Jill Richardson: Right-wing-run Florida's new law imperils academic freedom there

“Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” (1886) (oil on canvas), by Edward Moran, in The J. Clarence Davies Collection at Museum of the City of New York.

Via OtherWords.org

Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (1886) by Edward Moran. Oil on canvas. The J. Clarence Davies Collection, Museum of the City of New York.

Florida just passed a law that — to put it mildly — grossly violates academic freedom. Under the new bill, recently signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a right-wing Republican and in the past a fervent supporter of Donald Trump, students and faculty will be surveyed about their political views to ensure “intellectual freedom and ideological diversity.”

The real intent appears to be the opposite.

The bill doesn’t specify what will happen with this data once it’s collected. But DeSantis and the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, have suggested the responses could be used to target schools for budget cuts if politicians find the views of student and faculty objectionable.

This is a gross violation of academic freedom, which is supposed to protect students and faculty and pave the way for the production of knowledge.

As a PhD student who teaches undergraduates, I’m having visions of professors being subjected to forced confessions, as in China’s Cultural Revolution. (Scholars were so scorned then that the word “intelligentsia” — zhishifenzi — became derogatory.)

To see how state interference with academic freedom is problematic, consider Lysenkoism.

In the mid-20th Century, Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics and instead embraced a pseudoscience of his own creation. Communists governments adopted Lysenkoism as a “Communist” science of agriculture, with disastrous consequences. Stalin executed scientists who disagreed with Lysenkoism, even while Lysenko’s pseudoscience produced famines.

I hope that Florida Republicans — who are so concerned that people like me will turn students into Communists that they’re also now mandating professors teach the “evils of Communism” — will note the irony.

Florida Republicans might also like to know that a court case upholding academic freedom (Adams vs. University of North Carolina Wilmington) was essential to protecting conservative speech as well. In that case, the court sided with Prof. Michael Adams, who’d been denied a promotion over columns he’d written for a right-wing Web site, ruling that his views were protected speech.

The second part of Florida’s bill stipulates that students may not be shielded from “ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.” Again, this is not a problem. It doesn’t need fixing. Academic freedom already takes care of it.

Setting aside the irony that legislators seem to want to exclude certain views they disagree with, I also worry that this law will ban professors from managing their classrooms.

I teach controversial topics regularly. They are emotional topics and many students come to class with different, sometimes opposing views. It feels like playing with dynamite because there is a lot to balance in running the class in a way that is fair and conducive to learning for all.

But what do you do when a student endorses genocide during a class discussion? And follows it up with a two thumbs up endorsement for racism? Does curtailing disruptive behavior like this, which prevents others from learning, count as shielding students from uncomfortable “ideas and opinions”?

On the other hand, what do you do when your class wants to use class time to organize for social causes, and your job is to get them to learn an academic discipline, not Rally For Your Political Ideology 101?

Or one student cries because of what other students have said? Or leaves class because it is too emotionally painful for him or her to be there?

Those things have happened in my class. Academics need to have the freedom to manage their classes, and that means finding a balance between protecting their students’ emotions and helping them when emotions get in the way of learning.

Most of all, teachers and students need the freedom to look at ideas academically — and express their views plainly — without fear of retribution from state authorities who insist on “intellectual freedom” even as they seek to stamp it out.

Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin.

Jill Richardson: It’s past time to toss Trump’s huge lies about immigrants

Preparing for an immigrant-naturalization ceremony in Salem, Mass.

Via OtherWords.org

As Donald Trump leaves office, it’s worth remembering how he first launched his campaign: by calling immigrants “murderers” and “rapists.”

This was outrageous then. And there’s more evidence now that it was, of course, false.

A new study finds that “undocumented immigrants have considerably lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of criminal offenses, including violent, property, drug, and traffic crimes.”

The study concludes that there’s “no evidence that undocumented criminality has become more prevalent in recent years across any crime category.” Previous studies found no evidence to support Trump’s claim, but now we have better data than ever before.

Put another way, Trump was telling a dangerous lie.

Sociologists Michael Light, Jingying He and Jason Robey used crime and immigration data from Texas from 2012 to 2018 to find that “relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.”

Unfounded accusations of criminality are a longstanding tool of racism and other forms of bigotry across a range of social categories.

When anti-LGBTQ activist Anita Bryant wanted to discriminate against gays and lesbians in the 1970s, she claimed they molested children. More recently, when transphobic people wanted to ban trans women from women’s bathrooms, they falsely claimed that trans women would rape cisgender women in bathrooms.

Consider how much anti-Black racists justified their actions in the name of “protecting white women” from Black men. In 1955, a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, wrongly claimed that a 14-year-old Black boy, Emmett Till, grabbed her and threatened her. White men lynched Till in retaliation. More than half a century later, Donham revealed that her accusations were false.

In 1989, the Central Park Five — five Black and Latino boys between the ages of 14 and 16 —  were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for raping a white woman. They didn’t do it. In 2002, someone else confessed and DNA evidence confirmed it. (Trump, who took out full-page ads calling for their execution then, never apologized.)

Racism and bigotry are about power and status. Yet instead of openly admitting that some groups simply want power over others, most bigots find reasons that sound plausible to the uninformed — even if the reasons are completely untrue. Bigotry is much easier to market if it can masquerade as fighting crime.

It wasn’t just Trump himself. During the Trump administration, officials like the U.S. solicitor general argued before the Supreme Court that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately likely to commit crime. Data: None. Claims: False.

As the late New York U.S. Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

So when you hear a claim that a particular group of marginalized people are criminals, question it. What is the evidence for the claim? What is the evidence against the claim? Why is the person making the claim, and how will they benefit if people believe them?

If someone cites research, who performed the research, and who funded it? Do the funders have a financial stake in the research findings? Was it published in a peer-reviewed journal? Is the data publicly available for others to replicate the findings?

In this case, the research debunking this racist lie was government-funded, peer-reviewed in a major journal, and the data is available to the public.

Hearing that particular group of people poses a threat to your safety can be frightening. But because such claims have been used throughout history to spread bigotry against marginalized groups, they should always be fact-checked.

In this case, the evidence is clear. Trump stoked anti-immigrant sentiment in the name of fighting crime, and his claims were baseless and false. The lie should end with his presidency.

Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

Jill Richardson: How do we get skeptics to get COVID shots?

U.S. airman Ramón Colón-López receives Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center this month.

Via OtherWords.org

With the new COVID-19 vaccine available, Dr. Anthony Fauci says Americans can begin to achieve herd immunity by next summer. Herd immunity occurs when so many people are immune to the virus that it can’t spread, because an infected person won’t have anyone left to spread it to.

Yet as of last month, four in ten Americans said they definitely or probably won’t get the vaccine (although about half of that group said they would consider it once a vaccine became available and they could get more information about it).

Why, after living in quarantine for almost 10 months while the economy and our mental health crashes around us, after over 300,000 Americans are dead, is getting the vaccine even a question?

There are two ways to approach this question. The first is to dismiss it: Call vaccine skeptics derogatory names, post memes on social media about how stupid they are, and make rules requiring the vaccine.

The second way to approach the question is to try to understand vaccine skepticism in order to address Americans’ concerns.

Sociologist Jennifer Reich tied vaccine refusal to messages that treat health like a personal project, in which consumers must exercise their own discretion, and a culture of individualism in a world where there is not enough of anything to go around — jobs, money, health care, etc.

In this view, everyone must look out for themselves so they can get ahead, and that’s more important than doing your part to achieve herd immunity for our collective wellbeing.

Reich’s research on anti-vaxxers comes from before the current pandemic. She studied parents who refused to vaccinate their children for preventable diseases like measles. But it’s still worth considering in this new context. Reich believes it is unsurprising that some people do treat vaccines like a consumer choice and disregard that when they decline a vaccine, they endanger others too.

Another take on COVID vaccine refusal comes from Zakiya Whatley and Titilayo Shodiya, who are both women of color with PhDs in natural sciences. They focus on Black, Latinx and indigenous communities, who often distrust doctors. Their suspicion is not unfounded, given how much racism in medicine has harmed people of color, historically and in the present.

Scientists hold the power to define what is true and what is not in a way that non-scientists do not. Consider the power relations within medicine: When a patient goes to the doctor because they are ill, the doctor assesses their symptoms, makes a diagnosis, and prescribes a treatment.

Scientists determine what is recognized as a diagnosis and which treatments are available. Powerful financial interests (like pharmaceutical and insurance companies) play a major role too. The patient’s power is more limited: they can look up their symptoms on WebMD, accept or refuse the treatment prescribed, or go to a different doctor.

Sometimes lay people react to being on the less powerful end of the relationship by simply refusing to believe scientists. They might resist by embracing conspiracy theories or “barstool biology” that uses the language of science but not the scientific method.

Natural scientists have done their part by creating vaccines that are safe and highly effective. To get people to take the vaccine, we need social science. We must learn how to rebuild trust with people who have lost it. And we will do that by listening to them and understanding them, not by calling them stupid.

Jill Richardson, a sociologist, is an OtherWords.org columnist.

Headquarters of a COVID-19 vaccine inventor and maker, Moderna, in Cambridge, Mass. Greater Boston is one of the world’s centers of biotechnology.

Jill Richardson: Trump's bogus 'meritocracy'

“The Worship of Mammon;; (1909), by Evelyn De Morgan

Via OtherWords.org

Today I looked at a graph of income inequality over time in America. This was not new information to me, and yet it was still shocking.

From the 1950s until the early 1970s, Americans grew richer together. Some Americans were poor and others were rich, but their incomes, adjusted for inflation, grew at the same pace. Income roughly doubled for all.

Then the lines diverge. The rich got much, much, much richer and the rest of us had more modest gains.

Recently, Trump issued an executive order declaring America a “meritocracy” where hard work and skill are fairly rewarded. If America’s inequality reflects a meritocracy and the wealthy grew richer while everyone else didn’t, is the president calling the majority of the American people stupid and lazy?

I am in my seventh year of a PhD program. Everyone around me is in a difficult position. COVID-19 has hobbled the economy.

The freshmen are missing out on the normal college experience right after they all missed their proms and graduation ceremonies. Some of them are living in quarantined dorms where some students have COVID. I can’t imagine how worried their parents must be. And the upperclassmen will graduate into an economy that set records for the worst unemployment since the Great Depression this year.

Graduate students are struggling to do fieldwork under quarantine. The academic job market is wrecked. Nobody knows what this will mean for our futures. How will I pay my student loan debt? I’ve done my part to get my education, and I am on track to be qualified for a job. But will there be any jobs?

The people around me are lucky. They are at an excellent state university, in training for professional jobs. How much more are others suffering compared to us right now? Many Americans are suffering far worse than missing out on frat parties.

Over 208,000 are now dead from the coronavirus, and millions more are alive but suffering in various ways — mourning lost family members, suffering long term health complications, risking their lives to go to work, or out of work and in need of income.

I think I am saddest for people who lose family members during this time. You need friends and family with you when you grieve, and too many have had to bear that burden alone.

Meanwhile, the person responsible for the safety of our nation, who has mishandled the coronavirus from the start, was living in luxury and sleeping with a porn star while he wasn’t even paying his taxes.

Donating your salary is not that noble when you are gaining much more than that by dodging taxes. Implying that you got where you did through merit when it was cheating — and that the millions of Americans with less wealth than you have less merit — is an insult.

We live in a deeply unequal society, and we are led by someone who benefits from that inequality. No executive order should gaslight us into thinking that’s fair.

Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

Jill Richardson: Stay at home and stay angry

Via OtherWords.org

Social distancing is hard, and it’s not fun.

I don’t question that we are doing what is necessary. Until better testing, treatment, and prevention are available, it is. But quarantining us in our homes separates us at a time when we need connection.

And you know what? It’s okay to feel angry about that. It’s important to remember we’re doing this in part because the people at the top screwed up.

Trump fired the pandemic response team two years ago, even though Obama’s people warned them that we needed to work on preparedness for exactly this in 2016. Unsurprisingly, a government simulation exercise just last year found we were not prepared for a pandemic.

Later on, even after the disease had come to the U.S., infectious disease experts in Washington State had to fight the federal government for the right to test for the coronavirus.

It gets worse.

Now we know that North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr was taking the warnings seriously weeks before any real action was taken — and all he did was sell off a bunch of stock, while telling the public everything was fine. Meanwhile, Trump didn’t want a lot of testing, because he wanted to keep the number of confirmed cases low to aid his re-election.

The people we trusted to keep us safe didn’t do that. Now the entire economy’s turned upside down, people are dying, and we’re all cooped up at home.

It sucks. We should be angry.

I’m young enough that I probably don’t have to worry much about the likelihood of a serious case if I get sick. But I’m staying home, because I don’t want to get it and accidentally spread it to someone more vulnerable than myself.

I’m also aware of the sacrifice that many of us are making for the sake of others. Some lost their jobs, while others put themselves at risk working outside the home because they can’t afford not to — or, in the case of health care workers, because they’re badly needed.

Entire families are cooped up together and I’ve heard jokes that divorce lawyers will get plenty of business after this. Parents are posting memes about how much they appreciate teachers now that they are stuck with their kids all day. I’m entirely alone besides a cat.

I worry about the college seniors graduating this year and trying to find a job. What about people prone to anxiety and depression? How much will this exacerbate domestic abuse? What about people in jails, prisons, and detention centers?

Our society is deeply unequal. So while the virus itself doesn’t discriminate, this bigger crisis will hit people unequally. Some don’t have health insurance. Some are undocumented. Some are more susceptible to dying from the disease.

The people in power who screwed up are wealthy enough that they can work from home, maintain their income, and access affordable health care. Others will feel the full brunt of this, not them. It’s not fair.

I’m supportive of doing all we can to prevent the virus’s spread and to protect vulnerable people, but anger at the people whose incompetence put us in this position is justified. We deserve better.

Jill Richardson, a sociologist, is an OtherWords.org columnist.

Jill Richardson: 'Little Women' and the American attitude toward poverty

Louisa May Alcott’s grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, Mass., near the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau, on a hillside now known as "Authors' Ridge’’. Concord was a famous literary center in the 19th Century.

Via OtherWords.org

With Greta Gerwig’s new movie take on Louisa May Alcott’s classic 19th Century novel, Little Women, in theaters, I decided to reread the book.

The novel, set in Concord, Mass., communicates Alcott’s (1832-1888) beliefs about proper morality and gender roles through stories of a family of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, touting the American virtues of hard work, frugality, self-reliance, and charity.

The March family once had wealth, but they no longer do. Their father is serving in the Civil War, so they try to make do with what they have, even going without Christmas gifts.

When any of the sisters are overtaken by vanity or greed for finer things than they can afford, they learn their lessons. Love and hard work are enough to sustain a family, the story goes, and more important for one’s happiness than money.

What intrigues me is the double standard Alcott — and Americans — have for charity. Helping others is portrayed as virtuous. Receiving help, on the other hand, is not.

That poses quite a dilemma: How can any of us practice charity while others practice refusing it?

Alcott’s answer seems to be that only the “truly” destitute may accept help. In the book, the March sisters often help a family even poorer than they are. While the March sisters can stretch what they have to make due, the other family is starving.

This is more or less how means-tested government programs work today. To qualify for the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as Food Stamps, in 2019, a family of four could earn no more than $33,475 — a pitiful sum — and could only have a small amount of assets in savings.

When others want to help the March sisters, Alcott does not always approve. She’s comfortable with them receiving help from a wealthy aunt, but usually not from anyone outside the family. After one of the sisters, Amy, marries well, her husband disguises his charity to his sister-in-law Jo, so she doesn’t recognize it as such.

Again, giving is noble, but receiving is not.

This ties into Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which describes a value system in which financial success is considered a mark of moral goodness. If one is rich, that shows they worked hard and practiced virtue. The flipside, by that logic, is the poor are lazy and morally suspect.

For the past four decades in American politics, that’s how our leaders have treated the poor, as well. We’ve altered social-safety-net programs such as Bitwelfare to add often impossible, bureaucratically burdensome work requirements, or even drug testing. Recipients are suspected of wanting free handouts without having to work for them.

Studies of welfare recipients, like Jane Collins and Victoria Mayer’s book Both Hands Tied, shows that the working poor are anything but lazy. They are hard-working people trapped in an impossible situation. When drug tested, welfare recipients use drugs at lower rates than the general population.

Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is impossible, but rising out of poverty with a helping hand — or being prevented from falling into it with a safety net — isn’t. That should go for the Marches of the world as well as the “truly destitute.”

We’ve advanced beyond the 19th Century gender roles portrayed in Little Women, so that women have career options beyond marriage. So let’s also get past the 19th Century moralizing that ignores the structural factors that prevent class mobility for those who have done nothing wrong besides being born to poor parents.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

The Wayside, in Concord, home in turn to Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Sidney

Central Concord in the 1840s



Jill Richardson: California fires show why we need publicly owned utilities

Satellite view of Kincade Fire smoke in northern California on Oct. 24

Via OtherWords.org

Hundreds of thousands of Californians have been fleeing raging wildfires, while millions sit in the dark. And for-profit utilities may be to blame.

Pacific Gas & Electric — a private, for-profit utility in the state — has admitted that its equipment likely caused 10 wildfires this year alone. To avoid further damage, the utility has been shutting off its customers’ power when weather conditions cause increased fire danger.

Will this lower the risk of wildfires? Maybe. It will also leave blacked out hospitals choosing whether to refrigerate their vaccines or keep their medical records online.

As Vox environmental reporter David Roberts put it, giving customers a choice between blackouts or fires is a failure.

A popular theory says that businesses must be “efficient” in order to survive in a competitive marketplace. By contrast, the government — without such market pressure — is naturally “inefficient.”

But even in the best cases, for-profit utilities with state-sanctioned monopolies are not functioning in a competitive marketplace. And unlike public utilities, which simply have to cover the costs of operating, privatized utilities must generate something else: profits.

How do they do this? By cutting costs — including employee salaries and benefits, customer services, and equipment upgrades. In the case of PG&E, it’s meant failing to upgrade and maintain their aging infrastructure.

It would be one thing if PG&E’s grid used all of the latest, most up-to-date technology. But that’s not the case. Instead of making their grid more resilient, now they simply shut it off when the weather gets bad — and it may still be causing fires.

And if customers don’t like that, too bad. It’s a monopoly.

Prices and service aren’t the only things at stake. We also need to get power from sources that are reliable, safe, and environmentally clean.

A corporation with a profit incentive, which needs to provide shareholders with growth each quarter, may not invest in that. Upgrading and maintaining infrastructure cuts into profits, giving them a reason to sacrifice safety and eco-friendliness to cut costs.

Imagine a circumstance in which most consumers and businesses get their power from clean, rooftop solar panels.

Sounds great, but there’s a big problem for for-profit utilities: After the initial manufacturing and installation, there’s no profit in people getting their power from the sun.

It’s clean, it’s technologically sound, and yet it’s not available to most people. As long as private, for-profit corporations provide our power, cleaner solutions like rooftop solar will remain out of reach to many.

But what if we had publicly owned utilities?

The wildfires — and the climate crisis that’s making them worse — are public problems. The reliability of our power grid is a public need.

When we privatize our utilities, we limit the solutions we can choose from to those that are profitable to a corporation. We risk situations like the one we are in now, in which the public is suffering the consequences of decisions a private entity made to maximize its own profits.

The public interest, not private profit, should be priority No. 1. If there’s a silver lining to this mess with PG&E, it’s that more people will demand that

Jill Richardson, a sociologist, is a columnist for OtherWords.org.

Jill Richardson: Get ready for unnatural disasters this hurricane season

Hurricane Dorian off George on Sept. 4

From OtherWords.org

Donald Trump discusses immigration as if the benefits of residence in the U.S. are a pie. When immigrants get more, the people who were already here get less.

In general, that’s not true. When immigrants come here, they don’t just take some jobs (often low-wage jobs U.S. citizens don’t want), they also create new jobs. They need housing, transportation, food, and clothes, and they buy all of those things, creating more jobs for other people in this country.

However, in one way, Trump is turning his viewpoint into a self-fulfilling prophecy: He’s using our finite government funds to pay for incarcerating immigrants in detention facilities, which means he’s shifting that money away from other uses that could benefit the American people.

In that sense, it’s not immigrants who are taking from us. It’s Trump

For example, disaster relief. Trump’s using over $100 million in federal disaster aid money to pay for detention centers for immigrants — even as hurricane season gets underway

Does that worry him? Apparently not.

When asked about Hurricane Dorian, which was then a category 5 storm nearing the Atlantic coast, Trump actually said: “I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of a category 5.” He said the same thing last year about Hurricane Michael. And the same thing again the year before, about Hurricane Irma

Hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters are threats that definitely harm Americans. Historically, we as a nation take care of one another by appropriating some of our tax dollars for federal disaster relief

Nobody plans to be the victim of a natural disaster, and we can’t predict which communities will be hit by them. We can prepare for them as a nation so that when they happen, we are as ready as we can be, and we have the resources to deal with the aftermath

While we can’t control whether or not we get hit by hurricanes or tornadoes, we can control whether we invest in being prepared — or whether we waste that money instead on locking up immigrants in taxpayer-funded detention facilities.

We don’t need to do that.

When we take money from disaster relief and use it to imprison people who pose no safety threat to the American people, we are also harming the victims of natural disasters who need aid they won’t receive=

By moving money within the Department of Homeland Security from other areas (the Coast Guard, FEMA, etc.) to pay for beds in detention centers for people who have crossed the border illegally but represent no safety threat to this country, the Trump administration could leave America open to other types of threats instead.

Rather than spending tax dollars needed for actual threats to national security on detaining immigrants, we need comprehensive and humane immigration reform that keeps families together. Then we can use our money on what we actually need, like disaster relief.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

Jill Richardson: Race is a social construct invented for domination

From OtherWords.org

When I teach about race in sociology classes, I often begin by asking students how and when the idea of race came about.

Lesson one? Race is not a biological reality — it’s a social construct.

That doesn’t mean there’s no biological basis to it at all — anyone can tell the difference between different skin tones and understand the role that genetics play in passing on traits. However, if you were to try to divide the world into discrete racial categories based on genes, you couldn’t.

Where, exactly, in North Africa would you draw the line between black people and white people? Where in Central Asia is the split between Middle Eastern or European and Asian?

The racial categories we use today were created by humans, and they unfolded as they did because of our history. When Europeans came to this continent, taking land from (and often killing) Native Americans and enslaving Africans, they needed a justification and organization for their conquest and domination. They invented race to do that job.

Just because race is not a biological reality doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter — the consequences, after all, are all too real. One person could enslave another because of it.

Why do some racial groups do better than others in America? It’s not because one is genetically or culturally superior. It’s because people of color have been systematically disadvantaged throughout American history while white people have been advantaged over them.

When I teach this, I spend a lot of time detailing how as recently as a few decades ago, government programs facilitated white families owning their own homes in segregated neighborhoods while denying people of color opportunities for home ownership.

Many of the people who were helped or harmed by these policies are still alive, and they and their descendants are still affected in their wealth, health, education, and employment.

Obviously, America has come a long way from the 1600s — or even from the 1960s. But the El Paso shooter and the policies of the Trump administration show a continuity with America’s dark past.

In the first half of the 20th Century, our immigration policies reflected the notion of a white America, limiting or prohibiting people of color from coming to this country. The El Paso shooter believed in a white America. But Trump’s immigration policies validate that idea too.

Trump isn’t against all immigrants, seeing how he keeps marrying them. And his mom is one. But his Scottish mother and Czech and Slovenian wives fit within the notion of a white America. The people targeted in the recent ICE raids do not.

My great grandparents were poor, hardworking Eastern Europeans. The generations who came after them grew up attending American schools, holding jobs, and paying taxes. There’s no reason a Honduran, Filipino, or Mexican family arriving today cannot follow the same path my family did — no reason, that is, except discrimination on account of their skin color.

If we accept that Americans are people of all races, colors, and creeds, and if we accept America as a nation made up largely of immigrants, then all people can find a place here. If there is no “us” and “them,” then “we” don’t have to worry about “them.”

We can’t ignore the white supremacy baked into anti-immigrant notions that see people of color as un-American or as threats to America. When some advocate hateful ideas, others will act on them with violence.

Jill Richardson, a sociologist, is a columnist for OtherWords.org.

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Jill Richardson: Just because you're religious doesn't mean you can discriminate

An African-American child at a segregated drinking fountain on a courthouse lawn in North Carolina, in 1938.

Via OtherWords.org

A bill in Texas would allow professionals of all kinds — doctors, pharmacists, electricians — to deny services to LGBTQ customers on religious grounds.

This comes alongside the Trump administration’s rollout of a rule that would allow health-care providers to actually deny service to LGBTQ people on religious grounds.

I’m sorry, but I don’t care if you have a strongly held religious conviction that says I’m going to hell, or I’m not worthy of being treated like a human being, because I’m gay.

If that’s the case, you can go ahead and stay far away from me, and you can hate me all you want. Or you can love me and hate my “sin” of being myself and loving who I love, and then you have the right to tell yourself that’s not hateful.

But you don’t have a right to legally discriminate against me or anyone like me. At least, not outside of your own church — though even there, is it really necessary?

First off, several sources say the passages in the Bible that condemn homosexuality have been mistranslated and misinterpreted. A more accurate reading, they argue, finds that homosexuality isn’t an “abomination” after all.

Even if the Bible is the literal word of God, God didn’t give that word to humans in English. Humans translated it into English. Humans are fallible.

Second, even the most devout Jews and Christians don’t literally follow every single word in the Bible. They pick and choose. If one followed every commandment in the Leviticus to the letter, the result would be gruesome murders (a theme the book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo explored in grisly detail).

For instance, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says that children who disrespect their parents should be stoned to death. If anyone actually followed that, few children would live long enough to get their driver’s licenses.

But you know what? Nobody follows that. Because they shouldn’t.

And although our Constitution protects religious liberty, if someone stoned their disrespectful child to death out of sincerely held religious conviction, they would still go to prison for murder — rightfully.

I support religious freedom. But when religious people pick and choose which (possibly mistranslated) commandments they want to follow — and they choose the ones that discriminate against a group of people for the “sin” of loving — I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that their right to discriminate is more important than an LGBTQ person’s civil rights.

Go ahead and do what you want inside your own church. You have that right.

LGBTQ support groups are filled with the fallout of anti-gay church teachings — people who’ve lost their entire families, their friends, and their faith. Plenty believe they’re going to hell for being LGBTQ, while others even entered into doomed heterosexual marriages that fell apart when they couldn’t hide their true selves any longer.

Our community has a lot of trauma in it, but I suppose you have the religious freedom to keep heaping more of that trauma on us — within your own home and your own church.

I support religious freedom, which I guess means I support the right of any faith to exclude LGBTQ people based on a cherry-picked misinterpretation of scripture if they wish. But that right does not extend to discriminate in a non-religious workplace, emergency room, or anywhere else.

Half a century ago, some people claimed they had a deeply held religious conviction supporting racial segregation. Our government passed civil-rights laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race anyway,

Jill Richardson, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is an OtherWords.org columnist. She lives in San Diego.

Jill Richardson: Why many women don't report sex assault

When Christine Blasey Ford came forward to report that President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, sexually assaulted her in 1982, you could cue the response: Why didn’t she speak out then? Why didn’t she go to the police?

There’s a long, long list of reasons why a woman wouldn’t speak out even now, and no doubt it was even more difficult in the pre-Anita Hill world of 1982.

I can’t speak for everyone who has faced sexual assault, but I can speak for myself.

1. At first, I didn’t know that what happened to me was a crime. My first assault occurred in college, 18 years ago. He lived in my dorm. I knew what rape was and didn’t think I’d experienced that. But I didn’t know that sexual violations without consent that aren’t sexual intercourse are also a crime.

2. I couldn’t talk about it. Even now, I can’t describe what happened to my therapist in any detail. What happened involved body parts that are too private to discuss with those closest to me — let alone the police, a judge or a newspaper. Talking about a past trauma can be re-traumatizing. Some of us cope by staying silent.

3. I blamed myself. I physically resisted for a while and then I froze and it happened. At the time, I told myself that if I really didn’t want it, I would’ve kept fighting. I didn’t know that freezing is a normal human response in a traumatic situation.

4. Afterward, I wanted him to be my boyfriend. My therapist said this was my way of trying to improve the situation. If he was my boyfriend, then what happened could be reinterpreted as meaningful. It’s a perverse response, but it’s apparently not uncommon.

5. I know someone who reported a rape to the police and had a traumatic experience of testifying in court and getting cross-examined by her rapist’s lawyer in front of her rapist. And then the rapist was found innocent. I don’t want that to happen to me.

6. Now, 18 years later, the man who assaulted me is an instructor of neurology at a prominent children’s hospital. He did a terrible thing to me, once, nearly two decades ago. Should I attempt to ruin his career because of it?

The answer to that is: I don’t know. If I thought he was still assaulting women and my speaking out would contribute to making him stop, I would in a heartbeat.

What he did to me 18 years ago still hurts so much that I would only revisit that assault and expose him publicly if there was a very clear purpose to doing so.

I expect if I did attempt to expose him, I’d be attacked. People would say that it wasn’t an assault because I wanted him to be my boyfriend afterward. They would say I wanted it because I froze and stopped fighting. There are good odds I wouldn’t be believed.

I’ll tell you this: Like Christine Blasey Ford, if the man who assaulted me was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, I’d speak up. I don’t think a man who violates a woman that way is qualified to rule on cases of violence against women, or any other aspect of their well-being. I don’t think he could be impartial.

When a victim of sexual crimes comes forward, even if it’s decades after the crime took place, we shouldn’t use her past silence against her as “evidence” to discredit her. That urge to discredit is exactly why it takes so long for some to come forward in the first place.

Jill Richardson is an OtherWords columnist.

Jill Richardson: Food-stamp recipients probably to lose right to use the stamps at farmers markets

Via OtherWords.org

People on food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), receive their benefits on a card that can be read like a credit card. Crucial to allowing recipients to use food stamps at farmers markets are card readers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture just canceled its contract with the company that makes the card readers. As a result, food stamp recipients will likely lose the ability to use food stamps at farmers markets.

I was all set to write about this terrible mix-up. But then I realized it’s not the part I really care about.

Of course, food stamp recipients should be able to shop at farmers markets. But it’s a tiny part of a much bigger issue.

The diets of food stamp recipients lie at the intersection of two issues: our food system and economic inequality.

On one hand, you have a system of food that uses industrial methods to produce a cheap and abundant but often unhealthy food supply. Healthier foods tend to cost more, whereas junk food is cheap. And low-income neighborhoods often lack outlets that sell healthy food in the first place.

The answer to this isn’t to pay farmers less. Farmers are struggling — and if anything, higher prices paid to farmers for food and fiber would benefit rural communities in much needed ways.

The other way to help the diets of low-income people is to reduce poverty and inequality. Ideally, this will require large scale social change.

For example, schools in Detroit are so bad that students are suing the state because they weren’t taught to read. How is a kid who graduates from a school like that, even the smartest and most motivated kid, able to keep up with one who graduated from school that actually teaches its students?

In my perfect world, we’d find a way to ensure all Americans have an excellent education, affordable health care (including mental health care), affordable housing, and safe cities in which they don’t have to fear that calling the police will result in their own victimization. Workers will be able to organize to defend their rights as well.

In that world, fewer people would live in poverty, and more could afford good food.

One quick and efficient way to help reduce poverty is to raise the minimum wage. The 1968 minimum wage would be equivalent to $10.90 in 2015 dollars. The national minimum wage is only $7.25. Workers have lost ground over the last 50 years.

Meanwhile, since the early 1970s, as workers’ wages have stagnated or grown only slowly, productivity more than doubled.

Workers today do more than they did five decades ago but they make less money. The profits for the increased productivity go to the top 1 percent.

Accepting food stamps at a farmers market is nice. No doubt it’s more than nice for those on food stamps who shop at farmers markets. That contracting snafu should be fixed.

But to really help all Americans access fresh, healthy food, we need to either fix the food system or address economic inequality. Or, better yet, both.

Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. 

Jill Richardson: Time for an honest talk about 'free trade'

Via OtherWords.org

America, can we talk? We need to talk about “free trade.” We’ve needed to have this conversation for a while, actually. Like, since the 1980s.

For the past several decades, the U.S. political establishment has advocated free trade as part of a broader economic ideology called neoliberalism.

Now, you may need to ignore the word “liberal” in there — its meaning here is different from how most people use it in our politics.

Neoliberalism is not a Democratic idea. Ronald Reagan was a huge champion of it. In more recent decades, all of our presidents from both major political parties were on board with it — until, to some extent, Trump.

The simple way to understand neoliberalism is that it’s the package of economic and trade policies the U.S. has lived under since the Reagan administration. Deregulation. Privatization. That sort of thing.

One pillar of neoliberal ideology is free trade.

In business school, I was taught not to question it. The idea was that if countries removed trade tariffs, then everyone would benefit.

Each country would produce what it’s most “efficient” at producing: Developing nations will manufacture goods with cheap labor. The U.S. will grow lots of corn and soybeans and export them. And everyone wins because there will be low prices.\

The counter arguments are often humanitarian and environmental. If we’re going to buy clothing and iPhones from nations with cheap labor, lax environmental laws, and few labor rights, then the people who make the goods we buy will work in unsafe and inhumane conditions.

That’s essentially what happened.

For example, in 2013, a building housing garment factories in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,134 people and injuring thousands more. Cracks had appeared in the building before it collapsed, and an engineer declared it unsafe. Factory owners ordered their workers back to work — and then the building collapsed.

The workers were producing clothes for export, including top U.S. brands. But, on the upside (say the neoliberals), clothing made in Bangladesh is nice and cheap in the United States.

Also, corporations get massive profits. You can make more money when you can pay workers only $3 a day.

Free trade may help our consumers and corporate CEOs — but it hurts workers. In the book Threads, Jane Collins details how the garment industry changed after some companies began sending jobs overseas.

Workers in the U.S. became limited in how much they could push for higher wages. They knew that if they pushed too hard, their employer would fire them all and move the factory to Mexico, Vietnam, or Bangladesh.

Furthermore, an American company that wanted to pay its workers well was limited in its ability to do so, because it was competing with other companies that paid less for labor overseas.

A similar trend has played out, rather more famously, with manufacturing jobs.

For some voters in hard-hit regions, part of Trump’s appeal is that he was one of the first major party candidates to oppose free trade.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he’s got a great alternative for it.

Pugnaciously declaring he’s implementing a steel tariff has so far done little more than outrage our allies and provoke Europe to retaliate by putting tariffs on American goods like bourbon and blue jeans, which could also hurt American workers.

Trade wars won’t fix the deeper problem of neoliberalism. But maybe future leaders will see that it pays to question the costs of “free trade.”

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.

Jill Richardson: Exploding myths about 'chain migration'

Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island about 1908.

Via OtherWords.org:

Let’s do a mental exercise.

Imagine that Jose moves to the United States from El Salvador. He comes here legally — he applied for the diversity visa lottery and he won! Then he quickly gathered together the required papers to prove to the U.S. that he was who he said he was, and he wasn’t a criminal, and he moved to New York.

Once Jose’s here, he brings his kids, his wife, and his parents. In the next two decades, his parents bring their other children, who bring their families, and so on.

In all, 40 members of their family resettle in the U.S. over a 20-year period. They do this by applying for and obtaining family reunification visas.

What is the net effect of Jose bringing his entire family on overall U.S. immigration?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The U.S. has quotas for the number of immigrants who may come here legally in any given year. There are a few different types of visas, each with their own quotas.

Furthermore, there is a limit to how many people can come here from any one country, which primarily limits immigration from the countries with the most people coming here (like Mexico).

No matter how many relatives Jose wants to bring with him from his country, they still have to apply for visas — and there is a quota on how many visas will be given out.

You might have heard the term “chain migration.” It is a made-up, disparaging term for immigration for family reunification. It implies that allowing one single immigrant into the U.S. will unleash a flood of other family members all coming over the U.S. border.

It can’t. Not legally. Because we have quotas.

My family came here  about a century ago. My great-great grandfather came here first. He then sent for his wife and kids, including my great grandmother.

They probably came here in the steerage. They were poor Eastern European Jews. My grandfather says that they were from Austria. I’m sure they spoke no English.

I don’t know how that generation fared economically at first. The story my family tells is that my great grandmother was nuts. My grandfather once said to me, “It makes sense my mother is from the same country as Hitler!”

By the time she died, although she was an unpleasant person to her near-relations, she was also quite well off.

I know what happened later, though. My grandfather served in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II and then owned a small business. His children all went to college. My mother has a master’s degree, as do I.

Many families have stories like this. Maybe the first person in the family to immigrate here is poor and uneducated, but they work hard, and future generations are better educated, speak English, and become better off.

There’s a good argument for allowing families to reunite in the United States. Families support one another. A single person who comes here alone will have no support system.

Furthermore, I imagine a lot of the same people who are yelling that we should limit family reunification immigration are also the people who call themselves “pro-family values.”

What kind of family values is it to force families to split up?

Jill Richardson is a columnist for OtherWords.org

Jill Richardson: About those expletive countries

Via OtherWords.org

We recently learned that Donald Trump referred to African nations and Haiti using a derogatory and profane term. (Accounts differ, but all seem to agree it ended with “hole.”)

Writing off an enormous percentage of the world’s landmass and population as inferior isn’t just nasty, it’s incorrect.

It’s true that some nations have oppressive, despotic, or corrupt governments. Some have high rates of poverty. I don’t envy the citizens of North Korea, as they have both.

But human nature is universal. Human beings in every country demonstrate the same levels of courage and bravery, compassion and kindness, and intelligence and ingenuity as we do here in the United States.

I’ve traveled to five continents (all but Australia and Antarctica) and I’ve met people in each place who excel in ways Americans value — such as by attaining college educations or succeeding in high paying careers.

But I’ve also encountered incredible people proving their greatness in other ways.

In Mexico, I visited boarding schools in which the children, some as young as seventh grade, grew, harvested, and cooked their own food every single day, in addition to attending class and completing homework.

They did this without tractors, refrigerators, or stoves. Making breakfast meant waking up before dawn to light a fire (with wood they chopped themselves) and cooking beans and tortillas from scratch.

In the Philippines, I visited a community that was being exploited by a multinational corporation. The community called in an international non-profit organization to investigate and publicize what was happening. Then they bravely gave their names and told their stories publicly, risking retaliation as they attempted to fight for their rights.

In Kenya, children spend far more time in school than Americans do. I stayed with a family whose two kids arrived at school earlier and stayed later than I ever had to — and they went back for more on Saturdays. In Kenya, such dedication to school work is normal.

In Cuba, I found people who could invent just about anything from simple materials. One man created a hydraulic irrigation device out of a few soda bottles and some plastic tubing. With no electricity, the device turned the water on and off at regular intervals, providing the right amount of irrigation to the man’s guava seedlings.

These were not unusually extraordinary people. Just as many Americans exhibit brilliance, creativity, and hard work, so do people everywhere.

However, there is value in diversity. By traveling and meeting people from five continents, I not only encountered diversity in skin colors, languages, and cuisines — I also encountered diversity in ideas.

Americans can only lose if we shun people from the rest of the world. When we meet and work with people from each different culture on earth, whether here in the U.S. or outside it, we gain from their unique perspectives just as they gain from ours.

Some of the most exciting developments I’ve witnessed have come from two or more cultures working together, combining the ideas of each to create something more than the sum of its parts.

A nation’s poverty isn’t a mark of its people’s intelligence — or their value. By all means, criticize oppressive governments. Hate poverty, war, and disease. But remember that people everywhere possess the same common humanity that makes each culture on earth great.

 Jill Richardson, an OtherWords.,org columnist, is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. .

Jill Richardson: Finding common language on global warming

Via OtherWords.org

If you don’t already agree with me on something, odds are I can’t convince you I’m right.

There’s plenty of science showing that the global climate crisis is already affecting us, that vaccines don’t cause autism, and that humans evolved from a common ancestor with apes. Yet many Americans don’t believe in man-made climate change, the safety of vaccines, or human evolution.

For the two-thirds of Americans who believe in human-caused climate change, the future is terrifying. If you fall in the other third, try to imagine for a moment how you’d feel if you did believe the planet was warming, ice caps were melting, seas were rising, and weather was getting more extreme.

I’ll be honest: I’m scared. Scared enough to seriously consider whether it would be wise or ethical to have children. And I’m frustrated and angry that our country isn’t doing enough to prevent the coming crisis.

I don’t want to take away anyone’s car or air conditioning. I don’t want to force anyone to go vegetarian, or limit the number of children Americans can have. There must be a way to decrease pollution and roll back the clock on climate change without compromising our lifestyles in an intolerable way.

But it won’t happen while we’re all bickering about whether or not the climate crisis is happening in the first place.

While the disagreement is most often on scientific terms, actual scientists don’t have any doubt at this point. The question isn’t whether the climate is changing, but how fast it’s changing and what will happen as a result.

But it’s only a small percentage of Americans who are truly scientifically literate. It takes a lot of education — not to mention time and access to academic journals — to actually comb through the literature and find the facts as researchers see them.

Most of us just base our conclusions on media reports of scientific studies or one of Al Gore’s movies.

Part of the problem is, perhaps, economic. It’s nice to talk about switching to clean energy, but that means jobs in fossil-fuel industries would go away. So far, this country hasn’t done much in the way of helping people transition to new careers.

No environmentalist wants coal miners or oil workers to be unemployed. We want them to have well-paying, satisfying jobs that allow them to live the lifestyle they enjoy — without hurting the planet.

The good news it that solar generation alone now employs more people than oil, gas, and coal combined. But in some places, the only alternatives to good coal jobs, for example, may be poorly paid service jobs with lower wages. Perhaps some people would have to move (or else demand their states invest more in renewables).

Ultimately, we need to find a common language to have a discussion, and we need to get serious about providing for anyone whose job will be lost by switching to clean energy.

Because the alternative is doing nothing — and then figuring out later how to help people whose homes are under water from sea-level rise or increasingly violent hurricanes.

Jill Richardson is a columnist for OtherWords,org.

Jill Richardson: 'Win' hungry Trump is now making a mess of National Parks, too

Via OtherWords.org

By most measures  Donald Trump’ has had an ineffective presidency.

If you oppose his agenda, as I do, this is no doubt a good thing. Like countless others, I rely on Obamacare for my health insurance. I sleep soundly at night only because Trump and congressional Republicans failed in their attempts to take my insurance away.

But, while Trump spews verbal diarrhea at press conferences, refuses to denounce Nazis, fires and replaces half of his top appointees, and attempts to convince us he didn’t collude with the Russians, there’s one area in which he’s getting a few things done.

While Trump cannot single-handedly pass new laws, he can alter the policies within the executive branch of the government. And that’s what he’s been doing.

Even as we’ve been distracted by Russia investigations and Nazis, Trump managed to find the time in between his busy golfing and cable TV watching schedule to trash a few Obama-era environmental programs.

To take one petty example, he eliminated a ban on plastic water bottles in National Parks.

Surely that’s less significant than other Obama policies he’s undone, like pulling out of the Paris Climate accord. But it speaks to two facets that have become clear in Trump’s presidency.

First, Trump’s guiding policy goal appears to be demolishing everything that Obama did.

Did Obama do it? OK, undo it. Was Obama for it? Trump’s against it. Down to the minute details, like a local D.C. bike-share station Trump had removed from outside the White House. (Apparently White House commuters used it during the Obama administration.)

Second, those who work with Trump say he wants to “win.” Of course, everybody likes to win. But most politicians have deep convictions that the policies they advocate will benefit the nation in some way, and they want to win in order to better the country.

Sometimes it seems like Trump just wants to win because he wants to win. And, in part, he wants to do it by undoing Obama’s legacy.

True, his poll ratings are extremely low. Perhaps that’s why he continues to have rallies — not because he needs voters to turn out to any upcoming election, but because he enjoys having his ego stoked by thousands of screaming acolytes.

It’s why he fixates on cable news, and sends off nasty tweets about anyone who says anything negative about him. And it’s why his staff has to give him a folder of positive news about himself twice a day — to keep him from typing uncensored tweets that harm his image and his agenda.

Trump’s presidency may eventually self-destruct if he continues going in the same direction. But in the meantime, how much harm will he do?

Being against everything Obama was for, and undoing everything Obama did, will result in making some poor decisions.

Banning bottled water from national parks was never going to get rid of all plastic waste. It wasn’t even going to get rid of all of the plastic waste in the parks themselves. But it would’ve at least removed the most unnecessary waste.

Many of our parks are in remote areas, and handling their garbage requires some finesse to avoid harming wildlife. So reducing waste in the parks can help preserve these precious places Americans love. Bringing or buying a reusable bottle is a small sacrifice to help protect a place you care about for the next generation.

With his hands tied in other areas by a dysfunctional Congress, low approval ratings, high staff turnover, and ongoing scandals, Trump is turning his drive to win for the sake of winning into the small petty victories he can achieve — and in this case, our national parks paid the price.

Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. 

Jill Richardson: A push for urban chickens

Via OtherWords.org

If you live in Austin, Texas, the city will pay you to get chickens.

That’s right. Whereas in the past, cities often banned urban chickens, our nation has now crossed a threshold in which a city will pay residents to keep chickens.

The program is an effort to reduce waste in the city. And, while chickens will gladly eat your food scraps, weeds, bugs, and even mice or lizards if they can catch them, they don’t perform many waste-reduction duties that a good compost pile won’t do.

They’re just a lot cuter and friendlier than your average compost pile. And, of course, compost piles don’t lay eggs.

Unlike a large poultry operation with thousands of chickens in a confined space, backyard chickens don’t smell. A flock of five chickens in a tidy coop with ample bedding has no odor.

I just completed my master’s thesis about urban backyard chickens. Needless to say, I’ve visited many backyards and visited many flocks of urban chickens. In nearly all cases, the chickens were considered pets.

Unfortunately, none of the people I interviewed saved money by keeping chickens. Eggs are so cheap that saving money by raising them yourself is nearly impossible. But they all enjoyed having chickens, so they were getting benefits beyond just eggs.

Nearly all were gardeners, for example, and chickens produce an invaluable source of fertilizer: manure. Gardeners who aren’t fortunate enough to own chickens have to buy it by the bag at the store. Its effect on plants is practically magical.

One of the people I interviewed told me she got chickens after her husband joked that they should. She thought, “Chickens don’t belong in the city!” and began researching chickens online to show her husband what a ridiculous idea it was.

Only, the more she looked into it, the more she changed her mind.

Until the past decade, many city governments also thought chickens didn’t belong in the city. The laws have changed one by one, generally allowing residents to keep a small number of the animals.

Madison, Wisconsin, for example, allows only four. Seattle allows eight. San Diego allows five, unless residents can provide a sufficiently large enough space to keep more. And most cities ban roosters.

But Austin is unique in actually encouraging people to keep the birds.

Their stance makes sense. Taxpayers spend a lot of money disposing of waste in landfills. If it’s cheaper to taxpayers to incentivize families to keep chickens and divert their food waste from the landfill, then why not?

Perhaps Austin will take our country into a new era, one in which chickens are not just kept in the city by the quirky few. Imagine how much waste would stay out of the landfill if chickens became as common as dogs and cats. That day will not come soon, but I hope to see it in my lifetime.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. 

Jill Richardson: Regulation should favor certain businesses and penalize others

Via OtherWords.org

As the Trump regime’s anti-environment onslaught begins, there are several terms used by men (and in the case of Trump’s cabinet, it’s nearly all men) attempting to turn us against protecting the air we breathe and water we drink.

Polluting industries become “job creators,” and the policies that allow them to pollute are “pragmatic,” “balanced,” and “common sense.” Meanwhile, the rules put in place to keep Americans safe and our environment clean become “government abuse” or “overreach.”

These are buzzwords, developed by polluting industries and their political allies, to convince us to let them keep trashing our planet.

Another favorite, already uttered by Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is “picking winners and losers.” Any time the government attempts to rollback pollution, fossil-friendly politicians trot this phrase out.

Generously speaking, they mean this: New environmental rules allow some corporations to keep doing business profitably (the “winners”), while requiring others to make costly renovations or even shut down (the “losers”).

Sounds unfair, right?

Only, the “winners” are the responsible companies with cleaner business practices, and the “losers” are companies that profit by making Americans sick. Say, for example, an old coal-fired power plant spewing mercury into the atmosphere.

In fact, any government decision could be said to “pick winners and losers.”

Suppose the military drops a supplier making expensive, faulty weapons and instead gives its business to a company making equipment the military actually needs. Most of us wouldn’t criticize the government for dropping the dead-weight supplier.

Why should we apply different standards to environmental safety? Do we, the American people, have a responsibility to breathe polluted air and suffer the resulting illnesses in order to keep a polluting industry in business?

Of course not. Especially when the industry in question could have upgraded to cleaner equipment but refused to do so, in order to save money for themselves while sickening us.

Let’s re-frame the idea of picking winners and losers.

When the government allows companies to profit by polluting, they’re also picking winners and losers. The winners are companies that don’t have to invest in cleaner technologies, and the losers are the American people, who get sick from breathing dirty air.

No matter what the government does, whether it regulates or not, somebody wins and somebody loses. The only important question is who comes out on which side.

Oh, and a word about “job creators,” too. Drug cartels employ all kinds of people. That doesn’t mean what they’re doing is good for the rest of us.

Do we want policies that allow irresponsible corporations to win while the American people lose? Instead, I’d propose an ultimatum for dirty industries: Clean up your act or go out of business.

For ordinary Americans and responsible businesses, that sounds like a win-win to me.

Jill Richardson, an OtherWords.org columnist, is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.

Jill Richardson: Trump, the EPA and chaos

Via OtherWords.org

As Donald Trump was sworn in, my inbox filled up with concerns about the future of the Environmental Protection Agency. Allegedly, scientists were being censored. References to climate change were being erased.

But all that was just a warm-up act.

Before we could really act on the EPA, down came Constitution-shredding executive orders against refugees and Muslim immigrants.

The problem, for those of us who care about due process and the rule of law, is that it’s impossible to put out one fire before the next one begins — or to even keep track of everything.

For instance, as lawyers worked to ensure that Iraqis who’d put their lives in danger working for the U.S. weren’t deported back to Iraq, Trump removed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence from his National Security Council.

In their place, he installed the controversial white supremacist Steve Bannon (who’s stated that his goal is to “destroy the state”) and his own chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

With so much going on, some speculate that Trump is trying to create chaos, so Americans are too distracted to uncover and resist what he’s really doing.

On the environmental front, some believe that Trump is holding back on his plans until he can succeed in getting his pick for EPA administrator confirmed by the Senate. That nominee, Scott Pruitt, is a climate skeptic with several pending lawsuits against the agency he’s been picked to lead.

If that’s the case, we should re-examine what’s occurred with regard to the environment since inauguration, in preparation for what’s to come. Some changes were part of the normal change of power in Washington, whereas others were not.

For instance, any mention of climate change was wiped from the White House website.

This is in part because the entire website turns over with each new administration, removing all of the old speeches and press releases of the outgoing president. However, Trump’s new energy page presents a reality in which climate change doesn’t exist.

Moreover, the new administration froze all Obama-era regulations that hadn’t yet been finalized. In itself, this is actually a standard action new presidents take. However, the Trump administration went further than all previous presidents, also halting all EPA grants and contracts.

Another standard practice is to stop agencies from putting out press releases before the new administration has time to get its feet wet.

That said, the Trump administration has indicated it might muzzle its environmental scientists, threatening to subject their work to a case-by-case review by political appointees before their findings can be made public. That isn’t normal.

Initially, rumor had it that the EPA would remove its climate change website. This hasn’t occurred yet, but some believe it’s because Trump wants to hold back until he can get Pruitt, a longtime friend of the fossil fuel industry, confirmed.

Meanwhile, Trump has taken steps to reinstate both of the nation’s most controversial oil pipelines, the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Of course, with the Tweeter in Chief now in charge, some of the most interesting developments occurred on Twitter. When Badlands National Park tweeted data about climate change, their tweets were soon removed.

Shortly thereafter, “rogue” government twitter accounts appeared, purporting to give citizens the truth from our federal agencies.

In short, if this is the warm-up, what’s to come is scary.

The “environment” is an abstract concept, but it’s the air we breathe and the water we drink. We all must work to stay informed. Don’t get distracted by chaos when it’s used to cover up even more destructive harm to our nation and the planet it lives on.

Jill Richardson is a columnist for OtherWords.org and the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.