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17 August 21
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Ninety percent of counties that lost population in the last decade backed the ex-president.
The latest data from the 2020 census, which the government released on Thursday to kick off the congressional redistricting process, illustrate that fact in incredibly stark terms. It shows that the white population fell for the first time in history during the last decade, and that Americans continued to cluster in growing cities and suburbs, whether in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, or New York.
Perhaps most strikingly, while metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph below, rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.
This isn’t a new story per se. Rural America and small towns have been losing residents for decades. But the trend seems to have accelerated. From 2000 to 2010, for instance, only around one-third of all counties lost residents.
Given what we already knew about Trump’s base of support, it seemed likely that most of these emptying counties voted Republican in the last election. But how many, exactly? Mark Muro of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings ran the numbers for me.* He found that, in the 1,636 counties that shrank during the 2010s, the former president won a majority of votes in 90 percent of them. (Muro’s team had to exclude Alaska from its numbers because of a technical glitch.) If a corner of America is depopulating, it is almost certainly part of Trump country.
This is not to say that Trump country on the whole is in decline. The former president only received about 19 percent of his 74 million votes from counties with shrinking populations, according to Muro and his team’s analysis. Overall, the counties where he won added 7.8 million people during the previous decade. But Biden counties nearly doubled that total, expanding by 14.9 million individuals. Blue America is driving America’s population growth.
It’s unclear at this point whether the population trends of the past decade are set to continue. Muro noted to me, for instance, that metro-area growth softened during the last third of the 2010s, pre-pandemic. It’s also possible that the post-COVID acceptance of remote work could be a countervailing force that spreads Americans around ever-so-slightly more outside of big blue cities, though so far the pandemic doesn’t seem to have fundamentally changed the country’s moving patterns.
But the fact that places with diminishing populations so overwhelmingly backed our last president is one more data point in a bigger story about how the country has been polarizing between thriving metros dominated by Democrats and increasingly conservative communities that are either growing more slowly than major cities or are in outright decline. This is true both demographically and economically (though of course those things are intertwined). The Metropolitan Policy Program has previously found, for instance, that Biden counties generated 70 percent of the country’s GDP.* “Republican counties represent a waning, traditional economic base, situated in struggling small towns and rural areas,” Muro told me. “And the census story underscores the sense that growth, in the most literal sense, is somewhere else. Prosperity is out of reach.”
Pundits spent years and untold pixels arguing about whether “economic anxiety” actually motivated many Trump voters, an idea that seems shakier as time goes on and conservatism delves deeper into its anti-vax, anti-CRT politics. What’s more obviously true is that a large share of today’s Republicans live in parts of the country, including deindustrialized rural areas, that are simply remote from the sort of institutions, from government to colleges to major corporations, that tend to generate wealth and growth. The political tragedy of America’s shrinking communities is how that alienation has helped lead them to embrace a reactionary populism dedicated to waging culture wars and leveraging our outdated electoral structure to make sure a minority of the population can continue to govern rather than, say, taking steps that might actually revitalize small towns and farming communities. The sort of robust immigration and public investment favored by progressives might help bring a place back to life, after all; owning the libs for the next decade or so will not. Trump voters, regrettably, have made it clear which they care about more.
Soldiers. (photo: PA)
Was the Afghanistan War a failure? Not for the top five defense contractors and their shareholders.
f you purchased $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001 — the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks — and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295.
This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613.
That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.
Moreover, given that the top five biggest defense contractors — Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — are of course part of the S&P 500, the remaining firms had lower returns than the overall S&P returns.
These numbers suggest that it is incorrect to conclude that the Taliban’s immediate takeover of Afghanistan upon the U.S.’s departure means that the Afghanistan War was a failure. On the contrary, from the perspective of some of the most powerful people in the U.S., it may have been an extraordinary success. Notably, the boards of directors of all five defense contractors include retired top-level military officers.
Several commentators address this dynamic in the 2005 documentary “Why We Fight,” about a warning that President Dwight Eisenhower issued about the military-industrial complex. Former CIA contractor and academic Chalmers Johnson states, “I guarantee you, when war becomes that profitable, you’re going to see more of it.” A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel says, “American people who have a son or a daughter that’s going to be deployed … they look at the cost-benefit, and they go, ‘I don’t think that’s good.’ But when politicians who understand contracts, future contracts, when they look at war, they have a different cost-benefit analysis.”
These are the specific results for the relevant contractors since September 2001. All except Boeing receive the vast majority of their revenue from the U.S. government.
S&P 500
- Total return: 516.67 percent
- Annualized return: 9.56 percent
- $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $61,613.06
Basket of Top Five Contractor Stocks
- Total return: 872.94 percent
- $10,000 2001 stock purchase ($2,000 of each stock) today: $97,294.80
Boeing
- Total return: 974.97 percent
- Annualized return: 12.67 percent
- $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $107,588.47
- Board includes: Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr. (former vice chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff), Stayce D. Harris (former inspector general, Air Force), John M. Richardson (former navy chief of Naval Operations)
Raytheon
- Total return: 331.49 percent
- Annualized return: 7.62 percent
- $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $43,166.92
- Board includes: Ellen Pawlikowski (retired Air Force general), James Winnefeld Jr. (retired Navy admiral), Robert Work (former deputy secretary of defense)
Lockheed Martin
- Total return: 1,235.60 percent
- Annualized return: 13.90 percent
- $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $133,559.21
- Board includes: Bruce Carlson (retired Air Force general), Joseph Dunford Jr. (retired Marine Corps general)
General Dynamics
- Total return: 625.37 percent
- Annualized return: 10.46 percent
- $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $72,515.58
- Board includes: Rudy deLeon (former deputy secretary of defense), Cecil Haney (retired Navy admiral), James Mattis (former secretary of defense and former Marine Corps general), Peter Wall (retired British general)
Northrop Grumman
- Total return: 1,196.14 percent
- Annualized return: 13.73 percent
- $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $129,644.84
- Board includes: Gary Roughead (retired Navy admiral), Mark Welsh III (retired Air Force general)
All stock return calculations were made with the Dividend Channel’s DRIP calculator for the period from September 18, 2001 to August 15, 2021. They reflect returns gross of any taxes and fees and are not adjusted for inflation.
Taliban representatives Abdul Latif Mansoor, Shahabuddin Delawar, and Suhail Shaheen hold a news conference. (photo: Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters)
EDITOR'S NOTE: Ultimately, the key issue in Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. departure and Taliban takeover is going to be human rights. It’s really difficult to find fans of the Taliban; they are by all accounts pretty gnarly. In addition, there are without a doubt credible accounts of Taliban war crimes. The same can accurately and fairly be said of U.S. forces as well.
Nonetheless, it does seem important to the Taliban that they be seen as something resembling rational administrators and not mindless killers. While that is a fairly long shot at this stage, such an eventuality, should it be realized, would be a best-case scenario for human rights in post-American-occupation Afghanistan.
The international community should do everything it can to encourage and reward responsible conduct on the part of the Taliban. They do have a mandate from the Afghan people, by virtue of the country’s peaceful capitulation to their takeover. There is no popular resistance, which roughly equates to a popular mandate, provisionally.
The benefits to Western nations from a reasonably stable Afghanistan would be substantial, both economically and in global security terms. Is the Taliban up to the challenge? Let's hope they are. — MA/RSN
Senator Robert Peters. (photo: Robert Peters for Senate)
In conversation with activist legislator Robert Peters about how leftists can operate “on the inside,” how to get your bills signed into law, and how leftists can adopt effective messaging on public safety and violence.
obert Peters is a 36-year-old Illinois state senator who represents the state’s 13th district. It’s a seat that was held from 1997 to 2004 by none other than Barack Obama. But Robert Peters does not share Obama’s centrist politics. Peters is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a former delegate for Bernie Sanders. He has tried to steer a novel path, moving in mainstream Democratic party circles while grounding himself in movement politics. Peters was part of the Coalition to End Money Bond, which earlier this year successfully made Illinois the first state in the country to abolish cash bail. During his first year in office, Peters was the chief co-sponsor of 13 bills that were signed into law, including measures eliminating private detention centers, providing college students with SNAP benefits, increasing access to preventative HIV care for minors, increasing accountability for the foster care and corrections systems, and ending the Department of Corrections’ practice of suing ex-prisoners to recoup the costs of their imprisonment. He chairs the state senate’s Public Safety Committee and its Black Caucus. (Incidentally, he also turns out to be a paid subscriber of the Current Affairs podcast.) Peters recently spoke to Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson about his work on cash bail, how leftists can talk about violent crime without compromising on criminal punishment reform, and how he tries to “work within the system” while staying accountable to the left political movement. The interview has been condensed and edited lightly for grammar and clarity.
PETERS: This isn’t a video, right? Because I just moved office and there’s no backdrop.
ROBINSON: I wish it was video. Your shirt is fantastic.
PETERS: My friend said I have the face of a 15 year old, but I have the shirt of a retiree.
ROBINSON: Well, that’s cruel. I am very into colorful shirts. Now, let’s see, I’m going to introduce you: Current Affairs listeners, I am Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs magazine. And I am here with Illinois state senator Robert Peters, who happens to be probably one of the only state legislators who subscribes to the Current Affairs podcast! And so it is such an honor to meet you, Senator.
PETERS: Definitely. Thanks for having me. I’m a big fan of your guys’ work.
ROBINSON: Am I right, you’re the only DSA person in the Illinois State Senate?
PETERS: Yeah.
ROBINSON: So that’s a landmark victory. And it’s been a hell of a journey to get where you are today. And I wondered if you could start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself, and a little bit about how you ended up on the left.
PETERS: Yeah, so my path here was a long path, I would say. So a little bit of my background: I was born during the War on Drugs during Reagan’s presidency. My biological mom was addicted to drugs. I was forced into adoption and I was born deaf, so hard of hearing or small-d deaf. I developed a speech impediment, had ADHD. You know, it wasn’t the easiest childhood physically. And then for much of my life, my adopted mom struggled with alcoholism. She struggled with mental health issues. We live in a world where you’re not supposed to talk about these things and you’re supposed to go through them on your own. And I was lucky enough to have a community that invited me into their home, a neighbor who had a door open. And so I grew up, was able to have surgery, which helped me with my hearing, developed the ability to speak with the speech pathologist. I still struggled with ADHD, still do struggle in that category, especially with anxiety. Over the last 30 to 40 years, we’ve told people to pick themselves up by bootstraps that just don’t exist. And for me, the best way we get through life is if we do it together, understanding that you have to treat each other as neighbors on this planet and look out for each other. That played a big role in my development.
I was raised in a very politically active Hyde Park in Chicago. My predecessor being the former president, Barack Obama, so Hyde Park has a history. Harold Washington lived in Hyde Park. It’s just very politically active. After the Great Recession, I couldn’t find a job. My mom, before she passed away, had 300,000 dollars of housing debt she shouldn’t have had. I was angry. I always knew I was angry about something. Why am I angry? And it was organizing, some organizers at the People’s Lobby that did a really good job of helping me find why I was angry. And I was angry at a system that clearly had failed my biological mom. It had failed my friends, my neighbors, my adopted mom. It failed my dad in many ways. My dad was a civil rights lawyer and a criminal defense attorney. He was always taking on the police for police violence. I mean, he’s the last line of defense for a lot of people. And it was a false promise that was always said to people. So many people being told that they’re going to get a thing that just never seems to come.
And I so went into organizing, I worked on a lot of campaigns. I worked in traditional Democratic politics. And then found my voice in terms of a left space and organized around that. And I helped start the End Money Bond coalition, fought to increase the minimum wage, fought to tax corporations and the wealthy. And then I was lucky enough to be appointed to be a state senator. And I was like, I kind of got a lot of work to do, and let’s do it. You know, let’s jump in. And that’s how I’ve gotten to where I am now. This is a long, long time, did I…?
ROBINSON: Well, I did ask you for your entire life story. I do realize that the question was “Tell me everything that has happened to you up until now.” It was a very unfair way to begin. […] So I didn’t realize it was Obama’s old seat.
PETERS: So my two predecessors are a former president and the current Attorney General of the state, Kwame Raoul. So I feel absolutely no expectations here. Yeah, the pressure’s off. I mean, it’s weird, I sort of thrive better that way. When you have ADHD and anxiety, sadly because of the way the world works, you develop a process where you feel like you’re always under pressure. In college, I would wait to write a paper until 10 o’clock the night before. And then I would just go at it and then it was maybe not the best grammatically written paper. But I think it was big work that helped me get through college.
ROBINSON: Did you say you were appointed to office? How did that work?
PETERS: So I have a close relationship with the county board president and the head of the Cook County Democratic Party, Toni Preckwinkle. […] I was able to get appointed by the Democratic committeeman when Kwame Raoul became attorney general. And some people ask me “How does that work?” And I would say, I don’t know if I can tell you that you can mimic my path to governing power. You know, I have two rounds of civil disobedience. I was a Bernie delegate twice, and I have a close relationship to Democratic Party politics. And I fundamentally believe the system is broken. I don’t know if I can say to somebody else you should do it exactly how I did it. I try to describe it to people and I say it takes a combination of things to get here, but one of them is luck. You know, after the Great Recession, I couldn’t find a job. And this is in 2009 and I worked in politics as an intern. And everyone was like, “Well, what a great decision, what great work you did.” I was like, nah, I was lucky. I worked for a candidate who was projected not to do well, who did an amazing job and then whooped everyone’s butt in the primary and that played a big role.
ROBINSON: You must have a kind of complex relationship with Democratic Party politics, because obviously your politics… you’re a Sanders delegate, pretty far on the left, DSA member. And yet it seems like you’ve managed to maintain good relations or better relations than one might expect with people who are not as far to the left as you. I assume you struggle sometimes to decide the degree to which you need to act as an outsider and criticize the Democratic establishment and the degree to which you need to sort of work closely with it and be careful to cultivate good relations.
PETERS: Yeah, it depends. It’s situational, you have to pick and choose. First of all, I don’t have enough organized power to pretend, nor do people pay enough attention to state senators—I hope we can get to a point that they do—just to fight for the stake of a fight. I fundamentally believe there needs to be a combination of things. Organized power: I organize on the inside. And you pick and choose when you’re going to do a battle on something. Because I don’t have enough energy or time to try to fight every battle. I mean, in all honesty, my hope is that more people get into office. And to be honest with you in the Senate, we’ve gotten more and more progressive people that makes it easier to do that.
And I am of the belief that power respects power. So I try to tie myself to the movement as much as possible because I am the conduit for their organized power and governing position. And they are the conduit for me being able to govern the way I want to. And if those are tied together, it makes it easier to get things done under the dome. I always think of the End Money Bond coalition. We’re the first state in the country to abolish cash bail. And a large part of being able to do that was the coalition flexed a good amount of outside power, understood that you do need to hire some people to work under the dome, to translate the language of the movement to people in the capitol.
ROBINSON: Oh, I see what you mean, under the actual dome.
PETERS: I would say there’s under the dome and outside the dome. Under the dome, you’re organizing and you have to constantly be in a state of building relationships and picking your battles and power mapping and all that stuff. And in the capitol that’s the way to do that. And then there’s outside as well. And you have to apply those same principles in both spaces.
ROBINSON: I want to talk about the work you did on bail. Were there moments when you realized “Oh, you can actually win stuff if you organize well. You can actually change things”? For this series I’m interviewing left people who have reached government and who have accomplished things, to help get rid of that sense of hopelessness by talking to people who have fought hard fights and then actually noticed at a certain point that they had managed to accomplish at least some of what they wanted to accomplish. So do you recall whether there was a moment where you were like “Oh my God, we’re actually going to change the bail practices here”?
PETERS: It’s funny because I am extremely competitive. And so when someone says something’s impossible, I’m like, “Okay, so you’re telling me I need to go ahead and try it.” And I think the people I organize and work with are pretty similar. Looking at that challenge, when we were first doing this, I did not feel it was the responsibility of us in the coalition to have to answer for the horrible lame talking points and excuses that you see from law enforcement. And what I mean by that is oftentimes you can feel hopelessness because you get defensive about your position. And I feel comfortable in my position. I feel comfortable about what we’re doing to build power and who I am, not to have to be defensive about what we’re doing. If we’re going to play this game about who’s got the right vision for the world, who cares about the safety of the world, I will put ours up against anybody.
I still feel a part of this coalition. We built an amazing coalition. I think it is a model coalition for the rest of the country. It has grassroots groups that are gonna mess you up with direct action. It has grassroots groups that are gonna work in elections. It has grassroots groups that work directly on policy. It has the policy org who understands their place is specifically on policy. It has communications to make sure it communicates broadly. I even recommended that we hire a lobbyist. I said “There’s do-gooder lobbyists in the capitol, let’s hire them,” and we brought in an amazing set of people who work inside the capitol. So combining all of that.
I think that for all of us, yes, we were nervous, anxious, and thought, “This is just going to take forever to get done.” But we were so committed to making this happen. And the coalition is such a model to the point where the lead public defender of Cook County comes from the coalition, Sharone Mitchell, and they’ve gotten me into becoming a state senator—I always say I come from the coalition. And the two of us are doing amazing work in governing power because of this coalition.
And I think, yes, there’s anxiety and there’s fear. But if you believe your vision is the right vision and you care, and you’re willing to evolve—that’s important, because if you believe your message and tactic are always going to be the right one and you’re not listening to people and you’re not growing, I don’t think you really have a path to win anything or win power. If you look at the End Money Bond coalition, [for example,] to this day they talk about public safety. Before it was just like “money bond is wrong, it’s the worst thing ever, we’ve got to end money bond,” but that’s a negative statement not a positive one. And so they say “End money bond because it’s not actually keeping people safe. Here’s what we want to see for safety.” And describing that sense of safety for people. And that only happened because after being attacked over and over again, [we thought] “Why are we ceding ground on our vision? We know that what we’re doing is right.” And as we’ve talked to people we’ve evolved and grown, and we continue to build on that coalition.
ROBINSON: This is all really fascinating because, as I say, I would like to try to figure out things that other leftists could learn, and this is all stuff that [offers lessons.] You brought up speaking about public safety. I feel like there is a challenge right now for those of us who are horrified by the criminal punishment system. There’s been this spike in violence, and I sense this effort to roll back some of the advances that we made in creating a consensus about reforming that system. And we really want to avoid lapsing back into the “tough on crime” stuff that built the mass incarceration system. So I assume you have had to think about how to talk to ordinary people who might feel afraid of violent crime, and how to pair a reassurance about people’s safety with maintaining your commitment to ensuring that more people aren’t thrown into this really horrifying criminal punishment system.
PETERS: My belief is that if people want to doubt that I care about being safe, when I walk down the street I live in a place where there’s violence. That violence is not an indictment on criminal justice reform or whatever you want to call it. That violence is an indictment on a status quo that for the last 30 to 40 years has failed to keep us safe, has been filled with false promises. And it’s because it’s built on cowardice from people in political power who don’t want to make the hard decisions about the fact that if you build more housing and keep schools open and you give people healthcare and you fund it at the local and state level by taxing the rich, you’re more likely to keep people safe. So in every effort, instead of having to do that, they said “We’ll just throw a hammer at it called criminalization.” So my favorite thing to do to people who say that they care about public safety through criminalization is to say “Okay, then what?” So let’s say someone says “These damn kids are committing violence”—and you see these academic types on Twitter who think they know what they’re talking about, spouting off hot takes about bullshit. It’s very clear. The answers are very simple. And if you talk to anybody—for me, who knocks doors and does meetings, I think I know more about what public safety wants, combined with the data that shows it.
So here’s what we do. You pick up a kid and you’re like “This kid’s a shooter. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to hold this kid and we’re going find out what their parent is doing, because obviously the parents have failed.” And then I just go like this: “And then what?” Because you know what, it ain’t going to do shit to keep people safe. The very idea that we’re going to invest all this money that isn’t stopping murder, isn’t solving murder, and isn’t keeping us safe. And so I would say that the work that many of us are doing to fundamentally transform our system of safety is rooted in keeping people safe. We know what safety looks like. If you live in the North Shore of Chicago, where there’s a lot of money, you’ve got a good school. You’ve got a good job. You’ve got good public transportation. You have food on your table. You have good housing. That is public safety. If you’re not giving people that, you’re giving people a false promise. So almost everything I message with what I’m doing is that I’m not going to cede the ground from my office or when I organize when it comes to public safety.
ROBINSON: Because when they say, “Okay, yes, you talk about bail reform, but how are you going to make sure that my house isn’t broken into? How are you going to make sure that I don’t get carjacked?” you have an answer of what real public safety looks like and the kinds of investments it’s going to take and what’s going to get you there. And people can hear it and go “Oh, okay, he cares about my wellbeing.”
PETERS: And it gets even better. Bail is about who gets locked up and who doesn’t, based off money. So anybody who makes an argument, any official who says “if we get rid of bail, we’re going to make us unsafe,” I’m like “No, you’re saying it’s okay for someone like Kyle Rittenhouse to be let out. But it’s not okay for a poor Black person to be let out because technically our bail system is based off whether you have money.” If you have wealth and money, you can do whatever you want if you get bail, because then you can just get out. So I say to someone “When you take that young person who’s broken into your place, and you think we need to throw every bit of the hammer at it it’s not going to stop.” It won’t stop. What you are afraid of won’t stop. If we want it to stop, we have to invest in each other, in our sense of community, our collective self, the society. That’s where we’re going to be able to stop this. And if you think that someone who committed very bad things and has money should be out, then that’s what you’re talking about with bond. You’re talking about a tiered system that says if you’re rich and wealthy, and particularly if you’re white, you get to be able to pay yourself out to go back into the world, and that has nothing to do with public safety, it has everything to do with race, class, and gender.”
I would say the best way to put this is that fundamentally anything that’s happening right now when it comes to crime and violence is not an indictment of criminal justice reform. It’s an indictment on the status quo. And I think everyone needs to remember that if somebody’s complaining, like losing it on Twitter, saying “we gotta stop talking about this, it’s bad electoral politics: (A) It’s bad electoral politics. And (B) what they’re complaining about is things we do now, not things we are planning or hoping to do.
ROBINSON: Right. You’re attributing it to something that hasn’t actually happened, that we haven’t actually got. […] How do you talk to people about police budgets? If a constituent comes to you and says “I hear all this stuff about the left wanting to defund the police, they want to abolish the police. You can’t get rid of the police!” What do you say to someone who says that to you?
PETERS: I just keep it pretty straightforward: it’s not my job to figure out the clearance rates on murder, but it is the job of the public safety department. If they say they’re going to stop murder and solve murder, they should do it. We have harsher treatment for our education system than we do for our systems of safety. And so if we’re going to spend billions of dollars not to do the thing that it’s supposed to do, then they better explain that to the public. But that’s not my job to explain it for them. So if people are like “Wow, this crime is out of control,” well, we’re spending all this money, what’s going on here? Why is it that you’re not stopping and solving it? And it’s important to note that people don’t realize this. […] I think that it’s not my job to have to defend the status quo for a horrible record on criminal and violent activity.
ROBINSON: [I want to go back to what you were saying about the End Money Bond coalition], and why this coalition was a model coalition that you thought others could emulate. What I got from what you said so far was: you talk about adapting and being willing to learn, and making sure that when you figure out what people need, they hear a message that addresses whatever public safety concern they have. You incorporate and address that and the messaging gets better. You also talked about how the different parts of the coalition each had their particular job and they were really good at it and it worked together. Are there any other lessons from the success of this coalition, why you think it works well as a model?
PETERS: Yeah. I’ll use the fact that the public defender comes out of this coalition and I come out of the coalition and that is clearly understanding the importance of governing power and why you need governing power and why you need to respect it. So “inside outside” is always thrown around, and it gets misused. You can fundamentally change stuff with a good inside-outside strategy, if everyone can respect each other and respect certain positions of power and understand power and the role it plays in this world.
ROBINSON: Maybe you could lay out for our listeners who aren’t necessarily familiar with Illinois state politics what some of the most important pressing issues in Illinois government have been during your time there that you’ve been working on. I realize I am opening a can of worms.
PETERS: There are a host of things. We’re in a big battle to pass a clean energy bill, one that includes ambitious timelines for decarbonization. Hopefully we can get that done by the time this podcast drops. Gov. Pritzker. Hopefully we can get that done by the time this podcast drops. Listeners should google that. And then the budget: Gov. Pritzker closed three corporate tax loopholes and we were able to improve our bond rating. And I know bond ratings are problematic, but it is the world that we live in and it has made our state healthier. During my time here, we’ve increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Of course, we’re a triple-D state, so I have to emphasize that, because there’s not a lot of them in the United States.
ROBINSON: Meaning Democrats control both houses and the governorship.
PETERS: Yes. And that’s not always been the case and it creates this tension. I work well with my colleagues in the Senate. Well, there’ll be times when we disagree, but there are also times where we actually find some common ground issue by issue. And I know the importance of that, and it can create fundamental change. I mean, just to give you an idea of bills I was able to carry on behalf of so many organizations, we’re going to be the first state to abolish cash bail. We’re going to be the first state with mental health first responders. We banned private detention centers for immigrants. And that was just me. There are literally people who’ve carried so many. Senator Omar Aquino passed a bill that basically prevented ICE from operating in county jails. Part of that is that when you have a supermajority—and you’ve got to protect that supermajority—some people who otherwise in their district might not be the safest bet for them to make these votes, you could play around with the roll call more often to be able to get the 30 votes, which how much you need in the Senate. And so having the ability to play with the roll call makes it easier for us to pass some legislation.
ROBINSON: Sorry, what does that mean, “play with the roll call”?
PETERS: Right now we have 41 out of, I believe, it’s 59 senators. 41 are Democrats. You need 30 to pass a bill. […] I will always say that I generally have about 27, 28 votes that I can rely on, generally. And I go around on every vote. I have a binder and in the binder I have a roll call sheet. I have fact sheets. I have the bill language. And so I was able to pass I think 17 bills this year, and a large part of that is I went around with my binder to everyone’s desk, every one of my colleagues. And I talked to them about the legislation. Everyone. Not only did I do that, if there was someone who was quote unquote a “moderate” Republican, I still talked to them. I said, “You know what, it’s your job to answer the question that I’m throwing at you. It’s not my job to answer it for you.” So I’m going to go up to you with my binder. And I’m going to ask you. One of the things that stands out to me: me and senator Terri Bryant, she’s a pretty right-wing Southern Illinois Republican. She has four prisons in her district. We generally don’t agree on anything. But we had a conversation about, I can’t remember what bill it was. And she said she supported it. And then she got on the floor and she praised me, the most left person in the Senate.
And my colleagues who are a little bit more moderate, they were like, “Robert, can you believe, Robert?” I said, “You know what? I just went around. I asked a question, she agreed, and we were able to move it.” Now, I don’t know if I should be saying this out loud, because I’m sure this could be used against Terri Bryant. And that would be a horrible thing. I don’t want to be someone’s negative attack ad. But the idea is being able to have those conversations.
ROBINSON: I think Bernie does a similar thing. I feel like there are some Republicans who are softer on Bernie than you might think, because he’s very, very pragmatic in trying to find the narrow, narrow spot of common ground and work with it.
PETERS: There’s so much nuance to Senator Bernie Sanders that gets lost. And part of the reason why I go talk to some colleagues on the other side of the aisle is because of the work that Bernie did with Senator McCain over the veterans affairs work. And I remember that story and I was like, “Well, look at that, that’s Bernie Sanders, literally working with John McCain on a piece of legislation.” And to me, again, I come from organizing. Who is it to me? Always have a conversation with someone. Always have a good ask for someone. You don’t need to be transactional, you just need to sit down and get to know them, and have the conversation with them. And maybe in some cases you might be able to get their vote on a piece of legislation. And that’s why I carry that binder with a giant roll call sheet, because I want to know my yeses, my nos, and my maybes. And if someone’s a maybe I want to talk them through it.
I don’t try to introduce my own bills. I try to have people from organizations to help carry the bill. So you have an outside and inside strategy. So almost every piece of legislation I carry is because some organizations have presented me the bill, and it fits my vision, or we worked on it together. And then we say “Okay, let’s work together on this.” I’m going to do my inside-outside. And there’s times when I go “Look, I’m running to a roadblock here on the floor, I need you to go have a conversation and lobby so-and-so, so if you could do a lobby day here’s the four people you need to talk to.” And then a colleague will say “I had a conversation with someone who is directly impacted by such and such thing. I’m intrigued, I’m open to it. Talk to me about what you’re doing.” And we have those conversations, and then either they move into a green, which is a yes, or they move into a red, which is a no. And there are colleagues who don’t tell me their vote and I’m like “Just tell me, so I know it’s on my roll call and then I don’t need to worry about it anymore.” You know, I’d rather have someone tell me a no than to wait until voting time on the floor to press a button. That’s not helpful, to walk from their desks, you know? I’m a big believer in the power of the roll call. I think if you’re not doing strong roll calls and you’re not doing structured relationship building, yeah.
ROBINSON: Many people who have lefty politics might be cynical about the way that state government works. And they might assume that essentially votes are all predetermined. People are gonna vote the way they’re going to vote. I see you shaking your head, but I’m just laying out the way that I think if you’re a cynic about politics, you might think. There are these politicians that go in, they have these interests, they have these ideologies, they have these corporate backers and essentially, to negotiate and work relationships with them would seem futile. But actually what you suggested is that you can actually get a lot done if you focus, you can work with people who don’t share your ideology.
PETERS: Yeah. Look, it’s not going to work every time. There are some things harder than others. But you better go hard at a roll call. And I think people are mythologizing, especially with the Democratic Party as like this big behemoth with complete and total control. No, it’s actually a very open and empty space for people to fill. So go fill it. We can fill it. Honestly, some of the most progressive legislators in Springfield were appointed by Democratic Party committeemen. So because we’re in a period of crisis, it’s important to note that we can either use it as an opportunity to do a lot of great work, or we can not.
And it’s important not to make assumptions, right? If you make an assumption or you just completely give up in the fight, well, then, yes, nothing’s going to happen. And that type of pessimism in a lefty space is not helpful. I think that at the end of the day, what matters most is: you’ve got to get your own people in office, it’s important, you’ve got to be tied to a movement, and you’ve got to be committed. If you’re going to go in that space, you’ve got to get your own people and that in office, it’s important, you’ve gotta be tied to movement and you’ve gotta be committed. If you’re going to go in that space, you gotta roll call. I can’t stress that enough.
ROBINSON: The oldest story in politics is the story of the idealist who goes into politics and then makes one small compromise and then makes another compromise. And then sooner or later becomes everything they went into politics to oppose. I assume that you have thought about that as you’ve gone “under the dome,” in terms of making sure that you stay committed to your core values. How do you think about how you can avoid making compromises that are a bridge too far? How do you make sure that you stay principled and committed to your original values?
PETERS: It’s a few things. I try to talk to and relate to the base as much as possible, particularly when I’m in Springfield. I believe that my office should be a conduit for organizing, for movement spaces. So basically opening it up, whether it’s mutual aid efforts on the South Side, it’s hosting meetings, it’s being part of meetings. And sometimes when I’m not able to get something done, being held accountable. I try to make sure that I’m tied as much as possible. And I will ask. When he passed the bill, the safety act that had our end money bond piece in it, at two o’clock or one o’clock in the morning, I was talking to the coalition about negotiations on this bill. I said “They’re trying to do this in the bill, and I need to know: how far am I allowed to go?” This is how it normally goes: I remember saying to my colleague on the floor—usually people say this to you when you’re the progressive, so it was great to sort of return the favor so they can hear how sounds because it sucks—I said: “My people won’t let me go any further. That’s it. I can’t negotiate any further.” We’re not as weak as people think.
So when I’m negotiating on something, I always say: “Have you talked to the coalition? Have we talked to the organization, have we talked these folks in this movement?” Because I can’t say yes to that without approval. And the other part about this is I intentionally try to take on more and more risks. And what I mean by that is before electoral and legislative decisions that I make, I ask myself: does it scare the shit out of me? If I do this, am I going to be screwed by people on the right?” And I say to myself “Okay I’m going to make this decision and then we’d better build some real power.” Like, all right, got to organize.
Me and another state rep on the North Side, she’s sort of been a mentor on some stuff, she told me about a bill she wants to do that’s a huge fight for the left. And I’m not going to name it yet, because I don’t think we’re ready there, but it is a big one in the decriminalization space, and that’s all I’m gonna say. And I remember being like, “Yeah, I’m all in to do this, but holy shit.” We’ve got to really organize a crew to make this happen.
Being a DSA member was something where I said, it’s going to be bold, and there are people who have feeling about this and it’s a complicated district that stretches all the way to the Indiana border. And I think I need to show people this is who I am and I need to keep building with a long movement to build more power.
My hope is that at some point there should be enough people like myself in governing power for me to move on. My dad died when he was 63. And I always say that I want to be, like, a professor, want to be retired out of this by that point in an ideal world. And If I have kids I want to spend my time with them because I spent a lot of time with my dad and then I was 26 and he was gone. And so that plays such a big role in my thinking.
ROBINSON: So my final question for you, Senator Robert Peters, would be what’s next? What’s on the agenda now?
PETERS: So there’s a few bills. Some that I want to talk about publicly and some I don’t, because I want to make sure that before I introduce or work on a piece of legislation with folks that we’re in the right place and we’re ready to build on it. But there were some things I wasn’t able to get done this year that left me very disappointed. One of them is the name change bill. Particularly transgender folks who were incarcerated being unable to change their names in the public record, and often times they’re left with their dead name and it causes so many problems and so much pain and trauma for folks, so I want to make sure make people aren’t having to be re-traumatized with a dead name, so they can go buy a house, or if they’ve had a divorce, they don’t have to have that linger. So we’re going to keep pushing on this.
Either to end solitary confinement or get as close as we can to ending solitary confinement. There’s this guy Anthony Gay, he was incarcerated in solitary confinement, he hurt himself so he could be out of solitary and see the sun. I think that’s something we can move from, and I’m hopeful we can get that done, but it’s going to be tough work. I’ve talked to Anthony, to organizers, and we’re just going to have to really convince people that this doesn’t do anything to help people who are incarcerated.
The other one is protecting the end of cash bond. I know with the fact that there has been a heightened level of violence, those that represent the status quo are going to make up whatever excuse they need to to continue the incarceration machine. They’re going to try to roll back what Illinois did. I’m committed to fight them tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.
I have a couple more bills I hope to get signed. The governor signed a few of my bills, but two more I’m hoping to finally make it. One makes it officially a law to have non-police first responders to mental health and behavioral health issues, so that those who are going through a traumatic event are met with someone who’s a behavioral health expert to help them without the police. You hear about this on the news, it’s passed as a law in the state of Illinois, anybody who wants that bill reach out to Access Living. It’s a transformative program. It goes into effect in 2023, hopefully that gets signed.
The other one is mandatory school play time: every kid has to have 30 minutes of unstructured playtime in every public school in the state of Illinois.
ROBINSON: It’s so nice to hear about all this. I think there’s a lot that’s very valuable here and very encouraging in a time when people feel pretty despondent, like nothing can happen. Like the forces of the status quo are impenetrable and unmovable. And I think [you’ve shown] it’s very difficult, but you can make some progress slowly. So senator Robert Peters, thank you so much for joining me on Current Affairs.
PETERS: Definitely. Thanks, Nathan.
A vaccine. (photo: Artyom Geodakyan/Tass)
s federal policymakers search for ways to boost America’s vaccination rates, a lack of paid sick leave is playing a role in deterring low-wage workers from taking time off to get vaccinated, according to surveys and policy experts.
The shortcomings are playing an underreported role in vaccine hesitancy in the country, particularly among lower-income populations. Workers who do not get paid time off to get the shot or deal with potential side effects are less likely to get the vaccine, research by a Kaiser Family Foundation study shows.
About two out of ten unvaccinated employees said if their employer gave them paid time off they’d be more likely to get vaccinated, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey of 1,888 adults conducted from June 8 to June 21.Three vaccine clinic representatives said in interviews that the time-off issue was one of a handful they commonly hear from vaccine hesitant people.
That includes people like Zachary Livingston, the manager of a Subway in the Denver area.
The 40-year-old said he has been working 60-plus-hour weeks for months — with no bump in pay to his approximately $35,000 a year salary — to cover gaps in the store’s schedule as it has struggled to find workers. He’d like to get vaccinated, and believes everyone should get the jab, but said he hasn’t had the time or mental space to do it.
“By the time I’m out of work, it’s time to go to bed,” he said.
Livingston said he would have gotten the shot months ago, if he had been offered paid time off, but the store does not offer the benefit to get the vaccine or deal with the after effects — or sick pay, in general. He doesn’t have health insurance, either, and said he hasn’t seen a doctor in years. (Subway did not respond to a request for comment.)
Indeed, about a third of unvaccinated people, including some like Livingston, reported to Kaiser they would prefer to “wait and see” if they will get the vaccine while not ruling out the possibility of doing so.
“There is a share of the public that does not want the vaccine, but among those in the wait-and-see group the lack of time off is a major problem,” said Ashley Kirzinger, associate director for the Public Opinion and Survey Research team at Kaiser. “And it disproportionately affects those with lower levels of income and those unable to take time off.”
Daisy Berrospe, 30, the manager of a vaccine clinic run by La ClÃnica de La Raza, a nonprofit focused on the Latino and other underserved communities in Oakland, Calif. said it’s an issue they hear about regularly.
“It’s a big deal — it’s either miss work and get the vaccine, or continue to go to work to keep up with your paycheck,” Berrospe said.
Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said in an interview that he had not seen the data about the issue, but that he thought it was crucial for employers to give workers paid time off to get vaccinated.
“You should want your employees vaccinated,” he said. “Pay them for the day and give them an opportunity. And if they don’t feel good afterward, given them a couple days pay if you can.”
However, not everyone agrees how big of a role paid time off policies play in overturning vaccine hesitancy.
Doug Holtz-Eakin, a GOP policy expert who led the Congressional Budget Office during the Bush years, said he was skeptical of the idea that a lack of paid leave is hurting the vaccine push.
“I find that hard to believe,” he said. “You have to have a day off somewhere, and they’ve been trying to get the vaccines to people’s doors. It does not seem plausible to me that that’s the hang-up.”
Congress took steps to provide emergency paid leave since the start of the pandemic, well before vaccines had been approved. In March 2020, legislators approved a paid leave program that reimbursed employers and required them to give their workers time off should they become sick with covid. That program failed to cover millions of workers, exempting companies with more than 500 employees. And it expired last year.
Biden called for reinstating the mandate on employers to provide paid leave benefits, as part of his $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Congress ended up extending tax credits to reimburse companies that offer paid time off, broadening the program to cover time off for vaccines. But they made the program voluntary. Democrats have pointed to the limits of the budget procedure they used to approve the stimulus without any Republican votes.
“We have ample evidence that relying on employer-voluntary policies to protect people in this pandemic is not working,” said Rachel Deutsch, an attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy, a collective of progressive groups, which has tracked corporate responses to paid leave. “The Biden team has done a terrific job in vaccination work, but it seems clear we’re going to hit a wall with vaccinations as a result of an inadequate federal leave policy.”
A teacher’s assistant and translator in Los Angeles’ public school system said she was also dissuaded from getting the vaccine because of concerns about missing work. The 28-year-old, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared she’d be retaliated against by her employer, said that she has always wanted to get the vaccine, but never felt like she had the time or ability to do so with a full-time job and child care responsibilities at home.
She felt it would be asking for a special favor to request time off to get it, since her bosses never required or encouraged anyone to get the vaccine, she said, and she didn’t know if it would be appropriate to use the sick days she has been given from the district to get the shot.
“I didn’t want to go through the hassle and them say, like, oh, you don’t actually need it. Like, you’re getting it as your own choice,” she said. “I heard people say that, you know, their arm went limp, or that they had a lot of pain. I was just worried about having to drive somewhere, or potentially like coming down with a fever or any kind of side effect at work and not being able to perform.”
Months ticked by, from May, when she started work again after some time off, through much of the summer without her being vaccinated. She got the shot on her first day of summer break, in mid-July.
Shannon Haber, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said the district operated its own vaccination program between February and May to provide employees easy access to the vaccinations, giving them two hours of paid time off per test and three hours for the vaccine. They were given paid time for up to three days per vaccination dose, she said. However Haber declined to answer questions about whether the provision applied to so called semimonthly workers like the teaching assistant, who has provisional status because she does not yet have a teaching credential.
The White House provided a list of more than four dozen companies providing either some hours of paid leave or $100 bonuses — including Delta Air Lines, JPMorgan Chase, and Kroger’s — “thanks to the President’s call to action.”
“We strongly believe we need paid leave in our country. That’s why we’ve proposed doing that as part of the American Families Plan,” the White House statement said.
Surging caseloads in recent weeks have prompted many companies to institute vaccine mandates for workers and pushed some of the vaccine hesitant off the fence independently of that as well. The Biden administration is also working for a major expansion of national paid leave as part of its $3.5 trillion budget plan, but that measure could take weeks to pass. Those measures may do little for low-income workers in the immediate future.
John Jameson, the founder of the left-leaning political firm Winning Connections, which is working with Colorado public health officials to reach out to the vaccine hesitant, said the group has come across people who don’t feel like they are able to get the shot because of their work schedules and a lack of paid time off.
Outreach workers stress the ease and availability of the vaccine when they talk to people over the phone, using the same methods used to get voters to the polls.
“There’s no question that if people had the opportunity to just take time off from work, it would be it would be easier to get them to take the vaccine,” Jameson said. “If you’re in a minimum wage job and you’re worried you’re going to miss two days of work, that’s enough disincentive to keep some folks showing up for their second shot.”
Asylum-seeking migrants amid makeshift camps in Bosnia. (photo: Reuters)
How some refugees hoping to enter the EU via Croatia are deliberately ingesting dangerous substances in the hope that it will get them into hospital rather than pushed back across the border.
sylum seekers trying to enter the European Union via Croatia are deliberately ingesting dangerous substances, including powerful opiates, in the hope that police will take them to hospitals rather than illegally deporting them. Many are travelling with young children in tow.
Croatian authorities have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years for the violent treatment of asylum seekers during “pushbacks”, an illegal practice in which people are deported before they are allowed to apply for asylum. Hundreds of migrants and refugees are stranded just over the Croatian border in northwest Bosnia and have tried to enter the EU dozens of times to lodge an asylum claim.
Asylum seekers hope medical distress will trigger a hospital visit, and a chance to make their claim. They explain, however, that it is mainly women who ingest the substances – which include opiates, painkillers, sleeping pills, cigarette tobacco and even shampoo – because a sick man is unlikely to elicit any sympathy from the Croatian police. An ill woman, they say, may touch officers’ hearts.
“I went to Croatia for asylum [with my family], and I took four Tramadols,” a 38-year-old mother of three from the Kurdish region of Iran said via a video message sent to Al Jazeera from an abandoned house in Hadžin Potok, a Bosnian town less than two kilometres (about a mile) from the Croatian border. She declined to give her name out of shame at having taken drugs. An ordinary dose of Tramadol, an opiate that can cause severe and sometimes fatal breathing problems, might be one or two pills.
“[The pills] made me feel very sick, [and I had] dizziness and nausea. But when the police arrived they still pushed us back to Bosnia,” she said. “I had to take these tablets because of my children, so we can leave this country and go to Europe.”
This woman and other asylum seekers in Hadžin Potok showed Al Jazeera the stashes of Tramadol they use “on the game”, the term refugees use to describe an attempt to cross borders. Others living in the same area say they have also eaten cigarette tobacco and drunk shampoo, which many judge to be safer than ingesting opiates.
‘For the sake of my family’
People’s faith in this dangerous tactic is buoyed by stories of women like Ferhana*, who swallowed the contents of a cigarette last November in the Croatian forest while “on the game” with her husband and children.
“My heartbeat slowed down [and] I was out of breath … My body was numb. I could only hear sounds [but] could not react,” the 33-year-old remembered, communicating via text message from Munich, where she, her husband and their two young daughters now live as asylum seekers. She says she has long had a heart problem that required her to get an angioplasty upon arrival in Germany.
About 30 minutes after eating the cigarette, Ferhana says she lost consciousness. She woke up some hours later in a hospital in Zagreb, the Croatian capital.
“Even now my body trembles as I remember those days,” Ferhana explained, but says what she did was “for the sake of my family.” After a month in quarantine in a Croatian camp, they were able to travel to Germany, though her daughters, aged five and seven, are still “terrified” of police officers.
It is difficult to pin down how many people try this tactic, but asylum seekers of different nationalities and living dozens of kilometres apart tell similar stories of using controlled substances in a desperate attempt to trigger the asylum process.
The Danish Refugee Council, one of the main migration organisations operating in Bosnia, said in an email to Al Jazeera that its outreach team, which includes Red Cross medics, had heard “anecdotal reports” of such overdose tactics, but “did not have data available to share”. The International Organization for Migration, which runs several of the country’s refugee camps, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
‘Everyone here takes Tramadol’
Asylum seekers say they buy Tramadol from local pharmacies, other refugees, and everyday Bosnians on the black market for as little as 2.25 euros ($2.65) for 20 tablets. Tramadol normally requires a prescription, but refugees say they easily buy it without one. About a dozen asylum seekers named the same pharmacies where they get the pills.
Foreign volunteer medics in Bosnia report high usage of powerful drugs among migrant populations generally to treat physical and psychological pain.
“I would judge 95 percent of adults here take Tramadol or other pain medications,” said a German paramedic, referring to a small village where some 200 asylum seekers, most of them Afghan families, live in abandoned houses. The volunteer asked that her name and the location be withheld because it is illegal for her to provide medical services without a Bosnian license.
“Guys as young as 15 or 16 are taking these pills, and I have seen children under 14 with overdose symptoms from sleeping tablets,” the volunteer added.
“Everyone here takes Tramadol,” said one Afghan man in his twenties living in the village the paramedic mentioned. “We take it when the Croatian police hit us, so we don’t feel the pain.”
One 17-year-old girl living in a nearby house says her father sometimes takes Tramadol for pain while “on the game”.
“He has to carry my brother because he is four years old and can’t walk the whole way,” the girl, the eldest of seven children, explained.
Instead of knowingly overdosing on Tramadol “on the game”, asylum seekers in this encampment say they swallow cigarette tobacco with a sip of water, causing them to vomit repeatedly. Excessive vomiting, they hope, will prompt a hospital visit rather than a pushback.
A desperate attempt
“People will do anything to get to Europe,” an unaccompanied 17-year-old Afghan boy put it simply.
On a cold morning last December, Asal*, a 32-year-old Afghan mother of two, took the same gamble.
The pills were her idea, said her husband, Osman*, also 32, recalling that he pleaded with his wife to reconsider, reminding her that their children, aged seven and nine, needed her. But Asal was sure this was the only way the family could reach Croatia.
For 10 euros ($11.76), she bought a pack of 10 powerful sleeping tablets at a local pharmacy. Neither she nor Osman could remember the medication’s name or the dosage.
Before dawn, Asal, Osman, their children and Osman’s 70-year-old father, who has chronic breathing problems, crossed through the forest from Bosnia into Croatia alongside three other Afghan families with young children.
Not long after they crossed the border, Asal took eight of the 10 tablets, Osman recalled. The other women in the group did not take any medication.
Asal’s memory of that day is poor. But Osman remembers that less than an hour after his wife swallowed the pills, her skin turned yellow, her eyes became glazed and heavy and her head drooped to one side. The couple’s children started to cry because they did not understand what was happening to their mother.
On previous attempts to cross the border, the family had always encountered police in the spot where Asal took the tablets, and they hoped the police would soon come, find Asal in a bad state, and take everyone to the hospital. But this time the police did not show up.
Soon Asal was in extreme distress. She was screaming “‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!’” her husband recalled, and her skin was “like hot water”. She managed to walk one more kilometre (0.6 miles) after taking the pills before she collapsed, unconscious.
‘Go back to Bosnia!’
“Like dead. Finish,” Osman said soberly of his wife’s condition. The group decided to keep going. There were no police around, and if their luck continued they might make it to a refugee camp for families in Zagreb.
So they did the only thing they could, alone in the middle of the Croatian forest with no promise of help. The four men in the group took it in turns to carry the unconscious woman, who weighed about 60kg (132lbs), on their backs.
A few kilometres south of the Glina river, Osman said, Croatian authorities caught them. Asal was still unconscious, slumped over with her tongue hanging out. The officers’ only comment on her physical state was, “‘No problem. Hajde [“Let’s go” in Croatian],’” her husband recalled.
The group was brought back by car to Bosnia at approximately 10pm, and as the families were returning over the border they had just crossed that morning, Osman said the Croatian police shot their guns in the air threateningly, shouting: “Go back to Bosnia!”
When Al Jazeera met Asal in June in Velika Kladusa, one of the main towns in northwest Bosnia, she was herself again; a kind, mild-mannered woman. The family’s spirits, however, were low: July marked their 10th month in Bosnia.
Nearly every day this summer, Asal’s elderly father-in-law walked the two kilometres (1.2 miles) from their home, an abandoned house with no electricity or running water, to the Croatian border, alone, to ask the border guards for asylum. Sometimes he carried a plastic grocery bag with a few clothes, sometimes nothing at all. For months, he returned each day to the house, about an hour later, with the same answer.
Until one day in July, out of the blue, the authorities let him pass. The old man crossed the border in a worn pair of sandals and with only a change of clothes to his name. He now waits alone in a Zagreb refugee camp for the rest of his family to join him – but just when that will be is anyone’s guess.
A man stands in front of a city skyline. (photo: Unsplash)
The UN climate report pinpoints the biggest culprit behind overheated cities.
n the summer of 1995, Chicago experienced one of the most deadly heatwaves in U.S. history. As temperatures spiked that July, hitting 100 degrees for five straight days, 739 Chicagoans perished, many of them old folks in cramped apartments.
Two months later, the city began its 16-year project of tearing down the infamous towers of the Cabrini-Green housing project. For 50 years, the red-brick exterior high-rises of Cabrini-Green, buildings synonymous with the birth of urban renewal and public housing in America, towered over the North Side of Chicago. At one time the high-rises were home to 15,000 people, but decades of neglect turned once sprawling grass yards and playgrounds into dirt fields and empty patches of pavement as the once-pristine brick facade crumbled above.
They might seem like unconnected events. But the majority of people affected shared two traits: They were Black, and they were poor. A report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released on Monday looked at the relationship between housing, building structures, and broiling city blocks and found that deaths from heatwaves — like the one in Chicago — are not a coincidence.
“The [IPCC] news that came out this week shows us that you can’t chop up the challenges of meeting our everyday needs amidst climate change into neat silos, “ Rick Cole, executive director of the Congress for New Urbanism told Grist. “It’s impossible to solve our affordable housing crisis, our climate emergency, and people’s desire for improved quality of life against racism and disinvestment into separate silos.”
The IPCC report found that the single biggest contributor to amplifying heat and warming in cities is “urban geometry,” the relationship between city layouts, building construction, and density. The main problem driving the so-called “heat-island effect” is tall buildings. They create urban canyons, blocking winds from cooling things down and locking in heat. Urban centers can range as much as 22 degrees warmer than nearby rural areas. Stoked by climate change, extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other weather event. The report points to cities all around the world — especially Tehran, Iran and Kolkata, India — that are warmer than their surroundings.
Festering within the heat is a housing crisis that has left one-quarter of adult Americans, disproportionately Black and Latino, without housing or struggling to pay rent, and local governments scrambling for solutions. Many housing experts labeled the demise of the Cabrini-Green towers as the death of affordable high-rise housing across the country. Since then, however, cities and states across the country — in Ohio, New York City, and back in Chicago, developers are building taller affordable housing, going up, not out, in an effort to create density, walkable neighborhoods where infrastructure costs are lower and jobs, stores, and homes are closer together The trick is finding a solution that offers everyone safe and quality housing without overheating the planet.
In tightly-packed places like New York City, home to more than 6,000 high-rises, many of the effects of urban canyons and urban heat are unavoidable, said John Mandyck, CEO of the Urban Green Council in New York City. “New York City and other major cities such as San Francisco, don’t have the flexibility to build out,” he said. “It’s about mitigating the climate impact of density and housing millions of people.”
Mandyck thinks there’s a way to maintain tall buildings, and even build a few more in cities that need them, while combating both the housing and climate crisis. Cities could create gardens in the sky, which have successfully offered natural cooling and improved air quality in cities like Chicago, as well as planting trees and bushes to shade sidewalks and streets. Reflective roofing systems in New York City have led to more than 5.3 million square feet of roof spaces covered in a white reflective coating, preventing an estimated 2,500 tons of CO2 emissions every year.
Cities should also focus on cutting buildings’ carbon emissions, Mandyek said. In New York City, where supertall towers have taken over the skyline in recent years, buildings represent 70 percent of carbon emissions, but a 2019 law is set to lower those emissions by 40 percent in 2030 and 80 percent by 2050.
Although Cole does believe mitigation practices like these are important, he says hyper-dense high-rises will continue to pose problems. “Outside of Manhattan or the shoreline of Miami, from the standpoint of climate change, the real value is moving away from the artificial zoning limits that have required the development of high-rise housing,” he said. “Even if skyscrapers were the answer to our manufactured housing crisis, it’s not even one percent of the solution to our environmental problems because it adds challenges even as it mitigates some.”
More than 25 years after that first Cabrini tower came down, U.S. cities are much more equipped to tackle housing problems and the climate crisis, but action requires political willpower and individual sacrifices, experts say.
“We are out of balance right now on issues around climate change and urban development, and have been for a while,” Mandyck said. “But we have all the tools to come back in balance, to lower carbon emissions, cool down our cities, and to house and protect the people who have a lot at stake because of climate change.”
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