26 July 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
“People see one video of me fleeing like a terrified bunny, and they think that’s all there is to me,” Hawley told reporters at a press conference. “They’re totally forgetting that I’m also a guy who tried to overturn a free and fair election.”
Hawley admitted that, although it is tempting to stereotype him as “a guy who was scared shitless of a mob he had egged on earlier in the day, that’s just one side of me. What about the side of me that wantonly subverts democracy? That should count for something.”
“People are focussing on the totally chickenshit Josh Hawley and ignoring the lusting-for-autocracy Josh Hawley,” he complained.
Hawley’s press conference was cut short after a reporter asked a question and the senator ran away.
Joni Mitchell, July 2022. (photo: Nina Westervelt)
Joined by Brandi Carlile, Marcus Mumford and other artists, Mitchell played guitar, told stories, and sang a dozen songs in a surprise Newport headlining performance on Sunday
Over 13 songs, Mitchell, who last appeared at the festival 53 years ago, in 1969, held court as a star-studded crew of musicians (Carlile, Blake Mills, Lucius, Wynonna, Celisse, Taylor Goldsmith, Marcus Mumford, and many more) sat around on couches on-stage playing a mix of her favorite oldies (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” “Love Potion No. 9”) as well as an array of Mitchell masterpieces.
Sitting in a throne, Mitchell began the set by occasionally singing along to her own songs, accompanied by vocalists like Carlile, (“Carey”) Goldsmith (1991’s “Come In From The Cold”) and Celisse (“Help Me”). But by the end of the hour-plus performance, the 78 year-old singer who only recently sang on stage for the first time in nearly a decade had stood up, played a lengthy guitar solo (“Just Like This Train”) and sang a moving baritone lead vocal on Gershwin’s “Summertime'” as well as tear-jerking takes on “Both Sides Now” and “Circle Game.”
The premise: Recreating the recently infamous “Joni Jams,” the informal A-list gatherings of musicians at Mitchell’s Los Angeles home in recent years, where everyone from Carlile to Elton John to Herbie Hancock to Bonnie Raitt gather around Mitchell and trade songs and stories in the years following Mitchell’s aneurysm. “No one brings folk singers together like the humility of trying out a new song in front of Joni fucking Mitchell,” as Carlile, who curated and organized the entire set, explained in the introduction to the performance.
At the end of the set, Carlile pronounced the night’s eternal importance: “Joni Mitchell,” she proclaimed, “has returned.”
Fed Chair Jerome Powell. (photo: Getty)
The bad news is that inflation will slow because the Federal Reserve is slamming the brakes on monetary policy. This is likely to produce an economic recession and further stock market losses.
The Biden administration and the Fed have allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle for the first time since the 1980s. The administration did so with passage of its $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. The Fed did so by keeping its policy interest rate at zero for too long and by allowing the money supply to balloon by about 40% over a two-year period.
Inflation surge: a four-decade high
The result of the administration and Fed’s policy largesse, coupled with COVID-related global supply chain disruptions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was a surge in inflation. By June, consumer price inflation reached a shocking 9.1%, a rate we had not experienced in four decades.
At the same time, the Fed’s excessively easy monetary policy produced bubble-like conditions in the equity, housing and credit markets. By the end of last year, equity valuations reached nosebleed levels, experienced only once before in the past century.
Meanwhile, housing prices rose to a higher level than that before the 2006 housing bust even in inflation-adjusted terms.
Will the Fed cause a recession?
Thankfully, the Biden administration and the Fed no longer view inflation as a transitory phenomenon. Instead, the Fed is being allowed to take strong monetary policy action to bring inflation under control.
But now the Fed is becoming overly restrictive. With the economy showing clear signs of slowing, the Fed has raised interest rates in 75 basis point steps rather than by the more normal 25 basis points. Similarly, at a time when the stock and bond markets have already declined by about 20% since January, the Fed is on a path to withdraw market liquidity by as much as $95 billion a month.
One reason for expecting that the Fed might soon cause a recession is the fact that the Atlanta Federal Reserve now estimates that in the second quarter of this year, the economy probably contracted for a second consecutive quarter. Another is that the bond market is demanding higher yields for two-year Treasury bonds than it is for 10-year Treasury bonds. Over the past 50 years, this so-called yield curve inversion has been the most reliable predictor of an impending recession.
Among the reasons to fear that we are now headed for a hard economic landing is that mortgage rates have increased at their fastest pace in the past 30 years. The almost doubling in mortgage rates from 3% at the start of the year to nearly 6% now is causing housing demand to crumble as homes become less affordable.
Consumer confidence falls as wealth declines
It also has to be of concern that consumer confidence has declined to its lowest level in more than a year. It has done so as households have to cope with high inflation and with big losses in their 401(k)s. Since the start of the year, more than $9 trillion in household wealth has evaporated as result of a 20% decline in the stock and bond markets.
Further casting a dark cloud over the economy is the difficult environment for our exporters. As interest rates have been raised, the dollar has soared to a 20-year high, making our exports less competitive abroad.
At the same time, our main trade partners are experiencing difficulties of their own that reduce the size of our export markets. The Chinese economy is stumbling as a result of President Xi Jinping’s zero-tolerance COVID-19 policy, while the European economy is heading toward recession as a result of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's use of natural gas as an economic weapon.
A hard economic landing ahead?
All of this likely means that inflation will soon peak and begin to decline in a meaningful way. It will do so first as a result of the 20% decline over the past few months in international commodity prices in general and in oil prices in particular. It will then do so as an impending economic recession opens up slack in the labor and product markets.
It also likely means that by early next year, we will have a hard economic landing and disorderly financial markets. If that does occur, inflation will be the least of our economic problems.
A protester stands on the steps of the Kansas Statehouse during a rally in support of abortion rights on June 24, 2022, in Topeka, Kan (photo: Charlie Riedel/AP)
Anti-abortion actors have deployed misleading talking points to convince voters that the right to abortion isn’t on the line.
Underwood, director of communications for Kansans for Life, was a guest on “Up to Date,” a morning talk show on KCUR, the public radio station in Kansas City, Missouri.
The topic was an upcoming vote in neighboring Kansas on the “Value Them Both Amendment,” which, if passed, will strip reproductive rights from the state’s constitution and turn decisions about the legality of abortion over to the Legislature.
Underwood tried to cast the measure as a modest proposal. She was adamant that a “yes” vote would do no more than allow state lawmakers to enact “reasonable” regulations to ensure the health and safety of pregnant people seeking care. “We want to make sure that we’re able to have those kinds of protections for women in our state,” she said.
Steve Kraske, the show’s host, seemed skeptical. “Help me understand this though,” he began. “If the amendment in August passes and lawmakers once again have the ability to regulate abortion in the state of Kansas, wouldn’t the likely outcome going forward be that lawmakers would vote to ban abortion outright?”
“You know that Kansans are very commonsense people,” Underwood replied. “We believe in reasonable limitations on the abortion industry.”
The program aired just days after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which demolished Roe v. Wade, doing away with nearly 50 years of constitutional protection for abortion and giving state politicians the green light to impose their own views of reproductive autonomy. Following the ruling, Missouri was first out of the gate, banning abortion statewide within the hour. A number of states quickly followed suit; to date, 13 states have banned abortion. Roughly a dozen more are likely to do so, impacting tens of millions of people of reproductive age.
Meanwhile, in Kansas, abortion remains legal thanks to a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court ruling that concluded the state’s constitution includes the right to bodily autonomy. The decision has made Kansas a regional outlier and a key access point for people seeking abortion care in the South and Midwest.
Anti-abortion lawmakers bristled at the ruling and passed a resolution last year asking voters to amend the constitution to make clear that the promise of “equal and inalienable natural rights” in Kansas did not include abortion. The question will appear on the state’s August 2 primary ballot — making the Kansas election the nation’s first statewide post-Roe referendum on abortion rights. Advocates on both sides have been pushing hard to engage voters in what would otherwise be a mostly sleepy midterm primary. But whether it will be a true test of where voters stand remains an open question, due to widespread misinformation about the impact the amendment would have.
Advocates for reproductive autonomy — including Kansans for Constitutional Freedom and Vote No Kansas — say the notion that the amendment is about anything less than banning abortion is smoke and mirrors. “It’s a lie and it’s misleading and it’s false,” said Dr. Ashley Bloom, a family practice physician in Lawrence who has been supporting the “vote no” effort. Meanwhile, many in the “vote yes” camp insist, rather impossibly, that banning abortion is not what the amendment is about. Underwood told Kraske that it was simply about restoring “our state constitution and democracy.”
“But just to be clear, does a vote ‘yes’ for this amendment ultimately mean that abortion will be banned in the state of Kansas?” Kraske tried again. “Is that inevitable if that amendment passes?”
“There is no inevitable in the democratic process,” Underwood replied.
A Calculated Move
The amendment on the ballot in August has its roots in a bill passed by the Kansas Legislature in 2015. That year, the state became the first to enact a ban on the safest and most common method for ending pregnancy in the second trimester: what’s known as dilation and evacuation, or D&E.
Abortions later in pregnancy make up a small portion of the total number performed each year; roughly 6 percent take place after 14 weeks. But the procedure came under fire from anti-abortion activists and lawmakers who dubbed it “dismemberment abortion” (a term with no basis in medicine) because it causes disarticulation when the fetus hits the cervix.
Kansas’s D&E law was a de facto ban on all abortions later in pregnancy, prompting two doctors — a father-daughter team in Overland Park — to sue. The measure was a violation of federal constitutional law, at least at the time, and federal courts would go on to block copycat versions as impermissible bans on pre-viability abortion. But the Kansas doctors did not raise their claims in federal court. Instead, they sued in state court, arguing that the Kansas Constitution protected reproductive rights. And they were successful, both in the district court and court of appeals, which concluded in 2016 that the state’s Bill of Rights included the right to abortion. The state vowed to appeal. “The court’s failure to protect the basic human rights and dignity of the unborn is counter to Kansans’ sense of justice,” then-Gov. Sam Brownback said.
In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court sided with its lower-court colleagues in a 6-1 ruling. The court undertook an extensive historical and textual analysis of the state’s founding documents — the type of approach that the U.S. Supreme Court supermajority allegedly favors — to determine that the Kansas Constitution granted broader and more explicit individual rights than its federal counterpart. Specifically, the court grounded the right to abortion in the Kansas Bill of Rights’ Section 1 guarantee that “all men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“Section 1’s declaration of natural rights, which specifically includes the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, protects the core right of personal autonomy — which includes the ability to control one’s own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination,” the court wrote. “This right allows Kansans to make their own decisions regarding their bodies, their health, their family formation, and their family life. Pregnant women, like men, possess these rights.”
The court determined that any restriction on the right to abortion should be subject to strict scrutiny — the most stringent form of judicial review, which requires an infringement to serve some “compelling” government interest and be “narrowly tailored” to achieve it. “Imposing a lower standard than strict scrutiny … risks allowing the state to then intrude into all decisions about childbearing, our families, and our medical decision-making,” the court wrote. “It cheapens the rights at stake.”
To say that many in the Kansas Legislature were displeased would be an understatement. When the Legislature gaveled back into session in January 2020, lawmakers fast-tracked a resolution to get a proposed amendment on the ballot, but their effort failed. After the November election saw the state’s Legislature tip further to the right, lawmakers passed the resolution in 2021 and, despite vocal opposition, put it on the August 2 primary ballot instead of the ballot for the November general election.
Putting the question on the primary ballot was a calculated move designed to benefit from the generally smaller and more partisan field of voters. “They want to put it out when the lowest amount of people vote,” Democratic state Rep. Stephanie Clayton told KCUR. “The rights of Kansans are not subject to a vote of the people.”
In 2020, just 34 percent of registered voters in Kansas cast a ballot in the primary while nearly 71 percent voted in the general election. The large discrepancy in turnout has been steady over the last five election cycles, according to statistics from the Office of the Kansas Secretary of State.
The move is also significant because independents in Kansas are the second-largest group of voters in the state, behind registered Republicans and ahead of Democrats (Libertarians make up the smallest portion of the state’s registered voters). Independent voters do not choose candidates in primary elections, raising concerns that they may not come out to vote on the amendment, even though unaffiliated voters are always eligible to vote on statewide matters. That’s one of the reasons that Melinda Lavon, a certified professional midwife who started the Vote No Kansas political action committee, has dropped the word primary when talking about the upcoming vote. “Unaffiliated voters, in general, are not used to voting twice a year,” she said. “I avoid calling it a primary; we just call it a statewide election that all registered voters can vote in.”
Don’t Be Fooled
Until the 1990s, Kansas had very few restrictions on abortion. That began to change after the state was targeted by anti-abortion zealots with Operation Rescue, who descended on Wichita in 1991 for a series of increasingly threatening protests dubbed the “Summer of Mercy.” The most high-profile target of the campaign was Dr. George Tiller, a renowned doctor who provided abortion care later in pregnancy. In 2009, Tiller was assassinated while at church by an unhinged anti-abortion hard-liner.
In the years following the Summer of Mercy campaign, lawmakers in Kansas passed a host of abortion restrictions of dubious necessity, including a 24-hour waiting period, a mandatory ultrasound law, a parental consent law, a ban on public and private insurance coverage for abortion, a requirement that only physicians provide care, a ban on telehealth for medication abortion, and a ban on all abortion after 22 weeks.
Those restrictions remain in place despite the 2019 Kansas Supreme Court ruling. Nevertheless, supporters of the constitutional amendment, like Underwood and the Catholic church, have stuck with the talking point that the purpose of the amendment is to ensure that abortion can be properly regulated. During her appearance on KCUR, Underwood leaned in hard: “If you’re in favor of unlimited abortion and you’re fine with abortion facilities with no inspection, sanitation, and safety standards,” she said, “then you would want to vote ‘no.’”
Underwood and Kansans for Life did not respond to a request for comment.
Catholic church leaders have struck a similar chord. In a video statement, the Bishop of Wichita, Carl A. Kemme, came close to acknowledging that passing the amendment would lead to a ban on abortion. “The amendment will save many unborn children,” he said, before reverting to the health-and-safety mantra. “Without Value Them Both, the abortion industry in Kansas will be able to operate with virtually no restrictions or regulations,” he added. “The abortion industry is trying to buy this election with confusion and outright lies. Don’t be fooled.”
The Catholic church is bankrolling much of the “vote yes” campaign; the Kansas City, Kansas, archdiocese alone has pumped nearly $3 million into the effort; Kemme’s diocese has contributed more than $800,000. Together, they account for more than half the “vote yes” funds contributed to date.
The “vote no” crowd only recently pulled ahead after being out-fundraised more than 2-to-1. More than $13 million total has been donated to the two campaigns.
Contrary to the claims of Underwood and Kemme, the state’s four abortion clinics are licensed, regulated, and inspected by the health department. Proponents of the amendment do not acknowledge the myriad restrictions on abortion that have been enacted in Kansas, instead focusing on a court decision from 2021, which struck down a suite of restrictions passed a decade earlier. Those restrictions — which included extra inspections and increased staffing requirements not imposed on other medical providers, along with a measure that would make patient records less secure — were found to run afoul of state constitutional protections.
“Restrictions that merely delay access to abortion impair a fundamental right,” Shawnee County District Judge Mary Christopher concluded. “As a result, it is not difficult for this court to conclude the challenged laws infringe on a woman’s right to access legal abortion services.”
Christopher ruled that the state had failed to show that the regulations were needed. After all, they had been blocked from taking effect for a decade, and there was “no evidence of an event impacting the health or safety of a person seeking abortion care during the 10-year pendency of this action.”
Get Out the Vote
Since the May leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs, Bloom, the doctor in Lawrence, has seen her patients grow increasingly worried: What would losing reproductive rights mean for their future and the future of their families? “My patients are terrified,” she said. “They’re concerned about the implications of this intrusion of the government into personal medical matters and personal decisions regarding health care.”
She decided to lend her voice to the “vote no” campaign. “I feel like that’s really important, to have actual physicians speaking about medical decisions rather than politicians,” she said. She’s been canvassing voters and trying to cut through the confusion around the amendment, starting with its name, “Value Them Both,” which she thinks is deceiving. “They make it look like … if you vote ‘no’ on this, you don’t value babies. And that’s not what this is about,” she said. “I do value babies — and I value healthy families.”
She’s also been trying to set the record straight on what is in store if the amendment passes, which she believes is nothing short of a total ban on abortion. Abortion is already the country’s most heavily regulated medical procedure, she said, and the idea that voting yes would simply free up politicians to regulate its practice is nonsense. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck — and I’ve seen it act like a duck — I’m going to call it a duck.”
Lawmakers have repeatedly tacked abortion restrictions onto as many bills as they can, and have proposed bans that eschew exceptions for a person’s health, for rape or incest, “or for children who have had their bodily autonomy violated,” she pointed out. While debating passage of the amendment resolution in early 2021, Kansas lawmakers in both the House and Senate roundly rejected modifications that would recognize exemptions for rape, incest, and the life of the pregnant person. They also rejected an effort to put the measure on the November general ballot.
The Value Them Both Coalition’s repeated assurances that the amendment is about regulation were recently undercut by one of the coalition’s own members, according to audio of a meeting with Republicans in Reno County, just northwest of Wichita, that was obtained by the Kansas Reflector. In the recording, Lori Chrisman, who described herself as an 18-county regional director for the Value Them Both Coalition, told the crowd that a total ban on abortion would be teed up and ready to go once the amendment passed. Republican state Sen. Mark Steffen, who was also at the meeting, followed up, claiming the Kansas Supreme Court had “hijacked the abortion issue” and the Legislature needed to take back control. His “goal,” he said, was to define “life starting at conception.”
A spokesperson for the coalition told the Reflector that Chrisman was “no longer with the organization.”
Back in Lawrence, Lavon, the midwife, has been working hard to get out the “no” vote. She has trained canvassers and gathered with groups of volunteers to send out handwritten postcards to voters. She’s been encouraged by the diversity of voices coming together to defeat the amendment: Democratic Socialists, Catholic nuns, and Libertarians, just to name a few. As a Catholic herself, Lavon is frustrated by the church’s enormous spending on an effort to strip individuals of basic human rights. She thinks that money would be better spent on feeding and housing people or ensuring health care for everyone, especially the most vulnerable. “It’s sad to see so many church resources go into this when we should be serving our communities and taking care of people.”
At the same time, she credits hard-liners within the church and the Republican Party for bringing together the diverse “vote no” coalition. “The Republicans have united an awful lot of people that usually do not think the same way or support the same plan for an election.”
Glenn Thompson voted against Respect for Marriage Act, which would codify the right to have a same-sex marriage into federal law. (photo: )
Glenn Thompson voted against Respect for Marriage Act, which would codify the right to have a same-sex marriage into federal law
Thompson was one of 157 Republicans who voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which passed the US House last week. On Friday, he attended his son’s wedding.
“Congressman and Mrs Thompson were thrilled to attend and celebrate their son’s marriage on Friday night as he began this new chapter in his life,” a spokesperson for the lawmaker, Maddison Stone, said in a statement Monday. “The Thompsons are very happy to welcome their new son-in-law into their family.”
Democrats are pushing the measure amid concern that the US supreme court could take away the right to same-sex and interracial marriage in the wake of its decision to overturn the nationwide right to access an abortion. Those concerns were prompted by supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, who used a concurring opinion in the abortion case to suggest that the court use the same rationale to revisit its 2015 decision protecting same-sex marriage.
After the vote on the Respect for Marriage Act, Stone said the measure was a “stunt”.
“This bill was nothing more than an election-year messaging stunt for Democrats in Congress who have failed to address historic inflation and out of control prices at gas pumps and grocery stores,” Stone told the Centre Daily Times.
In 2015, the supreme court ruled the constitution protects the right to a same sex-marriage in a case called Obergefell v Hodges. After the Obergefell ruling, Thompson told a local newspaper that he wanted to make sure the religious rights of others were protected.
“Regardless of my personal beliefs and my continued support for states’ rights, today’s ruling must be followed by adequate congressional oversight in order to assure that federal protections the US supreme court has granted to same-sex couples does not infringe upon the religious liberties of others,” he told pennlive.com at the time.
Forty-seven Republicans joined Democrats in supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill now is in the US Senate, where it needs at least 10 GOP votes, and all Democratic ones, to overcome a filibuster. At least five Republican senators have indicated they will support the bill so far.
Colombian president-elect Gustavo Petro vice president–elect Francia Márquez receive presidential credentials at the National Civil Registry in Bogotá, June 23, 2022. (photo: Nathalia Angarita/Getty)
Recently elected president Gustavo Petro's victory was a milestone not only for Colombia but for all of Latin America. With it, a new progressive wave has washed across the region.
To understand the historic magnitude of his victory, the current political situation in Colombia, and the challenges that await the incoming government, Jacobin’s Nicolas Allen spoke with philosopher Luciana Cadahia.
Cadahia’s experience has been typical of many leftists in Colombia. A longtime Petro supporter, her political views ended up putting her at odds with her former employer, the Pontifical Xavierian University and, ultimately, with the right-wing forces gathered around former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe.
Today, she is a professor at the University of Chile, coordinator of the Populism, Republicanism and Global Crisis Network, and coauthor, with Paula Biglieri, of Seven Essays on Populism. Cadahia spoke with Jacobin about what we can expect from Colombia’s first leftist government.
Nicolas Allen
In some ways, Gustavo Petro’s win felt like a victory foretold. He was, after all, far ahead in the polls in the months leading up to the election. Perhaps, taking the long view, you could remind us why his victory was anything but predictable.
Luciana Cadahia
It is important to remember that Colombia has a long history of left-wing insurgencies, resistances, and popular organization. Sometimes we lose sight of that reality in a country like Colombia, which is seen by many as deeply right-wing. It can seem that way sometimes, but only because Colombia is one of the countries where the greatest number of political and social leaders are assassinated.
To give a concrete example, five presidential candidates were assassinated in Colombia during the twentieth century. All of them were popular leaders who sought to undo a long history of oligarchic power. The best-known cases are those of the left-wing liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 and the liberal candidate Luis Carlos Galán in 1989. But during the 1990s, presidential candidate and former M-19 guerrilla member Carlos Pizarro was also murdered, as well as Bernardo Jaramillo and Jaime Pardo of the Patriotic Union, the party formed from the alliance between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, in its Spanish acronym) and the Communist Party.
It’s important to reflect on this history because it means that, in a certain light, Colombia gave the lie to a certain triumphalism of the 1990s: at the same time as the Berlin Wall was falling, market democracy was being celebrated across the globe, and the Cold War was winding down, in Colombia, leftist and social movement leaders were being massacred.
The point is, Gustavo Petro should be seen as part of an unbroken legacy of popular leaders and radical movements struggling, against all odds, to wrestle power away from Colombia’s elite and give new meaning to the republic. In the case of Colombia, that struggle is about dismantling centuries of structural inequality, racism, and territorial dispossession.
What really sets Petro apart from that long history of progressive candidates who came before him is that this time, Colombia’s left-wing leader was not assassinated.
Nicolas Allen
His victory was also an important milestone for the peace process, wasn’t it?
Luciana Cadahia
Exactly. It was a milestone and, at the same time, the triumph of the Historic Pact was made possible by the peace process itself. Of course, it was the center-right government of Juan Manuel Santos that initiated that process. Between 2010 and 2018, during his two terms in office, Santos essentially decided to challenge the paramilitary hegemony of Álvaro Uribe — of which Santos himself was part, at least initially — and steer the country toward an unprecedented peace process.
During those ten years, very important negotiations took place between the guerrillas, the state, and different civil society actors. Also during that period, the Colombian people began to feel that change was in fact possible, and that it was feasible to end the armed conflict and untie the Gordian knot of systemic violence.
In 2018, Iván Duque, a direct representative of uribismo, won the presidency, and all that social, political, cultural, and economic momentum that had been building in Colombian society suddenly came to a halt. That violent rupture with the peace process and the equally abrupt resurgence of paramilitary warfare, together with the escalation of drug-trafficking activity, was traumatic for the Colombian people. This, combined with the economic crisis that came with the COVID-19 pandemic, led to increasing social restlessness and eventually culminated in the massive uprising of 2021.
In other words, we might say that Petro’s win is both a major advance for the peace process and a vital effort to rescue the cause of peace after it had been derailed by uribismo during Duque’s government.
I would add that, with Petro, there is more at stake than just the implementation of the Peace Accords; the other mission that Petro will have inherited from Colombian society is the full implementation of the 1991 constitution, a quite progressive document that resulted from the agreements between the M-19 guerrillas — of which Petro was a member — and the Colombian state.
The Constitution of 1991 was an important precedent for a series of progressive constitutions that came to define twenty-first-century radical politics in Latin America. When people think of the Pink Tide, they tend to think of the Andean constitutional assemblies: Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Colombia is usually left out of the picture.
This is a mistake, because, on the one hand, Colombia’s constitution inspired the subsequent constitutional processes and, on the other hand, the Colombian constitution was the result of a very important social pact that included the demobilized members of the M-19. That is to say, it was a constitution in which the democratic left played a big role.
Nicolas Allen
Petro himself has said that an ideal peace process would go beyond the demobilization of armed combatants to address the real social causes leading to violent conflict.
Luciana Cadahia
That’s right. The full realization of the accord’s potential would open the possibility of carrying out sweeping agrarian reform in Colombia. Let us not forget that land tenure is one of the Gordian knots in Colombia, and, to some extent, in all of Latin America. The elites in Colombia assassinated Gaitán precisely because he was going to carry out land reform. The guerrilla movement in Colombia began as peasant movements demanding agrarian reform.
In other words, to a certain extent, both the violence and the demand for peace begin and end with the question of access to land.
Nicolas Allen
Earlier you mentioned the protests of 2019 and 2021. To what extent were they decisive in these elections?
Luciana Cadahia
Colombia was, along with Ecuador, Chile, and Haiti, one of the epicenters of social mobilization that rocked Latin America in 2019. Specifically in Colombia, one of the triggers for the uprising was a sense of deception: the youth-led demonstrators came of political age during Santos’s administration and during the Peace Accords, so that when the logic of war was revived under Duque, they felt as if a promise for a better future had been broken. A similar sense of deception was what triggered the indigenous resistance and the black movement to join in street protests.
The social uprising of 2019 was a joining of forces: organized labor, indigenous movements, peasant organizations, and Afro-Colombian collectives joined with the youth and, later, popular and middle-class sectors too. This had the effect of breaking a certain hegemonic common sense, a certain self-image of Colombians as a conservative people, and made it seem much more believable that someone like Gustavo Petro could be the president of Colombia.
Nicolas Allen
But how did Petro become such an influential and popular, if not also controversial, figure in Colombian politics?
Luciana Cadahia
Ironically, the right-wing plot to oust Gustavo Petro as mayor of Bogotá, from 2012 to 2015, ended up backfiring: Petro became a household name. And this happened because Petro had the cunning to explain in clear terms that his impeachment was a typical ploy of the Colombian elites, completely in keeping with the systematic exclusion that all progressive and leftist forces in Colombia have long suffered from.
Petro showed that this type of oligarchic attitude — that politics should be reserved for the elite — was also creating the conditions for endless war in Colombia. Petro took the right-wing crusade against him as an opportunity to argue that a real peace process was not about winning the war against the guerrillas but rather about redressing historical injustices — social, environmental, racial — that the government refused to recognize.
Little by little, this progressive discourse began to catch on among everyday Colombians, and as it did, the logic of the war against an “internal enemy” — the war against guerrillas, leftists, narcos, etc. — began to lose its grip. This explains the 2018 elections, when Petro, together with Ángela María Robledo, made it to the runoff election. Iván Duque may have finally won that contest, but there were also many signs of systematic voter fraud.
All the while, Petro was organizing a “political instrument,” now known as the Historic Pact. This was formed from different leftist political parties — Petro’s own Colombia Humana, MAIS, Unión Patriótica, Polo Democrático, Francia Márquez’s Movimiento Soy Porque Somos, Poder Ciudadano, the demobilized members of the M-19, etc. — which were later joined by members of more traditional political forces. In Gramscian terms, the sheer size of that alliance created a transversal political pact that forced Petro’s adversaries to debate on the terms set by progressivism.
Nicolas Allen
And yet Petro won by a fairly narrow margin. That suggests a strong opposition once he takes office, doesn’t it?
Luciana Cadahia
Sure, of course. There are more than 10 million voters who either remained on the side of uribismo or somehow were put off by the idea of a Historic Pact government. But it would be wrong to think that these voters represent a homogeneous group with a coherent ideology. They are dispersed, often apolitical, and rarely loyal in their political sensibilities. This contrasts with the more than 11 million voters of the Historic Pact, who do share a distinct political orientation. That is to say, they share a minimum common agenda: to implement the Peace Accords and to guarantee social and territorial justice.
We shouldn’t discount the possibility that some part of the uribista base shifted to Rodolfo Hernandez in the second round, but we also shouldn’t lose sight that Petro has been the target of nearly a decade of scaremongering campaigns by the major media and political establishment. It would only be natural that such stigmatization would influence the average Colombian citizen.
Nicolas Allen
Many thought that, since elections came down to two non-uribista candidates, it could signal the end of Uribe’s influence.
Luciana Cadahia
It could be. Between 2002 and 2010 Álvaro Uribe built a right-wing narco-hegemony in Colombia — that is, an institutional, political, and economic regime based around the drug trafficking economy. That regime, whose ideology I would characterize as “right-wing popular nationalism,” consisted in extending and deepening existing links between organized crime and the state (what has come to be called the “narco-state”). The windfall of that process created opportunities for upward social mobility, to the benefit of some poorer sectors and the middle classes.
One of the foundational narratives undergirding this right-wing hegemony was the ongoing fight against the “internal enemy”: an ill-defined figure that combined guerrillas, leftists, “terrorists,” and drug traffickers (never mind that Uribe himself belonged to the latter group). But in reality, the “internal enemy” was a mechanism, typically fascist, to conjure a figure that represents the opposite of the existing symbolic, cultural, political, and economic order, and that can only be dealt with through extermination.
Beginning in 2010, that regime and the ideology legitimizing it began to lose steam. Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s supposed successor, won the presidency and immediately declared himself an opponent of uribismo, abandoning the discourse of the internal enemy and adopting the peace process as a banner cause for his two terms in office.
As mentioned before, the defeat of the plebiscite for the Peace Accords in 2016 and the triumph of Iván Duque in 2018 kept uribismo on life support, but the peace process had advanced too far. A new generation of Colombians was not willing to let the peace process come undone, which is why we saw the uprisings and eventually Petro’s victory.
Nicolas Allen
What are the highlights of Petro’s platform?
Luciana Cadahia
The triumph of the Historic Pact means that Colombia will become a regional leader. Just think: Colombia connects Central America, the Caribbean, the Andes, and the Southern Cone on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides. And a large part of its territory includes the Amazon.
By connecting all these different regions, Colombia can act as a strategic actor in the effort to control regional drug-trafficking networks. Colombia can also act as a key intermediary in the conflict with Venezuela, after long having been one of the key causes of that conflict, and can lead the way in terms of the energy transition in the region.
In a broader sense, Colombia can help to unify political and cultural repertoires, which are very fragmented at this moment in Latin America. At the same time, Colombian progressivism can put front and center issues that some felt were ignored during the previous Pink Tide: the transition from the extractive fossil economy to a new, more sustainable economic model; the central role of Caribbean and Afro-Latin Americans in politics (in addition to indigenous, peasant, and urban popular sectors, which were more prevalent in the previous cycle); a new hemispheric pact that assumes neither the leadership of United States nor an a priori rejection of the United States, which, after all, is an important regional player.
This last question is of special importance, considering the outsize role that Colombia has played as a strategic regional partner for US interests. I believe that we are on the verge of charting a different relationship with the United States, a more democratic and egalitarian relationship, if you like. With progressive governments in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Honduras, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and, quite likely, Brazil, there will be a powerful momentum to rethink the North-South relationship in the Americas. We are in a new position where it will be possible to push back against imperialist US policy and press for a more egalitarian, continental dialogue.
Nicolas Allen
Petro recently announced a cabinet that contains a mix of more traditional political figures, several of whom have served in previous administrations, and others who come from social movements. What does the composition of the cabinet tell us?
Luciana Cadahia
It seems to me that his cabinet choices were very intelligent. Sometimes there is a belief — perhaps a little naive — that real change only happens by putting people in office who have never held positions in government or who have no experience in public policy. I think Petro struck an appropriate balance between people with experience in strategic areas, such as José Antonio Ocampo in the Ministry of Economy or Álvaro Leyva Durán in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and other people with a lot of symbolic weight who can project a stance of plurinational unity, such as Patricia Ariza in Culture or Francia Márquez in Equality.
The appointment of Susana Muhamad as environment minister is a real statement of intent, since she combines experience as an environmental activist and in government. She has very clear ideas about how Colombia can form a different type of relationship with nature.
All in all, Petro has put together a well-balanced cabinet that will guarantee governability at a time when the Right could seek to destabilize the Historic Pact through the media or the courts.
Nicolas Allen
Would you say that one the main challenges Petro will face in his first months in office is dealing with the right-wing reaction?
Luciana Cadahia
The first thing the Historic Pact has to guarantee is governability. Latin American oligarchies tend to fight tooth and nail to preserve their privileges, and they are willing to use any and all resources at their disposal: the media, political instruments, economic power — you name it, so long as it means keeping popular governments from being able to govern. This is perhaps even more the case in a country like Colombia, where there are substantial alliances between certain elite strata and organized crime.
However, in one key respect, Colombia is unlike other progressive countries. Petro has the distinct advantage that he can build a plan for government on top of the already popular Peace Accords. That is, he has already inherited a program for structural change that precedes him. Again, this is to his advantage, because it sets him up as the leader who will execute the popular will, while downplaying the perception that he governs through any sort of cult of personality.
The other challenge is to address Colombia’s fiscal deficit through some form of progressive tax reform. Who is going to bear the brunt of the tax burden, the elites or the poor? Petro has been clear where he stands on the issue: that the wealthiest should shoulder the burden. But the question is whether he will have the political muscle to see that kind of reform through. We should recall that, in Ecuador and Argentina, progressive presidents were almost removed from office for doing so.
Then there are all the structural challenges: education, health, agrarian reform, recognition of historically excluded identities, and so on. As we were discussing before, many of these are materially tied to the full realization of the Peace Accords.
Finally, the most difficult and perhaps most promising challenge for the incoming administration: the transition from a fossil fuel economy to a sustainable model of production. Hopefully Petro’s administration will be the beginning of a continent-wide debate on the need for a new environmental policy.
Nicolas Allen
What kind of political muscle will Petro have to face his adversaries? What channels can Petro use to galvanize society to his side?
Luciana Cadahia
Defusing the threat of the extreme right will require a complicated operation: the building of an alternative common sense. In order to displace the rhetoric of war and the internal enemy, there needs to be something else on the national agenda.
Building that consensus will mean bringing on board all political and business sectors who are in favor of the peace process. At the same time, the process needs to be more open to social movements and activists — that is, these popular sectors, which have long been marginalized from public opinion, must also be able to shape national debates.
This will also mean rethinking culture itself, which has long been a stronghold of conservative power. Historically, the link between culture — literature especially — and power has left a negative legacy in Colombia. The famous literary critic Ángel Rama came up with the concept of the ciudad letrada after living in Bogotá in the 1980s: the idea that, in Latin America, what is called “culture” is really an instrument of domination.
Nicolas Allen
The victory of Petro and Márquez follows on the heels of Gabriel Boric’s win in Chile and months before the Brazilian election, where Lula is the favorite. How would you characterize the current political period in Latin America, which some are already calling a second progressive wave or “pink tide”?
Luciana Cadahia
I agree that the time has come to speak of two distinct periods of progressivism in Latin American politics. The first one is bookended by the triumph of Hugo Chávez and the project of a twenty-first-century socialism in 1999, and the second was inaugurated by Gabriel Boric in 2021. Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez are the consolidation of that second wave, the confirmation that we are in a new period.
The period in between the two is just as important to consider: crucially, we saw rise of the extreme right, which was largely absent from the previous cycle, and a transition between the two cycles with the likes of AMLO in Mexico, Pedro Castillo in Peru, Xiomara Castro in Honduras, and the return of MAS [Movimiento al Socialismo] in Bolivia, and the Frente de Todos in Argentina. So you could say there was a first progressive cycle that ran from 1999 to 2016, followed by an impasse between 2017 and 2020, and then a second cycle starting in 2021.
The first period was characterized by the fight against neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund, and US interventionism, as well as regional integration and the expansion of redistributive and restorative measures favoring popular sectors, indigenous movements, and the middle classes.
What most characterizes this second cycle is the political will to tackle certain issues, sometimes lacking in the earlier period, that are best embodied in the proposals of Petro and Márquez: extractivism and resource-export dependency, unresolved identity demands — particularly, although not exclusively, around Afro-Latin American sectors — and the need for a new, more fully continental self-image not concentrated exclusively in South America.
A letter from staff urges Joe Biden to intervene in negotiations over climate provisions and to declare a climate emergency. (photo: Getty)
A letter from staff urges Joe Biden to intervene in negotiations over climate provisions and to declare a climate emergency.
"Every day you do not act, the climate crisis spirals further out of control. The coming days represent our best opportunity to address the climate crisis and save countless lives with robust climate justice policy,” the letter, which was reported on and posted online by The Lever, reads. “Even if Democrats control both chambers and the White House again in four years, inaction in this moment will cause an era of record temperatures, extreme drought, sea level rise, and other deadly climate disasters. We do not have years to waste. We have little more than a week."
The letter comes after the most recent disintegration of climate talks thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin’s decision to walk away from negotiations centering on $375 billion worth of clean energy tax credits. Clean energy tax credits were the largest climate item still on the negotiating table, and as Kate Arnoff pointed out for The New Republic, while they’re a relatively flawed financing mechanism for curbing carbon emissions they’re also one of the only ones we have—but are still deeply opposed by Manchin.
According to The Lever, the letter comes from the Congressional Progressive Staff Association (CPSA), which has published similar open letters in the past month. Earlier this month, more than 200 congressional staffers signed a letter circulated by the group criticizing Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for their "silence on an expensive climate justice policy" and called for Congress to pass policy that "lays the groundwork for a more just and sustainable economy." The letter was signed with initials only, due to staffers fearing "political retribution," the outlet reported
Staffers were also inside Schumer’s Senate office on Monday with signs demanding CLIMATE ACTION NOW and CLIMATE POLICY NOW, calling on Schumer to keep negotiating with Senator Joe Manchin before the end of the legislative session. The United States Capitol Police told Motherboard in a statement that it arrested six of the protestors involved.
Spokespeople for CPSA and Senator Schumer's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite this, the Biden administration has continued to negotiate with Manchin—who’s taken more money from the oil and gas industry than any other sector, has torpedoed numerous items on Biden’s climate agenda—in good faith. Democrats have responded by mounting pressure for Biden to announce a climate emergency and take executive actions in the midst of historic heat waves and massive fires across Europe that might bypass the Senate roadblock.
Ahead of Biden’s expected announcement on July 20, The American Prospect executive editor David Dayen cautioned that while Biden could very well follow through with such policies—banning crude exports, halting fossil fuel imports, or stopping investment in fossil fuel infrastructure—there were still concerns about reaching the funding levels necessary to actually avert dire climate scenarios. “A strong executive can use current law to lower emissions and begin a transition to a cleaner, safer, and healthier energy economy. But it would have been far preferable to use that power to coax complementary legislative action, particularly on investment funding,” Dayen wrote.
Biden did announce a number of executive actions, however environmental groups are criticizing them for being insufficient because of inadequate funding and the lack of legal force a climate emergency might be backed by. “ Saying we’re in a climate emergency and declaring one under the law are totally different things. Declaring a climate emergency will unleash the full force of Biden’s executive powers to combat climate chaos and signal the climate leadership we so desperately need,” Jean Su, the Center for Biological Diversity's Energy Justice program director, told People's World.
The letter signed by staffers presents options for Biden and Schumer to bypass Manchin and enact climate policy. Staffers would like Biden to declare a climate emergency and end fossil fuel extraction on federal lands, and intervene in the Senate negotiations to force Manchin's vote for the Build Back Better act and its climate provisions.
“The first option must be for Senator Manchin to vote to pass the House Build Back Better climate justice provisions by the end of July, as part of a reconciliation package. The second must represent a bold and creative alternative that Senator Manchin understands to be much worse,” the letter reads. “For example, you and Senator Schumer could strip Senator Manchin of his Chairmanship of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, shut down the Mountain Valley Pipeline Project, eliminate the use of mountaintop removal and coal burning, and establish stringent water and air pollution standards."
The staffers also warned that "non-violent direct action" would follow a failure to act.
"This is an absolute emergency, and we want to work together, but since action to meet the scale of the crisis has yet to be delivered, we have no choice but to take matters into our own hands through non-violent direct action," the letter states.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.