charred. In three great urban earthquakes in modern history — Lisbon in 1755, San Francisco in 1906 and Tokyo in 1923 — it was the fires following the earthquake that was particularly devastating. “The fires were overwhelming,” said Jones, author of “The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do About Them.” “If the fire storms are getting going, and we’re going into Santa Ana conditions, and they haven’t been able to control the fires,” it’s possible that people may seek to flee to other states, Jones said. But states like Arizona could have other problems than just dealing with evacuees. Those states could suffer fuel shortages from the severing of pipelines in California where they cross the San Andreas fault, Jones said. While California may have to deal with a short-term shelter crisis, a longer-term concern is whether so many people move away permanently that communities wither, jobs are lost and businesses shutter, Jones said. The only years that L.A. has ever lost population were the two years following the 1971 Sylmar and 1994 Northridge earthquakes, Jones said. The 3½-day-simulation near Phoenix — planned over the course of a year, involving 75 agencies and more than 1,000 people — first focused on Arizona counties closest to California’s border. “They will be the first to experience fuel or food shortages, cellphones getting overloaded and a medical surge,” said Judy Kioski, spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs. “We’re worried about where are people going to shelter, how do we feed them, and family reunification.” The exercise included mass of tents on a field near Phoenix simulating a shelter; some acted as evacuees, others practiced how to render aid. Some lessons have been already learned. “One of the things we identified was turning rest areas into locations where we could have additional information, and providing hard copies of information if cellphones go out,” Kioski said. Previous drills have taken place in Utah, where the Wasatch fault zone threatens the Salt Lake City area with earthquakes as large as magnitude 7.5, and Missouri, where the New Madrid Seismic Zone generated several earthquakes between magnitudes 7 and 8 in the winter of 1811-12. In California, officials have undergone their own emergency simulations and drills. Recently, a simulation was held envisioning a big tsunami wiping out roads in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, and officials flew C-130 aircraft and helicopters in an exercise to test how supplies could be flown in and which airports could be accessible, said Kelly Huston, a deputy director for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. In September, the Bay Area will undergo its annual Urban Shield training that tests the region’s response capabilities in a disaster; this year, the exercise will focus on mass care and sheltering. Elements of emergency plans have already been put in force. When more than 100,000 people were ordered evacuated downstream of Oroville Dam last year amid fears an emergency spillway could collapse, officials moved to open up mass evacuation centers, including one in Sacramento. But one lesson that has been learned is that most people aren’t inclined to flee long distances, as was the case in the Wine Country wildfires last year. “We found most people want to stay near to or close to their homes,” Huston said, even if it meant pitching a tent in front a damaged property. That means a key priority may be, for instance, “to provide food and assistance to neighborhood by neighborhood.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531425955774-29ZW2VKEAYMSRUAJ8FKE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.05.42+PM.png environment - 360,000 Californians Have Unsafe Drinking Water. Are You One Of Them? At the Shiloh elementary school near Modesto, drinking fountains sit abandoned, covered in clear plastic. At Mom and Pop's Diner, a fixture in the Merced County town of Dos Palos, regulars ask for bottled water because they know better than to consume what comes out of the tap. And in rural Alpaugh, a few miles west of Highway 99 in Tulare County, residents such as Sandra Meraz have spent more than four decades worrying about what flows from their faucets. "You drink the water at your own risk," said Meraz, 77. "And that shouldn't be. We have families here with young children." An estimated 360,000 Californians are served by water systems with unsafe drinking water, according to a McClatchy analysis of data compiled by the State Water Resources Control Board. In many communities, people drink, shower, cook and wash dishes with water containing excessive amounts of pollutants, including arsenic, nitrates and uranium. The state's water problem, however, is far more pervasive than that number indicates. At least 6 million Californians are served by water providers that have been in violation of state standards at some point since 2012, according to McClatchy's analysis. In some areas, contaminated water is such a common occurrence, residents have almost come to expect it. "It's ubiquitous," said Darrin Polhemus, the state water board's deputy director for drinking water. "It's pretty extensive across broad swaths." Now, after years of half solutions, the state is considering its most comprehensive actions to date. Gov. Jerry Brown has asked the Legislature to enact a statewide tax on drinking water to fix wells and treatment systems in distressed communities. Residents and businesses would pay a tax on their monthly water bills, while agriculture would contribute through taxes on fertilizer purchases and fees paid by dairy farmers and feedlot operators. For the average Californian, the tax would mean paying an additional $11.40 per year. Learn more at the Sacramento Bee https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531426292847-TVRPAF5GDULLQDBNGRUD/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.10.21+PM.png environment - An Indian State Banned Pesticides. Tourism and Wildlife Flourished. Will Others Follow? SORENG, India — Fifteen years ago, the tiny Indian state of Sikkim launched a radical experiment: Its leaders decided to phase out pesticides on every farm in the state, a move without precedent in India — and probably the world. The change was especially significant for India, a country whose progress in agriculture was defined by the introduction of fertilizers and pesticides that rapidly boosted food production across the country, staving off famine and reducing the country’s reliance on foreign aid. But with the indiscriminate use of pesticides came a spike in cancer rates in industrial farming areas. Rivers became polluted and soil infertile. Sikkim’s leaders say they were driven to go all- organic by those concerns and because pesticide residue — including from some chemicals banned in other countries — was tainting fish, vegetables and rice. The cloud-wreathed Himalayan state is starting to see the dividends. Overall health has increased in the state, leaders say, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has embraced Sikkim and organic farming throughout India, pouring about $119 million into supporting organic farmers nationwide. India is betting that Sikkim can be the global model for other jurisdictions around the world that want to go all-organic. In the years since the shift to organic, Sikkim has outlawed pesticides and chemical fertilizers, aided farmers in certifying about 190,000 acres of farmland as organic and on April 1 banned the import of many nonorganic vegetables from other states. The transition has not always been easy: Some farmers have complained that their crop yields have decreased and that they haven’t gotten enough support from the government. The small state’s organic acres constitute just a sliver of India’s 5.6 million acres of chemical-free farmland, which itself is a fraction of India’s nearly 400 million acres of agricultural land. (The United States also has about 5 million acres of organic farmland.) Demand for organic food is high in India and growing fast. Concern about pesticides and desire for chemical-free food are fueling a market that is growing 25 percent a year, more than the 16 percent globally, according to a recent study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. The country’s market for packaged organic products is nearly $8 million now and is expected to top $12 million by 2020, the study said. “This is a big moment for India,” said Radha Mohan Singh, the country’s minister of agriculture and farmers’ welfare. In a brightly colored tent in a mountain town one recent day, Sikkim’s chief minister, Pawan Kumar Chamling, exhorted 300 or so constituents in the audience to embrace the eco-friendly lifestyle. “The approach Sikkim has started will be adopted by the whole world tomorrow,” he said, in a speech that stretched five hours. “This is our vision!” Chamling, 67, has been the principal driver of Sikkim’s move to go all-organic since his state legislature set up the program in 2003. He is largely self-educated, writes poetry in his spare time and is India’s longest-serving chief minister, in office since 1994. “When we decided to go into organic farming in Sikkim, we faced so many challenges,” he said. “Agriculturists or cultivators had no idea what organic farming is, so education was our first priority. Slowly, people began to understand and supported us.” But the executive order in March to ban the import of inorganic produce from neighboring states threw the state into turmoil, with prices of cabbage tripling in the markets, traders in revolt and the opposition party marching in protest. Chamling dismissed these most recent events as “teething problems” and said he was confident the chaos would sort itself out. The state government is introducing seasonal price caps on organic vegetables for consumers to keep prices affordable. There was no blueprint for change when Chamling began his efforts to preserve Sikkim’s fragile ecosystem, a land of hundreds of species of birds, wild orchids and glacier-fed streams, in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-tallest peak. The state — population 610,000 — nestles among China, Bhutan and Nepal and was a separate kingdom until it merged with India in 1975. India has just begun formulating its policies for organic farming after its “Green Revolution,” during which the country adopted modern farming methods of high-yield seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. To encourage farmers to make the switch to organic, Sikkim tapered off its supply of chemical pesticides and fertilizers — making their use a criminal offense in 2014 — launched education programs, and installed thousands of composting pits. By 2016, 190,000 acres of cultivable land had been certified organic. The state has also banned the use of plasticware. Roadside snack stalls use plates fashioned from leaves. The transition, which took more than a decade, has not been easy. Some farmers say their income has decreased, and some have quit farming altogether. One farmer, Pem Dorjee Sherpa, who grows potatoes and cardamom, said his income has fallen dramatically since he switched to pesticide-free farming, and he complained that farmers need better access to markets, organic manure and training. “The benefit of going organic has not reached us,” he said. Sonam Taneja, the program manager for food safety and toxins at the Centre for Science and Environment, a research and advocacy organization in New Delhi, received similar feedback when she visited 16 farms across the state for a report that came out last year. “The information I was getting was that farmers are struggling, fighting with pests, and yields are lower, and therefore they’re upset,” Taneja said. Productivity of most crops remained the same, except oranges, but the state will probably continue to have to rely on conventional produce from other states to feed itself, the study said. In April, state officials opened two markets where farmers can sell their products directly to consumers and have added more than two dozen transport vehicles help them move their goods to markets more easily. Officials say that the switch to all-organic has health benefits for Sikkimese, who are getting more nutritious food, and has rejuvenated the health of its soil as well as wildlife and dwindling bee populations. The country’s yield of large cardamom — dependent upon cross-pollination from bees — has increased more than 23 percent since 2014. The country’s move to all- ­organic also has been a boon to its tourist industry, with a growing market for eco-tours and farm vacations. The Lonely Planet travel guide named it the world’s top destination in 2014, and the number of foreign visitors has more than doubled since 2011, the state’s tourism department says. As a consequence, tourism provides a growing share of the state’s gross domestic product, rising from 5 to nearly 8 percent by 2016-2017. “It’s had a huge impact,” said Khorlo Bhutia, Sikkim’s secretary of horticulture and cash crop development. “It’s because of the good environment — chemical-free air, water, food — all these factors.” Experts say that India’s organic product market has been driven by health-conscious, middle-class urbanites alarmed by the overuse of pesticides. But that’s changing. India is encouraging farmers to engage in a self-regulating organic certification process that is cheaper than outside consultants and will make organic food more accessible for the domestic market. Choitresh Kumar Ganguly, an organic farmer from India who sits on board of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, said Sikkim can be a model for other states, such as Kerala and Meghalaya, that are planning to go all-organic. Sikkim’s neighbor, the kingdom of Bhutan, aspires to do so by 2020. “Sikkim is of course way ahead, and their political will is much stronger than any other state,” Ganguly said. “They’ve done a good job. They did not use so many pesticides to begin with so it was easier for them to move out than it will be for many other states. Still, there’s huge awareness, and it’s growing slowly.” Learn more at The Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531426375773-OGEZ0WOIYHF0CJ2TVFY1/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.12.32+PM.png environment - 5 Organizations Using Cool Tech Solutions and Research to Clean Up the Oceans The Earth is an ocean world. From space, this fact is obvious, whether the planet appears as a bluish dust mote at the edge of the solar system, a bright sapphire star from our planetary neighbors, or the blue marble we see in orbit. Our oceans are the lifeblood of Earth and are home to tens of thousands of fascinating species. They cover 72 percent of the planet, contain over 97 percent of its water, and produce half the oxygen we breathe in. But perhaps all this is a little too easy to forget for us land-dwellers. Like many other ecosystems, the oceans are threatened by various human activities like over-fishing, global warming, acidification, and above all, pollution. Tons of plastic—such as grocery bags, food containers, bottles, and other disposable products—flow into the ocean daily from big cities. The good news is, there’s room for hope. While our species is capable of disappointing actions, we are also capable of innovative progress. Here are some organizations and teams that are coming to the rescue by cleaning up the oceans. The Ocean Cleanup Backed with $30 million in funding and led by 22-year-old Boyan Slat, this foundation’s ingenious solution is based on the understanding that ocean currents tend to concentrate plastic into oceanic garbage patches. Their technology corrals floating plastic in these ocean currents with U-shaped screens, in which it’s trapped and shipped away to be recycled. They estimate they can clean up to 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in less than 5 years. The company recently announced a lease agreement for part of the former Alameda Naval Air Station, where assembly of the first cleanup system will begin. Seabin Project The Seabin Project is installing floating rubbish bins (with a pump and filtration center) at harbors, marinas, and other major hotspots, cleaning up garbage and oil floating in the water. These hotspots are considered some of the major sources of ocean littering. On average, an individual Seabin catches around 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms) per day, which is about a half a ton of debris a year. With the simple mission to rid the planet’s oceans of pollution, the Seabin Project recognizes that ultimately, like many other problems in the world, the ultimate solution to ocean pollution lies with education and systemic change. Consequently, the organization has developed an open-source education program for schools to learn more about the oceanic littering problem and the solutions available. They are also actively involved in industry participation, legislation, and lobbying. Recycling Technologies Current recycling technology has limited capabilities, which leads to most of our “recycled” trash ending up in landfills or in the ocean. British company Recycling Technologies has developed a revolutionary technology that turns all forms of plastic products into virgin plastic, wax, and oils, called Plaxx. This includes materials traditionally considered unrecyclable. Just last month, the company said they raised £3.7 million from crowdfunding, 200 percent more than their £1.2 million target. The company aims to leverage these funds in order to add 10 million tons of plastic recycling capacity worldwide by 2027. Moreover, they hope their technology will “close the circle on the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of plastic.” 5 Gyres Institute While many organizations are invested in cleaning and recycling plastic waste, some are focused on preventing their flow to the ocean to begin with. 5 Gyres Institute researches plastic pollution in all five main subtropical gyres, and their study identifying plastic microbeads influenced President Obama’s signing of the Microbead-Free Waters Act. The team focuses on activism by working with people, politicians, and corporations to stop emissions at the source. Founder Marcus Eriksen points out, “It’s far upstream trying to stop this flow of trash to sea. If you pick up what’s out there, you’re not stopping the problem continuing far into the future. You’ve got to stop the source.” Origin Materials Traditionally, bottles made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate) have been recyclable, but many other plastics come from nonrenewable petroleum-based sources. In fact, some bottles may only have 30 percent recyclable materials. Backed by $80 million, Origin Materials (formerly Micromidas) plans to manufacture plastic bottles from completely renewable biomass materials, such as sawdust and cardboard. The company has produced bottles with up to 80 percent renewable materials at a pilot plant and is aiming to produce 100 percent bio-based bottles at commercial scale in the coming years. A Global Challenge What each of these companies has done is take a daunting global challenge and turn it into an opportunity for disruptive innovation and human progress. After all, as Peter Diamandis points out, “The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.” While ocean waste is definitely a problem, it is also an opportunity for innovative problem-solving. These projects also represent how one global challenge can have many layers of solutions, taken from different angles by different stakeholders, such as startups, nonprofits, and activist groups. Like many of the threats that face us, they demonstrate how true progress comes not just from leveraging exponential technologies, but also from collaboration, education, and systemic legislative change. Learn more at Singularity Hub https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531426655454-8A2XSSQKN9GW02NIW178/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.15.24+PM.png environment - Solar and Wind Are Coming. And The Power Sector Isn’t Ready. The US electricity system is at an extremely sensitive and uncertain juncture. More and more indicators point toward a future in which wind and solar power play a large role. But that future is not locked in. It still depends in large part on policies and economics that, while moving in the right direction, aren’t there yet. And so the people who manage US electricity markets and infrastructure, who must make decisions with 20-, 30-, even 50-year consequences, are stuck making high-stakes bets in a haze of uncertainty. That uncertainty has increased markedly under the recent Republican administration(somewhat ironically, given its oft-stated goal of “regulatory certainty”). Under President Obama, the feds established a consistent cross-agency push toward clean energy. The long-term trajectory was clear. Now it’s been thrown into doubt. President Trump has embraced fossil fuels, and the owners of struggling coal plants are appealing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission(FERC) for bailouts. Should utilities and market managers bet that the Trumpian revolt against modernity will succeed in slowing the growth of renewable energy? Or should they bet that it’s a passing phase and renewable energy will triumph? A fascinating bit of new research from the energy geeks at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) sheds some light on the stakes involved. In a nutshell, things will look different in an electricity system with lots of variable renewable energy (VRE) — different prices, a different shape of demand, different timing, different needs — and if the people managing the electricity system bet on low VRE and get high, they are going to screw up all sorts of things. If the US gets serious about renewables, the electricity system will look very different As of 2016, wind and solar power — VRE — provide 7.1 percent of US electricity. VRE affects utility and market decisions, but it is not yet central to them. The LBNL team (Joachim Seel, Andrew Mills, and Ryan Wiser) notes that “many long-lasting decisions for supply- and demand-side electricity infrastructure and programs are based on historical observations or assume a business-as-usual future with low shares of VRE.” But what if VRE takes off? What if it hits 40 or 50 percent of national electricity supply by 2030? (Climate hawks would prefer an entirely decarbonized power sector by then; neither goal will be possible without a serious national policy push.) Would high VRE penetrations substantially change the decisions that energy regulators, policymakers, and investors need to make? In a word, yes. They would. The team modeled the effects of high (40 percent) VRE and found several notable changes relevant to the operation of wholesale energy markets. Here they are all at once, in a giant, info-packed chart! Now that your eyes are bleeding, let’s back up and walk through the changes. The team modeled four 2030 scenarios: a baseline, with VRE shares frozen at 2016 levels, and three high-VRE scenarios, one that’s wind at 30 percent share and solar at 10 percent, one that’s the reverse, and a “balanced” 20-20 scenario. They ran these four scenarios for each of four energy markets in the US: the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) covering Kansas, Oklahoma, and portions of surrounding states; the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). VRE will change prices and dynamics in energy markets Here are some of the results, which will throw wholesale markets into a new equilibrium. 1) VRE reduces average wholesale power prices. In all high-VRE scenarios, in all markets, average wholesale power prices go down. Depending on the scenario and region, the drop is anywhere from $5 to $16. Note that average prices fall the most under the high-solar scenario, in every market but ERCOT. Unlike the other states, Texas is a bit isolated, running its own grid with few interconnections to other grids through which it can import or export power. It has to deal with all that solar on its own (more on that later). Lower prices are good for consumers but bad for owners of big, uneconomic coal and nuclear plants, who rely on high prices to keep running. (Yes, it is a peculiar market in which most of the people responsible, including the president, view low prices as a threat.) 2) VRE bumps fossil fuels off the grid. In high-VRE scenarios, markets see anywhere from 4 to 16 percent retirement in “firm capacity,” i.e., coal, oil, and steam turbines. The exception is CAISO, which sees a small, 2 to 4 percent boost in firm capacity via the growth of natural gas. (Natural gas also grows in SPP and NYISO, though it’s offset by coal and oil retirements.) Notably, VRE reduces the amount of energy generated from fossil fuels (MWh) much faster than it reduces capacity (MW), anywhere from 25 to 50 percent (the most in NYISO). Basically, every new kWh from VRE displaces a kWh from fossil fuels. 3) VRE makes periods of very low prices and very low emissions more frequent. Depending on the market and scenario, high VRE buildout reduces overall carbon emissions anywhere from 21 to 47 percent and “leads to an increase in frequency of hours with very low marginal emission rates ranging from 5% of all hours in CAISO (wind scenario) to 31% in SPP (solar scenario).” Also more frequent under high VRE are periods in which wholesale power prices are extremely low, under $5 a MWh. (It’s these periods that so wreck the economics of big coal and nuclear plants.) The effect is especially pronounced in ERCOT under high solar. 4) VRE changes the shape of daily demand ... This is the most interesting bit for the energy nerds. I and many others have written about the “duck curve” that shows up in the shape of diurnal (24-hour) demand in California as the share of solar power increases — you can see it on the top left in the chart below. LBNL’s research has revealed what shapes would appear in the demand curves of other regions in high-VRE scenarios. As you can see, the duck effect is most pronounced in ERCOT, which has the least ability to export excess solar power (and ends up doing the most curtailment). 5) ... and pushes demand peaks later in the day. VRE doesn’t have much effect on the timing of peak demand in CAISO, but in the three other areas, high VRE pushes diurnal peak demand back a few hours (and raises it higher). 6) VRE makes prices more volatile. Power prices in high-VRE scenarios are lower on average, but they move around more. Solar scenarios are more volatile overall, though prices in high-wind scenarios swing over a wider range. In spring in California under a high-wind scenario, “energy prices in the morning may be at zero on some days while prices may reach up to $55/MWh on other days.” 7) VRE makes the services that support it much more valuable. Along with the volatility of VRE comes a need for more services that provide flexibility and stability to compensate. “Ancillary services” for the grid include things like spinning reserves, frequency and voltage regulation, demand response, and, most notably, storage. Those services will command higher prices under high VRE, especially high solar, drawing more competitors into those markets (a good thing for storage). So why do all these changes matter? High VRE scenarios call for different decisions from utilities and regulators The LBNL team set out to answer a question: How would the changes high VRE brings affect big decisions around electricity policy and infrastructure? VRE turns out to be material to those decisions in all sorts of ways. In fact, LBNL offers a helpful table with (squints) 11 different kinds of supply- and demand-side electricity decisions, along with how high-VRE scenarios might affect them and how decisions might change in the face of high VRE. I won’t burden you with a comprehensive review. Just a few examples LBNL highlights. When considering a portfolio of energy efficiency measures, VRE will make it more important to consider their timing as well as their size. For example, high shares of solar can depress prices during the day and shift peak times to the early evening. This indicates that traditional on-peak measures, like commercial office building air conditioning programs, may become less valuable while traditional off-peak measures, like street and residential lighting, may increase in value. VRE will make it more important to electrify everything, even if, in some contexts (like building heating and cooling), it might mean a short-term reduction in energy efficiency. The more water heaters and electric vehicles are connected to the grid, providing storage and controllable demand, the more stable a high-VRE grid will be. If nuclear plants are to survive in a high-VRE scenario (and climate hawks should want them to), they must become must more flexible, capable of ramping up and down in response to swings in VRE. That means “increasing R&D on flexible nuclear plant design and operations, addressing technical regulations on nuclear plant operations, or considering the size of the required incentive (if at all) to either keep nuclear plants operating in a low or high VRE future despite output curtailment, or to increase operational flexibility via plant retrofits.” This is just a small selection of the kinds of decisions that will need to be made differently if the US is actually going to ramp up renewable energy fast enough to hit its midcentury carbon target. Right now, the habits and patterns of decision-making shaped by low VRE penetration still have inertia, exacerbated by the lingering doubt Trump has imposed on power markets. But there are many reasons to believe that, Trump or no Trump, VRE numbers are going to keep rising at or faster than their current, already dizzying rates. The renewable energy future is rapidly becoming the present. Everyone in and around the power sector needs to snap to and get ready for it. Learn more at Vox https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531426756306-J25VT6BJV0RN5LEAERQZ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.19.01+PM.png environment - Bitcoin’s Energy Use Got Studied, and You Libertarian Nerds Look Even Worse Than Usual Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist first wrote about it six months ago. It’s expected to double again by the end of the year, according to a new peer-reviewed study out Wednesday. And if that happens, bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands. That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy. Although the author of the study, Alex de Vries, an economist and data consultant based in the Netherlands, has shared these calculations publicly before, this is the first time that an analysis of bitcoin’s energy appetite has appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. Bitcoin continues to soar in popularity — mostly as a speculative investment. And like any supercharged speculative investment, it swings wildly. Within the past 18 months, the price of bitcoin has soared ten-fold, crashed by 75 percent, only to double again, all while hedge funds and wealthy libertarians debate the future of the virtual currency. Beyond its tentative success as a get-rich-quick scheme, bitcoin has an increasingly real-world cost. The process of “mining” for coins requires a globally distributed computer network racing to solve math problems — and also helps keep any individual transaction confidential and tamper-proof. That, in turn, requires an ever-escalating arms race of computing power — and electricity use — which, at the moment, has no end in sight. A single bitcoin transaction is so energy intensive that it could power the average U.S. household for a month. A fluctuating bitcoin price, along with increases in computer efficiency, has slowed the cryptocurrency’s energy footprint growth rate to “just” 20 percent per month so far in this year. If that keeps up, bitcoin would consume all the world’s electricity by January 2021. That simply won’t happen — government regulators would surely come to their senses by then — but it is a sign of bitcoin’s disastrous growth rate. In recent months, bitcoin supporters have criticized de Vries for being too pessimistic about its energy usage. But, as de Vries writes in the study, his estimates could also be missing out on secretive or illegal participation in the network, meaning there’s maybe even more happening than meets the eye. In at least one instance that de Vries found, a researcher was caught diverting a National Science Foundation supercomputer to mining bitcoin. It’s a telling social phenomenon of late capitalism that we are willing to construct elaborate computer networks to conduct secure transactions with each other — and in the process torpedoing our hopes at a clean energy future. Learn more at Grist https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531426874996-GGK6YFBDLC1QM60UKZUY/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.21.01+PM.png environment - Why Cities Need a Chief Scientist Every city in the U.S. has a chief elected leader. Many cities have a chief technology officer. Several cities have a chief resilience officer. But, how many cities have a chief scientist? In an era of climate change and limited resources, isn’t this an idea whose time has come? I suggested this idea at the recent CitiesIPCC 2018 Conference in Edmonton, Canada, before a friendly audience of mayors, planners, policy makers, researchers, and yes, scientists to tentative applause. Can a fully “smart city” exist without a scientific understanding of its complexities and contradictions? With rising sea levels and more severe storms, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps and other weather calamities, is a mayor equipped to make long-term decisions without the advice of a scientist? Imagine you’re a mayor and your city is about to be hit by a powerful hurricane. You call your chief of police and emergency management lead, you get briefed by experts on energy, transportation and shelters. I bet you’ll even have a staffer recommend which fleece to wear. But where is the scientist? Wouldn’t you want to know why this is happening, and more importantly, how to mitigate for or adapt to future events? How about the potential ramifications on future weather patterns, land formations, infrastructure, etc.? In this era of professionalism, most cities have cabinet officials with backgrounds that include science and technology. However, because of the complex nature of research and the inherent conflicts between short- and long-term decision-making, wouldn’t it make sense to bring in an expert who can sift through the data and propose alternatives grounded in reason? When I shared this idea on Twitter, scientist Emma Terama responded, “The first city to hire #ChiefScientist will be a frontrunner …. great idea” and challenged the city of Helsinki to consider the idea. Copenhagen resident Lykke Leonardsen wasn’t sure what difference a City Scientist would have. “Science is a lot of things and I fear it would be difficult to use for cities.” To which Terama responded, “I believe as with govt. depts. it’s about sending a msg.” Emma also reminded me of the importance of social scientists. This was the other interesting thread coming out of CitiesIPCC — that addressing climate change will also require modifications in human behavior. Sounds reasonable, but how does a scientist used to crunching numbers and testing hypotheses take human factors into account? The good news is that several mayors already get it. Don Iveson, mayor of Edmonton, convened the first-ever cities conference on climate change to ask mayors to join the Edmonton Declaration that commits city leaders to urgent, evidence-based action. This bold call to action challenges cities of all sizes to seriously consider the role of scientific research and data in building ambitious climate action plans, and it prioritizes science-based decision-making to reinforce the targets of the Paris Climate Accord Agreement. Drafted in partnership with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, the Edmonton Declaration is the result of a Mayors Summit where city leaders from Canada, Ecuador, India and the United States joined with major city networks such as C40, UCLG and ICLEI in addition to key members of the scientific community. Mayor Iveson and other mayors will bring this declaration to the ICLEI World Congress in Montreal this June to gain wider approval. “We know this is ambitious, but that’s the type of leadership we need right now,” says Mayor Iveson. “While nations plan, cities take action. It’s time for cities to take the mantle of climate leadership and employ the solutions that will provide a sustainable future for the generations to come.” Recognizing that by 2050, more than two-thirds of humanity will be living in cities, ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability has made a major commitment to this effort. “Science gave us the wake-up call needed to get the Paris Agreement done,” says ICLEI Secretary General Gino Van Begin. “Now we must harness its potential for innovation to address the very present challenges that cities face in making the low-carbon transition happen. City leaders are already taking important steps in this direction, and we are calling on the scientific community to work with us to bridge gaps and identify evidence-based solutions for the present and future of our communities.” This first CitiesIPCC Cities and Climate Change Science Conference was organized by the city of Edmonton and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) together with nine partners: C40, Cities Alliance, Future Earth, ICLEI, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), UN Environment, UN-Habitat, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). With this much brainpower applied to the issue, the future looks incredibly bright. Learn more at nextcity.org https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531427145538-COFATLX0HI7YGBNUCI6H/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.24.26+PM.png environment - Trump's EPA Concludes Environmental Racism Is Real A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency finds that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air—even as the agency seeks to roll back regulations on pollution. “Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east.” Marvin Gaye wasn’t an environmental scientist, but his 1971 single “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” provides a stark and useful environmental analysis, complete with warnings of overcrowding and climate change. The song doesn’t explicitly mention race, but its place in Gaye’s What’s Going On album portrays a black Vietnam veteran, coming back to his segregated community and envisioning the hell that people endure. Gaye’s prophecies relied on the qualitative data of storytelling—of long-circulated anecdotes and warnings within black communities of bad air and water, poison, and cancer. But those warnings have been buttressed by study after study indicating that people of color face disproportionate risks from pollution, and that polluting industries are often located in the middle of their communities. Late last week, even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Trump administration continued a plan to dismantle many of the institutions built to address those disproportionate risks, researchers embedded in the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study indicating that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air. Specifically, the study finds that people in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people living above poverty. According to the study’s authors, “results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites.” The study focuses on particulate matter, a group of both natural and manmade microscopic suspensions of solids and liquids in the air that serve as air pollutants. Anthropogenic particulates include automobile fumes, smog, soot, oil smoke, ash, and construction dust, all of which have been linked to serious health problems. Particulate matter was named a known definite carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and it’s been named by the EPA as a contributor to several lung conditions, heart attacks, and possible premature deaths. The pollutant has been implicated in both asthma prevalence and severity, low birth weights, and high blood pressure. Read more at City Lab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531427221450-Q5RZN11PHL104WMSWX7W/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.26.48+PM.png environment - The 11 Cities Most Likely to Run Out of Drinking Water - Like Cape Town Cape Town is in the unenviable situation of being the first major city in the modern era to face the threat of running out of drinking water. However, the plight of the drought-hit South African city is just one extreme example of a problem that experts have long been warning about - water scarcity. Despite covering about 70% of the Earth's surface, water, especially drinking water, is not as plentiful as one might think. Only 3% of it is fresh. Over one billion people lack access to water and another 2.7 billion find it scarce for at least one month of the year. A 2014 survey of the world's 500 largest cities estimates that one in four are in a situation of "water stress" According to UN-endorsed projections, global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40% in 2030, thanks to a combination of climate change, human action and population growth. 1. São Paulo Brazil's financial capital and one of the 10 most populated cities in the world went through a similar ordeal to Cape Town in 2015, when the main reservoir fell below 4% capacity. At the height of the crisis, the city of over 21.7 million inhabitants had less than 20 days of water supply and police had to escort water trucks to stop looting. It is thought a drought that affected south-eastern Brazil between 2014 and 2017 was to blame, but a UN mission to São Paulo was critical of the state authorities "lack of proper planning and investments". The water crisis was deemed "finished" in 2016, but in January 2017 the main reserves were 15% below expected for the period - putting the city's future water supply once again in doubt. 2. Bangalore Local officials in the southern Indian city have been bamboozled by the growth of new property developments following Bangalore's rise as a technological hub and are struggling to manage the city's water and sewage systems. To make matters worse, the city's antiquated plumbing needs an urgent upheaval; a report by the national government found that the city loses over half of its drinking water to waste. Like China, India struggles with water pollution and Bangalore is no different: an in-depth inventory of the city's lakes found that 85% had water that could only be used for irrigation and industrial cooling. Not a single lake had suitable water for drinking or bathing. 3. Beijing The World Bank classifies water scarcity as when people in a determined location receive less than 1,000 cubic metres of fresh water per person a year. In 2014, each of the more than 20 million inhabitants of Beijing had only 145 cubic metres. China is home to almost 20% of the world's population but has only 7% of the world's fresh water. A Columbia University study estimates that the country's reserves declined 13% between 2000 and 2009. Graphene sieve makes seawater drinkable And there's also a pollution problem. Official figures from 2015 showed that 40% of Beijing's surface water was polluted to the point of not being useful even for agriculture or industrial use. The Chinese authorities have tried to address the problem by creating massive water diversion projects. They have also introduced educational programmes, as well as price hikes for heavy business users. 4. Cairo Once crucial to the establishment of one of the world's greatest civilisations, the River Nile is struggling in modern times. It is the source of 97% of Egypt's water but also the destination of increasing amounts of untreated agricultural, and residential waste. 5. Jakarta Like many coastal cities, the Indonesian capital faces the threat of rising sea levels. But in Jakarta the problem has been made worse by direct human action. Because less than half of the city's 10 million residents have access to piped water, illegal digging of wells is rife. This practice is draining the underground aquifers, almost literally deflating them. As a consequence, about 40% of Jakarta now lies below sea level, according to World Bank estimates. To make things worse, aquifers are not being replenished despite heavy rain because the prevalence of concrete and asphalt means that open fields cannot absorb rainfall. 6. Moscow One-quarter of the world's fresh water reserves are in Russia, but the country is plagued by pollution problems caused by the industrial legacy of the Soviet era. That is specifically worrying for Moscow, where the water supply is 70% dependent on surface water. Official regulatory bodies admit that 35% to 60% of total drinking water reserves in Russia do not meet sanitary standards Somalia drought claims dozens of lives Raw waste water use on farms '50% higher' 7. Istanbul According to official Turkish government figures, the country is technically in a situation of a water stress, since the per capita supply fell below 1,700 cubic metres in 2016. Local experts have warned that the situation could worsen to water scarcity by 2030. In recent years, heavily populated areas like Istanbul (14 million inhabitants) have begun to experience shortages in the drier months. The city's reservoir levels declined to less than 30 percent of capacity at the beginning of 2014. 8. Mexico City Water shortages are nothing new for many of the 21 million inhabitants of the Mexican capital. One in five get just a few hours from their taps a week and another 20% have running water for just part of the day. The city imports as much as 40% of its water from distant sources but has no large-scale operation for recycling wastewater. Water losses because of problems in the pipe network are also estimated at 40%. 9. London Of all the cities in the world, London is not the first that springs to mind when one thinks of water shortages. The reality is very different. With an average annual rainfall of about 600mm (less than the Paris average and only about half that of New York), London draws 80% of its water from rivers (the Thames and Lea). According to the Greater London Authority, the city is pushing close to capacity and is likely to have supply problems by 2025 and "serious shortages" by 2040. It looks likely that hosepipe bans could become more common in the future. Free water in England to cut plastic waste UK 'could adopt' Norway recycling system 10. Tokyo The Japanese capital enjoys precipitation levels similar to that of Seattle on the US west coast, which has a reputation for rain. Rainfall, however, is concentrated during just four months of the year. That water needs to be collected, as a drier-than-expected rainy season could lead to a drought. At least 750 private and public buildings in Tokyo have rainwater collection and utilisation systems. Home to more than 30 million people, Tokyo has a water system that depends 70% on surface water (rivers, lakes, and melted snow). Recent investment in the pipeline infrastructure aims also to reduce waste by leakage to only 3% in the near future. 11. Miami The US state of Florida is among the five US states most hit by rain every year. However, there is a crisis brewing in its most famous city, Miami. An early 20th Century project to drain nearby swamps had an unforeseen result; water from the Atlantic Ocean contaminated the Biscayne Aquifer, the city's main source of fresh water. Learn more at BBC https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531427383818-GEIL344A2CFK3XR8DWFL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+1.29.29+PM.png environment - L.A. Community Gets $35 Million to Tackle Environmental Challenges — and Much More The neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles is one of three communities in California to share in $140 million in grants aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions while chipping away at a host of urban ills, from public health disparities and housing shortages to pollution and displacement. The grants, announced late last month, are the first to be released as part of the state’s Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) program. The TCC program is designed to serve three overarching goals in disadvantaged communities—reducing emissions, strengthening economies, and improving public health. And it’s funded with the proceeds of California’s cap and trade system, enacted in 2013 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions statewide. In addition to Watts, which will receive $35 million to plant trees, create new affordable housing, and improve transportation infrastructure, $70 million was awarded to Fresno, and another $35 million to Ontario, a small city east of Los Angeles. Randall Winston, executive director of the Strategic Growth Council, which was created in 2008 to coordinate all of California’s work on environmental planning, transportation, and economic development, says that the TCC grants are meant to help disadvantaged communities design their own solutions to urban and environmental problems. The Strategic Growth Council used a tool called CalEnviroScreen, which ranks California communities based on their relative burdens from pollution and other health and social indicators, to weigh applications. Even before the TCC grants were officially announced last month, the SGC had decided that half the money would go to Fresno, which includes all of the ten most disadvantaged census tracts in the state, measured by CalEnviroScreen. Another quarter of the money was set aside for L.A., which has the highest number of disadvantaged census tracts in the state. “This program out of the gate sought to target the most polluted and poorest parts of the state,” Winston says. The application from Watts rose to the top for a number of reasons, Winston says. The city, which is 72 percent Hispanic/Latino and 26 percent African-American, has lower levels of educational attainment, half the median income, and a greater portion of rent-burdened residents than the state as a whole, according to data gathered by Watts Rising Collaborative, the group that submitted the application. And the history of Watts—six days of riots in the 1960s were followed by a state commission report that identified many of the causes of disparities in the area but was largely ignored—provided a “powerful” backdrop to its application as well, Winston says. But mostly it was the plan itself, and the team that put it together. The Watts Rising Collaborative includes more than a dozen partner agencies, led by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. According to the collaborative’s organizational chart, responsibility for preparing the application fell to the housing authority and the City of Los Angeles, but top-level guidance on the plan was the purview of a community leadership council, which include neighborhood representatives. Applicants for TCC grants were required to sign contractual agreements spelling out how community engagement would be included in both the planning and implementation of the proposals, Winston says. “To me that’s so important, because it speaks to how you can keep residents engaged,” Winston says. “These are long-term investments. It’s not the case that we’re looking to award $35 million and walk away. We’re looking to see the human infrastructure in place to sustain resident involvement and input. Watts has built up an infrastructure that is kind of like no other.” The work that’s planned in Watts is focused around the Jordan Downs public housing project, which opened in the 1950s. According to the Watts Rising application, it will involve the construction of 216 new affordable housing units, 300 new solar roofs, 150 new energy-efficient homes, 118,000 square feet of retail, five miles of bike lanes, 30 blocks of pedestrian improvements, and 5,000 new trees. Plans also included new electric buses and an electric car-share program for the public housing development. In addition to the many community goals it will serve, it’s expected to offset around 70,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Jenny Scanlin, director of development services for the housing authority, says the collaborative set its goals first, and then used garage-sale stickers to price out various individual projects, to make decisions about priorities. It began by culling through the potpourri of planning and redevelopment documents that the neighborhood has worked on over the years. A lot of projects and initiatives were already in “various stages of germination and funding,” Scanlin says. And while Watts has a strong network of community groups formed to address various problems, such as the Watts Gang Task Force, Scanlin says that a new degree of participation was needed to compete for the grants. “There was not necessarily a collaboration of folks working solely around environmental issues, or the confluence of economic, environmental, and public health issues, so we really had to create something new to be fully responsive to the call of TCC, or the intention of the program,” Scanlin says. Importantly, the project will also be guided by a policy of non-displacement. The work that will be done in Watts is done to improve quality of life for the community that’s already there. Scanlin says that the housing authority, like others around the country, “learned some very important lessons” from the HOPE VI urban renewal program that began in the 1990s. Through that program, housing authorities “temporarily” displaced many public housing residents only to see many of them unable to return to rebuilt projects. Policies adopted by the Watts Rising Collaborative assert that no residents will be displaced, and that new units will be mostly targeted to extremely-low-income and very-low-income families. “It’s about recognizing the importance of keeping this fabric of the community together and recognizing how tied our families are to Watts and the communities they live in, and not wanting to disturb those ties,” Scanlin says. Winston says that a lot of the applications for TCC grants included non-displacement policies. And while the Strategic Growth Council can’t force local governments to adopt those policies, it is thinking through ways to incorporate non-displacement in future grants. The group will be updating its guidelines this spring and hopes to be able to solicit more grant applications late this year. The program has already encouraged communities to think about ways to integrate investments in housing, transportation, infrastructure, and greening—areas that have traditionally been siloed, Winston says, with local recipients pursuing grants in piecemeal fashion. The TCC program is meant to bring those efforts together. “We really do think this program is geared to change the way we think about our community investments,” Winston says. EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve updated this article to correctly locate Watts within Los Angeles. Learn more at NextCity https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/5b47a8da03ce64097aa95af8/5b59f5d20e2e7260805c2294/1532622290791/ environment - Harnessing Natural Gas To Harvest Water From The Air Might Solve 2 Big Problems At Once https://civicas.net/education-2 daily 0.75 2018-07-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531762125101-17SL8KVNUOH5YEKH6QXW/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+10.28.25+AM.png education - Historically Black Baltimore University Wants to Diversify Architecture A new Morgan State University program, “Preservation in Practice,” aims to bring diversity to the architectural field, reports the Baltimore Sun. The eight-week program, lead by Morgan State professor of architecture and historic preservation, Dale Green, recruited six black architecture students. Green argued the city of Baltimore does not reflect its rich and diverse history through its monuments and architecture. He cited the absence of a monument dedicated to Harriet Tubman, a Maryland native. In its first summer, the “Preservation in Practice” program has been providing students hands-on experience in preservation. The students have visited historic sites in Baltimore and Wyoming, studied alongside architecture experts and even learned to lay bricks, the Sun reported. Most recently, the students worked at the Peale Center in downtown Baltimore, the oldest museum building in the United States. The Peale Center reopened its cultural center in 2017 after closing in 1997 due to lack of funds. Student participants helped continue restoring the Center to its previous state through maintenance of its historic brick and mortar, and also pulling weeds, according to the Sun. The program is a partnership with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service. The National Trust for Historic Preservation had the students work with its Hands-on Preservation Experience Crew (HOPE). Monica Rhodes, the director of HOPE told the Sun: “We started HOPE to engage a large, more diverse audience in architecture trades.” As the newspaper also noted, only five percent of architecture students are black, and only 0.3 percent of licensed architects are black women. Morgan State University is the first HBCU (historically black college or university) to introduce the program, and program partners hope to implement it at other HBCUs. “Historic preservation is extremely important,” said Monique Robinson, 22, a Morgan State junior. “This experience has inspired me to go find out where our history is. A lot of our history is repressed and lost. It’s ignored.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531762125101-17SL8KVNUOH5YEKH6QXW/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+10.28.25+AM.png education - Historically Black Baltimore University Wants to Diversify Architecture A new Morgan State University program, “Preservation in Practice,” aims to bring diversity to the architectural field, reports the Baltimore Sun. The eight-week program, lead by Morgan State professor of architecture and historic preservation, Dale Green, recruited six black architecture students. Green argued the city of Baltimore does not reflect its rich and diverse history through its monuments and architecture. He cited the absence of a monument dedicated to Harriet Tubman, a Maryland native. In its first summer, the “Preservation in Practice” program has been providing students hands-on experience in preservation. The students have visited historic sites in Baltimore and Wyoming, studied alongside architecture experts and even learned to lay bricks, the Sun reported. Most recently, the students worked at the Peale Center in downtown Baltimore, the oldest museum building in the United States. The Peale Center reopened its cultural center in 2017 after closing in 1997 due to lack of funds. Student participants helped continue restoring the Center to its previous state through maintenance of its historic brick and mortar, and also pulling weeds, according to the Sun. The program is a partnership with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service. The National Trust for Historic Preservation had the students work with its Hands-on Preservation Experience Crew (HOPE). Monica Rhodes, the director of HOPE told the Sun: “We started HOPE to engage a large, more diverse audience in architecture trades.” As the newspaper also noted, only five percent of architecture students are black, and only 0.3 percent of licensed architects are black women. Morgan State University is the first HBCU (historically black college or university) to introduce the program, and program partners hope to implement it at other HBCUs. “Historic preservation is extremely important,” said Monique Robinson, 22, a Morgan State junior. “This experience has inspired me to go find out where our history is. A lot of our history is repressed and lost. It’s ignored.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531420834165-8SO55159CMNK7T6N55KK/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.40.05+AM.png education - It’s Time to Stop Calling it ‘The Great Migration’ Last week, a white woman, Linda Krakora, called the police on a 12-year-old black boy for mowing a lawn too close to her property, just outside of Cleveland. Around the same time, another white woman, Alison Ettel, called the police on an 8-year-old black girl for selling water without a permit. In May, a white woman, Sarah Braasch, called the police on a fellow black Yale student for napping outside of her dorm. That same week, in Oakland, a white woman, Jennifer Schulte, called the police on black people barbecuing in a park. A white woman manager of a Starbucks in Philadelphia called the police on two black men for going to the bathroom without ordering coffee. All of these events happened not in the former Confederate South, but in northern cities. In fact, Buzzfeed recently reported a surge in 311 calls from certain gentrifying parts of New York City, many of them about trivial nuisances such as “playing dominoes.” These are cities located above the fabled Mason-Dixon line where African Americans fled throughout the first half of the 20th century during a time period known perhaps too safely as “The Great Migration.” During this time period, millions of African Americans escaped the racial terrorism of the south in hopes of finding sanctuary in the cities of the north. Instead they walked right into a whole other variety of racial harassment from white people, but evoking the same white supremacist principle that the mere existence of black people in a public space should be met with suspicion and policing. The recent instances of white women calling police on black people under the pettiest circumstances is just a continuation of that tradition, but it’s important to remember on this Fourth of July how we got here. The practice and policy of over-policing of black bodies extended through slavery, past the years and decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, and into the 20th century Jim Crow era, when states and cities passed “black code” and anti-integration laws that could get African Americans reported to the police for trivial violations such as the vaguely defined offense of “vagrancy,” or for being black in a park or on a beach reserved for whites. I was reminded during my recent visit to The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, that African Americans getting reported to the police for such pettifogging offenses meant more than just getting arrested or sent to jail. It meant getting killed—bodies roped up and hung from a tree before being shot up and burned on the ground—by the police or by a lynch mob, oftentimes one in the same. Many of these lynchings began with reports from white women. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (known informally as the lynching memorial), also in Montgomery, recalls the names of thousands of black people lynched from the 19th century to deep in the 1940s, and the reasons why. This doesn’t count the hundreds who were lynched after being accused of raping or sexually molesting a white women, or even for just looking at a white woman the wrong way, as what happened with the black teenager Emmett Till in 1955. African Americans could also be reported to the police—and then jailed and/or killed—for violating laws that forbade black people from being in the same place as white people, even if those places were supposed to be public spaces. In 1920, Mississippi passed a law that punished any printing company for publishing materials that encouraged “social equality or intermarriage between whites and negroes” with a $500 fine or six months in prison. In 1947, Texas passed a law forbidding black and white people from participating in the same boxing and wrestling matches together; the following year it banned black and white people from using the same public libraries. And per the Buzzfeed investigation about police calls for domino games, in 1952, Montgomery, Alabama, passed an ordinance stating: “it shall be unlawful for a Negro and a white person to play together or in company with each other in the city in any game of cards, dice, checkers, or dominoes.” This is what African Americans were evacuating from when they left the South. “Between 1910 and 1940, nearly six million refugees fled the South in response to the threat of racial terrorism,” reads an exhibit at The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, “...in a massive forced exodus known as The Great Migration.” When considering those facts, one can’t help but wonder why this era is known under such a benign label. “The Great Migration” makes it sound like a bunch of people just packed up their bags headed for better jobs and homes—no different than the recent trend of Amazon-ian and Apple-American tech nerds moving in droves from Silicon Valley to greener, more affordable pastures in the former Rust Belt. In reality, the stakes for African Americans in the 20th century were much grimmer and urgent—they were moving to save their lives, as Bryan Stevenson, the racial justice advocate behind the lynching memorial and museum, regularly emphasizes. It probably should be called The Great Massive Forced Exodus. “When you truly know what they were up against—the human rights abuses, the exclusion from voting and citizenship—and what happened upon their arrival, then you realize that 'refugee' gets closer to describing what they were,” says Isabel Wilkerson, author of the book The Warmth of Other Suns, a 15-year investigation into the escape patterns of black families throughout the 1900s. “They were seeking political asylum within their own homeland, to be free like other Americans.” Scholars of that era came up with the name “The Great Migration” and then it just sort of stuck. Wilkerson agrees that the name is innocent to a fault—the term “migrant” suggests “a provisional temporariness” or a seasonal worker, says Wilkerson, but most African Americans of that time period were leaving the South with no intention of returning. Yes, there was the hope for better jobs in the North, and the need for sharecroppers and farm laborers were dwindling in the South as we entered the 1960s because of technological advancements. But those were side benefits. The narrative behind blacks flooding cities such as Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City is not A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; it’s Birth of a Nation. Yet, while Wilkerson finds the term “Great Migration” problematic she says there’s still value in using it as a tagpoint that many people recognize as pivotal to U.S. history. “As someone who has devoted many years to studying the Great Migration, and who is also a product of the Great Migration, what matters most to me is that more Americans know about this watershed in American history that reshaped our cities, our culture, our politics, by whatever name it is called,” says Wilkerson. “When you understand the Great Migration, the forces that triggered it and the after-effects of it in the North and West—redlining, restrictive covenants, etc.—then what we are seeing in the news today should not surprise you. It's a cautionary tale for our current migration crises, our racial divide and our era as a whole.” Meaning, this explains why we still find white people calling the police on black people under the most inauspicious terms. Today, millions of Americans in cities across America will commemorate Independence Day with patiotism and pride. Meanwhile, many people of color will have to watch over their shoulders as they barbecue and play dominoes in celebration. Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531420919771-7M31GOPT77IYJVLSM948/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.41.38+AM.png education - Cities Are Watching You—Urban Sciences Graduates Watch Back IT IS NOT so often that a major university like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovers a new kind of science. But in the fall, the university will launch a novel sort of program, an undergraduate major called Urban Science that combines data analytics training with the sort of informed policy knowhow offered in typical Urban Studies programs. Yes, it will be a science, with hypotheses that can be measured by data and evaluated with software engineering tools by smartypants computer scientists. But the new program will also attempt to honor the actual fleshy people with hopes, fears, and questions about how the places where they make their homes might adapt to the future. Wifi networks, smart traffic lights, security cameras, cell phones, Ubers, and yeah, electric scooters throw off truckloads of data about American cities. Meanwhile, two-thirds of humanity is expected to live in urban places by 2050. Students will be asked to examine patterns mined from data, explain them in ways any urban dweller can understand, and transform them into effective, helpful policy—the guidelines that make cities go. Time to make all that information work for residents, instead of the other way around. Urban science is a budding discipline that has exploded over the past half-decade, and multidisciplinary programs have cropped up at mostly private institutions like New York University, Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and Carnegie Mellon. In some places, it goes by “urban informatics,” in some, “spatial science,” but taken together, these departments ask: What can researchers glean from all this new data? What can’t they? And how much can that new knowledge really improve people’s lives? Those in charge of the MIT program, officially a collaboration between the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, don’t necessarily envision their students as future city planners. They want to attract kids who might otherwise go straight to the sciences, but who also want some context about where the numbers go once they’ve organized, cleaned, and crunched them. “At MIT, the computer science degree is one of the more popular ones, because people feel like this is the language and tool of the future,” says Eran Ben-Joseph, the head of the university’s Urban Studies and Planning Department. “So for us, the question is, ‘How do you make a better connection between the training and computation, and what the implication of the work will be, for communities, for policies?” In other words: How do you create a good citizen and a good computer scientist? Good Citizenry 101 According to those who run urban data analytics programs across the country, building a thoughtful city resident isn’t as easy as forcing annoyed and sleep-deprived youngsters to pass an ethics class. To give students experience making good decisions with data, MIT and other universities offering new, urban science-like courses stress partnerships with cities, which give them access to real data in exchange for their consultation help. For example: For MIT’s Underworlds project, a collaboration between its urban studies staff and a computational microbiology lab, researchers built robots that search through Boston-area sewage for (literal) raw data about drug use and chronic diseases. Computer scientists use that information to understand what populations are suffering from specific health problems, to predict future outbreaks, and to inform public health policy. Other potential MIT projects include crafting transportation systems that get people to their jobs efficiently, but serve all members of the community and their different work schedules. Or take students in USC’s spatial sciences program. Through a partnership with the Los Angeles mayor’s office, its students have analyzed data, then created visualizations of where crime is most affecting the city. The university hopes its students will uncover important patterns, but it also wants to teach them to translate those patterns into words or infographics that all citizens can understand. “We have sensors and satellites flying all around the sky; we’re awash in data,” says John Wilson, a sociologist who directs the university’s Spatial Sciences Institute. “Now we need to make sense of it.” The trick, however, is to teach students how to handle data, as well as how to avoid worshipping its results blindly. Northeastern University’s urban informatics master’s program started admitting students in 2015 and now graduates about 10 a year. It often dispatches them on data-inflected missions that take them to the streets of Boston. There, they observe the sources of their data (and its limitations), and talk to the people generating it. “It’s not just being great at analytics,” says Daniel O’Brien, an assistant professor in the university’s public policy school who teaches in the program. “It’s being able to know which questions to ask and answer and how they fit into the long run of what cities have been, and what they’re going to be.” UP, Up, and Away After graduation, students from MIT, like those from other, similar programs, are likely to head to a few big tech companies, or least a few big companies that use a lot of tech: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, GM, Boeing, Northrop Grumman. Within those shiny office walls, workers are now beginning to question the ethics, sagacity, the point, really, of the work they do—how their data-mashing is affecting their fellow humans out in the world. That’s the point of an urban science degree, too. Meanwhile, city governments scramble to find talent to help them use and evaluate the sorts of data they increasingly demand from companies like Uber, Lyft, and e-scooter startups. They cannot offer salaries that complete with the ride-hailing startups and the Googles. But an increased supply of workers—the kids who are interested in civics and willing to go through the urban programs and then fan out into city governments—can help. As Amazon pushes cities to out-concession each other for a new headquarters, Elon Musk prepares to build mass transit in Chicago, and dockless bike-share companies seek sidewalk domination, the idea of combining big cities with big data seems more relevant than ever. And the nascent urban sciences major suddenly seems much more important. Learn more at WIRED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531421025350-1C8CP6EZCUDBX0X21MS4/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.43.30+AM.png education - L.A. School Board Approves $8.2-Billion Spending Plan Amid Concerns Over Future The Los Angeles school board on Tuesday approved an $8.2-billion spending plan for the next school year as expected, but also pledged support for a comparatively tiny amount of new spending to give students free college admissions tests and college savings accounts. The school board also debated whether to ask local voters for more money in November through an annual tax on every parcel located within school district boundaries. Board members postponed a decision until July 10. The budget, which has been under discussion for months, included no major surprises. As in previous meetings, senior district staff forecast that the nation’s second-largest school system was headed for financial disaster in four years, when they predict that reserves will have dried up. After some hand-wringing, the Board of Education approved the plan, 6 to 1. The dissenting vote came from Scott Schmerelson. He voted no after calling unsuccessfully for an additional $5 million for a school-based reform plan supported by the teachers union and allied activists. The entire board favored one new spending item: covering the costs of the college aptitude tests that many colleges require applicants to submit. Under the plan, students will take the SAT or ACT during a regular school day, probably in March, in their own schools. The familiar surroundings should help with student performance on the test, said supporters, including board members and staff from the city and school district. Based on a 10th-grade enrollment of 34,438 students, paying the fees for the tests should cost about $750,000. The estimate assumes that 85% of students will qualify for reduced rates because they come from low-income households. Initial training costs for staff to administer the tests could surpass $400,000. And extra help for students could cost close to that, although some free online resources are available. The resolution also directs the superintendent to report back in 60 days with a plan to provide the PSAT, a practice test for the SAT, to all eighth-, ninth-, and 10th-grade students. The district already pays for 10th graders to take the test. Separately, the board reiterated its support, by a formal vote, for a city-led plan to create a college savings account for every first-grader. Each account would get $50 in seed money and the plan would be rolled out over five years. “Just opening an account and putting that money away starts that college statement, that mentality,” board member Nick Melvoin said. “We’re putting students on the path toward higher learning,” board member Kelly Gonez said. The preliminary planning for such accounts has taken two years, with city staffers exploring different options for how the accounts could work. Later in the meeting, school board member George McKenna put forward a plan to try to slow or even reverse the district’s projected slide toward insolvency. McKenna proposed a parcel tax for the November ballot that would raise $150 million a year. Passing the measure would require a two-thirds majority. There’s much debate in districts across the state about whether the November election is likely to be a favorable moment for parcel taxes and school construction bonds. L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner did not get involved in Tuesday’s debate, but sources within the district suggest that he’s concerned that the timing is not yet right. McKenna alluded to that presumed hesitancy. “Mr. superintendent, with respect to your position, all you have to do is say go …. and the people in this district will go,” McKenna said. “I’m advocating for a now, a boldness and an urgency.” Several board members expressed concern about the expense of a ballot measure and fear that voters’ rejection then might hurt the district’s chances in a later election. “I am concerned that there has to be a strategy to win, not just a strategy to put on the ballot,” school board President Monica Garcia said. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531421098142-R68FLNV3GWJJCV2CF8ZL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.44.47+AM.png education - Building L.A.'s Rail System Will Create Thousands of Jobs. Can A Transportation Boarding School Fill Them? Boarding school conjures a certain image: children in preppy blazers, leafy quadrangles in New England and tuition that costs more than many families earn in a year. That stereotype would not apply if officials carry out their vision for a dusty, trash-strewn lot in South Los Angeles that has sat vacant for more than two decades. Their pitch? A transportation boarding school, free to its students. The school would offer a vocational and college-preparatory curriculum, tightly tailored to train students for jobs in the transportation industry. Officials say some could find work with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority or local contractors after graduation; others could go on to college to study engineering, architecture or urban planning. The 4.2-acre site at Vermont and Manchester avenues where the school would be built has been vacant since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when a swap meet was torched and burned to the ground. Since then, the land has been caught in a tug-of-war between politicians and residents who disagree on what should be built there to address blight. “For 25 years, we passed this spot and thought about insurrection,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who is also a Metro director, at a press event Monday. “But today, we think about resurrection.” Though the proposal is in its infancy, it has sparked resistance from some South L.A. residents who say the neighborhood needs more sit-down restaurants, grocery stores and retail space — not a boarding school. Los Angeles County won ownership of the lot through eminent domain in April. The boarding school is a key piece of the county’s development plan, along with apartments, a job training center, a plaza for transit riders on Vermont, and 50,000 square feet of retail space, including a grocery store. But the proposal does not include the sit-down restaurants, coffee shops and retail spaces that local residents need, said Elisa McGhee, who lives in Vermont Vista, a mile and a half south of the site. “This is not the best thing for our community,” McGhee said. “Building this school will not attract the retail that’s needed here.” She also questioned why Metro and the county would build a new school in South L.A., when struggling high schools nearby would welcome the funding and support. Some schools in Los Angeles offer magnet programs for science and technology, and others offer vocational training, but no one school offers them in combination, with a tight focus on the transportation industry, said Joanne Peterson, Metro’s head of human resources. The new development, she said, is an opportunity “to bring new life” to a piece of land in South L.A. that has been “unoccupied and blighted” for 26 years. The development’s location is also convenient because Vermont is the second-most traveled transit corridor in the county, officials said. The Board of Supervisors is expected to vote this week on an exclusive negotiating agreement with the nonprofit SEED Foundation, which runs public boarding schools, to develop more detailed plans for the L.A. school’s construction and operation. The foundation would also apply for a charter with the Los Angeles County Office of Education. About 400 students in high school could attend, staying on campus during the week and returning home on weekends, said Ridley-Thomas deputy Karly Katona. Room and board would be free. The school could open as soon as the fall of 2020, she said. The school’s annual operating subsidy from Los Angeles County is expected to be about $10 million, or about $25,000 per student, Katona said. Like other charters, the school would receive money from the state for each pupil, and would also pursue grants, philanthropic funding and donations from the transportation industry. Metro hopes graduates could address a critical need in Southern California: qualified workers. Nearly a dozen new rail lines are to be built across Los Angeles in the next four decades, creating thousands of vacant positions in construction and engineering. Already, Metro struggles to fill some jobs. The agency hires about 2,200 people per year, and is continuously recruiting for some positions, including track inspectors and engineers, Peterson said. About 40% of Metro’s 11,000 employees are eligible for retirement today. “What we’re trying to do is really flood the market with qualified people,” said Metro Chief Executive Phil Washington. “We want to be the farm team for the industry.” Trained graduates would be in high demand among firms that “either go to the union hall and get folks off the bench, or take a chance on someone right off the street,” Washington said. The hope, he said, is that private companies will send employees to guest lecture, help shape the curriculum and give money to the school. Early plans for the curriculum call for seven career tracks, including logistics, civics and public policy, engineering and mechanics. Students would also take classes that meet the state’s curriculum requirements. A similar approach exists at Transit Tech High School in New York City, where teenagers take English, math and other standard classes, but also learn about computer circuitry, hydraulics and electronic troubleshooting. The program is a public school, not a charter, and students go home at night. Formerly a vocational school for all kinds of trades, the school switched its focus in 1986 at the urging of New York transit officials. Today, the school bears the slogan “The express to success.” When graduates land jobs with Amtrak, or with New York City’s deteriorating subway system, the school’s Twitter account congratulates them with the rousing cheer, “Go Transit!” In L.A., officials hope to attract students from across the county who have been homeless, in foster care, or involved in the criminal justice system — and have reached out to LACOE, the Los Angeles Unified School District, community colleges and social service agencies for advice. Critics have questioned whether officials would launch a school with that emphasis, or a focus on career training, in a majority-white neighborhood. Officials say the obstacles children face in the neighborhoods near the site make the case for a school with a stable place to live. More than 1,700 children are in foster care and group homes in the eight surrounding ZIP codes, and the teen pregnancy rate is twice the county average. The school would be an opportunity to provide “early, strategic intervention” for teenagers who could otherwise “end up costing the county a lot of money in the long term,” Katona said. Metro officials argued that the program would amount to economic development, creating a pipeline that would allow young people to find work in their own neighborhoods. McGhee said she worried that the school would be a "soft jail,” where students from rival gangs could endanger other students or neighborhood residents. She said residents are “not going to want to mix kids up that are doing well with kids that are trying to catch up, or learning how to behave.” There are a few precedents for a program that focuses on foster youth, including San Pasqual Academy, a year-round boarding school in Escondido for teenagers in the foster care system. In the 2016 school year, 77% of students graduated, according to county data. The SEED Foundation’s boarding school in Miami, which opened in 2014, caters exclusively to students who are at risk of failing school, live in public housing or foster care, and whose families qualify for social services or other benefits. The foundation’s D.C. school is among the best-known charter schools in the country. It was featured in the 2010 documentary “Waiting for Superman,” and has hosted a number of dignitaries, including then-President Obama and Prince Charles of Britain. If the L.A. school includes a significant number of students who have been homeless, in foster care or arrested, teachers and administrators should be prepared to work through unresolved trauma, familial issues and other emotional needs, said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at UCLA. “A lot of times, you don’t see high-quality education and support being provided to disadvantaged kids,” Noguera said. But, he said, the idea of training students for high-quality jobs in the future “is a promising concept.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531421180735-CUMHXMUWJ2G48BK4PUCL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.46.08+AM.png education - Here’s How Your Brain Can Learn To Be Less Racist In 1968, the Polish-American psychologist Robert Zajonc conducted a landmark study at the University of Michigan. He recruited students and told them they’d be participating in a language-learning experiment, but this was just a cover for his true intentions. Instead, Zajonc began by showing them fake “Chinese” characters that he claimed signified various adjectives, then continued to display each character to his subjects over and over again, at various frequencies–some as many as 25 times, others just once or not at all. Finally, Zajonc asked each student volunteer to guess how positive or negative the definition of each adjective was (that is, did it represent a “good” trait or a “bad” trait) and how much they “liked” it. Zajonc discovered that there was a strong linear relationship between familiarity and not just how positively his subjects interpreted his utterly meaningless characters, but with how much they liked it, too. The more a student saw a given character, the more they preferred it. Zajonc’s research later became the foundation of the well-documented “mere exposure effect,” whereby the more we’re exposed to something, the better we like it. Which begs an obvious question: Does this apply to people, too? And if so, can mere exposure help our brains unlearn unconscious biases and assumptions–including racist ones? FEELING BETTER VERSUS FEELING LESS BAD Researchers Leslie Zebrowitz and Yi Zhang at Brandeis University set out to answer those questions in a study, and they published those findings in 2012. Their question was simple: What would happen–at the cognitive level–if they showed people faces of individuals of different ethnicities over and over? Zebrowitz and Zhang decided to focus on the orbitofrontal cortex, which is tied to the reward system of our brains. It drives two different reflexes that help our brains assess a situation before we take action. Specifically, the orbitofrontal cortex’s role is to tell us whether we’re better off approaching or avoiding a person, place, or thing. But it’s made up of a few component parts. Our minds’ so-called “approach reflex” can be measured by observing activity in our the medial orbitofrontal cortex. When this area of the brain is activated, your motor system eggs you on to engage with someone or something. As Zhang explained it to me, “In a gambling setting, if you start to win money, the medial orbitofrontal is where [the brain] activates the most because it registers positive rewards.” The lateralorbitofrontal cortex registers what brain scientists refer to as our “avoidance reflex,” which cues our bodies to run away to avoid a possible negative outcome. The stronger the activation, the more pronounced the feeling. “When you start to lose money,” she continued, “the lateral orbitofrontal is the region that activates more because that’s when you feel bad about the situation.” Zhang and Zebrowitz wanted to learn whether repeated exposure would either increase the approach reflex or decrease the avoidance reflex. Or as Zhang put it, “Is it because we start to feel better about those stimuli or is it that we start to feel less bad about them?” The researchers conducted an fMRI study of 16 white men and 16 white women. Each participant was exposed to pictures drawn from a collection of black faces, Korean faces, written Chinese characters (real ones), and random shapes. These pictures were shown different numbers of times to the study participants, with some pictures never shown and others shown many times. Next, the researchers put each participant into the fMRI machine and exposed them to 40 images they’d never seen before and 20 they had. The idea was to see how and where the brain would react. What the scientists found was that the unfamiliar ones images activated subjects’ avoidance reflex; simply put, people were afraid of the unknown. More than just for faces, this same effect occurred when respondents were exposed to unfamiliar shapes and Chinese characters. This made sense: humans have evolved to fear the unknown because it signals potential harm. However, the study subjects’ avoidance reflex was significantly reduced when they were exposed to the same faces, shapes, and characters they’d seen before going into the fMRI machine. HOW ANTI-BIAS SPREADS THROUGH THE BRAIN Zhang observed another surprising effect, though. “Once our participants have been exposed to a prototypical Korean face,” she explains, “they start to show less adverse reactions to other faces in the same racial category.” Indeed, familiarity actually helped subjects’ brains generalize from the particular images they were exposed to–helping reduce race-based biases overall. So what about the approach reflex? Interestingly, with increased familiarity, it neither changed nor increased. Familiarity does not make us like things more. Rather, it makes us fear things less. This is one reason why we typically enjoy our own homes. People and objects that are familiar feel safe. We may not particularly like that old chair we inherited from our grandmother–it’s not that great to sit in and it clearly needs reupholstering–but it gives us comfort to have around. It seems our brains must back out of their subconsciously racist beliefs, rather than actively embrace more inclusive ones. But once we take those first few steps away from our biases, our brains know where to go from there. Learn more at Fast Company https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531421288397-5RH2YZ5EVX7YV32SJD5G/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.47.52+AM.png education - In Race for Governor, Newsom and Cox Offer Competing Views on California Education Offering an expansive view of California’s education system that extends from before birth into the workplace, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom last night pledged to deliver on what he called a “cradle to college promise for the next generation” along with setting a goal to “end child poverty in California.” In speech to supporters in San Francisco Tuesday night after coming in first in California’s primary race for governor, he said the state needed to “reinvest” in its public education system, and begin treating teachers “like the heroes that they are.” He made his remarks after dealing a devastating blow to the gubernatorial bid of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was knocked out of the race after coming in third behind both Newsom and GOP businessman John Cox. Newsom received 33.3 percent of the vote, to Cox’s 26.4 percent and Villaraigosa’s 12.9 percent . Villaraigosa’s poor showing came despite an endorsement by the California Charter Schools Association Advocates, and $23 million in spending to boost his campaign by an independent expenditure committee that the charter schools organization established. Most of those funds came from multi-billionaires with a long history of backing charter schools. In his speech, Newsom referred to his severe dyslexia that made attending school a torturous experience, and has fundamentally shaped his views on education. His policy positions differ dramatically from those of Cox, whom he will face in the November general election. Cox rejects the idea that California needs to spend more money on public education. In his speech to supporters last night, he blamed Newsom for the “mismanagement” of the state’s public schools. “It wasn’t President Trump who gave us one of the most expensive and failing school systems in the country,” he said. “It is criminal to deprive children of the education they deserve.” Raising a theme he brought up repeatedly on the campaign trail, he said extra taxes approved by California voters at the ballot box in recent years are not going into the classroom, but instead are going “into administration and pensions.” He also argued for the “school choice” agenda similar to what Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are pushing. “We need to give parents and children the education they deserve, and that means more charters, giving parents more choice and encouraging home schooling,” he said. And instead of increasing funds for higher education and boosting student aid to make it more affordable for students, as Newsom promised, in an April interview with EdSource Cox said colleges should trim their budgets and require professors to teach more classes as a way to reduce costs. “You don’t make things more affordable by handing out loans and subsidies to people,” he said. In his interview with EdSource, Cox also reversed socially conservative positions on education he took during his brief campaign for president in 2007. Cox said then that he was concerned about a “problem with transvestites who want to be school teachers,” and supported a proposal that would cut off federal funding for schools that “expose our children to homosexual propaganda.” “I think the world has evolved to some degree since then, and I don’t necessarily hold those views now. I don’t necessarily consider them (transgender teachers) a danger or a problem,” Cox said. Newsom outlined his education reform plans in considerable detail in response to a 12-question questionnaire EdSource submitted to him lastmonth. Read his full responses here. Cox did not respond to the questionnaire, but his views on education can be found in this EdSource article. Newsom said he offered “a new way of thinking about education as a lifelong pursuit.” “Our role begins when babies are still in the womb and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career,” he wrote. His plans start with expanded access to prenatal care, developmental screenings and child care, as well as universal pre-kindergarten education for all 4-year-olds. They continue with large increases in K-12 funding — Newsom has thrown his support behind a proposal to raise per-pupil spending by 60 percent. And they extend into higher education, as Newsom calls for increased funding for California’s public colleges and universities, as well as a more generous state financial aid system to make college more affordable for students. Asked by EdSource how he would fund universal pre-school, for instance, Newsom did not directly answer. He wrote, in part, “I am committed to identifying the resources to ensure a robust early education system.” Despite Newsom’s extensive and detailed education platform, it is unlikely that education will be a major issue in the campaign itself, said seasoned political observers Bruce Cain, a political science professor and director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, and Mark DiCamillo, director of the UC Berkeley IGS Poll. Instead, issues that Cox will raise, such as immigration and the state’s gas tax — and other taxes generally — will be far more prominent, while Newsom will tie Cox to Trump, who is more unpopular in California than almost any other state, said DiCamillo. But education advocates will be looking closely at Newsom’s positions on education because it is a certainty, barring some political catastrophe, that Newsom will be California’s next governor. In that role, he will have considerable clout to implement his policies in a variety of ways. The governor appoints the 11-person State Board of Education, which is the state’s key policy-making body for education. His annual budget has an impact on how much money goes to schools and how it is spent. Newsom’s trouncing of Villaraigosa represented a major victory for the California Teachers Association and other teachers unions who had endorsed him. Early in his career Villaraigosa had worked for the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the union representing teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. But as state Assembly speaker and during his tenure as L.A. mayor he emerged as a leading critic of the unions. His endorsement by charter school advocates and the millions they poured into the gubernatorial campaign only deepened the hostilities. “Educators are excited that a champion of our public schools is on the path now to become our next governor,” CTA president Eric Heins said. “Newsom’s clear victory tonight shows that California’s democratic process is not for sale.” Villaraigosa’s inability to secure a place in the November election “was a huge defeat for charters,” said Kevin Gordon, president of Capitol Advisors, a prominent Sacramento-based education consulting firm. He said the charter groups that organized against Newsom “just emptied the piggy bank on the governor’s race with a big bet. Newsom pledged to be reasonable on charters, but he won’t forget the money raised by the charter school association against him.” But Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a professor in USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, said it was oversimplifying to say that Newsom’s victory over Villaraigosa was a blow to charter schools, and that there were many other reasons to explain Villaraigosa’s third place showing. Stanford’s Cain pointed to Villaraigosa having been out of office for a number of years, that his support among Latinos didn’t materialize to any significant degree, and he didn’t draw in independent or moderate Republican voters to support him in the primary. Despite the financial influence of their supporters, charter schools themselves weren’t an issue in the race, or one most voters cared about, Jeffe, Cain and DiCamillo said, “The issue really never gained salience in the election,” DiCamillo said. The silver lining for charter school supporters in yesterday’s election, Jeffe said, is that Marshall Tuck, the candidate they endorsed for state superintendent of public instruction, had come out ahead of Tony Thurmond, who is backed by teachers unions. Tuck and Thurmond will face each other in the November runoff, and the funds that wealthy charter backers might have spent on Villaraigosa, had he made it onto the ballot, may well now go to Tuck. Regardless of the outcome of the Tuck-Thurmond race, however, Newsom is overwhelmingly favored to win in November, and the positions he has taken on education now carry enormous weight. “The Republicans are not nominating an Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Cain said. “It looks to me like it’s going to be a runaway race for Gavin.” Learn more at EdSource https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531421573911-DVF8SG816DONA6KFG2IS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.52.34+AM.png education - Getting Comfortable Outside Their Comfort Zones There is no education without diverse points of view, said Danoff Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana, sitting in his office the morning after Harvard’s 367th Commencement sent 7,000 graduates into a world of differences. A good education piles up the unknowns, Khurana said. It allows students to reconsider assumptions in multiple aspects of their lives — intellectual, social, personal — by presenting them with new facts and new experiences, and by surrounding them with diverse groups of classmates and viewpoints, both formally and informally. In the end, that exposure not only instills knowledge and a more accurate view of the world, it gives students a lens through which to re-examine themselves, their upbringings, and their beliefs. “Diversity in the student body is important for the same reason that it’s important in research,” Khurana said. “The only way to advance a field, to advance research … is through a diversity of perspectives. It is a necessary condition for knowledge to advance. This is not a new, original insight, but one that we need to remind ourselves of over and over again.” Harvard College’s whole-person approach to creating a diverse student body is currently being challenged in federal district court, the latest in a series of lawsuits that have targeted universities’ right to consider race as one factor among many when choosing among academically qualified applicants. The last serious test came in June 2016, in Fisher v. University of Texas, when the Supreme Court upheld a university’s right to consider an applicant’s race in admissions. The most recent case has been brought against Harvard by a group created by conservative activist Edward Blum, who has sought through prior legal challenges to eliminate race-conscious admissions. The case argues that Asian-American students, who make up 22.7 percent of Harvard’s incoming freshman class and 6 percent of the U.S. population, are underrepresented on campus. “The only way to advance a field, to advance research … is through a diversity of perspectives. … This is not a new, original insight, but one that we need to remind ourselves of over and over again,” said Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo The report of the Khurana-chaired Committee to Study the Importance of Student Body Diversity, which was adopted by the faculty in 2016, noted the critical role diversity plays in a liberal arts education, one “in which challenge and confrontation are essential counterparts to collaboration and cooperation.” Recognition of the value of a diverse student body dates back to the College’s founding days, the report said, when Harvard’s charter, granted by Gov. Thomas Dudley in 1650, dedicated the institution to “the education of the English and Indian youth of this country.” The pursuit of student diversity continued over the centuries, albeit imperfectly and in the context of changing times. In the mid-1800s, as the nation veered toward civil war, then-Harvard President C.C. Felton argued for nationalizing what had been a regional college, because admitting students from “different and distant states must tend powerfully to remove prejudices by bringing them into friendly relations.” In the mid-1900s, with the admission of more public school students leading to a more socially and economically diverse student body, the House system was conceived as a way to keep students from self-sorting, by having them share living space. In 1997, after it became clear that individual Houses had become places more welcoming to students of specific backgrounds, assignments were randomized. “A fair reading of Harvard’s history reveals a process across time in which the College has developed a recognition and appreciation of the excellence that comes only from including and embracing multiple sources of talent,” the committee wrote. The report highlights different ways student-body diversity — whether racial, ethnic, socio-economic, national, or experiential — is an important part of the Harvard experience. One place different perspectives find expression is the classroom, where students can spark discussion on topics a more homogenous class might not think controversial, or even noteworthy, the report said. The General Education Curriculum, meanwhile, is designed to introduce students to diverse disciplines and ideas. Outside the classroom, residential and extracurricular experiences — including athletic teams, public service organizations, and clubs — expose students to new ideas and experiences. Students regularly cite classmates as an important source of learning, whether through late-night conversations or meet-ups at the dining hall. “Each of us brings a unique perspective based on our personal and sociological biography,” Khurana said. “These perspectives can offer deep insights and allow us to test our understandings against an intellectual framework or established understandings. Our personal experiences can also limit what we see and understand, which is why comparative perspectives are so critical. These comparative perspectives — historical, cross-cultural, a different framing of a problem — create new understandings and new possibilities.” While racial and ethnic differences are key considerations in forming the student body, other factors are also important. Harvard’s 15-year-old financial aid program has helped fuel social and economic diversity. More than half of today’s students receive financial aid, and the average annual cost to parents of students receiving aid is $12,000. One in five undergraduates comes from a family that earns less than $65,000 per year, meaning they pay nothing toward the cost of education. International education is another key facet of student diversity, fostered both by admitting students from all over the world and more than 250 study-abroad programs. The incoming freshman class is one of the most diverse in Harvard’s history. To date, it is 15.5 percent African-American, 22.7 percent Asian-American, 12.2 percent Latino, 2 percent Native American, and 0.4 percent native Hawaiian. It is also majority female, at 50.1 percent. International students, who make up 12 percent of the class, hail from 90 countries. “I don’t think we can say with any level of confidence that we are forming tomorrow’s global leaders if these students are not being shaped in a context that reflects global reality,” said Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Jonathan L. Walton. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo While Harvard has continued to work on diversity since the report came out, committee member Jonathan Walton said that it’s misguided to seek an end to the work — to see diversity as a goal to be achieved. “Diversity is a reality to be lived and experienced,” said Walton, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church. “We never say that we’re there. Diversity is like Veritas: it’s an ideal of which we are in constant pursuit.” Training students in a diverse environment is crucial to preparing them for the world that awaits them, Walton said. Future leaders in education, business, and government have to be able to understand and engage with people different from themselves. “I don’t think we can say with any level of confidence that we are forming tomorrow’s global leaders if these students are not being shaped in a context that reflects global reality,” Walton said. “One might say that we have to be mindful that we are not educating a generation of aristocratic elites that are given to neo-fascism because they’ve been able to use power and pedigree to mask their ignorance,” Walton said. “And we know ignorance leads to fear and intolerance, which always leads to hate and suffering. What’s our moral responsibility to society at large?” “What a disservice we do, frankly, to the world, if we fail in attracting excellence from all quarters, and even more if we fail to foster that excellence once we’ve identified it and have it on campus,” said Emma Dench. Rose Lincoln/Harvard file photo Emma Dench, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and another committee member, said that a commitment to campus diversity shows that Harvard takes seriously its mission to educate tomorrow’s global leaders. “What a disservice we do, frankly, to the world, if we fail in attracting excellence from all quarters, and even more if we fail to foster that excellence once we’ve identified it and have it on campus,” Dench said. One doesn’t have to look very far to see attacks on diversity-focused ideals, she added. “This is an area that is quite endangered,” Dench said. This spring, President Drew Faust accepted the recommendations of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, empaneled in May 2016, and appointed former Morehouse College President John Silvanus Wilson as a senior adviser and strategist to the president to implement them. In her Commencement speech, Faust reflected on the importance of diversity and the idea that Harvard is likely the most diverse place most students have lived, or may ever live. The University, she said, seeks to attract talented individuals of the broadest range of backgrounds and interests, and then asks them to both learn from and teach one another. “This isn’t easy. It requires individuals to question long-held assumptions, to open their minds and their hearts to ideas and arguments that may seem not just unfamiliar, but even disturbing and disorienting,” she said. “It … becomes ever more difficult in an increasingly polarized social and political environment in which expressions of hatred, bigotry, and divisiveness seem not just permitted but encouraged. But in spite of these challenges all around us, we at Harvard strive to be enriched, not divided, by our differences.” Learn more at The Harvard Gazette https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531421949844-R1SVQJ7W2MA8GSYV9C4L/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+11.53.44+AM.png education - Walmart to Offer Employees a College Education For $1 a Day Walmart, the country’s largest private employer, announced Wednesday that it will pay for its workers to go back to school — as long as they get degrees in business or supply-chain management. The retailer is partnering with three universities to offer associate’s and bachelor’s degrees to 1.4 million part-time, full-time and salaried Walmart and Sam’s Club employees — a pitch to improve employee retention rates and engagement at work, while also drawing new workers. Walmart will cover the costs of tuition, books and fees, while employees will be required to pay $1 a day for the duration of their studies. “We know there [are] a lot of benefits from a business perspective,” Drew Holler, vice president of people innovation for Walmart U.S., said on a call with reporters. “We know we’re going to see an influx of applications.” Degrees will be offered by the University of Florida in Gainesville, Brandman University in Irvine, Calif., and Bellevue University in Bellevue, Neb., all nonprofit institutions with online programs for working adults. Rachel Carlson, chief executive of Guild Education, a Denver-based company that will oversee the program, pointed out that the program allows employees to earn a degree without amassing college debt. Walmart’s announcement comes as retailers struggle to attract and retain workers in an increasingly competitive labor market. The unemployment rate is at a 17-year low, and the number of open jobs in retail — 723,000 as of March — has continued to grow, according to government data. Earlier this year, Walmart raised its starting hourly wage from $9 to $11 and began offering paid parental leave and adoption benefits to full-time employees. Other companies have also taken similar measures in recent months, with Target pledging to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 and Starbucks offering paid sick leave and stock grants to its baristas. Walmart, based in Bentonville, Ark., joins a growing number of employers in offering subsidized college educations. Chipotle Mexican Grill provides its workers as much as $5,250 in annual tuition assistance, while Starbucks gives employees a full ride to Arizona State University for undergraduate degrees in more than 60 subjects. For now, Walmart will pay only for degrees in business and supply-chain management because those areas of study “will be relevant across the industry and for future work opportunities,” according to spokeswoman Erica Jones. Employees can sign up for the program after working at Walmart for 90 days. Executives said there are no other requirements or fees, and participating employees are not obligated to remain with the company for any period of time. (Employees who leave Walmart before completing their degrees are no longer eligible for company subsidies but can continue on their own.) And unlike the tuition-reimbursement programs offered by many other companies, Walmart does not require employees to foot any costs upfront, making it more accessible for low-wage workers, said Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. “Most Walmart workers are not making a lot of money, so paying anything out of pocket, even for a relatively short period of time, can be difficult,” he said. “Walmart seems to have realized that if you have happier employees, you’ll have lower turnover.” But some said workers could face new challenges because they already struggle to plan around unpredictable work schedules. Walmart employees have long complained that they don’t receive as many shifts as they’d like, particularly if they need to schedule around other commitments, like schoolwork or childcare. Nearly 70 percent of part-time Walmart workers say they’d like to be full-time, according to a recent survey by OUR Walmart, an employee group that advocates for workers’ rights. “Because of Walmart’s erratic scheduling system, many people who work at Walmart are unable to plan to take college classes or even pick up their children from school,” said Cynthia Murray, who has been working at a Walmart store in Laurel, Md., for 18 years. Walmart executives said they did not know how much the program would cost the company, which last year had $486 billion in revenue, but said they expected as many as 68,000 employees to sign up in the first five years. Annual tuition and fees at the three schools ranged from $7,365 at Bellevue University to $28,658 for out-of-state students at the University of Florida, according to U.S. News & World Report. Learn more at the Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531422075539-6MOYU6RDSYF9RPR3YV0M/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.00.58+PM.png education - Living Homeless in California: The University of Hunger In August of 2016, Chanté Marie Catt left her home in Redding, in the Sacramento Valley, to begin her first semester at Humboldt State University. Catt was 36, with a boyfriend and 1-year-old daughter, and possessed a booming laugh and no small amount of confidence. After nearly two decades running her own pet-care business in Los Angeles, she had begun to feel limited by her lack of a college degree, and several years earlier followed her parents north and enrolled at Redding’s Shasta College. The transfer to Humboldt had her dreaming of towering redwoods and cool ocean breezes. “We were excited to start a new life, maybe buy a house,” she says. The couple tried to find a place from Redding, scouring Craigslist for openings without luck. In person, Catt figured, her prospects would improve. Once they had checked into a campground north of the university and enrolled their daughter in daycare, she dedicated her time to visiting property management companies. A week went by, then another. She paid application fees to management companies—$20 here, $43 there—and called through every listing she found, but even with a solid credit and rental history, never heard back. The family bounced from one campsite to another, with occasional stops at a motel to clean up. It was an expensive way to live, and she rapidly blew through $16,000 in financial aid and student loans. One day, out of a combination of anger and desperation, Catt took to Craigslist from her motel room. “I’m a sociology student,” she wrote, “starting research on our homeless students and on the property management companies here. Anyone want to share their stories!?” Within hours, she received more than 150 responses. Homeless students told her of moving from couch to couch, of sleeping in the woods and of completing their research assignments at McDonald’s, where they took advantage of free Wi-Fi. “My children are cold, we are broke from all the rental application fees and I’m tired of it,” wrote a mother of two. A graduate student who worked full-time revealed that he was living in his car for the second consecutive semester: “I never knew it would be this hard to find a place to rent.” Several weeks later, while still homeless, Catt had organized a campus group, the Homeless Student Advocate Alliance, and was spending her free time passing out fliers to attract more members. They weren’t hard to find. “Every couple of students I talked to was experiencing some sort of displacement,” she says. For many students at Humboldt, going to college meant becoming homeless. One homeless-student conference included workshops on outdoor living, covering topics like how to light fires to keep homework dry. The true scale of this crisis was revealed last January in a groundbreaking reportcommissioned by the California State University system. The study found that 11 percent of students on the university’s 23-campuses reported being homeless during the past year. The problem was most acute at Humboldt State, where nearly a fifth of the student body had been homeless at one point the previous year. “In large part, students are homeless because they don’t get enough financial aid,” says Jennifer Maguire, a Humboldt social work professor, who co-authored the study with Rashida Crutchfield of Long Beach State. “It’s even worse here, because we’re in a rural area with a very limited housing stock.” According to the North Coast Journal, a local newspaper, there aren’t even enough rental units in the city of Arcata, where the university is located, for the students who need housing—much less anywhere else. And while the university plans to build more student housing, it can currently only guarantee slots for first-year students. This shortage allows landlords to crank up rents and reject applicants at whim. For students without a financial cushion, the situation can quickly turn into a full-blown emergency—and in the CSU system, that’s a lot of students. More than half the students at Humboldt are the first in their family to attend college, and a third are Latino. Many work full-time; some have kids. “The ‘non-traditional’ student is now the traditional student,” says Maguire. On a cool April morning, more than 200 people packed into a theater at the College of the Redwoods in nearby Eureka, for a forum on homelessness co-hosted by Humboldt State. “I mentioned to a community member last week that I would be attending this summit today and she asked me, ‘What does homelessness have to do with HSU?’” said Humboldt State president Lisa Rossbacher. The crowd laughed, which represented at least some progress. It’s no longer a secret that Humboldt State students struggle with homelessness. “My children are cold, we are broke from all the rental application fees and I’m tired of it,” wrote a Humboldt State University student. Much of the progress is due to the efforts of activists like Catt. After several months of homelessness, her family eventually landed an apartment, thanks in part to an emergency welfare grant. By that time, she had organized the homeless student alliance, which was pressing the university to finally address the problem. Last fall, the group held a three-day conference at Humboldt State that included workshops on outdoor living, which covered topics like how to light a fire and keep your homework dry. On the third day, a group of students put up tents on the quad and stayed for two nights. They then moved to the library, which they occupied, and demanded that it remain open 24 hours a day to give homeless students a safe and warm place to be. The next day, an administrator contacted Catt and offered her the position of off-campus housing liaison, which had been one of the alliance’s demands. Since January, Catt has worked with more than 100 students, many of whom are in need of housing or have dealt with retaliation from landlords. It’s a start, though there are limits to what she can accomplish. One student who was living out of her car recently came to Catt’s office, and Catt gave her a code to the campus lockers, which are normally reserved for students taking physical education classes. The student broke down in tears at the prospect of a hot shower. A few days later, Catt texted her that a landlord had recently called with a room to rent, but the student had moved back in with her parents. “She told me it had just been too cold out there,” says Catt. A couple of days after the homeless summit, I met Jasmine Bigham, a 23-year-old transfer student, on the steps of the campus library. Like Catt, she had arrived at Humboldt in 2016, and anticipated finding housing within a week or two. “Weeks turned to months,” she says. She spent a semester living out of her Subaru Outback, searching for places to park at night that looked safe, then curling up on the back seat. She didn’t tell her parents. “No parents want their kids living like that,” she says—and anyways, they didn’t have much extra money. Bigham is from a small town in neighboring Siskiyou County, and before college had lived inside a metal shop designed to store tractors and supplies; her parents created walls by hanging tarps. “I sort of grew up having to figure shit out,” she says. Homelessness has caused Jasmine to give up on some dreams. She wants a college education, so that means giving up a home. After a semester in the Subaru, she bought a used trailer for $1,000 and parked it at a KOA campground for $600 a month. That felt safer, but then the trailer’s ceiling collapsed and an intoxicated neighbor harassed her, so she left for a room in a house that was infested with mold and rats. She could only handle the grime for so long, so last year she sold her Subaru and plowed the rest of her savings—which she earned by waitressing in Lake Tahoe—into a GMC van. Since January, she’s been living at a parking lot next to student housing. As we walk from the library to the parking lot, Bigham outlines her semester budget. Scholarships nearly cover her tuition, and she’s in charge of the rest. Right now she’s not working, because she’s taking 19 units, the maximum allowed. The parking pass is $180 a year, and she rents two lockers, at $5 a piece, for the semester. Each day she stops by the campus food pantry, where she fills plastic containers with soup and picks up rice and beans. She describes the area around campus as a food desert but in reverse—filled with only “really expensive healthy food” that’s out of her reach. She takes a bus to Eureka, then walks a mile to reach a more affordable grocery store, where she can load up on quinoa, bell peppers and mangos. She has a camping stove, or else prepares meals for the week at friends’ homes. At the parking lot, she points out several other vehicles where students are living. She’ll graduate in December, and tells me that when she returns this fall she hopes to get the other homeless students to park together, to create a greater sense of safety. She opens the back of her van, which is meticulously organized: a plastic container for her clothes, a folded mattress she bought on sale at Ross Dress for Less, an ice chest and cans of beans. “I had to learn what food stays good and what doesn’t,” she says. Bigham tells me that she’s always felt different. She is an African American from an all-white rural community. She grew up on a “broken-down ranch” with cows and pigs, while many students at Humboldt talk about eating meat as if it were a crime. “The hardest thing is people not understanding,” she says, leaning against her van. “If you talk about how people don’t have enough to eat, they say, ‘Well, why don’t they just feed themselves?’” Homelessness has caused her to give up on some dreams. She loved track, and was recruited by a couple of larger colleges to throw the javelin, but didn’t want to live in a big city. She hoped to continue with athletics, but juggling a full academic load while being homeless didn’t leave much room for anything else. She shrugs and smiles. “You can either be sad or you can figure it out. If you don’t have money, but you still want to do things, you have to give up something,” she says. She wants a college education, so that means giving up a home. Learn more at Capital and Main https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531422244124-CZ6LFDSSJ5OE6BQIMN39/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.03.48+PM.png education - An Unusual Idea for Fixing School Segregation Many proposals for addressing school segregation seem pretty small, especially when compared to the scale and severity of the problem. Without the power of a court-ordered desegregation mandate, progress can feel extremely far off, if not altogether impossible. Some even believe—understandably though mistakenly—that no meaningful steps can be taken to integrate schools unless housing segregation is resolved. But a new theory from Thomas Scott-Railton, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, provides reason to believe there are still new ways to think about this issue. Railton’s approach does something that’s all too rare in education-policy debates: He takes what are normally viewed as discrete issue areas—K–12 segregation, college admissions, and the lack of diversity at top universities—and says, what if those can all be addressed together? What if, in fact, it’s impossible to address them apart? Scott-Railton’s proposal, which he published in the Yale Law & Policy Review, is to reduce K–12 segregation by reforming the college-admissions process. Scott-Railton began thinking about this last fall, after listening to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s reporting on This American Life about school segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area. The radio broadcast featured wealthy white parents in a St. Louis suburb distressed by the prospect of black students from a neighboring town enrolling in their public schools. The black children’s district had recently lost its accreditation due to poor academic performance. (It was the same district that Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by police in August 2014, had graduated from.) If a Missouri school district loses its accreditation, the state permits any student enrolled to transfer to a nearby accredited one. Packed at a school-board meeting, white parents one after another spoke out about their fears of this new incoming student population—that they’d bring increased crime, violence, and disease. And, some parents feared how the black students’ test scores might threaten their own children’s academic standing. “Once [they come] in here, will that lower our accreditation?” asked one parent, to thunderous applause. Many of the white parents’ fears were prejudice, plain and simple. But Scott-Railton knew that the parents were right about one thing: Integrating the school could mean that the school’s rating would drop, and schools with lower ratings tend to pay a penalty in the highly competitive college process. Universities tend to give a leg up to affluent, high test-scoring suburban schools—which then incentivizes wealthier parents to seek out segregation. But what if those incentives could be changed? And thus Scott-Railton’s idea was born: to take demographics of schools into account in college admissions—giving priority to applicants who attended schools with a certain threshold of low-income students (say, above 40 percent). In other words, admissions officers would look favorably on students who attended an economically integrated school, much as they do those who have had unusual travel experiences or outstanding extracurricular achievements. In a nutshell, he argues, this idea would drive integration in three ways: It would create an incentive for middle class and wealthy parents to enroll their students in socioeconomically integrated schools, it would create countervailing considerations for white parents considering leaving currently integrated school districts, and it would provide an incentive for private schools to enroll more low-income students. Middle-class students would likely benefit more from Scott-Railton’s idea than low-income students, since his proposal doesn’t inherently change the financial barriers to attending college. But millions more would benefit from the increased K–12 integration, which decades of research show improves public schooling. It wouldn’t be the first time colleges sought to change applicant behavior by altering admissions incentives. In 2016, deans and admissions officers from more than 50 elite universities signed on to a report—Turning The Tide—a first-of-its-kind effort led by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to signal that going forward, colleges will work to de-emphasize resume padding and hyper-competitive achievement, and prioritize communal values and work taking care of others. The colleges recognized that they were powerfully positioned to transmit different cultural messages to applicants and their parents. One strength of Scott-Railton’s proposal is that colleges and universities would not have to sacrifice much to make it work. It would be relatively cost-neutral to implement, and wouldn’t require schools to accept any particular students. As he puts it, the plan operates within higher education’s “existing institutional constraints.” But that also means it would be unlikely to substantially increase campus diversity, at least initially, and for that reason Scott-Railton says his idea should not be seen as an alternative to measures like affirmative action and Pell Grants. Nevertheless, Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy and an expert on college admissions, said one of the biggest challenges this kind of proposal faces is just institutional inertia. “A lot of this will come down to courage,” he said. “Universities get bogged down in political constraints, caught up in managing competing interests, and it can sometimes just be easier to do nothing, rather than try something new.” But if colleges could work up the will to try it, another benefit of this idea would be that it seems to be on solid footing legally. In the wake of Supreme Court decisions that have challenged both K–12 desegregation plans and university-level affirmative-action policies, advocates for diversity have been wary of pursuing new strategies. Scott-Railton took that into account in crafting his proposal, which recommends that admissions boosts come primarily from taking the poverty level of a school—not its racial makeup—into account, and for this reason it is more likely to withstand any kind of constitutional challenge. “My sense of his plan is that it probably threads the needle pretty effectively,” said Sam Erman, a law professor at the University of Southern California who has studied integration and affirmative action. “There are some ambiguities in the legal doctrine, but it’s hard to see how you would launch a successful attack on this idea.” Fear that the Supreme Court would eliminate race-based affirmative action has led other scholars to propose a college-admissions focus on school or neighborhood demographics. For instance, in her 2014 book Place Not Race, law professor Sheryll Cashin proposed substituting race-based affirmative action with a geographically-based system that took segregation into account. Scott-Railton’s idea builds upon this sort of notion by focusing more explicitly on using admissions to transform the makeup of K–12 institutions. As Erman told me, without some kind of new experiment, integration advocates shouldn’t expect much to improve. “Most of what we’ve seen implemented are ideas that nibble at the margins, that make relatively small adjustments to things that the court has already approved,” he said, noting that unless the court swings left, it’s reasonable to expect the legal constraints to narrow even more. “This is a very smart and strategic way of dealing with what has been the overwhelming obstacle to school integration, which is white and middle-class resistance,” said Rick Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a longtime scholar of segregation. Kahlenberg said he likes the idea not only because it creates incentives for hyper-competitive affluent families, but also because it creates a way for universities to have more students who arrive with experience navigating diverse environments. “Elite universities need more bridge-builders,” he said. “I think this is a win-win.” While the idea remains in its infancy, some other researchers have launched efforts to develop it further. Ilona Arnold-Berkovits, an education researcher at Rutgers who also began thinking more deeply about these issues after listening to the same This American Life episode which inspired Scott-Railton, launched a website, schoolbonuspoints.org, to begin mobilizing other policy experts, researchers, and funders around this idea of voluntary incentives. There may be room for additional development. Scott-Railton’s idea could offer a real bulwark against white flight, but it is ultimately focused on integrated schools more than the truly disadvantaged schools. If an incentive-based policy like this were to be truly successful, leaders would need to coordinate it with efforts that directly address schools where racial and economic segregation are far worse. A strategy that preserves integration in schools that are 40 percent low-income may have no impact at all in a school that’s 90 percent low-income. Perhaps one of the strongest merits of Scott-Railton’s idea is that it advances a new way of thinking about some very old problems, and encourages thinking about two issues—K–12 integration and diversity in higher education—together, rather than apart. “In reality, for students, it’s a seamless web,” said Kahlenberg. “One impacts the other, and it’s not really until this proposal that we’ve seen those two worlds come together.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531422372718-N1OA2KTNRA7UMJ7WUKSC/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.05.58+PM.png education - UC Regents Approve Nonresident Student Tuition Hike University of California regents voted Thursday to increase tuition for nonresident students at a time of surging enrollment and constrained state funding. They approved the increase by a 12-3 vote despite eloquent pleas from numerous students, including those from California. To try to soften the blow, regents promised to rescind the increase if they managed to successfully lobby the Legislature for more money. They also unanimously voted to ask the state to restore financial aid for needy nonresident students, a benefit eliminated in 2016. The 3.5% increase would boost the supplemental tuition that nonresident students pay by $978 — from $28,014 to $28,992 for the 2018-19 school year. If regents end up raising the base tuition — which is what in-state students pay — nonresidents would have to absorb that increase, too. UC officials say the $35 million they expect to raise from the increase will help reduce class sizes and support more academic support and counseling. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, an ex-officio regent who is running for governor, wanted Thursday's vote to be delayed while lobbying efforts to get more money from the state continued. "Once again, we're letting them off the hook by making a decision prematurely," Newsom said. He voted against the increase, as did regents John A. Pérez and Paul Monge. But UC President Janet Napolitano said the notion that the Legislature would provide more money for nonresident students was "illusory." "Reality has to intrude here," she said. Napolitano urged regents to approve the increase, with admissions decisions coming later this month. She said families need to know what their college costs will be and campuses need to know whether they can count on the revenue. After the January regents meeting, UC students, faculty, administrators, alumni and regents launched a unified push to lobby the Legislature for an additional $140 million this year. They did so in part to bring in the $70 million needed to avoid a proposed 2.7% tuition increase for California students, and regents held off voting on that increase until May in hopes of success. The rest of the money would be used to ease overcrowding, repair aging facilities and enroll more California students. But UC budget officials, in a presentation after the tuition vote, said billions of dollars more are needed for new classrooms, dorms and labs, deferred maintenance, salary increases and the hiring of more faculty to lower class sizes, as well as to cover escalating pension and health costs. UC spending per student has dropped by 31% since 2000 because state funding has not risen to fully cover the additional 90,000 students enrolled since then. The regents, meeting at UCLA, acknowledged that they needed to find longer-term solutions to their budget woes — and some suggested they should do so in a cost-saving, high-tech way that would radically reshape the UC experience. Regents Peter Guber and Lark Park asked Thursday whether UC could afford to stick with the age-old model of educating students in campus buildings and housing them in campus dorms. "I don't know that five years at a college to finish a college degree has to be all five years in brick and mortar at the school," Guber said. "That seems a little asinine to me in the world we're living in right now." Park said new ideas were imperative given fiscal realities. Students, faculty and chancellors pushed back against any major replacement of face-to-face learning with online instruction. Napolitano suggested a deep dive into UC's current online education efforts at the May meeting. Myriad financial pressures, years in the making, led to the current controversy over nonresident students. When the state cut one-third of the UC system's funding after the 2008 recession, campuses scrambled to make up the lost revenue by recruiting higher-paying out-of-state and international students. From fall 2009 to fall 2017, the number of nonresident undergraduates nearly quadrupled, to 37,217 from 9,552, while the number of Californians rose from 167,900 to 179,530, according to UC data. The growing number of nonresidents sparked a political backlash. Legislators ordered a state audit — which contended that UC officials had harmed California students by enrolling so many from out of state — and then directed UC officials to eliminate financial aid for nonresident students and place a cap on their numbers. Just before the vote Thursday, regents Park and Sherry Lansing added the amendments to lobby for more money to rescind the tuition increase and seek state approval to reinstate their eligibility for financial aid. During public comments, they had heard nonresident students' stories of hardship. Ashraf Beshay, a fifth-year UCLA biology student from Egypt, told regents that an economic collapse in his country had devalued its currency, effectively sending the cost of his UC education soaring from $50,000 to $120,000. The higher costs have forced him to go to school part time, he said, and his father recently sold his car to pay his education bills. Other students, from China, said they had to overload their schedules to graduate in three years to save money. "Don't treat us as ATM machines," one said. Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531422445833-6CGUFOGYQUBWRB2HDRVF/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.07.08+PM.png education - A New Kind Of Computer Science Major Delves Into How Technology Is Reshaping Society In an upper-level seminar on artificial intelligence, Occidental College professor Justin Li started a discussion outside the realm of a typical computer science class. Should a self-driving car, if unable to brake in time, be programmed to steer into a wall to avoid crashing into pedestrians — perhaps killing a single person in the vehicle in order to save five on the street? One question led to another. Is it morally OK to choose five lives over one? How about 10? Who gets to make this decision anyway — the programmer, the government, the person who can afford a self-driving car? Occidental established a computer science major this fall, one of numerous liberal arts colleges to do so in recent years. They've popped up at Reed College in Oregon and Whitman College in Washington state. These schools better known for teaching history and philosophy are shaping their programs to draw on their strengths. They don't just focus on the vocational or on abstract algorithms. As artificial intelligence and automation increasingly enter everyday life, their courses push students to examine how modern technology both changes and challenges society. In Maine, Bates College started a multidisciplinary Digital and Computational Studiesprogram, with aims including "to interrogate the values and assumptions of a digitized world" and "increase understanding of the power and limitations of computers in solving problems." At Occidental, where a young Barack Obama discovered political science, teaching students how to code is the straightforward part, said Li, a cognitive science professor who led the design of the major. Classes also push them to grapple with the inequalities and philosophical dilemmas that technology is creating out in the world. Such social discussions are woven into every lesson. "The goal is to make students consider the real-world implications of what they are doing — that their code is not just abstract problem-solving but may have positive or negative impacts on real people," Li said. Stephanie Angulo, a junior, says it's that sort of approach that drew her to Occidental rather than an engineering school. She hopes to break glass ceilings one day as a tech leader and wanted to study somewhere that would also teach her how to write better. "You have to think about how you communicate your ideas or how you think about problems," said Angulo, who has interned at Facebook and is studying computer science and philosophy. "My friends and I talk about these issues pretty much every day, whereas I've noticed the people I've worked with who are more engineering-focused don't tend to think about these questions as much." The broader way of looking at computer science also has the benefit of perhaps drawing new people in to help narrow tech's much-discussed diversity and gender gaps, said Andrea Danyluk, a Williams College professor and member of the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium. "We have the art major who needs to take a science course or a history student who discovers this is actually kind of cool," she said. As more multidisciplinary programs emerge, some in the field caution against taking too much focus away from the fundamentals of computer science. "You need a very solid core," said Kim Bruce, who started the departments at Williams and at Pomona College. Learn more at LA Times. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531422531100-ZIZ35XY767A3YLR3JMXP/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.08.39+PM.png education - How Immigration Crackdowns Are Hurting America's Poorest Schools Lupita Hightower is the superintendent of a school district outside Phoenix, Arizona, that's 82 percent Latino and where 89 percent of kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The Tolleson Elementary School District doesn't ask families their immigration status, but judging from the concerned calls from teachers and principals, there's a good number that include undocumented members. Hightower's staff know that she herself was once undocumented—her parents brought her to the United States when she was in 7th grade—and often ask for her help whenever a student is having a crisis. "I think, a lot of times, the principal feels that I'll be able to understand and give them hope," she says. The day after Donald Trump's election, Hightower got on the phone with a 7th-grade boy, an American citizen, who was crying inconsolably because the president's rhetoric made him think his undocumented parents would be deported. More recently, Hightower spoke with a middle-school girl whose parents had been deported to Mexico. The girl and her siblings didn't have a guardian; their 21-year-old brother was taking care of them. The girl began cutting herself as a means of coping with the stress. Hightower called a crisis team, to start the process of getting the kids help. It seems true that she understands them. "I feel their pain," she says. Tolleson Elementary's problems are disturbingly common across the country, according to a new survey from the University of California–Los Angeles. Teachers and administrators from more than 700 schools in 12 states reported to researchers that they're feeling the effects of the Trump administration's harsher immigration policies in their classrooms. In recent months, their students seem to have exhibited more emotional and behavioral problems, more school absences, and worse academic performance. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a policy of not making arrests in "sensitive locations," such as schools and churches, which means enforcement actions don't typically occur at schools (although ICE recently made headlines for arresting undocumented parentsas they dropped their kids off for the day). But educators report that the stress at home is still hitting their classrooms, hard. "The additional burden of trying to educate children who are, very often, U.S. citizens, and are living in terror of losing their families, may simply be too much to ask of our schools," says Patricia Gándara, an educational psychologist who led the survey. Among the schools Gándara and her team analyzed, those with high proportions of students from low-income families, like Tolleson, were especially likely to report dealing with the ripple effects of immigration enforcement. "The ones that struggle the most to close achievement gaps are hit the hardest by this enforcement regime," she says. "The calls coming into NEA about immigration have never been higher or more frightening," says Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, a professional group for public-school workers. Immigrant advocates have long criticized President Barack Obama for his administration's high number of deportations. But those removals usually happened at the border, according to ICE numbers. The Trump administration has overseen many more so-called "interior" deportations, of people who are already living in the country. Those are much more likely to affect families with children enrolled in American public schools. The reasons for the behavioral and academic problems that teachers and staff are seeing can be obvious. Children are worried about themselves or their parents, like the students Hightower has had to soothe. There are also myriad other ways immigration enforcement can affect schoolkids. Some of Gándara's respondents said local workplace raids had put parents out of jobs, throwing families into poverty or forcing older kids to become breadwinners. Hightower, whose district participated in the survey, says she often sees formerly high-achieving students stop trying because they don't see a future for themselves in America. And it's not just undocumented students, or the children of undocumented adults, who are affected. Of the 5,400 teachers, principals, and school counselors who answered Gándara and her team's survey, about 2,000 said kids at their schools whose families aren't threatened by deportation have nevertheless had their learning affected by their worries for their classmates. Learn more at Pacific Standard https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531422644395-1VJ9TCEXSFXYA8WTOBDC/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+12.10.28+PM.png education - Pittsburgh's Black Renaissance Started in Its Schools From the 1920s through the 1950s, Schenley High, Westinghouse High, and other city schools graduated scores of black notables and anchored the neighborhoods around them. When historians analyze the causes of the Great Migration, the exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural South in the early 20th century, they stress the urgency of escaping the vicious Jim Crow backlash against Reconstruction and the dream of finding factory jobs in Northern cities. Yet a less studied factor—worth noting in this era of crude stereotypes about black attitudes toward education—was the lure of better schools in the North. And surprisingly, nowhere was that attraction greater than in the gritty steel town of Pittsburgh. In the 19th century, what is now the University of Pittsburgh was called the Western University of Pennsylvania and considered a sister school to Penn in Philadelphia. Before his death in 1858, Charles Avery, a white Pittsburgh cotton trader whose travels through the South had awoken him to the horrors of slavery and turned him into an ardent abolitionist, endowed a fund for 12 scholarships a year at Western University for “males of the colored people in the United States of America or the British Province of Canada.” Forty years later, Robert Lee Vann, the teenage son of a former slave cook from North Carolina, traveled by himself to Pittsburgh to claim one of those scholarships. It was the start of a remarkable success story. In 1910, after earning undergraduate and law degrees from Western University, Vann accepted a job as the editor of thePittsburgh Courier, a four-page chronicle of local events. Eventually becoming publisher and owner as well, Vann transformed the Courierinto America’s best-selling black newspaper, with 14 regional editions and an avid readership in black homes, barber shops, and beauty salons across the nation. Ever since the Civil War, blacks had voted overwhelmingly Republican out of loyalty to the Great Emancipator. But in 1932, Vann used the Courier as a soapbox to urge blacks to turn “the picture of Abraham Lincoln to the wall” and vote for FDR, beginning a migration to the Democratic Party that transformed American politics. As World War II loomed, Vann pressed for a greater role for black soldiers. After his death in 1940, his successors led a “Double Victory” campaign to rally black support at home while demanding an end to racial injustice once the war was over. (Sadly, that second victory never materialized—a betrayal that the Courier exposed as dashed hopes helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement.) Read more at City Lab https://civicas.net/politics-2 daily 0.75 2018-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622587032-9ALU61A5BWHWUKX7KYW7/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.29.18+AM.png politics - Without Mentioning Trump by Name, Obama Takes Aim at 'Strongman Politics' https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622587032-9ALU61A5BWHWUKX7KYW7/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.29.18+AM.png politics - Without Mentioning Trump by Name, Obama Takes Aim at 'Strongman Politics' https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531950118112-H6KS3C0LY1M07TJCKPUT/Screen+Shot+2018-07-18+at+2.41.44+PM.png politics - Americans Say Barack Obama Was The Best President Of Their Lifetime https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531949577713-Y450XCITHISMIT9DU2BP/Screen+Shot+2018-07-18+at+2.29.56+PM.png politics - Putin Weaves KGB Tradecraft and Attention to Detail in a Remarkable Meeting With Trump https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531860099224-S0USHOZVWTEJ0RTKTTXN/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+1.40.04+PM.png politics - I.R.S. Will No Longer Force Kochs and Other Groups to Disclose Donors https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531764928413-K4NJZHT9FSEEI2X93RMI/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+11.14.57+AM.png politics - GOP Senators Downplaying Russian Interference Shows How Trump has Co-Opted the Party With Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve THE BIG IDEA: Last year, in an interview on Super Bowl Sunday, Bill O’Reilly challenged President Trump over his desire to improve relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Putin’s a killer,” said the then-Fox News host. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “We got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. . . . So, a lot of killers around, believe me.” There was strong and vocal pushback at the time from most elected Republicans. -- Over the past several days, as Trump again engaged in a spree of whataboutism and moral relativism ahead of today’s summit in Helsinki with Putin, far fewer GOP lawmakers have called him out. Piers Morgan, the former CNN host and a one-time contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice,” interviewed Trump aboard Air Force One for the Daily Mail as he visited the United Kingdom. As the president discussed his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Morgan interrupted: “He’s a ruthless dictator.” “Sure he is,” Trump said. “He’s ruthless, but so are others. I mean, I could name plenty of others that we deal with that you don’t say the same thing about. I mean plenty of the people that I deal with are pretty ruthless people.” Asked if Putin would be in that group, Trump replied: “I can’t tell you that. I assume he probably is. But I could name others also. Look, if we can get along with Russia, that’s a good thing.” Then, in an interview that aired Sunday, CBS’s Jeff Glor asked Trump at his golf course in Scotland to identify the “biggest foe globally right now.” Trump named the European Union, which includes many of America’s closest historic allies. “Well, I think we have a lot of foes,” the president said. “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now you wouldn't think of the European Union, but they're a foe. Russia is foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically … But that doesn't mean they are bad. It doesn't mean anything. It means that they are competitive.” Trump also continued his pattern of blaming the American victim, not the foreign attacker. The president attacked the Democratic National Committee for allowing itself to get hacked and Barack Obama for not more forcefully responding, rather than the Russian government for conducting the hacks. “We had much better defenses. I’ve been told that by a number of people. We had much better defenses, so they couldn’t,” Trump said on CBS, referring to his campaign and the Republican National Committee. “I think the DNC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked. They had bad defenses and they were able to be hacked.” -- Trump hasn’t changed, but the Republican Party has.CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday how Trump should hold Putin accountable after a dozen Russian officials were indicted last week for orchestrating a massive hacking campaign to interfere with American democracy. Paul replied that it is unrealistic to hold Moscow accountable. “They are going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same,” said Paul, citing a study that he said shows the United States interfered in the elections of other countries 81 times during a 50-year period in the last century. “So, we all do it. What we need to do is make sure our electoral process is protected.” Paul, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, has always been a libertarian, but he often tried to downplay this side of his worldviewwhen he sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Now that Trump is in control, he’s talking much more like his father again. -- Even traditional hawks are now minimizing what the Russians did in 2016. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who chairs the Europe subcommittee on Foreign Relations, said after returning from a July Fourth visit to Moscow that Congress overreacted to Russia’s interference in our elections. “I've been pretty upfront that the election interference — as serious as that was and unacceptable — is not the greatest threat to our democracy,” he told the conservative Washington Examiner. “We've blown it way out of proportion — [as if it's] the greatest threat to democracy . . . We need to really honestly assess what actually happened, what effect did it have, and what effect are our sanctions actually having, positively and negatively.” Would he feel the same way if Russia interfered in his 2016 reelection campaign to help Russ Feingold, his Democratic opponent? “Johnson’s remarks to the Examiner were highlighted by Russian state media,” Roll Call reported. “The Russian news agency TASS reported on Johnson’s comments, as did Sputnik International.” Pressed on his comments last week during an appearance on WOSH, an AM talk radio station in Oshkosh, Johnson doubled down on his position that the U.S. faces more serious threats than election hacking. “It’s very difficult to really meddle in our elections,” the senator said. “It just is. These are locally run. It’s almost impossible to change the vote tally. My concern would be violating the voter files, but we have those issues anyway and there are plenty of controls on that. … From a standpoint of using social media, we spent a couple of billion dollars on the last election. They, maybe, spent a couple hundred thousand.” -- “Most countries would meddle and play in our domestic elections if they could, and some of them have,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said recently. “We have to be realistic [that] nations are going to do what is in their [national] interest. We’ve done a lot of things, too.” Shelby, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, made that comment to the Examiner as he prepared to lead a delegation of Senate Republicans on a CODEL to Russia. The group was in Moscow when the Senate Intelligence Committee published a bipartisan report that validated the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in 2016 election on the personal orders of Putin. “I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth,” Shelby told the speaker of the Duma in Moscow during the controversial trip. Shelby later sought to clarify that he was not saying Russia and the U.S. are the same, and that he is not excusing everything Moscow has done. “I was just stating the reality of it,” he told the Daily Beast. -- It’s hard to be surprised anymore, but it is nonetheless surreal to read quotes from Republican senators that sound like they might have been uttered instead by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn or Chalmers Johnson. Conservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick hammered peacenik liberals for this sort of relativism during the Cold War. Republicans used to be the ones who not only espoused American exceptionalism but accused Democrats of acting like the United States was just another name on the United Nations roster, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe. As Ronald Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, “I urge you to beware the temptation of … blithely declaring yourselves above it all and to label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” -- Trump, who took out full-page newspaper ads to attack Reagan’s foreign policy during the 1980s (even as it was winning the Cold War), has remade the Republican Party in his image over the past three years. The president has shown a consistent impulse to blame “both sides.” After the violence in Charlottesville last August, Trump said there are “two sides to a story.” He attacked counterprotesters for acting “very, very violently” as they came “with clubs in their hand” at the neo-Nazis and KKK members who were protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that,” Trump said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt? Do they have any problem? I think they do!” -- To be sure, there are notable holdouts. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), battling brain cancer, put out a rare statement calling on Trump to cancel today’s meeting — if he is “not prepared to hold Putin accountable.” “Putin is a murderer,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) tweetedSunday night. “He has ordered the assassinations of political adversaries and used outlawed chemical weapons to do it. He oversees Russian military units that shot down Malaysian flight 17 and murdered almost 300 civilians. … Putin is a crook and a liar. He has broken almost every agreement he has signed with the United States, including on Syria and Ukraine. He has become one of the world's richest men through embezzlement and stealing from his own people.” -- Paul’s comments on the Sunday shows were deeply revealing. The senator was adamant that he was not engaging in moral equivalency, but he suggested multiple times that the Kremlin was reacting to U.S. policy. Among the supposed provocations: Hillary Clinton calling for free and fair elections in Russia when she was secretary of state. “One of the reasons they really didn't like Hillary Clinton,” he told Tapper on CNN, “is they found her responsible for some of the activity by the U.S. in their elections under the Obama administration.” Explaining his decision to vote against a resolution expressing support for NATO last week, Paul reached back even further: “The provocation of pushing NATO forward after … James Baker promised [Mikhail] Gorbachev in 1990 when Germany unified that we would not go, the West would not go, one inch beyond Germany, and yet, a couple years later, under the Clinton administration, we kept pushing, pushing, pushing. … From Russia's perspective, they see NATO expansion as a threat. … Part of their militarism and part of their nationalism problem may be inherent to the tides of the current century there, but it's also in reaction to policy from the West as well.” -- This view is squarely outside the mainstream among foreign policy experts in both parties. Col. James McDonough, the U.S. Army’s attache to Poland, highlighted “Russia’s Moral Hypocrisy” in a piece for Task and Purpose magazine this spring: “Russian soldiers occupy Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine in violation of all international norms. Through these occupations Moscow enables the pirate state of Transnistria, enables the backwards ‘independence’ of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, strips Crimea from its internationally recognized sovereign, and feeds the Russian separatist movement in the Donbass. After supporting Libyan leader Mommar Khadafi for years, the Kremlin now backs one of his henchmen, warlord Khalifa Hafter, instead of the Western-backed, and UN-recognized, Government of National Accord, reportedly in exchange for military basing rights in eastern Libya. Further east in Sudan, Russia is exporting arms to the government of Omar al-Bashir whose abysmal record on human rights has left him shunned by more civilized countries. Most alarmingly, Russia has cozied up to Iran, the most significant exporter of terrorism in the Middle East, and Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, whose atrocities against his own people are now well known to the world. Russia’s bedfellows reek, and yet Moscow does not mind the smell. And where on the globe has Russian foreign policy been a force for justice and decency? Nothing comes to mind.” If you want to go deeper, here are two recent pieces that capture what was until recently a bipartisan consensus: “Russia and America Aren't Morally Equivalent. There is no comparison between Russian efforts to undermine elections and American efforts to strengthen them,” by Princeton professor Thomas Melia in the Atlantic. “Russia’s nefarious meddling is nothing like democracy assistance,” by Daniel Twining, president of the International Republican Institute, and Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute, in The Washington Post. -- Paul announced during a separate appearance Sunday on Fox News that he’s planning a trip to Russia next month with members of the libertarian Cato Institute. “We’ll be talking to the president after Helsinki and asking him if there’s something we can follow up on,” the Kentucky senator told Ed Henry. “I think there are a lot of simplistic people out there on both sides of the aisle that are criticizing President Trump. Engagement is a good idea. Even during the height of the Cuban missile crisis, there was a direct line of communication between [John] Kennedy and [Nikita] Khrushchev. … We don’t want to mistakenly amble into a war because we were in close proximity and didn’t know it.” -- In March, the Russian Embassy in Washington tweeted a picture of Paul meeting with Ambassador Anatoly Antonov. It said that the two men had discussed “improving” and “restoring” relations. A few minutes later, the embassy deleted that tweet. The picture was later reposted with a more anodyne caption that used neither of those words, according to Business Insider. -- Asked on CBS if he’ll demand Putin to extradite the dozen Russians who have been indicted by the Justice Department, Trump said: “I hadn’t thought of that.” “Well, I might,” he added. “But, again, this was during the Obama administration. They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration.” “It’s pretty silly for the president to demand something that he can’t get legally,” national security adviser John Bolton said on ABC. “The Russians take the position — you can like it or not like it — that their constitution forbids them to extradite Russian citizens.” U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman added on NBC that the FBI will “no doubt” work with the embassy to submit the request, but he noted that this “doesn’t necessarily mean that the Russians are going to follow through.” Paul said on CNN that making such a request would “be a moot point”: “I don't think Russia is sending anyone back over here for trial, the same way we wouldn't send anybody over there for trial. No country with any sovereignty or sense of sovereignty is sending anybody to another country for trial.” BLINKING RED LIGHTS: -- It was overshadowed by the indictments, but the nation’s top intelligence official gave a very significant speech on Friday afternoon at the Hudson Institute think tank in D.C. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, likened the cyber threat today to the climate before Sept. 11, 2001, when intelligence channels were “blinking red” with warning signs that a terrorist attack was imminent. “Here we are nearly two decades later, and I’m here to say the warning lights are blinking red again,” Coats said, according to the Associated Press. “The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, in coordination with international partners, have detected Russian government actors targeting government and businesses in the energy, nuclear, water, aviation and critical manufacturing sectors. … We are seeing aggressive attempts to manipulate social media and to spread propaganda focused on hot-button issues that are intended to exacerbate socio-political divisions.” Coats added that intelligence analysts are not seeing the identical sort of electoral interference as two years ago. “However, we fully realize that we are just one click on a keyboard away from a similar situation repeating itself,” he said. “These actions are persistent. They’re pervasive and they are meant to undermine America’s democracy on a daily basis, regardless of whether it is election time or not.” -- Here are three other sobering stories that should be on your radar: 1. The same Russian military intelligence service accused of disrupting our 2016 election is also believed to be responsible for the nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England, earlier this year. Ellen Barry, Michael Schwirtz and Eric Schmitt report in today’s New York Times: “British investigators believe the March 4 attack … was most probably carried out by current or former agents of the service, known as the G.R.U., who were sent to his home in southern England … British officials are now closing in on identifying the individuals they believe carried out the operation[.] [The Justice Department’s Friday indictment] detailed a sophisticated operation … carried out by a Russian military intelligence service few Americans know about. But analysts and government officials say the G.R.U. [serves] as an undercover strike force for the Kremlin in conflicts around the world. The agency has been linked to Russia’s hybrid war in Ukraine, as well as the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It has been involved in the seizing of Syrian cities on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad. In more peaceful regions, the G.R.U. is accused of creating political turmoil, mobilizing Slavic nationalists in Montenegro and funding protests to try to prevent Macedonia’s recent name change.” 2. “Russia Hawk Axed From National Security Council Right Before Trump-Putin Summit,” by the Daily Beast’s Kate Brannen and Spencer Ackerman: “The circumstances of retired Army Colonel Richard Hooker’s departure from the National Security Council on June 29 are in dispute. It’s not clear whether Hooker was forced out or if his detail on the NSC came to its natural end. But what’s not in doubt is that for the past 15 months, Hooker was senior director for Russia, Europe and NATO. … Hooker ended his tour on the National Security Council early after he discussed information pertinent to Russia with foreign officials without proper authorization, according to two government officials. … A former NSC official strongly denied [that] account.” 3. “A senior FBI official overseeing a government task force that addresses Russian attempts to meddle in U.S. elections has left the government for a job in the private sector,” the Wall Street Journal’s Dustin Volz reported Saturday. “Jeffrey Tricoli had been coleading the FBI foreign influence task force until June, when he left government work for a senior vice president job at Charles Schwab Corp. … Mr. Tricoli, an 18-year veteran of the FBI who became a section chief of the bureau’s cyber division in December 2016, didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to his personal email and LinkedIn account. “The reason for Mr. Tricoli’s departure wasn’t clear. But it adds to questions among some tech companies and lawmakers about how much the administration, and the task force in particular, are doing to protect future elections from Russian meddling. “Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and author of a book about information wars on social media, said the Trump administration has shown little interest in addressing Russian meddling, leaving the FBI’s efforts to tackle foreign influence ‘reactive’ instead of anticipatory.” -- Hard feelings watch: Jeb Bush named “The Manchurian Candidate” as the greatest political novel of all time. “It is a good read and shows that the Russians have always tried to get involved in our elections,” the former Florida governor told Steve Israel for a feature that ran this weekend. Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531518621524-MD743B8JXKKSA5B6FJYB/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.50.07+PM.png politics - California's Primary Election Saw Higher Turnout Than Recent Years, but Most Voters Still Skipped It In a sign of how modest expectations have become of Californians actually casting ballots, elections officials and advocates alike found relief Monday in the final tally showing 37% of voters cast ballots in June — small compared with total registration but the highest for a nonpresidential primary since 1998. Slightly more than 7.1 million voters participated in last month’s statewide election. Although it’s the third-highest number of ballots ever cast in a California primary — the record was set in 2000 — last month’s turnout was roughly equal to the average from similar elections since 1982. Just hitting the historic benchmark, though, is notable. Four years ago, statewide primary turnout dropped to a record low 25%. The tone of that election season was far more tepid; this time, pockets of the Golden State heard the call to arms in a national partisan battle that energized at least some number of voters. Also different than years past were new state laws designed to lower the barriers to participation. For whatever reason, be it frenzied politics or sober reforms, advocates said they hope June’s results are more trend than transitory. “We’re making progress — slowly, but it’s progress,” said Helen Hutchison, president of the League of Women Voters of California. Forty-seven counties reported voter turnout on June 5 higher than the statewide average, though many of the localities are rural regions with relatively few voters. Only 15 counties saw a majority of registered voters cast ballots. Los Angeles County reported voter turnout of 28%, the second lowest in California but a high water mark compared with previous primaries in off-year elections. Four years ago, the total was fewer than 1 in 7. “Increases in voter participation likely depend on the extent to which we can make voting relevant to a broader population of the electorate,” said Dean Logan, county registrar of voters. Six of the 10 largest counties by population beat the statewide 37% average, most of those in Northern California. That follows one of the state’s well-known political axioms: Southern California may have more voters, but they are less likely to show up on election day. That phenomenon often helps north-state candidates, a truism reinforced by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s strong showing in June’s race for governor compared with his closest Democratic rival, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Final numbers, with a formal certification of the results expected on Friday, show some 239,000 more ballots were cast across the Bay Area’s nine counties than in Los Angeles County — even though it’s home to 1.2 million more registered voters than the northern counties combined. Newsom’s home territory accounted for almost 4 of every 10 votes he received. For Republicans, who feared a shutout of the state’s top races that could lead party voters to skip the November election, saw strength in their base communities. That could have been helped by President Trump’s decision to endorse a GOP candidate, John Cox, in the race for governor. The nine counties with the largest Republican registration advantage, though smaller than those dominated by Democrats, all beat the statewide turnout average. In some cases, intense local races appear to have helped boost turnout. In San Francisco, where voters weighed in on a heated race for mayor, elections officials reported 52% turnout — higher than the city has seen, according to state election records, for any nonpresidential primary in at least the last quarter-century. In Orange County, home to four closely watched congressional races drawing national attention, 42% of voters cast ballots. A review by Political Data Inc., a private election analysis firm, found an average boost of 21 percentage points in the districts compared with 2014. But here, too, the conclusion drawn depends on the way the numbers are viewed. Although voters in those congressional districts were more energized than four years ago, there was either no uptick compared with 2016 or, in some cases, it appears overall turnout actually shrunk. The numbers are especially striking in some subgroups: Latino voters make up 20% of Orange County’s registered electorate but only 14% of the votes cast last month. “Voter participation is a complex issue and influenced by a number of factors,” Hutchison said. Of particular interest to voting rights groups were the impact of a handful of voting changes, some more wide-ranging than others, enacted by lawmakers since 2014. Ballots received in county offices three days after an election are now required to be counted, as long as they were postmarked no later than election day. Last month’s primary was also the first to allow voter registration on election day, an effort designed to encourage those who get interested late in the campaign season. It will probably take weeks or months to fully sift through data to assess the effect of those changes. One key question in June’s primary was whether more voters would show up in five California counties — the first proving grounds for the most sweeping change made to state elections. Those communities were the first to enact the “California Voter’s Choice Act,” a 2016 law allowing counties to discontinue the use of neighborhood polling places and exchange them with all-mail ballots and a handful of vote centers with a variety of election services. Of the five counties that used the new system — Sacramento, Napa, Nevada, Madera and San Mateo — only one, Nevada County, saw turnout above 50%. In general, the numbers represented only modest improvements in turnout from past gubernatorial primaries. “Most of the new innovations are focused on removing impediments – making it more convenient to register and to vote, opening up early voting, improving access for language minorities and people with disabilities,” said Dora Rose, deputy director of the League of Women Voters of California. California’s terms of office for statewide officials — from governor to attorney general and beyond — are staggered with each presidential term, thus occurring at the midway point of the national campaign cycle. The practical effect has almost always been lower voter turnout for the state contests, even though those officials hold far greater power over everyday life for Californians than does the president. The highest turnout for a gubernatorial primary in the state’s modern era was in 1978, when almost 69% of registered voters showed up. From there, the numbers steadily fell until 1998, when an open race for governor sparked a spirited campaign between three Democrats. Forty-two percent of voters cast ballots in that primary, and the numbers have dropped ever since. Additional changes in the election process could help. Two bills, passed by the California Legislature, could reduce the number of voters who fail to get their ballot counted. One would require postage-paid envelopes be sent with ballots in the mail, while the second would require county officials to contact a voter whose ballot signatures don’t match. “Both of these bills cost money to enact, but spending resources now to support voters would demonstrate that California’s leaders believe democracy is a worthwhile investment,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. Others suggest looking at the problem of participation beyond those who are already registered. When including all eligible Californians — not just those who are currently registered to vote — the effective participation in the June 5 primary drops to only 28% of the state’s citizens. Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote after the primary that “voter apathy is nothing new in California,” an opinion that generated hundreds of comments and tens of thousands of social media interactions. “We need to make sure election information is in plain language and available in multiple languages, provide clear explanations of ballot measures, shed light on campaign finance, and make it easier for voters to hear directly from candidates,” Rose said. “Not only do we want to see voter participation increased, we want to see California’s electorate be more representative,” she said. Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531520395855-K3KPTMFHTO03T59353LI/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.18.17+PM.png politics - The End of Civil Rights The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling racist heist. Activists hoped that the Ferguson report—which was prompted by the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black teenager and found that police conduct had “severely damaged the relationship between African Americans and the Ferguson Police Department”—would not only change the city, but would signal that the United States was finally willing to confront the legacy of white supremacy. The Ferguson City Council reluctantly agreed to a consent decree with the DOJ that would overhaul city policing. Federal courts rejected voter-suppression schemes and reaffirmed affirmative action. Movements from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ advocacy saw an opportunity to broaden the national civil-rights agenda. Then Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III took over. More than a year has elapsed since Sessions, formerly a senator from Alabama, was appointed U.S. attorney general by President Donald Trump. For the Trump administration, much of the last 18 months has been spent fighting the fires of one scandal after the next, and watching as the sprawling investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—led by Sessions’s own department—has threatened to consume Washington. In that particular drama, the president and his attorney general have clashed. Trump has openly insulted Sessions, claiming that Sessions took a “weak position” on investigating intelligence leaks, and saying that he “would have quickly picked someone else” had he known how Sessions would handle the Russia investigation. But behind the scenes, even as the president has agitated in public about firing his attorney general, Sessions is the true architect of much of what people believe to be Trump’s domestic-policy agenda. As implemented in recent decisions to curtail asylum grants, ramp up immigration enforcement, and dial back criminal-justice reform and voting-rights protections, this agenda is more than just the reversal of policies enacted during the Barack Obama era, which Trump promised during his campaign. Rather, from the Black Belt in Alabama in the 1980s to the farthest reaches of the border fence today, the Sessions Doctrine is the endgame of a long legal tradition of undermining minority civil rights. The Sessions Doctrine has moved somewhat suddenly to the forefront of the national conversation in the wake of aggressive moves by the Justice Department against immigration. Sessions has recently pushed for changes in the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the immigration-court system embedded within the DOJ. He’s considering ways to force judges to process more deportation cases, changes that several experts say will undoubtedly mean that fewer people receive due process or fair hearings. The attorney general has also moved to firmly limit asylum grants, and last week announced that he could effectively eliminate the ability of immigrants who face domestic or gang violence back home to successfully apply for asylum. That decision risks sending more vulnerable women and targets of gang violence back to dangerous situations. The asylum announcement came after a Mother Jones investigation found that a Salvadoran woman pressed into slavery by a gang that had killed her husband had been denied an asylum request under the Obama-era Board of Immigration Appeals in 2016 because her slave labor had constituted “material support” for a terrorist group. In a 2018 decision upholding the denial, the Board of Immigration Appeals reasoned that her denial was justified on the grounds that “any contributions to terrorist organizations further their terrorism.” That justification—like several other pieces of immigration and asylum policy—is merely a continuance of Obama-era decisions, but the request from the current board to reconsider her protection from deportation is another sign of a shift toward a stark black-and-white view of immigration, and a much more powerful deportation engine. Sessions successfully pushed Trump to end the Obama “catch and release” policy, under which unverified immigrants arrested in the immigration dragnet were let go before trial, and has enforced the “zero tolerance” policyin its place, one detaining all arrested immigrants pending trial. He’s instructed U.S. Attorneys to prioritize prosecuting first-time offenders among undocumented immigrants, and last week cited the Bible in defending the decision to separate mothers and children at the border, telling critics “to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.” When reached by email, a DOJ spokesperson said of the department’s immigration efforts: “In an effort to combat years of neglect and a lack of leadership in the immigration court system, the Justice Department has implemented a number of common-sense reforms designed to reduce the backlog without compromising due process.” For Paul W. Schmidt, former chairman of EOIR’s Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 to 2001 and a former EOIR immigration judge, the immigration system has always been vulnerable to naked political plays by the attorney general, but Sessions has so far been the boldest in making such plays. EOIR is “a division of the Justice Department, which is ridiculous,” he says. “You have a biased attorney general who’s jamming more cases into the system, and he reaches down and pulls out individual decisions he doesn’t like—a lot of them relating to asylum-seekers, women, and vulnerable groups—so he can rewrite the law to fit his white-nationalist agenda. It’s basically a kangaroo court.” Sessions’s immigration agenda extends well beyond his tightening grip over immigration courts and asylum boards. Even in the framework of the Justice Department’s new opioid policy, Sessions made clear he believed that so-called sanctuary cities and unverified immigrants had essentially imported the opioid problem into the U.S. In retaliation for such cities’ continued refusal to enforce strict federal immigration detentions and referrals, Sessions has fought to strip them of certain avenues of federal-grant funding. Under his guidance, the DOJ’s current top civil-rights lawyer has fought to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census, a change that many immigration advocates and researchers believe will make unverified immigrants more vulnerable to raids and reduce response rates among all immigrants, and in the process punish population centers where immigrants are heavily represented. According to Schmidt, the recent moves on immigration reflect a broader set of priorities that share several common threads. “He’s abandoned prison reform,” Schmidt says. “He’s favoring gerrymandering and other ways of cutting down minority voters. He’s cut protections for LGBT people. Foreign nationals are at the top of his hit list, but basically all vulnerable minorities and people of color are somewhere on his hit list.” The attorney general didn’t waste any time in making his priorities clear. Upon taking up his office in the Robert F. Kennedy building, just 12 days after his confirmation and swearing in, Sessions issued the first of many memos that would roll back the Obama administration’s criminal-justice priorities. On February 21, 2017, the DOJ rescinded a memo from the previous fall that had pledged to wind down the federal government’s contracts with private prisons. Following years of pressure from criminal-justice advocates, and reporting that outlined massive racial disparities, rampant abuse—especially of immigrants—and administrative inefficiencies in federal private prisons, the 2016 decision rested on a review from the Office of the Inspector General, which found that “contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable [Federal Bureau of Prisons] institutions.” In rescinding former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’s private-prison memo, Sessions did not mention the OIG’s report, or any of the allegations of brutality and misconduct in private prisons. He merely stated that the policy “impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.” With that, the DOJ set the course for an approach to law-and-order that relied more heavily on incarceration, one that pays little attention to data and statistics, and even less attention to the voices of the communities most in need. In one of his first prepared remarks as attorney general, Sessions outlined his doctrine as such: Rather than dictating to local police how to do their jobs – or spending scarce federal resources to sue them in court – we should use our money, research and expertise to help them figure out what is happening and determine the best ways to fight crime. [...] We need to resist the temptation to ignore or downplay this crisis and instead tackle it head-on, to ensure justice and safety for all Americans. We need to enforce our laws and put bad men behind bars. And we need to support the brave men and women of law enforcement as they work day and night to protect us. But Sessions “has definitely been a force for a regressive approach to criminal justice,” says Inimai Chettiar, the director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Since the day he set foot in office, he has one by one repealed the vast majority of items put forward by the Obama administration to advance reforms, not only in policing but with prosecutors and private prisons.” According to Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017, the pace and extent of retrenchment under the first year of Sessions’s tenure have been extraordinary. “This DOJ and Jeff Sessions are rolling back civil-rights progress and undermining fundamental American values of equality and justice in a fairly unprecedented manner,” Gupta told me. “Across every issue, from criminal-justice reform to voting rights to LGBTQ rights, the attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow, and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all.” T he Trump administration sees the Trump Doctrine as a negation of the Obama presidency, as Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, reported, or perhaps more crassly, as “the ‘Fuck Obama’ Doctrine.” This portrayal of the current executive line as a hindbrain-level reaction to even the slightest whiff of the White House’s previous occupant makes sense, and is probably the only way to consistently interpret Trump’s wildly impulsive policy gesticulation. But just as Obama himself is tied to a deeper tradition of racial discourse and civil rights in this country, so is his backlash. The history of voting rights and desegregation in America over the past 50 years—from the civil-rights movement through the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which to gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act—might be told well by the story of Alabama alone. It is a story in which Sessions’s own career is rooted, and one in which he’s played a central role over the past few decades. Sessions was only a teenager in 1963, when Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama. To keep his promise to resist the integration of schools in the state, Wallace took things into his own hands, personally obstructing the federally mandated enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. With his largely symbolic action, Wallace firmly cemented himself as a champion of “massive resistance,” a scorched-earth policy of state and local pushback against federally enforced civil-rights protections. Massive resistance had begun in Virginia after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and spread through the South. Through Wallace, it became the official policy platform of the entire state of Alabama. Arrayed against Wallace’s resistance was the Justice Department, including its relatively new Civil Rights Division. President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach engaged in an intricate dance with Wallace, including the famed confrontation between Katzenbach and Wallace outside the door frame of the university, after which—facing an intervention by the National Guard—Wallace stood down. The crucial role of the Civil Rights Division in defusing the situation in Alabama, and the growing and changing mandate of the department as a whole, is often overlooked. The 1963 incident came after years of similar resistance from southern states to integration. Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall oversaw much of the federal response, and developed a standard doctrine for dealing with education-related intransigence to integration. The approach had been solidified a year before Wallace’s big stand, during a lethal series of riots at Ole Miss over the attempt by James Meredith, a black student and activist, to integrate. Meredith was successfully able to attend the school with the help of an armed intervention by the National Guard, a moment made possible by black activists, the White House, white state officials, and, most notably, Marshall and the Civil Rights Division. These incidents changed the nature of the modern relationship between state and federal governments, and established the role of the Justice Department in securing civil rights. The theory of massive resistance was based in provocation, forcing the federal government to flex muscles—such as the potential mobilization of troops—that it had been loathe to use against state governments for almost a century. In Mississippi and Alabama, however, the Kennedys, Katzenbach, and Marshall put that option back on the table to defend the civil rights of former second-class citizens, and in doing so, recast the DOJ as a powerful ally for the aggrieved. In a sense, the biggest new advantage of the 1960s civil-rights movement compared with previous eras was the presence of federal leadership in the form of the DOJ, and a willingness by the attorney general and other top officials to use the full extent of the department’s power. As Marshall said in a 1985 interview, “The use of federal force is a last resort was our policy and I still think it was a proper policy.” As the federal government’s role in civil rights evolved, state obstruction grew more sophisticated. Faced with automatic scrutiny of new voting laws from the DOJ and courts, southern leaders nevertheless pushed ahead with schemes such as at-large voting plans, integration-busting private schools, and school-district secessions that in the aggregate helped maintain de facto segregation. Alabama was once again on the front line. The state that had served as ground zero for much of the struggle over black voting rights during the civil-rights movement was also—predictably—the theater for the long guerrilla war against the Voting Rights Act after its passage, so much so that many of the cases cited most often as precedent on VRA enforcement come from Alabama. As detailed in a report from some of Alabama’s most iconic civil-rights litigators, “Between the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act and the 1982 reauthorization … the Department of Justice objected fifty-nine times,” to new elections laws that the state had to submit to federal scrutiny.. “In addition,” the litigators wrote, “the Department of Justice sent observers to Alabama jurisdictions 107 times during the same period.” Into that fray stepped Jeff Sessions, a lawyer from Selma who rose through the ranks in the Southern District of Alabama. In 1985, as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Sessions chose to pursue a voter-fraud investigation against three black organizers in Alabama’s Black Belt, including one former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., Al Turner. The case, built on allegations of tampering with absentee ballots, didn’t net any convictions, but inflamed the still-raw wounds left after Jim Crow. Sessions faced accusations that his investigation was racist, that he ignored similarly clever absentee schemes that had been used by whites for decades, and that federal attorneys used intimidating tactics that could easily chill black political participation over what seemed to be minor discrepancies. Sessions and the DOJ defended his prosecution with the charge that he’d actually protected the voting rights of black belt citizens against three potential fraudsters. Sessions always maintained that he should’ve won the case. “I guarantee you there was sufficient evidence for a conviction," he said after the trial. Still, the prosecution that Turner described as a “witch hunt” made enemies of none other than Coretta Scott King, the civil-rights activist and widow of Martin Luther King Jr., who submitted a letter opposing Sessions’s 1986 nomination to the judgeship of the court for which he served as attorney. Scott King wrote: I urge you to consider carefully Mr. Sessions’ conduct in these matters. Such a review, I believe, raises serious questions about his commitment to the protection of the voting rights of all American citizens and consequently his fair and unbiased judgment regarding this fundamental right. When the circumstances and facts surrounding the indictments of Al Turner, his wife, Evelyn, and Spencer Hogue are analyzed, it becomes clear that the motivation was political, and the result frightening—the wide-scale chill of the exercise of the ballot for blacks, who suffered so much to receive that right in the first place. The nomination failed. But Sessions’s career continued apace. As the state’s attorney general, he pushed an expansive capital-punishment agenda, fighting to execute some intellectually disabled people. In an appeals court, he successfully argued in favor of the death penalty for a black defendant whose conviction had come after a trial during which a prosecutor rebutted the defense’s insanity case by arguing that “this is not another case of niggeritous.” Sessions supported a failed bill to execute people who received two or more serious drug offenses. And as a ProPublica investigation chronicles, while the state attorney general, Sessions also fought a long legal battle against a court order seeking to equalize funding for Alabama’s still-segregated schools. Sessions has professed a long career of ameliorating the injustices of Alabama’s herrenvolk regime. “I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African-American brothers and sisters. I have witnessed it,” he told the Senate last January. But the historical record often places his work in conflict with those of civil-rights activists and federal watchdogs. As he told the Montgomery Advertiser in 1995 after becoming Alabama Attorney General, his agenda was to “defend the state aggressively” in what the paper calls “certain types of lawsuits”—namely federal civil-rights cases. After 12 years as the main federal prosecutor in the state, two years as the state’s attorney general, and 20 years as a senator, the abysmal racial disparities in Alabama persist, and racially disparate disenfranchisement laws remained on the books even in 2017. W hile Barack Obama’s civil-rights and civil-liberties legacy is more than complicated as a result of his foreign-policy and domestic-surveillance records, his Justice Department was built with the heritage of aggressive civil-rights enforcement in mind. Notably, Obama’s first assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, Tom Perez, had worked for years as a federal prosecutor of hate crimes. Perez’s boss at the time, Attorney General Eric Holder, testified twice in favor of anti-hate-crime legislation passed in memory of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., two men killed in separate hate-related incidents in 1998. Under Holder and then his successor, Loretta Lynch, the department moved to address some racial disparities and the most punitive federally enforced crime policies. In addition to rolling back private prisons; moving toward more systemic civil-rights enforcement of police departments and brutality; and leveraging that move for arranging consent decrees, court-enforced agreements between a municipality and the DOJ to implement recommendations for improvement; one of the most consequential policies of Holder’s DOJ was the Smart on Crime initiative, which began in early 2013. That initiative was intended to give federal prosecutors more discretion to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses. Additionally, DOJ memos dialed back federal marijuana prosecutions where state law had decriminalized or legalized the drug, and the department ended a federal-asset-forfeiture program that in its final year of operation had netted local, state, and federal officials $65 million in cash, homes, and other property—even from some suspects who’d never been charged with a crime. In his tenure as attorney general, Jeff Sessions has made it a point to end each of these policies. In fact, he has expressed deep suspicion of the very idea of criminal-justice reform, and of any scrutiny of police actions. Instead of the aggressive “patterns and practice” investigations of whole police departments, the DOJ has emphasized “local control and accountability” in its collaborative initiatives. The department has ramped up the surveillance of black activists—even as the ranks of white-supremacist extremism and hate crimes surge—and brought to bear a narrative that crime in America increased under previous reforms. Sessions has led the DOJ away from some of its most expansive voting-rights enforcement, and reinvigorated the War on Drugs. And he has placed undocumented immigration as a major part of the problem in all phases of his criminal-justice, drug, and voting-rights changes. “The attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all,” Vanita Gupta said. The DOJ declined to comment on “ongoing matters” related to criminal-justice reforms and consent decrees. In a sense, the narrow vision of America bellowed from Trump’s bully pulpit and advanced more incisively through Sessions’s canon of memos is a fulfillment of a promise first made by President Richard Nixon and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, when they married the “southern strategy” with an urban War on Drugs. The union of those platforms creates a paradigm that favors expanding federal enforcement when it comes to crimes in which minorities are often considered perpetrators, but pushes against federal enforcement when civil rights are involved. Consider one of the FBI’s newest domestic-terrorism classifications, the “black identity extremist,” a designation first created in an August 2017 report from the FBI Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, and first made public by Foreign Policy in October. According to The New York Times, the report asserts that “black activists’ grievances about racialized police violence and inequities in the criminal justice system have spurred retaliatory violence against law enforcement officers,” citing sparse incidents of violence against police officers as proof that the Black Lives Matter movement engenders violence. In his testimony to the Congressional Black Caucus, Brennan Center fellow and former FBI agent Mike German said, “The [black identity extremist] assessment is of such poor analytic quality that it raises serious questions about the FBI’s purpose in producing it.” With no clear, evidence-driven purpose, the report and surveillance had the “potential to incite irrational police fear of black political activists.” The black-identity-extremist designation was an abstract idea—until it wasn’t. In January, Foreign Policy reported that the home of the Dallas activist Christopher Daniels, known to many as “Rakem Balogun,” had been raided in December by FBI agents, who seized two firearms and a copy of Robert F. Williams’s Negroes With Guns, and arrested him in front of his teenage son. The Guardian has speculated and Balogun himself has stated that he was the first target to be prosecuted using the aforementioned FBI designation. After two years of investigation and five months in FBI custody, Rakem Balogun was let go, the case built on his Facebook posts and protests apparently insufficient to establish that anything he did had actually endangered police. Even in the realm of voting rights, where the DOJ has most consistently acted as a watchdog against the remnants of Jim Crow, the Sessions Doctrine manages to target people of color instead of protecting them. The department under Sessions has reversed its position on the gerrymandering and voter-ID cases in which it was an active litigant until 2017. In July 2017, the DOJ shifted its position in the middle of a marathon series of lawsuits over a voter-ID law passed in Texas, which faced a federal lawsuit on the grounds that it discriminates based on race. The department originally served as a plaintiff against the law, but under Sessions submitted a brief supporting a modified form that allowed more kinds of acceptable identification and created an affidavit process for people who don’t have identification because of reasonable impediments. According to Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—and an active litigant in several voting-rights cases—the Sessions era, while brief, is unprecedented. “Let's start with voting,” Ifill told me. “The Department of Justice has essentially abandoned that area of civil-rights enforcement, even in the cases in which they were present, such as the Texas voter-ID case, in which we were co-counsel.” Among a civil-rights enforcement ecosystem that has already had to adjust on the fly to the loss of judicial and DOJ preclearance of state- and local-elections laws after the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Justice Department’s withdrawal from its voting-rights docket basically creates a massive vacuum, one ripe for exploitation in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. W hether Sessions himself will make it to the 2020 or even the 2018 elections is still anyone’s guess. The Russia investigation is ongoing, and every day it chafes a president who could fire Sessions. But the core irony in the acrimony between Trump and his attorney general is that Sessions—more so than just about anyone else in the Trump administration—has faithfully and skillfully executed the president’s policy agenda. He’s doubled down on “tough on crime” policies, sought to punish drug dealers, surveilled fierce critics of police, deflated the bipartisan movement for meaningful criminal-justice reform, supported voter-ID requirements, and used law enforcement and policy to build his own impediments at the border when Trump’s wall couldn’t find support. Each of those policies, however, doesn’t originate merely in the craw of Trump’s id. They are all seedlings from a well-tended garden of legal and intellectual resistance to the post-civil-rights era in the United States. If Trump’s promise is a return to status quo ante—a land before Black Lives Matter protests and Ferguson reports, one where police are unquestioned heroes and a black presidency is nothing more than a line in a Tupac song—then Jeff Sessions’s doctrine suggests that he represents a return to status quo ante ante, a regime more plainly constructed on the hierarchies and divisions that have for centuries defined America. The sense among several longtime civil-rights advocates and even former DOJ officials is that many of the signature victories of the civil-rights movement are now more precarious than ever. “I don't know that there’s been a time quite like this,” Ifill told me. “Certainly in the modern era, since 1957 when the Civil Rights Division was created, I don’t think that there has been a relationship like this.” There has never really been a golden age for civil-rights protections. Each of the previous presidential administrations has failed in protecting some group’s rights, or actively violated others’. “But that’s completely different than an abdication of leadership in the civil-rights base entirely, and that's what we're facing,” Ifill continued. Still, the current turn can’t be too surprising for people plugged into the system. Aftershocks from the Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby County, continue to disrupt civil-rights enforcement efforts. A class of crusaders against desegregation, in favor of the War on Drugs, and skeptical of an expansive, federally enforced voter-protection agenda has made the conservative movement its home, awaiting leaders at the highest levels of power who could continue on its behalf. This pathway always existed for Sessions, a man who has inherited much, and intends to bequeath more. Or, as Gupta put it, “it wasn't a mystery about who Jeff Sessions is and was and what he stood for." Learn more at The Atlantic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531518732480-67VZJFQB87FA9KP25GVF/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.51.52+PM.png politics - Most Americans Oppose Key Parts of Trump Immigration Plans, Including Wall, Limits on Citizens Bringing Family to U.S., Poll Says Americans overwhelmingly oppose the Trump administration’s now-rescinded policy of separating immigrant children from their parents, and smaller majorities also disagree with the president’s call to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and to restrict legal immigration by limiting citizens from bringing parents and siblings to this country, according to a new Washington Post-Schar School poll. On other aspects of the immigration debate, however, a more mixed picture emerges. Americans are more closely divided on the question of whether enough is being done to prevent illegal immigration and whether the country has gone too far in welcoming immigrants. Also, more people say they trust President Trump than congressional Democrats to deal with the issue of border security. The support for Trump on the border security issue is especially evident in congressional districts considered key battlegrounds in this fall’s midterm elections. Democrats appear more energized than Republicans about the fall elections, especially in battleground districts. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters in those districts, 59 percent say the midterms are extremely important, compared with 46 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Overall, registered voters say they prefer to vote for a Democrat over a Republican for the House, 47 percent to 37 percent. The margin on that question is not statistically larger in battleground districts, standing at 12 percentage points. The nation remains deeply divided along party lines, as it has throughout and before Trump’s presidency. Two other divisions define the political environment of 2018. On issues of immigration, as well as questions about Trump’s presidency, the gaps between men and women and between white voters with and without college degrees are sizable. Women and white college-educated voters are far more dissatisfied with the president and his policies than are men and white voters without college educations. However, gaps based on education are less significant in battleground districts. Trump’s overall approval stands at 43 percent, while his disapproval is 55 percent. Among men, 54 percent approve; among women, 32 percent approve. His handling of immigration draws slightly higher disapproval, with 39 percent approving and 59 percent disapproving. More than twice as many say they strongly disapprove as say they strongly approve. Among men, 51 percent disapprove, but among women, 67 percent disapprove. Among whites with college educations, 68 percent disapprove, but among non-college whites, 56 percent approve. Trump’s best numbers come on the economy: 50 percent approve, while 48 percent disapprove. Majorities nationally and in both battleground and non-battleground districts rate the economy as excellent or good. Men are far more positive than women — 26 points more likely to approve of his handling of the economy and 13 points more likely to rate the economy positively. On trade issues, the public sides with the president on one key question: whether America’s long-term trading partners have taken advantage of this country. By 52 percent to 43 percent, Americans agree with Trump rather than saying the nation’s partners trade fairly. In battleground districts, the margin is slightly larger. But even in agreeing with the president on that question, Americans show little support for his aggressive trade policies, such as his calls for tariffs on a variety of products that have rattled financial markets and angered U.S. allies. Barely 4 in 10 Americans, 41 percent, approve overall of Trump’s handling of the trade issue. On two other questions — how his trade policies will affect jobs in the United States and the cost of products here — majorities of Americans say the impact will be bad rather than good. Nearly 3 in 4 say the impact on the cost of products will be bad. The survey, sponsored by The Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago between June 27 and July 2 online and by phone. The survey drew from the firm’s probability-design AmeriSpeak panel, interviewing a total of 1,473 adults, including 865 who live in one of 58 congressional districts classified by the Cook Political Report as “toss-up” or “leaning” toward one party. The survey looked at a variety of aspects of the immigration debate, which has been front and center since the outcry over the separation of immigrant children from parents who were detained after coming across the border. On immigration, almost 7 in 10 (69 percent) say they opposed the policy that separated immigrant children from their parents, compared with 29 percent who supported the policy. About 6 in 10 Republicans supported it. Trump’s decision to reverse the policy drew widespread support, with three-quarters of Americans backing that decision. Asked about what to do now, a majority of Americans say they want families detained together rather than temporarily released until their court appearances and possible deportation. The vivid imagery of the children contributed to the backlash that forced Trump to reverse course. About 3 in 4 say they were bothered by the photos and stories about children being held separately from their parents, and nearly half of all Americans — including 6 in 10 women — said they were bothered a lot. But as to who is to blame for families being separated, the public is more divided, with 37 percent saying the Trump administration bears responsibility, 35 percent saying the blame goes to migrant families trying to enter the United States, and 25 percent saying both are equally to blame. A 41 percent plurality of women blame the Trump administration, while a 43 percent plurality of men blame migrants. Trump’s suggestion that U.S. immigration policy has become a magnet for criminals and gang members is rejected by most Americans. Roughly 4 in 10 say the biggest reason most people enter illegally is to flee danger in their own countries, with another 4 in 10 saying they are drawn because of economic opportunities. Just 6 percent nationally say most people enter as part of the drug trade or gangs. A plurality of Americans (48 percent) say that this country’s history of welcoming immigrants has been mainly good, while 4 in 10 say it has been both good and bad and 11 percent say its been mainly bad. As to whether immigration has gone too far, Americans are divided into three almost equal groups, with about a third saying it has gone too far, a third saying it has not gone far enough, and almost a third saying the right balance has been struck. A bare majority (51 percent) say the United States is doing enough to keep illegal immigrants from coming into the country, compared with 46 percent who do not. But that bare majority who feel enough is being done is considerably higher than it was during the first decade of this century. The overall results mask deep differences between the parties, with 2 in 3 Democrats saying enough is being done, while just 1 in 3 Republicans agree. Of the different policies measured in this poll, large majorities of Americans support allowing young immigrants who arrived as children and met certain requirements to remain (84 percent); a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants living here if they pass a background check (81 percent); requiring employers to verify their hires are in the United States legally (78 percent); and more funding for border security (65 percent). Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agree with those policies. On the policies that Americans oppose — the child separation policy, building the border wall and restricting legal immigration — majorities of Republicans favor them, in contrast to majorities of Democrats and independents who oppose them. More broadly, Democrats in Congress lead Trump when it comes to whom voters trust to handle immigration by a 38 percent to 30 percent margin, with 24 percent trusting neither. But on border security, Trump holds a 10-point edge over Democrats, which balloons to 17 points in congressional battleground districts. Immigration is seen by voters as one of the three most important issues in this fall’s congressional elections, along with jobs and the economy and health care. Immigration is cited by 19 percent of voters, jobs and the economy by 24 percent, and health care by 20 percent. Republicans hold a narrow 47 percent to 40 percent advantage in support among immigration-focused voters; that finding suggests this could be an issue that motivates the GOP base in November. Gun laws, which some Democrats hope will motivate their voters in November, rank fourth at 14 percent, while taxes, an issue the GOP is counting on, along with the economy, to prevent substantial losses rank fifth at 8 percent. As with immigration policy, there were clear partisan differences: Among Democrats, the top three issues are health care, guns and the economy. Republicans rank immigration and the economy in a virtual tie at the top, with health care, taxes and guns bunched together but far behind the top two. The survey also asked about other aspects of the Trump presidency. More people say they will vote in November to show opposition to Trump (37 percent) than say they will be trying to show support for him (25 percent), while 36 percent say he will not be a factor. Asked whether Republican candidates in general are too supportive or too critical of the president, voters say, 51 percent to 21 percent, that the GOP candidates have been too supportive, with the remainder saying the candidates are striking the right balance. Almost half say Democrats running for Congress are too critical of Trump — and that rises to a slight majority in battleground districts. Two in 3 Americans say the president tells the truth only some of the time or hardly ever, a finding consistent across battleground and non-battleground districts. More than one third of all Americans say he hardly ever tells the truth. Nearly half of all Americans (48 percent) say that, regardless of their personal feelings about the president, they think he is doing more to damage important values. Not quite 4 in 10 (37 percent) say he is doing more to protect those values. The nation is closely divided in its view of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties between Trump campaign officials and the Russian government. Currently, 49 percent approve of the way special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is handling the investigation, while 45 percent disapprove. Those divisions extend to the question of whether Trump officials colluded with the Russians. The percentages saying that this is a serious issue and that it is more of a distraction are identical — 48 percent apiece. But the responses on all of the Mueller questions were highly partisan, with strong majorities of Democrats supporting the special counsel and the investigation and equally strong percentages of Republicans opposing them. The margin of sampling error for overall survey results is plus or minus five percentage points. Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531519031478-BYXE5GO3H80HPY5NMB5G/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.56.44+PM.png politics - Obama: ‘You Are Right To Be Concerned’ BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Barack Obama’s message to Democrats: Stop dreaming of him. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday here in the lush backyard of two party megadonors, Obama warned of a country and world on the brink — “you are right to be concerned,” he told the crowd — but said they’d flub their chance to change that if they kept pining for a magical savior. “Do not wait for the perfect message, don’t wait to feel a tingle in your spine because you’re expecting politicians to be so inspiring and poetic and moving that somehow, ‘OK, I’ll get off my couch after all and go spend the 15-20 minutes it takes for me to vote,’” Obama said in his first public comments in months, which only a few reporters and no cameras were allowed in for. “Because that’s part of what happened in the last election. I heard that too much.” “Boil it down,” Obama said, reiterating an argument he made on the campaign trail for Ralph Northam in 2017 about the existential challenge Trump poses to America. “If we don’t vote, then this democracy doesn’t work.” He almost accepted some of the blame for the state of the party, though he framed it less as the DNC atrophying from years of benign neglect while he was in the White House and being saddled with his reelection campaign debt and more as people making the mistake of falling too much in love with him. “I’ll be honest with you, if I have a regret during my presidency, it is that people were so focused on me and the battles we were having, particularly after we lost the House, that folks stopped paying attention up and down the ballot,” Obama said. Obama stuck to his routine of never saying President Donald Trump’s name in public, but he spoke at length about what his problems are with the Trump presidency — and why he thinks Democrats would be foolish to believe that they’re in good shape to beat him just because they’ve been doing well in winning recent elections. “Fear is powerful,” Obama said. “Telling people that somebody’s out to get you, or somebody took your job, or somebody has it out for you, or is going to change you, or your community, or your way of life — that’s an old story and it has shown itself to be powerful in societies all around the world. It is a deliberate, systematic effort to tap into that part of our brain that carries fear in it.” He did not specifically discuss immigrant families being separated at detention centers. He did not discuss the travel ban or other rulings from the Supreme Court this week. Teed up gently but directly by DNC chairman Tom Perez, who was seated next to him on a small stage asking questions to prompt the discussion, he dodged a question about Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. Merrick Garland’s name wasn’t mentioned, and neither was the current push by most Senate Democrats — and supported by Obama’s former vice president Joe Biden — to say that Trump’s nominee should also not be given a hearing until after the next election. No one mentioned Joe Crowley’s shocker primary loss, or the burst of youthful optimism and talk of socialism that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win has injected into Democratic politics. He spoke only obliquely about the “Me Too” movement, saying that the current Republican leadership believes in “women staying in their place in all kinds of ways.” His only direct comments on current events were about the newspaper office shooting in Maryland earlier Thursday, which he said left him heartbroken but hopeful that people would see this one as the turning point to take action on gun laws. Instead, he talked mostly in general terms about how the Republicans and Democrats tell “different stories.” “There’s a fundamental contrast of how we view the world,” Obama said. “We are seeing the consequences of when one vision is realized, or in charge.” The event was the first of three fundraisers Obama is doing in California this week, with two scheduled Friday in San Francisco for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Thursday night’s event was to boost a DNC that is still struggling to reassert and refinance itself a year and a half into the chairmanship of Perez and with the massive undertaking of the 2020 election looming just behind the midterms. On that front, Obama said, Democrats could learn from Republicans, who have continued rapidly building out their infrastructure and fundraising despite Trump’s daily pummeling of the GOP to reshape it in his image. “They don’t worry about inspiration,” Obama said. “They worry about winning the seat and they are very systematic about work not just at the presidential level but at the congressional and state legislative levels.” But the tension between the desperation among many Democrats that Obama needs to lead the charge against Trump and the shift away that the former president and Democratic officials are pushing played out in Perez himself: He called Obama out onto the stage by saying, “Let’s give it up for the real president of the United States,” then 20 minutes later, downplayed what he called “political venture capitalists — they want to find the next Barack Obama” — who aren’t focused on the nuts and bolts of party building. Opinions were divided within the audience, too. “You only have a few super candidates,” said former California Gov. Gray Davis, applauding the focus on mechanics. “Notwithstanding his post-partisan rhetoric, Democrats need him, his inspiration, his energy and his memory to get through these dark days,” said Eric Bauman, the California Democratic chairman who is helping lead efforts for his party to flip several key nearby House seats. The event stuck to the focus-on-the-midterms message, with Christina Aguilera performing Aretha Franklin’s “Freedom” (“You better think / Think about what you’re trying to do to me”) and the hosts handing out gift bags in the end with a big red bag of Intelligentsia coffee beans inside and a “Stay Energized for November” sticker on front. A new national message will come, Obama argued, as the 2020 field of presidential candidates emerges. The people who are looking for one now are being ridiculous, he said, but if they needed something to hold them over, he said his own old slogan still works. “All these people that are out here kvetching and wringing their hands and stressed and anxious and constantly watching cable TV and howling at the moon, ‘What are we going to do?,’ their hair’s falling out, they can’t sleep,” Obama said. “The majority of the American people prefer a story of hope. A majority of the American people prefer a country that comes together rather than being divided. The majority of the country doesn’t want to see a dog-eat-dog world where everybody is angry all the time.” Obama mocked Trump and others for being among the angry: “They’re mad even when they win.” Trump’s executive actions and legal maneuvers to cut down Obamacare after failing to repeal it in Congress are a perfect example of what he means, Obama said. “I am not surprised that instead of replacing what we had done with something better, they just have done their best to undermine and erode what’s already in place,” he said. “Of course people are going to be angry about that, because if you had health care and suddenly somebody who says they’re going to make it better comes in and makes it worse, you’ll be pissed. You should go out and vote.” Obama called that an opportunity for Democrats. “Reality has an interesting way of coming up and biting you, and the other side has been peddling a lot of stuff that is so patently untrue that you can get away with it for a while, but at a certain point, you confront reality,” he said. “The Democrats’ job is not to exaggerate; the Democrats’ job is not to simply mimic the tactics of the other side. All we have to do is work hard on behalf of that truth. And if we do, we’ll get better outcomes.” Learn more at Politico https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531519127095-5LTPFVGACXFTBGZM9SWH/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+2.58.31+PM.png politics - In L.A., Obama Urges Donors Not to Take Midterms for Granted: 'We Are Seeing the Consequences' of a Political Story Based on Fear Without once mentioning the president by name, former President Obama on Thursday drew sharp contrast between his eight years in office and the Trump administration. “To a large degree, we are seeing a competition between two stories,” the former president told about 200 people at a high-dollar fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in Beverly Hills. “There’s the story that is based largely on fear, and there is a story based largely in hope. There’s the story that says we’re in it together, and there’s the story that says there’s an us and a them,” Obama told DNC Chairman Tom Perez during a conversation at the event. Reporters were allowed in to listen to the 48-minute discussion. The rest of the event was closed to the press. “There’s a fundamental contrast of how we view the world,” the former president said, “and I think we are seeing the consequences of when one vision is realized, or at least in charge.” But, drawing on what Perez called his role as “optimist in chief,” Obama added: “The good news is that it is entirely within our power to solve it. The simple message right now is that if people participate and they vote, then this democracy works.” Obama used his remarks to outline the stakes of the midterm elections and the competing visions on the ballot. He praised what he called the “extraordinarily powerful” phenomenon of women stepping up to run for office. Obama warned against taking anything for granted as pundits predict a blue wave could sweep Republicans from power in the U.S. House. “I would caution us from extrapolating too much from a bunch of special elections and starting to think that, ‘OK, this will take care of itself.’ Because it won’t,” he said. “Fear is powerful.” It would be a mistake, he added, to “go back to business as usual” or assume momentum from those races will carry Democrats through November. The former president said he believes most Americans don’t want “a dog-eat-dog world where everybody is angry all the time.” He said that while observing “the other side,” he finds it striking that “They’re mad even when they win. Have you noticed that? They don’t look happy at all.” He said Democrats should not get caught up in the kind of cult of personality his own candidacy inspired in some circles. “I’m giving you the executive summary: Vote. Participate. Get involved,” he said as the crowd applauded. “And do not wait for the perfect message, and don’t want to feel a tingle in your spine because you’re expecting politicians to be so inspiring and poetic and moving. Politics, like life, is imperfect. But there is better and there is worse.” And he defended Obamacare, his signature domestic accomplishment. “I said to the incoming president, just change the name. And claim that you have made these wonderful changes. And I'd be like, ‘You go!’ Because I didn't have pride of authorship, I just wanted people to have healthcare.” Criticizing Republicans for trying to “undermine and erode” the Affordable Care Act, he said they had been “peddling a lot of stuff that is so patently untrue.” He added, “Reality has an interesting way of coming up and biting you.” Obama’s remarks came in the midst of an ongoing border crisis in which thousands of children have been separated from parents arrested for attempting to enter the country illegally. It also comes as President Trump and Congress are grappling with the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. He did not mention either storyline Thursday. Obama did, however, open his remarks by saying he was “heartbroken” about the shooting in Annapolis earlier in the day. “I am hopeful that each time one of these tragedies strikes we remind ourselves that this is preventable. It’s not inevitable,” he said. “That America is not the only nation on Earth that has people who are troubled or violent, but we are unique in the weapons that those people can deploy. And it’s costly.” The event was held at the home of Allan Mutchnik, an executive of Harbor Freight Tools, and his wife, Nicole. They have been major donors to Democratic candidates and causes, and gave tens of thousands of dollars to a committee benefiting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Tickets started at $2,700 to attend the discussion and see a musical performance by Christina Aguilera. Top donors who paid $100,000 received five dinner tickets, a photo with Obama, membership to the DNC finance committee and other perks. The former president referenced Aguilera’s song, which was off the record, in urging people to stay involved. “Governance is work,” Obama said, “and we shouldn’t expect it to be entertaining all the time. Christina Aguilera was wonderful but you don't need to have an amazing singer at every event. Sometimes you’re just in a church basement making phone calls and eating cold pizza.” It was a rare post-presidency appearance for Obama, who has kept a low profile and made few public appearances since leaving the White House. In March, he came to the Golden State to raise money for Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri. He will continue his California fundraising swing Friday, where he will appear at a $10,000-per-person fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the Bay Area suburb of Atherton. Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531519232083-2OFJ350IWCDNBWM9KDJR/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.00.14+PM.png politics - Heading Off a Ballot Fight, California Lawmakers Approve Consumer Privacy Rules Gov. Jerry Brown signed a sweeping new consumer privacy law on Thursday that gives Californians new authority over their personal data, a framework that backers say could be adopted throughout the country. The legislation sailed through the Senate and Assembly earlier in the day, but the vote count belied the frenzied behind-the-scenes negotiations to craft a last-minute bill to stave off a similar ballot initiative. “Today we have a chance to make a difference by giving California consumers control of their own data,” said Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Arcadia), the author of the measure, AB 375. Under the new rules, Californians would have a right to know what information a business has about them, and have the ability to prohibit companies from selling that information and to ask businesses to delete information they provided. Consumers would be able to sue companies if a data breach leads to their unencrypted information being exposed or stolen. “This will serve as an inspiration across the country,” said Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys), a coauthor of the bill. The bill is intended to avert a showdown on the November ballot over an initiative backed by Alastair Mactaggart, a San Francisco real estate developer. Mactaggart said he would pull his measure, which has qualified for the ballot, once the bill was passed and signed by the governor. Shortly after the bill was signed, Secretary of State Alex Padilla confirmed the initiative was withdrawn. “I genuinely think the Legislature should be the place that does this,” Mactaggart said. “The reason that they don’t get it done in the first place is because business is so powerful.” Opponents to the initiative bemoaned the bill as well, but said it was slightly preferable to the proposal slated for the ballot, in part because it narrowed the circumstances under which consumers could sue companies. “Data regulation policy is complex and impacts every sector of the economy, including the internet industry,” said Robert Callahan, vice president of state government affairs of the Internet Assn. “That makes the lack of public discussion and process surrounding this far-reaching bill even more concerning.” In a message to other states considering similar action, Callahan said “the circumstances of this bill are specific to California.” Privacy groups generally hailed the measure as a major expansion of privacy rights, but signaled they wanted to further refine the policy in the coming year. Businesses will also seek changes next year — in advance of the bill’s implementation date of Jan. 1, 2020 — setting the stage for a major lobbying fight next year. "While the California Consumer Privacy Act is a strong first step in protecting consumers, especially kids, we have a lot more work to do,” said James Steyer, founder of Common Sense, which advocates privacy measures for children. “For starters, we need to ensure the attorney general or any data protection authority is well-resourced, well-informed and empowered to robustly enforce this and future laws. We also need companies to limit the information they collect to the data they need, and only use it in fair and expected ways. Finally, we need to ensure our most sensitive information is not sold without our opt-in consent." Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell), whose Silicon Valley district includes some of the largest tech companies, said he hoped next year would lead to substantive discussions about the policy. “We have to get this right. That’s what it’s about — ensuring there’s hearings and a process in place to best understand this,” Low said. “I can guarantee you this: The Legislature did not fundamentally understand what they were voting for in this privacy bill.” Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531519328627-Q70PRSR5TEFH4PCOQOO2/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.01.32+PM.png politics - A Poll Commissioned by Bush and Biden Shows Americans Losing Confidence in Democracy With Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve THE BIG IDEA: Half of Americans think the United States is in “real danger of becoming a nondemocratic, authoritarian country.” A majority, 55 percent, see democracy as “weak” — and 68 percent believe it is “getting weaker.” Eight in 10 Americans say they are either “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the condition of democracy here. These are among the sobering results of a major bipartisan pollpublished Tuesday that was commissioned by the George W. Bush Institute, the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center and Freedom House, which tracks the vitality of democracies around the world. The three groups have partnered to create the Democracy Project, with the goal of monitoring the health of the American system. “We hope this work can be a step toward restoring faith in democracy and democratic institutions,” Bush said in a statement. The concern about the condition of democracy inside the United States transcends the tribal divide between Republicans and Democrats, with majorities across races, genders, age groups, levels of education and income brackets expressing fear. “Americans are deeply worried about the health of their democracy and want to make it stronger,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House. “There appears to be a crisis in confidence in the functioning of our democracy, and it is not a party-line issue.” The report comes against the backdrop of a raging debate over civility and Donald Trump’s polarizing approach to the presidency. Former vice president Joe Biden, who oversees the Biden Center, said the results show “we can’t take our freedoms for granted — we have to work for them, and we have to defend them.” The good news is that Americans overwhelmingly still support the concept of democracy and believe it’s important to keep the system we’ve inherited. That’s in contrast to the years before World War II, when many people got caught under the spell of communism and fascism. Asked to rank the importance of living in a democracy on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being “absolutely important,” 60 percent picked 10 in the new poll. Overall, 84 percent picked a number between six and 10. Among Democrats, it was 92 percent. Among Republicans, it was 81 percent. There was a partisan divide when people were asked to pick whether America is in “real danger of becoming a nondemocratic, authoritarian country” or “there is no real danger.” Overall, 50 percent said there’s a real danger and 43 percent said there’s not. But 57 percent of self-identified Democrats said the danger is real, while only 37 percent of Republicans did. Racial minorities, women and young people who have missed out on the full bounty of American greatness also tend to perceive fewer benefits from democracy and are thus less convinced of the system’s value. Only 42 percent of nonwhite respondents said they are satisfied with “the way democracy is working in our country,” compared with 51 percent of white respondents. Spotlighting a generational gap in attitudes, only 39 percent of respondents under 35 picked 10 on the scale of one to 10 when asked to rate the importance of democracy. -- Racial discrimination and money’s corrosive impact on politics are two major factors driving this crisis of confidence. Participants in the survey were presented a list of 11 issues and asked to pick the two that most concern them when it comes to democracy in America. Almost 3 in 10 picked “big money in politics” and “racism and discrimination,” a statistical tie for the top issue. Overall, 8 in 10 Americans think “the influence of money in politics” is getting worse, rather than better. Three in 4 Americans think that “the laws enacted by our national government these days mostly reflect what powerful special interests and their lobbyists want.” This includes 81 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans. Just 17 percent of Americans agreed with the alternative statement: “The laws enacted by our national government these days mostly reflect what the people want.” Even when controlling for other factors, there is a direct link between people being concerned about the power of money in politics and their level of confidence in democracy. The survey was designed and conducted by North Star, a Republican firm, and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a Democratic firm. The nationwide telephone survey of 1,400 adults, conducted between April 28 and May 8, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percent. The coalition also conducted 10 focus groups across five states with different segments of the public to figure out how to most effectively make the case for democracy. Money in politics was a top concern that came up in each focus group. “Greed and power are so dangerous,” said one participant in Pittsburgh. “It’s so rampant right now. Whoever has the most money is going to be the most powerful.” Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531519620983-AYANT5LP52UIHKTRUDOM/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.06.29+PM.png politics - The Worries Over U.S. Intelligence Politics can create strange bedfellows, and political scandals can create unexpected celebrities. After a 55-year career deep inside U.S. intelligence, James Clapper has recently found something akin to notoriety, first as co-author of the famous Oct. 7, 2016, declaration that Russia was trying to tip the scales of the 2016 presidential election, and now as one of a handful of top former intelligence officials who have taken their criticisms of President Trump and concerns over a possible conspiracy with Russia to the public. The son of a U.S. Army signals intelligence officer in World War II, Clapper carried on that service tradition by joining the Air Force in 1963, rising to lieutenant general and becoming director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 1992 until his retirement from uniformed service in 1995. But Clapper’s vast expertise and respected leadership prompted both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to press him back into government service long after many of his peers had retired to work on their golf swings. As Director of National Intelligence (DNI) from 2010 to 2017, Clapper served as Obama’s most senior intelligence adviser, facing complex and contentious intelligence and national security issues such as the Edward Snowden revelations, the U.S. embassy bombing in Libya, the raid that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, and the ongoing investigation into how Russia intruded on the last U.S. presidential election. Clapper retired as DNI early last year. Now nearly 80, Clapper is a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. At a time when the intelligence community’s credibility is regularly questioned, Clapper’s frank new memoir, “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence,” delves into his vast experience on the front lines of his field. In an interview, Clapper talked about his candid new book, about what he learned during the Russia investigation, about why he speaks out about intelligence issues, and about how the nation might best defend itself against attacks from external and internal sources. Q&A James Clapper GAZETTE: You served in the U.S. government in intelligence for 55 years under every president since John F. Kennedy, but you’ve said that “hearing Donald Trump ask Russian intelligence to attack his political opponent — in a very specific, direct way — made me fear for our nation.” You don’t seem like someone who is easily rattled. What did you mean? CLAPPER: In all that time in intelligence, in one capacity or another, I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff, but never anything to disturb me as much as what I came to understand, comprehend, what the Russians were doing to meddle in the fundamental pillars of our political system. So when [candidate Trump] was exhorting an adversary of ours — which, in my mind, is the primary threat these days — to help him by going and finding allegedly 30,000 missing emails of Hillary Clinton, that to me is unconscionable and inappropriate and unheard of. There’s no time in our history where a president has exhorted an enemy, an adversary, to help him win an election and disparage a political opponent. GAZETTE: He later claimed he was joking. CLAPPER: He wasn’t joking any more than he was joking that he wants American citizens to behave like North Koreans do for leader Kim Jong-un. He wasn’t joking about that either. GAZETTE: You discuss in the book how you and other intelligence agency heads under President Obama, including FBI Director James Comey, briefed then President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Pence, incoming national security adviser Mike Flynn, chief of staff Reince Priebus, and press secretary Sean Spicer in early January 2017 on why the intelligence community had high confidence that Putin directly ordered the hacking and election interference. Since you provided Trump the same classified assessment that President Obama received … CLAPPER: Yes. And he had access to the very same highly classified hard-copy report, as well. GAZETTE: So, what did you think when you first heard him publicly question that conclusion, and why do you think he continues to deny or cast doubt on those findings? CLAPPER: What it showed me was, and he’s consistent to this day, that he could not then or now accept any information that casts doubt on the legitimacy of his election. And clearly the intelligence community assessment on the magnitude of the Russian meddling on our election — and I go ahead and make the call; I think they actually influenced the outcome — that’s just something he couldn’t accept. He was that way then, and he’s still that way. There’s all kinds of reasons speculated on why there’s deference to the Russians by him personally and to Putin personally, but I don’t know the answer to that. GAZETTE: In hindsight, was it a mistake to provide him with detailed intelligence on what the U.S. knew about Russian interference? CLAPPER: Absolutely not. The intelligence community should never, ever hold back any information from the president of the United States, no matter who it is. “[Trump] wasn’t joking [about asking the Russians for Hillary Clinton’s emails] any more than he was joking that he wants American citizens to behave like North Koreans do for leader Kim Jong-un.” GAZETTE: What was your reaction when you saw the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office and learned the president had revealed classified information to them about an Israeli source? CLAPPER: I thought it was dreadful; that was unconscionable. GAZETTE: In a recent PBS interview, you said you now believe the Russians actually “turned” the election. What did you mean, and do you think it’s possible that they could have pulled it off without help from any U.S. persons or without the knowledge of any social media platforms? CLAPPER: I think that because of the slim victory margin, 80,000 votes in three states, and the magnitude of what they did — the massive effort they made where they touched 126,000,000 voters, and you see examples of what they did where Americans were not aware and even denied the reality of the Russians having convened meetings in Florida, for example. I think they got people out to vote who wouldn’t otherwise have voted, and certainly reinforced votes. They appealed to every group in this country, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, white supremacists, pro-Muslims, anti-Muslims, pro-gun control, anti-gun control, and they deliberately tailored compelling messages in a very sophisticated way, in a multidimensional way. That is unprecedented. It’s only an informed opinion, that’s all it is, because in the intelligence community assessment, we did not make any call on the impact of Russian meddling on the election outcome. The intelligence community is not chartered and has no resources to do that. But as a private citizen, knowing what I know now since I left the government, and knowing what I knew before I left, that’s a conclusion I came to. GAZETTE: By December 2015, you write that it was clear to U.S. intelligence that Russia had shifted from attempting to damage Hillary Clinton’s chances and undermine faith in the U.S. electoral process to supporting Trump’s candidacy. You point to a number of examples during the 2016 campaign where Russia initiated and pushed certain themes and messages about Clinton and Trump, and then the Trump camp almost immediately echoed the language and messaging. … I know you’ve said you saw “no evidence of collusion,” but does behavior that appears coordinated suggest anything to you? CLAPPER: There’s a striking parallelism between what the Russians were doing and saying and what the campaign was doing and saying, particularly when it came to Hillary Clinton, both from the standpoint of her alleged scandals and her alleged maladies, both physical and mental. Now, do I have direct evidence that someone in the campaign was coordinating messaging with the Russians? No, I don’t. But the outward symptoms are curious. Some would argue that Trump exhorting the Russians to go find Clinton emails to help him is a form of collusion. GAZETTE: You say you were “not surprised” that Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan refused in late summer 2016 to issue a bipartisan public statement on Russia’s election interference. “It seemed they had decided by then that they didn’t care who their nominee was, how he got elected, or what effect having a foreign power influence our election would have on the nation, as long as they won,” you write. As someone who regularly studies people’s actions and motivations, did you or anyone look into why that was? CLAPPER: What they cared about was their almighty agenda, which is still the case. And you have to ask, when will Republicans, particularly the Republican leadership, say in response to some additional Trump excess like separating kids from their parents at the border, when will they say, “Enough”? That’s really the issue here. I don’t know. What’s more important to them is their agenda: getting judges appointed, tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, etc., etc. GAZETTE: Has it been tough for you, knowing what you know, to be sitting on the sidelines? CLAPPER: Actually, I’m in a better position to do something about it now than I was then — writing the book, speaking out on television, and having far more public impact than anything I did as DNI. And I have far more notoriety now than I did as DNI. It’s liberating because when you’re in the government there are lots of constraints on what you can say and where you can say it. “There’s a striking parallelism between what the Russians were doing and saying and what the [Trump] campaign was doing and saying, particularly when it came to Hillary Clinton.” GAZETTE: We know from public reporting that the FBI had been concerned that Russian intelligence officers were attempting to infiltrate the Trump campaign and made numerous contacts with various campaign figures, including advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, the president’s son and son-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. Last December, you called Putin “a great [KGB] case officer” who “knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president.” You clarified that to say you meant that figuratively, but could you elaborate on what led you to make that comparison? CLAPPER: He’s a [former] KGB officer, that’s what they do. It’s in their genes. … So, what he tries to do is, when he approaches Trump or anybody else, he’s going to approach it the same way he approached it for his professional career. How do I exploit this person? How do I gain leverage? How do I gain influence? How do I co-opt them? That’s the way they do business, and have since the Soviet era. And what Putin figured out was the way to get to him was through his ego. GAZETTE: If there were evidence that members of the Trump campaign aided Russia’s efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy or accepted help from Russia or China or Israel or all of the above to swing the election in Trump’s favor, where would that rank in the history of threats to the U.S.? That would seem to be a pretty major threat to our country. CLAPPER: It would be, absolutely. GAZETTE: How concerned are you that we don’t appear to be doing anything as a country to protect ourselves from further election interference from Russia and others? What do the trendlines look like? CLAPPER: Very [concerned]. Lots of things are going on, I’m sure, at the local, organization-by-organization level, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI. They’re all doing their thing. State and local officials are doing what they can to secure the voting apparatus to include registration rolls and all of that. I suspect, not knowing inside baseball, it’s uneven from state to state. So things are going on. But what’s missing is the galvanizing effect of a clear stalwart statement from the president of the United States that the Russians are messing with us and it’s got to stop. And this needs to be done not just for the government, but for the society. GAZETTE: Russian intelligence has a long, well-known history of infiltrating and attacking its adversaries, including the U.S., using and reusing many of the same tactics: disinformation, provocation, compromise, honeypots, etc. Why hasn’t the U.S. done a better job shutting these methods down? CLAPPER: They work at it very hard, and we don’t do what we should do to counter it. For example, the U.S. Information Agency, which is an organization that was up and running during the heyday of the Cold War to counter-message Russian propaganda, we need something like that, but on steroids, to do the counter-messaging and, if nothing else, to point out what the Russians are doing and saying, and how they’re doing it, and to get the message across that people shouldn’t believe everything they hear and see. Ex-CIA officer discusses how Trump Jr. emails, meeting might affect Mueller investigation GAZETTE: The DNI as an organization is better today than it was in 1963 when you started as a signals intelligence officer, you say. But are we safer as a country, especially with regard to intelligence threats from Russia and China? What are the things going on over the next few years, and are you concerned at all? CLAPPER: We’re safer, from an intelligence standpoint, particularly from the external threats. I think there’s excellent insight into what the Russians and the Chinese are doing. I view the Russians as short-term. At least for the next six years, as long as Putin’s in office, we’re going to be in a bad place with Russia and it will continue to be our primary adversary, an existential threat to this country. Long-term, it’s China because of its economic power and its prowess in science and technical matters. “Lots of things are going on [to protect against further election interference]. But what’s missing is the galvanizing effect of a clear stalwart statement from the president of the United States that the Russians are messing with us and it’s got to stop. And this needs to be done not just for the government, but for the society.” GAZETTE: Sir David Omand, a former head of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, was at the Kennedy School last spring talking about how democratic societies in the digital era are more vulnerable than ever before to manipulation through the classic tools of subversion, things like propaganda, intimidation, and dirty tricks. Through social media, foreign actors are able to engage in subversive and seditious activities today with unprecedented scale and ease. He said one strategy intelligence communities will need to adopt to counter these efforts is to give up the desire for total secrecy and be more open to educating the media and the public about the nature of existing threats. After 2016, do U.S. intelligence agencies need to become more outward-facing than they’ve been, and what can they realistically do without jeopardizing valuable sources and methods? CLAPPER: That’s exactly the point. There’s always going to be an aura of mystery and suspicion about the intelligence community because internally what it does has to be secret to protect sources and methods and tradecraft. I did a lot of things while I was DNI after Snowden to be more transparent, particularly about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But when you talk about intelligence, adversaries go to school on that very same transparency, so there’s a double-edged sword there, and you have to engage the risk-vs.-gain thing. And it could be not just nation-states, but non-nation-states as well. GAZETTE: How have the public attacks on the intelligence agencies by the president and his supporters over the last two years affected morale in them? Are the attacks doing long-term damage? CLAPPER: I don’t know about long term, I can’t say. I think right now the intelligence community is not in the crosshairs. The criticism is focused more on the FBI, regrettably, and the Department of Justice. So I think the intelligence community, as long as it has leadership that will provide the top cover, will be OK and will keep serving up the truth to power whether they’re powerless in the truth or not. Learn more at The Harvard Gazette https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531520061457-XFAQN4KBSPCVYML18HO3/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.13.42+PM.png politics - Michael Bloomberg to Spend $80 Million in 2018 to Help Democrats Win the House (CNN) Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg intends to spend an eye-popping $80 million on the midterm elections, throwing most of his financial weight behind Democrats in their effort take control of the House of Representatives this fall. Bloomberg's 2018 plan, which was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed to CNN by his adviser Howard Wolfson, positions him as one of the largest donors to Democrats this cycle. The cash infusion will be a major boon for Democrats in what promises to be an expensive election year, even as party leaders have been optimistic about their odds. House Republicans and their allies have been raising money at an impressive clip, but Bloomberg's commitment is poised to swamp those of even the wealthiest Republican donors. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, for example, recently pledged $30 million to re-elect House Republicans. In a statement, Bloomberg said Republicans had "failed" in their control of Congress. "And so this fall, I'm going to support Democrats in their efforts to win control of the House," Bloomberg said. The decision marks a departure for Bloomberg, who has previously divided his political spending between candidates for both parties and with a focus surrounding his priority issues, which include gun control. "To be clear: I have plenty of disagreements with some Democrats, especially those who seek to make this election about impeachment," Bloomberg added in his statement. "Nothing could be more irresponsible. But I believe that 'We the People' cannot afford to elect another Congress that lacks the courage to reach across the aisle and the independence to assert its constitutional authority. And so I will support Democratic candidates who are committed to doing both." In his statement, Bloomberg said he would support Republican and Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 2018. Wolfson, a senior adviser to Bloomberg, will help steer the billionaire's political efforts. Wolfson said Bloomberg will focus his efforts on winning the House for Democrats because "he believes the House has been most dysfunctional and has failed most dramatically in its responsibilities." Bloomberg plans to spend the money through his own super PAC, rather than donating to Democratic Party committees or aligned groups, said Wolfson. Learn more at CNN https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531520205792-C1AB8U7H9P9JR8UUR4X2/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.16.31+PM.png politics - A Judge in Kansas Just Struck Down One of The Toughest Voter ID Laws in The Country. Here's What You Need to Know. In 2011, Kansas passed a law that Republicans said was aimed at ending voter fraud by requiring people to show proof of citizenship to register to vote. But opponents argued that it was really an attempt to reduce registration by blacks and Latinos — who tend to vote Democratic — and challenged the law with a barrage of lawsuits. On Monday, a federal judge agreed and struck it down. The decision is a victory for civil rights groups and a rebuke of the law’s architect, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who oversaw President Trump’s now defunct voter fraud commission and is running for governor as a Republican. In a 188-page ruling, Judge Julie Robinson said the law “disproportionately impacts … qualified registration applicants, while only nominally preventing noncitizen voter registration.” Here’s some background on the law and the recent ruling: How did the law come about? In the months after Kobach became secretary of state in 2011, he called on the state’s Republican-led Legislature to pass a measure to stop perceived voter fraud. The Kansas Secure and Fair Elections Act mandated that Kansans must produce government-issued identification, such as a driver’s license, a military ID or a passport, to register to vote. Lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the measure and sent it to the desk of then-Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, who signed it into law. The stated motive of the law was questionable from the start. Studies have consistently shown that voter fraud is almost nonexistent — in Kansas and nationwide. Kansas secretary of state records showed that between 2005 and 2009 — a period when millions of people cast ballots — only seven cases of alleged fraud were referred to authorities in local, state and federal races. Even so, Kobach and the Legislature lauded passage of the bill as a victory for Kansans. “Every effort must be made to protect each legitimate vote from being canceled by fraudulent voter activity,” Kobach said at the time. “Voter fraud is a national problem, and Kansas has offered a solution that will protect every state that adopts it.” What happened next? It got ugly — fast. Since the law took effect in 2013, dozens of groups, including the local chapters of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and American Civil Liberties Union, along with voting rights groups, filed lawsuits that alleged the new measure would suppress voter turnout by making it difficult to register and vote. The measure saw several back-and-forth battles in lower courts. Monday’s ruling, however, is the most significant to date. What did the ruling say? Robinson was ruling on a 2016 lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of the League of Women Voters and individual Kansans. The suit argued that the law disenfranchised people who were attempting to register legally but did not have access to the required identification. The ACLU estimated that that more than 35,000 citizens were blocked from registering to vote between 2013 and 2016. Kobach countered that the law was working. He said that 129 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote since 2000, and that the law was blocking such attempts. In her decision, the judge said the law violated both the Constitution and the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that requires states to offer people the opportunity to register to vote when renewing a driver’s license or public assistance. “The Court finds that the burden imposed on Kansans by this law outweighs the state’s interest in preventing noncitizen voter fraud, keeping accurate voter rolls, and maintaining confidence in elections,” she wrote. In addition, Robinson said that Kobach would not be allowed to renew his law license until he took six hours of legal education. Hours after the ruling, Kobach said he would appeal. “Judge Robinson is the first judge in the country to come to the extreme conclusion that requiring a voter to prove his citizenship is unconstitutional. Her conclusion is incorrect, and it is inconsistent with precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court,” Kobach’s office said in a statement. What have voting rights groups said about the Kansas ruling? It was their clearest victory to date against Kobach. Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said the ruling “is a stinging rebuke of Kris Kobach and the centerpiece of his voter-suppression efforts: a show-me-your papers law that has disenfranchised tens of thousands of Kansans.” “That law was based on a xenophobic lie that noncitizens are engaged in rampant election fraud,” Ho said. Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, said the ruling confirms that “noncitizen voter fraud is very rare” and that the law was never needed. “Fortunately Kansas voters will no longer be saddled with this unjustified burden on their voting rights, imposed as part of Mr. Kobach’s agenda,” she said. The ruling could also give pause to other states considering such laws. Alabama and Georgia have passed measures requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote, but the laws are not being enforced. Where does Kobach go from here? Kobach is facing a competitive Republican primary in August. It’s unclear how much the federal ruling this week will matter to Kansas voters. It was Kobach’s second major setback of the year. The first involved the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which Trump created by executive order in May 2017 with the mission of restoring confidence and integrity in the electoral process. He made Kobach, a staunch ally during the 2016 election, the vice chairman. The commission soon faced a flurry of lawsuits over privacy concerns for seeking personal data on voters across the country. In January, Trump issued an executive order to disband the commission. He did so “rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the time. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531520773774-CCQ5ESCA3JGSW1B24WQQ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.25.50+PM.png politics - Michael Woo: Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Democracy? Challenges to Building Affordable Housing in LA Is California's housing crisis a result of political inaction or economic forces? What role do communities and democratic processes play in the shortage of units that policymakers state are needed to match population changes? At a recent UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate event, former Los Angeles Councilmember Michael Woo provided an overview that covered the numerous factors contributing to Southern California's current status. Woo, currently the Dean of College of Environmental Design at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, discussed how government and the private sector have failed to address fundamental changes in urbanization, population shifts, and local political coalitions. TPR is pleased to present an excerpt of Woo's remarks. Michael Woo: Don’t blame democracy for the high cost of housing in Los Angeles. While our political system gives a loud and powerful voice to local neighborhood groups whose members already have a place to live, democracy itself shouldn’t be blamed for the powerlessness of those who are victimized by the housing shortage. I’d argue that our current housing debacle is both a political problem and an economic problem for the most vulnerable people in the community. Unless we address both the political system that disproportionately represents people with money and the housing market that fails to deliver for people who don’t have money, we’ll miss the big picture. In Los Angeles County, an estimated 568,000 new rental units are needed to serve the needs of low-income renters. An estimated 567,000 low-income renters cannot access government assistance and are at risk of becoming homeless. Overall in California, an estimated 3.5 million new homes are needed by 2025—seven years from now—to address pent-up demand and population growth. These numbers are really daunting, and we are falling further and further behind. Between 2005 and 2014, California built 308 housing units for every 1,000 new residents coming into the state. This is resulting in a widening gap between supply and demand. In the city of LA, keeping up with housing demand will require building approximately 5,300 affordable units annually—but only about 1,100 new units are being built every year. Furthermore, apartment owners have removed 20,000 rent-controlled units since 2001—many of them demolished and replaced with market-rate units at higher cost. This produces a real predicament: We have too many people who are spending too much of their incomes on housing. In the city of LA, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $2,556 a month. In order to afford that without spending more than 30 percent of your income on housing, your household income needs to be $109,000. It gets a little better as you get further away from the center of the region. In Riverside, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is about $1,431. To afford that at 30 percent of your income, your household income needs to be about $61,000. That’s a big difference—but the desperate search for affordable housing also can lead to hardship in the form of the cost and the time involved in long daily commuting between home and work . In LA, 58 percent of renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Nearly one-third of LA renters spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. The fact that that a lot of people are spending such an astronomical percentage of their income on housing means that they are not spending on household essentials like food, education, and healthcare. To me, this points to a potential political coalition with the business owners and industry leaders affected by such a large percentage of our population not spending money on other necessities. They are potential allies in the effort to produce more housing. We need a crash program—a crusade, a campaign, a mobilization—to build more housing. But what will that take? If you think that a crash program for housing is politically or economically impossible, history shows that it’s a matter of commitment. For example, after World War II, Singapore built about 21,000 new housing units during a 12-year period. Those new units were equivalent to about 8.8 percent of the overall population. In Hong Kong, there was also a tremendous increase in the number of units. At its peak, the culmination of the public sector and the private sector built 61,000 housing units during a single fiscal year (1964-1965). At that time, the overall population was about 3.6 million. Then there’s the rapid urbanization of China. The movement of people from China’s countryside to its cities represents the largest migration in the history of the world. In 1949, 10 percent of China’s population was urban; by 2014, that increased to 50 percent. By 2017, China’s urban population had grown to 690 million people. Why did this happen? It was a conscious, deliberate decision. Urbanization—and the building of housing to accommodate the population—was a national strategy for economic development and poverty reduction. Of course, from an American’s point of view, China’s rapid urbanization and housing boom also produced many side-effects that would be unacceptable in this country. Creating so many housing units in such a short time caused a lot of chaos and pain, and a lot of people lost their homes and property. The traditional urban fabric of many Chinese cities was destroyed, and there were huge environmental impacts. But they did build a lot of housing. The United Kingdom’s New Towns movement suggests an alternative strategy for building housing but deliberately avoiding urban congestion. As an urban planning student, I studied Ebenezer Howard’s idea of garden cities—ways of accommodating population growth without replicating the urban scale of London, but by creating new, more livable, human-scale communities outside of the UK’s existing urban centers . The UK was able to develop 32 New Towns after World War II, housing 2.8 million people. An example of a housing mobilization closer to home may be found in David Brinkley’s book about Washington in World War II, Washington Goes to War. Brinkley tells the story of the Herculean effort in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack to plan ahead for the anticipated massive increase in federal employees involved in the war effort. By 1942, Washington, DC built 400,000 new units of temporary housing and 18,000 units of permanent housing. What are lessons from these other parts of the world for a California’s mobilization for housing? First: If there is a common vision anticipating a massive increase in job growth, population growth, or migration, this could motivate government and the private sector to do something about it. In some of the places I described, the push to build a massive amount of new housing was accelerated by centralized political authority, a financial commitment to build housing, political tools such as the power to confiscate private property, and weak opposition. It doesn’t hurt if you have a Communist system, or some kind of centralized or authoritarian system. It’s hard for a Not In My Backyard movement to thrive in an authoritarian system. But the Washington example shows that an authoritarian system is not required for a crash program to build housing. In the case of DC, the crisis atmosphere at the beginning of the war brought together the resources and the players needed to create so many housing units in such a short period of time. The UK New Towns movement shows that it is possible to build a lot of units at human scale, and not necessarily replicate London or destroy the urban fabric. Even closer to us, California—especially in Southern California after World War II—yields certain lessons about doing things right. We had success in normalizing the production of affordable units—perhaps not for the very lowest incomes, but at least for middle- and working-class residents who wanted to enter the housing market. From 1945 to 1975, 6 million homes, including 3.5 million single-family homes, were built in California. The large number of returning veterans and the need for a regional economy that would build upon the defense industries made it easier to justify a combination of policies that resulted in a dramatic expansion of housing opportunities. The GI Bill had an enormous impact on boosting homeownership in the United States. The Veterans Emergency Housing Program, in three years, from 1946-1949, produced 2.5 million homes nationally. California was one of the places where the savings and loan industry grew up, making it easier for people who had never owned a home to get their first mortgages. There were also factors in Southern California that didn’t apply in other parts of the country: the cost of land, the relatively low cost of building, and the development of new methods of creating housing, like tract housing. This leads back to the subject of this address: Is democracy really the problem? To me, the real question is this: Why don’t the people who need affordable housing—those most affected by this crisis—have more power in the political system? I’ll give you an example from my own experience. In 1986, I was a new member of the Los Angeles City Council. Knowing that I was interested in housing and architecture, the Museum of Contemporary Art asked me to support an exhibit paying tribute to the Case Study Houses (the now iconic series of single-family homes in Los Angeles, using new building materials and designed by leading mid-century modern architects) by commissioning an affordable multifamily apartment building in my City Council district. The redevelopment agency found us an empty lot in Hollywood that belonged to the city of LA that would be suitable for 40 units of very-low-income family housing (the category of affordable housing in shortest supply in Hollywood). The museum organized a design competition that was won by the architect Adéle Naudé Santos. The city donated the land for the project, and the redevelopment agency provided housing subsidies that would make it possible for the rents to be afforded by very low-income households. But getting buy-in from the The neighbors was not so easy. Some said that they were concerned about density, even though the project was lower density than many market-rate housing units in the area. Frankly, another concern was a palpable fear of poor people moving into the neighborhood. I distinctly recall an extremely contentious neighborhood meeting that, in my eight years on the City Council, was the closest to a lynch mob I’ve ever experienced. It took 10 years to get the La Brea Franklin project built. And contrary to the complaints of the project’s opponents, it did not become a center of drug-dealing, gangs, prostitution, or dirty laundry hanging from balconies. In fact, you wouldn’t be able to tell driving by that it was a project for very low-income families. It worked, but it was torturous to get it to happen. Several years later, I ran for reelection and won with 70 percent. But poring over the election results on a map, I saw that this precinct was one of a few in the district that I lost—and I suspect it was because of this project. The lesson I learned is that if you want your elected officials to take chances, it helps if the districts are large and the terms are long enough for people to forgive and forget. But if political leaders think that serving the demand for affordable housing results in alienating voters, we may need to invent ways to enable affordable housing to be built through a more normalized process, without requiring a demonstration of political courage. In Southern California, political power is very fragmented and decentralized. This system works well for many people, on many issues. But when it comes to problems that don’t respect political boundaries—like housing, economic development, or transportation— our system doesn’t work well. The supply of available land for developing housing is not growing, but we can use existing land more efficiently. One solution is more density around transit hubs. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, if we were to maximize the development potential around high-frequency transit stations in the county of Los Angeles, we could get as many as 903,000 more housing units. That’s a lot of housing. We also need to make more efficient use of vacant land—in other words, infill development. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that there are between 5,600 to 8,900 vacant parcels around LA County that are zoned for multifamily housing. There are also granny flats or accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Individually, these don’t have a lot of impact. But if there were more of them around the city, the county, and the region, they could make a significant impact. In the most recent issue of our college magazine, I wrote an open letter to the faculty of my college challenging them to do more to address housing. For example, designers could come up with ideas about how to use more prefab or modular materials, like recycled shipping containers. Or designers could be creative about “micro-units.” In San Francisco, some developers are experimenting with dormitories for urban professionals to use space efficiently and to bring costs down. Another idea is reusing buildings that may be becoming obsolete. In some U.S. cities, above-ground parking structures are being redesigned as living units. If we anticipate that the Uber and Lyft generation won’t need to own as many cars, and perhaps parking structures won’t be as common or as large as they are now, then we could convert parking structures or shopping centers that are no longer economically feasible into housing. For the politically adventurous, I have a number third-rail ideas—dangerous ideas that are guaranteed to lose elected officials votes!—that could create incentives for a mobilization for housing at the state and local levels. At the state level, the Regional Housing Needs Assessment has no teeth. In many cases, local governments disregard it because there isn’t a downside to not meeting their targets. One possibility would be to link state tax revenue allocations to local performance producing affordable housing. In 2011, a major tool for financing affordable housing in the state went away when the redevelopment agencies were eliminated. I’m not suggesting that we bring back redevelopment. But if the state is serious about using its power to generate revenues for affordable housing, the Legislature and the governor could set aside more money from the state general fund, authorize general obligation funds, or expand the existing Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. The next idea is to reform CEQA. I’m not suggesting eliminating CEQA entirely, but making it harder for CEQA to be used for nuisance lawsuits against affordable housing projects. Proposition 13 bailed out a lot of homeowners in the late 1970s who were threatened by the gradual increase in property taxes. But it has baked in a system that is inherently unfair to those entering the housing market after 1978. It has also created perverse incentives for local government to not encourage housing development and instead promote commercial development such as car dealerships and big-box retail that generates sales-tax revenue, in order to replace the revenue lost as a result of Prop 13. One way to make a difference is to rewrite Prop 13 to enable local government to generate revenue without becoming reliant on special fees, which can increase the cost of building housing. Another option is the initiative route. This sometimes backfires, but it is a method that is available in California. Take Measure R, which generated tax revenues to support expansion of the L.A. County transit system. People thought it was never going to happen, and yet it got the votes to pass. Maybe something like that could be done for housing. Another way to bring ideas into the political process is to go around the process, using something like a Blue Ribbon Commission. H.L. Mencken once said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” If anybody comes to you with a menu of solutions for housing that are clear and simple, they’re probably wrong. Let’s face up to the hard choices needed to replace our current political and economic malaise with housing choices that give people hope. Learn more at The Planning Report https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531520857512-3PHIQ4O29ML6LKND5KAW/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.27.20+PM.png politics - Q&A: San Francisco Mayor-Elect London Breed On What She Hopes To Accomplish At The Helm Of Her Hometown After a hard-fought, history-making campaign, San Francisco’s Mayor-elect London Breed took a four-day vacation in Cabo San Lucas. Now ready to assume office, the city’s first African American woman mayor talked to The Times this week about how she’ll tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the Bay Area city. Breed, who was raised by her grandmother in public housing, said homelessness and affordable housing will be among her top priorities. (This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.) Your campaign was sort of defined by the adversity you faced as a kid growing up in the city. How do you reconnect people who are natives of a city that in recent years has become a very different place? I think so many people are not in the city anymore that I grew up with. I think what’s important is to make sure that people who are either natives of San Francisco, or live there now, especially those who are struggling, feel like they are part of our city — feel like it’s their city too and also feel like there are opportunities that exist in this city for them. Especially the future generations and kids who are growing up now in poverty. I also want to make sure we make better decisions and incorporate everyone into the prosperity that exists in our city. A thing I notice in L.A., and I see this in San Francisco too. There’s this influx of young people and wealth, and it’s disconnected from the civic energy of the place. Do you see that as a problem? What can a mayor do to fix that? I do see that as a problem that there’s a disconnect. I think part of it is really trying to hold people accountable differently than we’re doing now. I don’t want San Francisco to be just a place where people just move for opportunities. I want to create the future of San Francisco with the young people here. One of the programs that I am proposing is paid internship opportunities for high school students. What that does is provide a way for young people — especially those in our public school system — to work and be a part of these companies at an early age. For the individuals in the tech world, this is how the door can be opened to mentorship opportunities, relationship building and to a real connection to people who are growing up now in San Francisco. The campaign became quite nasty and defined by race in a somewhat surprising way. Now that it’s over, what did you think of the tone and tenor of the race as it occurred? I wasn’t happy with the negativity — the divisiveness, just some of the things that came out. But I can’t control that. I can only control what I did throughout the campaign and I tried to stay focused on the issues. I was hoping and I believe this occurred — that voters saw through all the noise and made what they thought was the right decision. When you were acting mayor and then later ousted by the Board of Supervisors, it seemed to be a galvanizing force for your constituents. Did you see that as something that may have helped you? People were so upset. I think that definitely played a role in more people getting active and engaged in the campaign. I think it inspired a lot of people, because when you think about it, a lot of people know what it feels like to be treated like that. When you see it happen in such a public way, it does something to you. I think people were really hurt and frustrated by the decision. Now here we are. The race is over, and it’s time for us to come together and think about moving San Francisco forward. You will be sworn in on July 11. What do you see as the three or four biggest challenges that you face? First of all, my goal is to get as much rest as I can and to take care of myself first. The thing that is of course going to be my top, top priority is addressing homelessness and cleaning up our streets and housing production. On the housing question, you were a big supporter of SB 827, legislation sponsored by Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) that would make it easier for developers to build residential housing near transit centers. Are you going to push a similar type of policy in the city? It doesn’t have to be necessarily a blanket policy. It could be based on specific corridors that make sense — like transit-rich corridors. I think there are ways to improve our policies for the purposes of increasing housing production. So there are things that can be done. We are going to be building on the McDonald’s site at Haight and Visalia. Sites like that, that are not being used in the most effective ways are sites that we should be identifying for housing production where we’re not displacing anyone and where we’re not bulldozing people’s homes for redevelopment. There’s a better way to do it if you work with the private sector to accomplish the goal as well. The city is not going to be able to do it on its own. The cavalry is not coming with a boatload of money to build housing. We have got to get creative. What do you make of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s struggles to build housing in Los Angeles? Are there any lessons for you here? Have you spoken to him? He actually reached out to me. We haven’t had a chance to talk. Given all the fights taking place across the state over homelessness, what do you see as the quickest and most sustainable way of providing more housing? I have been talking to people who own a number of buildings throughout the city. I think there’s existing vacant properties we can move forward with sooner rather than later. As far as housing production, I think what we’re going to have to do is completely revamp our existing system and look at ways to get the board to remove certain things that are in our polices and, if necessary, take our case to the voters. We have to analyze what the holdup is and explain the process and why it’s taking so long and then inform the voters this is what we need to do, and this will cut the time maybe in half. So my goal is to go that route. I have to push these projects through that are being stalled and also the 423 accessory dwelling units that are on hold in the Department of Building Inspection. I got to get that stuff through. There are number of things that I can continue to push for that would put more units on the market in the process of doing what we need to do to reform the entire system. You are the first African American woman mayor of San Francisco. I wonder if you could just put me in your shoes for a moment. Where were you when that ‘wow’ moment hit you? I don’t know if it has really sunk in yet. Everyday I’m waking up like “wow.” I don’t even know what to say or how to describe it. It’s very hard to describe. I have definitely been thinking about my grandmother a lot — just thinking about the challenges. I have been thinking about the struggles in my life. Just thinking about things that I wish didn’t happen and that’s been really at the top of my mind. But also there’s excitement about how I will have the ability to prevent — not stop everything — but help prevent some of the things that happened to me in my life from happening to other people, with the decisions we’re able to make. That’s really something I have been thinking about. I can’t wait to go to the neighborhood I grew up in where I know some of my young folks are maybe not working and not doing the right thing. Opening the door of opportunity is really what I’m most excited about and what I keep thinking about and how being in this role will help achieve that goal. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531520949354-WMP5X1UQEQB6MO3T5HKT/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.28.54+PM.png politics - Is That Environmental Group a Pawn of Beijing? Nonprofits Wary of Being Branded 'Foreign Agents' When leaders of a powerful congressional committee turned their attention this month to the scourge of foreign agents plotting to weaken American democracy, they didn’t target Eastern European hackers or shadowy international political operatives. They instead took off after the even-tempered environmental lawyers at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), the chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he suspects the group has become an agent of China’s Communist Party. Why else, Bishop and a colleague wrote in a letter to the group demanding documents, would NRDC spend so much effort fawning over our adversary’s imperfect environmental record while attacking the Trump administration’s stewardship? The committee’s interrogation of one of the country’s leading environmental groups came as part of a larger trend: Last year, Robert S. Mueller III’s special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election breathed new life into the federal law requiring registration of foreign agents. Since then, the 80-year-old statute has started to become weaponized by political interests to go after their opponents. A broad spectrum of civil society groups that work internationally fear they could face a new legal threat — being pressured to register as foreign agents, a designation that could severely damage an organization. “It is not at all clear where this is headed,” said Sam Worthington, CEO of InterAction, a large coalition of U.S.-based nonprofits that work internationally. He warns that thousands of American nonprofits could find themselves in the same predicament as the Natural Resources Defense Council. Like several other baleful developments in U.S. public life, the potential misuse of the foreign agent registration law parallels developments in Russia. Advocates for nonprofit groups worry that a legal tool meant to protect American institutions could be used to strike at those out of favor in Washington, much as the Kremlin has used similar rules to intimidate and shut down civil society groups. America’s Foreign Agent Registration Act has been around since 1938, when it was passed to flush out Nazi agents in the prelude to World War II. By the 1950s it had become a staple of the so-called Red scare, used to attack perceived communist sympathizers. W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent black sociologist and writer, was indicted in 1951 on charges of being an unregistered Soviet agent, with prosecutors citing his role as chair of the Peace Information Center, a group that advocated nuclear disarmament. He was acquitted, but the State Department banned him from traveling for eight more years because Du Bois would not sign an affidavit renouncing communism. In recent years, the act was laxly enforced and routinely ignored by Washington lobbyists who did work for foreign governments but claimed that they did not meet the law’s requirements to register. That changed last year when Mueller indicted President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, on, among other charges, failure to register. That was followed in November, by the Justice Department forcing the Russian-funded television network RT America to register. Suddenly, attorneys and lobbyists in Washington with foreign governments on their client lists began to register in significantly larger numbers. As is often the case in Washington’s highly polarized political environment, it didn’t take long for people to begin worrying about unintended consequences. In April, a group of 43 nonprofits urged lawmakers seeking to bolster enforcement of the registration law to proceed cautiously, warning their proposals could open nonprofits to “politicized enforcement actions and attack.” “The act is so vaguely and broadly written that it lends itself to being politicized,” said Nick Robinson, legal advisor for the International Center for Nonprofit Law. “That might be by politicians or the Department of Justice or others who can use this to target nonprofits.” “We have seen this before,” Robinson said, pointing to the Du Bois case. “We and a whole bunch of other nonprofits are concerned about this,” he added. The coalition’s letter was sent only weeks after Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee issued a report suggesting environmental groups protesting fracking and natural gas pipelines had become unwitting agents of the Russian government. The same committee last year accused the Sea Change Foundation, a major funder of large U.S. environmental groups, of getting money from Russian energy interests eager to curb gas extraction in the U.S. The committee seized on reports in right-wing media about the group’s opaque financial documents in making its accusations, but it admitted that there was “little to no paper trail.” The members of Congress demanded the Trump administration investigate if Sea Change was a foreign agent. Roderick Forrest, an attorney for the Bermuda-based firm through which much of the money to Sea Change was channeled, said in an email that allegations are “completely false and irresponsible” and that there is “no Russian connection whatsoever.” But Sea Change and others may now find themselves targeted by the Natural Resources Committee. “We are looking into groups beyond NRDC,” said a committee aide who was not authorized to speak on the record. Committee officials denied Bishop and the co-author of the letter, oversight subcommittee chairman Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), are using the registration act to target groups that oppose their push to expand oil and gas drilling. They say they merely seek clarity about their foreign affiliations. “There is some question about to what degree a foreign entity drives NRDC’s mission,” the aide said. “Have they crossed the line from just being sycophants to Chinese leadership to actively or indirectly carrying out their information campaign in some capacity?” In their letter, Bishop and Westerman challenged NRDC’s praise of China’s environmental efforts and questioned whether the group was “aiding China’s perception management efforts with respect to pollution control and its international standing on environmental issues in ways that may be detrimental to the United States.” The letter cites NRDC’s praise of fisheries protections by China at the same time Greenpeace was sharply critical of the nation for subsidizing commercial fleets that are depleting fisheries around the world. “The Committee is concerned that the NRDC’s need to maintain access to Chinese officials has influenced its political activities in the United States,” the congressmen wrote. A spokeswoman for Greenpeace called NRDC an ally that it fully supports. NRDC did not respond to interview requests. In a statement, Bob Deans, the organization’s director of strategic engagement, said the group’s work combating pollution worldwide is in America’s national interest. “We’re proud of our work, in China and elsewhere, helping to create a more sustainable future for everyone, and we look forward to discussing that work with Chairman Bishop and the committee,” the statement said. The committee’s investigation has alarmed even some of those who have urged Congress to do more to inoculate American institutions against Chinese government interference. Among them is Glenn Tiffert, a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who recently testified to Congress about the methods the Chinese use to project influence. He pointed to organizations, including the Confucius Institutes present at hundreds of American schools and universities. Their mission is to teach Chinese language and culture, but critics worry they have become a subtle tool the Chinese Communist Party uses to indoctrinate students. Educators have been debating whether the institutes should be compelled to register as foreign agents. Branding them as such would likely prompt schools to sever their relationships, depriving students of the language training and other coursework they provide. Tiffert says that’s a debate the nation needs to have as it contemplates the nuanced ways in which foreign governments exert influence inside America. But he calls the congressional insinuations about the NRDC deeply concerning. “This should not be about American civil society organizations, like NRDC,” he said. “We need to be cautious about recklessly crossing that line.” The committee’s letter “brings to mind some dark chapters in history when loose innuendo and association with foreign government were hurled for political purposes,” he said in an interview. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531521151522-NK9TP7NAE4H61KIE7EJE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.32.08+PM.png politics - Ohio’s Voter Purging Process Is About Disenfranchising Cities There are two key things to understand about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Husted vs APRI decision yesterday, which allows the state to punish infrequent voters by purging them from voter lists. This ruling will further erode the voting power of people who live in cities because the areas most affected by purges in Ohio are its largest metropolises: Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. The stakes just heightened for people who get evicted or are displaced from their homes, adding possible disenfranchisement to their list of problems. At question in this case is the state’s Supplemental Process for purging voters, which goes like this: If you live in Ohio and you decide to, for whatever reason, skip voting in one federal election, this can trigger the state to send a document to your listed residence asking you to confirm that you still live there. If you do not send this document back and don’t vote for another few elections, the state assumes you no longer live at this address and will remove your name from your local voter list. This means that the next time you decide to vote, you will likely not be able to—or at best, you can vote provisionally. This is what happened to Navy veteran Larry Harmon when he tried to vote in 2015 but was denied because he failed to vote in 2009 and 2010 and didn’t respond to the address confirmation mailer that was sent to him. Harmon and the A. Philip Randolph Institute sued the state with the backing of several other civil rights and social justice organizations, such as the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH), Demos, and the ACLU. The U.S. Department of Justice also filed a legal brief in 2016 on their behalf stating that Ohio’s purging process violates the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The Justice Department has held and defended the position that a person can’t be purged for not voting dating back to NVRA’s passage in 1993, through both Democrat and Republican administrations. But states have resorted to all sorts of questionable voter purging schemes, often disproportionately affecting voters of color. The NVRA’s anti-purging provisions were further strengthened by HAVA in response to the 2000 Bush-Gore election, which was bungled in large part because of the reckless voter purging that happened in Florida. A district court sided with Harmon in 2016, but that decision was overturned by a federal appeals court later that same year. Harmon’s defenders appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but this time the Justice Department, under a leadership that is unfriendly to civil rights, decided to reverse the position it previously held for two decades. In a new brief, it posited that Ohio’s Supplemental Policy actually does not violate NVRA or HAVA. Yesterday, SCOTUS agreed. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, pointed to a clause in the NVRA that said a person could be purged if he has “failed to respond to a notice” and “has not voted” for a certain period of time. But what Harmon’s advocates were contesting was how Ohio was going about this: The purge process can begin when a person misses voting once, after which they are sent the address confirmation notice. Meanwhile, even HAVA states that a person can’t be purged solely for a failure to vote. Ohio is the only state that has a purging policy like this, but thanks to yesterday’s SCOTUS decision, it likely won’t be the last. The ruling opens the door to other states to employ the same kind of purging process. If the current test case is any indication, that would be devastating for major cities because in Ohio, those are the jurisdictions that have been most heavily impacted. According to a Reuters study from 2016: Voters of all stripes in Ohio are affected, but the policy appears to be helping Republicans in the state’s largest metropolitan areas, according to a Reuters survey of voter lists. In the state’s three largest counties that include Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods. That’s because residents of relatively affluent Republican-leaning neighborhoods are more likely to vote in both congressional elections and presidential contests, historical turnouts show. Democrats are less likely to vote in mid-term elections and thus are more at risk of falling off the rolls. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted as much in her dissent, and also explained that people of color have been disproportionately impacted as well: It is unsurprising in light of the history of such purge programs that numerous amici report that the Supplemental Process has disproportionately affected minority, low-income, disabled, and veteran voters. As one example, amici point to an investigation that revealed that in Hamilton County, “African-American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati had 10% of their voters removed due to inactivity” since 2012, as “compared to only 4% of voters in a suburban, majority-white neighborhood.” Harmon’s defense argued that Ohio is incorrect to assume a person has moved just because they dodged an election or two—indeed, Harmon had been living in the same place for 16 years when his name was scrubbed from voter lists. There are myriad reasons for not voting, not least of which is because you just might not want to. Perhaps there is no candidate who best encapsulates your interests. This might often be the case for Democrats living in cities when considering participating in statewide elections, given the way cities are gerrymandered out of power and trapped by Republican-dominated state legislatures and governors that cater to suburban districts. However, people of color, of low-income, and people who live in cities will always be vulnerable to residency-based purging schemes because they are the people most likely to change addresses. Cities have larger populations of people who rent (in many cities, renters are upwards of half the total population). Cities are also staging grounds for frequent neighborhood change—public housing gets razed for mixed-income complexes, new urban development plans kick off, gentrification kicks in—all of which lead to higher rates of displacement of families than are found in suburbs. Even homeowners of color were more likely to not only get foreclosed upon during the recent housing crash, but also most likely to not have recovered. Many are living in transitional and temporary housing. Not to mention, cities are at the heart of the long-running eviction crisis in the United States. Cincinnati figures among the top ten metros for this, with an eviction rate that is 2.36 times the national average, according to Eviction Lab. Cleveland’s and Columbus’s eviction rates are not far behind. With this ruling, the displaced can now add disenfranchisement to their list of worries while seeking resettlement. People of color can add this to the lately growing list of voting rights setbacks and obstacles experienced of late. Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent that the majority’s ruling neglects to acknowledge the history of voter discrimination and suppression that led to voter protection laws like NVRA and HAVA to begin with. Justice Alito replied that racial discrimination at the polls was not relevant to this case. “The only question before us is whether [Ohio’s Supplemental Process] violates federal law,” said Alito. “We have no authority to second-guess Congress.” And yet second-guessing Congress is exactly what SCOTUS did in 2013 when it ruled to strip away key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that Congress had almost unanimously reauthorized and did not ask SCOTUS to correct. Those provisions mostly protected people of color living in southern states with long histories of racial discrimination. If those same southern states decide to launch purging schemes like the one now rendered constitutional in Ohio (Florida has tried similar), then voters of color there will have even less protection. Ohio’s Secretary of State Jon Husted said these purges are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but study after study has pointed to the fact that this happens at such a vanishing rate that it’s not worth mentioning. Donald Trump disbanded his voter fraud commissionearlier this year because it was unable to unearth such fraudulent activity. There’s little reward or incentive for illegal voting in Ohio, where the penalty for this is a felony that could land one in jail for five years. There is a solution, though, if Ohio is truly worried about keeping accurate voter registration files. It’s called automatic voter registration, which, as its name suggests, automatically updates a voter’s registration information whenever they get a new driver’s license, state ID, or apply for state benefits. It’s been adopted in roughly a dozen states so far and can be effective in reducing the chances of losing track of voters whether they move or not. A bill was introduced in Ohio in February 2017 to initiate automatic voter registration, and is still pending. Ohio Secretary of State Husted opposes it. Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531521265429-DXC9Q25SKPM32KPBACX1/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.34.00+PM.png politics - Democrats Turn to Hollywood for Messaging Help LOS ANGELES — The Democratic National Committee and members of Congress are turning to Hollywood for help with voter turnout and messaging ahead of the midterm elections and 2020 presidential campaign, quietly consulting with a group of actors, writers and producers here. DNC Chairman Tom Perez, several House members and other top elected officials have already met with the group, formed by members of the entertainment industry in the wake of the 2016 election, that participants liken to a TV writers’ room, complete with producers of such programs as “Veep.” The existence of the group and details of the meetings have not been previously reported. The group has discussed targeted voter-registration programs with visiting Democrats, as well as the party’s framing of issues ranging from abortion rights to gun control. In one recent meeting, a Midwestern senator sought advice about how to discuss gun control with conservative-leaning voters in his or her state, multiple participants said. Participants declined to identify the senator or other elected officials who have visited. “We’re a messaging strike force, mostly around voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts,” said Mathew Littman, a former Joe Biden speechwriter who helped to organize the group with Stephanie Daily Smith, a political consultant based in Los Angeles. The group is primarily focused on programs to increase voter registration, and the DNC’s involvement is limited to that effort. Participants say they are developing programs targeting young people, black voters and Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria — a potentially significant voting bloc for the Democratic Party in Florida and other key states. But the meetings have also served as an opportunity to address broader messaging issues, with several House members explicitly requesting help on speechwriting and overall messaging, participants said. In meetings with candidates and DNC officials, group members have urged the party to adopt a more aggressive communications strategy than the party mustered in a demoralizing 2016 presidential campaign. “One of the first things we were at least talking about in the beginning meetings was how to improve upon the message as to what does the Democratic Party stand for, what does that represent,” said Andrew Marcus, who owns the television and film company Apiary Entertainment. “When the Republican Party or [President Donald] Trump is able to say ‘Make America great again’ and nobody that I know can tell you what the DNC or any of the leading candidates’ slogans [are], I think that’s a marketing problem.” Alex Gregory, a writer and producer, said he has lobbied Democrats in their meetings to tie in vitro fertilization to abortion rights debates, while generally encouraging Democrats to adopt “more emotional content” in their messaging. “It really is focused on … what do we stand for? In some ways, how did we lose?” Gregory said. “It is a moment of soul searching right now, in that we lost to an insane person … and that was more appealing than what we had to offer.” The group conducts conference calls, shares an email list and has met about five times since September, Littman said. It involves about 35 members, including producers, show-runners, executives, directors, an animator and actors such as Rosemarie DeWitt, Ron Livingston, Jason George, Alyssa Milano and Helen Hunt. They hold midday meetings, typically at the Century City headquarters of the public relations giant PMK-BNC, seated around a long table in a 14th-floor conference room overlooking the Los Angeles skyline. Littman, who ran government affairs for Broadcom Inc. and runs the meetings, said the elected officials are promised anonymity in order to speak freely. In one of the group’s first projects, members are working to find young celebrities who might post videos of themselves registering to vote. Targets include stars of the TV comedy “Black-ish” and celebrities with ties to Puerto Rico. The group is also discussing a college campus voter registration drive that would include some kind of VIP concert or other experience for students who register large numbers of voters. David Mandel, executive producer of “Veep,” said “it’s disgusting what happened” with the government response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico and that if Democrats can drive up registration in Florida and Texas, “those numbers can make a difference.” Of the group’s long-term goals, the producer Cindy Cowan said, “We’re looking at November. But our bigger end game, like most people’s end game, is the presidential.” Though Hollywood professionals and celebrities have long maintained ties to the Democratic Party, their significance has largely been limited to their ability to raise money for candidates and causes. The group meeting is unusual for the lack of a direct fundraising tie. “I was looking for something to do that didn’t involve giving money,” Gregory said. “What I like about this thing is it’s not transactional.” For the DNC and Democratic politicians who participate, the group’s meetings provide an opportunity to deepen relationships with a significant donor pool. But participants said they do not sense a soft pedal for contributions, and fundraising is explicitly prohibited. “Right now, this is a lot of connecting us to talent and other influencers who have a large social media following or are well known in various communities in order to help us engage voters and highlight the importance of voting,” said DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa. “These are creative influencers that are bringing to the table their creative minds in order to best reach out to these voters.” The arrangement draws not only on Hollywood’s stable of liberal-leaning celebrities — who have been used in voter registration efforts and political campaigns for years — but also on the industry’s creative expertise, which Democrats have traditionally been slower to exploit. Daily Smith said entertainment industry professionals “wanted to give their intellectual capital” and that after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, “The one thing we learned is that we can’t take anything for granted, and we should be asking everyone for help right now.” “One of our strengths is an incredibly creative community that knows how to message and knows how to reach people and can come up with hopefully some kind of messaging for the DNC and others that can help going forward,” said Craig Zisk, a director and producer involved in the group. “We do it for movie posters, we do it for TV Guide slug-lines, and we want to be able to do that for the DNC.” The group is only beginning to emerge from its infancy, and the significance of its efforts is unclear. In addition, participants are acutely aware of the backlash the Democratic Party has long endured for its ties to Hollywood — exacerbated by sexual harassment scandals that have tarnished the industry. Republicans frequently have made a cudgel of “Hollywood values,” and out-of-state Democrats who raise money here have routinely been pilloried for the association at home. “Look, the world knows they don’t necessarily need Hollywood telling people what to do,” Mandel said. “I have no desire to tell people what to do.” However, Mandel said, “One thing I think we are pretty good at is getting the word out on something.” Livingston, of “Office Space” and “Boardwalk Empire” fame, suggested the group may also help celebrities hone their approach to political campaigning “in a way that’s helpful, and not just self-congratulatory,” describing the meetings as “really more a chance for politicians to educate me about politics.” Livingston, who grew up in Iowa, said he thought he could be helpful in the Midwest. “I’m a little more familiar with who the Trump voters are, because I have some Trump voters in my family,” he said. “We’re going to need some people who voted for Trump to vote for some Democrats this time around.” He added, “If they think that’s helpful, I’m offering it.” Learn more at Politico https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531521374279-YCMX71XA3EWH9506EC10/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.35.54+PM.png politics - How Do We Detoxify California's Poison Tap Water? More Democracy The public water boards in the southern San Joaquin Valley are only nominally public. Of 565 water board seats in Fresno, Kern, Kings and Tulare counties, 491 — a stunning 87% — went uncontested in elections over the last four years, according to the Visalia-based Community Water Center. Candidates ran unopposed so often that three-quarters of the boards didn’t even bother to hold elections. These boards are the closest thing to local government in more than 300 unincorporated communities in the water-scarce San Joaquin Valley. They manage delivery of drinking water to residents and water to farms and dairies. They fund investments in pumps and pipes, set water rates and collect fees, and in some cases manage groundwater consumption. Most pertinently, they are responsible for water quality in agricultural communities where chemical runoff and naturally occurring contaminants such as arsenic have poisoned wells. As a result, a million or more Californians, most of them living in poor farmworker communities, can’t safely drink the water that comes out of their taps. As Laurel Firestone, the Community Water Center’s co-executive director, explained to me, local water boards have the potential to change that, particularly if board members are drawn from the communities that are directly affected by the boards’ decisions. Unfortunately, as the San Joaquin Valley study showed, few boards meet that criterion. Instead, power gets concentrated in the same set of hands over time, often district “good old boys” — older white males who may not even live where water quality is the worst. The story of West Goshen, an unincorporated town of 500 or so mostly Latino farmworkers and their families in Tulare County, shows both the harm that unrepresentative boards can do and the benefits of invigorating them. Until 2007, most West Goshen residents didn’t even know that an elected local water board existed. Then the board, in the form of the West Goshen Mutual Water Co., quadrupled their water rates. It turned out that a single family had run the board and the company for more than a decade, according to Lucy Hernandez, a West Goshen resident who led opposition to the incumbents. West Goshen homeowners should have been voting regularly for those who oversee their water, but partly because of the board’s obscurity, the members never faced opposition; they skipped elections. The board held “public” meetings that community members didn’t know about. “Father, wife, son, niece — it was like a family business,” Hernandez told me. The rate increase, which was triggered by the need to repair a broken pump, provoked a community revolt. When new board members took over, West Goshen applied for state grants and received money to fix the pump. But the system’s problems weren’t over. A few years later, tests showed West Goshen’s water was contaminated with nitrate from agricultural runoff. Residents could use their tap water, risking health problems from diarrhea to cancer to death, or they could spend a sizeable portion of their scant incomes on bottled water. Again the board applied for state grants, this time $3 million, so that its constituents could be hooked up to the robust water system in the neighboring city of Visalia. Not only was West Goshen’s drinking water made safe, but the town’s rates dropped by half or more because it was sharing costs with Visalia. West Goshen’s success story stands for the crucial work water boards do at the local level. But Firestone believes such grassroots water activism will also have an impact on statewide water policy. Not least because their members often move on to seats on regional water boards, where their power multiplies. Here’s an example of what’s at stake. Gov. Jerry Brown’s current budget includes provisions for a Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, which would provide money to fix tainted drinking water systems throughout the state — its approval would constitute one of Brown’s most important accomplishments. Payments for the fund would come from farmers, as a way of resolving their legal responsibility for the water contamination caused by agricultural chemicals, and from a 95-cent monthly fee on municipal utility users’ water bills (with low-income residents exempted). Farmers, environmentalists and water-stressed communities support the fund. The primary opponent is the Assn. of California Water Agencies, a statewide coalition of 448 public water agencies. Timothy Quinn, ACWA’s executive director, told the Sacramento Bee last week that a problem caused largely by farming shouldn’t be solved “by putting a charge on somebody’s bill in Los Angeles or San Diego or San Francisco.” Given that approval requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature, ACWA’s opposition could prevent passage of the measure. ACWA’s position “shows how disconnected many water agencies are from the communities within their own jurisdictions,” Firestone said. With more local representation on the water boards, the agency’s stance could change. The Community Water Center has held workshops in unincorporated communities to explain the water boards’ significance and the opportunity to run for seats. Some residents have felt too intimidated to run, so the center has established a “water leaders” network for current and newly elected board members to share information and support. The benefits are obvious. Sham democracy gets replaced with the real thing, and we get that much closer to making good on the human right to clean water for hundreds of thousands of Californians. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531521543967-A8O2S30HPFARUW0BARVN/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.38.02+PM.png politics - The Question That Could Decide The 2020 Election The first declared candidate for president in 2020 has made 19 trips to Iowa or New Hampshire since last summer. He has published a book on how to “unify our divided nation.” He is “having a blast.” And he does not seem troubled that you may have no idea that he is in the race, or possibly even who he is. It will be up to the good Democrats of Iowa and New Hampshire to fix that, says Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.). It’s worth sitting down with Delaney, as I did recently over breakfast, not because he’s necessarily going to be the next president — though, after 2016, you’d be foolish to count anyone out at this stage — but because he has thought carefully and intelligently about what kind of leadership the next president should provide, whoever he or she turns out to be. As a moderate, wealthy, self- ­described “pragmatic idealist” committed to bipartisanship and compromise in the service of accomplishment, Delaney might not seem the likeliest standard-­bearer for the Democrats in 2020. The party, after all, is often depicted as galloping toward angry resistance and full-blown socialism, promising free tuition, single-payer health care and a government job for anyone who wants one. But Delaney said his meetings in Iowa and New Hampshire over the past year have convinced him that many voters are no longer all that captivated by the old Bernie vs. Hillary dynamic. He is finding them receptive to the argument that an appeal to bipartisanship may be not only good for the country but, when the Republicans under President Trump have become so meanly partisan, a winning strategy to boot. “The more I’m in it, the less it seems to be about policy choices and the more about a values approach to the presidency,” he said. “How can we restore some sense of respect to the presidency? How do we restore civility and competence in government? How do we start feeling good again about what’s happening in Washington?” Delaney recalled a recent meeting with about 15 Democrats at a Pizza Ranch in Winterset, Iowa, where the head of the local party, a union electrician, said he had been a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — but opposed single-payer health insurance and free college tuition. “So I asked him, why was he a Bernie supporter?” Delaney recalled. “And he said, ‘He was honest, he was genuine, he was actually talking about priorities that were important to my family.’ ” Delaney champions plenty of specific policy measures in his book, “The Right Answer: How We Can Unify Our Divided Nation”: universal prekindergarten to broaden opportunity, an expanded earned-income tax credit to boost low-wage workers, universally available (but not mandatory) national service for high school graduates, and more. But his broader message is that one party alone isn’t going to accomplish any of these — and that even the most sensible and broadly supported reforms aren’t happening because of the hyperpartisanship that is “destroying our country.” “Imagine that you’re trying to do business with someone and the first words out of your mouth are ‘You’re stupid and everything you think is wrong. Now let’s work out a deal,’ ” he writes in his book. “That would never fly in the business world, and it obviously doesn’t work so well in politics, either.” For Delaney, Trump’s depredations only strengthen the argument. The nation isn’t preparing for the future, in education, infrastructure, research or technology, because the government can’t get anything done, he said. A lot of Democrats share that concern — but so do a lot of independents and a growing number of Republican voters. “Democrats should be the party that brings people together,” he argued. “It’s not only the right thing, it’s what people are looking for.” In his first 100 days in office, Delaney says he would champion only measures with bipartisan support, such as criminal-justice reform, infrastructure development and dealing with the opioid crisis. He would go to Congress once a quarter and take questions, unscripted, from members on both sides of the aisle. Other Democratic candidates likely will be making this kind of argument for pragmatic leadership — former mayors and governors, maybe former business executives, too. Given that field, Delaney knows pundits aren’t going to take a little-known three-term congressman from Maryland all that seriously unless he surprises in the early contests. But if he falls short, it won’t be for lack of a theory of the case. “I tell voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, this is your job,” he said. “If you don’t find unknown candidates, you have no reason to exist in this process.” In 1976, he said, the question was how to restore trust to a corrupt government, and the process produced Jimmy Carter. “Today the central question is, ‘How do you bring the country back together?’ ” Delaney said. “If that’s not the question, then I’m not the winner.” Learn more at the Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531521641522-7VQMU7KO1H54GOYEL39O/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.40.26+PM.png politics - What Mayors Are Talking About Two mayors deliver their annual state of the city addresses. They both acknowledge imperfect crime records and tout their hiring of police officers. They both prioritize revitalizing their streets. And they both talk about increasing the density of core neighborhoods. Put them in a room together, and they agree about most things. But there’s one topic they frame very differently: Their relationship with their colleagues in state and federal government. “We are living in interesting times,” said Lawrence, Massachusetts, Mayor Dan Rivera in his city address. He contextualized the challenges for the city by pointing to the Trump administration’s “struggles to keep its doors open” and “men and women taking to the streets to protest” in cities across the country. Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s address struck a very different political tone. “We don’t get involved in the partisan politics of the day,” he said. “Our team shuts up, rolls up its sleeves, and takes action.” The relationship between cities and other governments is one of the top issues that U.S. mayors increasingly talked about in setting their priorities this year, according to an analysis of 160 State of the City addresses by the National League of Cities (NLC). Other popular topics that emerged more than in previous years include infrastructure and public parks. “Cities big and small are contending with a tall order: Do more with less, help more people, expand more programs, but do it with less money, and less support from the federal government,” said Brooks Rainwater, the executive director of NLC’s Center for City Solutions. “In some ways, it’s the same old story. But when we have crises like the opioid epidemic and climate change on our plates, it starts to feel more dire, and in some ways more absurd.” Talking about the report during a panel discussion, Rivera said he chose to lead his speech by addressing these political issues because he wanted his constituents to understand that “even though we balanced our books and we’re addressing issues that for a long time people wanted us to address, the circumstances surrounding that have changed.” “Federal grants to police officers [are] no more,” Rivera said. “A full response to what the national conversation is naming as a crisis around the opioid epidemic, no response. A shared financing of public education and transportation, that’s not coming either.” Political context aside, most of the top priorities for mayors haven’t changed, according to NLC’s analysis of the 160 speeches that were available online. The most commonly discussed priority for mayors remains economic development, with a recent focus on downtown revitalization. Streets and signs ranked highly across geographic regions, and in all but the biggest cities. Public safety remains a top concern, particularly this year, talking about the police. Even mayors like Rivera know that these are the issues his constituents will ask him about first. “It doesn’t matter what people are talking about at the national and at the state level,” he said. “When you go grocery shopping, people are talking about their park, their sidewalk, their street. And you could be at this thing were you’re celebrating something very big, and you just did this great thing, and inevitably somebody will walk up to you and say, ‘hey you know my trash didn’t get picked up today.’ And so you can’t run from that.” The biggest cities, those with more than 300,000 people, were most likely to talk about “intergovernmental relations,” the third-ranked discrete topic after police and public transit. This concern manifested itself in pledges for new priorities like climate change that fill gaps in national regulation: “We understand clearly we have to protect our own people from global warming when our national government fails to do so,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in this year’s speech. It also manifested itself in escalating battles with state governments, which are increasingly blocking cities from acting on issues like property tax and rent control, while expecting significant contributions from cities for state pension funds. “It is hard to believe that the governor is even talking about trying to limit city, county, and school district tax increases to 2.5 percent per year (without a vote), when the state property tax has increased by 288 percent in just five years,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler in his address. “This year I warn of another concern and ask for your assistance,” said Mayor Steve Leary of Winter Park, Florida. “Our leaders in Tallahassee have lost their way. Members of the Florida House and Senate have chosen leadership, party, lobbyists, and their own selfish interests over the constituents that elected them. Their overt attempts to preempt home rule and create one-size-fits-all legislation is beyond dangerous, it is borderline unconstitutional.” Big cities were also most likely to elevate homelessness and affordable housing as top issues. For smaller cities, these issues did not crack the top 10. Opioids were only coded in 11 percent of speeches, and substance abuse in 7 percent. Infrastructure, by contrast, was talked about in 56 percent of speeches. But the issue of opioids was one of several identified as emerging based on its appearance in a subset of speeches. Others were climate change and broadband internet access. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, touted his initiative to expand public WiFi, saying: “To thrive tomorrow, we must also pay attention to a new category of infrastructure. Residents need to know they can rely on good digital infrastructure.” A small and relatively unchanged proportion of mayors, 14 percent, talked about government data and technology, despite an increasing public focus on the notion of “smart cities.” Other topics at the intersection of technology and infrastructure like dockless bikes were increasingly mentioned this year, including by Buttigieg, in what he called a merging of “digital and transportation infrastructure.” Many local priorities are, of course, harder to quantify. Mayor Strickland of Memphis cited population loss as the number one issue for his city, a contrast from the narrative in many of the largest U.S. cities where new residents are associated with rising costs and displacement. To address that issue, Strickland said, he’s following a trend common to most cities: building up density in core areas, instead of “building out.” But he’s also looking to several of the other primary issues on NLC’s list, particularly crime and schools, which he says are driving people out of the city. Strickland ran for office on a campaign to improve public safety, and has touted advances in 911 response times and police hiring in his address. But police hiring alone may not solve everything, as Memphis is a majority-black city with a history of racially charged policing. Just prior to Strickland’s election, the police department was reviewed by the Department of Justice over the shooting of a black teen by police, and the ACLU is suing Memphis over alleged police surveillance. Asked how he confronts racial tensions in approaching the issue of “public safety,” Strickland noted that the police department is diverse—majority African-American—and that his public safety strategy includes not just policing but other intersectional issues like education and community planning. “Memphians all over the city, black and white, Democrat and Republican, no matter where you live, are really sick of crime,” he told me. “There are certain neighborhoods that hear a gunshot every single night.” Rivera’s city of Lawrence also considers crime among its most significant and intractable problems. His city had the worst homicide rate in 15 years last year, he said. He, too, has been focused on police hiring, as well as community policing. But unlike Strickland, he cited gun trafficking and police staffing as issues that should be addressed at the national level. Anita Yadavalli, program director of city fiscal policy at NLC, said several mayors brought up guns in their annual addresses this year, particularly school shootings. The study only tracked speeches between January and April, but she predicted that if she were to keep tracking addresses that occur through the summer, guns would continue to emerge as an issue for mayors. “That’s something that especially I find that mayors are calling on federal action. You know it’s basically in the vein of, ‘Hey we’re struggling in these cities, what can you do about it?’” She added that some cities are also touting moves to pass legislation like banning bump stocks. “I think that mayors are just trying to take action into their own hands through on-the-ground programs and trying to implement gun violence policies wherever they can,” she said. Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531522027079-74H249XZ4DDXMACOO6KI/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.42.10+PM.png politics - What Virginia’s Expansion of Medicaid Means The Post reports: The [Virginia] state Senate approved expanding Medicaid to cover 400,000 low-income residents, putting an end to years of Republican intransigence and opposition. As health-care advocate Topher Spiro put it: “This is a major victory that will transform the lives of thousands of families.” Wednesday’s decision is a tribute to the power of voting and the resistance to President Trump, which flipped 15 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates from Republican to Democrat in last fall’s state elections. The expansion is attached to the state budget, which Gov. Ralph Northam (D) — who campaigned for office last fall on a promise to expand Medicaid in Virginia — is expected to sign as soon as it reaches his desk. Achieving Medicaid coverage for 400,000 additional people is a mammoth victory for Democrats in a state that has been trending blue for years, but now seems firmly in that party’s column. The vote holds multiple lessons for both parties. (1) Republicans have made the mistake of treating Medicaid as a budget issue — a piggy bank to be raided — not a health-care issue. They’ve had ample opportunity to reform the program but, aside from a few waivers to allow states to innovate, whenever Medicaid comes up in GOP circles the topic is usually about limiting coverage and cutting cost. (2) This is a victory for the Affordable Care Act, no question. Obamacare made Medicaid expansion possible and, whatever you think of the efforts by the administration and Congress to chip away at the ACA, an expansion of this size suggests President Barack Obama’s health-care legacy is on firmer footing than Democrats feared when they lost the White House, as well as their majorities in the House and Senate. (3) This will be a big issue in November when multiple states (Utah, Idaho, Nebraska) will vote on Medicaid expansion, which delights Democrats. Democrats are returning to their bread-and-butter issues (e.g., wage stagnation, lack of access to health care) as they remind voters which party defended the ACA, and which party voted to eliminate it without an adequate replacement. The Medicaid issue will help the Democratic Party turn out its base, which is already pumped up to cast a symbolic vote against Trump. (4) The Medicaid issue affects nearly every state and federal race. Democrats will argue that Republicans “want to take away health care” while Republicans will be forced to defend their votes and take a stance on expansion. That’s a problem given how popular Medicaid expansion has become. (“A poll conducted late last year by Public Opinion Strategies and the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association found 83 percent of the state’s residents supported the expansion, including a majority of self-identified Republicans. . . . Polls show that two thirds of Utah voters support the Medicaid expansion in their state. So it’s unlikely to be close,” The Post report continued.) Meanwhile, Maine’s controversial Republican Gov. Paul LePage is being sued for failure to expand Medicaid after a state referendum approving it passed with 59 percent of the vote. (5) Virginia will be the 33rd state (along with the District of Columbia) to approve Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion appears here to stay, and despite the best efforts of the GOP House and right-wing pundits, has widespread, bipartisan support in every geographic region, with the exception of the Southeast (which includes some of the poorest states) and the Great Plains (although Nebraska and Idaho could join Virginia). “In a nutshell, Medicaid is the absolute star of the Trump presidency despite every effort on their part,” said Andy Slavitt, the former head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who served during the Obama administration. “By the end of his term, you could see five more states expand. And there is a tipping point for the hold out states at that point. The irony of course is that this is a far more Democratic idea than exchanges, a Republican idea [originating at the Heritage Foundation].” (6) For all the talk of democracy’s dysfunction the 2017 elections in Virginia showed how the system worked. Democrats ran on expanding Medicaid, voters overwhelmingly chose Democrats, and now Virginia voters got what they wanted. (By the way, it may surprise political watchers who focus solely on Washington to learn that a lot of state governments are responsive to and demonstrate bipartisan cooperation.) (7) Democrats are seeking to make health care the top issue in November while Republicans want to wave the bloody shirt on immigration (which will hurt them in states with large numbers of Hispanic voters) and to tout tax reform (which has not impressed many voters). Democrats have the advantage on the issue mix — and likely should heed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who warned to talk about health care and jobs, not Russia and impeachment. Learn more at The Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531522118972-5D2FAX4XKM46R7903L3U/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.48.20+PM.png politics - Mitch McConnell is Winning the Long Game Franklin D. Roosevelt, afflicted by the disease at age 39, died in April 1945 at the polio recuperation facility he had created in Warm Springs, Ga. Before then, Mitch McConnell, living in Five Points, Ala., began going there for treatment for the polio that struck him at age 2, in 1944. After paralysis by polio, an inner iron undergirded the ebullience of FDR, who hitherto had relied on privilege and charm. McConnell, who had none of the former and is parsimonious with the latter, acquired while overcoming polio the patience and grit that on June 12 will make him the longest-serving leader of Senate Republicans, surpassing Bob Dole. Since McConnell and his mother, returning from two years of intermittent treatments in Warm Springs, bought his first pair of walking shoes, he has played “the long game,” which is the title of his 2016 memoir. In his 33 Senate years, he has become a major figure in the history of two of the government’s three branches — the legislative and now the judicial as he oversees the reshaping of federal courts. If McConnell’s low emotional metabolism allowed him to become agitated, he would do so about complaints — mostly from people inattentive to events or uninformed about possibilities — that Republican control of the two political branches is not producing results. McConnell says: The largest tax reduction in 31 years has contributed to the best economy in 18 years. Defense spending is up, many Dodd-Frank banking rules and the Obamacare individual mandate have been repealed. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, blocked for 38 years, has been approved, as has a reconfigured National Labor Relations Board, a source of much Obama administration mischief. The Congressional Review Act, under which Congress can disapprove many regulations issued by federal agencies, has been used 19 times since it was enacted in 1996 — 18 of them during this Congress. This, says McConnell, constitutes the best 18 months of center-right governance in his Senate career, which began when Ronald Reagan’s second term did. There also are the judges. Some conservative warriors in the bleachers — people inordinately proud of their muscular spectatorship — deny McConnell’s toughness. Bruised Democrats know better. By preventing a vote on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland — invoking a rule first suggested by Democratic Sens. Joe Biden and Charles E. Schumer: Supreme Court justices should not be confirmed in presidential election years — McConnell kept open the seat of Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. The election produced a president unburdened by jurisprudential convictions but deferential to the Federalist Societyand other conservatives who think about such things. Furthermore, the White House Counsel’s Office, which oversees judicial nominations, is an island of professionalism attached to a seedy carnival. To reshape the circuit courts of appeal (of 179 authorized positions, 21 have been filled in 18 months, and there are 14 current or announced vacancies), McConnell ended the requirement of a supermajority to stop filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. Filibusters had always been possible but were never practiced. Not even, McConnell notes, during the ferocious fight over the nominationof now-Justice Clarence Thomas. This nomination went to the Senate floor without the Judiciary Committee’s recommendation and barely passed (52 to 48), but was not filibustered. To prevent Republicans from reciprocating with filibusters against Obama’s packing-by-enlargement of the nation’s second-most-important court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Democrats changed Senate rules to bar filibusters of judicial nominees other than those for the Supreme Court. McConnell removed that pointless exemption to make possible the confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch. McConnell is amenable to ending filibusters of nominations to executive and judicial positions. (The Senate, he says, is “in the personnel business.”) But without filibusters of legislation, he says, the nation might have socialized medicine, guaranteed government jobs, card-check workplace unionization, a ban on right-to-work laws, and other afflictions. He notes that since popular election of senators began in 1914, Republicans have never had more than 60 senators. And in the past 100 years, Democrats have simultaneously held the presidency, the House and the Senate for 34 years, Republicans for only 20. Almost 30 years after the end of his presidency, Reagan still shapes events because of his nomination of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who often has been 20 percent of a court majority. Three decades from now, McConnell will be shaping the nation through judges who today are in their 40s, some of whom might be destined to be Gorsuch’s colleagues. This is the long game. Learn more at The Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531522197886-RNE2Y4W1OG7BKX33O4ML/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.49.44+PM.png politics - Two California Public Record Laws: One for the Legislature and One for Everyone Else Editor’s note: This is part of a package of stories marking Sunshine Week, during which the media assesses the status of the free press in the U.S. Coming this week: TODAY: The California Legislature created one open-records law for state and local governments, the California Public Records Act, and a totally different law for themselves, the Legislative Open Records Act. MONDAY: Journalists beware! The internet has become a burgeoning forum for phony news, shady online ads and posts, intricately coordinated smear campaigns and Russian disinformation plots. TUESDAY: President Trump’s campaign to discredit the news media and dismiss critical reporting has spread throughout the political landscape. Officials at all levels of government are now using the term “fake news” as a weapon against unflattering stories. WEDNESDAY: The state of press freedoms in the U.S., based on an annual survey by the Newseum’s First Amendment Center. ocuments released in February, showing current and former California legislators had been accused of sexual misbehavior and other harassment, weren’t released under the California Public Records Act. Instead, the Legislature has its own, more restrictive public records law: the Legislative Open Records Act. The California Public Records Act was signed into law 50 years ago by Gov. Ronald Reagan. The law says, in theory, all government agency records are public except for specific exceptions. But the Legislature was exempt from the law. Seven years later, it passed the Legislative Open Records Act. “The Legislature carved out a special deal for itself with LORA, and it’s a deal that leaves the public out in the cold,” said David Snyder, executive director of the San Rafael-based First Amendment Coalition. “There’s a lot of things that the Legislature is not required to disclose that every other government agency in California has to disclose.” Communications between elected officials and staff, such as between school district officials, are public documents under the California Public Records Act. But those communications are just one of the things the Legislature has decided don’t apply in its case. In all, the Legislative Open Records Act carves out 11 exemptions in which the Legislature doesn’t have to release records to the public, according to Nikki Moore, Legal Counsel for the California News Publishers Association. Records of complaints to the legislature and investigations by the Legislature are also among the items excluded by LORA. “Under the CPRA, you may not be able to get everything relating to investigations of misconduct, but there’s pretty good case law that you’re entitled to records of investigations, so long as the allegations are not totally unfounded,” Snyder said. “But LORA just puts all of this in a black box. If there’s allegations of misconduct, no matter how grave, no matter how vital they are to the public interest, you’re just not entitled to them.” California public officials having one standard, and the Legislature having a different, lesser standard, isn’t restricted to just this law. The Ralph M. Brown Act, passed in 1953, requires government agencies to release an agenda of what will be voted on 72 hours before a meeting. The Bagley-Keene Act, passed in 1967, requires state government agencies to also make their proceedings public. But neither act covers the meetings of the legislature itself. “If you ask (former Assemblyman Bill) Bagley, who was responsible for the act, why he didn’t include the Legislature, he’d said it’s because it wouldn’t have passed,” said Frank V. Zerunyan, a Professor of the Practice of Governance at the USC Price School of Public Policy. It took until 2016, and Prop. 54, which nearly two-thirds of voters voted in favor of, to get the Legislature to release the text of bills it was going to vote on 72 hours before a vote. Learn more at The Orange County Register https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531522609879-JN83YGYDN1CUPAMH6YAX/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.56.32+PM.png politics - The Rise of Virtual Citizenship “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.” Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace. Hannah Arendt called citizenship “the right to have rights.” Like any other right, it can be bestowed and withheld by those in power, but in its newer forms it can also be bought, traded, and rewritten. Virtual citizenship is a commodity that can be acquired through the purchase of real estate or financial investments, subscribed to via an online service, or assembled by peer-to-peer digital networks. And as these options become available, they’re also used, like so many technologies, to exclude those who don’t fit in. In a world that increasingly operates online, geography and physical infrastructure still remain crucial to control and management. Undersea fiber-optic cables trace the legacy of imperial trading routes. Google and Facebook erect data centers in Scandinavia and the Pacific Northwest, close to cheap hydroelectric power and natural cooling. The trade in citizenship itself often manifests locally as architecture. From luxury apartments in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean to data centers in Europe and refugee settlements in the Middle East, a scattered geography of buildings brings a different reality into focus: one in which political decisions and national laws transform physical space into virtual territory. The sparkling seafront of Limassol, the second-largest city in Cyprus, stretches for several miles along the southwestern coast of the island. In recent years it has become particularly popular among Russian tourists and emigrants, who have settled in the area. Almost 20 percent of the population is now Russian-speaking. Along 28 October Avenue, which borders the seafront, new towers have sprung up, as well as a marina and housing complex, filled with international coffee and restaurant chains. The 19-floor Olympic Residence towers are the tallest residential buildings on the island, along with the Oval building, a 16-floor structure shaped like its name. Soon a crop of new skyscrapers will join them, including three 37- to 39-story towers called Trilogy and the 170-meter Onebuilding. Each building’s website features text in English, Russian, and in several cases, Chinese. China’s Juwai property portal lists other, cheaper options, from hillside holiday apartments to sprawling villas. Many are illustrated with computer renderings—they haven’t actually been built yet. The appeal of Limassol isn’t limited to its excellent climate and proximity to the ocean. The real attraction, as many of the advertisements make clear, is citizenship. The properties are proxies for a far more valuable prize: a golden visa. Visas are nothing new; they allow foreigners to travel and work within a host nation’s borders for varying lengths of time. But the golden visa is a relatively recent innovation. Pioneered in the Caribbean, golden visas trade citizenship for cash by setting a price on passports. If foreign nationals invest in property above a certain price threshold, they can buy their way into a country—and beyond, once they hold a citizenship and passport. A luxury holiday home on Saint Kitts and Nevis or Grenada in the West Indies might be useful for those looking to take advantage of those islands’ liberal tax regimes. But a passport acquired through Cyprus’s golden-visa scheme makes the bearer a citizen of the European Union, with all the benefits that accrue therewith. Moreover, there’s no requirement to reside in or even to visit Cyprus. The whole business, including acquisition of suitably priced real estate, can be carried out without ever setting foot on the island. The real estate doesn’t even have to exist yet—it can be completely virtual, just a computer rendering on a website. All for just 2 million euros, the minimum spend for the citizenship by investment. As a result, Cypriot real-estate websites are filled with investment guides and details on how to apply for a new passport. This is the new era of virtual citizenship, where your papers and your identity—and all the rights that flow from them—owe more to legal frameworks and investment vehicles than any particular patch of ground where you might live. Cyprus is a compelling location for such international games. Strategically anchored in the eastern Mediterranean, the island has long been a coveted and contested territory. Through the centuries, it has been occupied by Frankish crusaders, Venetian merchants, and Ottoman raiders. Since the Turkish invasion of 1974, Cyprus has been divided into two territories: the strongly Greek-identified but independent Republic of Cyprus in the south and west, and the disputed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus to the east. Another former colonial power, Britain, maintains its own legal and independent territories on the island, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. Power has often roosted here, poised to prey upon nearby territories. At one end of the island, fields of satellite dishes at NSA/GCHQ’s Ayios Nikolaos Station keep a close watch on the Middle East; at the other end, across the bay from Limassol, U-2 spy planes and RAF Tornadoes bound for Syria and North Africa roar out over the sea. In the case of the Limassol towers, that power is wealthy Russian and Chinese investors with an eye on accessing the European Union. Meanwhile, older residents of the city find themselves cut off from the sea, their homes overshadowed, and most of the profits from the golden-visa scheme disappearing into the pockets of law firms, developers, and politicians. Juwai, the Chinese portal, casts a wider eye than just Cyprus. Its website hosts a side-by-side comparison of various golden-visa schemes, laying out the costs and benefits of each, from the price of the investment to how long buyers must wait for a new passport to come through. Not all the schemes are created equally. Cyprus’s neighbor Greece has one of the cheapest schemes going, with residency available for just 250,000 euros. But that’s only residency—the right to stay in the country—not local, let alone EU, citizenship, which can take years to obtain and might never be granted. Sometimes the schemes have gone awry, too. Some 400,000 foreign investors in Portugal’s 500,000-euro golden-visa scheme have been left in limbo by bureaucratic collapse, waiting years for a passport which was promised within months. Chinese homeowners have been forced to fly in and out of the country every couple of months in order to maintain short-term visas, despite having paid thousands for property. Other real-estate schemes have fallen into disrepute thanks to even murkier political arrangements. A decade ago, a Kuwait-backed company set out its stall on the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros. As Atossa Araxia Abrahamian explains in her recent book, The Cosmopolites, Comoro Gulf Holdings erected billboards along the seafront of Grande Comore featuring computer renderings of business parks and luxury apartment complexes designed to appeal to wealthy foreigners in search of passports. But the buildings never got off the drawing board. Instead, Comoros found itself entangled in a much shadier deal with the Gulf states. Having agreed to open up its citizenship to investors, the islands—or at least certain members of their government—received huge payments, mostly from the United Arab Emirates. But the passports, sent over in bulk and frequently surfacing on the black market, weren’t for Emiratis. Rather, they were for the Bidoon: the more than 100,000 people across the Gulf nations who, despite residing in the region for generations, have never been included as citizens, and are effectively stateless. For years, the Gulf states have come under international pressure to address the issue of their stateless populations. The United Nations has declared that it wants to end statelessness by 2024. The market in citizenship provided a tempting opportunity to resolve the problem. Once again, people were given the chance to acquire the passport and associated rights of a place they’d never seen and where they probably never intended to live. In this case, however, they were more coerced than willing: Few Kuwaiti and Emirati Bidoon had ever heard of, let alone visited, Comoros. Many were tricked into accepting when renewing other documents, or had travel permits and driving licenses held ransom until they signed. While most have been allowed to remain in the Gulf, the acquisition of a passport means that troublesome Bidoon—particularly those agitating for better conditions—can be quietly shipped out of the country. The legal frameworks of virtual citizenship invert and globalize the logic of the special economic zone—a geographical space of exception, where the usual rules of state and finance don’t apply. Special economic zones are one of the key innovations of global capitalism, stretching back to the British Empire’s treaty ports in China and Japan in the 19th century, and underpinning the hyper-accelerated growth of Shenzhen and Dubai in the 21st. Historically, they’ve been used to protect commercial interests and allow for wild experiments in industry and real estate, but increasingly they are being touted as a solution to issues of migration and citizenship. In Jordan, where most of the 650,000 Syrian refugees are barred from jobs, the King Hussein Bin Talal Development Area has been set up on the outskirts of the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp. It is mandated to employ the refugees as a percentage of its workforce. The zone is the result of the Jordan Compact: an agreement between the Hashemite Kingdom and the European Union to provide jobs for refugees in return for special trade rules and access for European companies. Among the proposed launch partners are Ikea and the supermarket giant Asda, who will get access to cheap labor, and whose produced goods can be imported tax-free into Europe. The refugees, meanwhile, are required to stay where they are. Their position is akin to the passport-trading cosmopolites in one respect: They are subjects of the globalized economic system more than citizens of a nation. Learn more at Atlantic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531522692899-KLSM3D36K23HKEUB2VLE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+3.57.54+PM.png politics - Turning Protest Into Policy This protest feels different. In the aftermath of yet another shooting rampage, the angry and organized outcry by surviving students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has fanned a flicker of hope that the latest killings might prompt some tightening of state and national gun laws. Using the hashtag #NeverAgain, many students who survived the Feb. 14 massacre have led an impassioned campaign against Florida’s relaxed gun laws, relaying their outrage to state legislators and savvily blazing a trail through the media with their stories of loss. They have coupled those tales with unflinching demands for government accountability, forcing even the adults in Washington, D.C., to pay attention. After facing criticism over his response to the mass shooting, President Trump met with students, teachers, parents, and their local officials at the White House on Wednesday. When visitors asked what he could do to make students feel safe again in school, he suggested that teachers be trained to carry concealed weapons in class. During a lively CNN town hall session Wednesday night, several Douglas High students asked tough questions of Florida’s U.S. senators. The students plan a national school walkout day on March 14 and a march on Washington on March 24. Douglas Johnson is a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and a former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He teaches members of social protest campaigns, human rights non-governmental organizations, and agencies like UNICEF how to improve strategic thinking and expand their tactical knowledge. In a Q&A session, he talked with the Gazette about why the #NeverAgain protest is doing well out of the gate and what it may need to do to ensure that its efforts change gun policies and don’t fade once the media spotlight turns elsewhere. Learn more at Harvard Gazette https://civicas.net/justice-2 daily 0.75 2018-07-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531869303000-HO2HQU1Z1Q5HEG4Y96KL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.14.42+PM.png justice - 'I'm here. I’m here.' Father Reunited With Son Amid Tears, Relief and Fear of What's Next https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531869303000-HO2HQU1Z1Q5HEG4Y96KL/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.14.42+PM.png justice - 'I'm here. I’m here.' Father Reunited With Son Amid Tears, Relief and Fear of What's Next https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531869201827-AJOBHUQYQLT2J6OX3SOG/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+4.12.59+PM.png justice - Woman Berated for Puerto Rican Flag Shirt Hopes Her Experience 'Shines a Light on What’s Going on With Racism' https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531859632797-0OY2Q2OS3KHPOB39NCX0/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+1.33.31+PM.png justice - Judge’s Order That Times Alter Article Sparks 1st Amendment Fight https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531859486991-MPZVRHF2UZ2YVO3E2E81/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+1.30.56+PM.png justice - Tijuana Residents Face Loss of Homes, Patios and Even a Shrine as New Border Wall Rises https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531859167148-CCYKM945VCAHRTQJLY1Y/merlin_141184422_4b25850e-7e0f-457d-ac51-f18dc85c1bd4-jumbo.jpg justice - A Fight for Men’s Rights, in California Courts https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531764686431-QYVXV39DZWCCTWRJI4KG/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+11.11.14+AM.png justice - Reproductive Rights Under a Supreme Court with Brett Kavanaugh aren’t Only a Women’s Issue The retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had prompted speculation and fear among supporters of reproductive rights even before President Trump nominated D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace him. In the Supreme Court’s decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Kennedy joined with several colleagues to protect the “core holding” of Roe v. Wade, and he had remained a supporter — if not exactly an ardent one — of a precedent-based right to abortion. If the Senate confirms Kavanaugh, many supporters of reproductive rights fear that a five-justice majority will then stand prepared either to overrule Roe outright, or else to chip away until Roeis reduced to an empty husk. Given that the Supreme Court will likely limit the right to reproductive choice, meaningful access to abortion would become contingent on the will of state legislatures. Forceful advocacy for reproductive choice at both the national and state level has seldom been more important. And it’s time for men to join the front lines of the fight. Abortion is usually framed as a women’s issue. In some ways, this makes sense: Reproductive choice — and its absence — affects what happens within women’s bodies. And for the one in four women who have had an abortion, the issue is particularly personal. But it is important to remember that men also benefit greatly from safe and legal abortions. A partner’s abortion has enabled men to finish school, allowed men to pursue their chosen careers, saved men from the loss of a spouse because of medical complications, kept men from economic hardship and spared men the emotional burden of unwanted parenthood. Men should be deeply invested in reproductive freedom, too. Yet in the face of the current threat to reproductive freedom, calls to action have been disproportionately directed toward women. Consider the strategy of sharing personal stories, which is designed to destigmatize abortion and to emphasize its importance. Following upon a Supreme Court amicus brief in which women lawyers recounted the importance of abortion to their professional and personal well-being, a recent New York Times opinion piece suggests that more women who have had abortions should speak up and tell their stories. While this nuanced essay makes clear that no one is obligated to tell her story, others — including many men — have called upon women to tell their stories more forcefully. What we too seldom hear is that men should also tell their abortion stories. We need to hear from the man who was able to stay in college, the man who did not become a single parent to two daughters after his wife died during a complicated pregnancy, the man whose uninterrupted research while a graduate student yielded a lifesaving cancer treatment and the man whose family did not become homeless during a stretch of unemployment — all because their partners had access to safe and legal abortion. Mathematically speaking, millions of men have such stories. The one-in-four women who have had an abortion did not get pregnant on their own. These stories are powerful. Yet we rarely hear these perspectives, and more rarely still do we hear calls for men to describe how abortion has affected them personally. This needs to change. At a fundamental level, men can relate to other men’s stories, in much the same way as advocates hope women can relate to other women’s stories. This person could be my best friend. It could be my son. It could be me. Maybe it was. Reproductive choice advocates often say that everyone knows and cares about a woman who has had an abortion. This is true. It’s equally true that everyone knows a man whose life is much better because abortion is safe and legal — or maybe they are such a man themselves. Because men have also benefited from abortion, they should do more to share the responsibility for defending it. Women often face terrible repercussions when their abortions become public: They are attacked online, slut-shamed and in some instances face legal repercussions. None of this should happen, of course — but it does, and it’s time for men to shoulder more of that burden. Indeed, the burden might not be as heavy for men: When it comes to sex, research shows that women are more likely than men to be stigmatized for identical behavior, and men would therefore face less scorn for disclosing how a partner’s abortion benefited them. And if men came forward with personal narratives about how abortion has affected — and improved — their lives, perhaps abortion as a whole would become a less stigmatized topic. Urging men to share their abortion stories does not imply that men should get to decide whether women have abortions. Women should have the absolute right to determine what happens to their own bodies. But in practice, many couples decide how to handle an unplanned pregnancy together. Research by Arthur Shostak and his colleagues found that about half of women are accompanied to abortion waiting rooms by men, indicating that they are involved in the process of choosing and seeking abortion care. And when women have the opportunity to choose, men also benefit. For decades, men have benefited from the availability of safe and legal abortion. And it’s time for men to start taking threats to reproductive freedom personally. To all the men who know the importance of reproductive choice from firsthand experience: If you are ready, share your abortion stories with your families, your friends and your community. Call your representatives and insist that they only confirm justices who will respect the long-established precedents of Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. And, when the time comes, hold your representatives accountable at the ballot box for protecting reproductive freedom. Abortion is your issue, too. Learn more at The Lily https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531763427004-EPB7DOOEVQT9TOZK6GW2/Screen+Shot+2018-07-16+at+10.50.03+AM.png justice - Woman Accused of Attacking 91-Year-Old is Charged with Attempted Murder A 30-year-old woman has been charged with attempted murder in an attack on a 91-year-old man on the Fourth of July, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. Laquisha Jones was also charged with elder abuse and infliction of injury in connection with the attack, in which an elderly man was struck with a brick in Willowbrook last week, the district attorney’s office said. Prosecutors are asking that bail be set at $1.125 million. Prosecutors said Jones attacked Rodolfo Rodriguez near 118th and Robin streets. Following the assault, they said, Rodriguez was taken to the hospital and Jones fled the scene. Century Station detectives arrested Jones on Tuesday night. Rodriguez had gone out for a walk in Willowbrook about 7 p.m. on July 4 when he was assaulted, according to a GoFundMe campaign set up by his family. Rodriguez has a broken cheekbone and bruises on his face. His family said a woman confronted Rodriguez after he reportedly bumped into a little girl who was with her. Rodriguez was then struck from behind, and “as he fell on the ground, he blacked out,” Sheriff’s Det. Matt Luna said. Misbel Borjas, who lives near Rodriguez, was passing by in a car when she saw him walking and trying to pass a woman and a girl. Then, Borjas said, she saw the woman push Rodriguez and start to hit him with a block of concrete. “She was yelling at him, ‘Go back to your country,’ or ‘Go back to Mexico,’” Borjas recalled. “It was racist.” But authorities said that through their investigation, “detectives have discovered that this is not a hate-related incident.” Jones is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon. The felony complaint includes special allegations that she used a deadly and dangerous weapon (the brick) during the commission of the crime and that she committed great bodily injury upon the victim, according to the district attorney’s office. The charging document alleges that Jones was previously convicted of making criminal threats in 2017, in an unrelated case. If convicted as charged, Jones faces a maximum possible sentence of 29 years in state prison. Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531442220057-WB66SNOX67UXZDU2QZY5/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.36.35+PM.png justice - Impact of ‘Zero Tolerance’ on Display in Texas Immigration Court. One After Another, Asylum seekers are Ordered Deported. Sitting before an immigration judge in this south Texas detention center Thursday, a Central American mother separated from her son pleaded for asylum. “Your honor, I’m just asking for one opportunity to be here,” said the woman wearing a blue prison uniform and a red plastic rosary around her neck. “You don’t know how much pain it has caused us to be separated from our children. We’re kind of losing it.” Judge Robert Powell’s face was stern. During the past five years, he has denied 79% of asylum cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. “What you’re describing is not persecution,” he said. “I’m asking for an opportunity,” the woman replied in Spanish through an interpreter. “I’m not here to give you an opportunity.” He ordered her deported. Immigrant family separations on the border were supposed to end after President Trump issued an executive order June 20. A federal judge in California ordered all children be reunited with their parents in a month, and those age 5 and under within 15 days. On Thursday, the administration said up to 3,000 children have been separated — hundreds more than initially reported — and DNA testing has begun to reunite families. Port Isabel has been designated the “primary family reunification and removal center,” but lawyers here said they have yet to see detained parents reunited. To qualify for asylum in the U.S., immigrants must prove they fear persecution at home because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group,” and that their government is unwilling or unable to protect them. Most of the Central American parents detained here after “zero tolerance” fled gang and domestic violence. But that’s no longer grounds for seeking asylum, according to a guidance last month from Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. Immigration courts are part of the Justice Department, so judges are following that guidance. Because immigration courts are administrative, not criminal, immigrants are not entitled to public defenders. And so, each day, they attempt to represent themselves in hearings that sometimes last only a few minutes. The courtrooms are empty. That’s because, like a half dozen others nationwide, the court is inside a fortified Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Access is restricted, and may be denied. The Times had to request to attend court hearings — which are public — 24 hours in advance. After access to the facility was approved last week, access was denied to the courtrooms when guards said the proceedings were closed, without explanation. Detainees have little access to the outside world, including their children. It costs them 90 cents a minute to place a phone call. When they do, they can be nearly inaudible. They receive mail, but when reporters wrote to them last week, the letters were confiscated and guards questioned why they had been contacted, according to a lawyer. Lawyers also said some separated parents have been pressured into agreeing to deportation in order to reunite with their children. UNICEF officials toured Port Isabel Thursday. A dozen pro bono lawyers visited immigrants. But they were spread thin. None represented parents at the credible fear reviews, where judges considered whether to uphold an asylum officer’s finding that they be deported. Immigration Judge Morris Onyewuchi, a former Homeland Security lawyer appointed to the bench two years ago, questioned several parents’ appeals. “You have children?” he asked a Honduran mother. Yes, Elinda Aguilar said, she had three. “Two of them were with me when we got separated by immigration, the other is in Honduras,” said Aguilar, 44. “How many times have you been to the U.S.?” the judge asked. Aguilar said this was her first time. The judge reviewed what Aguilar had told an asylum officer: That she had fled an ex-husband who beat, raped and threatened her. “He told you he would kill you if you went with another man?” the judge said. Yes, Aguilar replied. The judge noted that Aguilar had reported the crimes to police, who charged her husband, although he never showed up in court. Then he announced his decision: deportation. Aguilar looked confused. “Did the asylum officer talk to you and explain my case?” she said. The judge said he was acting according to the law. Although she was fleeing an abusive husband, he said, “your courts intervened and they put him through the legal process. That’s also how things work in this country.” Aguilar knit her hands. She wasn’t leaving yet. “I would like to know what’s going to happen to my children, the ones who came with me,” she asked the judge. “The Department of Homeland Security will deal with that. Talk to your deportation officer,” he said. Guards led her away as she looked shocked, and brought in the next parent. Denis Cardona, 31, told the judge he fled Honduras to the U.S. with his son Alexander. “Where is he?” the judge asked. “He’s here, detained, but I don’t know where,” Cardona said. “I was told he’s an hour away.” The judge reviewed Cardona’s case. It was his first time crossing the border to the U.S. He had fled threats from the MS-13 gang after a land dispute with a cousin. “And you did not report this to authorities in your country?” the judge said. Yes, Cardona said, “but they didn’t listen.” “It’s difficult for police to get where we were, and also the police do not help poor people,” he said. Why hadn’t he told the asylum officer all that, the judge asked. Cardona said he had. He leaned his head on his hand. He looked tired. Moments later, the judge ruled. “This is a family dispute. This is not grounds for asylum in the United States,” he said. Deported. Down the hall, Judge Powell heard appeals from separated parents appearing by video feed from Pearsall Detention Center to the west. Though he denied most asylum cases, there are exceptions. Recently, after an asylum officer denied a claim by a Central American woman who said police raped and threatened to kill her, Powell reversed that decision. She can now pursue her asylum claim, though she still hasn’t been released or reunited with her kids. On Thursday Nora Barahona, of Honduras, told Powell she had fled to the U.S. after her husband beat and raped her, abusing their children. She crossed the border with her 12-year-old daughter, but was separated by immigration officials. “They told me they had sent her to Florida,” she sobbed. The judge ordered Barahona deported, as he would a dozen others who appeared before him. He read from a script, telling each that they had failed to meet the requirements for asylum. He ended with: “Good luck in your home country.” Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531442341546-LD0RBULFKFCDBZXG52HF/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.38.46+PM.png justice - 'We Beg You To Help Us': Immigrant Women in Detention Describe Their Treatment and Share Fears About Their Children The words appear on a scrap of paper, scrawled in pencil by an immigrant mother held at a detention center: “We beg you to help us, return our children. Our children are very desperate. My son asks me to get him out and I’m powerless here.” In another letter, childish print on notebook paper, a mother spoke of her son: “It’s been a month since they snatched him away and there are moments when I can’t go on.… If they are going to deport me, let them do it — but with my child. Without him, I am not going to leave here.” At least 2,053 children were separated from their parents due to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Officials have said they reunited 538 of those children, but didn’t intend to reunite them with parents who were detained. In more than a dozen letters collected by volunteers, detained mothers separated from their children shared their despair, pleaded to be released and sent messages of love to their children. Trump issued an executive order last month to end the practice of separating families, but when and how the government will reunite them is unclear. On Tuesday, a federal judge in California ordered officials to return small children to their parents in two weeks, others within a month, but Justice Department lawyers said Friday they need more time and planned to detain families longer. Families were initially separated at a Border Patrol processing center in the Texas border city of McAllen into chain-link fence cells, which the mothers called “dog kennels.” Reporters were recently given guided tours of the center, but forbidden from interviewing or photographing detainees. Some detention centers do not allow reporters to visit detainees, who must pay for phone calls. Last week, The Times asked volunteers and attorneys visiting detained immigrant parents in Texas to convey written questions. More than a dozen mothers at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, 30 miles north of Austin, responded. Volunteers from local nonprofit Grassroots Leadership shared their letters with The Times, identifying the women by first name because some of their asylum claims are still pending. The mothers left various countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Their letters provide a glimpse of why they came to the U.S., how they were separated from their children and what they hope will happen now. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions has directed Justice Department lawyers to reject asylum claims based on fears of domestic and gang violence, the two main reasons many of the mothers fled Central America. One asylum seeker asked how the U.S. could enforce such a policy. “Is it that the president doesn’t have any children so he can ignore the pain he is causing us?” a mother of two wrote, adding that she ran away from her country “because they threatened to kill me and my children … but here they killed us alive by taking away our children.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have said parents were separated from their children when they were charged with illegal entry and taken to federal criminal court, a new practice under the zero-tolerance policy. In their letters, detained mothers described the separations as painful, especially for their children. “He screamed, begging them to please not separate us. He hugged me, crying. He asked me not to let them separate him from me,” wrote Lesvia, recalling how her son tried to kiss her between the bars of his cell until an official made him sit down. Officials said parents were given forms in Spanish explaining the separation process. But in several letters, mothers said they were told little or nothing about the process. Some mothers describe being reassured as they headed to court that they would see their children again, only to return and find them gone. A mother who asked not to be named wrote that she and her 15-year-old son were detained separately and that she was told to board a bus to another detention center. “I asked about my son and they wouldn’t respond. I insisted on knowing and they told me, ‘Ma’am, your son is not here, he is far away and you’re being deported to your country.’” She said that’s when she started to cry and “pleaded with them to let me stay with my son.” “The official told me, ‘Don’t make me use a Taser gun on you,’” she wrote. Friends later told her that’s when she fainted. At the time she wrote the letter, she had not heard from her son in 23 days. Miriam, a single mother, said she was separated from her 10-year-old son, Kennet, on June 3 after the she came to the U.S. seeking asylum from gang threats and sexual harassment in El Salvador. “I didn’t know about the new law separating children and mothers,” she wrote, adding that her asylum claim was initially rejected and she was not allowed to call her son for 14 days. When she and her son finally spoke, Miriam wrote, he had a fever and a sore throat and “from the beginning of the call to the end of the call he could not stop crying, begging me to please get him out of that place and bring him to be with me.” Federal officials have said that immigrant parents separated from their children have been in touch with them by phone. But many of the mothers echoed Miriam’s comments, writing that they had not talked to their children for weeks, didn’t know where they were and worried about their safety. Some mothers said guards told them they would never see their children again. “They said after June 4, which was my court hearing, I would be able to see him, but that wasn’t true,” a mother named Antonia wrote. When Antonia was allowed to call her 12-year-old son June 20, she wrote, “He was begging me to get him out of that place. He was crying and it made me feel helpless, not being able to do anything from inside here to get my son back.” Sandra wrote that when she was separated from her 12-year-old son on June 1, she was told she would see him again “in a matter of hours.” “It was all a lie,” she wrote in a letter dated June 28. “From that day to this, they have not told me if they will give him to me or what will happen.” Yasmin said she also wasn’t told she would be separated from her two daughters, ages 12 and 13, after they were detained May 22, according to her letter. “They told me it was temporary and that I would later be reunited with them, but it wasn’t like that,” she wrote. Days passed, and as she and other mothers despaired, Yasmin wrote that their guards laughed. “Around me were many mothers crying for their children. Several would often faint because what they would hear is that we would be deported and they weren’t going to return our children, they would stay behind,” she wrote of the guards. “For seven days I didn’t know anything about my children because they wouldn’t give any information about them, not to any mother.” Some detained parents told lawyers last week that they have been pressured by immigration officials to abandon their asylum claims if they want to see their children. Others have already been deported without their children, lawyers said. The American Civil Liberties Union, Texas Civil Rights Project and other legal advocacy groups have objected, saying the government is interfering with the immigrants’ right to due process. Over the weekend, mothers at Hutto — many of whom have applied for asylum — told volunteers from Grassroots Leadership that they had been notified by immigration officials to prepare for transfer to a temporary detention center at Fort Bliss Army post outside El Paso for reunification with their children and deportation. Despite concerns about the possibility of being deported, in their notes to their children, the mothers tried to stay positive. “I miss you a lot, I love you and we will be together soon,” Noyma wrote to her son. “I don’t want you to be sad.” “Every day I pray to God that we will be together again, and we will never be separated again because you are the most beautiful thing God has given me,” Miriam wrote. “I love you despite living this nightmare.… I’m not going to give up until I have you in my arms,” Lesvia wrote. “When we’re together again, I will spoil you like always. I will cook your meals and we will go on walks and I’ll lie next to you until you fall asleep,” Claudia wrote to her 7-year-old son Kevin. “I love you, my prince. I hope to God and the Virgin Mary, my child, that we will soon be together and we’ll never be separated again. I love you baby, sending you kisses.” Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531442433391-OH08B4KVCOS22OS8MS9B/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.40.18+PM.png justice - The European Country that Makes the U.S. Look Lenient on Immigration Nearly every day, an immigration lawyer makes his or her way to a barbed-wire enclosure along Hungary’s border with Serbia, ready to walk an asylum seeker through the daunting process of pleading for safe haven in one of the most refugee-resistant countries in Europe. Now these lawyers risk jail time if they so much as help a client fill out a complicated Hungarian-language form. Hungary’s parliament last week approved a legislative package aimed not only at barring the gates to almost any outsider — but also decreeing punishment for those who try to aid would-be migrants. Amid paroxysms of immigration-related political strife in the United States — family separations at the border with Mexico, the Supreme Court’s upholding of the administration’s travel ban targeting nationals from certain Muslim-majority countries — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a self-professed fan of President Trump, is savoring his latest and most sweeping victory in the migration wars shaking Europe. The new measures, set to take effect as early as this weekend, allow for the prosecution and jailing of human rights workers and volunteers for providing services, advice or support to migrants and asylum seekers. The package, which prompted vehement criticism from the European Union and human rights groups, could still be vetoed by Hungary’s president, Janos Ader, but such a scenario is seen as highly unlikely. Hungary has taken in vanishingly small numbers of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, but Orban — whose populist Fidesz party swept to victory in April elections, securing him a third term — sees vindication in the draconian anti-immigration measures increasingly espoused not only by hard-right leaders elsewhere in Europe, but also by the U.S. president. Even before the latest stringent measures, Hungary earned a reputation for hostility toward migrants who surged through Europe three years ago, a wave made up largely of Syrian war refugees trying to make their way to friendlier destinations such as Germany and Sweden. Hungary erected a barrier on its border with Serbia and Croatia; state media relentlessly bashed Muslims as a threat to Christian Hungary. A much-viewed video showed a Hungarian camerawoman tripping a Syrian man as he ran across a field carrying his child, sending him sprawling. Orban, who crowed at being the first European head of state to congratulate Trump on his 2016 election victory, sees the U.S. president as a kindred spirit. Critics agree, often portraying the pair in the same unflattering light, particularly on immigration issues. Jan Egeland, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, tweeted last week that Budapest and Washington were seemingly in a “race to the bottom” when it came to dealing with foreigners seeking refuge from violence. Hungary has responded with defiance toward those who say Orban’s aspirations to an “illiberal state” — with moves that have included a constitutional rewrite and a crackdown on press freedom — mark a blatant break with EU norms and values. “We want to keep Hungary a Hungarian country, and we don’t think that multiculturalism is by definition good,” Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told the BBC this week. Orban’s government, like the Trump administration, has repeatedly cited border security and the need for anti-smuggling measures as a pretext for the newly tightened laws. And like Trump, the Hungarian leader appeals to his base with routine use of harsh, heightened language to characterize immigrants. ”The invasion should be stopped!” Orban told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. Adding fuel to the fire, the EU’s internal struggles over the migrant issue have been greeted with seeming glee from both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, set to meet next month in Helsinki, Finland. At a moment when leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron are trying to maintain a united European front in the face of aggressive trade moves by Trump and the threat of election interference from Russia, migration is perhaps the most polarizing issue confronting the bloc. Merkel, speaking Thursday to Germany’s Parliament, called it a “make-or-break” question. The battle is in many ways paradoxical. The number of arrivals in Europe has dropped off dramatically since the 2015 crisis. But in an echo of the U.S. dynamic of falling rates of migrant arrivals coinciding with ever more strident efforts to place the issue at political center stage, Orban has set himself up as the champion of an anti-migration faction mainly made up of countries that were satellites of the former Soviet Union. That cohort also includes a chorus of far-right voices in countries that weren’t part of the Soviet bloc, such as Austria and Italy. One of the most vocal and vitriolic of those is Matteo Salvini, Italy’s combative new interior minister, who is also the deputy prime minister. Leader of the anti-immigration League party, Salvini has taken aim at ethnic minorities including Italy’s Roma population, blocked refugee rescue boats from docking and declared that the country needed “mass cleansing.” Salvini was among the Italian officials who met Tuesday with John Bolton during the U.S. national security advisor’s Rome stopover en route to Moscow to lay groundwork for the Trump-Putin meeting. An emergency gathering Sunday by a group of leading European Union members, which was boycotted by Hungary and several other states, was meant to engineer at least a show of unity on migrant burden-sharing. Instead it showcased deep divisions, rendered all the more painful by Trump’s apparent glee over splintering of the EU and political schisms within member states that count among America’s closest allies. This month, the U.S. president shocked Germans with his open jeering of Merkel over the pressures her governing coalition faces on the migration issue, coupling his gibes with a false insistence that migrants have driven up German crime rates. Vessela Tcherneva, program director for the European Council on Foreign Relations and the head of its Bulgaria office, cited Trump’s use of “nativist, nationalistic forces” to deepen splits within the bloc as well as efforts at inroads in individual member states where his message might resonate. Orban has long proudly showcased his affinity for Trump, and the two leaders had a friendly phone call this month as a political storm gathered over the U.S. president’s since-softened policy of separating migrant parents and children at the southwestern border. For Orban, “the immigration issue is an area of commonality with Trump policies,” Tcherneva said. She cited a “wider context of what kind of societies these politicians want to lead, being sovereign and powerful at the expense of others…. This is very alien to the nature of the European Union.” Former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, exiled from the White House but focused on offering encouragement to Europe’s hard right, has had particularly kind words for Orban. Appearing at a conference in Budapest last month, he hailed the Hungarian leader as “Trump before Trump.” In Hungary, activists say the new immigration legislation portends a long struggle. Marta Pardavi, the co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human-rights watchdog group, said the harsh new measures, while not unexpected, were nonetheless “very, very shocking.” Some of Orban’s critics have called for the invoking of Article 7 of the EU’s founding Treaty of Lisbon, which calls on all member states to “respect the values” of the bloc. Hungary has already been called out in the European Parliament for at least a dozen democratic breaches, and the European Commission could launch a so-called infringement proceeding, which could open the way to contesting the measures in court. But a two-day EU summit that began Thursday brought more messy public acrimony, with Orban and his partisans loudly spurning calls for migrant burden-sharing. Most observers believe that at most, the bloc may manage symbolic accord on tightening Europe’s external borders and steps such as creating incentives for third countries to dissuade migrants from trying to reach Europe’s shores. In the meantime, activists say, Hungary’s new measures are likely to have a profound chilling effect, made all the worse by uncertainty, on those who try to move ahead with previously legal forms of migrant aid. “You don’t have to be convicted for this to massively disturb your day-to-day work, and your personal and family life,” said Todor Gardos, who carries out Eastern European research for New York-based Human Rights Watch. “The law is very vague, but at the same time allows for very specific application,” he said. “Suddenly you have people who view your files, the police and prosecution can be investigating you … and without even knowing, you can be entering into the criminal justice system.” Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531442522728-Q2LGIFHUPRWQE7GQQUKC/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.41.42+PM.png justice - 21 Americans With Opposing Views on Guns Sat Down to Talk to Each Other. Here's What They Discovered. They were here because of Parkland. And before that: Sandy Hook. Before that: Columbine. Outside, as the sun came up, kids wearing “March For Our Lives” T-shirts clogged the streets carrying signs reading “PROTECT KIDS NOT GUNS.” It was the weekend of the young people’s protest. These 21 strangers gathered inside, away from the noise. They had traveled to Washington, D.C., not to march, but to take part in an experiment. They were victims of gun violence, and gun collectors, and cops and lawyers and hunters and teenagers and moms. Could they do a better job talking with a group of strangers than they had managed to do with their own families? Could they agree on some measures to mitigate the crisis? Could they have a productive conversation, or even a civil one? A gun, by its nature, is a polarizing thing. A gun forces us to envision ourselves on either one end of it or the other. A gun is an equalizer, a tool, a symbol of liberty and power and slaughter and loss. Some of the 21 gathered here saw a gun as an instrument of protection. One kept an AR-15 atop the armoire. A few often wore guns strapped to their bodies, under their clothes. Others had been threatened with guns. They feared that guns empowered people who would marginalize or silence them. They had been intimidated, mugged, raped. They’d lost mothers and cousins and uncles and friends. They’d been recruited from around the country and across the political divide in an attempt to see if it was possible to create an experience that might build understanding. They would spend two days learning to listen, and then they’d join 130 others in a conversation on Facebook, where people often go to hear only what they already believe. None of them were entirely sure what they were getting into. Here was Malak Wazne, 18. Before this experiment was over, a Michigan teenager a lot like her would be shot at while knocking on a door asking for directions. Would Malak’s ideas be welcome? Here was Dan Zelenka, a lawyer and competitive shooter, who knew just about everything there was to know about guns. He came to teach. Would he also be willing to learn? Here was Alexis Intili, who could spot a liberal a mile away. “Dumb idiot morons,” she called them, to their faces. The marchers outside annoyed her. She would never, ever have anything to learn from a high school kid. What did they know? In a small room, they sat in a circle, close enough that their knees touched. Group leaders coached them to ask better questions, to avoid marginalizing words, to think about how they naturally embed assumptions inside questions. “It seems to me that this issue all comes down to safety,” said Mathilde Wimberly, a retired educator from Metairie, La., who favors gun control. “My question is, What are you so afraid of? But that’s offensive.” She thought for a moment. “Can you tell me more about why you feel that you need lots of guns?” It’s the difference, a group leader said, between asking, “What are you so afraid of?” and “What sorts of things make you feel afraid?” Each person wrote on a Post-it note one thing they wanted the others to understand about them: “All I want is to come home at the end of the school day.” “As a law-abiding gun owner, I am not a danger to you.” “I feel like I’m fighting for my right to be alive.” Alexis hoped someone would insult President Trump so she could go off. She’s from Staten Island, where recently she saw two people have a fistfight in a Dunkin’ Donuts over whether the last episode of The Sopranos was any good. She’s comfortable with confrontation. She was primed for it. But emotion? “I didn’t want to listen to other people’s damn stories and their crying.” She’s a financial adviser, and in business, she thought, emotion makes you weak. She grew up in an I’ll-give-you-something-to-cry-about house in a Republican bubble. “I never got a chance to know anyone else,” she said. “Nor did I want to. I didn’t care.” She’s pro-gun, but her niece and nephew, ages 10 and 7, are hiding under desks during lockdown drills at school. So something has to change. She sized up the others in the group. Too young. Too liberal. Too stupid. But she had asked to be part of this, and she decided to give it her best. Then the other members of the group shared their stories. And she listened. She heard stories about PTSD, rape, suicide and stone-cold killing. “There’s a lot more to this,” she said to herself. “Damn, man. I’m a closed-minded bitch.” The conversation that began in Washington, D.C., migrated to Facebook, where it included about 150 people over the next month. Alexis gave up Netflix so she could settle into bed with her laptop each night and take her role in the conversation seriously. Dan checked his Facebook feed almost constantly. They were forced to consider the roots of their deeply held beliefs. The questions they would ask gave voice to their prejudices and fears. Why is your personal safety worth more than mine? If you saw me walking down the street carrying a gun, what would you honestly think? Is the right to bear arms unalienable, as some believe the Declaration of Independence suggests? Is this right endowed by God, or bestowed by the government in the Bill of Rights? With an eye on history and another on current events, they re-examined language they thought they understood. Security. Militia. Well-regulated. Free State. On a warm Sunday morning, on the edge of St. Tammany Parish outside of New Orleans, past Rick’s Catfish Cabin and Todd’s Country Corner, Dan pulled his FordExpedition into an earthen quarry and unloaded a bunch of guns. “My toys,” he said. He pulled out his M1A1 Thompson submachine gun, his M1 Garand, his German MP40, his Swedish “K”, his M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle and his German MG42. He also brought along a few AR-15s—assault rifles, as they’re widely known. The guns Dan and his pals shoot every fourth Sunday in friendly competition. The guns he wants to demonstrate and destigmatize, even as they have become the weapon of choice in mass murders across America. On Facebook, Dan had offered a lengthy explanation to the oft-asked question, Why would anyone need an AR-15? Lots of reasons, he wrote. It’s the most popular rifle in America. Adaptable for many types of hunting, easier to shoot accurately than a handgun. Dan’s nephew J.P., a high school sophomore, dragged metal targets across the Louisiana dirt speckled by spent shells that twinkled in the sunlight. Time to shoot. At age 3, Dan wore toy six-shooters to his aunt’s wedding. At 10, his dad bought him a .22 rifle for Christmas. “Forty-five years worth of guns,” he said. Dan likes to shoot, and he loves to defend the Constitution, especially the Second Amendment. “We are,” he said, “the arsenal of democracy.” His mind was made up. He was so resolute some in the Facebook group thought he was a mole for the National Rifle Association. Gun crimes are down sharply since the mid-’90s, he pointed out correctly. “America has gotten safer, but we watch night after night the news about the epidemic of gun violence.” The problem, then? “It’s the criminals,” he said. He supports changes to stop violent criminals from getting guns. But he does not support restrictions on broad, ill-defined categories of guns. “The term assault weapon means nothing and it means everything,” he said, “because the term is infinitely expandable to mean whatever they make it up to be. And every time they change it, it expands to include more and more firearms. “If you really sat down and looked at the numbers—took all the emotion away—then you have to support gun rights,” he said. He has known four people who have been present at mass shootings. Two young women he met hiking in the Grand Tetons wound up inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July 2012, when a madman opened fire. One of the women took a bullet to the knee. Twelve were killed, 70 injured—the largest number of casualties in one shooting in modern U.S. history, until the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which held the distinction until the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas, where Dan’s old girlfriend had been listening to country music. That’s three. The fourth was his friend Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Congressman shot through the hip last year when a man opened fire at a Republican baseball practice near the U.S. Capitol. On Facebook, Dan posed and then considered the essential question: Are school shootings the price we pay for a certain level of liberty? “What we should never do is allow the criminal conduct of a few to be the catalyst for the infringement of any right protected by the Constitution,” he wrote. Throughout our history, he wrote, we have sent young people to fight for American rights and ideals. “If someone began attacking our schools demanding that we surrender our freedom of religion or freedom of speech or right to vote, would we comply? I think not. Would we be willing to pay a price in blood to protect our freedom? “Clearly, if history is an indicator, the answer is yes.” On this Sunday, Dan coached his nephew, lying on his belly, staring down the scope of a German machine gun that fires 20 rounds per second. “You’re going to have to use some muscle,” Dan told him. “Pull it hard. Pull it real hard.” Behind the scenes of the Facebook conversation, an army of moderators took turns in shifts, helping people craft comments and reframe questions. They nudged women and young people to speak up, and they gently asked a couple of white guys to quit hogging the mic. Helene Cohen Bludman felt shouted down by Dan and his lawyerly recitation of gun statistics. So the moderators set her up in a one-on-one conversation with Jon Godfrey, a military veteran in New York, who was one of the 21 initial participants in D.C. Jon talked about living in a rural area, in a house at the end of a long, dark driveway, where police response times were not comforting. He told her about the gun he leaves with his wife when he’s away. He put together a presentation for Helene illustrating the things they had in common: sports, dogs, grandchildren. “I felt myself understanding for the first time,” said Helene, a freelance writer from Bryn Mawr, Pa. “Honestly, this was such an epiphany for me. I did not change my feelings about guns, but I understood that good, smart people could feel differently.” Three people got kicked out of the Facebook group. A few faded away. The moderators struggled with how to handle the mansplainers. Were people participating or advocating? Would pulling them aside help? They read 13,500 posts and replies in the course of the month. A group from Pittsburgh gathers on the East Front of the Capitol before joining the student-led March for Our Lives rally on Pennsylvania Avenue to call for action to prevent gun violence on March 24, 2018. “The litmus test was are people trying? Do they want to have this conversation?” said Eve Pearlman, the co-founder of Spaceship Media, the firm that helped lead the conversation. “If they are, we can work with them on the habits they’ve worked on over a lifetime. If they want to keep trying, we can keep trying with them.” Brittany Walker Pettigrew, another moderator, found herself scrolling comments on her lunch hour at her day job when she came across one that made her freeze. The post, by a white male gun-rights supporter, was an attempt to answer the question “Why do people need to own guns?” It has since been edited, but it said, in essence, I need my guns like Rosa Parks “needed” to sit at the front of the bus. For Brittany, a 45-year old African-American child-welfare manager in Oakland, Calif., that post was so blatantly offensive that she had to sit down. She and the other moderators debated how to handle things. Was this guy racist? Should he be banned? But Brittany, channeling the spirit of the group, decided to talk to him and try to explain why people just can’t bring Rosa Parks into all this. Afterward, Brittany wasn’t entirely sure if the man understood. But she realized that he had actually been trying to say something useful. And then, over time, something much more powerful started to sink in. “I was heard. And I heard him,” she said. “And there’s nobody in my family that has ever spoken to a white person about racism and not been killed for it.” In the end, they didn’t propose legislation or draft a resolution or circulate a petition. They didn’t even change their minds. “We explicitly don’t have the goal of changing minds,” said Eve. “There is such a breakdown in public spaces for civil discourse. The act of humanizing each other is itself the goal.” But one weekend in April, Helene, the freelance writer from Pennsylvania, was organizing a community march for gun violence, passing around handouts, when she scanned the suggestions for protest signs and cringed. “The NRA is evil.” That would not have bothered her before, but now she knew that NRA members don’t like to be called evil any more than liberals like to be called socialists. Her experience in the group helped her learn to listen again. “Now that extends to when I have conversations that are not about gun violence,” she said. “I see the shades of gray where before I couldn’t.” Alexis, the Staten Island financial adviser, swears the change she felt in D.C. has been lasting. She considers her D.C. counterparts friends for life. Even the liberals. She never wants to return to the closed-minded, bubble-dwelling name caller she used to be. When she got into a disagreement with a work colleague, she says she suppressed the reflex to call him “dumb idiot moron,” and instead said, “Tell me why you feel that way.” April ended, and so did the conversation—on official channels, anyway. Ruth Grunberg of Cortland, N.Y., started a book club for members of the group, and they got too busy chatting to read any actual books. Ade’Kamil Kelly of East Orange, N.J., recorded a podcast. Dan, the Louisiana lawyer, attended the NRA convention in Dallas. Alexis went to a business meeting in Las Vegas, where gun laws are as loose as the necklines, so she asked Dan where she should go to shoot something big. He directed her to Battlefield Vegas, where Alexis said she paid $330 to shoot an AK-47, a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum revolver, a German MG42 machine gun and a Barrett M107A1 .50-caliber sniper rifle. She wanted to feel a kickback that knocked her out of her shoes. The weight of the guns. The flames shooting out of the barrel. The smell of hot metal and powder. The thunder that made people around her back up. The vibrations from the guns firing in the lanes beside her. She wanted to embrace the moment when she, a 45-year-old financial adviser, fired a gun that could blow a plane out of the sky. And then she thought: “You could shoot down a room full of people in seconds.” And: “What if one of these other people in here is crazy?” And: “Why are these guns even around?” And: “It’s not worth everybody being slaughtered.” Dan would never forgive her for saying it, she thought, but ban them. Ban automatics. Ban semi-automatics too. Then, on May 18, Santa Fe High School. Alexis heard when she got back from Las Vegas. The details were blurry. Was it eight kids dead? Was it only eight this time? Only? Other members of the Facebook group took in the news having mostly returned to the bubbles of their lives. Malak, who had joined the conversation knowing she represented both Muslims and high school students, got the news in theater class in Dearborn, Mich. She walked from fifth period to sixth watching the live feed on her phone. The feeling among her friends was one of defeat, a collective shrug. It was eight kids dead, in fact. And two teachers. Thirteen injured. The shooter, a 17-year-old in a trench coat, used a pump-action shotgun and a .38 revolver owned legally by his father. David Preston, a courier in Mobile, Ala., who was robbed at gunpoint years ago while delivering pizzas, wrote a public post on his personal Facebook page: “What is going to be The Narrative of the gun grabbers when it is revealed that the Texas school shooter used a Remington 870 instead of an AR-15?” David says he was working for Papa John’s when a gunman ordered him to hand over his tip money. Thirty-five bucks. The next day he bought a gun. Helene had accepted his friend request just days before. Now he was calling the Parkland students pawns of a liberal media. Helene thought it wouldn’t matter to the families of those dead kids what kind of weapon it was, and she felt all the old familiar powerlessness and resignation and despair. Had they learned anything, really? Would any of them change? Not their minds—that had never been the point. But their hearts? Helene clicked his profile, and then she clicked: Unfriend. So where does it all lead? As each of them take whatever kernel of empathy or understanding or consternation into the rest of their lives, what will they reap? If an experiment doesn’t produce a new law or at least a campaign slogan, did it do any good? In Staten Island, Alexis is organizing a splinter group, hoping to repeat the project. She figures her neighbors are stubborn like her, and the group leaders had better bring their A-game. Another new group is starting in Alabama. Last month, MassLive.com, an Advance Local newsroom in Massachusetts, led a new group in a two-day moderated gun conversation that mirrored the one in D.C. A woman who had lost a son, a mom who had been shot in the face and a hunter still in his camo all came together and felt the same connection and sense of wanting to do … something. They stood in a circle when it was over and tried to articulate their hopes. “I want my words to have power.” “I want to make people who look like me less threatening.” “I want to grow as a person, and be better.” Share your story Want to understand why someone could feel so differently about guns? Do you feel like those on “the other side” don’t understand how you’ve gotten to your point of view? As a part of “Guns: An American Conversation,” Advance Local and Essential Partners launched their Heart-to-Heart story sharing initiative to pair you anonymously with one other person somewhere in the USA. They receive your story, then you receive theirs. Find the form at www.heart2heartstory.com, or call 1-877-209-5717 and you’ll get the form by mail. We’re hoping to keep conversations like this going all over America. About this project “Guns: An American Conversation” convened people on opposite sides of the social and political spectrum to engage in a dialogue around the polarizing topic of guns. The project began with a workshop for 21 participants on March 24 and 25 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and expanded to 150 people who participated in a monthlong moderated Facebook group. It was launched by a coalition of American newsrooms owned by Advance Local, in partnership with the journalism organization Spaceship Media, Essential Partners and TIME. This article and a documentary video on the project are being published jointly in TIME and Advance news outlets across the U.S. Learn more at TIME https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531442745760-IF3N2KGG4J6GPT96BR2X/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.45.29+PM.png justice - How Rosenstein’s and Wray’s Testimony Undermined GOP Efforts to Undermine the Russia Investigation The case President Trump and his allies have built against the Justice Department and the FBI is circumstantial at best. And on Thursday, the various arguments Trump and his Republican allies have leaned on to suggest or outright claim FBI bias against the president got knocked down, one by one, by the top of the bureau's chain of command. What's more, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray categorically denied these characterizations of the FBI's work while under oath. Wray and Rosenstein, who appointed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, testified Thursday for hours to the House's Judiciary Committee. Let's run down the top GOP attacks thrown at the Russia investigation and what Rosenstein and Wray had to say about them. 1. GOP argument: The Russia investigation is led by Democrats Some members of Mueller's team have donated to Democrats. But not all, as Trump frequently frames it. And at least one of those same Mueller staffers also donated to Republicans. In addition, as Wray and Rosenstein underscored Thursday after questioning from Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), they aren't Democrats. “I do not consider myself an angry Democrat,” Wray said. “Are you a Democrat?” Gutiérrez asked Wray. “No I am not,” he replied. Gutiérrez: “Mr. Rosenstein, are you a Democrat?” Rosenstein: “I am not a Democrat, and I am not angry.” What's more, Rosenstein said he wasn't aware of any conflicts of interest Mueller himself might have, which Trump cryptically referred to in a tweet Thursday morning. 2. GOP argument: Rosenstein inappropriately approved spying on the Trump campaign House Republicans declassified a memo this February arguing that the FBI leaned on politically biased information to get a warrant to spy on a former Trump campaign official, Carter Page. In that memo, Rosenstein was mentioned — right as it was reported that Trump was considering using the memo to fire Rosenstein. Legal experts have said Rosenstein played by the book on authorizing a warrant renewal to spy on Page, which is known as a FISA warrant. Plus, he wasn't a big part of it. The original decision to spy on Page happened before Rosenstein was in the job. And he's not the one who approved subsequent spying; only federal judges on a secret court can do that. Rosenstein underscored all of that Thursday: “It'd be a dereliction of duty for me to fail to approve a FISA that was justified by the facts and the law,” Rosenstein said. 3. GOP argument: The Justice Department is hiding something when it doesn't immediately hand over documents to Congress Rosenstein and House Republicans have been tangling for the better part of a year over various House Republican requests for documents as they investigate both the probe of Hillary Clinton's emails and the motives behind the Russia investigation. In the middle of Thursday's hearing, Republicans voted to demand Rosenstein turn over sensitive documents to Congress. But is tussling over classified documents a natural tension between Congress and the Justice Department or, as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tried to frame it, a sinister move by the Justice Department? “We have caught you hiding information,” Jordan accused. Rosenstein pushed back on that. Hard. He got visibly upset, and he denied under oath that the Justice Department has any nefarious intentions. “When you find some problem with production and questions, it doesn't mean I'm personally concealing something from you,” Rosenstein said. “It means we are running an organization that is trying to follow the rules.” 4. GOP argument: FBI agent Peter Strzok's personal bias affected the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation Republicans have argued it's implausible that an agent who was near the top of both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation demonstrated political bias against Trump in personal texts but didn't bring that bias to work. But that flies in the face of findings from an independent report by the Justice Department's inspector general. The report said Strzok's texts weren't professional but found no evidence that Strzok's bias actually influenced the outcome of any investigation. He's since been removed from the Russia investigation. Wray reiterated that Thursday: “My understanding of it is that [the inspector general] found no evidence of political bias actually impacting the investigation that he reviewed.” Earlier in the hearing, Wray, unprompted, defended his agency from broad characterizations (made by the president) of bias: “This report is about a specific set of events and a specific set of employees. Nothing in this report impugns the integrity with our workforce as a whole or the FBI as an institution.” On those texts, Rosenstein later added: “There were violations of the rules, I recognize that. . . . I can assure you that the cases that are brought under our watch are going to be under compliance of the rules. The folks we work with day in and day out there are almost all there to do the right thing.” 5. GOP argument: Rosenstein should recuse himself from the investigation Getting rid of Rosenstein would get rid of a lot of Trump's self-professed problems. Rosenstein appointed Mueller and approves Mueller's work; Trump could appoint someone else to oversee the Russia investigation. On Thursday, Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) asked Rosenstein why he hasn't stepped aside if he oversaw parts of the investigation that DeSantis and Trump and allies think were skewed politically. Rosenstein replied he had no reason to: “I can assure that, if it were appropriate for me to recuse, I'd be more than happy to do so and let somebody else handle this. But it's my responsibility to do it.” Both Wray and Rosenstein, prompted by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), also took the opportunity to say they wouldn't bow to political pressure to leave their jobs. Rosenstein: “Congressman, in the DOJ, we are accustomed to criticisms of our work, and it doesn't affect our work.” Wray: “Congressman, as I've said repeatedly, I am committed to doing this job by the books in all respects, and there is no amount of political pressure that is going to dissuade me from that by either side.” Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531442921950-PIB4BC5ZY270X0DF07A7/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.48.26+PM.png justice - Difficult Road Lies Ahead for Reuniting Migrant Children with Parents, Despite Court Ruling A day after a San Diego federal judge issued an injunction ordering the Trump administration to reunite thousands of migrant children with their parents within the next 30 days, the next central question seems to be: Now what? There was no clear answer Wednesday as various federal agencies struggled with how to abide by the order, especially given the confusion that continues in light of President Trump’s executive order last week to end family separations at the border. Asked about the injunction, Trump offered no complaint, saying, “We believe the families should be together also, so there's not a lot to fight.” But details on a plan of action were scarce. The Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of the separated children, referred questions Wednesday to the Justice Department, which in turn said it was up to Congress to deal with the border situation. “Without this action by Congress, lawlessness at the border will continue, which will only lead to predictable results — more heroin and fentanyl pushed by Mexican cartels plaguing our communities, a surge in MS-13 gang members, and an increase in the number of human trafficking prosecutions,” a DOJ representative said. HHS is caring for about 12,000 migrant children, including some 2,000 who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border with a parent. The department's Administration for Children and Families said in a statement that it was “focused on continuing to provide quality services and care” to minors being held in Office of Refugee Resettlement-funded facilities and reunifying children with relatives or appropriate sponsors. “Reunification is always the ultimate goal of those entrusted with the care of unaccompanied alien children, and we are working toward that for those unaccompanied alien children currently in our custody,” it said. But Robert Carey, who led the refugee office during the Obama administration, said the agency will probably struggle to link children with their parents, especially if parents are still detained or have already been deported. Historically, children in the refugee office's care arrive alone in the U.S., with personal documents or a contact for a relative already in the country, making it easier to place them with a sponsor. But there have been widespread reports of children being taken from their parents unexpectedly, and where neither side knows where the other is. In his order, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw was highly critical of the reunification process, arguing that administration officials were only trying to reunite kids who were being removed from the country. When parents were not immediately removed, it was essentially up to the parent to try to locate a child. “The facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance — responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government's own making,” he wrote. The ACLU, which requested the injunction as part of a federal lawsuit in San Diego, celebrated Sabraw’s order Wednesday and said it would be closely monitoring the government for compliance. Here are some of the central questions surrounding family separations and what the injunction means. What exactly did the injunction do? The preliminary injunction calls for all immigrants in U.S. Department of Homeland Security custody to be reunited with their separated children within 30 days, or 14 days for youngsters under 5. It also requires parents to have telephone contact with their separated children in government custody within 10 days. The order prohibits future immigrants in DHS custody from being detained without their children. And if the parent is released, then their children must also be released into their custody. Children must also be deported with their parents. There are some exceptions: If a parent is found to be unfit or a danger to the child, or if a parent voluntarily declines to be reunited while in DHS custody or for deportation. Is the injunction just for those who cross the border illegally? No, families who present themselves at a port of entry with a claim for asylum have also been separated — including a Congolese woman known as Ms. L. in the San Diego lawsuit — so the injunction covers them, as well. These separations usually occur if immigration officials cannot verify the parental relationship with the children or because a parent had some kind of criminal history. It is not yet clear how the judge’s order will affect these cases. “We are a country of laws, and of compassion,” Sabraw stated in his order regarding asylum seekers. “We have plainly stated our intent to treat refugees with an ordered process, and benevolence, by codifying principles of asylum. The government’s treatment of Ms. L and other similarly situated class members does not meet this standard and it is unlikely to pass constitutional muster.” Is this timeline for reunification reasonable? The American Civil Liberties Union , which requested the injunction, thinks so. “This is more a matter of priority or urgency than an inability to deal with logistics,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday. “When the U.S. government puts all its resources to work, it can get something like this done easily.” He said the ACLU doesn’t care about the specifics of the plan, as long as it gets done. He said thousands of volunteers and nonprofit agencies stand ready to assist the government in getting children back together with their parents. The government argued in a briefing just a day earlier that a court order would slow down the reunification process and “cause confusion and conflicting obligations.” There are logistical challenges. Children are being kept in shelters across the United States — many are thousands of miles from the border. Many immigrant parents say they haven’t been able to locate their children because the parents don’t have their “A number,” or “alien number.” Immigration authorities will have to determine whether to detain families as units — a difficult proposition because of a serious lack of bed space appropriate for families and a court settlement limiting the amount of time children can spend in detention. Authorities could also parole them into the community, possibly under GPS monitoring. The Trump administration has been reluctant to offer parole to immigration detainees, a practice that was used by the Obama administration. The government is seeking to have family detention quarters set up on military bases, possibly including Camp Pendleton, but it is unknown how soon the facilities would be up and running. And then there are the unknown number of parents who have already been deported from the U.S. without their children. Can the government appeal? The government can request an emergency stay of the injunction — a step it would probably take if it did not want to begin immediately complying with the order — and it can appeal the injunction to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The 9th Circuit option might be taken if the Trump administration wants to fight the order’s prohibition of family separations. It is not clear yet what the government will do. How does the injunction affect criminal immigration prosecutions under the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy? The injunction does not have a direct effect on criminal prosecutions. Under its “zero-tolerance” policy, the Trump administration has vowed to criminally prosecute 100% of people caught illegally crossing the border. That means immigrants are arrested and taken to a criminal detention facility. The injunction does not order parents to be released from criminal detention or for children to be reunited with a parent in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. Instead, the order directs reunification once the criminal case is over and the parent is released into DHS custody for civil immigration proceedings. For those who are charged with misdemeanor illegal entry — the charge that makes up the vast majority of arrests under zero tolerance — the criminal case usually takes a few weeks to a month in the Southern District of California. To confuse matters, Trump’s executive order on family separation indicates families caught at the border facing criminal entry charges will be detained together in the future. Since that executive order, the Border Patrol has generally declined to refer parents apprehended with children for criminal prosecution unless the parent has a criminal record or there are extenuating circumstances. What was the judge’s reasoning for granting the injunction? Sabraw disagreed with the government’s argument that the executive order settled the family separation issue and thus an injunction was not needed. The executive order did not address reunifying the 2,000-plus children already separated, and it is not absolute in its promise to halt separations. Sabraw ruled that the way families have been separated “shocks the conscience,” which is a legal standard used when weighing such injunctions, and found that the separations caused irreparable harm to children. He noted the lack of an effective system or procedure to track separated children, noting that detainees’ personal property is better accounted for than their children are. He concluded that nothing in the injunction would stymie Trump’s ability to enforce criminal and immigration laws. “The Government would remain free to enforce its criminal and immigration laws, and to exercise its discretion in matters of release and detention consistent with law. It would just have to do so in a way that preserves the class members’ constitutional rights to family association and integrity.” Learn more at LA Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531443051558-649KOLO76JFI6FI4PCUJ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.50.35+PM.png justice - U.S. Officials Separated Him From His Child. Then He Was Deported to El Salvador. CORRAL DE MULAS, El Salvador — Arnovis Guidos Portillo remembers the authorities in green uniforms telling him that this would only be temporary. They told him that his 6-year-old daughter, Meybelin, should really go with them, he recalled. The holding cell was cold, he said he was told, and the child was not sleeping well. Don’t worry, he was assured, she would take the first bus, and he would follow soon. “What’s best is we take her to another place,” he recalled a U.S. official telling him. It’s a conversation this 26-year-old farmer from El Salvador has replayed for nearly a month. His daughter was taken from him on his second day in U.S. immigration custody in Texas, he and his lawyers said, and she remains somewhere in the United States. Guidos was deported Thursday back to this small Central American nation, where he lives in a one-room, dirt-floor shack with no electricity and two goats in the yard. He and his daughter are one of more than 2,000 migrant families who have firsthand experience with President Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. The decision to prosecute all those caught crossing illegally into the United States meant that parents and children were sent to separate detention centers and shelters. Although Trump ended family separations in an executive order last week, many parents are still trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare, far from their children and unsure how they will be reunited. “I would advise anyone who wants to travel to the United States with their children not to do it,” he said. “I would never want them to have to walk in my shoes.” And yet, Guidos is ready to travel again, if he cannot find Meybelin soon, even if he must retrace his recent 1,500-mile journey: crossing Mexico crammed in the back of a refrigerated cargo truck after weeks in U.S. detention with frigid rooms and scalding showers and mocking guards. Details of Guidos’s case were confirmed by court documents and his lawyers. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said in a statement that the agency takes all allegations of mistreatment seriously and that its men and women “perform their duties professionally and treat everyone equally with dignity and respect.” “Children represent the most vulnerable population and as such every CBP employee carries the fundamental ethical and moral belief as well as a legal obligation to put the welfare of any child first,” the statement said. A spokeswoman for ICE, Sarah Rodriguez, said that Guidos, on June 19, “submitted a written request that he be removed to El Salvador without his child.” Parents in ICE custody “have the opportunity to wait in detention for a coordinated removal with a child or may waive their right to such coordination,” she said. Guidos arrived home Friday evening in the coastal province of Usulutan, far out on a remote peninsula jutting into the Pacific Ocean. He works on a corn farm, earning $7 a day, and helps a local organization hatch baby sea turtles from eggs laid on the beach. He built his house from scrap wood his brother gave him. It has two mattresses — one for him, one for Meybelin — a hammock, a pink dresser for her clothes. A few minutes after arriving home, he had taken her best white dress out of its plastic bag, a reminder of her, when his cellphone rang and Meybelin’s tiny voice, from wherever she was, entered the room. Guidos was holding back tears from the first moments. He asked her how she was, whether she had eaten. Was she playing or studying or going to church? Despite endless requests over the past month, no one had told him her location or when she might be freed, and she was too young to know. Had the people there bathed her, he asked? Combed her hair? Given her toys? “Papa,” she said. “When are you going to take me out of here?” And that’s when he really began to cry. Years of troubles Guidos’s problems began two years ago on a soccer field cut out of the jungle behind his house, he said. He got into a fight with a player whose brother was a top member of the Barrio 18 gang in Puerto El Triunfo, the town across the bay. In recent years, gangs seized control of the one paved road running down this rural peninsula. Teenagers manned checkpoints with rifles slung over their shoulders and extorted passersby. It could cost $100 in $5 and $10 payments just to get off the peninsula, he said. Two years ago, El Salvador had one of the highest murder rates in the world. Gang violence has displaced hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, many of whom seek refuge in the United States. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a ruling earlier this month that immigration judges generally cannot consider gang violence as grounds for asylum. After the fight on the soccer field, Guidos went into hiding. Gang members lived within sight of his shack, and they hauled away a brother-in-law at one point and put a pistol in his mouth, he said. Twice Guidos fled north, hoping for asylum, but was deported once from Mexico and once from Louisiana. By then, he had separated from Meybelin’s mother. He decided to take his daughter out of kindergarten and make one more try. His brother lived in Kansas, and he hoped to make it there. “It’s hard to hide here,” he said of Corral de Mulas. “Everyone knows you.” On May 26, after nearly a week of travel, Guidos and Meybelin boarded a raft, floated the Rio Grande, and walked into the scrub near Hidalgo, Tex., to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol and ask for asylum. He did not know exactly where they were taken, but normally migrants are processed at CBP facilities before going to court and moving on to a longer-term detention center. On their first day in detention, they were given Mylar blankets and ham sandwiches every six hours, he said. Now, he considers this his best day in detention because Meybelin was still with him. Once she was taken away, yelling and crying, he could get no answers about where she had gone. On May 29, three days after arriving, he pleaded guilty to crossing the border illegally and was sentenced to time served, according to federal court documents. Afterward, he begged for information about his daughter. He recalled one U.S. official telling him: “They may have taken her to Florida or New York.” “That’s when I really felt hell come down on me,” he said. Guidos was transferred to an ICE detention center outside of Laredo, Tex., after his court appearance, according to paperwork he was given. Authorities there would regularly ask migrants if they wanted to sign papers approving their own deportation, he said. For two weeks, he declined, insisting he would not leave the United States without Meybelin. Eventually, he said, he was told that nothing would change. He lost all hope and signed the document for his removal. “He told me, ‘You’re never going to get information about your daughter here,’ ” Guidos recalled one official saying. “It’s better to go back to your country.” A sorrowful arrival Guidos was in tears when he walked out of the deportee processing center in San Salvador on Thursday afternoon, carrying his belongings in a plastic bag. “Imagine, all of her life she’s been with me and now she’s not,” he said of his daughter. “And I don’t even know where she is.” He got into the bed of a pickup truck with his other relatives for the three-hour drive to his village. The day he arrived in El Salvador, he received his first call from Meybelin since their separation. It’s unclear whether she knew her relatives’ phone numbers or was given them by shelter staff. When Meybelin called again the next evening, she used a phone number that is associated with a shelter in Phoenix, run by Southwest Key Programs, a ­Texas-based nonprofit organization that has received $1.1 billion in federal contracts to house migrant children since 2014. A Southwest Key Programs spokeswoman said she could not confirm if Meybelin was at the Phoenix shelter and referred queries to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. An HHS spokesman said it would take days to confirm her location and, even then, the department might not be able to speak about her case because of privacy concerns. Immigration lawyers working with detained families say that family reunification is an expensive process that can take years due to the difficulty of obtaining information across various government agencies. “There is no clear path made by the administration to reunite the 2,300 children already taken from their parents,” said Jennifer Falcon, communications director at RAICES, an organization that is representing Meybelin through her family. “And every day, it gets more difficult as they continue mass deportation of their parents.” Falcon spoke before a late Saturday announcement by the Trump administration about a plan to reunify the migrant families. Meybelin has been able to periodically call relatives in the United States and El Salvador, but the family has had trouble getting answers from shelter staff. “They won’t let her pass the phone to anyone,” said her grandmother, Sonia de Jesus Portillo. “I’ve run out of tissues, I’ve been crying so much. We’re desperate.” When Meybelin called on Friday evening, Guidos tried to stay calm. “How are you, mi amor?” he asked. “Good.” “What are you doing?” “I don’t know.” She told him she wanted her clothes and didn’t like the food. She said she had tried to call her mother twice but no one answered. “Mi amor, don’t worry. We’re going to get you, do you hear?” He promised to take her to the park when she was home. “Meybelin,” he said as the tears ran down his face. “I love you, mi amor.” “Me too, papa.” When the call ended, he sat down on his mattress, three countries away from this ­6-year-old girl, and cried into his hands. Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531443262594-YBVQU2XPXU4DX8MZNUQ2/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.53.52+PM.png justice - There Are More Guns Than People in the United States, According to a New Study of Global Firearm Ownership There are more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, or enough for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over. Those numbers come from the latest edition of the global Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. The report, which draws on official data, survey data and other measures for 230 countries, finds that global firearm ownership is heavily concentrated in the United States. In 2017, for instance, Americans made up 4 percent of the world's population but owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock of 857 million civilian firearms. With an estimated 120.5 guns for every 100 residents, the firearm ownership rate in the United States is twice that of the next-highest nation, Yemen, with just 52.8 guns per 100 residents. In raw number terms, the closest country to the United States is India, with 71.1 million firearms in circulation. These numbers do not include firearms owned by law enforcement agencies or militaries. On gun ownership, the United States stands out among the world's wealthiest nations, with an ownership rate more than three times higher than the rate in the next-highest country, Canada. The gun ownership rate in the United States is more than six times higher than the average among similar wealthy nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Obama years were a boom time for America's gun manufacturers, which doubled their annual output between 2009 and 2013, fueled in part by fears of a federal crackdown on gun ownership that never materialized. “In the United States alone civilians acquired at least 122 million new or imported firearms during the period 2006–17,” the Small Arms Survey found. If global gun ownership is concentrated in American hands, American gun ownership is concentrated even more narrowly in the country's gun-owning households. As of 2017, Gallup found that 42 percent of American households reported owning guns. With an estimated 118 million households in the United States, per the U.S. Census, that would mean that the country's 393 million guns are distributed among 50 million households. The implication is that the average gun-owning household owns nearly eight guns. A separate Harvard-Northeastern study published in 2016 found that 3 percent of American adults (individuals in this case, not households) own half the nation's firearms. Combined with the latest Small Arms Survey estimate, that would mean that 3 percent of American adults own nearly one quarter of the world's civilian firearms stockpile. It's worth noting, however, that the Harvard-Northeastern study, which was based on a survey of gun owners, estimated a much lower number of guns in circulation: 265 million as of January 2015. Because there is no official tally of American gun ownership, there's a margin of error around any estimate of either gun ownership or the number of guns in circulation. Some gun owners may be disinclined to answer survey questions, for instance, which would result in an undercount of the number of households and individuals owning guns. Similarly, any estimate of the number of guns in circulation has to make an assumption about attrition — the number of firearms that are destroyed or otherwise become unusable in any given year. The number of guns in circulation could be subject to overcount or undercount, depending on how researchers model the effects of attrition. Regardless, the big-picture trends are not in dispute. Measured in rates or in raw terms, the United States is the civilian gun capital of the world. Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531443390469-XUYELIJS1GBLU6MQB92N/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.56.14+PM.png justice - Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health One morning this past September, Kiarra Boulware boarded the 26 bus to Baltimore’s Bon Secours Hospital, where she would seek help for the most urgent problem in her life: the 200-some excess pounds she carried on her 5-foot-2-inch frame. To Kiarra, the weight sometimes felt like a great burden, and at other times like just another fact of life. She had survived a childhood marred by death, drugs, and violence. She had recently gained control over her addiction to alcohol, which, last summer, had brought her to a residential recovery center in the city’s Sandtown neighborhood, made famous by the Freddie Gray protests in 2015. But she still struggled with binge eating—so much so that she would eat entire plates of quesadillas or mozzarella sticks in minutes. As the bus rattled past rowhouses and corner stores, Kiarra told me she hadn’t yet received the Cpap breathing machine she needed for her sleep apnea. The extra fat seemed to constrict her airways while she slept, and a sleep study had shown that she stopped breathing 40 times an hour. She remembered one doctor saying, “I’m scared you’re going to die in your sleep.” In the haze of alcoholism, she’d never followed up on the test. Now doctors at Bon Secours were trying to order the machine for her, but insurance hurdles had gotten in the way. Kiarra’s weight brought an assortment of old-person problems to her 27-year-old life: sleep apnea, diabetes, and menstrual dysregulation, which made her worry she would never have children. For a while, she’d ignored these issues. Day to day, her size mostly made it hard to shop for clothes. But the severity of her situation sank in when a diabetic friend had to have a toe amputated. Kiarra visited the woman in the hospital. She saw her tears and her red, bandaged foot, and resolved not to become an amputee herself. Kiarra arrived at the hospital early and waited in the cafeteria. Bon Secours is one of several world-class hospitals in Baltimore. Another, Johns Hopkins Hospital, is in some respects the birthplace of modern American medicine, having invented everything from the medical residency to the surgical glove. But of course not even the best hospitals in America can keep you from getting sick in the first place. It was lunchtime, but Kiarra didn’t have any cash—her job, working the front desk at the recovery center where she lived, paid a stipend of just $150 a week. When she did have money, she often sought comfort in fast food. But when her cash and food stamps ran out, she sometimes had what she called “hungry nights,” when she went to bed without having eaten anything all day. When I’d first met Kiarra, a few months earlier, I’d been struck by how upbeat she seemed. Her recovery center—called Maryland Community Health Initiatives, but known in the neighborhood as Penn North—sits on a grimy street crowded with men selling drugs. Some of the center’s clients, fresh off their habits, seemed withdrawn, or even morose. Kiarra, though, had the bubbly demeanor of a student-council president. She described the rough neighborhoods where she’d grown up as fun and “familylike.” She said that although neither of her parents had been very involved when she was a kid, her grandparents had provided a loving home. Regarding her diabetes, she told me she was “grateful that it’s reversible.” After finishing her addiction treatment, she planned to reenroll in college and move into a dorm. Now, though, a much more anxious Kiarra sat before her doctor, a young white man named Tyler Gray, who began by advising Kiarra to get a Pap smear. “Do we have to do it today?” she asked. “Is there something you’re concerned about or nervous about?,” Gray asked. Kiarra was nervous about a lot of things. She “deals by not dealing,” as she puts it, but lately she’d had to deal with so much. “Ever since the diabetes thing, I hate hearing I have something else,” she said softly, beginning to cry. “I’ve been fat for what seems like so long, and now I get all the fat problems.” “I don’t want to be fat,” she added, “but I don’t know how to not be fat.” Kiarra’s struggles with her weight are imbued with this sense, that getting thin is a mystery she might never solve, that diet secrets are literally secret. On a Sunday, she might diligently make a meal plan for the week, only to find herself reaching for Popeyes fried chicken by Wednesday. She blames herself for her poor health—as do many of the people I met in her community, where obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are ubiquitous. They said they’d made bad choices. They used food, and sometimes drugs, to soothe their pain. But these individual failings are only part of the picture. In Baltimore, a 20-year gap in life expectancy exists between the city’s poor, largely African American neighborhoods and its wealthier, whiter areas. A baby born in Cheswolde, in Baltimore’s far-northwest corner, can expect to live until age 87. Nine miles away in Clifton-Berea, near where The Wire was filmed, the life expectancy is 67, roughly the same as that of Rwanda, and 12 years shorter than the American average. Similar disparities exist in other segregated cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago. These cities are among the most extreme examples of a national phenomenon: Across the United States, black people suffer disproportionately from some of the most devastating health problems, from cancer deaths and diabetes to maternal mortality and preterm births. Although the racial disparity in early death has narrowed in recent decades, black people have the life expectancy, nationwide, that white people had in the 1980s—about three years shorter than the current white life expectancy. African Americans face a greater risk of death at practically every stage of life. Except in the case of a few specific ailments, such as nondiabetic kidney disease, scientists have largely failed to identify genetic differences that might explain racial health disparities. The major underlying causes, many scientists now believe, are social and environmental forces that affect African Americans more than most other groups. To better understand how these forces work, I spent nearly a year reporting in Sandtown and other parts of Baltimore. What I found in Kiarra’s struggle was the story of how one person’s efforts to get better—imperfect as they may have been—were made vastly more difficult by a daunting series of obstacles. But it is also a bigger story, of how African Americans became stuck in profoundly unhealthy neighborhoods, and of how the legacy of racism can literally take years off their lives. Far from being a relic of the past, America’s racist and segregationist history continues to harm black people in the most intimate of ways—seeping into their lungs, their blood, even their DNA. When kiarra was a little girl, Baltimore was, as it is today, mired in violence, drugs, and poverty. In 1996, the city had the highest rate of drug-related emergency-room visits in the nation and one of the country’s highest homicide rates. With her father in and out of jail for robbery and drug dealing, Kiarra and her mother, three siblings, and three cousins piled into her grandmother’s home. It was a joyous but chaotic household. Kiarra describes her grandmother as “God’s assistant”—a deeply religious woman who, despite a house bursting with hungry mouths, would still make an extra dinner for the addicts on the block. Kiarra’s mother, meanwhile, was “the hood princess,” a woman who would do her hair just to go to the grocery store. She was a teen mom, like her own mother had been. Many facets of Kiarra’s youth—the fact that her parents weren’t together, her father’s incarceration, the guns on the corners—are what researchers consider “adverse childhood experiences,” stressful events early in life that can cause health problems in adulthood. An abnormally large proportion of the children in Baltimore—nearly a third—have two or more aces. People with four or more aces are seven times as likely to be alcoholics as people with no aces, and twice as likely to have heart disease. One study found that six or more aces can cut life expectancy by as much as 20 years. Kiarra had at least six. She and others I interviewed recall the inner-city Baltimore of their youth fondly. Everyone lived crammed together with siblings and cousins, but people looked out for one another; neighbors hosted back-to-school cookouts every year, and people took pride in their homes. Kiarra ran around with the other kids on the block until her grandma called her in each night at 8 o’clock. She made the honor roll in fifth grade and got to speak in front of the whole class. She read novels by Sister Souljah and wrote short stories in longhand. Yet Kiarra also describes some jarring incidents. When she was 8, she heard a loud bop bop bop outside and ran out to find her stepbrother lying in the street, dead. One friend died of asthma in middle school; another went to jail, then hanged himself. (Other people I spoke with around Penn North and other recovery facilities had similarly traumatic experiences. It seemed like every second person I met told me they had been molested as a child, and even more said their family members had struggled with addiction.) Kiarra told me she got pregnant by a friend when she was 12, and gave birth to a boy when she was 13. Within a year, the baby died unexpectedly, and Kiarra was so traumatized that she ended up spending more than a month in a psychiatric hospital. When she came home, her boyfriend physically and sexually abused her. He “slapped me so hard, I was seeing stars,” she said. She took solace in eating, a common refuge for victims of abuse. One 2013 study of thousands of women found that those who had been severely physically or sexually abused as children had nearly double the risk of food addiction. Kiarra ate “everything, anything,” she said, “mostly bad foods, junk food, pizza,” along with chicken boxes—the fried-chicken-and-fries combos slung by Baltimore’s carryout joints. At first, she thought the extra weight looked good on her. Then she started feeling fat. Eventually, she said, “it was like, Fuck it. I’m fat.” As her high-school graduation approached, she tried on the white gown she’d bought just weeks earlier and realized that it was already too tight. Kiarra didn’t know many college-educated people, but she wanted to go to Spelman, a historically black college in Georgia, and join a sorority. Her family talked her out of applying, she said. Instead, she enrolled in one local college after another, but she kept dropping out, sometimes to help her siblings with their children and other times because she simply lost interest. After accumulating $30,000 in student loans, she had only a year’s worth of credits. So Kiarra put college on hold and worked at Kmart and as a home health aide—solid jobs but, as she likes to say, “not my ceiling.” She longed for a purpose. Sometimes, she had an inkling that she was meant to be an important person; she would picture herself giving a speech to an auditorium full of people. But she remained depressed, stuck, and, increasingly, obese. She began doing ecstasy, and, later, downing a pint of vodka a day. She remembers coming to her home-health-aide job drunk one time and leaving a patient on the toilet. “Did you forget me?” the woman asked, half an hour later. Kiarra broke down crying. Soon after, she checked into Penn North for her first try at recovery. This past year’s attempt is her third. Sandtown is 97 percent black, and half of its families live in poverty. Its homicide rate is more than double that of the rest of the city, and last year about 8 percent of the deaths there were due to drug and alcohol overdose. Still, its top killers are heart disease and cancer, which African Americans nationwide are more likely to die from than other groups are. The way African Americans became trapped in Baltimore’s poorest—and least healthy—neighborhoods mirrors their history in the ghettos of other major cities. It began with outright bans on their presence in certain neighborhoods in the early 1900s and continued through the 2000s, when policy makers, lenders, and fellow citizens employed subtler forms of discrimination. In the early 1900s, blacks in Baltimore disproportionately suffered from tuberculosis, so much so that one area not far from Penn North was known as the “lung block.” In 1907, an investigator hired by local charities described what she saw in Meyer Court, a poor area in Baltimore. The contents of an outdoor toilet “were found streaming down the center of this narrow court to the street beyond,” she wrote. The smell within one house was “ ‘sickening’ … No provision of any kind is made for supplying the occupants of this court with water.” Yet one cause, the housing investigator concluded, was the residents’ “low standards and absence of ideals.” When blacks tried to flee to better areas, some had their windows smashed and their steps smeared with tar. In 1910, a Yale-educated black lawyer named George McMechen moved into a house in a white neighborhood, and Baltimore reacted by adopting a segregation ordinance that The New York Times called “the most pronounced ‘Jim Crow’ measure on record.” Later, neighborhood associations urged homeowners to sign covenants promising never to sell to African Americans. Some of Baltimore’s rowhouses are so long-forsaken, they have trees growing through the windows. They are in themselves harmful to people’s health. For much of the 20th century, the Federal Housing Administration declined to insure mortgages for blacks, who instead had to buy homes by signing contracts with speculators who demanded payments that, in many cases, amounted to most of the buyer’s income. (As a result, many black families never reaped the gains of homeownership—a key source of Americans’ wealth.) Housing discrimination persisted well beyond the Jim Crow years, as neighborhood associations rejected proposals to build low-income housing in affluent suburbs. In the 1990s, house flippers would buy up homes in Baltimore’s predominantly black neighborhoods and resell them to unsuspecting first-time home buyers at inflated prices by using falsified documents. The subsequent foreclosures are a major reason so many properties in the city sit vacant today. Some of Baltimore’s rowhouses are so long-forsaken, they have trees growing through the windows. These dilapidated homes are in themselves harmful to people’s health. Neighborhoods with poorly maintained houses or a large number of abandoned properties, for instance, face a high risk of mouse infestation. Every year, more than 5,000 Baltimore children go to the emergency room for an asthma attack—and according to research from Johns Hopkins, mouse allergen is the biggest environmental factor in those attacks. The allergen, found in mouse urine, travels through the air on dust, and Johns Hopkins researchers have found high levels of it on most of the beds of poor Baltimore kids they have tested. When kids inhale the allergen, it can spark inflammation and mucus buildup in their lungs, making them cough and wheeze. These attacks can cause long-term harm: Children with asthma are more likely to be obese and in overall poorer health as adults. Getting rid of the mice requires sealing up cracks and holes in the house—a process that can cost thousands of dollars, given the state of many Baltimore homes. The mice, of course, are just one symptom of the widespread neglect that can set in once neighborhoods become as segregated as Baltimore’s are. One study estimated that, in the year 2000, racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths—about as many as were caused by strokes. All summer, Penn North’s aging air conditioners strained against the soupy heat outside. For Kiarra, the first few months at the recovery center felt like boot camp. The staff woke the residents before 7 a.m., even if they didn’t have anywhere in particular to be. Kiarra’s days were packed with therapies: acupuncture in the mornings, meant to help reduce cravings; individual meetings with peer counselors; Narcotics Anonymous sessions, in which dozens of strangers slumped on metal folding chairs and told stories of past drug binges. Once a week, Kiarra would leave her post at the front desk and walk across an empty playground for an appointment with her psychotherapist, Ms. Bea (who asked that I not use her full name). Kiarra would climb the steep, narrow staircase of Penn North’s clinical building, then stop at the landing to catch her breath. Healing the Divide: Kiarra’s Story Ms. Bea’s goal was to help Kiarra understand how her substance abuse, her weight, and her difficult childhood were interconnected. Like many young people in Baltimore, Kiarra had spent her life trying to attain ordinary things—love, respect—that seemed always to skid beyond her grasp. She wanted male attention, but then she got pregnant. The baby made her happy, but the baby died. Her siblings started having kids and she loved them, but she was jealous. She fell into a deep-sink depression. She’d eat a second dinner, then get so drunk that she’d scream at her friends. She’d realize that she was going to wake up to a blistering hangover and would keep drinking. It was coming anyway, so why not? “Struggle days,” she called these times. During one appointment in August, Kiarra told Ms. Bea that she had been attending Overeaters Anonymous meetings by phone. Something another member had shared, about why people are sometimes reluctant to shed weight, had stuck with her. “He was saying when you lose the fat, you lose a part of you,” Kiarra recalled. A few years earlier, she had founded a club for plus-size women called Beautiful Beyond Weight, with some of her best friends. The goal was to help overweight women feel better about themselves. They put on fashion shows that she described as “Beyoncé big, but on a Christina Aguilera budget.” She worried that if she lost too much weight, the other girls in the club would think she was a hypocrite. She decided she would aim to be “slim-thicc”—not too skinny. “So imagine if you were a size 14,” Ms. Bea said. “What would be happening here—with you?” Ms. Bea was trying to help Kiarra see how she sometimes uses her size as a form of protection, a way of making her feel invisible to men, so that she could eventually work through her fear. In Kiarra’s experience, disappearing could be useful. She told me that once, when she was 17, before she had gotten so big, she met a guy in an online chat room. She went over to his place, where they watched TV and started having sex. But then—the skid—his three friends barged into the room and raped her. She fled, half-dressed, as soon as she could. “Yeah,” Kiarra said, envisioning herself many sizes smaller. “I wouldn’t be able to take it.” Kiarra has trouble concentrating sometimes, and she thinks the reason might be that she and her brother were exposed to lead from old paint. When Kiarra was 6, her grandmother heard that a girl living in another property owned by the same landlord had been hospitalized. She took Kiarra to get tested. The results showed that the concentration of lead in her blood was more than six times the level the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers elevated—an amount that can irreversibly lower IQ and reduce attention span. Kiarra, too, was hospitalized, for a month. Scientists and industry experts knew in the 19th century that lead paint was dangerous. “Lead is a merciless poison,” an executive with a Michigan lead-paint company admitted in a book in 1892. It “gradually affects the nerves and organs of circulation to such a degree that it is next to impossible to restore them to their normal condition.” But as late as the 1940s and ’50s, trade groups representing companies that made lead products, including the Lead Industries Association, promoted the use of lead paint in homes and successfully lobbied for the repeal of restrictions on that use. Lead-paint companies published coloring books and advised their salesmen to “not forget the children—some day they may be customers.” According to The Baltimore Sun, a study in 1956 found that lead-poisoned children in the slums of Baltimore had six times as much lead in their systems as severely exposed workers who handled lead for a living. In speeches and publications, Lead Industries Association officials cast childhood lead poisoning as vanishingly rare. When they did acknowledge the problem, they blamed “slum” children for chewing on wood surfaces—“gnaw-ledge,” as Manfred Bowditch, the group’s health-and-safety director, called it—and their “ignorant parents” for allowing them to do so. In a letter to the Baltimore health department, Bowditch called the lead-poisoned toddlers “little human rodents.” Even after stricter regulations came along, landlords in segregated neighborhoods—as well as the city’s own public-housing agency—neglected properties, allowing old paint to chip and leaded dust to accumulate. Some landlords, seeking to avoid the expense of renovating homes and the risk of tenant lawsuits, refused to rent to families with children, since they would face the greatest risk from lead exposure. Poor families feared that if they complained about lead, they might be evicted. Partly because of Maryland’s more rigorous screening, the state’s lead-poisoning rate for children was 15 times the national average in the ’90s; the majority of the poisoned children lived in the poor areas of Baltimore. In some neighborhoods, 70 percent of children had been exposed to lead. The city’s under-resourced agencies failed to address the problem. Clogged by landlords who hid behind shell companies, Baltimore’s lead-paint enforcement system had ground to a halt by the time Kiarra was poisoned. According to Tapping Into The Wire, a book co-authored by Peter L. Beilenson, the city’s former health commissioner, Baltimore didn’t bring a single lead-paint enforcement action against landlords in the ’90s. (A subsequent crackdown on landlords has lowered lead-poisoning rates dramatically.) When Kiarra was 14, her family sued their landlord for damages, but their lawyer dropped the case because the landlord claimed he had no money and no insurance with which to compensate them. Kiarra remembers her grandmother not wanting to give up, demanding of the lawyer, “What do you mean there’s nothing you can do?”—only to get lost in a tangle of legal rules she didn’t fully understand. On a hot saturday this past August, Kiarra brought her nieces with her to work and corralled them in the front office. She was babysitting that day, and staffing was short at the center. The girls climbed restlessly on the stained office chairs and under the tables. Kiarra is close with her family. She spends much of her free time texting her favorite sisters on her cracked cellphone, and she talks to her grandmother every few days. Any familial strife upsets her deeply: She can vividly recount a long list of times her mother disappointed her. Then again, sometimes she feels like she’s the one who has let everyone down, with all her drinking and dropping out. Near the end of the day, Kiarra’s cellphone rang. It was her father, calling to yell at her because she hadn’t come to see him recently. “I’ve been busy,” Kiarra told him. When Kiarra was little, and when her father wasn’t incarcerated, he had provided for his children—unlike many dads she knew. She’d sought his approval by researching Islam, his religion, and trying to reconcile it with the strict Christianity of her grandmother’s home. A few years ago, she tried to impress him by joining a tough-seeming social club that turned out to be too much like a gang. (It “wasn’t a good fit,” she told me.) On some level, she still respected her father. But he had an explosive personality and struggled with depression and addiction. Kiarra told me he taught her what men are supposed to be: fierce protectors who sometimes turn their wrath on the women in their lives. Kiarra usually tried to see her father’s outbursts as a cry for help. But today, she decided to confront him. Their conversation escalated as they accused each other of failing at fatherhood and daughterhood. “How many of my plays have you been to?,” Kiarra demanded. Her father launched into a tirade. “I will come for your fucking dumb ass!,” I overheard him yell at one point. “You going to respect me!” “Respect works both ways,” Kiarra said. “I’m not that little girl that’s gonna let you slap the shit out of me.” What bothered Kiarra most was that her father had never hit his other daughter that way, so why her? Why did it feel like he was always rejecting her? (Her father later confirmed that he had hit her as a child, saying, “Discipline is a must, whatever form you choose.”) As he continued screaming—“I’m gonna put your fuckin’ head in the dirt”—Kiarra’s eyes glazed over. “Death gotta be better than here,” she said. She hung up, then wiped away tears. Just today, he had called her at 12:30 a.m., 3:48 a.m., 7:47 a.m., 11:24 a.m., 3:33 p.m., and 4:44 p.m. One time when she didn’t answer the phone, Kiarra said, he showed up in person at Penn North. Her father called back, rambling less coherently than before. “How much of my life did you spend incarcerated?,” Kiarra asked him. When she was little, she would go out hustling with him. “I was 14 fucking years old seeing dead fucking bodies, and you’re talking about where the fuck did this drinking shit come from?” Kiarra hung up, this time for good. Then she wept. “As long as I’m fucked up, this man is cool, but as soon as I decide I want to get my fucking life together it’s like …” Her voice trailed off. She turned and told me she wanted to go to McDonald’s. “McDonald’s is killing me,” she said, “but it’s a special treat.” She ordered her usual—a McDouble and a McChicken, along with a sweet tea—and waited silently amid the beeping of the cash registers. Most of the people I met at Penn North were optimistic and surrounded by fiercely loyal friends. But their lives also seemed, like Kiarra’s, unrelentingly stressful. Between the hugs and handshakes, I heard a lot of trepidation. I have to move again … Where will I go? Will I get this job at Target? Will I ever walk again? Will I get to eat today? Research shows that this kind of day-in, day-out worry can ravage a person’s health. Certain stressful experiences—such as living in a disordered, impoverished neighborhood—are associated with a shortening of the telomeres, structures that sit on the tips of our chromosomes, which are bundles of DNA inside our cells. Often compared to the plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces, telomeres keep chromosomes from falling apart. They can also be a measure of how much a body has been ground down by life. Some researchers think stress shrinks telomeres, until they get so short that the cell dies, hastening the onset of disease. Different kinds of prolonged emotional strain can affect telomeres. In one study, mothers who had high stress levels had telomeres that were as short as those of a person about a decade older. Another study found that children who spent part of their childhood in Romanian orphanages had telomeres that shortened rapidly. Even among people making $175,000 a year or more, blacks are more likely to suffer from certain diseases than whites are. Arline T. Geronimus, an expert on health disparities at the University of Michigan, has found that African Americans have more stress-related wear and tear in their bodies than white people do, and the difference widens with age. By measuring telomere length in hundreds of women, Geronimus estimated that black women were, biologically, about seven and a half years older than white women of the same age. Unrelenting stress also affects our daily behaviors: Stress causes some people to eat more, especially calorically dense foods, and to sleep less. On average, African Americans get about 40 minutes less sleep each night than white people do. Among women in one recent study, poor sleep alone explained more than half the racial disparity in cardiovascular-disease risk. Living in a dangerous neighborhood like Sandtown requires a vigilance that can flood the body with adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones are supposed to kick in only long enough for us to get away from an immediate threat. If they trickle through us constantly, they can raise the risk of heart disease and compromise the body’s immune system. These kinds of changes in body chemistry aren’t limited to people living in poverty. Even well-off black people face daily racial discrimination, which can have many of the same biological effects as unsafe streets. Thomas LaVeist, the dean of Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, has found, for example, that even among people earning $175,000 a year or more, blacks are more likely to suffer from certain diseases than whites are. In an emerging field of research, scientists have linked stress, including from prejudice, to compounds called methyl groups attaching to our genes, like snowflakes sticking to a tree branch. These methyl groups can cause genes to turn on or off, setting disease patterns in motion. Recently, a study linked racial discrimination to changes in methylation on genes that affect schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and asthma. Several studies also show that experiencing racism might be part of the reason black women are about 50 percent more likely than white women to have premature babies and about twice as likely to have low-birth-weight babies. Researchers think the stress they experience might cause the body to go into labor too soon or to mount an immune attack against the fetus. This disparity, too, does not appear to be genetic: Black women from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are less likely to have preterm births than African American women are, possibly because they’ve spent less time living in America’s racist environment. hroughout the fall, Kiarra kept her doctor appointments, and she began working out at the small gym at Penn North, placing a picture of Chrissy Lampkin, the curvaceous girlfriend of the rapper Jim Jones, on her treadmill as motivation. But Kiarra still wasn’t losing much weight. Like most Americans, she got advice from her friends on what to eat—but that advice at times proved confusing and contradictory. She tried a boiled-egg diet, which left her with hunger pangs and a lot of leftover eggs in the fridge. She went seven days without meat but wound up eating more starches, which sent her blood sugar soaring. One bright day in late September, Kiarra returned to Bon Secours to see Ebony Hicks, a behavioral-health consultant who, like Kiarra’s doctor, works through Health Care for the Homeless, a Baltimore nonprofit that cares for the very poor. Hicks began by asking Kiarra what her goal was. Kiarra said getting down to an even 200 pounds “would be awesome.” Her weight remained, stubbornly, about 150 pounds higher than that. But she stayed optimistic, writing down Hicks’s aphorisms about needing to be patient and not expecting immediate results—“Anything overnight usually lasts about a night!”—in a notebook she’d brought with her. Gently, Hicks asked Kiarra what she had eaten that day. “French fries,” Kiarra said. “All you’ve had is french fries?,” Hicks asked. “Mm-hmm.” It was 3:30 in the afternoon. They walked to a room across the hall, and Kiarra stepped onto a scale. “I gained two pounds,” she said quickly, “so now I’m depressed. I eat too much.” “We have to work on getting you more regularly eating throughout the day,” Hicks said. Kiarra asked whether “detox tea,” something she’d heard about from a friend, was healthy. “You can detox with lots of fiber-filled vegetables,” Hicks said. “What’s that?,” Kiarra asked. Hicks pulled up a web page describing fruits and vegetables that contain fiber. She listed them off one by one. Would Kiarra eat avocados? No. Coconut? Also no. “I do eat berries,” Kiarra said. “Let’s put that down.” Kiarra doesn’t know why she dislikes so many fruits and vegetables. Her grandmother cooked healthy meals, putting turkey in big pots of greens for flavor. She had a rule that you could never leave the table without eating your vegetables. Kiarra would fall asleep at the table. Hicks gamely pressed on. “Peas? You like peas?” “I think I’m going to throw up,” Kiarra said, grimacing. “Chickpeas,” Hicks offered. “You ever ate hummus?” “What is hummus?” Fried food has long been Kiarra’s legal high—cheap, easily acquired, something to brighten the gloomiest day. It is also one of the few luxuries around. Predominantly black neighborhoods tend to become what researchers call “food swamps,” or areas where fast-food joints outnumber healthier options. (Food deserts, by contrast, simply lack grocery stores.) One study in New York found that as the number of African Americans who lived in a given area increased, so did the distance to the nearest clothing store, pharmacy, electronics store, office-supply store. Meanwhile, one type of establishment drew nearer: fast-food restaurants. That’s not a coincidence. After the riots of the 1960s, the federal government began promoting the growth of small businesses in minority neighborhoods as a way to ease racial tensions. “What we need is to get private enterprise into the ghetto, and put the people of the ghetto into private enterprises,” President Richard Nixon said around the time he created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, in 1969. As Chin Jou, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, describes in her book, Supersizing Urban America, fast-food companies were some of the most eager entrants into this “ghetto” market. Fast-food restaurants spent the next few decades “rushing into urban markets,” as one Detroit News report put it, seeking out these areas’ “untapped labor force” and “concentrated audience.” In the 1990s, the federal government gave fast-food restaurants financial incentives to open locations in inner cities, including in Baltimore. The urban expansion made business sense. “The ethnic population is better for us than the general market,” Sidney Feltenstein, Burger King’s executive vice president of brand strategy, explained to the Miami Herald in 1992. “They tend to have larger families, and that means larger checks.” (Supermarket chains didn’t share this enthusiasm; in part because the widespread use of food stamps causes an uneven flow of customers throughout the month, they have largely avoided expanding in poor areas.) One reason college graduates live longer, researchers believe, is that education endows people with the sense that they control their own destiny. Fast-food executives looked for ways to entice black customers. Burger King made ads featuring Shaft. KFC redecorated locations in cities like Baltimore to cater to stereotypically black tastes, and piped “rap, rhythm and blues, and soul music” into the restaurants, Jou writes. “Employees were given new Afrocentric uniforms consisting of kente cloth dashikis.” A study from 2005 found that TV programs aimed at African Americans feature more fast-food advertisements than other shows do, as well as more commercials for soda and candy. Black children today see twice as many soda and candy ads as white children do. The marketing and franchising onslaught worked, and the diets of low-income people changed dramatically. Before the rise of fast food and processed foods, many low-income black families grew their own food and ate lots of grains and beans. In 1965, one study found, poor and middle-income blacks ate healthier—though often more meager—diets than rich whites did. But over the next few decades, the price of meat, junk food, and simple carbohydrates plummeted, while the price of vegetables rose. By the mid-’90s, 28 percent of African Americans were considered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to have a “poor” diet, compared with just 16 percent of whites. At carver Vocational-Technical High School, which Kiarra and Freddie Gray attended at the same time, only about a third of students go on to enroll in college—yet another factor that could be contributing to the area’s low life expectancy, given that college graduates outlive high-school dropouts in every racial category. One reason college graduates live longer, researchers believe, is that education endows people with the sense that they control their own destiny. Well-educated people seek out more nutritional information because they’ve been told they can achieve anything—why not perfect health, too? Kiarra, by contrast, wasn’t yet sure what she could accomplish. She wanted to live up to an image in her mind of a “fly, crazy, daring, dream-chasing girl,” but she cycled between getting excited about new possibilities and being flattened by setbacks. Sometimes, she would dream of turning Beautiful Beyond Weight into a business—one that would sell T-shirts and caps with empowering messages for plus-size women. But she wasn’t really sure how to do that. When Kiarra felt especially adrift, she would visit Steve Dixon, Penn North’s director, in his tiny office at the end of the hall, and ask him for advice on finding her purpose. He would tell her to pray and meditate. “When you pray, it’s like you’re talking to God,” Kiarra told me once. “But when you meditate, it’s God talking to you.” In November, some combination of prayer, meditation, and research led Kiarra to enroll in a medical-assistant training program. The class added another $7,000 to her student-loan debt, but Kiarra seemed to thrive in it, and a few weeks before Christmas, she was excitedly planning her post–Penn North life. Once she had her medical-assistant certificate in hand, she would move to Philadelphia, get a job at Temple University, and take classes to become a registered nurse. Eventually, she hoped to become a nursing professor. That future held everything she wanted: helping people, being a leader, making her own money, having her own place. Feeling chipper, she decided to browse the wigs at a nearby store, stroking the hairpieces and whispering to the best ones that she would be back for them on payday. She had a new reason to get dolled up: a truck driver, “fine as wine” and with no kids—and, accordingly, no messy entanglement with another woman. She tried to boss him around, but he told her to mind her own business, and she kind of liked that. His birthday was approaching, and she wanted to take him someplace fancy. She would wear a black dress, and he would wear a black suit. To help pay for everything, Kiarra decided to register as a Lyft driver. All that was required was a $250 deposit; she began calling around to different relatives to raise the money. Twenty-seventeen, she thought, had been her best year yet. A few weeks later, a bitter cold settled through the East Coast, and Kiarra’s sunny mood had faded. Things had ended with the truck driver over some mean Facebook posts and the fact that he’d lied to her about not having kids. She was also reconsidering her plans for the future, now thinking that instead of setting her sights on Temple, she should focus on graduating and finding a job—any job—that would pay well enough and provide insurance that would cover her extensive health-care needs. Her grandmother said driving for Lyft in Baltimore was too dangerous. She might not move to Philly after all. Kiarra figured that if she really wanted to have a successful plus-size clothing brand, she’d at least have to live long enough to see it happen. But a new opportunity presented itself. Because of a change in her insurance plan, Kiarra had to switch doctors. Right away, her new doctor asked her whether she had considered bariatric surgery. Kiarra said she was scared of the complications, such as digestive problems and infections, but the doctor reassured her that complications are rare. She was interested in the gastric sleeve, a procedure that would dramatically reduce the size of her stomach, causing hormonal changes that would help her lose much of her body fat. Kiarra still felt conflicted about losing her identity as an overweight woman. She couldn’t relate to the people on the Overeaters Anonymous calls who said they hated their bodies. She liked hers. “People say, ‘Hey, you’re fat,’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘That’s obvious.’ ” But she was motivated by her diabetes—which was already causing her vision to blur and her feet to tingle—along with the looming threat of other “fat diseases,” as she called them, frightening ones like heart failure. She figured that if she really wanted to have a successful plus-size clothing brand, she’d at least have to live long enough to see it happen. She decided on the spot to go forward with the surgery, worried that she might change her mind otherwise. She signed up for the mandatory pre-op classes that prepare participants to eat just half a cup of food for every meal, at least initially, after the surgery. Her mother was nervous, but her sisters were all for it. Her grandmother told her to put it in God’s hands. Earlier that month, Kiarra had organized a birthday party for her 2-year-old niece, Brooklynn, in Penn North’s community room, decking out the dingy yellow walls with pink balloons and ribbons. Within a few weeks, it was decided that Kiarra would gain custody of Brooklynn for a while so that Kiarra’s sister could go back to get her high-school diploma. Kiarra was happy with this arrangement—she already sometimes referred to Brooklynn as her “daughter-girl”—and she began to see Brooklynn as a reason to stay on track. Juggling coursework and single parenthood exhausted her at times, but she wanted to be the successful role model for Brooklynn that she never had herself. In the chatty toddler who loved dress-up and Moana, Kiarra had found, if not her purpose, at least a purpose. “It feels like the Earth is full, you know?” she told me one day this spring. Her new status as the child’s guardian meant that her stay at Penn North could be extended, through some alchemy of program definitions, for nearly another year. Staying on would mean cheap housing for Kiarra and Brooklynn, two people who desperately needed it. With that settled, Kiarra turned her attention to the six-month process of hoop-jumping that was required to qualify for the gastric-sleeve surgery. The first pre-op class was an hour and a half long and took place at a hospital 30 minutes from Penn North. Kiarra thought the time commitment seemed excessive; with a smirk, she wondered aloud why the doctors couldn’t just tell her and the other patients, “Y’all fat. We gonna cut you up.” But the doctors needed Kiarra to understand that the surgery was not something to take lightly. To qualify, she would have to get her sleep apnea and diabetes under control. She would have to keep a food journal, submit to behavioral evaluations, write an essay explaining why she no longer wanted to be morbidly obese. For the rest of her life, she’d need to wait 30 minutes between eating a meal and drinking a beverage. When one of Kiarra’s classmates said that after the surgery, eating too much would cause you to get violently sick for an hour, Kiarra recoiled a little. All of the rules and obligations seemed more intense than Kiarra had expected. “Six months, you’re going on like 16 appointments,” she said. “Whoo, that’s a lot.” Given all she had to contend with, I wondered whether she would end up meeting the requirements—and, given the stakes, what might happen to her if she didn’t. Tony Conn, a Penn North staffer with whom Kiarra is close, calls her a “wonderful, brilliant person.” Early on in my reporting, he told me her biggest flaw is that she sometimes doesn’t see things through to the end. “As soon as [something] looks like it’s gonna come to light, she’s like, ‘Okay, I did that. So let’s find something else,’ ” he said. But lately, Kiarra had shown a new sense of calm and dedication. One day while she worked the front desk, an older man flirted with her as he signed the attendance sheet. “When you look in the mirror,” he said, “and see how beautiful you are, what do you say to yourself?” “We’ve come a long way,” she said quietly. “Let’s stay there.” Learn more at The Atlantic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531443500669-7NEZQTXHEFMCGMD9VYAB/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+5.58.01+PM.png justice - Here’s a List of Organizations That are Mobilizing to Help Immigrant Children Separated From Their Families It’s been nearly two months since the Trump administration announced its new “zero tolerance” policy regarding illegal immigration, which federal officials say has led to about 2,000 undocumented immigrant children in government custody being separated from their parents. The first tent city that’ll house immigrant children opened in El Paso on Friday. Some families have been separated for months; some parents have been deported without their children. We’ve compiled a list of organizations that are mobilizing to try and help children that have been separated from their parents at the Texas-Mexico border: Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project works to prevent the deportation of asylum-seeking families fleeing violence. The group accepts donations and asks people to sign up for volunteer opportunities here. South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project is providing free legal services to asylum seekers detained in South Texas. RAICES is a nonprofit that provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children, families and refugees in Texas. It’s accepting donations and volunteers at its website. In addition, the #postcards4families campaignwill donate $5 to RAICES for every postcard kids write to help the separated immigrant children. The CARA Project is currently recruiting attorneys, law students and paralegals with experience in asylum work. The group asks volunteers to be fluent in Spanish or willing to work with an interpreter. Kids In Need of Defense partners with major law firms, corporations and bar associations to create a nationwide pro bono network to represent unaccompanied children through their immigration proceedings. Volunteers don’t need to have immigration law experience. The El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center provides legal representation to immigrants who might not be able to afford it otherwise. It’s accepting volunteers and donations. The Austin Bar Association Civil Right and Immigration Section is coordinating training for pro bono attorneys to handle credible fear interviews for asylum seekers. Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley shelters immigrants who've recently been released from U.S. Border Patrol custody. American Gateways provides legal services and representation to detained parents. It's currently seeking volunteers to represent detained parents and is accepting donations. Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services is the largest provider of free and low cost immigration services in West Texas and says it's the only organization in El Paso serving unaccompanied children. Justice for Our Neighbors provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrant individuals and families in Texas. The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights is looking for more child advocates to visit the immigrant kids inside the detention centers weekly and accompany them to immigration proceedings. It is also raising money for advocates who will deal specifically with family separation cases. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is raising money to provide immigrant children "immediate shelter and beds, medical services, counseling and therapy to help them deal with the trauma of family separation." Together Rising is collecting money that'll go to advocacy groups that are working to reunify immigrant children with their families. Comfort Cases is raising money to provide backpacks to the separated immigrant children. Each case will contain items such as blankets, pajamas, toiletries, a stuffed animal, a book, a journal and art supplies. The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights is training adults who want to become “child advocates” who will work one-on-one with unaccompanied immigrant children while they are subject to deportation proceedings. Tahirih Justice Center is providing free legal and social services to immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence. Circle of Health International has staffed a clinic caring for refugees and asylum seekers immediately upon their their release. Their McAllen clinic is currently seeing upwards of 100 patients a day. The Office of Refugee Resettlement requires that all people who want to foster one of the unaccompanied immigrant children be fully licensed by their state. If you are not already licensed, the agency recommends contacting organizations such as United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. Annunciation House is helping serve immigrants and refugees in El Paso. The organization is accepting donations here. The Human Rights Initiative of North Texas is representing asylum seekers as well as unaccompanied minors — including those separated from parents. The Salvation Army of El Paso is supporting 17 shelter rooms for separated families while they await reunification with their children and their court hearings. Baker Ripley's team of immigration attorneys are providing representation to detained families seeking asylum as well as working to reunite children and parents. La Posada Providencia in San Benito runs a shelter for people who have applied for asylum and been released from detention centers while their cases are pending. The Children’s Immigration Law Academy has pro bono attorneys representing children in immigration-related proceedings. It's also providing specialized training to legal service providers and volunteers who're serving unaccompanied immigrant children. The Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee in El Paso started the Fronterizo Fianza Fund, which will go toward things like posting bond for asylum seekers. The Migrant Center for Human Rights is providing free and low-cost legal services for detained asylum seekers in Texas. Learn more at The Texas Tribune https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531443825845-P98F7L9HF28C3H3XNYPJ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.03.31+PM.png justice - Inside Casa Padre, The Converted Walmart Where The U.S. Is Holding Nearly 1,500 Immigrant Children BROWNSVILLE, Tex. — For more than a year, the old Walmart along the Mexican border here has been a mystery to those driving by on the highway. In place of the supercenter’s trademark logo hangs a curious sign: “Casa Padre.” But behind the sliding doors is a bustling city unto itself, equipped with classrooms, recreation centers and medical examination rooms. Casa Padre now houses more than 1,400 immigrant boys in federal custody. While most are teenagers who entered the United States alone, dozens of others — often younger — were forcibly separated from their parents at the border by a new Trump administration “zero tolerance” policy. On Wednesday evening, for the first time since that policy was announced — and amid increased national interest after a U.S. senator was turned away — federal authorities allowed a small group of reporters to tour the secretive shelter, the largest of its kind in the nation. Inside, where there was once a McDonald’s, cafeteria workers served chicken, vegetables and plastic fruit cups. In the former loading docks, children watched the animated movie “Moana,” dubbed in Spanish. In what used to be a garage, six young people played basketball. “They used to do oil changes in here,” said Martin Hinojosa, director of compliance for Southwest Key Programs, the nonprofit group that runs Casa Padre under a federal contract. Texas-based Southwest Key has grown quickly in recent years, fueled by surges of young Central Americans seeking refuge north, an expansion that has helped push annual compensation for the nonprofit’s chief executive, Juan Sanchez, to nearly $1.5 million, filings with the Internal Revenue Service show. The organization now houses 5,129 immigrant children in three states — approaching half the approximately 11,400 currently in federal custody — in facilities that are being strained to capacity, according to Sanchez. The policy of criminally prosecuting all who cross the border illegally is creating a new category of residents at these holding centers, young boys and girls who are grappling with the trauma of being unexpectedly separated from their mothers and fathers. To accommodate them, Sanchez said, Southwest Key is retrofitting some facilities with smaller bathrooms, smaller sinks, smaller everything. “We’re trying to do the best that we can taking care of these children. Our goal ultimately is to reunite kids with their families,” he said. “We’re not a detention center. . . . What we operate are shelters that take care of kids. It’s a big, big difference.” Southwest Key has long sheltered teens who arrived at the border alone, and such youths makeup the largest group in Casa Padre. The typically younger children who have been separated from their parents make up about 5 percent of residents at Casa Padre and 10 percent of all Southwest Key residents, Sanchez estimated. Federal officials have not allowed reporters to visit the facilities that house the youngest children, and it is not clear precisely how many of those children are being held or where. In the two weeks after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the separation policy, on May 7, 638 adults were prosecuted, and they had been accompanied by 658 children, federal officials have said. Advocates for immigrants worry that shelters across the border, including Casa Padre, do not have a sufficient number of employees or the experience to help so many young children in such difficult circumstances. Each day, the federal government sends Casa Padre a list of children detained at the border to be placed in the shelter, said Jaime Garcia, program director for Southwest Key. They arrive in white vans, half a dozen at a time. After they are fed, are clothed and get showered, the boys spend up to 72 hours in “intake” as they are vaccinated and checked for tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases and other maladies. Once they are medically cleared, they join the throng of boys in the shelter, where they stay for an average of 49 days, according to Southwest Key officials. The number of children at Casa Padre is constantly rising — on Wednesday it was 1,469. They line up in hallways featuring murals of U.S. presidents and inspirational quotes. President Trump’s image is the first a visitor encounters, drawn in black and white against the backdrop of an American flag. “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war,” reads the quote, a line from his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.” A mural of former president Barack Obama contains a quote taken from a 2014 speech in which he announced protections for some undocumented immigrants: “My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.” The bedrooms at Casa Padre are doorless, with walls reaching halfway to a 20-foot-high industrial ceiling that serves as a constant reminder of the building’s past. It used to be four beds to a room. But as the shelter fills to capacity, a fifth bed — a cot — has been added to each. Atop one boy’s pillow lay a teddy bear, a bow around its neck and a smile on its upward turned face. Yellow lines on the ground mark the area boys must line up. In the cafeteria, a mural tells kids to speak quietly, ask before getting up and not share food. Next to their beds are lists of each boy’s belongings: two T-shirts, three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, one polo, a pair of jeans. Lights go out at 9 p.m. and come back on at 6 a.m. There are so many children that they attend school in two shifts: one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. They sit in small, numbered classrooms with yellow walls covered in posters of planets. On Wednesday, through tiny windows, they waved to the reporters outside. “You might want to smile,” Southwest Key executive Alexia Rodriguez told the journalists at one point. “The kids feel a little like animals in a cage, being looked at.” They spend two hours outside each day, including one hour of physical exercise and one hour of free time, which many kids spend playing on dusty soccer fields, Southwest Key officials said. The boys are allowed to make two phone calls a week. Southwest Key officials said it sometimes takes days — or weeks — for children to reach their parents. The unusually high number of unaccompanied immigrant children crossing the southern border in recent years has been good for Southwest Key’s business. The organization has received more than $1.1 billion to shelter unaccompanied minors since 2014, including $310 million in the current fiscal year, federal spending records show. Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531443899556-WJLBXM2S68WR6LWLKUYB/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.04.42+PM.png justice - Border Protection Commissioner Talks 'Zero Tolerance,' Family Separations And How to Discourage Immigration National immigration policy has shifted significantly in recent weeks, as the Trump administration implemented a controversial “zero tolerance” policy of criminally charging and detaining more migrants who cross the border illegally, separating parents from children. So many migrants are being detained, the federal government announced plans to house children at military bases and adults at federal prisons, the largest in Victorville, Calif. At the same time, the number of migrants caught crossing the southern border has remained steady for the last three months. We sat down to discuss the news with U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan during his visit to agents in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the epicenter of migration in recent years. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Why did you come to Rio Grande Valley this month and last, and what have you learned from your visits? It's our busiest sector border-wide for illegal crossings between ports of entry for the Border Patrol. It’s the sector with the highest amount of narcotics being smuggled between ports of entry. And it's one of our most critical locations from Laredo to Brownsville, with the eight ports of entry, in terms of trade and travel flowing through our ports. So, you know, 10% of my workforce is in between Laredo and Brownsville and it's an important place to visit. And again it's our highest-tempo operation. So I need to stay very much in tune with what the challenges are our men and women are facing, understand them, understand what resources they need, how policy decisions are affecting them, to make sure that I'm on top of it. Can you say anything about how many immigrants were caught crossing the southern border illegally last month? This would include people apprehended entering the country illegally and “inadmissibles” applying for asylum. We've had consistent levels of apprehensions and inadmissible crossing since March. March and April were pretty much level at 50,000, both between apprehensions between ports of entry at that 36,000-37,000 level, and inadmissibles arriving at ports of entry between 12,000 and 13,000. So we remain day to day at those levels, which presents a number of challenges operationally. Has “zero tolerance” had any impact, or is it too early to say? It’s too early to say what the increased ability to apply consequences for crossing the border illegally — what effect that will have on the traffic coming towards us. The smuggling cycle is 25 to 30 days from a family or an individual making a decision in Central America to go to the United States and starting that journey with the smuggling organization. So the zero tolerance efforts have not been in place long enough to really assess how that's affecting the decision-making of folks attempting to enter our country. What about other impacts of zero tolerance? Do you have enough space to hold people in the temporary holding areas? U.S. Border Patrol has managed a consequence-delivery system for a decade or so. They’ve always sought to apply the appropriate consequences for someone entering the country illegally. If they're someone who's committed a crime in the U.S. — who’s coming back a second or third time — you want to make sure that's prosecuted and addressed with a successful repatriation. So we've done significant numbers of prosecutions in the past in some areas of the border with courts and U.S. attorneys that have more capacity. Del Rio sector… has been a strong proponent of Operation Streamline [which quickly processes immigrants in the federal criminal court system]. We have more prosecutions happening routinely. So the notion of increasing consequences, increasing prosecutions for those crossing illegally, is not foreign to us. What [zero tolerance] means: We prosecute more when we don't exempt categories of people crossing illegally from prosecution, that we just have additional processes to take with those individuals that are being set up for prosecutions. There are different forms and systems that we have to use to set up the prosecution for the U.S. attorney's office. That's an additional processing effort. But the intent is for that to dissuade crossing between ports of entry, which is dangerous for the people making those crossings. We have significantly increased rescues in Rio Grande Valley sector this year for people that are in distress. You've seen the tractor-trailer cases, where smuggling organizations are putting people at risk by putting them in situations where they are in the back of a tractor-trailer with 100-degree heat with high humidity. It’s extraordinarily dangerous. They also pay smugglers much more money to cross illegally, which means that it strengthens transnational criminal organizations that are threatening the safety of Mexican citizens to our south and the security of the government of Mexico. Increasing prosecutors will hopefully dissuade that. Do you have the capacity to deal with the number of people being apprehended now? There have been some reports of disease outbreaks. What lessons did U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement learn from the influx of migrants in 2014? We learned a lot of lessons from 2014 and have created different processes, including the Central Processing Center [in McAllen, Texas], to help manage different flows. We have not seen a significant outbreak issue. We have not seen a significant increase in time in custody. It's essentially the same number of people; they're just being handled differently. Some of them spend time in U.S. marshals’ custody instead of going directly to ICE, but then they go to ICE after they are processed. So it's a different set of steps, but it's not a dramatic change in the overall level. How are you handling the family separations? We still have children in the same place where we had unaccompanied children. It's really important for your readers to understand the difference between the concept of family separation and prosecuting adults who cross the border illegally, even if they are bringing in children with them. We do not have a policy of administrative separation. We are not doing that. Families or people that come across as a group, as a family-unit group, are being separated only if the adults are being prosecuted or if there's a determination made by the agent that there's not actually a family relationship, which has happened several hundred times just in the sector this year. We do see the attempt by smugglers and those crossing to try to exploit the loopholes created by court decisions which don't allow for ICE to detain family units through the completion of their immigration process. So they have to release them within 20 days. That means it’s incentivizing people to pretend to be families even if they're not. That’s [happened] 600 times just in Rio Grande Valley sector this fiscal year. We're prosecuting the parents; they're temporarily separated for prosecutors. So they go to the U.S. marshals; they will be prosecuted by the U.S. attorney's office. Then they're detained by ICE while the child is sent to Health and Human Services, in the custody of HHS. So that’s incentivizing people to come fraudulently with kids? That's the catch-and-release loophole due to the interpretation of the Flores [2015 class-action lawsuit] settlement by the 9th Circuit District Court that says that ICE cannot detain families more than 20 days. So instead of being allowed to keep that family together through their immigration process, ICE is forced to release the family. So that's the loophole that incentivizes people to present as a family even if they're not. Is there anything you can say about the U.S. potentially classifying Mexico as a “safe third country” for asylum seekers, which would force them to seek asylum there? I've traveled to a refugee camp in Turkey, the Norway border with Russia, the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala — all to understand migration phenomena. And from those experiences, it's very clear that the best way to manage migration flows and to assist populations that are struggling in their home country is for destination countries and transit countries to be aligned, and for efforts to aid the populations in their country of origin. U.S. policy very clearly, for this administration, is to support Central American security and prosperity. We need to invest in their governance efforts and their economic development and in their security against gangs, smugglers, drug cartels and so forth to help prevent the push factors from existing in those countries and to help support their economic development. But migration flows respond to incentives and success. If they believe that they will be allowed to stay in the destination country, they will try to make it. If they believe that they will be slowed down or turned around by a transit country, that will change the process. All you have to do is look at the Arctic route in Norway. In 2015, in three months,. 5,500 people from 38 countries arrived from Russia. The Norwegians worked with Russia to recognize the Russian asylum system and that shut down overnight — those 5,500 stopped coming. With [German] Chancellor Angela Merkel and [Turkish] President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, they reached an agreement in 2015 on the flow of Syrian nationals through Turkey to Greece and said that they would support refugee camps in Turkey. Those flows stopped overnight from Turkey to Greece. You need to collaborate on regional migration. Mexico has been a leader in the region. They've gathered Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Panama and the U.S. together to talk about ways we can all get better at managing our policies in this area. Continued dialogue would be outstanding — to partner with all countries in the region on migration flows. What about critics who say the U.S. would be shifting the burden of these asylum seekers onto Mexico? The most effective response to deter illegal flows of migration, of migrants, is detaining people through their immigration proceedings and effectively repatriating them. This is what, during the Obama administration, [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary [Jeh] Johnson did when we had a spike in family units in 2014. He detained them in a DHS facility through their immigration process and actually removed them back to Central America. That was highly publicized with the leadership of Guatemala and Honduras. They don't want their youth and energy to leave, so they are welcoming them home. And that created a dramatic deterrent. Crossings of family units dropped off almost immediately from that successful high-profile repatriation. The challenge we have now is that tool of detaining families through their immigration procedure has been taken away by subsequent court decisions. Immigrants who say they are fleeing persecution have long been allowed to approach U.S. officials to apply for asylum. There were some reports about asylum seekers getting turned back on border bridges to Mexico — has there been any policy change? When our ports of entry reach capacity, when their ability to manage all of their missions — counter-narcotics, national security, facilitation of lawful trade — is challenged by the time and the space to process people that are arriving without documents, from time to time we have to manage the queues and address that processing based on that capacity. Does that mean people are turned away, or they're turned away temporarily but they can come back? We're not denying people approaching the U.S. border without documents. We're asking them to come back when we have the capacity to manage them. So there's been no change in terms of migrants with paperwork being allowed to seek asylum at ports of entry? No. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444040204-X8K612WYJ31MKYQ3XK6Z/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.06.10+PM.png justice - They're Sick, Traumatized, Malnourished and Transient — What Child Poverty Looks Like in Los Angeles Many of the children who visit the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center at 58th and Hoover in South Los Angeles are anything but well. The dentists treat children who suffer excruciating pain from swollen gums and rotting teeth. “I just had a 2 1/2-year-old I had to refer for full mouth reconstruction,” said Dr. Shidrokh Mafi, who gets frustrated by parents who don’t follow advice about making sure their children brush, floss and avoid baby bottle syndrome — the decay caused by sugars from juice and soft drinks. The doctors routinely see chronic preventable diseases common in third-world countries, and developmental delays are standard. Dr. David Bolour said he sees children daily who suffer from trauma they’ve experienced in their high-crime neighborhoods or in the places they fled, particularly Central American countries torn by violence. “I had a 6-year-old who witnessed his grandfather’s hands being chopped off right in front of his eyes,” said Bolour, who seemed a bit traumatized himself after three years of working with children haunted and damaged by things that are a routine part of their lives. “I had a 14-year-old yesterday whose mother was deported to Mexico, and he can’t even answer my questions about it. … He has anger toward his mother, actually. About 50% of the 20 patients I see in a day are dealing with something psychological or emotional, and it’s affecting their health.” Bolour said common aches and pains in children can have different causes than he was fully aware of before he began working in South L.A. “I’m seeing severe headaches, chest pain, abdominal pain, leg pains, dizziness — things that in my training were not addressed in a psychological way or thought to have a psychological root,” Bolour said . “But I’m seeing them so commonly here, and there’s a clear link.” California, home to the world’s fifth-largest economy, has the dubious paradoxical distinction of unmatched wealth and nation-leading poverty rates. In one of the most recent studies, the California Budget & Policy Center reported that more than 20% of the state’s children live in families who can’t afford basic necessities, thanks in part to the state’s housing crisis and high cost of living. Such reports are laden with sobering statistical analysis and valiant calls for legislative action to supplement existing support. But they usually lack the most important part of the story. Children. We all know there’s a divide, particularly in a state like California, where unimaginable abundance lives not far from economic despair. But if you live in poverty as a California child, what do you eat in a day, what do you wear, what are your housing conditions, the crime rates in your neighborhood, the quality of your schools? What are your hopes, and what are your fears? You can find some of those answers with a visit to the doctor’s office. St. John’s, a nonprofit, has 15 medical centers and treats about 100,000 low-income residents in South Los Angeles and Compton. A big part of the mission is to provide health and nutrition education and advocacy for clients, but the deficits in people’s lives can be staggering and the challenges can seem insurmountable. “What we’re seeing is huge amounts of people being displaced, more and more food insecurity, housing insecurity, people moving, families doubling up, and all kinds of slum housing conditions that cause people to be sick,” said St. John’s CEO Jim Mangia. “We pull cockroaches out of kids’ ears every week,” he said. Jessica, 26, takes a prenatal class at the main St. John’s clinic. A few minutes after I began asking about her living conditions, she dropped her head and began weeping. Her sobs were muffled, maybe to keep her 3-year-old son from seeing his mother in such distress. He sat on the floor, playing with a game on his mother’s phone. They had their own home in Guatemala, said Jessica, who asked that her last name not be used. She was an assistant to the head of a bank, and her husband was a barber. They lived a good life, her son was cared for by his grandmother when she was at work and she’s expecting a second child in November. But extortion and violence are commonplace in her country, she said. Her husband was given an ultimatum: Pay a protection tax to a local syndicate, or his family would be killed. He went to the police, who were no help. So he shut down his business, the family cleaned out its savings, got tourist visas and flew to Los Angeles two months ago. Distant relatives took them in, but the arrangement is temporary. Jessica, her husband and son live in one small room of a house shared with four other people. Her husband finds construction jobs some days and contributes to the household food budget, and her son gets enough to eat, she said. But Jessica often goes hungry, even though her baby is due this fall and nutrition is key at this point. She said she doesn’t want to impose any more than she already does on a family who is allowing them to stay rent-free for now, but not forever. “Sometimes I’m embarrassed to get more food,” she said. Jessica thought she’d be able to file for political asylum because of threats against her family in Guatemala, but an attorney told her that might not be possible, especially in the current political climate, in which parents and children fleeing their countries are being separated. So she wonders what will come of them when their tourist visas run out, her hosts ask her to move and she can’t go back home but might not be allowed to stay in the U.S. “I don’t know what will happen,” Jessica said, but she feels safer here than she did in Guatemala. “At least I know I’m not going to be left a widow.” Ronda Davis, who brought her four kids to the clinic for checkups, said she has lived in her car and in shelters. She said the family has dressed in parking lots, and she has washed the children with baby wipes when no bath was available. She said they often were cold at night. Davis said she regrets starting a family when she was so young and repeating the cycle that began when she and her mother were homeless and her father died of an overdose. “But they’re here,” she said of her kids, “and I’m going to do the best I can.” The eldest has been acting out in school and is slightly overweight. The youngest child has delayed speech. The 3-year-old, badly asthmatic, sat glumly on an exam table with a mask over her face and steam pouring out of it. “That sounds much better now,” Dr. Patricia Campbell said after applying a stethoscope and listening to the girl’s breathing. Campbell said asthma is caused by dust, mold, carpets, smoke, proximity to highways and vehicle exhaust — all the things children are exposed to daily in low-income communities. “Obesity, chronic care and developmental issues are the three main things we see. And lots of speech development issues,” Campbell said. Obesity is not necessarily about eating too much, but about eating the wrong foods. Mangia, the CEO, said the clinics see cases of “blood sugar levels through the roof” when a patient runs out of money and may eat nothing but tortillas for days. For too many children, diets are high in processed food. Salt, sugar and fat outlets dominate the fast-food landscape in South Los Angeles, where pork rinds are a little easier to find than kale chips. “Healthy food can be expensive,” said Campbell, who talked about Westside friends as if they lived in a different universe, flush with organic diets, books and daily exposure to healthy, rather than harmful, experiences. She said she sees a disproportionate amount of teenage diabetes at the clinic and thinks developmental disabilities are tied to a lack of intellectual stimulation, in part because so many parents are busy just trying to survive. Campbell said she’s raising money to buy books for her patients. Just down the hall, Bolour examined a young boy who had been diagnosed with autism a year earlier but was showing some improvement. Bolour said it can be difficult to distinguish between autism and the developmental disabilities associated with poverty. The boy’s mother said the family lives in a backyard cottage and their only income is from her husband’s job at Panda Express. “We try our best,” said the mother, “but fruits and vegetables are high right now.” Bolour, who grew up on the Westside, said it’s impossible to not get attached to the families he sees, and to wonder, at the same time, how much longer he can do a job that’s as emotionally draining as it is rewarding. “Every time I drive here, I feel like I’m coming to a different country,” the doctor said. “A friend of mine had a baby and asked me if 6 months old was too early to put the baby in one of those running strollers. I never got that question in my three years in South L.A.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444133298-9YYB7CVINSJHBML1C1TY/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.08.36+PM.png justice - Why the Legal Strategy Behind Masterpiece Cakeshop Gets Art Backwards—and Why It Should Make People Nervous Commenting on Supreme Court decisions is probably above the pay grade of a lowly art critic. Still, there’s an important point to be made about Monday’s much-debated decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The key conflict in the case of the Christian baker who refused to make a cake to celebrate the wedding of Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins may be gay rights vs. religious freedom—but at its heart it also represents social conservatives pressing a new and unexpected union of art and politics. What is important to grasp (and what some of the legal commentary leaves unsaid) is this: The issue was not whether businesses, in general, may deny service to same-sex couples because of religious conviction. The issue was whether artists, specifically, may deny service to same-sex couples because of religious conviction. In effect, the baker and his lawyers have sought to draw upon the exceptional quality of artistic labor in order to carve out an exception to the anti-discrimination laws that American business owners must otherwise observe. “I serve everybody,” Jack Phillips, the baker, emphasized on Good Morning America on Tuesday. “I just don’t create cakes for every occasion that people ask me to create.” Asked if their legal campaign amounted to an attempt to legitimate anti-gay discrimination, Phillips’s lawyer Kristen Waggoner—of the Christian advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom—was clear: “Absolutely not, the court made very clear, as we made clear in our argument before the court, that Jack loves and serves anyone who walks into his store. But he doesn’t express all messages.” In essence, they are trying to carve up the cake of discrimination. They say that while Phillips may have to serve everyone equally in routine business, there are parts of his business that are not routine. Those are the parts that bring into play his creativity and expression, which therefore touch on his inner life—the unique artistic aspects of his work. Thus, Waggoner went on to stress: “He’s an expert baker, so when you go into his cake shop, he sketches, he sculpts, he hand-paints these custom cakes that are one-of-a-kind cakes, and that is what the court dealt with yesterday.” An amicus brief put together by the Center for Religious Expression puts the comparison of cake-baking to art in even more flowery terms. Signed by 479 “creative professionals”—including the president of the company that produced The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; the actor who played Jesus in film The Gospel of Matthew; and Sharon Halverson, a piano teacher—it stated: Jack Phillips is a creative professional. Wedding cakes are his works of art. In lieu of watercolors or pastels, Phillips uses fondant icing or frosting. He does not wield brushes, but icing bags and various tips, in carrying out the designs. The cake itself acts as his canvas and conveys his message. And Phillips’ shop, Masterpiece Cakeshop, is the gallery where his art pieces are displayed. Since he did not, in fact, ask Craig and Mullins what message they wanted on their cake, denying them service based on the fact that any cake would of necessity be a pro-gay statement, the whole thing becomes about symbolism in the abstract. Indeed, arguments around the Masterpiece Cakeshop case have invoked the oeuvres of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock as evidence that purely abstract form can be “expressive” of deep personal and social ideas. This, clearly, leads to some serious problems of the slippery-slope type. Here’s the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin describing arguments when Masterpiece was argued last December: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg [asked] if a person who designs wedding invitations is also an artist, who could refuse to do business with gay customers. [Kristin] Waggoner hedged, and Kagan jumped in. What about the jeweler who designs the rings? “It would depend on the context,” the lawyer responded. But Kagan was just warming up. What about the hair stylist? An artist? “Absolutely not,” Waggoner said. “There’s no expression or protected speech in that kind of context.” Kagan asked, “The makeup artist?” Not an artist, Waggoner said. “It’s called an artist,” Kagan shot back. “It’s the makeup artist.” The courtroom audience, which is usually sedate, roared with laughter. Kagan wasn’t done. What about the chef who cooked the wedding dinner? Not an artist, Waggoner said. “Whoa!” Kagan replied. “The baker is engaged in speech, but the chef is not engaged in speech?” Justice Breyer would go on to spell out the implications of the line of questioning. “The reason we’re asking these questions,” he said to Waggoner, “is because obviously we want some kind of distinction that will not undermine every civil-rights law, from the year one… including everybody who has been discriminated against in very basic things of life, food, design of furniture, homes, and buildings.” So it is that the question of how you draw a line around something called “art” becomes a burning political issue of our day. It is important to realize how we arrived at this juncture. The Alliance Defending Freedom was founded in the early ‘90s by a consortium of hard-right religious conservatives as a counterweight to the American Civil Liberties Union, with the intent of finding ways to press social conservative values through the law. The Alliance’s rhetoric has been extreme enough that at one time it was branded a hate group. Its longtime director, Alan Sears, penned a charming little tome in 2003 titled The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today. According to an article in the New York Times last year, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case is emblematic of the Alliance’s new, deliberately less openly homophobic public relations strategy—an attempt to sweeten their message, so to speak. As an ACLU lawyer explained, “[T]hey are no longer leading with the messages they used to, which are ‘gay people are pedophiles and we need to keep them away from our kids.’” To this end, the ADF has been actively cultivating a network of Christian small business owners—in particular creatives like graphic designers, videographers, and florists—who are open to the argument that anti-discrimination laws force them to violate their values by forcing them to accept creative work from LGBT+ clients. The ADF has offered them media training and slick PR campaigns, and sued cities preemptively on their behalf as fast as it can get them to sign on. The attempt to use artistic freedom to undermine the scope of gay rights in the wake of the legalization of gay marriage in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case may be compared to another right-wing attempt to roll back the clock: the very successful, decades-long strategy to undermine abortion rights after Roe v. Wade. By finding enough legal loopholes and pressing relentlessly to expand them, intransigent social conservatives have rendered the “right to choose” effectively inoperable in many places by eliminating any meaningful choice—all without having to repeal Roe. Given the ADF’s history, goals, and general methods, it may be that the definitional slipperiness around “creative labor” noted by Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Ginzburg is exactly the point, despite reassurances to the contrary in court and to the media. Once you establish an exception for discrimination that involves “expression,” you potentially open up a large class of exceptions indeed. In The Managed Heart, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the now-popular term “emotional labor,” noting that a substantial and growing proportion of jobs in our economy include some “emotional” or “expressive” or “creative” components. (The classic example is a flight attendant, for whom some portion of work is dedicated to keeping things pleasant for passengers.) ADF’s description of Phillips (and its other “creative professionals”) is heavy on rhetoric about how craft overlaps with deeply held internal beliefs. A small irony is that, to the extent that Masterpiece Cakeshop is indeed similar to “the gallery where [Phillips’s] art pieces are displayed,” it is the cakes that he says he actually is willing to sell to gay clients—cakes produced, presumably, according to his own designs, which later find a buyer—that are most analogous to artworks in a gallery. Generally, you go to an art gallery to get something that has been produced with an independent vision, not to commission something new. It is the value placed on this independent vision that gives us the myth of the “autonomy” of art. On the other hand, the kind of custom cake-making that Phillips refuses to do for a same-sex wedding resembles perfectly ordinary design work. As a category of labor, design is far, far more common than art (despite a consistent effort by “creative economy” pundits to blur the two together). Commissioned labor, whether or not it involves goods that are “hand-painted” or “one-of-a-kind,” generally involves using one’s skills within parameters set by a client. I cannot pretend to be clever enough to resolve the legal issues here. I mean, hell—even the Supreme Court wasn’t able to. Many observers have interpreted the decision as dodging the central conflict, instead reversing the Colorado Court of Appeals decision on the technical grounds that it had not been impartial. “The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the decision. What I can say is that long-term, these matters are won in the court of public opinion as well as in the court of law, with the frame of debate changing as the scope of what is thinkable shifts. So one should note, since the battle goes on, how the terms of the struggle are shifting. It is true, of course, that a large and growing share of the rising generation identifies as LGBT+—one in five—and a much, much larger percentage is sympathetic to gay rights or identifies as an ally. If you were betting on businesses to succeed over the long run, you would still not bet on the ones that proudly flew the flag of anti-gay marriage animus. But pressing the association between religious liberty and artistic liberty is simultaneously a legal strategy to advance a cause, a political strategy to galvanize the conservative movement, and a PR strategy to turn the tide of public support. Rhetorically, it goads its opponents to choose between sounding as if they support creative autonomy—an incredibly cherished, if highly mythologized, value in our hyper-alienated society—and equal rights. At one time, the maxim that “everyone is an artist” was considered a lefty call-to-arms. Associated with German artist Joseph Beuys, it meant that everyone should think of themselves as creatively empowered, no matter what they did; to cast off alienation and infuse their work and world with personal meaning. It is amusing, perhaps, to see social conservatives—normally perhaps the last you’d associate with a broad and plural notion of what art should be—now echo that rhetoric as a means to an end. But it is also alarming. It represents a new phase in our renewed culture wars. And it is one that people need to take the measure of, because unfortunately, all signs indicate that this particular cake is just an appetizer of what is to come. Learn more at Artnews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444242949-DWFV1G8MSSKPQHAJ5CTB/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.10.26+PM.png justice - Feds Plan Mass Prosecution of Illegal Border-Crossing Cases in San Diego, Attorneys Say U.S. border authorities, in a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, are planning to introduce a fast-track prosecution program to criminally charge more people who cross the border into California illegally, according to attorneys in San Diego. Under the program, called Operation Streamline, migrants will be moved through the criminal justice system in group hearings, with cases handled in a matter of hours, from arraignment to sentencing. Mass prosecutions of up to 100 migrants per day occur in federal districts in Arizona and Texas but would mark a major shift for California’s southern district, based in San Diego, which hasn’t seen expedited judicial proceedings since the border was overrun with illegal immigration decades ago. Most people who cross illegally into California are not criminally prosecuted, but the numbers would increase substantially under Streamline. The plans were recently announced to members of the Criminal Case Management Committee, a group of attorneys, judges and law enforcement officials convened by the district’s chief judge, Barry Moskowitz, to address surging caseloads in the district. The plans have yet to be finalized, but prosecutors told the committee that they want to charge anywhere from 35 to 100 people per day, including first-time crossers, according to Jeremy Warren, a longtime criminal defense attorney who attended a meeting of the committee Wednesday. “They want anybody arrested crossing the border to be prosecuted with illegal entry,” Warren said, adding that discussions are still underway on how the court will accommodate the additional cases. Prosecutors want the program to start in one month, he said. Federal and court officials, including from the departments of Homeland Security and Justice, declined interview requests. Kelly Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego, said prosecutors are working with the courts to manage increasing immigration caseloads “in a manner that respects the constitutional rights of defendants.” The U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego arrests, on average, about 120 migrants per day along the 60-mile stretch it patrols. Cases are rising sharply following the announcement of a zero tolerance policy in April by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. U.S. authorities say border prosecutions are an effective deterrent, and have made it a cornerstone of President Trump’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration. Streamline is a U.S. Border Patrol program that requires coordination with U.S. attorneys and federal court judges to set prosecution goals. It has long generated controversy and protests, with critics calling it “assembly-line justice” that undermines basic rights of criminal defendants. To deal with rising caseloads, judges in the district at times keep courtrooms open late, immigration agents assist with security, and defendants are shuttled into court from detention centers as far away as Arizona. In a rare step, Moskowitz formed the criminal case management committee last month, including prosecutors, judges, and criminal defense attorneys. “The increase has and will cause strains, issues and problems for the court and its personnel,” Moskowitz said in his order creating the committee. The border patrol introduced Streamline in Texas in 2005 as a way of penalizing migrants who would otherwise be deported without being charged. Implementation of the program varies from district to district, depending on resources and enforcement priorities, but the program generally aims to increase prosecutions by expediting the judicial process. Within a day of their arrest, migrants appear in courtrooms, where prosecutors offer them misdemeanor plea agreement deals. The maximum sentence for the crime of “improper” entry into the country is six months, but most defendants plead guilty and are deported after a few days or weeks in jail. The southern district of California is one of the nation’s busiest, handling significant numbers of healthcare and white-collar fraud cases as well as major gang and drug cartel cases. The district, unlike those others with Streamline programs, has had relatively low illegal border crossing activity for years. Immigration prosecutions were focused on more-serious offenders, including human smugglers and repeat crossers with criminal records. Defense attorneys have long criticized Streamline, saying it sacrifices constitutional due-process protections for speed. With several court appearances combined in one, attorneys have limited time to confer with clients that can be complex, they say. “We’ll defend the cases that are brought, but we don’t want to be in position where we’re processing people like parts in a factory.… People who have been separated from their children are not in a position to make a decision in half an hour,” said Warren. Charles LaBella, a former senior federal prosecutor in the district, called Streamline “turnstile justice” that is not what the federal courts were meant to do. “It takes the emphasis off serious criminal aliens and eyes off white-collar criminals, Medicare fraud, bank fraud … to use resources to prosecute misdemeanors against people who are coming to pick fruit or find menial work to send money back home,” he said. But supporters say the program provides a strong message that the law will now be strictly enforced all along the border — a scenario that will deter many people from trying to cross again and be charged with a felony. “Most of these folks are not people who want to spend time in jail with a rapist or a drug dealer,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration.“They are regular folks, dishwashers, landscapers … for the most part they are not involved in that kind of criminality. But the crime they are committing is sneaking across the border, and the message needs to be sent that this is not something you will be able to get away with.” Border districts are already showing signs of strain as the zero tolerance policy takes hold. In south Texas, up to 40 shackled defendants at a time appear in courtrooms to plead guilty. In southern Arizona, Chief Judge Raner Collins said the district can’t raise the current limit of 75 defendants per day without getting more resources. Activists in the past have picketed courthouses and attempted to stop migrant-filled buses from reaching the federal building in Tucson. Judge Robert Brack, who is believed to have handled more Streamline cases than any other judge in the country, recently told The Times that has decided to step down as a full-time judge in his New Mexico district. “I have presided over a process that destroys families for a long time, and I am weary of it,” Brack said. “And I think we as a country are better than this.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444324584-WW5GWS4TSHKGC2R5Z9HF/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.11.52+PM.png justice - Major Paint Companies Lobby California Lawmakers to Overturn a Court Ruling Forcing Them to Clean Up Lead in Homes With a key deadline a month away, two national paint companies are turning up the pressure on California lawmakers to absolve them of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in legal penalties from lead paint hazards. The companies, Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra, have hired five lobbying firms, sponsored a website, purchased advertisements and spent at least $2.8 million on a political campaign. At issue is a state court ruling finding that the companies promoted the use of lead paint in homes even after they knew the material could harm children, and making them financially responsible for cleaning it up. Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra are behind a proposed November ballot initiative that would overturn the court decision, eliminate their financial penalty and instead authorize a $2-billion taxpayer-funded bond to fund the cleanup of lead paint and other health hazards in homes and schools. Instead of taking the initiative to voters, the companies would prefer to strike a deal with lawmakers to relieve some of their burden. Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra face a June 28 deadline to withdraw the measure, which is expected to have collected enough valid signatures to get the secretary of state's blessing for placement on the statewide ballot. "I think it's fair to say that there's interest," Anthony Dias, a Sherwin-Williams attorney, said of conversations the companies have had with lawmakers, though he declined to name any of the legislators. "The Legislature understands that they are better equipped to deal with an issue than the courts are." There are no pending bills that would address the companies' concerns. Publicly, lawmakers are reacting to the companies' push with fury. A half-dozen legislators have written bills that would further penalize the paint companies, including one that would add a new $2 fee on all paint sold in California — by any paint company — that would go into effect if the November initiative passes. Lawmakers took turns pillorying the companies at a public hearing last week on the proposed initiative. "I've never heard such deceptive testimony in my life," Assemblyman Bill Quirk (D-Hayward) said. "It takes a lot to get me angry. You have gotten me angry." Striking some compromise would spare the paint companies potentially tens of millions in campaigning to pass a statewide ballot measure. A failed 2008 effort by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens to provide billions in state subsidies for consumers to purchase natural gas vehicles fueled by companies Pickens owned cost $23 million. The dispute over who's responsible for cleaning up lead paint, which became illegal to use in homes in 1978, dates back 18 years. Ten cities and counties, including Los Angeles, sued Sherwin-Williams, ConAgra and NL Industries, arguing that lead paint in homes was a public nuisance and that the three companies should have to pay to get rid of it. In November, a state appeals court largely upheld a lower-court ruling that put the companies on the hook for cleaning up paint in homes built before 1951, an amount likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars. Earlier this month, the plaintiffs settled with NL Industries for $60 million and as part of the deal that company withdrew its support for the proposed initiative. Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra are pursuing an appeal of the case at the U.S. Supreme Court while also ramping up efforts in the Legislature. They argue that the court ruling, specifically the declaration that lead paint in homes is a public nuisance, harms not only them but also homeowners. The court required the companies to clean up pre-1951 homes, but provided no funding to get rid of lead paint in those built afterward. This finding, Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra contend, makes owners of homes built after 1951 responsible for the lead cleanup. That's an assessment shared by the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce among other business groups. The companies started a website warning that the court ruling "red tags" millions of California properties. Lawmakers have said they've received thousands of emails from their constituents in response. The companies and their supporters went further in the hearing last week, arguing that the implications of the court decision for homeowners were akin to the racist government-backed mortgage lending policies in the 1930s known as redlining and the recent lead crisis in Flint, Mich. The cities and counties that sued Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra vigorously disagree with the companies' legal argument, and independent observers share that stance. Sean Hecht, a UCLA School of Law professor who has followed the litigation, said the court decision doesn't increase homeowners' liability. The companies "want to scare people into thinking this is going to be this dramatic problem for the real estate community and maybe tenants, and it's hard for me to see how the ruling does what they say at all," Hecht said. Instead, cities and counties argue, the paint companies are trying to use the threat of a ballot measure and their current lobbying efforts to erase their current legal problems and avoid future ones. The existing court ruling applies only to the 10 local governments that sued and, unless the laws change or the initiative is successful, others in California could do the same thing. "Our lawsuit sets forth a blueprint by which city attorneys, county counsels, other public prosecutors for other jurisdictions throughout this state can file similar public nuisance lawsuits and obtain similar funds," Jenny Lam, a deputy county counsel in Santa Clara, told legislators at last week's hearing. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444394504-6GU6AYDJUPDKNIIMODJ6/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.12.59+PM.png justice - The U.S. Lost Track of 1,475 Immigrant Children Last Year. Here’s Why People Are Outraged Now. Reports of federal authorities losing track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children in their custody. Scathing criticism over children being taken from their migrant parents at the border. Proposed rallies. In the recent days, outrage about treatment of children taken into U.S. custody at the Southwest border has reached a fever pitch, exploding in a barrage of tweets and calls to action with the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren and #MissingChildren. How accurate are certain claims circulating online? Are these children really missing? What do those children have to do with the Trump administration’s new immigration enforcement policies? How many families are being separated? And why is there so much outrage about it now? We take a look at how the story has snowballed. Did the United States really lose track of 1,475 immigrant kids? In short, yes. During a Senate committee hearing late last month, Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services, testified that the federal agency had lost track of 1,475 children who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on their own (that is, unaccompanied by adults) and subsequently were placed with adult sponsors in the United States. As the Associated Press reported, the number was based on a survey of more than 7,000 children: From October to December 2017, HHS called 7,635 children the agency had placed with sponsors, and found 6,075 of the children were still living with their sponsors, 28 had run away, five had been deported and 52 were living with someone else. The rest were missing, said Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at HHS. Health and Human Services officials have argued it is not the department’s legal responsibility to find those children after they are released from the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which falls under HHS‘s Administration for Children and Families. And some have pointed out that adult sponsors are sometimes relatives who already were living in the United States and who intentionally may not be responding to contact attempts by HHS. However, neither of those arguments has done much to quell outrage surrounding the testimony by Wagner, a principal deputy at HHS who oversees the Administration for Children and Families. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), chairman of the Senate subcommittee, has repeatedly argued that it was a matter of humanity, not simply legal responsibility, citing a case in which federal officials had turned over eight immigrant children to human traffickers. “These kids, regardless of their immigration status, deserve to be treated properly, not abused or trafficked,” Portman said in the subcommittee. “This is all about accountability.” Portman reiterated his stance in an April 24 “Frontline” special called “Trafficked in America,” which documented the plight of the eight children who were forced to work on an egg farm in Ohio. “We’ve got these kids. They’re here. They’re living on our soil,” he told the PBS program. “And for us to just, you know, assume someone else is going to take care of them and throw them to the wolves, which is what HHS was doing, is flat-out wrong. I don’t care what you think about immigration policy, it’s wrong.” According to HHS, approximately 85 percent of sponsors who ultimately acquire custody of unaccompanied minors are parents or close family members. Were these 1,475 children separated from their parents at the border? No. The children unaccounted for in last year’s HHS survey all arrived at the Southwest border alone. The government refers to these children as “unaccompanied alien children,” or UACs. Are children being taken from their parents after they cross the border into the United States? Yes. On May 7, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice Department would begin prosecuting every person who crossed the Southwest border illegally — or at least attempt to prosecute “100 percent” — even if some of them could or should be treated as asylum seekers, as the American Civil Liberties Union has argued. Although Sessions said he understood that some people were fleeing violence or other dangerous situations, he has also stated that the United States “cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation.” “If you cross the border unlawfully … then we will prosecute you,” he said in a pair of speeches in Scottsdale, Ariz., and San Diego. “If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then we’ll prosecute you. … If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.” The consequence of this new “100 percent” policy is that children will be separated from their parents as the adults are charged with a crime, even if the adults are seeking asylum and present themselves at official ports of entry. Under federal rules, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transfers unaccompanied minors, and now children of detained adults, to Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement within 48 hours of their crossing the border, according to the AP. Are child-parent separations being used as a tool to deter border crossings? That would appear to be the case. As The Washington Post’s Sari Horwitz and Maria Sacchetti reported, internal discussions about separating families at the border suggested that it was to dissuade people from attempting to cross the border: Senior immigration and border officials called for the increased prosecutions [in April] in a confidential memo to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. They said filing criminal charges against migrants, including parents traveling with children, would be the “most effective” way to tamp down on illegal border crossings. The “zero-tolerance” measure announced Monday could split up thousands of families because children are not allowed in criminal jails. Until now, most families apprehended crossing the border illegally have been released to await civil deportation hearings. In a May 11 interview with NPR’s John Burnett, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly referred to family separation as something that would be a “tough deterrent” to migrant parents who may be thinking of bringing their children to the border. “Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people,” Kelly told Burnett. “But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from — fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. … They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. But a big name of the game is deterrence.” What are some of the issues that these children face during separation? For months, stories have abounded of families separated by immigration authorities at the border: Three children were separated from their mother as they fled a gang in El Salvador; a 7-year-old was taken from her Congolese mother who was seeking asylum; and so on, in reportedly hundreds of cases. In almost every case, the families have described heart-wrenching goodbyes and agonizing uncertainty about whether they would be reunited. According to the Florence Project, an Arizona nonprofit organization that provides legal and social services to detained immigrants, there have been more than 200 cases of parents being separated from their children since the beginning of the year in the state alone. “The type of devastation that we’re talking about … where a separated mother doesn’t know where her child is for four days, that’s entirely common right now in this administration,” Laura St. John, the group’s legal director, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “Children and parents who are separated sometimes don’t have any way to communicate with each other for days, for weeks — I’ve seen months where a parent had no idea where their child was after the U.S. government took their child away.” St. John noted her group also was seeing increasingly younger children being taken into custody by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, as opposed to the migrant teenagers who had previously crossed the border themselves. “Just last week we saw a 53-week-old infant in court without a parent,” St. John told Hayes. “What we’re seeing now is that, because the government is separating the children from the parents, the government is actually rendering these children as unaccompanied minors and bringing them to the shelters.” On the same program, Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project, told Hayes that the number of separations his group has seen was “unprecedented.” “This is the worst thing I’ve seen in 25-plus years of doing this civil rights work,” Gelernt said. “I am talking to these mothers and they are describing their kids screaming, ‘Mommy, Mommy, don’t let them take me away!’ … The medical evidence is overwhelming that we may be doing permanent trauma to these kids, and yet the government is finding every way they can to try and justify it.” The Office of Refugee Resettlement reported that children spent an average of 34 days in their custody during the 2015 fiscal year. What has the government’s response been? In his May 11 NPR interview, the White House chief of staff danced around a question about whether it was “cruel and heartless” for U.S. border officials to take an immigrant child away from his or her mother. “I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Kelly told Burnett. “The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.” Many members of Congress have expressed concern about family separations. In February, 71 Democratic lawmakers signed a letter to Nielsen stating that they were “deeply disturbed” by the increasing practice, which “suggests a lack of understanding about the violence many families are fleeing in their home countries.” On May 16, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) questioned Nielsen about the “immoral” policy and asked whether she had been directed to separate families to deter future border crossing attempts. Nielsen denied that the new policy was an act of deterrence. “What purpose have you been given for separating parents from their children?” Harris asked. “So my decision has been that anyone who breaks the law will be prosecuted,” Nielsen said. “If you’re a parent or you’re a single person or you happen to have a family, if you cross between the ports of entry, we will refer you for prosecution. You’ve broken U.S. law.” Nielsen also tried to recast questions that characterized children being removed from their parents’ custody as family separations. When Harris demanded to know whether or how Border Patrol agents were trained to take children from their parents, Nielsen interrupted. “No, what we’ll be doing is prosecuting parents who have broken the law, just as we do every day in the United States of America,” she said. “I can appreciate that,” Harris continued, “but if that parent has a 4-year-old child, what do you plan on doing with that child?” “The child, under law, goes to HHS for care and custody,” Nielsen said. “They will be separated from their parents,” Harris said, slowly. “My question then is, when you are separating children from their parents, do you have a protocol in place about how that should be done and are you training the people who will actually remove a child from their parent on how to do that in the least traumatic way? I would hope you do train on how to do that.” Nielsen said she would provide that information to Harris later. Although the hearing took place two weeks ago, Harris tweeted footage from it on Saturday afternoon, calling Nielsen’s responses “beyond insufficient.” How has HHS responded? On Monday night, HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan said in a statement that “the assertion that unaccompanied alien children (UAC) are ‘lost’ is completely false. This is a classic example of the adage ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’” Hargan’s statement said that ORR “began voluntarily making calls in 2016 as a 30-day follow-up on the release of UAC to make sure that UAC and their sponsors did not require additional services. This additional step, which is not required and was not done previously, is now being used to confuse and spread misinformation. “These children are not ‘lost’; their sponsors — who are usually parents or family members and in all cases have been vetted for criminality and ability to provide for them — simply did not respond or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made. While there are many possible reasons for this, in many cases sponsors cannot be reached because they themselves are illegal aliens and do not want to be reached by federal authorities. “This is the core of this issue: In many cases, HHS has been put in the position of placing illegal aliens with the individuals who helped arrange for them to enter the country illegally. This makes the immediate crisis worse and creates a perverse incentive for further violation of federal immigration law.” He added that “the tracking of UAC after release is just one of the recent headlines that focus on the symptoms of our broken immigration system while ignoring its fundamental flaws. President Trump’s administration has been calling on Congress to put an end to dangerous loopholes in U.S. immigration laws like the practice of ‘catch and release,’ in which federal authorities release illegal immigrants to await hearings for which few show up. In the worst cases, these loopholes are being exploited by human traffickers and violent gangs like MS-13. Until these laws are fixed, the American taxpayer is paying the bill for costly programs that aggravate the problem and put children in dangerous situations.” Why are we hearing about these issues now? As mentioned, reports of the 1,475 children HHS could not account for first emerged in April, and proposals to crack down on migrant families crossing the border were discussed as early as last year. Nevertheless, the story snowballed this past week, with thousands expressing outrage online about both family separations or the HHS survey from last year. Why? As with other topics that mushroom inexplicably on social media, it’s unclear. The issues may have drawn renewed attention in part because of a widely shared column in USA Today by Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini. Friday also happened to be International Missing Children’s Day, producing what some called an ill-timed tweet from the recruiting arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Although ICE is not the agency that is responsible for migrant children, it has since President Trump took office cracked down on deporting undocumented immigrants who previously would not have been a priority. As mentioned before, the 1,475 children were not separated from their parents at the border. However, many who have expressed outrage online about family separations have been appending their tweets with the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren or #MissingChildren, intentionally or unintentionally linking the two issues. Some who should have been better informed also conflated the two, implying that federal officials had lost 1,500 immigrant children who had been taken from their parents, when this was not the case. Other officials and celebrities seized on the hashtag to propose protests and spread the story further, sometimes with erroneous information. For example, some mistakenly accused ICE, a different agency, of “losing” 1,500 children. Many began recirculating an Arizona Republic slideshow with photos from 2014 of a federal detention center for child immigrants. However, as Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind pointed out in a long thread about both matters, the fact that HHS has already admitted that it cannot account for nearly 1,500 migrant children previously in its custody does not inspire confidence that the agency could perform better with an expanded scope of responsibilities. “Is this relevant to their newly expanded duties to care for kids separated from parents? You bet it is,” Lind wrote. “But that’s [because] it’s the agency failing at its TRADITIONAL function, and now being asked to perform a new one.” The topic gained traction Saturday morning when Trump tried to blame Democrats for “the horrible law that separates children from parents once they cross the Border” — even though there is no such law, and even though it was a policy supported by his administration. Trump also tried to use the issue to drum up support for his proposed border wall. “He used DACA kids as a bargaining chip, and it didn’t work,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. “So now he’s using vulnerable Central American families for his nativist agenda. It’s shameless.” Tuesday morning, apparently responding to a segment on “Fox and Friends,” the president returned to Twitter to criticize some of the lawmakers and others on the left whose the #WhereAreTheChildren tweets had used archival photos showing unaccompanied minors in federal custody. Learn more at The Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444487168-PU22ALE4MSLTX2L268GA/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.14.36+PM.png justice - ‘I’ll be killed if I go back’: Undocumented Immigrant Refuses to Board Flight at JFK The van pulled up to John F. Kennedy International Airport on a recent Thursday evening. Around it, passengers poured out of taxis and headed toward their gates. Inside the van, Prince Gbohoutou gripped his seat belt in fear. The government was about to put the 26-year-old tattoo artist from Maryland on a flight to his native country in Africa. A month earlier, Gbohoutou, a recently married asylum seeker from the Central African Republic, had gone to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement appointment in Baltimore hoping to get a work permit. Instead, the New Carrollton resident was detained in front of his American wife and told he was being deported. Now, ICE agents opened the van’s door and ordered him out. But Gbohoutou, with shackled hands, said he held fast to the seat. He was afraid to return to the Central African Republic, where he said his mother had been killed. As suitcase-toting bystanders looked on, Gbohoutou said, an ICE agent struck him on the legs with a baton while others tried to yank him out of the van. Eventually, the ICE agents cut the seat belt with a knife — nicking Gbohoutou’s hand — before handcuffing him to a wheelchair and taking him to his flight, he claimed. But the airline refused to take an unwilling passenger, Gbohoutou said, and ICE was forced to return him — at least temporarily — to his cell. Justine W. Whelan, an ICE spokeswoman, said in a statement that “all allegations of physical abuse and mistreatment by ICE officers in this case are patently false.” She said an immigration judge ordered Gbohoutou deported seven years ago, his appeal was denied, and it was the agency’s “duty to execute that final order.” But Gbohoutou’s story, including the dramatic airport scene on May 24, has sparked a new campaign to allow him to remain in the United States, where he came legally as a child and spent much of his life. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has become an advocate for Gbohoutou, saying he is “part of our community” and could be in “imminent danger” if deported. Van Hollen said he has contacted officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, warning them that his removal would be “unjust.” “I’ll be killed if I go back,” Gbohoutou said Saturday in a telephone interview from an ICE detention center in Frederick, Md. “I’m just hoping some people find it in their hearts to [let me stay].” Similar, if less dramatic, encounters have played out with increasing frequency across the country as the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration. Undocumented immigrants without criminal records, like Gbohoutou, who were generally off limits under the Obama administration, are now fair game, officials say. Gbohoutou came to the United States legally in 2006, when he was 14, to join his father, who worked for their country’s ambassador in Washington. His mother stayed behind in the Central African Republic, which is one of the world’s poorest countries and has long been wracked by religious and civil conflict. When the situation there worsened, his father applied for asylum, including his son as a dependent. But the application was rejected. When their appeal was also denied, his father thought it better to remain in the United States illegally than return. “The fact that he was brought here as a kid means he’s really blameless,” said Adam Crandell, Gbohoutou’s immigration attorney, noting that he graduated from High Point High School in Beltsville, Md., and was eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program to protect undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children. Gbohoutou was still in high school when he met the woman who would become his wife. He was on a D.C. bus when on stepped Shaniece. “He was cute, I was cute,” she said. “We exchanged words, and then we exchanged numbers.” For their first date, he took her to her favorite restaurant, TGI Friday’s. For their second, she went to his senior prom. But as they dated, Gbohoutou’s life began to fall apart. Shortly after his family’s asylum application was denied, his mother was kidnapped in the Central African Republic by political rivals, he said. “I guess they wanted my dad to go back,” Gbohoutou said. “They tortured her. And they beat her to death.” His father died a few weeks later — a “physical manifestation of grief,” Crandell said — leaving Gbohoutou to navigate life in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. That life was not without incident. Gbohoutou was arrested in 2011, when he was 19, accused of shoplifting from a mall, Crandell said, but the charges were dropped. His only other criminal charge, for failure to present identification to police during a traffic stop in 2016, was also dropped. In 2014, Gbohoutou was detained by ICE for about six months. Crandell said it was unclear why his client was held, but it might have been connected with the shoplifting charge. Since then, Gbohoutou has been required to check in with ICE periodically. Despite worries over the new administration, his first few check-ins under President Trump went without a hitch. The last one, on Shaniece’s birthday, seemed to be a sign that his hard luck had ended. The couple wed last May and had recently begun the process to get him a green card. This spring they vacationed in Florida. When they returned, there was an envelope from ICE waiting. The agency asked Gbohoutou to come in on April 19 but didn’t say why. The couple hoped it was so he could receive a work permit. “We didn’t have any fear,” Shaniece said. “We thought, what could go wrong?” At the Baltimore office, Gbohoutou’s name was called while Shaniece was in the bathroom. When an ICE agent asked him if he had a relative to take his things, his stomach dropped. When his wife returned, Gbohoutou told her to be strong. “I put my head down and started crying,” she said. When she looked up, he was gone. With the help of the immigrants rights group Sanctuary DMV, Shaniece hired Crandell and began a campaign to free her husband. On May 16, Crandell filed a motion to reopen Gbohoutou’s case. But on Thursday, after missing a call from Gbohoutou, Shaniece rang his detention center only to be told he was being transferred to New York to be deported. Crandell says he thinks his client was spared Thursday only because no ICE agent was scheduled to accompany him to Africa. But he hopes the airport incident has bought him enough time to persuade the Board of Immigration Appeals to reopen Gbohoutou’s case. Crandell said that ICE was within its rights but that sending his client back to the Central African Republic would be “hamfisted and cruel.” Gbohoutou said he hopes to remain in the United States, become an architect and start a family. “I’m not a bad person,” he said, but added that if ICE tries to deport him again, “I’m still not going to get on the plane.” Learn more at The Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444559943-R4YBRCMCSSMM67A74V9W/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.15.46+PM.png justice - Stockton's Young Mayor Has Bold Turnaround Plan: Basic Income And Stipends For Potential Shooters Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs says that for way too long, his city has been known for headlines about bankruptcy, violent crime and the housing collapse. In the future, he wants it to be known as a place willing to test bold solutions. Bold, and a little controversial. Tubbs, a Stockton native and Stanford graduate who is all of 27 years old, wants to give at least $500 a month to a select group of residents. They'll be able to spend it as they wish, for 18 months, in a pilot program to test the impact of what's called guaranteed basic income. If the very sound of that knocked you half off your chair, this next initiative might finish the job. Stockton is about to award stipends of up to $1,000 a month to residents deemed most likely to shoot somebody. This program is called Advance Peace, and it's modeled after a crime reduction program in the Bay Area city of Richmond. The idea is that a small number of people are responsible for a large percentage of violence, and offering them an alternative path — with counseling and case management over an 18-month period, along with a stipend if they stay the course — can be a good investment all around. "Let me be clear, Advance Peace is not a get out of jail free card," Tubbs wrote in explaining the program on Stockton's public safety website. "Participating in this program doesn't erase the past, but it does help these young men learn how to make better choices for their own and our community's collective future." There's a difference between a vision and a hallucination, and time will tell with Tubbs. But I like the young man's mix of rebelliousness, impatience and willingness to take risks. We met last year when I wrote about how Stockton had gone from housing collapse to housing boom. Workers in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco-Oakland area, driven out of the cuckoo housing markets in those communities, have snapped up cheaper properties in Stockton, accepting the bargain of killer commutes. But Stockton still suffers the crushing burdens of poverty, crime and now the rising rents and home prices that come with gentrification. For those who don't have the education or training to work 60 miles away on tech's front lines, Stockton still struggles to develop jobs that pay a living wage, and I paid the mayor another visit last week to talk about his plans for residents whose most pressing problems have not lifted. "We get 50 constituents a week, if not more, calling and emailing us to explain why they would benefit" from a $500 monthly stipend, Tubbs said. "It's heartbreaking that they're asking, but it's also exciting that we can do something for these people." "Exciting" is not the way everyone describes the program. "You've got to be kidding," Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and vice presidential running mate, tweeted last month. But Tubbs responded with a Twitter touche. "Actually modeled after the Alaska Permanent Fund," he wrote. "Are you familiar with it?" The Alaska fund shares the wealth on state oil revenues, awarding residents roughly $2,000 a year. The first thing you need to know about Stockton's stipend plans is that taxpayers aren't footing the bill. Nor will they pay for Tubbs' "Stockton Scholars" program, which will tap a $20-million grant from the California Community Foundation in an effort to triple the number of Stockton students who go to college. "I firmly believe that talent and intelligence are universal, but resources and opportunities are not. Stockton Scholars is born out of that belief," Tubbs said when he introduced the program this year. Tubbs said that when he became mayor last year, he had a habit of sending late-night emails to a crack team of volunteer research assistants. One night he asked them to look into novel ways to attack poverty. "They came back with guaranteed income," said Tubbs, and it jogged a memory for him. In college, he read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community," in which King promoted a guaranteed annual income. So the idea of stipends isn't exactly new — Canada and Finland have tried it; Oakland has a pilot program — nor is it exclusively a liberal pipe dream. In some form, the pitch has supporters and detractors on both the right and the left, although on the right, it's often framed as a substitute for existing safety net programs. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Space X's Elon Musk have both pitched the idea in terms of inevitability, given the growing income gap and the threat of massive job losses because of automation. Tubbs attended a San Francisco conference on those very topics last year and met Natalie Foster of the Economic Security Project, whose ambitious goal is to find ways to lift people out of poverty and to rebuild the middle class. Foster co-chairs the project with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. "One thing we wanted to do was spur our first mayor-led demonstration project in the U.S.," said Foster, who began working on the details with Tubbs and expects Stockton's program to begin early next year. As small as the program will be, it's not going to dramatically affect many Stockton residents, but the goal is to get a sense of whether such an infusion on a broader scale can significantly alter lives and boost the economy. Still to be worked out are details on who will be eligible and how recipients will be selected. Mayor Tubbs said he wants middle-class residents to be eligible, because lots of people making $50,000 to $60,000 a year struggle to get through each month. To those who say there's dignity in work, and that free money might remove the incentive, Tubbs notes that he grew up poor despite the efforts of an overworked mother. A large percentage of Stockton's poorest people have jobs, he said, but no economic security. "Working 12 to 14 hours a day and not being able to pay the bills creates more stress than dignity," he said. Tubbs said what he's heard from residents is that if their number comes up, they won't use the extra $500 a month to buy a new car or television. They'll pay bills. One mother said it would help with inflated food and utility costs when her kids come home from college for the summer. "Or it pays for child care so you can work more," said Tubbs. "Or you could work less and spend more time with the kids, or take care of your sick parents, or pay for your rising rent." Jason Furman, a Harvard professor and former economic advisor to President Obama, is no fan of this idea. He said he'd prefer wage supplements or tax credits over the awarding of money with no strings attached. If the goal is to eventually make guaranteed income a publicly funded program, Furman said, the necessary tax increase would be huge "and unlikely to materialize." And if it did, programs that pay for specific needs might get shredded. Furman also believes the better approach would be to develop a new economy of better-paying jobs and find ways to encourage work, rather than surrender to the threat of automation. Natalie Foster had an answer for that. "You shouldn't live in poverty in the richest country on earth at the richest moment in time," she said. "It's not a question of where the money comes from. It's a question of political will, and there are a number of ways to finance it, from fees on the people making millions shuffling paper on Wall Street to a carbon tax." Well, let's see how it goes in Stockton first. I'm not quite ready to pay a tax to fund this kind of a giveaway, but as long as this is a small demonstration project financed by private and nonprofit sources interested in greater distribution of the wealth, why not? Even under those terms, it's easy to find those in Stockton who can't believe what sounds to them like liberal claptrap, and they've got plenty of reasonable questions. What if people use the money for drugs? Why won't they be required to work or perform a public service? And don't we already have welfare? "I think it's not smart," said insurance agent Evelyn Vega, who wouldn't mind it so much if the free money went to people with legitimate need, rather than being awarded randomly and without requirements. "After Bill Clinton passed the welfare-to-work act, my mom had to go back to school and it eventually motivated her." "Obviously, it's a dumb idea," said deli operator Robin Luna-Gonzalez, who was referring to the Advance Peace initiative. She said she has an autistic son whose care center is closing in a budgetary crunch. "Why are we paying criminals?" she asked. Her husband, James Gonzalez, said he thinks automation will create some jobs as it eliminates others. He might be open to the concept of supplemental pay if it's aimed at education or job training, but not if it's do-whatever-you-want cash, green and easy. "We already give away billions of dollars to people who sit at home on welfare and make no effort to work," he said. Herk Washington, Mayor Tubbs' barber, told me he and his wife do well and don't need an extra $500 a month. But he showed me the bus schedule that has his $2 off haircut coupon for transit riders, and told me when he rides the bus, he talks to a lot of people barely getting by. And supplemental income has been a hot topic in his clip shop. "There was a man sitting in that chair right there, a hard-working man, and he said he could use the help," said Washington, who hadn't known about the man's financial struggles until that day. Washington said he's all for the stipend, and for the Advance Peace program. It'll cost a few dollars, he said, but it might save lives and money. "Nothing is guaranteed," said Washington. "But to do nothing is worse than to do something." Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444627973-N0QUYU9HF8DTZ9CMEP4E/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.16.55+PM.png justice - ‘If We Let Everybody Go, There’d Be Nobody in Prison’ For Mother’s Day last year, Ebony Thomas’s new husband, Anthony, gifted her a car, a white Volkswagen Passat bought secondhand. She had just started a new job, working as a medical assistant at a facility near to their home in Lakewood Heights, in southeast Atlanta. “My husband wanted me to have a car to get around better, especially with the new job,” she told me. One month later, with Anthony out of town for work, Ms. Thomas decided to make a run to the store. Two blocks from home, Ms. Thomas was stopped by a police officer. Her tag light was out and she had yet to purchase appropriate stickers for the car. She also had an outstanding seatbelt ticket from another traffic stop in 2015. “I didn’t really have the money to pay that ticket. Then we moved and I honestly just forgot about it,” she said. Because the ticket went ignored, and Ms. Thomas had failed to appear in court, her license had been suspended. The arresting officer “was going to let me go, after I reasoned with him some,” Ms. Thomas said. “He let me out of the squad car and was just going to tow my car.” Then another officer arrived, and he persuaded the original officer to go through with the arrest. “I remember he said, ‘If we let everybody go, there’d be nobody in prison,’” Ms. Thomas said. She was taken to Atlanta’s Fulton County jail, and she was in jail for three days before a family member found her. Her relatives had been frantic, calling all the local hospitals and police stations. “This is really embarrassing, but I couldn’t remember anybody’s number by heart,” Ms. Thomas said. “I couldn’t call anybody, so I just sat there.” A judge set Ms. Thomas’s bail at $1,500. Bail is paid at 10 percent. Her family couldn’t afford $150, so Ms. Thomas remained in jail for eight days. During that time, her name was picked up by several organizations that had banded together for a Mother’s Day initiative last year that would pay bail for black mothers who couldn’t afford it. The organizations, which include National Bailout and the nonprofit Color of Change, eventually paid for over 100 black mothers around the country to leave jail. (National Bailout says they bail out all varieties of black mothers: “queer, trans, young, elder and immigrant.”) Ms. Thomas was one of them. "Our ultimate goal is to end money bail,” said Clarice McCants, the criminal justice campaign director of Color of Change. But for now, “there are mothers, away from their families, languishing in jail just because they lack the funds to make bail.” In the United States, a bail payment is intended as collateral. It’s meant to ensure that a person charged with a crime will appear in court if they are released before trial. As such, bail payments are not meant to be prohibitively expensive — they are meant to incentivize a person to return to court. The Eighth Amendment, in particular, outlaws “excessive” bail amounts, but there is a national crisis of sky-high bail amounts. As a result, pretrial detention is the norm, rather than a limited exception. In 2016, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, around 70 percent of county jail inmates nationwide had not been convicted of a crime. Ms. Thomas’s bail may not have counted as “excessive,” but for her it was still outside the realm of affordability. Expensive bail, in general, is a far more widespread problem for black women, as they are four times as likely to be imprisoned as white women. Black defendants routinely receive higher bail amounts than white defendants with similar charges. Many things happen while people are held awaiting trial. Families lose income. Children suffer the absence of a parent. The costs of incarceration — whether its fees paid to probation officers or payments made to bail bondsmen — add up, and can be debilitating for families that are already financially vulnerable. A secondary fear, for many, is the involvement of Child Protective Services. Ms. Thomas felt fortunate that her son, Jorden, was seventeen at the time of her arrest, and her family intervened to care for him while she was away. But her inability to afford bail still resulted in a chain of personal disasters. She lost her job because of the extended period of absence. She now has a criminal background, which makes finding work difficult. Her court fines, coupled with a fee she pays to see her probation officer every month, came to $150 — the original amount of bail she could not pay. “It’s absolutely ludicrous,” she said. “I make a way, doing odd jobs and babysitting here and there. But I’m not a criminal, you know. I didn’t hurt anybody, or kill anybody.” Since her release, Ms. Thomas has become a spokeswoman for the organizations that bailed her out. “They use my face in the advertisements,” she said, and laughed. This year, the groups have reunited to bail out more mothers. Color of Change has counted 59 women bailed out by Friday, a number expected to grow. Organizers are planning a similar initiative in June to bail out black fathers for Father’s Day. In the meantime, Ms. Thomas is facing the continuing costs of bail as they come. “I just lean on God, you know?” she said. “I depend on him.” Learn more at The New York Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444696757-ISVV24QUSD53A8XMGYZ0/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.18.02+PM.png justice - The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant The Trump administration’s first year of immigration policy has relied on claims that immigrants bring crime into America. President Trump’s latest target is sanctuary cities. “Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities,” he said last week. “They’re safe havens for just some terrible people.” As of 2017, according to Gallup polls, almost half of Americans agreed that immigrants make crime worse. But is it true that immigration drives crime? Many studies have shown that it does not. Immigrant populations in the United States have been growing fast for decades now. Crime in the same period, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with the national rate of violent crime today well below what it was in 1980. In a large-scale collaboration by four universities, led by Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, researchers compared immigration rates with crime rates for 200 metropolitan areas over the last several decades. The selected areas included huge urban hubs like New York and smaller manufacturing centers less than a hundredth that size, like Muncie, Ind., and were dispersed geographically across the country. According to data from the study, a large majority of the areas have many more immigrants today than they did in 1980 and fewer violent crimes. The Marshall Project extended the study’s data up to 2016, showing that crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board. In 136 metro areas, almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. The number of areas where crime and immigration both increased was much lower — 54 areas, slightly more than a quarter of the total. The 10 places with the largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime in 2016 than in 1980. And yet the argument that immigrants bring crime into America has driven many of the policies enacted or proposed by the administration so far: restrictions to entry, travel and visas; heightened border enforcement; plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. This month, the Justice Department filed alawsuit against California in response to the state’s restrictions on local police to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants charged with crimes. On Tuesday, California’s Orange County signed on in support of that suit. But while the immigrant population in the county has more than doubled since 1980, overall violent crime has decreased by more than 50 percent. There’s a similar pattern in two other places where Mr. Trump has recently feuded with local leaders: Oakland, Calif., and Lawrence, Mass. He described both cities as breeding grounds for drugs and crime brought by immigrants. But Oakland, like Orange County, has had increasing immigration and falling crime. In Lawrence, though murder and robbery rates grew, overall violent crime rates still fell by 10 percent. In general, the study’s data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two, and that the 54 areas in the study where both grew were instances of coincidence, not cause and effect. This was a consistent pattern in each decade from 1980 to 2016, with immigrant populations and crime failing to grow together. Learn more at New York Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444787546-YEPQPP9Y7SBZPJ517GWN/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.19.30+PM.png justice - How Refugees Are Helping Create Blockchain's Brand New World Without legal proof of your existence, you can’t do many things. You can’t vote, and you can’t drive. You can’t start a bank account, or access government services. Good luck getting into a bar. According to the World Bank, more than a billion people have no way to prove their identity. The un-verified include refugees, trafficked children, the homeless, and other people who slip through society without developing many institutional affiliations. The problem feeds on itself: the longer a person goes without associations, the harder it is provide enough of a record to create them. But as bitcoin’s popularity swells, a small group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and social entrepreneurs is trying to put the cryptographic ledger that underpins the novel currency to work in service of the vulnerable. They see promise in using blockchain technology to create an immutable record, one that has the added side effect of making financial transactions cheaper and more efficient. Though best known for underpinning volatile cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain technology has a number of qualities which make it appealing for record-keeping. A distributed ledger doesn’t depend on a central authority to verify its existence, or to facilitate transactions within it, which makes it less vulnerable to tampering. By using applications that are built on the ‘chain, individuals may be able to build up records over time, use those records across borders as a form of identity—essentially creating the trust they need to interact with the world, without depending on a centralized authority, like a government or a bank, to vouch for them. For now, these efforts are small experiments. In Finland, the Finnish Immigration Service offers refugees a prepaid Mastercard developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI that also links to a digital identity, composed of the record of one’s financial transactions, which is stored on the blockchain. In Moldova, the government is working with digital identification experts from the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) to brainstorm ways to use blockchain to provide children living in rural areas with a digital identity, so it’s more difficult for traffickers to smuggle them across borders. Among the more robust programs is a pilot the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) launched in Jordan last May. Syrian refugees stationed at the Azraq Refugee Camp receive vouchers to shop at the local grocery store. The WFP integrated blockchain into its biometric authentication technology, so Syrian refugees can cash in their vouchers at the supermarket by staring into a retina scanner. These transactions are recorded on a private Ethereum-based blockchain, called Building Blocks. Because the blockchain eliminates the need for WFP to pay banks to facilitate transactions, Building Blocks could save the WFP as much as $150,000 each month in bank fees in Jordan alone. The program has been so successful that by the end of the year, the WFP plans to expand the technology throughout Jordan. Blockchain enthusiasts imagine a future in which refugees can access more than just food vouchers, accumulating a transaction history that could stand in as a credit history when they attempt to resettle. ID2020, an alliance of large companies like Accenture and Microsoft, with UN agencies, nongovermental organizations and governments, is developing technology that helps undocumented people secure elements of identity, from children’s vaccination cards to voter registration. While most of these systems are enabled by existing technology, like the internet, recently the group has started to review blockchain-based opportunities. In an upcoming pilot program, the alliance will incorporate blockchain into a biometric system used by the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, to facilitate transactions like cash transfers, shelter or food. In addition to helping the aid group save on bank fees and making sure that aid goes directly to refugees, a blockchain-based system can help refugees build a more permanent identity. Right now, when refugees enter a camp run by UNHCR, they’re issued documentation, but there’s no way to extend your UNHCR identity once you leave. But by recording these transactions on the blockchain, which keeps an indelible record, there’s the possibility the system could function as identification in a new country. This approach is finding backers beyond those who work with refugees. A New York City startup called Blockchain for Change has developed an Android app called Fummi that allows homeless people to access food pantries and shelters, tap into financial services, and generally manage their digital identities. In December, the startup teamed with a group that relies on federal subsidies to provide smartphones to low-income people to distribute mobile phones to 3,000 homeless people, starting in the Bronx. The app shows when people have checked into shelters, or how much they have paid for showers or haircuts. The app has a digital wallet for dollars, and also a cryptocurrency created for the project. To start, the currency can be redeemed for talk-time and data. But the goal is to help people connect to services more regularly and efficiently, while bringing down the cost of the services. Because those without homes tend to move around regularly, many re-apply for a federal program like food stamps in a new place every few months at great administrative cost. Because their transactions, which compose their identity, are permanently stored on the blockchain, the startup hopes federal program can tap into the permanent transaction recorded on the blockchain to reduce the sign-up costs. But as technology is deployed rapidly in service of the world’s most vulnerable populations, there’s a risk that it will alter services in ways that will harm the people it’s set up to help. In the earliest days of the web, which turned 29 earlier this week, its proponents believed that they held the potential to make the world a more free and open place. They didn’t anticipate the degree to which it would consolidate power in the hands of a few corporate and government interests. ID2020 Executive Director Dakota Gruener points out that historically, there’s always been a trade-off between offering access to services and providing privacy and security. “It’s always been a binary,” she says. “People are quite excited that it appears there's now a model in which you could provide people broad access to the services that they need in a privacy-protecting way.” She’s clear, however, that blockchain is not a panacea, and while it may be helpful for certain aspects involved in shoring up a digital identity, ID2020 primarily relies on existing technology. Learn more are WIRED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444874200-54AQNWKHXDKPRP8Q8SRF/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.20.57+PM.png justice - JR Mounts a Towering Monument to Refugees at The Armory Show On an eerily warm afternoon in mid-February, the French street artist JR is in a Bushwick, Brooklyn, warehouse with three members of his artistic team. Clad in matching, deep-green jumpsuits, they’re busily at work on JR’s latest New York project, using wheatpaste to adhere giant photographs of migrants onto sturdy steel armatures. The looming, 25-foot-tall photographs of two men, five women, a young boy, and a baby are enlargements of images from the archives of Ellis Island. Size aside, they appear rather straightforward. The artist, sporting his characteristic fedora and dark sunglasses, gestures to the massive photo installation in progress. “Do you know the little trick of these images?” he asks, excited. It’s there, in plain sight: JR replaced the Ellis Island immigrants’ faces with those of present-day refugees he met at the Zaatari camp, on the Syria-Jordan border. “The real process of my work is to actually connect people,” JR tells me. “I wish I could bring these people here physically, but they cannot travel—they’re stuck in a camp, they can’t enter Jordan and yet can’t go back to Syria. So I’m bringing their images, and I’m bringing a discussion.” Titled So Close (2018), and presented by The Armory Show, Artsy, and Jeffrey Deitch, the new photographic mural is the centerpiece of the Manhattan art fair’s Platform section this year. Anyone riding on the West Side Highway this week will catch a glimpse of it, and it’s the first thing fairgoers will see upon entering the The Armory Show at Pier 94—a vision of immigrants in a line, waiting. Learn more at artsy https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531444955245-7HDDYZ11PTMGTZOJH1PA/Screen+Shot+2018-07-12+at+6.22.21+PM.png justice - The Algorithm That Can Resettle Refugees In January, the U.S. State Department lifted refugee resettlement restrictions for 11 of the “high-risk” countries once targeted under President Donald Trump’s infamous travel ban. Now, displaced families fleeing unrest and oppression in areas on that list, likely to include places like Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, are again able to enter the U.S.—but only on a strict case-by-case basis. And as the number of refugees the country accepts shrinks—in 2017, the U.S. took in its lowest amount in more than a decade—the global refugee crisis grows. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council, a global resettlement agency, the number of global refugees reached its highest level in measurable history by the end of 2016: Today, 65.6 million people live in some state of displacement. Most refugees in the last decade came from Syria, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They’ve been recently joined by an estimated 800,000Rohingya Muslims who have been expelled from their native Myanmar. Every minute around the world, 20 people are forcibly displaced. The disparate impact of war and upheaval on civilians is often random, and always cruel. But researchers are attempting to use technology to ensure that the journey of resettlement, at least, doesn’t have to be. The existing process of moving refugees from camps (many of which are located in Bangladesh or Jordan or Lebanon) into more permanent homes in places like the U.S. can be a time-consuming and often imperfect process. Once a week, U.S. resettlement agencies gather to determine the number of refugees that have been processed by the State Department who need to be resettled stateside. Those individuals are then allocated into cities, and placed under the jurisdictions of particular nonprofits. All of this work is done by resettlement agency workers, who know refugees’ needs as well as what resources local organizations have at their disposal (such as hospitals, health clinics, housing, and local aid workers with knowledge of certain languages). Over time, resettlement patterns have emerged, and pockets of refugee communities have grown around the country: Somali neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Nepali avenues in Burlington, Vermont; Rohingya enclaves in Kitchener, Ontario and Buffalo, New York. There, refugees can hopefully find the same social supports that have sustained generations of American immigrant communities—ethnic networks and local infrastructures in place to help them adjust. It’s a very analog system. “[Agency workers] have a sense of each refugee profile, they have a great relationship with communities, and they know how to place people … manually, spreadsheet by spreadsheet,” said Alex Teytelboym, Oxford economics associate professor and co-founder of Refugees’ Say, an organization developing new refugee matching technologies. “You just think of the best place to put them and you trust your instinct.” Now, however, researchers have begun to ask if if those instincts could be aided by data-driven algorithms. Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab, for example, has developed a new tool for matching refugees to host cities, which sorts for where a given refugee will find the best employment potential. Teytelboym, meanwhile, is working on a different sort of algorithm with Refugees’ Say co-founder Will Jones. Theirs is designed to take into account a subtler interplay of factors—the real preferences of both refugees and the host countries that will eventually absorb them. The hardest part of automating this kind of extremely high-stakes human decision-making: determining what a computer should prioritize, and in what order. Jobs, jobs, jobs Immigration policy organizations like Stanford’s have spent years developing improved education systems, job training programs, and language learning labs to give refugees a better chance at landing work. But such programs are costly and hard to scale. “So our attention shifted to this geographic allocation,” said Jens Hainmueller, a Stanford researcher and one of the algorithm developers. “That’s an area where if you can come up with a better way, you get these increased employment rates at basically zero cost.” Stanford’s algorithm uses existing employment data to first analyze where refugees have been sent in the past, and whether or not they’ve been successful in their job searches. Then it uses this knowledge to match new refugees with similar characteristics. In test runs, a team of researchers used data on 30,000 refugees, ages 18 to 64, who were placed in the U.S. and Switzerland from 2011 to 2016. The majority were originally from Somalia, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. They compared rates of actual employment to the chances of finding work via algorithm. With a robot on board, employment rates would have been 41 percent higher, they estimate. At the algorithm’s best, they say, employment opportunities for those it places could increase by up to 70 percent. “Some of these improvements are coming from the fact that there’s quite a lot of synergy between places and people,” said Hainmueller. In the current allocation system, for example, a French-speaking refugee bound for Switzerland would have the same chance of landing in a German-speaking region of the country, rather than a French-speaking one. Their prospects of finding a job in the latter, however, are 40 percent higher. The takeaway is obvious: Send refugees where they can speak and understand the language. Another easily programmed priority: Send people who can do certain jobs where those jobs are most needed. “The nice thing is that there’s a multitude of these synergies,” said Hainmueller. “And the algorithm—by seeing how well [refugees have] done in the past—is learning all of those by basically picking up these patterns of where refugees of certain characteristics find work or not.” But employment odds are not static, nor are labor supplies. Say the job market for meatpackers is saturated, or Afghans are starting to experience discrimination that cuts them out of the workforces where they’ve historically found support. The algorithm will identify these trends, learn from them, and update its predictions accordingly. Early employment was chosen as a primary matching factor because it’s a tangible advance that has proven and positive trickle effects. “Employment is the pathway by which a refugee can get agency,” said Mike Mitchell, associate vice president of U.S. programs with HIAS, a Maryland-based refugee resettlement agency. “By getting a job, they can progress, and build an income and build assets and integrate into American society.” Swift employment is also touted as a shortcut to cultural immersion. “People meet other people at work, they learn the language,” said Hainmueller. Relying solely on in-group networks without forging ties to host communities has been shown to hinder future financial stability. “Even if there’s controversy because of the Trump administration, Americans on the whole tend to be open.” There’s another good reason to focus on employment metrics: they’re the statistics governments are actively collecting. “We know 90 days after arrival whether they’ve found work or not, because this is the declared goal of [the U.S.’s] refugee resettlement program—to transition refugees into quick self-sufficiency,” said Hainmueller. But employment can be a touchy issue among the communities that accept refugees, thanks to fears that hordes of newcomers will snap up jobs that existing residents should be doing. Matching refugees to labor networks that need them can work to dissolve the misconception that refugees are job-stealers—they’re filling gaps in an existing labor market, not duplicating American skills. But it also feeds into the notion that in order to be an American you have to be “skilled”—and that the worth of immigrants is tied to their productivity, not their humanity. According to Mitchell, finding a job is less important than finding the right job: one with room for growth; that will help you build skills and save for retirement. “If refugee A is working in a CVS, stocking, and refugee B is working in a computer company on a path to getting a certification at Microsoft, that makes all the difference,” he said. A better algorithm would include factors like the kind of job, length of commute, and quality of the family’s school district. “That’s all going to contribute to the stability of a refugee’s family, which is going to help ensure integration.” Teytelboym agrees: “Being employed within three months is not necessarily a measure of success—it’s just an easy political gain for the host countries, and it puts pressure on refugees to end up in low-paying jobs. We would prefer a holistic view.” The bigger picture The Refugees’ Say algorithm is designed to measure that thus-far immeasurable (or unmeasured) whole. Before placement, refugees spend days in meetings with State Department officials and attending cultural orientations, getting briefed on their placement options—but rarely their opinions. Teytelboym proposes surveying refugees in the camps, allowing them to tell placement agencies exactly where they’d prefer to build a life. Then they’ll build an algorithm around it. “Some things are kind of hard to observe. That’s exactly where precise preference comes in,” said Teytelboym. “It’s the ultimate arbiter of what good welfare is: to what extent people’s own individual, idiosyncratic, perhaps strange or unusual preferences are taken into account.” And it’s not just about preference: Every family’s needs are multidimensional. One member of a family might have specific medical needs, or speak a rare language, and another might have unusual or important skills. Their ultimate destination should be a place that can support all or most of those realities. Those idiosyncrasies are mirrored at the city level. A host city like Burlington might have better hospitals than those in Kitchener, or more Afghani restaurants. In the algorithm Teytelboym is building, those location metrics are weighed, too. Measurable emotional considerations—like keeping family members together—are built-in as algorithm overrides. Asking host cities for their “preferences” could have some less desirable effects: It might conceivably make racial profiling easier, opening the door for cities to enforce their own local-level versions of President Trump’s “Muslim ban.” But Teytelboym and Mitchell say that while the administration has slowed the flow of refugees at the federal level, local agencies are far less reticent. “By and large we find the opposite,” said Teytelboym. “These communities want to take a lot more refugees than the State Department is willing to move.” That’s what Mitchell says, too. “Our experience at HAIS is that the communities where we resettle refugees are really welcoming,” he said. “Even if there’s controversy because of the Trump administration, Americans on the whole tend to be open.” Of course, there is no such thing as an “American whole.” A September study by Dartmouth researchers complicates this narrative: They found that even liberals who support refugee resettlement on the national level balk at accepting new families into their communities. To avoid discrimination, however, Teytelboym’s algorithm codes “preferences” as linked to resource availability. Esoteric medical needs? Don’t choose us. Speak Afghani? We’re ready for you. A digital tool for a human crisis Refugees’ Say is partnering with refugee resettlement organizations to collect preference data themselves, while Stanford’s program is limited based on existing data. But if jurisdictions began to track other, more intangible indicators of refugee well-being, Stanford’s algorithm could easily be tweaked to include more human dimensions. “We’d very much encourage governments to [collect more data] in order to get a broader read of refugee integration success,” said Hainmueller. For now, however, measurable emotional considerations (like keeping relatives together) are built-in as algorithm overrides. As adaptable as both algorithms are, they’re not meant to entirely automate government’s placement processes. Agencies can’t simply send thousands of refugees to the place an algorithm identifies as the best labor market, without taking into consideration the shares and capacities of local offices. And a human touch is still beneficial, especially when dealing with such a human crisis. “This is just one way of considering how to make decisions on behalf of the people we serve,” said Mitchell. “This is probably the start of something that will transform the decision-making we do for clients that is needed—not only in refugee resettlement, but in the nonprofit sector.” Learn more at Citylab https://civicas.net/women-2 daily 0.75 2018-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622899435-J6MFT3VEUMNOAXAB69ZI/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.34.40+AM.png women - Kids of Working Moms Grow into Happy Adults https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622899435-J6MFT3VEUMNOAXAB69ZI/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.34.40+AM.png women - Kids of Working Moms Grow into Happy Adults https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622814728-WGSYJ26SUOFXWH1RB690/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.33.20+AM.png women - Don’t Forget the Women Who Forged Saudi Arabia’s Art Scene https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1532622723402-1JDFRJY0PZ4R579RBZU2/Screen+Shot+2018-07-26+at+9.31.38+AM.png women - Inside the Powerful ESPYs Moment When Aly Raisman and Over 100 Athletes Accepted the Arthur Ashe Courage Award https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531950580812-H2RVG34WO4Q8PR323GPN/Screen+Shot+2018-07-18+at+2.49.28+PM.png women - The Rise Of America’s Democratic Socialists https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531860242831-33ZB8G6U0Z8AZ2D1UX1I/Screen+Shot+2018-07-17+at+1.43.44+PM.png women - Revving Up to Fight The Patriarchy: Pakistan's Women Learn to Ride Motorbikes https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531522896691-9XFCSBPCA4LAN861JJ4U/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.00.34+PM.png women - How Two Black Women Referees Expanded the Conversation About Representation in Sports In the conversation about gender equality in sports, most of the attention is focused on the players. Sometimes the attention is directed at the coaches, but for the most part, referees have been left out of the conversation. Yet, there must be capable women with years of experience on their fields, courts and diamonds who could make those all-or-nothing game time calls as well as any white male referee. Which is why the courtside appearance of Danielle Scott and Angelica Suffren, two black women referees, at an NBA Summer League game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat garnered so much attention. Officiates are almost never paid attention to – unless they make a bad call – but this situation was different. Their inclusion means a lot to other women trying to stay close to the sport they’re passionate about and to female fans, who can see an instance of their sports knowledge respected by players, coaches and fans. Women in sports are generally not treated the same as their male counterparts. They’re paid less and have less prominence. On this year’s Forbes’ ranking of highest-paid athletes, not a single woman was listed. Last year, Serena Williams ranked at the No. 51 spot, but likely fell off because of her maternity leave. This is the first year the NBA has also recruited women to officiate their training ground program like the NBPA Top 100 Camp. Last year, women made up a third of the referees the NBA G League, their minor league basketball program. One of the women, Jenna Schroeder, was a former college player who wanted to stay in the world of basketball after she stop playing. It’s the same sort of background expertise many male referees bring to the court, and now by training them through the NBA ranks, there’s a chance we’ll see many more women referees. Before initiatives like this, women would either have to shelve their basketball career for good or compete for one of the highly coveted coaching jobs. Learn more at Lily News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531523080263-HMEJZHGEWYXSYI8R1YWK/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.04.24+PM.png women - Thousands Of Women In D.C. Protest Trump’s Migrant Family Separations A wave of women took to the streets and protested in a Senate office building in the nation’s capital on Thursday, to call out the Trump administration’s immigrant family separations and detentions. Around 2,500 people, largely women, joined in the demonstration in Washington, D.C., organizers told HuffPost. Led by organizers of the Women’s March, the rally was in response to President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy, which refers all unauthorized immigrants crossing the border for criminal prosecution, and has led to the separation of more than 2,000 kids from their parents. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and about 600 others were arrested at the demonstration. Protesters were processed on site and released, according to a statement from Capitol Police. “I was just arrested with 500+ women and @WomensMarch to say @RealDonaldTrump’s cruel zero-tolerance policy will not continue,” Jayapal tweeted. “Not in our country. Not in our name.” Demonstrators from across the country descended on D.C. for the protest, first blocking the street in front of the Department of Justice, and then proceeding to the Hart building, where hundreds sat down in the lobby wrapped in foil blankets ― a reference to similar blankets given to migrant families held in federal detention centers. Protesters waved banners saying “End all detention camps,” and chanted “We care!” in an apparent response to First Lady Melania Trump recently wearing a jacket marked “I really don’t care, do u?” while on her way to visit migrant children at a detention center in Texas. “Women across the country are horrified as we see our government violating the rights of women, separating families, and traumatizing children,” Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour said in a statement. “We are rising up to demand an end to the criminalization of immigrants.” Several Democratic lawmakers showed up, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), and Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and John Lewis (D-Ga.), as well as celebrities such as Susan Sarandon. The protest was the latest of several in recent weeks against Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown. Another major demonstration is planned for Saturday across cities nationwide. Learn more at Huffington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531523533214-NX7EQYN4DK1GL5MIXVJC/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.11.55+PM.png women - #MeToo Has Implicated 414 High-Profile Executives and Employees in 18 Months At least 414 high-profile executives and employees across fields and industries have been outed by the #MeToo Movement in 18 months, according to data collected by a New York-based crisis consulting firm. The study looked at national news articles that singled out people for sexual harassment or other similar misdeeds, said Davia Temin, whose firm Temin & Co. did the research. Individuals with at least seven separate, national mentions were included. That includes celebrities like Bill Cosby and Louis CK, but the vast majority are corporate executives and business leaders like Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, who resigned late last week after revelations of an affair with an employee. Among the 414 people accused, 190 were fired or left their jobs. Another 122 have been put on leave, suspended or are facing investigations since December 2016. For about 69 people, there were no repercussions. In recent months, the rate of accusations has been slowing but the percentage of people being fired has increased, Temin said. “It started to become a tsunami, certainly after Weinstein, and it sparked other stories in the same industry and then across all industries,” Temin said. “I think it’s settled into a new plateau, but it is certainly higher than we’ve ever had before.” Only eight of the people, like Kraznich, were said to be involved in consensual relationships. Out of the 414 people accused, all but seven are men. Much of the behavior is related to incidents that may have happened a long time ago but surfaced now as tolerance has dropped and it’s become more newsworthy. “The eagle eyes are out for this,” Temin said. “Women understand a little better their collective power, and they’re using it.” Learn more at TIME https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531523615648-ZYU6BDD1KRQ9N5J5HQ0V/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.13.19+PM.png women - Saudi Arabia Makes History, Ending Longstanding Rule That Barred Women From Driving Women in Saudi Arabia can now get in the driver's seat as the country officially lifts a decades-old rule that barred them from driving vehicles. Women across the country celebrated, with many getting behind the wheel and driving around Saudi streets — the first time they could lawfully exercise such freedoms for since the late 1950s. The Kingdom has been working since last autumn to prepare for a fresh influx of female motorists. Saudi Arabia has officially lifted a decades-old rule that barred women from driving. Women across the country celebrated, with many getting behind the wheel and driving around Saudi streets — the first time they could lawfully exercise such freedoms for since the late 1950s. The Kingdom has been working since last autumn to prepare for a fresh influx of female motorists. Several women's driving schools began popping up all over the country, with many flocking to Princess Nourah bin Abdulrahman University which became the Kingdom's first driving school for women. State oil firm Aramco even offered driving lessons to its thousands of female employees, teaching them the basics like checking oil levels, changing a tire, and the importance of wearing a seat belt. Ten women made history earlier this month when they became the first women to receive Saudi driver's licenses. These women held licenses from other countries and excitedly swapped them over. For many women, their newfound freedom signals an evolving paradigm for women in the country. "We need the car to do our daily activities. We are working, we are mothers, we have a lot of social networking, we need to go out — so we need transport," Amira Abdulgader toldReuters. "It will change my life." Women can now pursue jobs that require the use of a car, like any number of the popular ride-hailing services. "It's not only equality, it's about building our country together," said Enaam Gazi Al-Aswad, who had been poised to become the nation's first female driver for ride-hailing app Careem, according to CNBC."It's about community ... Women and men equally now in Saudi Arabia, not like before." While the nation is celebrating the historic moment of progress, last month the government doubled down on activists who had been campaigning for the right to drive. At least 12 prominent women's rights activists were arrested since May 15, according to Human Rights Watch. The organization said some of the activists were held on charges similar to those for which other activists are serving long prison sentences. Women have risked fines and imprisonment for decades Women have been barred from driving since 1957, as part of the country's strict interpretation of Islam. While there was no formal law against it, women who drove in public faced fines and could be arrested. While there no clear explanation for why women shouldn't drive, supporters of the rule argued that driving could lead to women socializing with men, which was seen as potentially disrupting the established order inside Saudi's patriarchal society. But activists have been campaigning against the policy for years. In 1990, 47 women were arrested after driving through the streets of Riyadh in defiance of the ban. The movement grew stronger in 2007 when a group calling itself the Association for the Protection and Defense of Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia petitioned then-King Abdullah to repeal the rule. On International Women's Day in 2008, the movement's cofounder Wajeha Huwaider filmed herself driving and posted the video on YouTube, which received international media attention. The movement has continued to grow over the years. In 2011, Manal Al-Sharif, along with other women inspired by the growing Arab Spring demonstrations, started a campaign called "Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself,"There's also the Facebook group, Women2Drive. The group gained support both locally and internationally, and soon women were risking arrest to get behind the wheel. Because of her activism, Al-Sharif was detained and released several times, and told not to drive or discuss her situation with the media. Manal has written several books, including Daring to Drive: a Saudi Woman's Awakening.She is seen as one of the world's most influential women on the subject. She now resides in Australia and remains an active critic of the Saudi government, using her experience to push for change. "I got involved with the [Women2Drive] campaign because women were invisible. It almost feels like women don't exist in Saudi Arabia," she told Business Insider. She says many factors have influenced the way women are treated in Saudi Arabia. "It is institutional oppression, and it's carried out not only through policy, but also a general attitude that men have towards women," she said. "We are faced with two evils: The government restricts women with policy, and male guardians restrict women through culture." She said a woman's place in society starts young, with young girls going through "systematic humiliation" from primary school through college. She says girls should be nurtured to become confident leaders, not mired in shame. Still, Al-Sharif says she has been amazed by the pace of change in Saudi Arabia over the last year. Since Mohammed Bin Salman ascended to power, the country has lifted its ban on cinemas, appointed women to positions of power, and allowed women to attend soccer matches at major stadiums. "King Abdullah wanted to make changes for women but wasn't able to do a lot because of internal politics," she said. "Mohammed Bin Salman has been pushing real change, and has been paving the way for full inclusion of women in the economy and society." The 32-year-old Crown Prince has been pushing for modernization and a complete economic and cultural overhaul in the country through his Vision2030 program. Al-Sharif says Prince Mohammed's desire to revamp the economy has resulted in major policy changes for women. "The government is realizing how important it is to the economy to educate and include women," she said. "They have no choice — the economy is our best reformer." But Al-Sharif says there is a lot of work to do. "Lifting the ban on women's driving didn't come overnight, it's been consistent campaigning to change people's consciousness." Al-Sharif says change needs to happen in "all facets of society," from education to policy to media, and even home life. She is now campaigning to end Saudi Arabia's restrictive guardianship laws, which require men to make decisions for women on matters including education, health care, and travel. "Destructive behavior needs to end and we need to create a culture of respect. Policy can change, but its the attitude that is the real obstacle." A bright future for Saudi women, but a long way to go Dr. Lina Abirafeh, the director at the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World, told Business Insider that she has seen surface-level changes enhancing women's rights, but Saudi society has some work left to do. "Positive steps are being taken but Saudi Arabia still lags behind in terms of women's rights. Saudi Arabia ranks very low in measures for gender equality compared to other countries." She noted that in the 2016 Global Gender Gap Report, ranking health, education, economic, and political engagement, Saudi Arabia ranked at 141 out of the 144 countries listed. Abirafeh said small changes in the last year have impacted women's quality of life, and signal positive change to come. "The ban on driving had long served as a symbol of the country's repressive attitude towards women and their denial of women's rights and fundamental freedoms,"Abirafeh said, adding that there are many other inequalities that need to be addressed. "Driving is clearly the most symbolic — and visible. This in a society where men and women hardly interact, and where women need a male guardian to make decisions and give permissions on their behalf." "These recent changes are important, but they come with many conditions and caveats. There might be a strategy to appear liberal in the global arena but it is hard to tell if there is genuine intention for real change within the society - or if these are tokenistic," she said. She believes Saudi Arabia can do much more for reform at all levels, including repealing laws that discriminate against women, reviewing the country's extreme interpretations of religious texts that deny women freedom of mobility and bodily autonomy, and reaching out to communities to change the patriarchal ethos that exists. "There is a need to progress gradually but also to be clear that the goal is full equality — without exceptions," Abirafeh said. She remains hopeful for the future, but is not convinced that Saudi society is prepared for full equality and the implications that come with it. "Inequalities are many, and attitudes will take a long time to change. It doesn't seem that there is broad-based buy-in to women's rights among the population - yet. And as long as patriarchy prevails, this is a clear impediment to women achieving full rights and equality." Learn more at Business Insider https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531523723578-AO66T7A8NEQ4B6UW0QHQ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.15.01+PM.png women - Meet the Saudi Women Who Advocated for the Right to Drive — and are Paying Dearly for It JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia — When Saudi Arabia’s women are finally allowed to drive on Sunday, it will be the culmination of a decades-long struggle by a group of Saudi feminists who suffered imprisonment, harassment and other hardships as they campaigned for that simple right. But many of the women at the center of the struggle will not be around to celebrate. Since May, the Saudi government has arrested at least a dozen women’s rights advocates, accusing them of nefarious contacts with foreign parties and branding them traitors in the press. The crackdown has been seen by some as a warning from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to other activists: Reforms are a gift from the leadership to Saudi citizens, not rights that can be won. The activists did not limit themselves to the driving campaign. They fought for survivors of domestic violence, women shackled by restrictive guardianship laws and political prisoners. They represented different generations of Saudi women, trying over decades to bend the will of a harshly conservative and often obdurate state. Some garnered international acclaim. Others toiled at home, enlisting Saudi women in a struggle for rights. Here is a look at four of the imprisoned activists. Eman al-Nafjan, 39 In one of the first entries on her Saudiwoman blog, her widely read chronicle of life and women’s activism in Saudi Arabia, Eman al-Nafjan wrote a post titled “Upbeat feminist news from Saudi :).” She had seen a picture of a Saudi female astronaut in a newspaper, “no hijab and free-floating with a group of men and women including Steven Hawking.” And she noted the “buzz about women being allowed to drive,” citing another newspaper report that speculated that the ban might be lifted by the end of the year. That was in 2008. The driving ban would stand for another decade. In the interim, Nafjan, a professor of linguistics, traced the recent history of the women’s rights movement in Saudi Arabia, writing in English about the women who led the movement and the men who stood with them. She described, in simple terms, the elaborate system of social control that Saudi women were seeking to dismantle — “gender apartheid,” as she called it in one post. “Yes it is true. If you are a woman you have to have special travel documents,” she wrote in a post titled “Women Travel Documents.” “If your main mahram (legal male guardian) is with you then him escorting you will suffice. But if you happen to be a Saudi woman and need or want to leave the country without your main mahram, you have to have a special yellow card.” Other posts tackled poverty, the rights of Palestinians and Bob Dylan. She wrote lists of Saudi heroes that included people who have since fled into exile or been arrested. In September 2017, when the lifting of the driving ban was announced, Nafjan posted her last article on the blog. “The manner in which the ban was lifted seemed too simple to be real,” she wrote. “Initially, I was overwhelmed with my own powerlessness as a woman living in a patriarchal absolute monarchy. “Were our efforts the reason the ban was lifted? Or was it a decision that had been made regardless of our struggles?” Loujain al-Hathloul, 28 Asked once about the 73 days she spent in prison in 2014, for driving her car from Abu Dhabi across the border to Saudi Arabia, Loujain al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia’s most visible women’s rights activists, offered a positive spin. Her experience in prison had been “enriching” and “a unique opportunity to meet women who are not acknowledged,” she told a reporter from the Financial Times a few years after her release. But the social blowback for her activism had been withering, too — replete with the accusations of treason, harming the public interest and sullying the reputation of Saudi Arabia abroad, charges well-known to her fellow activists. Her description of the backlash, in a letter posted on her website two years ago, illustrated the toll taken on the activists because of attacks by their fellow Saudis. “Naturally, many accused me of using the opportunity for my own publicity without any interest nor regard for the advancement or well-being of fellow Saudi women, but this opinion is not important,” she wrote. “Others laid blame on me and claimed that what I did was going to delay the official decision to lift the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, especially since my attempt was seen as a direct challenge against the government; they ignored the fact that their silence for 22 years did not have any positive outcome either. “We have to all realise that criticising some phenomena in our home country does not equate to hating it, wishing evil upon it nor is it an attempt to shake its balance,” she continued. “It’s the total opposite.” Aziza al-Yousef, 60 When a Saudi cleric was accused of raping and beating to death his 5-year-old daughter, Aziza al-Yousef helped start a rare public awareness campaign that focused international attention on the case as well as on the larger issue of inequality in Saudi Arabia’s justice system. The intervention was typical for Yousef, who is widely seen as one of Saudi Arabia’s most dogged human rights advocates — leading campaigns to lift the driving ban and repeal male guardianship laws while supporting survivors of domestic violence. “Fathers and husbands who murder their children or wives are consistently sentenced to five to twelve years in prison at most. This leniency is not extended to mothers and wives,” Yousef wrote in a news release on the case that she co-authored with Manal al-Sharif, another activist. The preacher, Fayhan al-Ghamdi, was sentenced in 2013 to eight years in prison but was released in 2015, after paying compensation to the mother of his daughter, Lama. Yousef, a retired computer science professor at King Saud University and a mother of five, continued pressing for equal justice and repeal of the guardianship laws, appearing on television shows, meeting with officials and hosting a regular salon at her house to discuss women’s rights. Her activism was local: She ­encouraged her peers to resist exile and “stay home and fight for their rights,” another activist said. In the run-up to a driving protest she helped organize in October 2013, she told journalists she had been defying the driving ban for at least two years. “I’ve been driving around Riyadh since then and haven’t had any real problems,” she told a reporter for the Telegraph newspaper. “Twice someone ran at my car and made threatening gestures — one old man, one younger — but it was no big deal. “I’ve driven all over the world. Why not in my homeland?” Nouf Abdulaziz, 31 Weeks after the other activists were arrested in May, Saudi authorities detained Nouf Abdul­aziz, a feminist, writer and television producer who had expressed support for the women on Twitter. The show of solidarity was a reflex for Abdulaziz, who is also an outspoken defender of Saudi political prisoners. Her activism had cost Abdul­aziz plenty. She had struggled to find work before her arrest, largely, she and those who knew her suspected, because of her reputation for speaking out. “She has intellectual integrity,” said Hana al-Khamri, a writer and activist who knows Abdulaziz. “She did not let the fear that was planted by the regime following the arrests intimidate her.” “Hello, my name is Nouf, and I am not a provoker, inciter nor a wrecker, nor a terrorist, nor a criminal or a traitor,” Abdulaziz wrote in a letter a friend posted online after her arrest. “A daughter to an honorable and honest family that has undergone a lot of harm because of what happened to me. “Maybe they see that being rid of me is the path to a better country,” she wrote. “I was never but a good citizen that loved her country and wished the best for it.” After she posted Abdulaziz’s letter, the friend, Mayaa al-Zahrani, was also arrested, according to Saudi activists and Human Rights Watch. Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531523840177-1GDW5M42QCHY874NLJEZ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.16.48+PM.png women - U.S. Open to Change Seeding Process in Wake of Serena Williams’s Pregnancy Leave The U.S. Open will not penalize players whose rankings have tumbled because of pregnancy-related breaks from the game in awarding seeds for its women’s field, starting with this year’s tournament. But it’s unclear how the U.S. Tennis Association will strike a fair balance between the interests of returning mothers whose rankings have slid and active players who have surged ahead of them in the interim. The decision in principle follows criticism leveled at French Open officials in May for not seeding Serena Williams, a three-time champion of the tournament, in her return to competition after giving birth to a daughter in September. During Williams’s 13-month hiatus from the game, her ranking slid from No. 1 in the world to No. 454. While she was granted a place in the French Open’s 128-player women’s field, the fact that she didn’t receive one of the tournament’s 32 seeds meant she was at risk of facing one of the top players in the world in her first-round match. Williams advanced to the French Open’s fourth round, nonetheless, but was forced to withdraw hours before facing former No. 1 Maria Sharapova because of an injured pectoral muscle. Katrina Adams, president and chief executive of the USTA, confirmed that the tournament would factor in absences for pregnancy and childbirth in issuing its seeds starting with the upcoming tournament, which gets underway Aug. 27. “We have top players who exemplify womanhood, becoming mothers, and are not being allowed to return following their pregnancy with a record that reflects that — Victoria Azarenka last year, and Serena now doing the same thing,” Adams said Saturday in a telephone interview. Adams noted that in the business world, when the CEO of a company leaves to have a baby, she doesn’t start at the bottom when she returns to work. “With Serena, you’re looking at one of arguably the greatest players of all time. There’s a level of respect there,” Adams said. “But it’s not about Serena; it’s about the accomplishments of a Serena — a number one player, with 23 Grand Slams. Adams explained that the precise formula had not been worked out, explaining: “We have no idea what, when or how, but we definitely know we’ll seed her.” The USTA’s decision was first reported by the New York Times. The issue of how tennis treats players returning from childbirth has emerged as a source of debate among tournament officials and competitors, particularly in light of the French Open’s decision regarding Williams, 36, who has dominated the game for the past 15 years. While many tennis followers believe women shouldn’t be penalized for missing time because of pregnancy, the issue of how to do so without giving them preference over active players who deserve a seed commensurate with their current ranking is tricky. How do tournaments strike a fair balance? In a telephone interview earlier this week, former touring pro Pam Shriver, who works as an analyst for ESPN, predicted the issue will become increasingly commonplace. Not every female player will make the decision to postpone childbirth until after retirement, as did Shriver, former world No. 1 Chris Evert (also a mother of three) and many of their peers in the 1980s and ’90s. “It’s going to be happening more and more because of the extended lengths of careers,” Shriver said. “There are going to be more moms on tour for the foreseeable future. [Williams] is the most high-profile one.” Each of the sport’s four majors — Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens — has the prerogative to seed players as it sees fit to ensure a balanced tournament. Typically, the majors follow the most recent world rankings, although Wimbledon traditionally exercises its privilege to depart from that formula and consider players’ past performance on grass. Wimbledon, which will begin July 2, will announce its seedings Wednesday. Tournament officials have signaled they are likely to award Williams, a seven-time champion of the tournament, one of the 32 seeds despite her ranking of 183rd. Wimbledon has precedence for doing so with several players, Williams among them. In 2011, tournament officials seeded Williams, the defending champion, seventh despite a ranking of 26th in the world at the time. The slide resulted from a near year-long absence triggered by a freak injury, suffered when she stepped on broken glass and later developed blood clots in her lungs following her 2010 Wimbledon championship. Women’s Tennis Association rules don’t protect the seeds of players whose rankings have slid because of missed time — whether because of injury, pregnancy or suspension. The organization is expected to reconsider that policy later this year. Regardless, the four Grand Slams are not beholden to WTA policies in seeding their fields. Since returning to competition in March, following a Fed Cup appearance, Williams has played seven singles matches on the pro tour, posting a 5-2 record at tournaments in Indian Wells, Miami and the French Open. Former top-five player James Blake, who is now Miami’s tournament director, said this spring that he believed the WTA current policy for seeding players returning from pregnancy was “a kind of punishment.” Shriver agrees but believes the solution is tricky. While she said she believes strongly that there should be no protection for players who have missed time because of suspensions (as Sharapova did following a positive test for a banned substance), Shriver sees the issue of pregnancy, which is often regarded the same as an injury in workplace policy, as different. Going forward, Shriver said she clearly sees the merits of protecting players returning from pregnancy for the purposes of getting a spot in tournaments. But a protected seed in those tournaments, she believes, is a different matter. “Giving somebody an automatic seed is really something you need to think about. That means you’re assuming that person is playing at the same standard or at the standard that seed warrants. When you give somebody a seed, that means you believe they are worthy, based on their current play, to represent that seeded position.” Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531523974231-9RRCKNWLV2OUOHR14EOJ/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.19.13+PM.png women - For the First Time Since 1980, Iranian Women Were Allowed to Watch the World Cup in the Same Stadium as Men Female soccer fans in Iran were taken through a roller coaster of emotions on Wednesday — and all before their team stepped onto the field to play against Spain. For 38 years, women have been banned from watching men’s sporting events in Iran. But on Tuesday, local news agencies in Iran reported that women would be allowed to watch a live broadcast of Iran’s World Cup match against Spain, taking place in Russia the next day, at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium. Then, just hours before the doors were set to open, authorities canceled the event. “Tonight’s match between Iran and Spain will not be broadcasted at Azadi Stadium today due to infrastructure difficulties,” Iran’s Tasnim news agency wrote less than three hours before kickoff. “Since there will be no public broadcast, it is respectfully asked from our dear nationals to avoid going to Azadi Stadium.” Many fans turned up at the stadium anyway. Finally, after about an hour, the police gave way. The stadium gates were opened and men, women and children who had bought tickets filed in, whipping out their phones and selfie sticks to capture a piece of history. Moments later, the official account of Iran’s national team tweeted a picture of a female fan in the stands of Azadi Stadium holding up an Iranian flag. “Azadi Stadium, now!” the tweet said in Farsi. Iran’s ban on women watching men’s sporting events has long sparked protests, but it became the subject of heated debate in the lead-up to the World Cup. Earlier this year, Iran publicly reinforced the ban, which was introduced by Iran’s ruling clerics after the 1979 Islamic revolution. In March, 35 women attempting to sneak into Azadi Stadium for a match between two Tehran clubs were detained by authorities. A day later, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who was present at the match, told reporters that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had “promised that women in Iran will have access to football stadiums soon.” On Friday, Iranian female fans frustrated by the ban took to the stadiums in St. Petersburg in the first of such protests in the tournament’s history. With women finally having entered Azadi Stadium for the first time since the ban, they are hoping that the rules around watching sporting games in Iran will be changed permanently. “Once spectators have shown their respect for the rules, we hope it will be possible to screen the Iran-Portugal game in the same stadium [next Monday] and that will mark the start of families attending matches played at the Azadi,” Tayebeh Siavoshi, a female member of Iran’s parliament, told the Iranian Students News Agency. Yeganeh Rezaian, a 34-year-old Iranian journalist living in the United States, also was optimistic. Rezaian, who recently wrote about the lack of rights for female soccer fans in Iran, watched the 2014 World Cup in a dark coffee shop in Tehran, with the doors locked and the volume muted. (Rezaian’s husband is a Washington Post columnist.) “If we do it once . . . we can keep pushing for more. I really, really hope it happens,” Rezaian said, her voice choking up with emotion. Learn more at The Lily https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531524095275-K1FHSY34EO4T0JYYWTUV/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.21.19+PM.png women - California Today: History in San Francisco with the Election of a Black Female Mayor The election of London Breed as mayor of San Francisco, which was all but made official Wednesday when Mark Leno, the runner-up in the election, conceded defeat, was a remarkable victory. Ms. Breed is the first African-American woman to hold the post in San Francisco. And San Francisco is now the largest American city with a female mayor. For many black people in the city, Ms. Breed’s election has a special resonance, one that rekindles the hope that the long and steady decline of San Francisco’s African-American population might be stanched or even reversed. “We were fast becoming an invisible people in this city,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, the pastor of Third Baptist Church, where Ms. Breed is a congregant. “Maybe we can now stop this hemorrhaging.” John William Templeton, a historian of black culture and business in San Francisco, said he hoped Ms. Breed could serve as a beacon and a magnet for black entrepreneurs across the country. “The campaign got a lot of people around the country interested in San Francisco who wouldn’t have thought about it before,” he said. Mr. Templeton contrasts the many individual successes of black people in San Francisco with the collective poverty of African-Americans over all in the city. Black people have a median income that is a fraction of that for whites or Asians. “Blacks have succeeded individually but not as a group,” he said. In a city where black people make up less than five percent of the population, the chief of police, the city administrator, the superintendent of schools and the head of the public works department are all African-Americans. Mr. Templeton points to both the racist policies toward blacks and Chinese people of decades past and the city’s current evangelizing spirit of tolerance. Ms. Breed’s election, he said, “reflects the best of San Francisco as a western sanctuary where people who didn’t have opportunities in other places could come.” Learn more at NY Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531524254153-NZUT9T9ZS6OONVU3M1Y2/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.23.45+PM.png women - tartups Founded by Black Women Gaining Momentum Among Investors When Uncharted Power founder Jessica O. Matthews delivered a pitch to venture capital investors in the fall of 2015, she did it in costume — her company happened to be celebrating Halloween the day a friend brought by some venture capital investors, unannounced. “I was not concerned, being dressed as Serena Williams, who is everything,” Matthews told Next City. “Can’t say the same for other members of the team.” Whether or not the costume had anything to do with it, Matthews did end up raising $7 million in venture capital, putting her Harlem-based company on the path to developing products that generate power from being walked upon, driven upon, kicked or pushed around — so far. A new report reveals that black women founders like Matthews are indeed on the rise when it comes to venture capital investment, though there is still very far to go for venture capital investment in the United States to reflect the country’s true diversity. Released yesterday, ProjectDiane 2018: The State of Black Women Founders is the second biennial report providing a snapshot of the state of black women founders and the startups they lead in the United States. According to ProjectDiane 2018, the amount raised by black women founders increased 500 percent, from $50 million in 2016 to $250 million in 2017. Still, Black women raised only 0.0006 percent of all tech venture funding since 2009, the report found. Despite the number of startups founded by black women more than doubling since 2016, a majority of startups founded by black women still have not received any venture capital funding, according to the report. To produce the ProjectDiane 2018 report, the research firm digitalundivided reviewed over 8,000 U.S.-based startups and companies located in the Crunchbase, Pitchbook and Mattermark databases as well as updated data from the ProjectDiane2016 database. The firm also reached out to organizations working with black and Latinx entrepreneurs and startups, and employed an online survey to collect additional data. Funding for the report came from JPMorgan Chase, the Case Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Covering the years 2015-2017, the ProjectDiane 2018 report encompasses a period when more black-led venture capital firms have come into existence and into the headlines. John Henry, who sold his on-demand laundry startup and founded Harlem tech accelerator Cofound Harlem, went on to co-found Harlem Capital Partners in 2015, which has promised to invest in 1,000 ventures led by people of color over 20 years. Arlan Hamilton founded Backstage Capital also in 2015, raising $5 million in capital to invest in female, minority, and LGBTQ entrepreneurs. She made headlines again earlier this year, announcing a $36 million fund to invest exclusively in startups founded by other black women, TechCrunch reported. Increasing diversity in tech and other popular venture-backed sectors (such as food) isn’t merely a charity case for investors. There’s an economic case to be made, as well. “[Hamilton] gets access to entrepreneurs that your typical [Silicon] Valley investor might not,” says Lars Rasmussen, an angel investor and veteran of Google and Facebook who invested in Backstage Capital’s first $5 million fund, told Inc. Magazine. “It’s almost like using an unfair advantage by knowing Arlan and using her connections into an area that is overlooked, and wrongly overlooked.” Learn more at Next City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531524391935-P6UV1IFWBWDW3MY481ZT/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.26.13+PM.png women - Iran Arrests Two Prominent Supporters of Anti-Head Scarf Protests Iranian authorities on Wednesday jailed a prominent human rights lawyer who has defended women who removed their mandatory Islamic head scarves in public. Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested at her home by unidentified agents and taken to Evin Prison in Tehran, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group. Her husband, Reza Khandan, said the agents told him she must serve a five-year sentence but did not say on what charges she was being detained, the group said. Khandan confirmed her arrest to The Times. Separately, state media reported that Farhad Jafari, a well known writer in the city of Mashhad, was arrested 12 days ago for supporting “the girls of Enghelab Avenue,” near the Tehran square where, in December, a woman removed her headscarf in protest of modesty laws that require Iranian women to cover their hair. The simple protest galvanized a nationwide women’s movement against the head scarf, or hijab, and added to the antigovernment unrest that has roiled Iran over the past several months. The arrests suggested that Iran’s crackdown against human rights defenders and dissidents was escalating as the judiciary and clerical establishment seeks to keep a lid on public anger. Sotoudeh, one of Iran’s most high-profile rights lawyers, has defended one of the women arrested and prosecuted in the anti-hijab protests. More recently, she has criticized the Iranian judiciary’s move to allow only state-approved lawyers to work on cases involving activists, dissidents and other detainees held for political reasons. She and other opponents of Iran’s hard-line judiciary were reportedly planning a sit-in to protest the restrictions, which top judicial officials have defended as being in the interest of national security. “The arrest of this distinguished attorney, who has dedicated her life to defending detainees held on politically motivated charges, reveals the state’s fear of those who defend due process and the rule of law in Iran,” Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said in a statement. Amnesty International called Sotoudeh’s arrest “an outrage” and demanded her immediate release. “Her arrest today is the latest example of the Iranian authorities’ vindictive attempts to stop her from carrying out her important work as a lawyer,” said Philip Luther, the group’s research and advocacy director for the Middle East. Sotoudeh had previously served a three-year prison sentence for “spreading propaganda against the system.” She was granted a pardon in 2013 and released by President Hassan Rouhani at the start of his term, when he promised to relax political and social restrictions. Rouhani, who won reelection last year, has failed to deliver on those promises. Meanwhile, Iranians have grown increasingly frustrated as their country risks sliding back into economic isolation following President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement and reinstate U.S. sanctions. Jafari, the writer, was taken to Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad, according to news reports. The Iranian Writers Assn. condemned his arrest as “a clear breach of freedom of speech and the basic rights of citizens.” “Farhad Jafari has not committed any crime, unless exercising freedom of speech is a crime,” the group said in a statement. Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531524561892-VFMFOW4FXMHK691K9IMI/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.27.54+PM.png women - ‘Back to the Dark Ages’: Sessions’s Asylum Ruling Reverses Decades of Women’s Rights Progress, Critics Say Aminta Cifuentes suffered weekly beatings at the hands of her husband. He broke her nose, burned her with paint thinner and raped her. She called the police in her native Guatemala several times but was told they could not interfere in a domestic matter, according to a court ruling. When Cifuentes’s husband hit her in the head, leaving her bloody, police came to the home but refused to arrest him. He threatened to kill her if she called authorities again. So in 2005, Cifuentes fled to the United States. “If I had stayed there, he would have killed me,” she told the Arizona Republic. And after nearly a decade of waiting on an appeal, Cifuentes was granted asylum. The 2014 landmark decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals set the precedent that women fleeing domestic violence were eligible to apply for asylum. It established clarity in a long-running debate over whether asylum can be granted on the basis of violence perpetrated in the “private” sphere, according to Karen Musalo, director for the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. But on Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned the precedent set in Cifuentes’s case, deciding that victims of domestic abuse and gang violence generally will not qualify for asylum under federal law. (Unlike the federal courts established under Article III of the Constitution, the immigration court system is part of the Justice Department.) For critics, including former immigration judges, the unilateral decision undoes decades of carefully deliberated legal progress. For gender studies experts, such as Musalo, the move “basically throws us back to the Dark Ages, when we didn’t recognize that women’s rights were human rights.” “If we say in the year 2018 that a woman has been beaten almost to death in a country that accepts that as almost the norm, and that we as a civilized society can deny her protection and send her to her death?” Musalo said. “I don’t see this as just an immigration issue … I see this as a women’s rights issue.” Sessions’s decision reversed a 2016 ruling by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, the body responsible for interpreting U.S. asylum law, granting asylum to a Salvadoran woman who said she was abused by her husband. Musalo is co-counsel in the case. Sessions’s reasoning hinged on the argument that domestic violence victims generally are not persecuted as members of a “particular social group,” according to his ruling. Under federal law, asylum applicants must show that either “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion … was or will be at least one central reason” for their persecution. In the precedent-setting Cifuentes case, the Board of Immigration Appeals held that an applicant can qualify for asylum as a member of a particular social group of “married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship.” To support its ruling, the board noted that Guatemala has a culture of “machismo and family violence.” Spousal rape is common and local police often fail to enforce domestic violence laws. Sessions rejected that reasoning. “When private actors inflict violence based on a personal relationship with a victim,” Sessions wrote, “then the victim’s membership in a larger group may well not be ‘one central reason’ for the abuse.” “The prototypical refugee flees her home country because the government has persecuted her,” Sessions wrote. “An alien may suffer threats and violence in a foreign country for any number of reasons relating to her social, economic, family, or other personal circumstances. Yet the asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune.” As Kara Lynum, an immigration lawyer in Minnesota, tweeted, “Sessions thinks these women aren’t eligible for asylum because their husbands are only violent to them — not all women.” A group of 15 retired immigration judges and former members of the Board of Immigration Appeals wrote a letter in response to Sessions’s decision, calling it an “affront to the rule of law.” The Cifuentes case, they wrote, “was the culmination of a 15 year process” through the immigration courts and Board of Immigration Appeals. The issue was certified by three attorneys general, one Democrat and two Republican. The private bar and law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, agreed with the final determination, the former judges wrote. The decision was also supported by asylum protections under international refugee treaties, they said. “For reasons understood only by himself, the Attorney General today erased an important legal development that was universally agreed to be correct,” the former judges wrote. Courts and attorneys general have debated the definition of a “particular social group” since the mid-1990s, according to Musalo. “It took the refugee area a while to catch up with the human rights area of law,” Musalo said. A series of cases led up to the Cifuentes decision. In 1996, the Board of Immigration Appeals established that women fleeing gender-based persecution could be eligible for asylum in the United States. The case, known as Matter of Kasinga, centered on a teenager who fled her home in Togo to escape female genital cutting and a forced polygamous marriage. Musalo was lead attorney in the case, which held that fear of female genital cutting could be used as a basis for asylum. “Fundamentally the principle was the same,” as the one at stake in Sessions’s ruling, Musalo said. Female genital cutting, like domestic violence in the broader sense, generally takes place in the “private” sphere, inflicted behind closed doors by relatives of victims. Musalo also represented Rody Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who fled extreme domestic abuse and, in 2009, won an important asylum case after a 14-year legal fight. Her victory broke ground for other women seeking asylum on the basis of domestic violence. Then, after years of incremental decisions, the Board of Immigration Appeals published its first precedent-setting opinion in the 2014 Cifuentes case, known as Matter of A-R-C-G. “I actually thought that finally we had made some progress,” Musalo said. Although the impact wasn’t quite as pronounced as many experts had hoped, it was a step for women fleeing gender-based violence in Latin America and other parts of the world. Now, Musalo says, Sessions is trying to undo all that and is doing so at a particularly monumental time for gender equality in the United States and worldwide. “We’ve gone too far in society with the MeToo movement and all of the other advances in women’s rights to accept this principle,” Musalo said. “It shows that there are these deeply entrenched attitudes toward gender and gender equality,” she added. “There are always those forces that are sort of the dying gasp of wanting to hold on to the way things were.” Sessions assigned the 2016 case to himself under his power as attorney general and said the move will help reduce the growing backlog of 700,000 court cases. He concluded his ruling by saying he does not intend to “minimize the vile abuse” that the Salvadoran woman suffered or the “harrowing experiences of many other victims of domestic violence around the world.” But the “asylum statute is not a general hardship statute,” Sessions wrote. Relatively few refugees are granted asylum annually. In 2016, for example, nearly 62 percent of applicants were denied asylum, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge and former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals, wrote on his blog that Sessions sought to encourage immigration judges to “just find a way to say no as quickly as possible.” (Schmidt authored the decision in the Kasinga case extending asylum protection to victims of female genital mutilation.) Sessions’s ruling is “likely to speed up the ‘deportation railway,’ ” Schmidt wrote. But it will also encourage immigration judges to “cut corners, and avoid having to analyze the entire case,” he argued. “Sessions is likely to end up with sloppy work and lots of Circuit Court remands for ‘do overs,’ ” Schmidt wrote. “At a minimum, that’s going to add to the already out of control Immigration Court backlog.” Learn more at The Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531524841042-VFHNW1CNII06HM8444DK/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.33.31+PM.png women - The Quest of Laurene Powell Jobs Laurene Powell Jobs — like the inventors and disrupters who were all around her — was thinking big. It was 2004, and she was an East Coast transplant — sprung from a cage in West Milford, N.J., as her musical idol Bruce Springsteen might put it — acclimating to the audacious sense of possibility suffusing the laboratories, garages and office parks of Silicon Valley. She could often be found at a desk in a rented office in Palo Alto, Calif., working a phone and an Apple computer. There, her own creation was beginning to take shape. It would involve philanthropy … technology … social change — she was charting the destination as she made the journey. She eventually named the project Emerson Collective after Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of her favorite writers. In time it would become perhaps the most influential product of Silicon Valley that you’ve never heard of. Yet at first, growth was slow. The work took a back seat to raising her three children and managing the care of her husband, Steve Jobs, as he battled the cancer that killed him in 2011 at age 56, followed by a period of working through family grief. She inherited his fortune, now worth something like $20 billion, and became the sixth-richest woman on the planet. By 2014, Emerson Collective was up to 10 employees. “For the first few years I worked here, there would be people who would say, ‘Who?’ ” says the eighth hire, Anne Marie Burgoyne, director of grants. “ ‘Is there someone in the Valley who’s famous whose last name is Emerson?’ That seemed like a fair question. The Valley is a place of reputation, so it’s logical to ask whose last name is Emerson. Nobody knew who we were.” Powell Jobs, now 54, wanted it that way, and she wished she could stay out of the spotlight. She wrote a short essay on the sublimity of anonymous giving that she handed out to employees. One of her staff recently gave it to me to read but not to quote: Her policy on anonymity is anonymous. She was frequently seen but not heard — seated with Michelle Obama during the State of the Union address in 2012, vacationing with former D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, whom she dated a few years ago after he moved to California. When she did speak, she seemed most comfortable having wonkishly impersonal conversations at forums with, say, a Stanford entre­pre­neur­ship professor on the subject of “Injecting Innovation Into Intractable Systems,” or with musician Will.I.Am on “Art, Activism and Impact.” All the while, she tended to Emerson Collective, quietly assembling a kind of Justice League of practical progressives: Arne Duncan, education secretary in the Obama administration, came on board to tackle gun violence in Chicago. Russlynn Ali, assistant education secretary for civil rights in the Obama administration, co-founded Emerson’s affiliate for education reform, the XQ Institute, where none other than storied urban fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko has landed as chief creative and strategy officer. (“I feel like everything I’ve done up until this moment was for this reason,” the former T-shirt designer for Spike Lee and Chuck D told me.) Andy Karsner, assistant energy secretary for renewable energy in the George W. Bush administration, runs environmental programs. Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, consults on communications strategy. Dan Tangherlini, head of the General Services Administration under Obama (and D.C. city administrator under Fenty) is the chief financial officer. Peter Lattman, former deputy business editor of the New York Times, oversees media investments and grants. Marshall Fitz, former vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, runs immigration reform efforts. Then, last year, Powell Jobs unleashed a series of dramatic moves across a three-dimensional chessboard of American culture. In July, Emerson Collective purchased a majority stake in the Atlantic, a 161-year-old pillar of the journalistic establishment. In September, an arm of the collective and Hollywood’s Entertainment Industry Foundation co-opted the four major networks in prime time to simultaneously present an hour of live television, featuring dozens of celebrities inviting the nation to reconceive high school. Over the following weeks, the collective partnered with the French artist JR to create two monumental pieces of guerrilla art on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border that went viral on social media as satirical critiques of the border wall. In October, she bought the second-largest stake — about 20 percent — in the estimated $2.5 billion holding company that owns the NBA’s Wizards, the NHL’s Capitals, Capital One Arena and several other sports ventures. The pace continued this year. In February, Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant announced he was committing $10 million to help create a Washington-area branch of a program that Powell Jobs had co-founded, which supports students to and through college in nine cities. In March, Emerson Collective helped bring director Alejandro Iñárritu’s shattering virtual-reality installation “Carne y Arena” — an immersive experience that simulates what it’s like for an immigrant to cross the border — to an abandoned church in Northeast Washington. She had our attention now — but what was she doing? Emerson Collective did not appear to conform to traditional models of philanthropy. Its worldview seemed more or less clear — center-left politics with a dash of techie libertarianism — but its grand plan was unstated while its methods of spurring social change implied that simply funding good works is no longer enough. The engine Powell Jobs had designed was equal parts think tank, foundation, venture capital fund, media baron, arts patron and activist hive. Certainly, it was an original creation — and potentially a powerful one. “I’d like us to be a place where great leaders want to come and try to do difficult things,” Powell Jobs told me recently. “I think we bring a lot more to the table than money. … If you want to just be a check writer, you’d run out of money and not solve anything.” Laurene Powell made her first foray into philanthropy near the beginning of high school in West Milford. She learned of the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center and dipped into her savings to send a cashier’s check of about $20. She got a form thank-you letter back from civil rights crusader Morris Dees. “They would reliably write to me a couple of times a year,” she says. “I would read them over and over, and they told really beautiful stories. I was always animated by the notion of who gets the opportunity and who doesn’t.” Her father was a Marine Corps pilot who was killed in an airborne collision when she was 3. Her mother was left with four children under the age of 6 and not much money. She scrambled for ways to make ends meet, setting an example of “work ethic and commitment to focusing on what you need to do to be successful or, in her case, to survive,” Laurene’s older brother Brad told me. Laurene and her three brothers — two older, one younger — always had jobs. The local paper route was passed down from one sibling to the next. There was no money for the family to travel, so Laurene collected stamps of countries she would like to visit someday. (Their mother later married a school guidance counselor, and Powell Jobs has a younger sister and three stepsiblings from that marriage.) “School was the thing that really worked for me,” she says. “I did well in school, and so it was a nice, positive, rewarding cycle for me to want to spend as much time there and to excel.” Fewer than half the students at her high school went on to college, according to Powell Jobs, but she and her brothers were determined. With student loans, multiple jobs, work-study and a small family commitment, she paid for enrollment in the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied economics, political science and French. “I know it in my core that, without that, I never would have had the opportunities that I have in my life,” she says. Education would become Emerson Collective’s seminal issue. “For the students who I work with, I understand that school is their way out,” she says. “It’s really their portal to anything larger than what they see around them. That was true for me.” After Penn, she landed a job as a quantitative analyst with the fixed-income trading department at Goldman Sachs. “She was one of those people who interfaced between the super geniuses and the guys like me who were more normal,” Jon Corzine, who ran the fixed-income division before going on to become governor of New Jersey, told me. In other words, she translated esoteric research into strategies that traders and clients could use. “She was just a strong personality on the floor, because of her intelligence and her ability to relate to people.” At a time when there weren’t many women on the trading floor, Corzine says, she was one of a few “pioneers … who were prepared to deal courageously with a world that wasn’t always trying to assess people on the quality of their minds and performance.” She loved the work but left within a few years; wanting to be an entrepreneur, she applied to the Stanford Graduate School of Business. One evening in October 1989, she and a fellow business school student arrived late for a guest lecture where nearly all the seats were taken. They sat in the aisle, then grabbed seats in the front row. The guest lecturer was led to the seat beside her. “I looked to my right, and there was a beautiful girl there, so we started chatting while I was waiting to be introduced,” Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. It had been Laurene’s friend’s idea to come to the lecture in the first place. “I knew that Steve Jobs was the speaker, but the face I thought of was that of Bill Gates,” she told Isaacson. “I had them mixed up.” After the lecture, Jobs invited her to dinner. They walked to a vegetarian restaurant in Palo Alto and stayed for four hours. In March 1991, when he was 36 and she was 27, they were married in a historic lodge in Yosemite National Park. “Steve and I were together for 22 years starting from the day we met and never apart,” she told me. “And it’s the greatest blessing of my life.” Emerson Collective’s headquarters occupies three floors of a building on a corner in Palo Alto. The walls carry prints such as Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” plus edgier fare such as Adam Pendleton’s room-length collage mural inspired by Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech. On a recent Monday, employees had flown in from across the country for a periodic day of all-hands meetings, when grants, investments, campaigns and strategies would be reviewed. The hushed hum of exam day prevailed. Powell Jobs and I talked the next day in a conference room, where she explained how the collective, which has about 130 employees, works. “Really important is to be very, very close to the individuals, families and communities that we’re hoping to serve,” she said. “If we’re not listening to them, if we’re not thinking of how do we equip them with the tools to solve their own problems, if we don’t understand that actually the wisdom of the community far surpasses our own, then we’re in the wrong business. If people are in this building for more than a few days in a row and not out in the field, then we need to check each other.” “There’s a sense here that failure is not the death knell, that it actually can be a badge of honor and a learning experience,” she continued. “All of our country would benefit from having that attitude towards failure.” She set up the collective as a limited liability company rather than a foundation, not unlike the three-year-old Chan Zuckerberg Initiative established by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. This gives flexibility to do more than just make grants to nonprofit groups. “When philanthropists are engaged in the type of system change that Laurene is,” Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, a venture philanthropy expert at Stanford and a friend of Powell Jobs’s, told me later, “you have to be as nimble as possible because ecosystems are constantly shifting, stakeholders are developing new positions on particular issues, political contexts change, economic forces evolve.” Emerson invests in private companies, Powell Jobs said, not because the goal is to make money but because Silicon Valley has shown her that “amazing entrepreneurs who … are 100 percent aligned with our mission” can find solutions that might not occur to a nonprofit. Emerson is also able to back advocacy groups, launch its own activist campaigns and contribute to political organizations. It has given $2.6 million at the federal level since 2013, primarily to Emerge America, dedicated to recruiting Democratic women candidates, and to Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC. Powell Jobs herself is a registered independent and has made about $4 million in federal campaign contributions since 1997, mainly to Democratic candidates and organizations in line with issues of concern to Emerson. The LLC structure also means Emerson need not disclose details of its assets and spending. “The majority of her philanthropy, no one knows about,” Arrillaga-Andreessen said. However, a tax filing Powell Jobs signed last fall offers a clue to the scale, showing that a related entity called the Emerson Collective Foundation began 2017 with $1.2 billion available, largely from Disney stocks and bonds, a fruit of Steve Jobs’s sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006. For the crew Powell Jobs has assembled, being tapped to join the collective was like being called to a mission. In early 2016, shortly after he had left the Obama administration, Arne Duncan mentioned to Powell Jobs his idea for a novel experiment to confront the gun carnage in his home town of Chicago. “I said that I can’t guarantee you that I’ll be successful — I may fail,” Duncan recalled to me. “She said basically, ‘I want to take on some of society’s most in­trac­table problems for the next 25 years and then pass the torch to someone else. So why don’t I support you in that work?’ … I think she was actually attracted to the level of difficulty.” From his think tank perch in the immigration reform movement, Marshall Fitz watched Emerson coming over the horizon with surprise. “The common kind of question that is asked out in Silicon Valley and certainly asked at Emerson is, ‘What if?’ ” he told me. “As a D.C. policy-wonk guy, we never asked that question because, one, we rarely had the resources or the time and space to ask the question. Because of the culture, rarely do you have the creativity to think fully outside the box in a way that she was clearly already bringing to the table.” To make sure Emerson is thinking as audaciously as the entrepreneurs all around it, Powell Jobs will go on “tech tours” with her friend Ron Conway, the legendary Silicon Valley angel investor. They visit the next big things in the area, as they did Pinterest, Facebook and Airbnb before they were all that. “What’s fascinating is that by listening to all these founders, she has basically put founders at the head of each of the sectors of Emerson Collective, so that she’s really funding entrepreneurs inside the collective who want to disrupt their spaces,” Conway told me. “She wants people to innovate in their sector — education reform, getting the Dream Act passed. So Emerson has become like an accelerator for causes around social change.” In the mid-1990s, Powell Jobs began tutoring 12th-graders in a nearby high school. Many of them would be the first in their families to go to college — if they could get there. Filled with racial, ethnic and class tension, the school happened to have been the setting for “Dangerous Minds,” the 1995 film starring Michelle Pfeiffer. “We found such a failed system,” Powell Jobs explained later to a lecture hall full of Stanford students, where this time she was the honored speaker. “It needed the type of entre­pre­neur­ship and problem solving that I was doing in the for-profit space and that I thought was a higher and better use of my life to do in the social sector.” She and her friend and fellow tutor, Carlos Watson, who would go on to co-create OZY Media, co-founded College Track in the struggling community of East Palo Alto in 1997. Their central insight, which might seem obvious now but wasn’t then, is that students without resources or a family tradition of higher education need support that other families take for granted: how to believe in yourself, how to find your voice and tap your passion, how to write an application essay, how to assemble loans and scholarships. Now in nine cities — Durant’s branch in Prince George’s will be the 10th, and two are planned for the District — the program follows students for 10 years, starting in ninth grade and for six years after high school, if needed to graduate from college. Powell Jobs continues to personally mentor students during the transition from high school to college. To her students, she was and is “Laurene,” not the wife or widow of someone big. “I didn’t learn who Laurene really was until I was about to graduate from college, six years after I met her,” one of Powell Jobs’s mentees named Mayra told me. Now 32, she is an undocumented immigrant brought from Mexico as a child, and she asked that her last name not be published because President Trump has ordered the cancellation of the program that protects her and other “dreamers” from deportation. She went on to graduate school and now works in public health in the Bay Area. Mayra’s immigration status is an important detail in this story. She entered College Track in 2001. The first time she ever disclosed her status was in the college application essay she worked on with Powell Jobs. This was around when Powell Jobs discovered the issue of undocumented immigrants, as the first class of College Track kids was applying to college. Despite knowing no other country but America, they could be denied financial aid and the ability to work. Powell Jobs naively thought it was just an absurd glitch in the system that would be quickly fixed once politicians heard about it. “I didn’t know that there was another side to the argument,” she told me. “I still do not think there is.” She became an advocate for immigration reform and began seeking ways to influence that debate. This is how the moving parts in her machine for making change became more intricate, with one issue leading to another. “If we actually want to be helpful to the individual and their family, we can’t just focus on education, we have to focus on the whole ecosystem so that they can live much more healthy, productive lives where they are,” she says. “Every single community that we work with in College Track is dealing with some issue on the spectrum of serious, poisonous, toxic environmental issues in their air, water and soil. I thought for a long time we’d like to have a practice around that, but it wasn’t until I found the right people that we started building it out.” This period in the late 1990s and early 2000s coincided with Steve Jobs driving Apple toward a series of innovations, including the Apple Store, iTunes and the iPod. And he supported his wife’s own innovations. “He loved the work of College Track,” Powell Jobs says. “And he was as offended by the dreamers’ situation as I was. He felt like these things were no-brainers. … And he was equally frustrated that the schools deliver very different education across the country.” Their own children biked to the public schools in Palo Alto. The family lived in a house like all the others on a regular street, not in a gated community. Steve Jobs’s cancer was diagnosed in 2003. Powell Jobs is frank about the pain of “losing my husband and life partner — seeing him through a terrible illness, then losing him and raising my kids as a single mom. And in doing it, dealing with the public in that way. Having to grieve but also manage the public grieving, and buttress my kids as they managed the same thing.” She told me the experience may well inform her in her current efforts: “There are a lot of people who have experienced loss and suffering, but sometimes they haven’t done the work to allow them to connect to someone else’s loss and suffering.” Even when the couple knew there would soon come a time when Laurene would have a whole lot of money to spend as she saw fit, they didn’t talk much about how she would go about it. Steve left it to her to design that future. “He had a lot of faith in me, and he definitely believed I could figure out many things,” she says. She remains in close touch with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. “She deeply understands Apple,” Cook told me. “She’s one of my most trusted advisers,” on subjects such as privacy, immigration and education. “She takes on these fairly multidimensional, complex issues and sort of unpeels them layer by layer, and I think has positioned Emerson really well to make a huge difference in the world.” The recent dramatic pickup of Emerson’s activity coincides with Powell Jobs’s youngest child having left for college. “The ambition has been there for a long time,” she says, “and only now it’s more and more possible to work in this way.” “I’m very aware of the fact that we’re all just passing through here,” she adds. “I feel like I’m hitting my stride now. … Change doesn’t happen quickly. It happens slowly, slowly, and then all at once. Sometimes that’s 10 years, sometimes it’s 20 years, and sometimes you don’t live to see it. … It is my goal to effectively deploy resources. If there’s nothing left when I die, that’s just fine.” n 2013 Powell Jobs commissioned documentarian Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “He Named Me Malala”) to make a film called “The Dream Is Now” about dreamers hoping to build lives in this country. She wanted it done in a matter of months to have a timely influence on the political debate. It was typical of Emerson Collective’s approach to issues. Alongside the usual tools of polling and policy advocacy, it will create, say, an “immigration innovation incubator” to foster tech solutions, and it will enlist artists and storytellers to appeal to the public on alternative channels. “She was very involved in helping us pick who we should follow, how we should frame the issue,” Guggenheim told me. “We talk a lot about changing hearts and minds, about engaging people and telling stories that break through. … She is very focused on how do we tell stories that can change hearts and minds.” Immigration is perhaps the most partisan fight into which she is pushing a stack of her billions of chips, on behalf of those who see the issue the way she does. On the other side is a countervailing apparatus of funders, thinkers and advocates pushing for tighter borders, fewer legal immigrants and more deportations. Since she entered the fray in 2001, her opponents have won nearly every battle in Washington, so she is turning her tactics away from the capital. “We’re looking for ways to activate people around the country, so that they can understand what’s at stake,” she says. “So that they can start building a chorus that Congress can’t ignore.” Her strategy on education policy has been similarly novel. The long list of storytellers in acting and song who participated in last fall’s prime-time education reform special — from Tom Hanks and Viola Davis to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Andra Day — did a good job of selling Emerson’s approach to reimagining high school. The XQ Institute, Emerson’s independent education arm, has pledged $115 million to 18 schools across the country pursuing their own innovative approaches, including Washington Leadership Academy, a tech-focused public charter in the District. Without prescribing exact models, the group wants schools to focus on the competence a student achieves in a given subject more than the number of hours she sits in that class. There’s an emphasis on knowledge relevant to employers of the future. However, some reviews of the televised special were skeptical: “Encouraging such tinkering is a fine use of philanthropic dollars,” Jack Schneider, assistant professor of education at College of the Holy Cross, wrote in The Washington Post. “But that isn’t what the XQ project is promoting. Instead, it is publicizing a historically uninformed message that today’s technologies demand something new of us as human beings and that our unchanging high schools are failing at the task.” Either way, the dollars will continue to flow toward Powell Jobs’s vision of immigration and education reform. On all her issues, as she masters the eclectic levers of influence she is fashioning to her ends, she has the resources to sway the debate in a way that some might question — but few can match. The most effective way to create change in this country is to build a grass-roots movement, a national outcry that is so loud and so powerful that our leaders cannot ignore it. Laurene Powell Jobs And yet, Powell Jobs herself is content to melt into the background. One night at the Inner-City Muslim Action Network on the South Side of Chicago, for the benefit of some visitors including the Chicago-raised rapper Common and me, young men told stories of why they joined Emerson’s anti-violence program called Chicago CRED. Deontae Allison, 22, who would receive his high school equivalency diploma the next day, said he has been shot 13 times. “I went through the negative life. I’m trying to see what a positive life is now.” Old associates on the streets can’t believe that, at CRED, Allison consorts with men from bitterly rival neighborhoods. “Now we look at each other as brothers,” he told me later. A young man in a White Sox hat training to be an electrician said: “Last month I lost my father to gun violence. I lost a lot of friends to gun violence, close friends, people I used to run with, three of them died. This program makes you want to wake up the next day.” Run by Arne Duncan, CRED stands for Creating Real Economic Destiny. It starts with the market-based belief that young men will enter the productive legal economy from the drug trade and other criminal street commerce if they have a chance at a decent job and wage. Half a dozen cohorts of up to 30 men in different sections of the city report every day to centers where they learn trades while being paid up to $12.50 an hour. Even more important, they can study for high school equivalency diplomas, receive counseling for emotional trauma, get mentoring from life coaches and write illustrated memoirs that are published as books. It’s not giving them a “second chance,” Duncan says. “For a lot of guys, we’re giving them a first chance they’ve never had.” There’s a waiting list of more than 100 to enroll. That night at the Muslim action network, after several of the young men told their stories, case manager Billy Moore spoke up. He was responsible for a notorious killing in Chicago. In 1984, at the age of 16, he shot and killed high school basketball hero Ben Wilson and served nearly 20 years in prison. Now he uses his example as a lesson to the young men. “You can’t measure the success of a conversation,” he said. Recently Moore’s own son was shot to death. “I’m so committed to my mission in life right now that if the young man who killed my son walked through the doors and asked to be a part of this program,” he said, “then I would sign up to be his case worker, so I could change his life.” Afterward Powell Jobs exchanged small talk with the men, some of whom have gotten to know her, but she made no formal remarks on this evening nor the next day at the graduation ceremony where, in contrast, a corporate co-sponsor took the opportunity to make a speech. Neither she nor Emerson were mentioned from the podium or in the program. “She blends in with the crowd, yet she’s probably the most powerful woman in the world,” Moore said. “My father told me a long time ago you can know a man’s true character when you give him unquestioned power. She has power. You can see her true character is being a humble woman. She don’t use her power to steal attention from what’s going on.” Rami Nashashibi, executive director of the Muslim network, told me he has seen too many “great-white-hope-syndrome programs with this idea of we’re going to, quote unquote, save some black and brown kids, feel good about ourselves, and the money may or may not be here in three years.” Rarely do they acknowledge the bigger picture of structural racism and systemic oppression layered into the history of every block where these young men come from. Powell Jobs “believes in a bigger picture and was able to connect dots,” Nashashibi said. “A philanthropist on her level can really just do a lot of that from a comfortable distance and not want to come and have a whole bunch of conversations, and not dictate and drive. She’s willing and eager just to be an active participant in the space.” Learn more at Washington Post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531524953476-O3SD69MWVYUKX6BVZ2IR/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.35.36+PM.png women - Spain’s New Cabinet is Majority Female. Here’s Why That’s Unusual. This week, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez made history by appointing 11 female cabinet members, out of 16. The country’s new Socialist government is the first to boast a cabinet of more women than men. Socialist spokesman Ander Gil told reporters that the cabinet configuration “complies with the word given by the prime minister, with women and men with long and prestigious careers.” “This is a responsible government that represents very well the talent and the future of Spain,” he told La Sexta TV. Sánchez’s cabinet is unusual in Spain and around the world. Here’s why: • Women hold just 23 percent of the seats in national parliaments, up from 11 percent in 1995. • According to a 2017 United Nations study, women make up less than 10 percent of elected parliaments in nearly 40 percent of countries. • In four countries, no women hold national office. • There are fewer than 30 female heads of state and heads of government, and women don’t fare any better when it comes to cabinet positions. In 2017, 18 percent of all cabinet ministers were women. This phenomenon also plays out in the United States where female representation is lacking across the board. More than 100 countries have more women in their legislatures than the U.S. One challenge is that the U.S. boasts relatively strong incumbency rates. Nearly 90 percent of congressmen run for reelection, and nearly all of them win — meaning it’s harder to replace men with women. As Vox explained — citing research from the Inter-Parliamentary Union — American women are less likely to run for office than women in other countries: Women consistently underestimated their qualifications and perceived themselves differently than men who had nearly identical credentials. Women were also more likely to perceive campaigning as harder and were less likely to have anyone — whether a friend or a party official — encourage them to pursue political office. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Lawless and Fox’s study is this: Potential women candidates were 15 times more likely than men to be responsible for the majority of child care, and six times more likely to manage most housework. With those kinds of obligations, who has the time to run for office? Twenty-two percent of Trump’s senior-level Cabinet jobs are held by women, which is a slight departure from the Cabinet of President Barack Obama, where one-third of those seats were filled by women. Learn more at The Lily https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531525075942-3ABPHTXGO8K9NRFI4PLK/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.37.32+PM.png women - Not One Woman Made This Year’s Forbes ‘100 Highest-Paid Athletes’ List Forbes has just released its annual list of the top 100 highest paid athletes in the world, and for the first time, it doesn’t include any women. Tennis legend Serena Williams was the only female on the list last year, ranking No. 51 with $27 million in earnings. But Williams took an absence from the sport to have a child, so her earnings weren’t enough to make this year’s list. “Williams remained engaged with her partners during the year and banked an estimated $18 million off the court from sponsors Nike, Wilson, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Lincoln, Gatorade, Beats, and more,” Kurt Badenhausen, a senior editor at Forbes said, “but it wasn’t enough to crack the top 100.” In recent years, tennis stars Maria Sharapova and Li Na have made the list, but Li retired in 2014 and Sharapova was suspended for 15 months for using a banned substance. Forbes compiled the list by adding all prize money, salaries, bonuses, and endorsement deals earned between June 1, 2017 and June 1, 2018. The No.1 athlete on the list, retired boxer Floyd Mayweather, crushed the competition by making $285 million — more than the No. 2 and No. 3 athletes on the list combined. Nearly all of his 2018 income came from a single 36-minute fight against UFC’s Conor McGregor. McGregor also made this list at No. 4, raking in $99 million. The absence of any women on the list is made worse by the inclusion of Mayweather at the top. He has a long and disturbing history of physically abusing women. As the #MeToo movement has slowly turned the tide against serial abusers, Mayweather’s continued success serves as a reminder for the world of sports. According to Forbes, the lack of women on the list has a lot to do with the growing popularity of team sports and related licensing deals as opposed to individual sports, such as golf and tennis, where women having typically earned more endorsements. “Athletes in team sports make up 82% of the list,” Forbes said. “Salaries in team sports have exploded over the past 25 years as media companies spent billions on TV deals for live sports content.” But sexism can also explain some of the wage gap as well. The U.S. women’s national soccer team, which generates more revenue than the men’s squad, has recently filed a wage-discrimination complaint against U.S. Soccer in 2016, with claims of being paid one-quarter of what the men make. In the world of basketball, NBA players are paid about 50% of the league revenue, whereas WNBA players only receive about 33%. “It’s tempting to assume that when we account for the revenue disparity between the NBA and WNBA, the gender wage gap disappears,” David Berri at Vice Sports writes. “Unfortunately, that seems to run counter to the data. Even when we consider differences in revenue, there remains a significant gap between the wages paid to WNBA players and their NBA counterparts.” Learn more at Good Sports https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531525414983-7BXZEVYX0EUHY2JH5761/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+4.42.08+PM.png women - Saudi Arabia Has Started Giving Driving Licenses to Women, but Some Who Campaigned to Drive are in Jail Saudi Arabia has issued the first driving licenses to women in decades, even as prominent advocates for giving women the right to drive in the conservative kingdom have been arrested and labeled as “traitors” by government-backed media. Ten women who already had valid driving licenses from other countries were allowed to trade them in for Saudi ones Monday after undergoing brief tests at the General Traffic Department in the capital, Riyadh, and other cities, the government said in a statement. But they won’t be able to use the new licenses until June 24, when all women can begin applying for them. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that does not currently permit women to drive, a policy that has long been a source of international condemnation. Although there is no law barring women from driving, no licenses have been issued to them in more than 50 years, forcing women to rely on chauffeurs and taxis or male relatives with vehicles. The lifting of the de facto ban, announced in September, has been one of the most eagerly anticipated reforms in Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has championed sweeping changes intended to modernize the country and create job opportunities for a mostly young population. But the uproar over the recent arrests threatens to eclipse any public relations benefits from allowing women to drive. “It’s absolutely welcomed that the authorities have begun issuing driving licenses to women,” said Samah Hadid, who directs campaigns in the Middle East for the London-based human rights group Amnesty International. “But unfortunately this comes at a price where the very women who campaigned for the right to drive are behind bars instead of behind the wheel.” Rothna Begum, a women's rights researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch, dismissed Monday’s event as a publicity stunt intended to deflect criticism. “Now we have videos of traffic police handing over these driver’s licenses to divert the world’s attention from the fact that the women who were actually behind championing the cause … are not only in prison but have been charged and potentially face very, very long sentences,” she said. At least 17 people were arrested on suspicion of trying to undermine the kingdom’s security and stability, a case that human rights groups said has primarily targeted individuals who advocated for women’s rights. They include activists who were arrested before for defying the ban on women driving and also campaigned for the lifting of restrictions requiring women to obtain the permission of a male guardian before marrying, traveling abroad or getting released from prison. Eight were temporarily released, pending the completion of a procedural review, the Saudi Public Prosecutor's Office said in a statement Sunday. Nine others — four women and five men — remain in custody and face possible trial. The detainees were said to have admitted to serious charges, including communicating and cooperating with individuals and organizations “hostile to the kingdom,” recruiting “persons in a sensitive government entity to obtain confidential information and official documents to harm the higher interests of the kingdom” and providing financial and moral support to “hostile elements abroad.” Activists convicted on similar charges are serving between eight and 10 years in prison, Begum said. Saudi prosecutors did not publicly identify the suspects who remain in custody. But Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said they include three women who are among the most well-known proponents for allowing everyone to drive: Loujain Hathloul, Aziza Yousef and Eman Nafjan. State-backed media accused the detainees of betraying their country and acting as “agents of embassies.” One pro-government Twitter account posted images of some of them with the word “traitor” written in red across their faces. Activists said their treatment shows that for all the social and economic reforms in Saudi Arabia, there is still no tolerance for criticizing the monarchy or advocating for more change. “This is a kingdom that bans protests, that bans independent human rights organizations and trade unions,” Begum said. “This has not changed under Mohammed bin Salman. If anything, since his ascent to power, the situation has become more repressive for human rights defenders.” Even some supporters of the crown prince suggested that the government may have erred in arresting the women. “My understanding is that they broke the law technically in something they did, which was not really directly related to their activism,” said Ali Shihabi, founder of the Washington-based Arabia Foundation. “But I still think that this was maybe an overreaction.” He said the 32-year-old prince has done more than any king in the last 50 years to advance women’s rights in Saudi Arabia — an effort that has required him to push back against a “very strong, conservative, reactionary part of society that has been resisting these changes for decades.” Shihabi said officials may have wanted to show that they aren’t cracking down only on conservative clerics and their supporters, who have also faced arrest in recent years. “The government is very nervous [about] balancing different elements of society as it’s pushing for disruptive change,” he said. At the same time, he added, the government does not want to be seen as implementing a “Western agenda.” “Because these women are so Western and liberal, and they are being feted in the West … they help give meat to that narrative with Saudi conservative public opinion,” Shihabi said. “In the view of the crown prince, this is in the interests of Saudi Arabia. It’s not because Uncle Sam has asked him to do this.” Learn more at L.A. Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531528558357-03C0JA0EZFIUV99UCNPR/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+5.26.36+PM.png women - All-Male Job Shortlists Banned By Accountancy Giant PwC Accountancy giant PwC has banned all-male shortlists for jobs in the UK in an attempt to increase the number of women in senior roles at the firm. It said the move was prompted by its recent pay gap report showing men on average earned 43.8% more than women. The company said recruitment was one of the areas it was looking at as a way to narrow the gap. PwC also plans to ban all-male interview panels and examine how "career defining roles" are awarded. Making sure that "everybody in the firm" had access to important career opportunities such as working on big projects or for well known clients, would be "a real game changer", said PwC's chief people officer Laura Hinton. She said the move was part of the firm's wider plan to improve the diversity of its workforce, which includes looking at the attitude of senior management. It also has a returnship programme, which encourages those who have taken a break from work, such as maternity leave, to do six months paid work experience. The company has also started to allocate "progression coaches" - usually partners - who will work with women and ethnic minorities employees to help develop their careers. The Daily Mail, which first reported PwC's decision, said it was the first of the big four accountancy firms to ban all-male shortlists. 'More common' Jill Miller, policy adviser at the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD), said it did not have data on the number of firms which had banned all-male shortlists for jobs, but said it was becoming "more common". She said new rules forcing firms to publish their gender pay gaps had increased transparency and focused leaders' attention on how to improve the figures. However, many firms were failing to exploit the data they had on their workforce, she said, such as when and why women were leaving the firm. "It's important to look at as wide a talent pool as possible. Overall it's about levelling the playing field and getting best person for the job." PwC's decision comes amid a furore over diversity at the Bank of England, which recently appointed a male economist to its rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee despite a shortlist of four women and one man. The Treasury said the role had been awarded on merit. Ms Hinton said that hiring diverse people at a senior level was "a real challenge" because candidates tended to be "disproportionately male". Improving diversity at graduate and school-leaver levels was easier because the firm had more control, she said. For example, it had found that male graduates tended to apply for graduate placements earlier on in their university career. As a result, rather than filling up their assessment centres on a first-come first-served basis, it makes sure each centre has a 50/50 split between male and female applicants. "Little things like that can stack up against women," she said. "The challenge is making sure that at every stage in the process we are saying yes to get the right person and not excluding. The objective is to keep pushing and to encourage others to do the same." Learn more at BBC https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531528654857-QPR5R68WJPG6DGYZRIWE/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+5.37.17+PM.png women - Women Lead L.A.: Activating Women to Collaborate, Lead, and Make Positive Change What does your organization do? VoteRunLead trains diverse women to unleash their political power, run for office, and transform American democracy – all through award-winning programs, online tech, and by inspiring community. Please describe the activation your organization seeks to launch. VoteRunLead is an expert at building independent political power and grassroots movements at the local level. Through the LA2050 Activation Challenge, we aim to train at least 10,000 women by 2020 through online and in-person events, helping to motivate underrepresented leaders, and ultimately ushering at least 50 women to run for offices in L.A. County by 2020. Women not running will also catalyze positive change by voting, speaking out on issues, and organizing their communities. Which of the CONNECT metrics will your activation impact? Government responsiveness to residents’ needs Participation in neighborhood councils Voting rates Will your proposal impact any other LA2050 goal categories? LA is the best place to LEARN LA is the best place to CREATE LA is the best place to PLAY LA is the healthiest place to LIVE In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working? County of Los Angeles How will your activation mobilize Angelenos? Advocate for policy Digital organizing or activism Trainings and/or in-person engagements Create new tools or technologies for greater civic/political engagement Increase participation in political processes Influence individual behavior Describe in greater detail how your activation will make LA the best place to CONNECT? A recent poll showed that LA is one of VoteRunLead’s “hotspots,” with a huge demand for our trainings coming from LA County. With relatively low voter turnout and a city council that is 77 percent men, LA is an ideal location to connect and engage through civic participation and women’s leadership training. VoteRunLead would be honored to help residents connect through our tried-and-true strategies: In-Person Trainings and Engagements. Our signature training, called “Run As You Are,” is a six-point curriculum covering key ways for women to develop and execute their public leadership skills, including 1) Confidence & Qualifications; 2) Campaigns & Elections; 3) Government & Civic Literacy; 4) Practice & Feedback Cycles; 5) People & Networks; and 6) Reputation & Impact. Evaluations of these award-winning trainings show that women emerge with greater knowledge and confidence, committed to the path to lead. Digital organizing and activism. VoteRunLead’s online trainings and workshops provide an opportunity for leaders to learn from anywhere, on their own schedules. In 2017, 6500+ views of our curriculum demonstrate that women are willing to partake in online experiences, and our social media network of nearly 20,000 individuals is active, engaged, and supportive. Increasing participation in political processes. VoteRunLead targets women to run for office between now and 2020; specifically, those who are underrepresented: women of color, younger women, women with lower incomes – and they are eager to lead. Our data shows that our trainings are effective: In November 2017 elections, we had 49 women on the ballots across the country (a similar organization, 6x the size of VoteRunLead, had 55 women running). Nearly 70% of our candidates won their elections, including 70% of first-time candidates (statistics show that usually, first-timers win 10% of the time) and 39% were women of color. And, even if trainees don’t run, they vote. Advocating for policy. Studies show women are more likely than men to pass a bill and work in a bipartisan manner. Our alumnae pass pay equity bills, bring long-ignored issues to the fore, and advocate for vulnerable populations. Nonpartisan VoteRunLead welcomes women of all backgrounds and beliefs, speaking to all parties and millennials who often claim no party affiliation. VoteRunLead creates new tools and technologies for greater civic/political engagement. As mentioned above, VoteRunLead has an engaged online community and aims to expand online tools. Influencing individual behavior. VoteRunLead’s message of empowerment and collaboration impacts women not only on a systemic level, but also on an individual one, which opens new doors in their everyday lives. Through this work, VoteRunLead will deliver specifically on the LA2050 metric to increase participation in neighborhood councils, training and propelling women into office to create a more responsive governance that addresses residents’ needs. How will your activation engage Angelenos to make LA the best place to CONNECT Since its inception in 2014, VoteRunLead has maintained a population of trainees that is at least 60 percent women of color, with approximately 25 percent coming from lower-income households and 30 percent of our trainees starting their leadership trainings with us at age 35 or younger. No other leadership training organization for women is so diverse or so intent on finding and connecting the untapped, unheard voices that are so necessary to making our democracy an inclusive, effective one. Moving forward, VoteRunLead will continue our commitment to diversity and inclusion, ensuring that the next waves of leaders are truly representative of the population. To do so, we will continue the strategies and tactics that have been so effective to date, partnering with like-minded organizations that focus on recruitment of diverse voices, such as Higher Heights, IGNITE, 9 to 5 Working Women, Gamma Phi Delta sorority, MomsRising.org, and more. We will also bring in additional partners to reach women from different backgrounds, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and political affiliations, to bring the full perspectives and power of women leaders forward. Additionally, creative partnerships with corporations such as WeWork, wherein space is donated for trainings and workshops, connect VoteRunLead to reach entrepreneurs, movers, and shakers in communities across the country. Please explain how you will define and measure success for your activation. Measuring success through the following goals and outcomes, VoteRunLead will: VoteRunLead aims to tap into the potential of women in LA, across party lines, who are motivated to and ready to lead. By 2020 (during the grant term), the organization aims to: Train 1,000 women in LA through in-person trainings and workshops; Reach 9,000 women in LA through online experiences; Propel at least 50 women to run for office in their communities, whether through elections on the school board, city council, etc. and through appointed positions; Activate all women to step into their unique leadership roles in their communities, joining the ranks of motivated citizens who connect and improve their city and county; and Propel women into public leadership so that representation reflects the actual population (currently, 51 percent of the U.S. is women; about 40 percent are women of color, but approximately 80 percent of government is led by men, and they are overwhelmingly white men). We believe that our activation crosses over into the LEARN, PLAY, CREATE, and LIVE areas as well. Through VoteRunLead trainings, women are encouraged to articulate what they value and explore how they can realize those values in their communities. Thus, even if an alumna doesn’t run for office, she may take it upon herself to become an entrepreneur, engage with her child’s school, and/or advocate for green spaces and healthy environments. Where do you hope this activation or your organization will be in five years? In five years, VoteRunLead as an organization hopes to have trained more than 1.2 million women nationwide, with approximately 10,000 of them hailing from LA. We know this is possible, because the excitement and motivation are happening now, with no signs of slowing down. We cannot miss the opportunity to align our tools and training with the the enthusiasm women are showing through marches, protests, and social media movements! VoteRunLead has the expertise, the proven program, the team, and the model to activate the next wave of activated citizens. Ilhan Omar is a great example of who we attract and what we do. VoteRunLead was founded in Minnesota and works regularly there to provide trainings. Omar is currently a MN State Representative, who trained with VoteRunLead for years, solving work/life challenges as we provided scholarships and child care–because we know that’s what it takes for women to be able to run. With training, personal meetings with our experts, and our nationwide support network, Omar has become a nationally recognized leader, the first Somali-American legislator, and a trainer for VoteRunLead. We’re shifting the story that women cannot or should not lead, and making it possible for women to do so en masse. We would love to create this kind of success in LA. VoteRunLead is fortunate to have a growing media presence, supported by an active network of trainees, alumnae, and experts who live our message of empowerment and inclusivity. These women sit on school boards and in state houses across America, are racially and ethnically diverse, and come from both rural and urban areas. Recent media coverage includes: The aforementioned alumna Ilhan Omar, a former refugee, Muslim, and mother of three was profiled in Time magazine’s “Firsts” series. She was also featured by NPR, BBC, and NBC (all searchable online); VoteRunLead was recently featured in ABC’s Nightline; and Politico is talking about how VoteRunLead trainees are changing the game. Your support is critical in ensuring our success. We are nimble and tech-savvy, well-known for the racial and ethnic diversity of our leaders and alumnae. We have a proven curriculum, a track record of significant “wins,” a network of powerful individuals and partnerships, and an engaged, diverse group of 10,000+ new women ready to vote, run, and lead. We are eager to make a seismic impact on the political practice and policies in LA, to include all voices and create equal opportunity. Yet we need innovative opportunities such as LA2050 in order to make this happen. This is not a moment, it’s a movement. It leads the way for generations of women and girls who will be civically minded and politically active, and this movement includes all of us. We are ready to activate LA! Learn more at LA 2050 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531528794334-CWBY42JTT4VXZ8ULB4ID/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+5.39.34+PM.png women - Women Experience More Incivility at Work — Especially from Other Women Most employees, at one point or another, have been the victim of incivility at work. Ranging from snarky comments or rude interruptions to being disrespected in a brusque email, organizations can be breeding grounds for this type of behavior. Compared to more egregious forms of workplace mistreatment like sexual harassment, incivility — which is classified as low-intensity deviance at work — may seem minor. Yet, the costs of incivility can add up. Estimates from a large-scale study indicated some astounding statistics: in response to incivility experiences, 48% of employees intentionally decreased their work effort, 47% intentionally decreased their time at work, and 38% internationally decreased the level of quality in their work. Even more shocking, 80% of employees indicated that they lost time at work due to merely ruminating about experienced incivility, with 66% indicating that their performance declined, and 78% indicating that they lowered their commitment to their organization. The authors of this study also estimated that — due to cognitive distractions and time delays — the monetary cost of incivility can be upwards of $14,000 per employee. As such, there are financial and human well-being-related costs borne from exposure to incivility at work. One finding that has been frequently documented is that women tend to report experiencing more incivility at work than their male counterparts. However, it has been unclear to as to who is perpetrating the mistreatment towards women at work. Some have theorized that men may be the culprits, as men are the more dominant social class in society and may feel as though they have the power to mistreat women. Perhaps as more overt forms of mistreatment like sexual harassment have become legally prohibited and socially taboo, subtle forms of discrimination in the form of incivility may increasingly occur within the workplace. Others, however, have theorized and suggested that women may be mistreating other womenbecause they are more likely to view each other as competition for advancement opportunities in companies. Our research examined these two opposing views by conducting three complementary studies. These studies involved rather large samples, surveying between 400 and over 600 U.S. employees per study, across a variety of service operations and time periods. In each study, we consistently found that women reported experiencing more incivility from other women than from their male coworkers. Examples of this incivility included being addressed in unprofessional terms, having derogatory comments directed toward them, being put down in a condescending way, and being ignored or excluded from professional camaraderie. This is not to say that men weren’t acting uncivilly; rather, the frequency was higher between women and their female counterparts. In addition, men didn’t seem to have differential experiences surrounding mistreatment — they experienced lower incivility than women overall, and reported fairly equal levels of incivility from both women and men. These findings were consistent even after accounting for the gender composition of the workplace and for personality traits — like how dispositionally negative and paranoid people in our samples typically were — that may increase the likelihood that individuals perceive mistreatment. The question, though, is why? Why would women be more susceptible to this treatment from other women? Our research suggests that when women acted more assertively at work — expressing opinions in meetings, assigning people to tasks, and taking charge — they were even more likely to report receiving uncivil treatment from other women at work. We suspect that it may be that women acting assertively contradicts the norms that women must be warm and nurturing rather than emphatic and dominant. This means that women who take charge at work may suffer backlash in the form of being interpersonally mistreated. It may also be the case that these assertive behaviors are viewed as ruthless by other women; given that women are more likely to compare themselves against each other, these behaviors may signal competition, eliciting incivility as a response. Men, however, don’t seem to have the same problems when they deviate from gender norms, at least in how other men respond to these exceptions. In our research, men who acted in a warm, nurturing manner tended to report lower instances of incivility from other men compared to those who reported lower levels of this kind of behavior at work. So, whereas women were seemingly penalized by their female counterparts for acting in a way inconsistent with gender norms, men received a social credit of sorts from their male peers. Society seems to be providing men with more latitude to deviate from societal expectations, whereas women aren’t afforded the same luxury. Lastly, we found that the effects of being the target of incivility took a toll on women’s well-being. We asked employees in one of our studies to report their job satisfaction at work over the last month; in another, we also assessed job satisfaction in addition to how alive and energetic employees felt and their intent to leave their current job. In response to being mistreated by their female counterparts, women reported lower job satisfaction, lower levels of vitality, and increased intentions to quit their job. Incivility directed from men did not garner these same results for women or for men in our studies. As such, incivility among women may be a unique experience that organizations should work towards addressing. How? Broadly, organizations should aim to cultivate cultures of civility with their employees and both teach and train civility at work. There is evidence, for example, that interventions aimed at increasing discussions surrounding the value of civility at work can be effective at reducing rates of mistreatment. Other options include employee-run resource groups or affinity groups for women, preferably sponsored by senior female leaders; or mentoring programs that pair aspiring women with female leaders. Employees and managers alike also need to treat issues associated with incivility seriously. There may be a tendency to shrug off these experiences, but doing so can perpetuate a negative cycle for employees and diminish the very real experiences women are having in the workplace. Managers and coworkers alike take accounts of incivility to heart to improve women’s experiences in the workplace. Research aside, it is important for people to analyze their own experiences and behaviors. Let’s be honest: there has probably been a time when we’ve all been rude at work. Maybe we were so busy we didn’t have time to be polite; maybe someone rubbed us the wrong way; or maybe we were just in a bad mood. Ultimately, when we are rude to our coworkers or our teammates, we harm them in the same way that these experiences can harm us. Being introspective and understanding our own experiences and actions can help make the workplace a more civil place, which ultimately makes it better for both women and men. Learn more at Harvard Business Review https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531528876827-8OK0QDXGDY8ZSZQS1749/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+5.41.01+PM.png women - 5 Things You Should Know About Pioneering Geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi Thursday’s Google Doodle celebrates pioneering geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi on what would have been her 98th birthday. Saruhashi’s groundbreaking research focused on acid rain, radioactivity spread through oceans, and CO2 levels in seawater. 1. Saruhashi broke many glass ceilings She was the first woman to earn a PhD in chemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1957, the first woman elected to the Science Council of Japan in 1980, and the first woman to win the Miyake Prize for geochemistry in 1985, an award named after her mentor, Miyake Yasuo. 2. To promote more women in the science, Saruhashi also started the Society of Japanese Women Scientists The mission of the society, established in 1958, is to have more women contributing to sciences and world peace. “There are many women who have the ability to become great scientists. I would like to see the day when women can contribute to science and technology on an equal footing with men,” she once said. 3. Saruhashi’s first major contribution to the field involved a methodology to determine CO2 levels in seawater She was the first to determine carbonic acid levels based on temperature, pH Level, and chlorinity. Today, oceanographers call this “Saruhashi’s Table”. 4. Saruhashi’s second major area of research was to quantify nuclear pollution caused by testing in the 1950s She measured the amount of radioactivity in seawater and found that fallout from U.S. atomic tests in the Marshall Islands in the 1950s reached Japan after about a year and a half. Her findings on how radioactivity spreads helped led to restrictions on oceanic nuclear experimentation in 1963. 5. In 1981, Saruhashi founded the Saruhashi Prize The Saruhashi Prize is an annual award to recognize the research contributions of female scientists. She died in 2007 of pneumonia. Google’s Doodle remembers Saruhashi with an illustration that depicts her with a clipboard in front of a turbulent blue sea. Learn more at Time https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531528967200-BRETQN4FBV2TMQ19F8BS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+5.42.31+PM.png women - This Map Shows When Female Workers in Each State Will Achieve Equal Pay Women in Florida may be the first in the U.S. to achieve paycheck parity in 2038, while those in Wyoming may be among the last to close the wage gap, not getting there until 2153. According to new research released today by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), there will be 13 states where movement in the gender wage gap is so slow that a woman born in 2017 will not see equal pay during her working life. Nationally, women averaged 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man in 2015. Julie Anderson, a senior research associate with IWPR, looked at Census data between 1959 and 2015 to track the differences in earnings between women and men who are employed full-time, year-round. Based on historical trends, the research paper predicts how long it will take for women in each state to earn as much as their male counterparts. The answer isn’t very optimistic—projections reveal just how lethargic change has been so far and how significant the variations are across state lines. If the current pace is to continue, the paper argues, it will take another 42 years until the country as a whole closes the wage gap in 2059. In four states—North Dakota, Louisiana, Utah, and Wyoming—pay equality won’t be achieved until the 22nd century. It’s important to note that the situation is far worse for women of color. If current trends continue, Anderson warns that black women will have to wait until 2124, while Hispanic women will not see pay equity for another 231 years—until 2248. Among the states that are the closest to ending wage inequality, the reasons aren’t uniform. For example, in Florida and Nevada, it’s not necessarily due to robust policies that bolster equal pay. Rather, it’s because men are setting a fairly low bar for earnings. “Women in states like Florida and Nevada earn somewhere in the middle when compared to other states, but men in those states earn near the bottom in relation to overall men’s earnings,” says Anderson. When it comes to other high-ranking states, like California and Maryland, we can see how current efforts will pay off in the future. These states, Anderson says, are working hard to pass policies like paid sick leave and medical leave that play a major role in keeping women in the workforce. California and Maryland are predicted to close the wage gap in 2043. The predominant industries and occupations within a state can also explain differences in earnings. States ranked at the bottom—Wyoming, Louisiana, and North Dakota—all have a very large share of men working energy and construction jobs. “These industries pay high wages, and employ very few women,” says Anderson. However, in states that employ a large number of government workers, such as Washington, D.C., there’s generally more transparency around things like promotion and hiring practices, which helps bridge the gap and boost equal pay, she adds. Could focusing on state-level data help us better understand what is causing wage gaps? Anderson thinks so. It paints a complicated picture, she says, but mapping “also points out different entry points for states to focus their efforts on if they want to address the problem.” Learn more at CityLab https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531529184337-1FAY9BH5X4W8KIXZT6NS/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+5.46.03+PM.png women - When Disease Strikes, Gender Matters Experts in Harvard Chan School discussion say research, treatment need to be more sensitive to differences between men and women. Much of how we attack serious illnesses like heart disease, depression, and Alzheimer’s has been informed by studies of men. And that approach misses important gender differences in how the diseases look, progress, and respond to treatment, according to panelists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “[We need] education and awareness on every level, with every sector,” said British Robinson, chief executive officer of the Women’s Heart Alliance. “We have to take a whole-systems approach. That system includes our medical and clinical systems, hospitals systems. It includes our physicians, our nurses, our community health workers.” Differences between men and women are particularly salient in diseases of the heart and brain, panelists said, including heart attack and heart failure, major depression — which occurs at double the rate in women — and Alzheimer’s disease, which strikes women more frequently than their longer average lifespans explain. More women experience heart attacks that have atypical symptoms, including heartburn, back pain, anxiousness, and fatigue. In addition, women tend toward smoother arterial plaque, which can make heart disease harder to diagnose through catheterization, panelists said. “They’re called ‘atypical’ because the ‘typical’ was defined on the male norm, and so when women present with burning or back pain or jaw pain they’re often triaged in a different way in the emergency room,” said Marjorie Jenkins, director of medical initiatives and scientific engagement for the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Women’s Health. “So a woman comes in. She’s anxious. She has heartburn. She has back pain. She’s questioned. She tells the doctor she’s tired. She’s really nervous. So the doctor thinks she’s having a panic attack or she’s depressed and therefore she gets medication for that. Those medications will not treat a heart attack. She needs to be screened for heart disease.” Harvard Medical School Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine Jill Goldstein, who heads the Women, Heart and Brain Global Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Ana Langer, a professor of the practice of public health and director of the Women and Health Initiative at Harvard Chan School, also participated in the discussion on Wednesday, “Heart and Brain Disease in Women: Sex and Gender Connections.” One opportunity for raising awareness is in research, panelists said, noting that before recent gains, women were underrepresented for decades. Even when women are included, data isn’t always analyzed by sex, missing an opportunity to tease out gender differences. “If we don’t get the data, we won’t know the answers,” Jenkins said. To truly understand gender disparities, researchers should design trials in a way that accounts for factors such as the natural ebb and flow of hormones, which Goldstein cited as a possible driver of differences. Studies also need to account for the influence of life stages such as puberty, pregnancy, and menopause, panelists said. Learn more at Harvard Gazette https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531545786082-VP05KB0OBJLGO6E86Y5A/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+10.22.51+PM.png women - Why Investor Jalak Jobanputra is Betting Big on Crypto When investor and entrepreneur Jalak Jobanputra first visited a blockchain conference five years ago she got goosebumps. The experienced investor had heard of cryptocurrencies but now that they had truly come into maturity she was excited. Now, five years later, she’s building her entire VC practice around blockchain and sees bright days ahead for the technology. Join us Jobanputra, the founder of FuturePerfect Ventures, as we talk about her take on crypto, the future of investment, and the direction she’s headed in terms of investment and startup innovation. Technotopia is a podcast by John Biggs about a better future. You can subscribe in Stitcher, RSS, or iTunes and listen the MP3 here. Read more at Tech Crunch https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1531545876501-FCIYY3R6R4RE3I10YIND/Screen+Shot+2018-07-13+at+10.24.21+PM.png women - There’s a True Story Behind Black Panther’s Strong Women. Here’s Why That Matters When Black Panther opened last weekend to record-breaking box office success, many of the viewers driving the film to that achievement were female moviegoers, who made up 45% of the audience. Though that number may defy conventional wisdom about superhero movies, it’s not so surprising given the actual plot of the movie. After all, as the University of Pennsylvania’s Salamishah Tillet noted for The Hollywood Reporter, the movie doesn’t just pass the Bechdel test — a measure of the substantiality of a film’s female characters — but “those scenes in which two or more women are talking to, disagreeing with, or fighting alongside each other without a man present are some of the movie’s most riveting ones.” But the strong women of Black Panther are more than just a potential inspiration to women in the audience today. They’re also a window into a true, if oft-forgotten, piece of history. In the film, the fictional Dora Milaje — “adored ones,” an all-female military group that protects the King and the fictional nation of Wakanda — are perhaps the most obvious example of female strength. The Dora Milaje were introduced in Black Panther comic by Christopher Priest, who took over as lead writer of the series in 1998; since the series’ relaunch in 2016, they’ve become much more central to the plot. (The title character, who was Marvel’s first African-American superhero, was created in 1966.) In their initial appearance, Priest’s narrator describes the female bodyguards as “Deadly Amazonian high school karate chicks,” who were also the King’s “wives-in training.” While many have speculated about the inspiration behind these warriors, it is clear that one of their main antecedents was the famous all-female African military corps of Dahomey, West Africa (now The Republic of Benin), whom the French dubbed “Dahomey Amazons” after female warriors in Greek mythology. Some experts believe that the first such regiment, which emerged sometime in the 17th century, comprised hunters called gbeto, while others contend they were recruited from among the King’s many wives. As Sylvia Serbin describes in The Women Soldiers of Dahomey, these warriors can be difficult to categorize, as their names were based on a woman’s weapons expertise and unit to which she was assigned. Whatever their origin, the King was always surrounded by armed women in public and private life. By the end of the 19th century an estimated 4,000 women, many of whom began their training as teens, were among the Dahomey military ranks. In times of war, during the transatlantic slave trade and in the fight against French colonialism, Dahomey female warriors “were the last line of defense between the enemy and the King,” writes Serbin, “and were prepared to sacrifice their lives to protect him.” Not only is this history clearly reflected in the fictionalized Wakanda, where Black Panther is set, but so is the idea of a political system wherein men and women control political institutions jointly. Though the nation has a King, he depends on the central female characters, played by Angela Bassett (mother/adviser to the King), Letitia Wright (Princess/lead scientist), Lupita Nyong’o (spy/insurrectionist), and Danai Gurira (adviser to the King/General of Dora Milaje). As numerous Africianist historians have attested, this system also shows up in the true history of pre-colonial African reality. For example, John Henrik Clarke explained in his essay on African Warrior Queens in Black Women of Antiquity, in the years before colonialism, “Africans had produced a way of life where men were secure enough to let women advance as far as their talents would take them.” European societies of the time were constructed differently, and men believed women were not intellectually capable of making political decisions. Even so, European women were viewed as virtuously superior to their foreign female counterparts. Consequently, notions of black female innate inferiority led to the creation of stereotypes — what scholars Patricia Morton and Patricia Hill Collins have called “disfigured images” and “controlling images,” respectively — that were used to justify oppression. From slavery to the present, black women have had to contend with four major stereotypes, which Collins identified in her classic book Black Feminist Thought. First, the Jezebel, the hyper-sexual woman who sought to corrupt the good morals of white men. Second, the Mammy, the dutiful caretaker who insured that everyone, white and black, adhered to the tenets of white supremacy. Third, the Matriarch, an ultra-domineering woman who terrorized her children and castrated her male partner. And fourth, the Welfare Mother (an update of the Jezebel), a woman with no work ethic or sexual morals, who has multiple children just to receive government assistance. Notably absent among those stereotypes is the idea of the righteous warrior. The Dora Milaje aren’t the only way in which Black Panther brings pre-colonial African ideas into modernity. As Nathan Connolly has written for The Hollywood Reporter, the movie contends with five centuries of imagining a world without a history of “environmental degradation, colonialism, cultural genocide or the elevation of white aesthetics to the exclusion of all else.” Part of the real work of creating such a world must begin with moving black women, in the words of bell hooks, “from margin to center,” and creating an aesthetics that challenges, refutes and destroys those stereotypical concepts of black womanhood. The importance of this achievement cannot be overstated. For black women and girls the world over, Wakanda represents a fictional world in which their natural beauty and intelligence are accepted norms of a society that values and affirms both their femininity and humanity. How much more significant, then, to know that this vision is based on reality. 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https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529473144253-G73DM31AATOC4NJA9QUV/civicas+copy.jpg Politics https://civicas.net/justice daily 0.75 2018-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529473083779-MS8C5I2UC13PC9413P50/civicas+copy.jpg Justice https://civicas.net/culture daily 0.75 2018-09-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529472914606-JOOX3K7X4U49KXCZDRVX/civicas+copy.jpg Culture https://civicas.net/environment daily 0.75 2019-01-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529473044974-R1TQ1IZ3CT5D4HF80RUC/civicas+copy.jpg Environment https://civicas.net/education daily 0.75 2018-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529473009270-PR4DNE20LN3580NGKR79/civicas+copy.jpg Education https://civicas.net/los-angeles daily 0.75 2018-08-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1529516291544-CVF7I7Z1OS09DC6NBR2O/civicas+copy.jpg Los Angeles https://civicas.net/membership daily 0.75 2022-12-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1593657120809-R7XA9AZTB24968G46VTB/civicas+logo.jpg Membership https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555394632888-APWSMP1OEJQAF226V0X3/2018-3-8%25252BCivicas%25252Bforum%25252B-%25252B68.jpg Membership WE ARE BUILDING A NETWORK OF WOMEN LEADERS PASSIONATE ABOUT CIVIC LIFE https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441496078-74VX97HMQO6QSBCKT2OE/calender-2389150_1280.jpg Membership Keep up to date and engage with fellow Civicas members by attending Civicas and community events listed on our Civic Calendar. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441527203-T4IEFX9XOH73K0RF7OK3/news-2389226_1280.jpg Membership Keep current and informed with curated Civic News and catalyze conversations with our monthly Civicas Review. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441613294-6NWEDJV52LO0GCC2G79U/folder-2389217_1280.jpg Membership Review our archive of Civic Resources including inspiring civic organizations. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441553362-EKWN7M147CQ75T6A52GJ/chat-2389223_1280.jpg Membership Connect with women leaders through our Membership Directory. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441589662-RKXZNM4BDLMDBZEJUUJ7/list-2389219_1280.jpg Membership Share your civic resources and projects with the Civicas network. Members have exclusive access to a password protected Membership Roster. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441453528-759V6LMQ9C1FEFWL8AJJ/open-2389230_1280city.jpg Membership Experience unique opportunities to connect with the City of Los Angeles. https://civicas.net/about-civicas daily 0.75 2019-04-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555016729602-LWYLIBXLA31TSBRGL3JK/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-02-21%2Bat%2B3.01.55%2BPM.jpg About Civicas https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555372434436-SC8TMULER42L79A5XKQ4/Civicas+Banner.png About Civicas https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555369880980-9KPIHWUT7WF0HGWVMUMK/2017-3-8+WCAN+event++-+05.jpg About Civicas https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555369881757-TNTCXVFA6Q2AVAB5PXAY/2017-3-8+WCAN+event++-+11.jpg About Civicas https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555369882646-4P4B1ZBRUYFU6TVK1XFM/2017-3-8+WCAN+event++-+16.jpg About Civicas https://civicas.net/contact-us daily 0.75 2020-11-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555442463161-HGSSE8V8UYVZJ2GUOM8Q/Screen+Shot+2019-02-21+at+3.01.55+PM.png Contact Civicas https://civicas.net/new-member-form daily 0.75 2023-04-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555373583628-X0H8R5AWF2HNU3LKS59I/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-02-21%2Bat%2B3.01.55%2BPM.jpg Member Form https://civicas.net/civicas-leadership daily 0.75 2021-02-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1550790215271-QXSJOF2RIUU6Q9990LXS/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-02-21%2Bat%2B3.01.55%2BPM.jpg Leadership Page https://civicas.net/civicas-archive daily 0.75 2024-11-26 https://civicas.net/covid-19-response daily 0.75 2020-03-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1585367884098-FJ06ONL1VZL74O7AB7UQ/civicas+logo+cropped.jpeg COVID-19 Response (Copy) https://civicas.net/covid19 daily 0.75 2021-04-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1591153583215-QN4EYVDNKL2LAFG7HSHV/unnamed.png COVID-19 https://civicas.net/social-justice daily 0.75 2021-10-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1591153193780-9ES2MIOKL5MF36DQI9NV/Civicas+Logo.jpg Social Justice https://civicas.net/civic-resources daily 0.75 2024-09-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1593656981069-BMLF88WJLDWT2K08Q44K/civicas+logo.jpg Civic Resources https://civicas.net/civic-health daily 0.75 2022-02-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1593658122839-IMKPCA2F9C2BEP2I8R35/civicas+logo.jpg Civic Health https://civicas.net/civic-space daily 0.75 2021-07-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1601920001657-TD7JTJRIQRLHMEJ7NYNM/civicas+logo.jpg Civic Space https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617221378429-UAPWA26EISIASYCYAAMI/la_alfresco_graphic_med.jpg Civic Space https://civicas.net/education-3 daily 0.75 2022-02-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1603716432622-0SC57RTOLQN92R7MYM3H/civicas+logo.jpg Education https://civicas.net/climate-change daily 0.75 2021-11-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1603736197342-KOI5AE1JMMRWOC9KT1GR/civicas+logo.jpg Climate Change https://civicas.net/holiday-party daily 0.75 2020-12-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1593657201137-XWPD5H622ATIWK8L89DR/civicas+logo.jpg Holiday Party (2020) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1606239966562-FJMM7BLDHVERS8II3PWW/Civicas+2020+Holiday+Party+Invitation.jpg Holiday Party (2020) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1607450800359-LGEE1H7VD2J2FKI4I238/Violet+Cheese+Fondue.jpg Holiday Party (2020) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1607406510599-IMTST2FLCFMITO0KACE0/image0.jpeg Holiday Party (2020) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1607322486976-WBE82DQB3M4HJTU5F0C4/Gluhwein+1.jpg Holiday Party (2020) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555542984604-2DJOH1J017JE0AE0UQXL/City+of+LA+Skyline+blue.png Holiday Party (2020) https://civicas.net/civicask daily 0.75 2023-08-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617297929171-LMGQXV10YWQZ8BX9N4ZY/civicas+logo+cropped.jpeg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617298054934-NWQEK3CK4F1LP61BYCRP/CivicASK+Network+Diagram+copy.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/7d4d4531-2ab2-45a2-bdfe-bd9bc0e58fb5/NRG+one+pager+6%3A15.jpeg CivicASK - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272918335-Y0PY5B6DFU661B7XZCU1/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+1.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272925540-DAA4JF2IUZTUAY9K4FH3/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+2.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272924621-1WSFPRLL2XO59RXDFS7M/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+3.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272924416-5CRXF4K7AC7K7DU3G1OW/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+4.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272923627-OZP8DVBQ237IAHVBTYHY/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+5.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272923359-R3M8HCMXBAZRPZ2IA7BD/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+6.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272922186-GACNL49DO1S5Q5Z7FC1O/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+7.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272922072-GCSVJ40JUMH1GRFH3Q3E/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+8.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272921080-7VQOTU14DF2S1XVJAK4K/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+9.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272920840-8OP9GMXMD7QFH57S4JQW/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+10.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272919617-1CGXNS481PNONVXG0F3N/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+11.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272919574-OS1L641VQOPG9QJXPTFM/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+12.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272918304-SHJP79XAMMZEDU6B5NAG/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+13.jpg CivicASK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/952ee7dd-f50b-4409-a09d-1420cc907eb5/El+Nido+pilot+resource+asks.jpeg CivicASK - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/9d0da826-474b-4a81-ba21-b5048c6bb1cc/NRG+deck+6-18+page+11.jpg CivicASK - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/a4aafc1d-1409-4b32-ae74-c0c8158b3f6f/NRG+process.jpg CivicASK - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://civicas.net/housingandhomelessness daily 0.75 2023-06-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1630412056711-3YLY18F7U2W5NF891ECF/civicas+logo+cropped.jpeg Housing & Homelessness - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1634181929214-5QDL2F1MLMDSMW2DAFC9/Civicas+Homlessness+Forum+Invitation.jpg Housing & Homelessness - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://civicas.net/new-member-form-old-with-link daily 0.75 2022-12-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555373583628-X0H8R5AWF2HNU3LKS59I/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-02-21%2Bat%2B3.01.55%2BPM.jpg New Member Form (old with link) https://civicas.net/membership-old-with-not-ready-member-form daily 0.75 2022-12-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1593657120809-R7XA9AZTB24968G46VTB/civicas+logo.jpg Membership (old with not ready member form) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555394632888-APWSMP1OEJQAF226V0X3/2018-3-8%25252BCivicas%25252Bforum%25252B-%25252B68.jpg Membership (old with not ready member form) WE ARE BUILDING A NETWORK OF WOMEN LEADERS PASSIONATE ABOUT CIVIC LIFE https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441496078-74VX97HMQO6QSBCKT2OE/calender-2389150_1280.jpg Membership (old with not ready member form) Keep up to date and engage with fellow Civicas members by attending Civicas and community events listed on our Civic Calendar. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441527203-T4IEFX9XOH73K0RF7OK3/news-2389226_1280.jpg Membership (old with not ready member form) Keep current and informed with curated Civic News and catalyze conversations with our monthly Civicas Review. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441613294-6NWEDJV52LO0GCC2G79U/folder-2389217_1280.jpg Membership (old with not ready member form) Review our archive of Civic Resources including inspiring civic organizations. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441553362-EKWN7M147CQ75T6A52GJ/chat-2389223_1280.jpg Membership (old with not ready member form) Connect with women leaders through our Membership Directory. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441589662-RKXZNM4BDLMDBZEJUUJ7/list-2389219_1280.jpg Membership (old with not ready member form) Share your civic resources and projects with the Civicas network. Complete a Member Form and check out others in our Membership Directory. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1555441453528-759V6LMQ9C1FEFWL8AJJ/open-2389230_1280city.jpg Membership (old with not ready member form) Experience unique opportunities to connect with the City of Los Angeles. https://civicas.net/new-page-2 daily 0.75 2022-12-29 https://civicas.net/asks-offers daily 0.75 2023-08-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617297929171-LMGQXV10YWQZ8BX9N4ZY/civicas+logo+cropped.jpeg ASKS/OFFERS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617298054934-NWQEK3CK4F1LP61BYCRP/CivicASK+Network+Diagram+copy.jpg ASKS/OFFERS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/664da4e6-b159-4ba7-9fa5-9a0a959aa489/Civic+Blockchain+painting.jpg ASKS/OFFERS - Make it stand out Civic Blockchain Connections Diagram https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617395419453-L5HI5NAZU93H118PDAJ8/la_alfresco_graphic_med.jpg ASKS/OFFERS https://civicas.net/civicask-copy-1 daily 0.75 2023-08-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617297929171-LMGQXV10YWQZ8BX9N4ZY/civicas+logo+cropped.jpeg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617298054934-NWQEK3CK4F1LP61BYCRP/CivicASK+Network+Diagram+copy.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/7d4d4531-2ab2-45a2-bdfe-bd9bc0e58fb5/NRG+one+pager+6%3A15.jpeg CivicASK (Copy) - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272918335-Y0PY5B6DFU661B7XZCU1/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+1.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272925540-DAA4JF2IUZTUAY9K4FH3/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+2.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272924621-1WSFPRLL2XO59RXDFS7M/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+3.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272924416-5CRXF4K7AC7K7DU3G1OW/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+4.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272923627-OZP8DVBQ237IAHVBTYHY/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+5.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272923359-R3M8HCMXBAZRPZ2IA7BD/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+6.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272922186-GACNL49DO1S5Q5Z7FC1O/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+7.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272922072-GCSVJ40JUMH1GRFH3Q3E/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+8.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272921080-7VQOTU14DF2S1XVJAK4K/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+9.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272920840-8OP9GMXMD7QFH57S4JQW/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+10.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272919617-1CGXNS481PNONVXG0F3N/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+11.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272919574-OS1L641VQOPG9QJXPTFM/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+12.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272918304-SHJP79XAMMZEDU6B5NAG/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+13.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/952ee7dd-f50b-4409-a09d-1420cc907eb5/El+Nido+pilot+resource+asks.jpeg CivicASK (Copy) - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/9d0da826-474b-4a81-ba21-b5048c6bb1cc/NRG+deck+6-18+page+11.jpg CivicASK (Copy) - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/664da4e6-b159-4ba7-9fa5-9a0a959aa489/Civic+Blockchain+painting.jpg CivicASK (Copy) - Make it stand out Civic Blockchain Connections Diagram https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617395419453-L5HI5NAZU93H118PDAJ8/la_alfresco_graphic_med.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://civicas.net/civicask-copy daily 0.75 2023-08-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617297929171-LMGQXV10YWQZ8BX9N4ZY/civicas+logo+cropped.jpeg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617298054934-NWQEK3CK4F1LP61BYCRP/CivicASK+Network+Diagram+copy.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/7d4d4531-2ab2-45a2-bdfe-bd9bc0e58fb5/NRG+one+pager+6%3A15.jpeg CivicASK (Copy) - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272918335-Y0PY5B6DFU661B7XZCU1/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+1.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272925540-DAA4JF2IUZTUAY9K4FH3/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+2.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272924621-1WSFPRLL2XO59RXDFS7M/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+3.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272924416-5CRXF4K7AC7K7DU3G1OW/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+4.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272923627-OZP8DVBQ237IAHVBTYHY/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+5.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272923359-R3M8HCMXBAZRPZ2IA7BD/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+6.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272922186-GACNL49DO1S5Q5Z7FC1O/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+7.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272922072-GCSVJ40JUMH1GRFH3Q3E/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+8.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272921080-7VQOTU14DF2S1XVJAK4K/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+9.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272920840-8OP9GMXMD7QFH57S4JQW/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+10.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272919617-1CGXNS481PNONVXG0F3N/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+11.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272919574-OS1L641VQOPG9QJXPTFM/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+12.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1687272918304-SHJP79XAMMZEDU6B5NAG/NRG+deck+6_19+smaller+jpeg+13.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/952ee7dd-f50b-4409-a09d-1420cc907eb5/El+Nido+pilot+resource+asks.jpeg CivicASK (Copy) - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/9d0da826-474b-4a81-ba21-b5048c6bb1cc/NRG+deck+6-18+page+11.jpg CivicASK (Copy) - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/664da4e6-b159-4ba7-9fa5-9a0a959aa489/Civic+Blockchain+painting.jpg CivicASK (Copy) - Make it stand out Civic Blockchain Connections Diagram https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1617395419453-L5HI5NAZU93H118PDAJ8/la_alfresco_graphic_med.jpg CivicASK (Copy) https://civicas.net/emergency-preparedness daily 0.75 2024-02-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1593658122839-IMKPCA2F9C2BEP2I8R35/civicas+logo.jpg Emergency Preparedness https://civicas.net/democracy-information daily 0.75 2024-10-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1593658122839-IMKPCA2F9C2BEP2I8R35/civicas+logo.jpg Strengthening Democracy https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/d7d366ae-743b-4b07-a203-c78332af73ee/Civicas+Fall+Forum+2024+-+Democracy.jpg Strengthening Democracy - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1726867377204-Q2TNN9XNKN394YPVL27M/IMG_0372.jpeg Strengthening Democracy - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://civicas.net/civic-education-copy daily 0.75 2026-03-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c1a9211e5b6c71380fe3ae/1593654860898-7X12E0GVJ1YRAUNF9JOI/civicas+logo.jpg Civic Education (Copy) https://civicas.net/contribute daily 0.75 2018-03-13