The Bowdoin Globalist – Issue 10 April 2015

A Letter from the Ayatollah – Agriculture in India – Nationalism in the EU – Boko Haram – Syriza’s Rise – Offender-Funded Justice – Charlie Hebdo – Insulin Shortages – Murder in Argentina – Precision Medicine – Quantitative Easing – Police Militarization – Modular Cell Phones Volume IV, Issue 3, April 2015

THE WILD LIFE AND DEATH OF MARK HUGHES 1

Letter from the Editors The Bowdoin Globalist Editors In Chief Kate Herman Mark Pizzi Nick Tonckens Associate Editors Camille Wasinger Dylan Devenyi Drew Van Kuiken Layout Kate Berkley Mark Pizzi Photography Editor Hannah Rafkin Staff Writers Sara Baronsky Hailey Blain Griffin Brewer Liam Gunn Adam Hunt Derek Kang Kayla Kaufman Danny Mejia-Cruz Skylen Monaco Maeve Morse Chase Savage Hannah Sherman Serena Taj Spencer Wuest Michaelle Yeo

Dear Reader, In this issue you will find two, staunchly opposed, opinion pieces. As we, the editorial board of The Bowdoin Globalist, have made clear in previous letters, we do not articulate editorial opinion. This principle derives largely from our desire to create an open forum for student opinions while facilitating greater discussion of these issues across campus. Therefore, this magazine does not seek to limit discussion by giving one position or the other more prominence in a published form.

Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the ensuing events, there was an increasingly heated debate among our staff about how to respond as journalists. Given the nature of the Hebdo events, particularly in light of questions regarding freedom of speech and the accompanying responsibility to practice that freedom, there were simultaneously calls to reprint the cartoons, to never print them, to defend their publication, and to wholly separate the principles of our own publication with that of Hebdo.

Out of a desire to continue this dialogue, not only among our staff, but on the campus as a whole, two of our editors penned opposing opinion pieces on this issue. While neither piece represents the editorial opinion of the magazine, it does demonstrate the spectrum across which this publication operates and therefore is more representative of the Globalist than an uncontested assertion of opinion could ever be.

Sincerely, Kate, Mark, and Nick

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CONTENTS Volume IV, Issue 3, April 2015

A Most Supreme Pen Pal

By Camille Wasinger

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The Quixotic Quest to Defend Civil Liberties in France

By Kate Herman

The Seeds of a Failed Agricultural Revolution

By Danny Mejia-Cruz

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Worldwide Access to Insulin Falls Short

By Hailey Blain

Nationalism and the Future of the European Union

By Dylan Devenyi

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The 86th Casualty

By Hannah Sherman

Steal from the Rich, Kill the Poor

By Skylen Monaco

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Healthcare: The Next Generation

By Maeve Morse

The Politics of Public Debt

By Griff Brewer

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Easing the Greek Burden

By Chase Savage

Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How

By Drew Van Kuiken

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The American Homefront

By Derek Kang

Offender-Funded Justice

By Serena Taj

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The Building Blocks of the Future

By Kayla Kaufaman

The Martyrdom of Charlie Hebdo

By Nick Tonckens

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A Most Supreme Pen Pal

By Camille Wasinger The world has a West vs. Islam problem. As French cartoonists are killed for penning depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and upstanding Muslim American citizens are murdered in the streets over “parking disputes,” it is easy to think that Samuel Huntington must have been right: there must be some fundamental, unalterable differences between us—the self-congratulating and materialistic Westerners—and them—the violent and anti-secular Muslims—that makes our respective “civilizations” incapable of peaceful coexistence. Since Huntington wrote his famous “clash of civilizations” thesis, which posits that the conflicts of the 21st century will occur along the fault lines of ancient cultural traditions like Islam and the West, his words have been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Though academics scorn his arbitrary classification of civilizations and his monolithic treatment of diverse cultures, the discourse of a clash between Islam and the West has become the media’s most beloved narrative and brought many a Westerner to equate “Muslim” with “terrorist.” Whether you think Huntington was off his rocker, or want to join his fan club, that’s not the point. In our world today, there is a growing schism between Islam and the West. The question of where it came from—actual immutable dissimilarities in humanity or perceived and constructed difference—doesn’t really matter anymore. What matters today is that lives are being lost because of it, and it is past high time to do something about it.

The problem is not Islamic extremism, as many a Western news anchor would argue, or American exceptionalism, as a jihadi militant may assert.

Rather, it is the pervading vilification and homogenization of members within one “civilization” by those of the other. The tragedy is that a deep and prejudiced misunderstanding has arisen between two formidable and noble cultural traditions and has played itself out in violent acts and an abandonment of basic human empathy. Since Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the United States and much of the Western world has perpetuated a view of itself as victim, our way of life unjustifiably targeted by destructive and aggressive Islamic fanatics. The atrocities and anti-West mottos of groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Boko Haram in Nigeria, and al-Shabaab in Somalia, along with events like hostage-taking in Sydney and the 2012 murder of the US Ambassador to Libya, just add fuel to the fire and buttress such sentiments. Likewise, since the days of colonialism, Islamist discourse has portrayed Muslims as the victims of the overbearing cultural dominance and economic control of the West. The decadence and “Orientalist” view of many American tourists and the West’s propping up of brutally repressive dictatorships across the Middle East has reinforced such a worldview. Events like the 2013 American drone strike that turned a Yemeni wedding into a 14-person funeral and a series of deadly mosque shootings and arsons across the United States in 2012 do not help ameliorate the prevalent perception.

With the recent events in Paris and Chapel Hill bringing this “culture clash” to a boiling point, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote a letter on January 21st addressed to “the youth of Europe and North America.” This unprecedented appeal asks younger generations growing up in the West to make an effort to understand Islam independently from the interpretations of our parents, governments, and media. Despite the astounding significance of such a gesture—this is, after all, the same man who has referred to the United States as “Great Satan”—the letter received

relatively sparse media attention in the West. While major news sources like The New York Times and BBC covered it, it was not front-page news, and arguably should have been.

The Ayatollah’s letter is important for two reasons: 1) the simple fact that it exists, and 2) its insightful content. The fact that it was written at all is a remarkable display of goodwill on the part of the Ayatollah. It is also extraordinarily optimistic. Not only is it important for Westerners to see that the Iranian Ayatollah, an influential Islamic scholar, is willing to reach out and bridge the chasm between Islam and the West in his appeal, but the letter also demonstrates his faith in Western youth to overcome societal prejudices and recognize a common humanity. With the simple act of writing such a letter, the Ayatollah rightfully acknowledges that not all Westerners have already, or would like to, buy into the misguided and regrettably prevalent view that “Muslim=terrorist.”

The actual content of the letter—a call for more individual interpretation and unbiased portrayal of Islam in Western society—also rightfully identifies a critical step towards mending the relationship between Islam and the West. As the Western education system is currently constructed, there is no room for Islam. History and social studies courses emphasize Western history and the accomplishments of Western civilization, disregarding or even omitting the contributions of Islamic civilization over the ages. Although America has long prided itself as a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious, and ultimately multi-cultural society, there is remarkably little to be found in our history books about the rich legacies and achievements of cultures outside Europe and North America. Only when students learn about Islam in a context beyond news reports that show only barbaric acts of Islamic extremist terrorism will they be able to separate the ideas of Islam and Muslim from the actions of those groups and individuals that have injudiciously taken on the name of the faith in justification for their bloodthirsty agendas.

While achieving more balanced and unbiased education in the West will begin to address the misunderstanding between Islam and the West, all roads run two ways. Just as it is important for Westerners to separate “Muslim” from “terrorist,” it is important for those who view Western states as “Great Satans” to separate the actions of those governments from those of their people. The Ayatollah’s letter begins to do this—respecting the intellect and judgment of Western youth enough to believe that we can and will look beyond the prejudice prevalent within our societies—but such understandings must pervade beyond one Iranian leader.

Ending the conflict between people of Islam and people of the West will be a critical challenge for the millennial generation. While there is no easy fix for lives lost and years of vilification and victimization, mending the divide of understanding is an important start. So, in my response to Ayatollah Khamenei, I say this: As a youth of North America, I will endeavor to learn and form my own opinions of Islam and the diversity of people who ascribe to it, if you and others across the schism who abhor the actions of my government will do the same for me and the variety of people with whom I share a Western identity. n

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The Seeds of a Failed Agricultural Revolution

By Danny Mejia-Cruz

The benefits of a globalized agricultural economy has been extolled much in the same way that most neo-liberal policies have been championed in recent decades. The advantages, mostly economic, are often framed in the context of the efforts of developing countries to integrate themselves into an increasingly global trade system. Nowhere has this discussion on the nature of globally-integrated agricultural economies been more heated than in India, which continues to struggle with its efforts to become a powerhouse in the global agriculture game. In an effort to wean itself from a reliance on cash crops, India has instituted a number of policies regarding genetically modified (GM) seeds. Though well intentioned, these policies have had grave unintended consequences, devastating the livelihoods of thousands of farmers and threatening the future of the Indian agricultural sector as a whole.

Agriculture, according to the Indian government, is “unquestionably the largest livelihood provider in India, more so in the vast rural areas.”

The rural areas in question serve as the home for seventy percent of India’s 1.2 billion people, most of them farmers. Unfortunately, most recent data suggests that India’s agricultural sector contributes only 21% of the country’s gross domestic product – suggesting that millions in these rural areas live in poverty. In fact, the World Bank reports that India has the largest concentration of poor people in the world, with over 300 million living below the poverty line. To make matters worse, the Indian government’s agricultural legislation has been weak, disorganized, and ineffectual. The Economist recently pointed out that the agricultural sector “still fixes prices and subsidizes inputs, when public money would be far better spent on infrastructure and research.” These shortcomings have had immediate negative impacts on an economy that relies heavily on cash crops.

A decade ago, in an effort to restructure its economy and agricultural sector, India accepted loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF loans, intended to increase the rate of mechanization and agricultural development in the country, came with a number of conditions. Among them was a promise of preferential access to Indian markets for several agricultural corporations, including Monsanto, Cargill, and Syngenta. Many of these corporations have since flooded Indian markets with GM seeds that are produced in their own research and development departments. The seed varieties of corn, cotton, and other crops introduced by these large agro-businesses are advertised as resulting in a product whose genes have been successfully altered to excrete a protein fatal to some insects, therefore cutting line item costs for pesticides completely. According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, India’s small shareholder farmers would no longer suffer from bollworms, which once devastated their harvests.

Ten years after the institution of these policies, the dream of lush, green, bollworm-free fields–envisioned by Indian farmers and proponents

of economic development alike–has unfortunately not come to fruition.

In fact, regression has been noted since the introduction of GM seeds, not only in the quality of life of farmers, but also in the productivity of the Indian agricultural sector itself. In regards to quality of life, several organizations and major publications have made strong arguments that link Indian farmer suicides–more than 270,000 since 1995 according to some accounts–to the increasingly high price of GM seeds that continue to control the market and which have thrust hundreds of thousands of farmers into a cycle of inescapable debt. Despite general economic growth, India’s agricultural productivity has suffered not only because of the social instabilities caused by widespread farmer indebtedness, but also because of massive oversights regarding the use of GM seeds. The seeds, once viewed as the potential saviors of the Indian agricultural sector, are not adapted to the unique Indian environment, nor are they tested before leaving the corporate laboratories in which they are developed. To make matters worse, neither the Indian government nor the seed developers took into account changing environmental conditions caused by worsening climate change, an oversight which has compounded India’s volatile food security situation and threatened its potential for economic growth.

And yet, in the face of these cataclysmic problems, multinational agricultural corporations like Monsanto continue to raise seed prices in order to decrease research costs at home and manage stringent biotechnology research regulations formulated by the National Institutes of Health and enforced by the American government. In sum, the combined effects of corporate seed monopolies, social instabilities, and declining agricultural output has created a system of dependence that reinforces a cycle of poverty in India. The question of where to begin to look for solutions is becoming increasingly challenging, and intervention via microenterprise efforts has only recently become a focus of the Indian government’s attention.

The system of dependency that has been created is one that has alarmed not only advocates for economic development, but also ecologists and environmentalists. Clearly, the quest for development, at least as it concerns India, has not taken into account multiple variables that are necessary for success on both the micro and macro levels. Besides using India’s agricultural problems as a valuable case study for poor development economics, we must attempt to undo the system of dependence on GM seeds that world powers and multinational organizations have thrust the country into. In order to do so, it is imperative that internal reform at institutions such as the World Bank and IMF take place to enable the formation of more sustainable development policies. Doing so will allow for a more holistic approach to development that benefits individuals as well as the state. Reform at these institutions may be the only way to truly affect positive change in the agricultural sphere without the devastating social and microeconomic ramifications that have taken place in India. n

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Nationalism and the Future of the European Union

By Dylan Devenyi

Several months ago, the people of Scotland voted rather narrowly (about 55%-45%) to remain a part of the United Kingdom. On the surface, this seems like it should have been a massive blow to the Scottish National Party (SNP), who championed the referendum. After all, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond did resign in the days after the failed independence bid. Instead of collapsing, however, the SNP is poised to have their most successful national election in their history this May (Salmond himself is standing for election and may take a seat in Westminster himself).

TheLabour Party, which has traditionally held most of Scotland’s seats in Westminster, is falling drastically in the polls – so much so that Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron quipped that “an opinion poll in Scotland showed that more people believe in the Loch Ness monster than believe in [Ed Milliband, Labour Party Leader’s] leadership.” With this electoral earthquake looming on the horizon, it seems like the debate on what Scotland should be – a constituent nation of the UK, a federated “state,” or an independent nation – is only just beginning.

Catalonia, a prosperous region of Northeastern Spain with a wealthy population and a unique language, has also been deliberating on a controversial bid for independence. Last November, around 80% of participating voters voted for independence (although turnout was only around 40%, much less than the nearly 85% recorded in Scotland). The main reason for the much lower turnout was that, unlike in the Scottish case, the larger national government did not agree to respect the results.

Spain’s Constitutional Court declared a Catalan independence referendum Illegal, and so it went ahead to merely assess popular opinion without a serious chance of leading to independence. The Catalan independence coalition has not let up, with their leader Artur Mas calling for a new parliamentary election at the end of this year, one year early. Tensions continue to heat up and there is infighting among pro-independence parties, but nonetheless conflict still exists between the Catalan regional government and the Spanish Federation.

These two cases both saw failed independence bids at the end of last year, but the UK and Spain are not out of the woods yet. And neither is the European Union at large: both of these cases would have been a first for the European Union, with no precedent set on how member splits would be handled. In the Scottish case, questions about maintaining the Pound, switching to the Euro, or even returning to the Scottish Pound remain unanswered. The uncertainty leading up to the referendum took a toll on London’s enormously important financial sector as institutions shifted assets to safer markets. And although no new Scottish referendum is likely to come in the next few years, devolution promises have already been

broken and the Scottish Nationalists are stronger than ever. As they prepare to seat numerous new Members of Parliament (MPs) in Westminster, Britain will almost certainly face a coalition government in the next cycle with no one party being strong enough to control Parliament.

The European Union currently faces a myriad of problems. The European currency and economy have faced a slower recovery than their American counterparts, and some countries are contemplating exits. The Greek debt crisis is still not resolved as the German government refuses to lend them more money. The new Liberal Greek government may push them towards an exit from the Euro. Facing criticism from the Euro-skeptical right, the Conservative party in Britain is currently promising a British Exit referendum (known as the “Brexit”) in 2017 and even the generally pro-Europe Labour party is allowing for the possibility of a referendum.

Scotland is the most pro-EU part of the UK, so this controversy has further strengthened the pro-Europe SNP. Nationalist efforts in small European nations present a genuine risk for destabilization. As several British firms have shown, companies are often leery of how these border changes may change the regulatory landscape in ways they can’t predict. The financial security of Europe is under pressure from multiple fronts – lingering Greek debt problems, uncertainty from the British banks, a changing relationship with Russia (which poses a threat to the European gas supply) and the potential infighting that may result from new countries emerging from old ones all pose a risk to the long term stability of the consolidated European Union.

Spain in particular would likely to attempt to block Catalan accession to the European Union were the country to secede (the Spanish Government is so leery of this possibility that they refuse to even recognize Kosovar independence), leading to controversy as existing trade and population sharing deals were threatened. A Scottish exit could severely weaken to British financial market, the strongest in Europe, while presenting the same awkward questions about “rejoining” the EU. Furthermore, the loss of Scotland from the UK would mean that the most pro-Europe part of the country would be gone – likely increasing the chance of a “Brexit.”

Scotland and Catalonia may both remain parts of their mother nations today, but their nationalists have far from given up. In the uncertain political and economic landscape of Europe, these two small nations still have the potential to radically shake up the state of the European Union.

Many have argued that Europe’s small “autonomous regions” could better govern themselves independently of their current overlords, but only time will tell whether or not they will, and whether or not such changes could break the wavering resolve of Europe’s great experiment. n

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Steal from the Rich, Kill the Poor

By Skylen Monaco

It is January 2015 and the rattle of heavy gunfire and the screech of motor-bikes resound from the outskirts of Maiduguri, Nigeria’s northeast capital city. Armed insurgents of the Islamic terrorist organization Boko Haram clash with Nigeria’s poorly equipped military. The soldiers are tired, discouraged, and overwhelmed by the ferocity of this terrorist insurgency. Hours pass and Boko Haram eventually relents, forced out of the city with help from local armed vigilantes. There is silence - for now.

A young survivor of Boko Haram’s recent attacks in northeast Nigeria recalls his near death experience with one of the world’s deadliest terrorist organizations in an exclusive Al Jazeera interview, “they followed us on motorcycles and trucks. They shot and hacked at us. We were trampling on dead bodies as we ran in the bush.” He, like many others in northern Nigeria, have suffered under Boko Haram’s effort to establish a northern Islamic caliphate in opposition to the predominantly Christian south.

Boko Haram roughly translates to: “Western education is sin.” Since 2009, the group has been recruiting and brainwashing young, disenfranchised men in the Muslim north with radical religious doctrine, solidifying their belief that the Nigerian government is weak and corrupt. Poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and weak family structures, which plague the north only help Boko Haram and its followers reinforce their contempt for Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. So far, the government has done nothing to help alleviate the chronic poverty in northern Nigeria, and has done even less in past 10 years to prevent Boko Haram’s gradual rise to power.

Those Nigerians who feel that the government has failed to meet its obligation to them will inevitably turn to power structures that can fill these gaps. This is why Boko Haram, although radical and violent, is an unfortunate alternative for many people in northern Nigeria. The costs of supporting a group who might kill followers suspected of supporting western ideals is outweighed by the benefits they provide: an adequate education, resources, and protection.

Given the wealth inequality within Nigeria, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it is hard to refute these allegations of corruption and state failure. There is a stark divide between southern oil-made millionaires and poor northerners. Nigeria is the 6th largest producer of petroleum in the world, the 8th largest exporter, and has the 10th largest proven oil reserves. Despite these promising numbers, most of the country’s wealth is concentrated in the south. Nigeria has 16,000 millionaires, mostly residing behind gated communities. How can the government claim any pretense of goodwill for its poor northern citizens when they rub elbows with the southern elite upper class and ignore the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor? Boko Haram has long criticized Nigeria’s wealth inequality and has used it as a platform to rail against the government.

Many northern states in Nigeria still report cases of polio, making them the only region in Africa where it is still endemic. The life expectan-

cy in Nigeria is 52 years old. Compare this to Somalia: its life expectancy is two years higher despite the absence of a functioning government. It is therefore no surprise that Boko Haram has had so much success in undermining the government’s counterinsurgency efforts. These unacceptable examples demonstrate how extreme poverty has affected the quality of life of northern Nigerians and add more strength to Boko Haram’s argument against the government, making their cause appear just in comparison.

Not only are they winning the hearts and minds of the marginalized Islamic population in the north, they are outmaneuvering Nigeria’s seemingly inept military. Footage of insurgents rallying around Boko Haram operated tanks, waving tattered black flags in support, and cheering as they overwhelm Nigerian military bases can be seen on YouTube. President Goodluck Jonathan has refused to acknowledge that these military failures are due to a lack of government assistance, but instead calls his military “cowards.” Yet as Boko Haram grows more powerful, and moves closer to its goal of establishing a caliphate, the necessity of a solution becomes all the more critical. Recent attacks have made it clear that it is past the time for the government to point fingers, and is now imperative that the government restores security within Nigeria and bordering countries.

How can we stop Boko Haram? Many analysts agree that the Nigerian government must give the people of north what Boko Haram is currently promising it: an education and access to political and economic goods.

If the government wants to win the hearts and minds of northerners, they must address the region’s chronic poverty and the growing wealth inequality. Boko Haram will no longer have the authority to claim that the government is weak and corrupt if they are able to provide their young recruits with better resources. Since Boko Haram has proven itself to be violent and unpredictable, its constituents will have no reason to support it for the benefits it once provided them. Local northern allegiance with a sympathetic and fair Nigerian government will undermine Boko Haram’s influence and will be a significant step in eliminating their threat.

Boko Haram is not a popular movement. A good majority of Muslim and Christian Nigerians do not support this terrorist organization. In fact, given that Nigeria’s population is 178,516,904 people and Boko Haram’s supporters number roughly 280,000, literally 99.9% of Nigerians do not support Boko Haram. The Sharia law that Boko Haram currently imposes on the region it controls is indiscriminate, justifying the deaths of anyone who opposes them - even Muslims. This problem cannot therefore be reduced to a “North vs. South” or “Muslim vs. Christian” feud. Boko Haram represents no person, region, or religion and must be stopped. Nigeria, whose motto is “Unity and Faith, Peace and Progress,” will free itself from the grips of terrorism once rule of law overcomes barbaric savagery. This will only occur once the Nigerian government addresses wealth inequality and extreme poverty, effectively undermining Boko Haram’s tenuous claim to legitimacy. n

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The Politics of Public Debt

By Griff Brewer

Greece’s entry into the Eurozone in 2001 was heralded as a victory for the European community. The creation of the euro represented the culmination of post-war European cooperation, and an expansion to Greece proved that that Europe’s goal of centralized economic planning could be successfully exported. For Greeks as well membership in the Eurozone cemented their place as a “mature” economy. The high interest rates and crushing debt that plagued the Greek economy only a decade before must have seemed like a distant memory. Impressive 4% growth throughout the 90s brought the country’s economy in-line with the rest of the European Union and justified admission into the monetary union.

A common currency and German planning— it was thought— would ensure growth and economic security for generations of Greeks to come.

Today, to say that this turn-of-the-millennium optimism for cooperation needs to be reevaluated would be a severe understatement.

The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession have threatened the very bonds that hold the Eurozone together—a tension that has dissipated little six years later. Nowhere have these strains produced more conflict than Greece, where, 25 years later, Greeks are questioning their decision to adopt the euro.

The economic situation in Greece is dire. A mountain of debt that had piled up before the 2008 crisis exacerbated the effects of recession.

Devaluation of Greek long-term loans to junk bond status deprived the Greek government of the capital it needed to sustain an unbalanced budget. Tourism rates—essential to its service-based economy— dropped through the floor in the wake of worldwide recession, and, along with it, government revenues.

In 2010, the German government decided intervention was necessary to preserve the Eurozone. A German-led coalition consisting of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (nicknamed “Troika”) offered Greece a €110 billion bailout loan —with strings attached. Upon accepting the loan, Greece would be required to balance its budget through a policy of austerity. A departure from the Keynesian model of increasing government expenditure in order to account for decreased private investment during a recession, German

austerity advocated cutting public sector jobs and gutting public welfare in an aggressive attempt to slash the budget.

Though ECB officials would likely disagree, there can be no doubt that Greeks have widely declared austerity a failed policy. The current unemployment rate sits at over 26%, while youth unemployment is at a frightening 60%. Long-term unemployment is somehow even more shocking— 900,000 of the 1.3 million unemployed Greeks haven’t received a paycheck in over two years. The forced sale of public assets proved less profitable than first estimated, and the paralyzed welfare system left the government incapable of ensuring the unemployed. The most damning argument against continued austerity, however, is the 25% contraction of GDP since the beginning of the crisis.

Unsurprisingly, Greeks condemned German interference, with some likening cooperation among government officials to “collaboration.” In the 2012 general elections, public opinion could already be seen shifting against austerity. The Syriza party, a radical left-wing socialist group, was voted in as the central opposition party to the New Democracy “collaborators.” Running on reversing austerity, increased public spending, and an extensive debt-forgiveness program, Syriza’s growing popularity drew on widespread economic dissatisfaction. The party’s Eurocommunist roots and common lineage with the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) gave it credibility among the intelligentsia and working class, respectively.

Since the 2012 elections, Syriza has made a sweeping rise to power.

When parliament failed to elect a president in late December of last year, special elections placed Syriza in power with an effective public mandate, voting them into two seats short of an absolute majority. Within days, Syriza formed an unlikely coalition with the far-right Independent Greeks, and Greece’s youngest prime minister since 1865, Alexis Tsipras, assumed office in Athens.

The first issue for the new coalition government has been addressing the terms of the Troika loan. At one time, it appeared that Mr. Tsipras and his colleagues could favor a “Grexit,” or departure from the euro altogether, a move that would almost certainly coincide with a loan default.

In an effort to assure voters before the most recent elections, however, the

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above those of the country and its people,” he told the news channel La Sexta.

Slow economic recovery with prescribed German remedies has prompted defection from central banking across Europe. If it was ever in question, it is now clear that the Mediterranean economies of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece are a far cry from the powerhouse economies of Germany and even France. If the powers of Europe hope to one day expand the euro to a post-communist Bulgaria or Romania, they must not let Greece leave. Greek secession could upset the fragile continental economy, and growing nationalist politics across Europe could lead a push for the dissolution of the Eurozone altogether.

Luckily, a Grexit is extremely unlikely. Germany, however, must show a willingness to re-examine the terms of its deal to Greece. Perhaps if Troika officials accept that previous deals were made with unrealistic expectations, renegotiation can be justified by fault on both sides. Citizens in both countries, though, seem ready for reconciliation. Three-quarters of Greeks support staying in the Eurozone “at all costs.” Germans share the sentiment; a majority support keeping Greece in the Eurozone.

Public opinion reflects a common realization in a post-recession world: cooperation is essential. An economic stalemate could prove fatal for a teetering Europe. n

party signaled it would be more open to negotiations than previously thought. Nonetheless, Mr. Tsipras has been steadfast in demanding debtforgiveness. Germany understandably stands in opposition; it’s tax-payer money financing the loans, after all. But a renegotiation is all but inevitable as Mr. Tsipras digs in his heels.

Whether the loan is refinanced or not (and it will be), the recent elections will bring an end to austerity in Greece for the time being. The European Community’s power to enforce contracts under the authority of the Maastricht Treaty has already been contested by economic powers less influential than Greece—see Sweden’s abstention from adopting the euro in 2003. Perhaps more importantly, though, Mr. Tsipras has built his reputation on an unwillingness to budge against German bureaucrats.

This resistance to Brussels and Frankfurt has not gone unnoticed around the rest of the European community. In Spain, the left-wing Podemos party—which has surged in popularity over the past year to become Spain’s second largest party—celebrated with demonstrations supporting the choice of Greek citizens. Podemos seeks an overhaul of austerity and more independence from European authority in Brussels as well. Pablo Iglesias, leader of Podemos, sought to draw a comparison of what was to come in Spain. “The victory of Syriza will provoke something new in the political panorama of Greece – they’re going to have a real Greek president. Not a delegate of Angela Merkel whose interests will rank

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LOSE WEIGHT NOW, ASK ME HOW A story of the Megarich run wild, and those who paid the price.

By Drew Van Kuiken

When Darcy LaPier Hughes wandered through her new home on the morning of May 21st, 2000, it might have been easy to take the place for granted. Ms. LaPier, a former beauty queen, had recently embarked on her fourth marriage of the past 10 years, subbing out perennial white guy Jet Li impersonator, Jean Claude Van Damme, and instead opting for the perfectly sun-tanned, ever-coiffed allure of Mark Hughes.

On her walk through the $25 million home—a then-Malibu record— Ms. LaPier could have tried to soak in the 300-feet of Pacific Ocean beachfront, the 7½ acres of prime Los Angeles real estate, or even the wall-mounted TV screen so large that, in all of LA, only Dustin Hoffman could boast of a similarly opulent set up. Given that her walk took place the morning after the couple’s alcohol-soaked birthday bash, held for Mr. Hughes’ beloved 87-year-old grandmother, Mimi, it’s entirely possible Ms. LaPier didn’t get the chance to take in much of anything at all though.

Either way, when Ms. LaPier Hughes first walked into the master bedroom to find her husband, cloaked in a black t-shirt and black bikini briefs, lying back to the door on their four-poster bed, she doubtlessly struggled to fully comprehend what had occurred. Because, yes, her new beau, her always-smiling, irresistibly likable, widely worshipped, tragically flawed new partner was dead. That much was clear. But Mark Hughes’ death also marked the final act in a Horatio Alger-esque tale of triumph and disaster that left a wider, sadder legacy than any tale, real or imagined, ever should.

Hughes’ story begins at age 13, when he went to live with his mother in a small corner of Los Angeles called La Mirada. For a 13-year-old somehow already starting to experiment with alcohol and drugs, it’s really, really difficult to imagine a more harmful move. In joining his mother after his parents’ divorce, Hughes traded the stable home of his father for his mother’s lawless world of self-preservation. Though one can hardly expect 13-year-olds caught in a messy divorce to exercise good judgment, Hughes’ decision to follow his mother seems to belong among the Bay of Pigs, Napoleon’s trip to Russia, and trusting the Trojan Horse in the history of bad decisions.

Hughes’ mother nursed a prescription drug habit with costs running close to $2,000 a year throughout Hughes’ childhood. She would ignore grocery shopping in favor of finding another high, sometimes leaving her children hungry and without options. In 1970, when Hughes’ father and two younger brothers officially left the house and Hughes and his mother moved to La Mirada, it’s unclear Mrs. Hughes’ even tried to maintain the façade of parenthood, instead preferring to let the still pubescent Hughes run wild.

For a kid who, as a friend described, once showed up to the school bus stop with a gallon of red wine and a handful of pills, running wild may have been the worst possible option. He would go on to drop out of high school after 9th grade, with apparently no one to advise him otherwise.

If you came looking for a compelling tale of young genius, of unstoppable talent, and an earnest desire to change the world, Mark Hughes is not your man.

Hughes’ story picks up again exactly where one might expect it: nowhere good. In 1975, the 18-year old Hughes found himself in a far different place than the anarcho-paradise of La Mirada; by then, it was abundantly clear that his mother’s (unintentionally) experimental, hands-

off method of parenting never quite clicked. Early that year, Hughes moved to CEDU, a drug rehab institution in the California mountains. As inspiring as a young kid, eager to start his life fresh and voluntarily trying to combat the scary disease of addiction may seem, it’s unfortunately not true. Hughes made the trip following several drug busts as a wayward teenager and never seemed to let the school’s lessons truly sink in.

Still, the trip wasn’t all for naught: while at CEDU, Hughes learned the art of salesmanship. As a kid who dreamt of cash, Hughes’ found himself constantly fundraising at CEDU and, with a 5% commission on every donation raised, finally whetting the appetite of his previously inaccessible monetary dreams. As a former CEDU staff member later remembered, the fundraising program gave Hughes a chance to become a star, projecting his energy and feelings onto everyone around him and quickly becoming among the most successful of fundraisers.

CEDU, which had been short on cash at the time, claims it intended to build character through the fundraising program, but one struggles to imagine the 19 year old Hughes ever achieving star status at a job designed to build character. The single-minded focus on sales that the program instilled in Hughes however, such focus undoubtedly left a mark.

The impact only truly came to light several years later though, after Hughes founded what would become his life’s work: Herbalife, a questionably effective, undoubtedly shady, weight-loss vitamin and milkshake company that would go on to make Hughes more money than most rational human beings would ever know what to do with.

But before even selling his first milkshake out of the trunk of his car— which, more than anything else, may serve as a testament to Hughes’ ability as a salesman—Hughes needed to find a compelling story for his interest in weight loss. He needed to find his pitch. And in due time, he found it. It came—quite literally— from the ashes of the frustratingly poor decision Hughes made 10 years earlier.

Salesman to the core, Hughes knew how to spin a story. The way he told it, the supposed flame that set afire his passion for weight loss emerged from his ultimate tragedy. He connected with audiences naturally and when he told them that he knew just how hard dieting could be, people listened. When he recounted his experience as a child who watched his own mother struggle day in, day out with her weight, people understood.

And when he would go on to remark that having lost his own mother to a prescription diet pill overdose at the ripe young age of 19, he knew something had to be done, people believed him. Unfortunately, Hughes never looked those same audiences in the eyes, telling them his whole story was a lie.

Genius, no. Gifted, not quite. But with his well-crafted perversion of the truth, Hughes somehow simultaneously out-lied all the sleazy used car dealers of the world and out-slimed all the mafiosos still dumping bodies in the marshlands of New Jersey. He found a way to take a story concerning his own mother’s tragic struggle with addiction to prescription pain medications and turn it into the foundation of a multinational empire. Even when the coroner’s report and his own father’s statements painted a far different picture than Hughes’, Hughes held fast to the entirely imaginary world upon which he built his success, never allowing the truth to bother him and, incidentally, showing exactly why his salesmanship always succeeded: confidence.

In December of 2012, billionaire investor Bill Ackman, titan of the hedge-fund world, decided to change that. Or, more or less. Ackman decided to take on Herbalife, one of the industry rearguards, which would make a statement to the wider industry as a whole and, as Ackman seemed to imply, the world would become a more just, safer place.

Ackman’s non-announcement announcement of his decision (more on this in a second) came in a move somehow well-befitting the sliminess of Herbalife. He called a special December 20th session of the annual Ira Sohn Conference, a widely-observed Wall Street event that usually occurs in May, and drummed up as much excitement as he could about it, trying to bring as many news teams as he could without leaking too much information before the big day.

Ackman’s presentation, appropriately entitled “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” (lesser known as the age-old question of social agents fighting for a moral revolution) definitely didn’t disappoint. Ackman, along with two analysts, put on a 3½ hour show with a 330-slide powerpoint making their best case as to why Herbalife would fail in the coming months and years. For a man who claims that he never practices before presentations, Ackman did pretty well.

Ackman’s presentation never explicitly mentioned that he had already taken a $1 billion ‘short’ bet—where he makes money as Herbalife’s stock price drops and loses it as the price rises—on Herbalife, but the implication was clear. The market knew that Ackman had a position, one he would go on to fight a very public battle to help support, and that was what mattered.

The whole thing reeked of insider trading, but the Sohn Conference always does. No one, including the American legal system, seems to care all that much.

Although it proved the most public of the events, the Sohn conference only stood as the beginning of what became a scorched-Earth campaign for Ackman. Soon after, he mobilized his hedge-fund’s team as a sort of Secret Service-cum-Wall Street type entity, having them traipse around the country to find especially tragic stories of loss and organize guerrilla protests against Herbalife. As the New York Times found, the team also came under fire for starting a government letter-writing campaign where the signees had no memory of ever sending their pleas in. Ah, the joys of Wall Street.

In Ackman’s defense, his firm does now maintain one of the few places for curious consumers to research Herbalife outside of the company’s own website. Ackman’s sleek, well-designed website—with the oddly conspiratorial url factsaboutherbalife.com—opens up with a wall of text about as readable as the iTunes terms and conditions. The text mentions that an investment firm operates the website, but after a quick click to enter the website, the warning can only be found in greyed out text once one scrolls to the very bottom of each page.

The website contains valuable material though: the testimonials, while obviously biased against Herbalife, paint what is really a more complicated landscape than even Ackman wants to admit. In some ways, the testimonials are predictable—‘we didn’t know what we were getting in to,’ ‘no one wanted to buy,’ the list goes on—but others show why MLM’s can be tricky in the legal arena. As victim Susan Fox shared in 2000—before Ackman had a stake in the game—she and her husband found Herbalife while stuck in miserable jobs, enticed by the idea of working from home.

And while the optimism streamed down from salespeople, reality set in rather quickly. Interest became a full-time career within minutes, and that was only the beginning. From the moment they first expressed interest in the company, the onslaught of high pressure pitches, nominally optional offers for extra company products and hidden fees meant that both the Foxs’ new job had huge startup fees—they spent $4,000 after just their first conference call—and no easy way to back out.

The Fox’s went on to work 10-11 hour days, constantly mailing out

Of course, Hughes’ business ideas never were all that original. He built his company around the idea of Multi-Level Marketing, or MLM, which is better known as the weird group of companies that inspire your friends to try to sell you random household goods. Also notably, every pitch seems to begin with someone saying “This isn’t a pyramid scheme, but–.” As a more technical definition, MLM companies allow individuals to become full scale distributors, each more focused on finding a set of their own distributors than selling their actual products. Ideally, money trickles down into everyone’s pockets, slowly making its way down an increasingly long chain of sellers. Whether it actually works that way is up for debate.

The origin story of MLM, like that of any good scheme toeing the line between immorality and illegality, differs depending on who you ask.

Some sources bestow the honor upon the California Perfume Company, known today as Avon Products, and others look to the influence of Carl Rehnborg and the Amway Corporation’s Nutrilite line.

Rife with cultural stereotyping and a vague sense of American imperialism, Rehnborg’s story—where he travels to China for 10 years and sees the impact, at close range, of an inadequate diet—has all the trappings of a good 1920’s tale, but its faux-focus on pseudo health also feels oddly similar to the story Mark Hughes would go on to peddle 50 years later.

On a wider scale, Rehnborg’s story develops in much the same way that many MLM companies, Herbalife included, do: one man comes up with a good product, gives it to his friends, and his friends like it so much that they want to bring their own friends in on the magic. Never mind the trust inherent in eating an either unlabeled or never before seen, as in Rehnborg’s case, vitamin, especially one created by an unknown ‘friend of a friend’; as the start up stories go, the hand of Manifest Destiny itself takes control, the product explodes onto the national scene. As more buyers want to sell to more and more of their friends, MLM companies quickly become a self-perpetuating entity, no longer governed by the rules of gravity or diminishing returns.

One should understand: if personified as high schoolers, MLM companies would be the kids who love to tell stories, but never quite seem to tell the truth. Even so, when an MLM company does take off, it can happen in the blink of an eye. Take the explosion of Herbalife itself. It took a mere five years for Herbalife’s sales to soar from $386,000 to $423 million per year. To underscore that point, that’s a sales increase of more than 100,000%. In 1999, the year before Hughes’ death, Herbalife’s retail sales stood at $1.79 billion and the company had expanded into 46 countries.

Stretching across the globe, its multinational sales force stood more than a million strong and the company showed no signs of stopping.

MLM companies’ astronomical growth, at face value, looks impossible to believe. But once you look into what their growth actually consists of, the picture becomes far murkier. The US government currently requires distributors to make more money from the selling of the actual products than the recruitment of new members and, unsurprisingly, Herbalife contends that 69% of distributor payments come from retail sales. It’s unclear who actually even makes any meaningful amount of money from the entire enterprise though; even Herbalife itself admits that only 9.85% of distributors make more than $7,354 in a given year. For a company that doles out promotional videos of a distributor who makes more than $100,000 a year driving a Ferrari, something seems a little amiss, but such is life with MLM companies. This, my friends, is the grey area.

The grey area has proven a kind home to the MLM industry over the years, shielding the pseudo-scams from potentially life-threatening government investigations, magazine exposés constantly rediscovering the immorality of the whole thing, and regular people realizing that marketing doesn’t always align with reality. Sure, the rare successful inquiry will take down one corporation or another, but the industry always seems to stand strong.

Kuiken

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books of information, talking to strangers, and attending seminars all at Herbalife’s advice. The success that Herbalife seemed to guarantee eluded them. The support system that Herbalife promised—a supervisor to bounce ideas off and a distributor network to seek out advice from— collapsed only months after they joined. Just a year in, they found themselves thousands of dollars in debt. They had only sold to friends and relatives, not the legions of waiting consumers ready to buy in. They most they ever received from Herbalife was a check for $3.

The Fox’s are not alone. Ackman’s research, controversial as it was, proved that. And had Ackman intended to act on behalf of those he wanted to protect, spreading the truth they couldn’t make public without the bullhorn of a larger organization, the whole thing might have been excusable. But as former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange commission Harvey Pitt noted, Ackman’s campaign began “to look like an effort to move the [stock] price rather than spread the truth.” Still, there’s no concrete evidence of that, so let’s move on.

If Ackman’s campaign looks like the work of someone blessed with an incomprehensibly strong confidence in himself, that’s because it is. Today’s billionaire carries the same spirit that has guided most of his life, once tellingly leading him to make a $2,000 bet over the SAT with his own father. His father called off the bet the night before the test, but Ackman maintains that his 780—as opposed to the 800 that he had promised— on the verbal section wouldn’t have counted anyways, because he’s “still convinced some of the questions were wrong.”

In the post-2008 era of supposedly more cautious and moral bankers, Ackman stands out. He’s certainly not without his equals though. And with that, we welcome to Dan Loeb and Carl Icahn to the story.

As one might expect, a guy who seems to believe that Manifest Destiny guides his stock picks doesn’t have an abundance of good friends in the industry. But Loeb and Icahn, fellow investors, don’t just dislike Ackman, they hate the guy. Each has their own reason—Loeb cites an outlandish story of conflicting egos, where Ackman destroyed his cycling trip in the Hamptons, and Icahn, in a display of unprecedented machismo, essentially claims that because Ackman sued him for money that Ackman was owed, he doesn’t deserve Icahn’s respect—but the thirst for blood among the two is very real.

Thus, when both Loeb and Icahn announced massive purchases of Herbalife stock—long positions, where they profited if the stock price rose—in the months following Ackman’s Sohn conference, no one seemed to surprised. Loeb ended up making his acquisition first and presented a relatively well-thought out rationale for making the trade. He responded to Ackman’s presentation and, in investing $300 million, at least attempted to separate his personal distaste from business sense.

Still, for a guy who began his career investing in companies and then taking to online investor message boards and attacking unfriendly CEOs, the evidence of a personal grudge shone through in his trade.

Icahn though, who recently graced the cover of TIME magazine as “the most important investor in America,” never even attempted to couch his investment behind sound logic. The earlier lawsuit—which dealt with a mere $9 million, or what accounts to lunch money for the $20.2 billion net-worth Wall Street celebrity—made enough of an impact that Icahn wanted to purchase 17.3% of all Herbalife stock.

Loeb and Icahn’s involvement eventually led to a 52-week high watermark for the Herbalife stock and opened the door to endless ridicule for Ackman. But well before it looked like Ackman had hemorrhaged cash, before the entire financial industry tried to decry Ackman’s investment as a complete disaster, the relationship between Icahn and Ackman had already led to what might be the funniest and most telling occurrence about Wall Street in recent CNBC history.

It all began when Icahn went on CNBC and essentially called out

Ackman for hiding behind altruism as opposed to the raw desire for profit with his short of Herbalife. The next day, Ackman went on CNBC to defend himself against Icahn’s claims and Icahn decided to call into the show. Within seconds, CNBC became Bravo 2.0, land of the surreal and impossible. Trading floors all over New York stopped in their tracks, incredulous at the spectacle of two billionaires verbally boxing on national television.

As the two sparred back and forth, Icahn and Ackman revealed the very real fervor with which they disliked each other. But the conversation became the stuff of legend once Icahn revealed the way he views his competition: “I’ve really sort of had it with this guy Ackman,” he said. “He’s like the crybaby in the schoolyard. I went to a tough school in Queens, and they used to beat up the little Jewish boys. He was like one of these little Jewish boys, crying that the world was taking advantage of him.”

Two years later, the dust has settled around the whole situation. Loeb and Icahn cashed out their investments long ago, each making a pretty penny and walking away with what one can only assume to be a clear conscience. Or, at least, an even larger than their already larger than life ego. Either way, the Herbalife episode remains but a footnote in their respective careers.

Ackman, however, lingers on. Accounting for legal fees and the like, his bet only began approaching the black around January of 2015. But he insists that even an astronomical drop in the stock price of Herbalife couldn’t convince him to sell; he wants to see the company run into the ground, to reach the mythical stock price of 0, or he wants to see nothing at all.

His campaign no longer carries the same gravity that it once did. His bet’s become old news and nobody really seems to care about the moral impetus he wants to attach to investigations of the company. Even he, to a certain extent, moved on. His fund, Pershing Square Capital, posted gains of 40.17% in 2014. The financial media crowned him the #1 hedge-fund of the year.

True motives aside, it should be recognized that Ackman plans to donate $10 million to TheDream.US, a charity designed to provide scholarship money to immigrants under temporary relief from deportation. He claims that the donation will serve as a precursor to the larger injection of $200 million he plans to give once Herbalife is officially dead.

And despite its slow withdrawal from media coverage, Ackman’s bet may yet prove prescient. When asked about it in January, Ackman’s response proved telling though, underscoring some of his more fundamental motives. In an interview with USA Today, he joked that “If I could have started [the short] in 2014 [after Loeb and Icahn drove up the share price], I would look like a genius.”

Ackman’s idea of genius shares little resemblance with that of the distributors he’s trying to save. The promise that lured them in, that gave them the inkling of hope, that shielded them from the bright, blinking indicator signs that seems so obvious from the outside, starts and ends with the mystique of Mark Hughes.

Just three months before he passed away, Mark Hughes stood on a very big stage for a very big presentation. Looking more like an actor than a diet shake mogul, Hughes sported an immaculate haircut and a better tan.

On his lapel, he proudly wore the badge that made so many of his disciples believe in him: “Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How.” An audience of 4,000 rose and fell with his every word; after 20 years of existence, Herbalife looked more like a cult than an alternative to Weight Watchers.

From the audience, Paco Perez watched Hughes shed a tear as he promised to take Herbalife around the world. Emotion swelled up inside the former bellboy turned distributor. It was a moment he’ll never forget.

“The dream has helped so many people like me,” he said. It’s unclear whether he lost any weight. n

Easing the Greek Burden

By Chase Savage

There are, however, potential pitfalls that are unique to Europe. For starters, unlike the United States or Japan, the ECB is not dealing with one country: it is dealing with nineteen. While all the countries share the euro, all nineteen countries are not the same economically. While countries such as Germany and France remain some of the largest economies in the world, other countries such as Cyprus and Malta are some of the smallest.

The ECB must balance the intricate differences in the nineteen economies.

In addition to the fact that some of the countries, such as Italy, Greece, and Spain are either in the midst of further economic downturns or are still in the process of coming out of the financial recession. Countries such as Germany are fearful about sharing in the suffering of the other member states, as the idea of risk sharing does not sit well with the stronger Eurozone economies. The ECB attempted to reduce this issue by making only twenty percent of the ECB’s assets shared risk across all the Eurozone.

The other eighty percent of assets will be held by the individual national banks in an effort to have each country shoulder their own debt and, in case of financial downturn, not bring the rest of the Eurozone down with it. Furthermore, as reported by The Financial Times, the assets will be bought in proportion to the size and strength of the Eurozone countries.

By shifting the responsibility to the national banks and having them buy their own national debt, the ECB is hoping to ensure similar success to other QE programs while reducing the overall risk. While it still has not entirely satisfied the austerity focused Germans, this concession did allow for overall passage.

There remains another problem, one that extends far beyond simple economics. Greece, the nation that started it all with an overabundance in government and public sector spending, wants to be absolved of most of its debt owed to other Eurozone countries. Furthermore, it specifically aims its frustrations at Germany’s insistence that Greece must implement austerity measures in order to receive its bailout funds. So great was the outcry that on January 25, only days after the ECB announced its QE program, Greece voted for and elected a new Parliament. Replacing the

When the European Central Bank (ECB) on January 22 launched its long-expected expansion of its quantitative easing (QE) program, the world markets looked on with hopeful eyes. Seeking to spur growth and raise European inflation to around 2 percent, the ECB’s plan is simple.

Every month starting in March 2015, the ECB will buy approximately €60 billion in government-back bonds from each of the nineteen Eurozone countries. The plan is expected to last until September 2016 at a minimum with thoughts that if the ECB’s inflationary goal is not reached, the plan would continue. Overall, an expected €1 trillion in assets is expected to be bought by the ECB. Said ECB President Mario Draghi, “Expectations work only if there is a certain credibility. Today we are showing that credibility is deserved” For “Super Mario”, he is hoping that his plan will deliver upon early promises.

The ECB is not revolutionary in its implementation of QE. Although relatively new, QE has been a tool used by numerous central banks in an effort to revitalize economic growth in the wake of the 2007-2008 Financial Recession. First used by Japan in the early 2000s to spur growth, The United States’ Federal Reserve was the first central bank to launch QE after the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Recently ceased by the Fed in October 2014, it is too early to study the effects of QE in the United States. As reported by the New York Times, the Fed saw its balance sheets rise to approximately $4.48 trillion in assets, in addition to the equity markets nearing pre-recession figures, as the Dow Jones and the S&P 500, for example, saw record numbers hit by the end of 2014. However, while American unemployment has fallen to approximately 5.7 percent as of February 6 and workforce participation is nearing pre-financial recession figures, inflation still remains far below the Fed’s goal of 2 percent inflation.

The jury remains out on QE and the ECB could be taking a large risk in implementing this policy.

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of default, the European financial system would be greatly weakened and would encourage other indebted countries to do the same. For Greece, however, the consequences of such a move would be destructive to their own economy. A new Greek currency would be extremely weak compared to the Euro, triggering high inflation and costly imports. Furthermore, as The Economist stated, Greece would more than likely default due to the inordinate increase in size of its foreign debt.

There is a need for compromise on both sides. Greece cannot be expected to pay back all of its debt. Currently at 175 % of GDP, Greece’s debt is unpayable and has been marred by recession throughout the austerity program. The ECB, for example, recently extended €5 billion in emergency loans in an effort to keep Greek banks from running out of reserve funds.

As The Financial Times reported, the ECB felt the need to extend the emergency loan to Greece due to the steady withdrawal of approximately €200 to €300 million a day during the week of February 8th. It is clear that austerity in Greece cannot continue to move as planned. Countries such as Germany must accept that they will not receive all of their money back but should accept receiving a reasonable, but smaller, amount than they had hoped. One such proposal, supported by The Economist, is a “GDP-linked bonds” plan that Mr. Varoufakis recommends, in which the amount Greece would have to pay back to their creditors would be based on Greece’s own economic prosperity. However, Greece must be willing to keep some of the privatization policies that have been in place, such as reduced private sector spending and holding off on a proposed minimum wage hike. Mr. Tsipras, for example, must hold off on his proposed €2 billion welfare program, as to reinstitute Greece’s old welfare state model would severely hamper the progress Greece’s private sector has made.

Greece currently cannot function soundly and will be brought further into economic recession if it fails to tighten its belt. In short, perhaps the greatest impact of the ECB will be what road it potentially leads Greece’s relationship with Germany on. Super Mario may have to find another trick up his sleeve. n

neutral-leaning austerity government is the far left-wing Syriza party, headed by Alexis Tsipras. Directly challenging German austerity measures, Mr. Tsipras has stood firm in his belief that Greece should be absolved of most of its debt and should be allowed to return to its pre-recession spending habits. Furthermore, his selection of Yanis Varoufakis as Greece’s new financial minster also worried many European countries due to his Marxist-leaning ideology. Mr. Tsipras and Mr. Varoufakis toured across Europe, touting potentially new deals to be reached that would remove the stringent austerity measures placed upon Greece. While some, such as Francois Holllande of France have been more receptive, others, such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, have not. In short, Greece and the ECB are on a collision course, one that could have far reaching consequences.

Why Greece remains important in this debate is the potential “Grexit”.

Greece no longer is willing to continue austerity and directly challenges Germany’s final word over the Eurozone’s economic policy. While the European economy as a whole is far stronger than it was when the first thought of “Grexit” sprung up in 2011-2012, there are large ramifications if Greece were to leave the Eurozone. For starters, the rise in populist countries among countries in the midst of bailout plans, such as Spain, is concerning. Syriza’s blatant attack on austerity could embolden other anti-austerity movements throughout the European continent. These populist movements are hoping to return their respective nations back to their old economic patterns, as they view austerity as a direct threat and one that has caused unnecessary economic hardship. If Greece were to leave the Eurozone, there is nothing to stop other countries like Spain from doing the same. This would throw convention to the wind, as most believe that a country cannot leave the Euro once it has entered. Theoretically, the Euro could be dissolved and the European Monetary Union would be reduced to nothing. Furthermore, as cited by The Economist, much of Greece’s current €300 billion in debt is held by the ECB, the IMF, and the European Financial Stability Facility, which serves as the EU’s crisisresolution fund. If Greece were to decide to leave the Eurozone because

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The Martydom of Charlie Hebdo

By Nick Tonckens

I never much cared for Charlie Hebdo. Occasionally I would walk by a newsstand on Place Victor Hugo, where I live, and perhaps smirk or wrinkle my nose at some garish caricature on Charlie’s cover. This would usually be a politician, although on the day of the shootings it was a demented baby Jesus rapidly exiting a spread-eagled Virgin Mary. I remember that a couple years ago I picked up a copy someone left behind on the Metro. It took me until very recently to realize that the generic, turbaned man on the cover was supposed to be Muhammad, and that this issue in particular had literally earned the staff of Charlie Hebdo a spot on Al-Qaeda’s most wanted list.

The debate over such cartoons has flared up periodically over the past decade, usually as part of the well-worn cycle of publication, protest, re-publication as protest, and so on. And so, in the wake of January’s brutal attacks on Parisian cartoonists, cops, and Jews, the usual rhetoric soared to new levels of intensity. I cannot begin to cover all the different discussions being had over the spread of radical Islamism and Islamophobia in the West, and the balance between freedom of speech and cultural sensitivity.

But I want to put Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons and broader editorial policy into their proper historical, cultural, and political context. For much of the criticism aimed at Charlie Hebdo - particularly from outside of France completely misunderstands the very specific ideological intent behind the newspaper’s content.

Many have objected to the irreverent images of Muhammad, contemporary Muslim clerics, and Islamist extremists, on the grounds that they propagate offensive stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes towards Muslims.

They accuse Charlie Hebdo of contributing to the rampant Islamophobia so characteristic of the ascendant European right, and thereby. reinforcing and the marginalized status of Muslim communities throughout Europe.

Some have said that even if Charlie Hebdo only seeks to insult Islam as an organized religion like any other, doing so still constitutes an unnecessary act of aggression towards the marginalized Muslim populations of Europe.

All such criticisms miss their mark. Charlie Hebdo neither supports the xenophobic tide rising across Europe, nor should it cease publishing its content in the name of sensitivity.

To understand the first point, let us turn back the clock to Charlie Hebdo’s founding. It was founded in 1970, out of the ashes of a left-wing satirical magazine named L’Hebdo Hara-Kiri, which was run by the kind of young leftists who kickstarted the student uprisings of May 1968 (Hebdo is short for hebdomadaire, or weekly). After the French government banned Hara-Kiri for mocking the death of former president Charles de Gaulle, the staff named their reconstituted magazine in honor of both the dead president and the Peanuts cartoons that Hara-Kiri used to run. The new magazine continued Hara-Kiri’s tradition of assaulting the conservative, quasi-authoritarian political and social order that de Gaulle represented.

To these hip young leftists, de Gaulle embodied all they loathed about contemporary France: militarism, imperialism, xenophobia, and Catholicism.

Up until its dissolution in 1981 and since its return in 1991, Charlie Hebdo has constantly sought to undermine everything that smacks of nationalism or social conservatism: it regularly depicts the Pope and other Catholic priests as closeted, gay pedophiles, mercilessly pillories Israel for its policies towards Palestine and Lebanon, and consistently opposes Western military interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere. Above all, it takes glee in lacerating the xenophobic French right, which uses Islamophobic language to advocate for immigration restrictions. One cover literally depicted National Front leader Marine Le Pen as a piece of shit. In short, Charlie Hebdo stands in stark opposition to the right-wing movements gathering support across Europe. Written and illustrated by aging Marxists, and with its circulation of 60,000 mainly confined to leftish, affluent Paris, the newspaper has nothing to do with the brand of populist xenophobia represented by Le Pen’s National Front, or any of its analogues in Germany, the Netherlands, or elsewhere.

Let us focus for a minute on Charlie Hebdo’s relationship to reli-

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images search ought to quickly sate the reader’s curiosity.

After the release of the cover online (though not the lewd images within the magazine), and preceding the publication of the actual issue, unknown attackers firebombed Charlie Hebdo’s offices and hacked its website. The office was effectively destroyed. Charlie Hebdo’s late editor, known as Charb, said at the time that the attackers were “radical stupid people who don’t know what Islam is … idiots who betray their own religion.” He vowed to keep publishing. The next issue’s cover showed a male Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and an imam locked in a passionate, slobbery kiss against the backdrop of the newspaper’s smoldering offices. The caption read, “Love is stronger than hate.”

Fast-forward to the second attack. Charb died, along with most of his fellow cartoonists and an assortment of staffers, guests, and police officers.

The survivors published an issue with a weeping Muhammad on the front, holding up a sign with the words, “All is Forgiven.” Once again, a mixed message of conciliation and provocation.

Why the provocation? To cease publishing pictures of Muhammad in response to the massacre, or to the firebombing, or to the riots, or to the death threats, would demonstrate that violence truly can silence free speech, that the fear of retribution creates self-censorship. If that fear is imposed by someone else, is it even self-censorship? Does it matter? No one should refrain from speaking, or drawing, or publishing to avoid murder. The bleak fact is that Europe today is unsafe for anyone who wishes to speak in the manner Charlie Hebdo has. A fundamentalist murdered Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh and vocal critic of radical Islam in 2004. The Danish cartoonist behind the original cartoons escaped assassination just last week. There are more that I do not have room to list here.

But of course, Charlie Hebdo would not have had to demonstrate its lack of fear had it not bothered to publish such cartoons in the first place, right? Doesn’t the same go for the Danish newspaper that published the original cartoons? Or the vast array of newspapers and websites that republished Charlie Hebdo’s work after the 2015 massacre?

No, no, and no. Muslims who take offense to depiction of Muhammad have every right to be offended. But the law of nearly every democratic nation ensures the de jure right to offend, up to a point. Unfortunately, no nation can fully ensure the de facto right to offend, so long as cartoons are met with murder, fire, and vandalism. Barring the creation of thought police, only one strategy can guarantee the freedom of speech against that violent retaliation: the vocal support of society.

When cartoonists and filmmakers get gunned down in the streets, in their workplaces, and in their homes, society absolutely must not respond by censoring their work. That sends the message that the murderers had a point, or that the offending speaker should not have spoken. Those speakers may be crass, rude, offensive, and immature. Charlie Hebdo surely meets that description. But the right to offend falls under the right to free speech. If we do not stand by the most distasteful members of society when they literally come under fire, we put the broader principle of free speech at risk.

To say, “je suis Charlie,” is not to say, “Muslims should suck it up.” Not even close. It means, “our fates are intertwined.” When I marched with over one million other Parisians in the largest mass rally in modern French history, the most common signs around said, “Je suis Charlie. Je suis Juif.

Je suis flic.” (I am Charlie. I am Jewish. I am a cop.) Those who held that sign did not endorse the tenets or claim the history of Judaism, nor did they bear all the pride and sins of the French police. In the same way, those of us who proclaim, “Je suis Charlie,” do not endorse Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons per se, nor do we claim to share its militantly left-wing ideology. We marched and held signs to show that we were not afraid, that guns must not alter our actions. To the contrary, we must speak more fiercely than ever before. n

gion. Leftist to the last, the newspaper opposes organized religion on the grounds that spiritual dogma is both delusional and oppressive - recall Marx’s aphorism that, “religion is the opiate of the people.” While Catholicism has long suffered the brunt of its ridicule, Judaism and Islam have now and again entered its crosshairs. Charlie Hebdo frequently lambasts ultra-Orthodox Jews in the process of criticizing Israel, on the grounds that religiously-inspired Zionism contributes to the violent oppression of Palestinians.

It is important to note that in all of its depictions of Muslims, Charlie Hebdo has only ever depicted three types of Muslims: violent jihadists, imams, and Muhammad. Let’s unpack each of these categories. It should go without saying that jihadists deserve ridicule. Imams, as representatives of organized religion fall in the same category as the popes, priests, and nuns that Charlie Hebdo loves to depict in all sorts of lewd postures. They have actually featured relatively rarely and neutrally in Charlie Hebdo’s pages, compared to their maligned Christian equivalents.

But why Muhammad? Why do the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo feel it necessary to injure the feelings of millions of Muslims in France and around the world? The act alone of publishing a visual depiction of the Prophet is enough to incite genuine grievance and outrage on a global scale. Why would Charlie Hebdo cross this line, repeatedly and with escalating levels of vulgarity? Why on earth depict Muhammad as a gay porn star? Who actually benefits from such disrespect, or the violent responses that disrespect provokes? The cartoons aren’t even that funny.

Once again, context is everything. Each and every time that Charlie Hebdo has published a drawing of Muhammad, it has been in direct response to the actions of violent Islamic extremists. That is an undisputed fact. After the Danish newspaper Jillends-Posten published a cartoon of Muhammad in 2005, a global firestorm of protest ignited. Perfectly legitimate peaceful protest and civic campaigns were unfortunately accompanied by attacks on Western embassies and over 200 riot-related deaths, in addition to a flood of death threats against the cartoonists. In response to these violent actions, Charlie Hebdo responded by not only reprinting the offending cartoon, but also publishing some original caricatures of their own. I will get to the principle of reprinting offending cartoons later, but for now let us focus on Charlie Hebdo’s own content.

The cover of that issue depicted Muhammad weeping and exclaiming “It is hard to be loved by idiots!” The caption read: “Muhammad overwhelmed by fundamentalists.” This cartoon clearly separated the Prophet of Islam from the extremists who distort it for their own ends, in stark contrast to genuine Islamophobia, which conflates the core tenets of the religion with its most violent elements. However, it still depicted Muhammad, thereby violating a deeply-felt cultural prohibition in most of the Muslim Arab world (this prohibition does not exist to the same extent in Iran, a non-Arab country that has its own distinct relationship with Islam). The Grand Mosque of Paris, Muslim World League, and Union of French Islamic Organizations sued Charlie Hebdo for hate speech. France, and Europe in general, has a much more tightly defined conception of free speech, which restricts expression deemed racist or unduly prejudiced. In the event, the courts ruled that Charlie Hebdo had attacked terrorists, not Islam itself.

In 2011, Charlie Hebdo responded to the imposition of Sharia law in Libya by publishing a special issue, titled “Charia Hebdo.” This was the issue I found abandoned on the Paris Metro. Behind the cover of Muhammad lay cartoons ridiculing the mandatory wearing of the veil, the stoning of adulterers, the persecution of gays, and other human rights abuses associated with strict interpretations of Sharia law. I seriously doubt the reasonableness of any human being who takes offense at that particular line of content. The cartoons featuring Muhammad specifically, however, were preposterously disrespectful, not to mention crass. A quick Google

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To begin plainly, there was a crime committed. The slaughter of journalists for the exercise of their civil liberties is abhorrent to both ideological and moral sentiments, and it is not at question whether or not the shooting on January 7th was a crime. However, it also clear that preceding that crime, there was an offense committed. Though very few would argue that the offense merited the crime, it has merited further dialogue as to the nature and the extent of the offense itself.

The satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, has been printing cartoons mocking religious institutions for years, most infamously, Muhammad himself. In 2006, international attention was focused on cartoons of the Prophet that originated in Denmark, which Hebdo decided on principle to reprint. Then in 2011, the controversy was brought to Hebdo itself after an edition of the magazine claimed Muhammad as their editor-in-chief –the new ‘Charia Hebdo’. News coverage of the magazine, and particularly their editorial board, has produced a firestorm of op-eds, interviews, and even a documentary.

The presence of Charlie Hebdo is now considered of national importance, particularly in light of a perceived duty towards the exercise of free speech, but the fact remains that, as a communist and therefore atheist publication, the intent of the wit and writ of Charlie Hebdo is to skewer religion –often with what amounts to little more than a straw man, prepared for effigy. The publication’s cartoons depicting Muhammad, now a frequent gambit, have little political or critical import. Instead, they rely upon cheap laughs and tired tropes like the reactionary Islamist or the enigmatic, veiled Muslim woman.

Regardless, the work of the magazine has since been catapulted to the frontline of the imagined ‘war on free speech’. Following each incident, a growing crowd rallies to wave the flag of Hebdo. This January in particular saw an international outcry, proudly proclaiming #JeSuisCharlie in personal identification with the publication. Individuals across the world marched in defiance –but in defiance of what? There was no known impediment to the actual publishing of the magazine, and thousands read it safely. No police had shown up at the door of the editorial offices. The police instead defended the magazine, and at the risk of their own lives.

Yet those in support of Hebdo cry out that their freedom was threatened.

Consequently, the January shooting has grown in ideological import, canonizing those who were previously dismissed as cheap provocateurs.

The crime committed is now not only murder, but ‘a violent assault on the freedom of speech’. However, as most of Paris, and citizens the world over, amassed in staggering numbers, proudly walking down the street under the protection of both the police and their fellow civilians, it seems appropriate to wonder who exactly they are rallying against. What specter had appeared that had so threatened the great French laïcité? Who are they yelling at?

The extent of the offense attributed to these cartoons may still be under debate, but if one does not feel able to stand in judgment of the offense committed, an appraisal of its repercussions is then warranted. The last month has witnessed a sprawling witchhunt across the continent as news media outlets dutifully track the increasingly vague connections made to the original attack. The web through which the blame of the initial crime has been thrown upon others amounts to little except the reaffirmation that such reactionary extremism is always lurking below the surface of sunny, liberal Europe. As a mass of hate crimes against Muslim and Arab communities erupted across the continent, and the world over, suspicions are reaffirmed that such sentiment is not only held by the reactionaries, but all those espousing the beliefs of Islam itself. The specter of an illiberal Islam is not only looming, but is being actively produced.

While Hedbo has set its sights on many religious institutions over the years, Islam is uniquely positioned to be painted as the reactionary censor.

In a state such as France, where the prevailing norm is the rejection of traditional institutions like religion for the sake of enlightened rationality, it is the adherence to a religious precept, like the aniconism of Islam, that represents the assumed ‘irrationality’. Many of the arguments in defense of Hebdo are made in this vein that to be offended by a simple, satirical cartoon is, at heart, irrational and therefore to be dismissed.

There is something at work much more perverse than the churlish statement that ‘Muslims just can’t take a joke’. Appealing to the greater god of Rationality effectively reorients the discussion from whether or not

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Charlie and the Quixotic Quest to Defend Civil Liberties in France

By Kate Herman

Hebdo has the right to offend to whether or not Muslims, and any other conscientious readers, have the right to be offended. All who are offended, to any degree, by the cartoons are then lumped into the pre-packaged category of reactionary Islamists, and therefore further separated from the rational citizens of the good French republic.

As we rally to the defense of cheap provocateurs, confident in our transcendent principles of free speech and freedom of expression, we acknowledge our need to maintain this capacity to define ourselves in contrast to the other. Our laws are not established in respect for other cultures, religions, or creeds, but tolerance. Tolerance itself is a principle that doesn’t require the straining of any ideological muscles to maintain a moral high ground. In declaring secular principles of coexistence, we have simultaneously established the extent of our freedoms on the backs of the minorities – ever present to act as the shadow of what we could become if we give up these principles, or let them slowly slide into a passive form of relativism. We speak of freedom of speech, always held in comparison to the necessary evil of protected hate speech –but what seems a contradiction is an intimately held truth of the principle itself. The right to speak freely is more often the right to maintain a discourse of what is accepted and what is cast as unacceptable. Muhammad with his trousers down is not only a cheap laugh, but an exercised capacity by Hebdo to ridicule simply because they can.

The free speech that Hebdo and its hashtag cohorts claim in their defiance is more accurately the right to speak as the dominant class. This is made readily evident by the fact that Hebdo supporters were marching in solidarity with statesmen like the UK’s PM Cameron, Israel’s PM Netanyahu, the UAE and Bahrain’s foreign ministers, Gabon’s President Ondimba, and, most egregiously, Turkey’s PM Davutoğlu. Statesmen who have singlehandedly imprisoned and injured more journalists, literary minds, and theorists than have ever been liberated by a principle of free speech alone.

Tolerance is a concept established in power dynamics, politely glossing over what remains as incontrovertible difference in capacity to shape the discourse, while maintaining the prerogative of the majority to speak as they choose. Tolerance is evoked as a means by which to create space for

the consistent reaffirmation of the idealized norm at the expense of the other. In order to maintain the norm, respect for the other is cast by the wayside.

In a twist of irony, the narrative of Hebdo and its supporters over the last few years has circled around their own demand for respect. In a 2012 interview with Le Monde, Charbonnier, a Charlie Hebdo editor proclaimed that, “I prefer to die standing than live on my knees” – a statement made once again in supposed defiance of an abstract specter of censorship, but also a statement made in demand of respect, not merely tolerance.

Hebdo’s journalists did not stand on principle, but cowered behind it.

The defense of such cartoons on the basis of free speech is little more than an injunction against being held accountable. Is the idea of free speech truly to say whatever springs to mind without any threat of being held accountable? Is it merely a mechanism to ensure that absolutely any form of speech can be held as a paragon of liberal virtue? Even lewd cartoons, mindlessly churned out to maintain a readership?

Charlie Hebdo is not an integrally racist, bigoted, or otherwise culpable publication, nor is its work wholly without merit, but the demonstrated tendency to opt for provocation over the kind of social critique that the French media is fully capable of is a far more serious fault. Hebdo’s cartoons are not the valorized duty to exercise one’s opinions, but simple provocations. Scrawling unflattering depictions of Muhammad half-naked does not work to strengthen the ideal of free speech, but simply cheapens it. The mere invocation of the right to free speech is a willfully ignorant, two-dimensional understanding of the ideal as a whole. We are legally able to exercise our rights, but while the right to free speech is legally enshrined, the right to exercise good judgment cannot be equally enforced.

This is, at heart, misrecognition of where the onus of tolerance lies. It is not the values and doctrines of another religion that we must tolerate.

Religions, as do the individuals that identify with them, demand respect.

It is instead the misguided demonstration of freedom – the valorization of their misanthropic duty – that needs to be tolerated. We are called upon by the values and principles of a globalized coexistence to respect ideas, but we must only tolerate half-baked cartoons. n

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Worldwide Access to Insulin Falls Short

By Hailey Blain

Type 1 Diabetes is a chronic condition that, with current technology and a strong education, is manageable, yet remains the eighth leading cause of death worldwide. In individuals with Type 1 Diabetes, the pancreas does not produce the insulin needed to allow sugar to enter the cells and produce energy. A diagnosis with diabetes used to be a death sentence, but today individuals can maintain healthy lives through insulin therapy and an excellent education and support system. Therefore, because insulin “satisfies the priority health care needs of the population” it is classified as an “essential medicine” by the World Health Organization. According to the WHO, “Essential medicines are intended to be available within the context of functioning health systems at all times in adequate amounts, in the appropriate dosage forms, with assured quality and adequate information, and at a price the individual and the community can afford.”

Therefore, by definition, it is unacceptable and a severe violation of human rights that many people with diabetes still lack access to insulin.

It is shocking that, globally, a lack of insulin is the most common cause of death for an individual with Type 1 Diabetes.

While insulin has been available for ninety years, some people still do not have access to the life-saving resource. Insulin was discovered in 1922

by Dr. Fredrick Banting and Charles Best and, as a result, Type 1 Diabetes became a condition with which an individual could live and thrive. This was a miraculous advancement, and since then the production of insulin and technologies used to administer it have greatly improved. However, a large population still does not have access to a basic supply of insulin necessary to keep them alive. There is a network of barriers that prevent this access including high prices, a dearth of medical facilities and professionals, the impediment of low socioeconomic status, and inadequate health policies.

In many countries, namely low and middle-income countries, there

are not nearly enough hospitals and doctor’s offices properly equipped to help treat a diabetic patient. For example, in Mozambique, there are about one million people per hospital. This ratio makes it extremely difficult for patients diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes to receive adequate care. In addition many people have to travel great distances to get to the nearest healthcare facility; in fact, the majority of patients travel one to two hours to get to their nearest doctor’s office. This prohibits many who are not able to afford the trip and is one of the major costs of managing the disease.

Travel costs can constitute anywhere from twelve percent of the total cost of managing the disease as in Mali to sixty-one percent in Mozambique.

Furthermore, there is an appalling lack of healthcare workers. There are only two endocrinologists, or doctors specializing in diabetes, Mozambique, Mali, and Zambia. Additionally, in Nicaragua and Vietnam, specialists are concentrated in large urban areas, thereby depriving those who lived outside these areas of proper medical care.

The reality of living with diabetes in the United States is in great contrast with living with the disease in other parts of the world. I, for example, have experienced a very different reality of living with diabetes.

In comparison to Mozambique, in the United States there are about 56,000 people per hospital. Travel times are much shorter for the average American in comparison to travel times in most low and middle-income countries. Furthermore, there are about 1000 endocrinologists in the

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disease, an increase in risk for heart attacks, and depression. These statistics are alarming and point to the outcome of problematic health care policies and monopolization by pharmaceutical companies.

Pharmaceutical companies have a lot of the power in determining the accessibility of insulin. Currently this power is not being harnessed in a positive way. The main reason that insulin is so expensive is that about eighty percent of the global insulin market is controlled by three pharmaceutical companies. The market is heavily monopolized because of the insurmountable barriers companies face entering the marketplace.

Ensuring that all people have access to the medicine they need should be a top priority of the world’s leaders. The hope in the midst of the current situation is that many individuals are noticing the dire nature of the issue.

Recently, many grassroots organizations have sprung up to address the issue of accessibility to insulin such as the 100 Campaign, AYUDA, the Big Blue Test, and the International Insulin Federation. Furthermore, researchers in Geneva and Boston have announced a new study that will map the global insulin market from the angle of insulin manufacturers, regulatory barriers, and patents. While these organizations and researchers are making positive steps in improving access, big pharmaceutical companies and international governments are not taking the steps that they have a responsibility to take in order to ensure the right to health care that each individual deserves. n

United States, a much more favorable statistic, but one that still represents a serious shortage.

Additionally, the lack of medical care is correlated with a lack of education on how to manage the condition. Education is just as important as insulin in diabetes management. One must understand how much insulin to inject, how exercise affects blood sugars, how to properly test blood sugar, and much more. A lack of guidance is detrimental to the health of a person with Type 1 Diabetes.

The barriers to caring for diabetes in these countries have severe consequences on the lives of those who are diagnosed with this disease.

Paying for insulin makes up a large percentage of per capita income for families; in Zambia it makes up twenty-one percent, while in Mali it makes up sixty-one percent. Many simply are not able to pay for the proper medicine. In Nicaragua an estimated one in five people with diabetes are receiving treatment. Furthermore, the obstacles result in high mortality rates for children. In the United States, ninety-eight percent of Type 1 patients in the United States survive six years after being diagnosed. In contrast, one percent of children with type 1 diabetes survive six years in sub-Saharan Africa. Fifteen percent of children in the pre-insulin era, where the treatment entailed extreme diets, survived for six years after diagnosis. Without exacting treatment, diabetes results in many severe complications such as blindness, foot neuropathy, amputations, kidney

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The 86th Casualty

By Hannah Sherman

On January 17th, 35-year-old Diego Lagomarsino visited Alberto Nisman’s apartment on the 13th floor of a luxury high-rise building in Buenos Aires. Lagomarsino made himself a cup of coffee and then gave Nisman, the mostly unremarkable yet remarkably driven Argentine prosecutor he worked for, his .22-caliber Bersa. Nisman never returned Lagomarsino’s gun. The following day Nisman neglected to return his bodyguards’ calls and pick up the newspaper lying at the foot of his door.

His bodyguards, barred without a key to the apartment, grew concerned and called his family. Nisman’s mother rushed over, tried to open the door, and found her key jammed, somehow failing her at a crucial moment. As she later learned, there was another key wedged into the opposite lock.

One locksmith later, Nisman’s mother and bodyguards finally entered the apartment. No record of their entrance exists – the service elevator and stairwell cameras serendipitously broke in the days leading up their visit – but the gravity of what they found ensured their visit would not be forgotten. As Nisman’s mother pushed open the door to her son’s bathroom, she found the .22-caliber Bersa lying on the floor. Nisman’s fingerprints covered the gun; investigators later found no trace of any other DNA. Nisman lay on the floor, motionless, bullet wound to the head.

He left no note. He was 51 years old.

Less than 24 hours later, Nisman had planned to testify before the Argentine Congress concerning the explosive accusations he had made the week before against Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

In the almost 300-page report he submitted, Nisman accused President Kirchner and her foreign minister Hector Timerman of playing an integral role in covering up a 1994 terrorist attack. In a shocking discovery, police would later find drafts of arrest warrants for both Kirchner and Timerman in the garbage outside of Nisman’s apartment. As one can imagine, issuing an arrest for a sitting, democratically-elected President was a big deal.

Nisman seemed to realize the weight of his accusations though, not simply because he asked to borrow the .22-caliber Bersa. The day before his death he told a reporter: “I might get out of this dead.” Little did he know that his premonition would come to pass, making him the 86th casualty in the largest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history.

Nisman’s story begins on July 18, 1994, when a van packed with explosives detonates at the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, or AMIA) building, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The bombing kills 85 people and injures hundreds more. At the time, Argentina had a Jewish population approximately 250,000 strong, the largest in Latin America and the sixth largest in the world outside of Israel, and the AMIA attack had an understandably catastrophic effect on the Jewish community. The AMIA bombing is the largest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history. It’s also one of the deadliest, unsolved bombings in modern history, and one of the largest anti-Semitic attacks since World War II. The president at the time, Carlos Menem, stuck between a rock and

a hard place, does not open an investigation into the bombing. A rumor soon surfaces linking the attack to Iran and Hezbollah, and Menem, the son of two Syrian immigrants, finds himself the unfortunate source of attention in Argentina’s search for answers. Certain groups in Argentina speculate that President Menem actually played a role in the bombings, although none succeed in substantiating this rumor. The United States and Israel support Argentina in its blaming of Iran. No one ever really finds a resolution. Despite its deadly toll on Argentina’s Jewish population, the AMIA attack soon falls to the wayside of Argentine politics.

President Kirchner, widely referred to as simply Cristina, has been a polarizing force in Argentina since the beginning of her presidency in 2007. As one of the few exceptions in a world dominated by male leaders, Cristina takes a very different route from her female counterparts, opting to emphasize her femininity rather than masking it with pantsuits and short hair. She never appears in public without her thick, dark hair in perfect, tumbling waves, and her eyes are always flawlessly lined. She wears designer suits and expensive jewelry. Her plastic surgery and shopping sprees are public knowledge in Argentina; after a meeting with French president Nicolas Sarkozy, she spent over $100,000 on 20 pairs of Louboutins before flying home to Buenos Aires. Her heels are so high, her nails so long, and her eyelashes so thick that she seems more like Sophia Vergara than the president of the third-largest economy in Latin America.

She is 61.

And yet, despite her feminine appearance, the aggressive tenacity stereotypically reserved for male politicians hides just beneath her perfectly coiffed exterior. Cristina is antagonistic and does not work to build consensus or develop allies. She trusts only a tiny circle of advisors, and fights openly with her enemies, including the press. Like a particularly self-conscious B-list actress, she frequently uses twitter to confront unfriendly journalists. Not one to discriminate in her choice of victims, she posted a tweet mocking the Chinese accent during a recent diplomatic visit to China as well. Within an hour, the message was retweeted over a thousand times. She also used what is evidently her favorite social media platform to share with the world her favorite character on Game of Thrones – the mother of dragons – and to send a birthday message to Bo Obama. If intended to coax the US government into forgiving Argentina’s $1.3 billion dollar debt to New York investors, the birthday message has not yet achieved the desired effect. As an impressively ambitious Plan B though, last year she claimed the US may be behind a plot to overthrow her government and assassinate her. Although unannounced, her price reportedly stands at $1.3 billion dollars.

Despite the controversy she inspires, Cristina is dearly beloved by her supporters, who call her the “Modern Evita” and the “Iron Lady of the South.” In addition, as only the second female president of Argentina and its first to be democratically elected, Cristina has fought extremely hard to prove herself in a country where the culture of machismo still runs strong.

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Argentina from 1946 to 1955 – established Argentina’s secret service in a shrewd political move at the beginning of his tenure. The initial purpose of the organization that became the SI was to assist Nazi war criminals in escaping secretly from Germany to Argentina in the aftermath of WWII. This transport occurred at the same time that thousands of Jews fled to Argentina. Once the Nazis had established themselves anonymously in and around Buenos Aires, Perón generously offered many of them positions in his newly created service. This sinister beginning foreshadowed the dark dealings to come.

During Argentina’s Dirty War, the SI participated in one of the most repressive periods of state terrorism in Latin American history which, considering the competition, is quite a distinguished feat. SI agents tracked down and murdered thousands of left-wing opponents of the military dictatorship. Many of the agents responsible for the more than 13,000 ‘disappearances’ remained in power after Argentina’s transition to democracy in 1983. In a tradition reminiscent of Watergate, Argentine presidents and senior members of Congress have since then used the SI to spy on journalists, judges, and opposition politicians. Cristina, after her apparent realization that this might not be the best idea, now plans to drastically limit the number of government officials with access to SI agents.

Antonio Stiuso is one of the most mysterious figures in Argentina, and one of the most feared. Little is known about this enigmatic man, a man who personifies and embodies the SI in many ways, except that he is a 61-year-old communications expert who joined the secret service in 1972–two years before the start of the Dirty War–at the age of 18. Over the course of four decades, he worked his way up to a position of great power and for years ran a vast and terrifying eavesdropping network in

She faces an overwhelming wave of criticism every time she makes a move.

Nevertheless, Cristina has championed women’s rights during her political career and her government was the first in Latin America to legalize samesex marriage.

Cristina has only served to spark the controversy surrounding Nisman’s death. On January 19th, the day after Nisman’s mother and bodyguards found his body, she published a tirelessly researched letter in which she presented the well-supported case that Nisman’s death was clearly a suicide; three days later, Cristina abandoned her thesis, apparently now convinced that rogue secret service agents murdered Nisman as part of a plot to undermine her administration.

Unfortunately, as it often goes in Argentina, the most outlandish theories can prove more accurate. In a development better suited to The Departed than real life, investigators found that Security Secretary Sergio Berni arrived at Nisman’s apartment even before the police. In Cristina’s new account of the events, agents fed false information to Nisman and, in a move seemingly inspired by Al Capone, then killed him as part of a plot against her government.

A week later Damián Pachter, the first journalist to report Nisman’s death, fled to Israel, fearing for his life. He was convinced that an Argentine intelligence officer was tailing him, a prospect that apparently makes Jerusalem look like a sleepy coastal town in rural Maine. Cristina, who could only have spent the week in deep personal reflection, Cristina made an announcement: Argentina should probably reform its Intelligence Secretariat (SI).

In a country with a history as dark and shady as Argentina’s, the SI does not disappoint. General Juan Perón – one of the most controversial yet iconic political figures in Latin American history and the dictator of

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Argentina. Western intelligence services including the CIA respect him highly. To add intrigue to mystery, only one blurry picture exists of Stiuso, and for years nobody outside the highest level of government knew his name. However, in 2004, justice minister Gustavo Beliz unmasked him on television and accused him of having manipulated politicians and journalists for years. Beliz was promptly fired and, faced with the threat of Stiuso’s far-reaching power, fled to Uruguay. Antonio Stiuso is the contact Cristina accused of feeding information to Nisman.

Last December Cristina fired Stiuso, reportedly after she discovered that he spent years giving Nisman access to various wire taps after he became disillusioned with her administration, thanks in large part to the many shady political dealings he discovered. It appears that Nisman based most of his report on information he gleaned from tapped phone calls that Stiuso passed on to him. Some people even believe that Cristina’s letter indirectly accuses Stiuso of writing Nisman’s report for him. On February 5th Stiuso was issued a summons to testify about Nisman’s death. His testimony could be key in discovering answers to the mystery surrounding Nisman’s death. However, with the whole country seemingly looking for him, Stiuso has disappeared. Police tried and failed to find him at any of his three known addresses. Even Stiuso’s lawyer does not know where he is.

It appears that the search to find Stiuso is as futile as summoning a ghost.

In September 2004, President Néstor Kirchner – Argentina’s former president and Cristina’s late husband – selected Alberto Nisman to lead an official investigation of the 1994 attack. Many groups inside Argentina – understandably furious that after a decade an official investigation into the AMIA attacks had still not been opened – increased their demands for justice for the victims of the bombing and they finally reached a level that could no longer be ignored. Along with numerous other high-profile Argentine figures, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio – now Pope Francis – also pressured the government to open an investigation. The subsequent inquiry unfolded in a rather predictable fashion, albeit with certain problematic drawbacks. In October 2006 Nisman made his first formal charges against Iran and Hezbollah. In March 2007, he convinced Interpol to issue nine arrest warrants, eight of which were for Iranian officials. To this day no arrests have been made. In May 2008 Nisman called for the

arrest of former president Carlos Menem for attempting to obstruct an investigation into the attack. Menem was later charged with corruption but has yet to stand trial.

The final blow to Nisman’s efforts came in February of 2013. Cristina discovered that Nisman had uncovered alleged secret negotiations between Argentina and Iran to cover up the attacks. In what proved to be a futile attempt to gain control over the investigation, she announced a joint Argentine-Iranian inquiry into the attacks. Her announcement was highly unpopular and effectively killed Nisman’s search for the truth.

However, the Argentine courts later struck it down as unconstitutional, thereby providing Nisman with a window to reopen his investigation.

Stiuso, disenchanted with Cristina’s attempts to prevent information concerning the attacks from becoming public, doubled down on his efforts to provide wiretaps to Nisman. In a further attempt to discredit Cristina, Stiuso also began feeding information related to some of Argentina’s numerous infamous corruption cases of the past two years to the courts and journalists. These events, which Cristina considered the ultimate betrayal, culminated in Stiuso’s sacking last December.

It is important at this point to step back and examine the most important piece of the puzzle: Nisman’s accusations. In his report of nearly 300 pages, Nisman lays out the following Hollywood-esque story, complete with a nearly inconceivable plot. In 1994 senior Iranian officials plan and finance the AMIA attack and Hezbollah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon, carries it out. President Menem then proceeds to stubbornly obstruct attempts to open an investigation into the attack. A rumor circulates that Menem himself may have played a role in the attacks, but nothing comes of it. This dubious strategy succeeds until 2004, when the first President Kirchner can no longer handle the overwhelming criticism and is forced by public opinion to open an investigation. It flat lines until 2013, when Cristina strikes a secret deal with Iran. Here Nisman’s story becomes particularly divisive. According to the report, Argentina agrees to cover up the attack and guarantee immunity to a number of former Iranian government officials. In exchange, Iran promises oil and other favorable economic and trade benefits. Immediately before his death, Nisman disclosed he had obtained intercepts of telephone calls in which Argentine intelligence

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forensic experts identified a second set of DNA on a coffee cup in the kitchen sink. After days in which the only prints found were those of Nisman himself, this came as a shock. The DNA belonged to Diego Lagomarsino. In the wake of this discovery, investigators charged him with providing a firearm to someone not licensed to use it and summoned him to testify. Lagomarsino stated that Nisman asked him for the .22-caliber Bersa because he had lost trust in his security detail. In a drama that has played out more like a Shakespearean tragedy than a political death, and which is littered with dozens of principle characters, Lagomarsino is the only person to testify thus far.

Unsurprisingly, Lagomarsino’s testimony has failed to tip the balance toward any one of the myriad directions this case could go. With Nisman dead and no answers in sight, it is unclear what the next step should be.

In the meantime, Cristina’s government, as divisive as it is, continues to find ways to effectively discredit Nisman’s accusations. Simultaneously, conflicting theories circulate. Many are convinced that Cristina is solely responsible for Nisman’s death. Others swear that it was Stiuso, fearful that Nisman had become a threat to his own position in Argentina. Still others assert that the crime belongs to Iran, its last fruitless attempt to end an ongoing crisis that began over two decades ago. A minority cling to the belief that Nisman really did commit suicide, believing that if he did not end his own life someone else would do it for him. All know that waiting around for Stiuso to clear the air won’t help. And so becomes the 86th casualty, hardly forgotten, very much gone. n

officers and Iranian officials discuss complex details of the deal. Stiuso fed these intercepts to Nisman. In the face of the intricate layers of information that have come to light since Nisman’s death, Cristina continues to deny everything.

Alberto Nisman’s demise joins a long tradition of suspicious deaths in Latin America’s history. Many years after the fact, experts exhumed the body of Chilean president Salvador Allende, attempting to solve the mystery of whether his death during the 1973 coup was a suicide or a murder. Pablo Neruda, the heroic Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, presents a similar unknown. Investigators recently exhumed his body to determine whether he died of cancer or crime shortly after the same coup that defeated Allende. In the most dramatic event, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez of Venezuela ordered the corpse of Simón Bolívar, the 19thcentury founding father of Latin America, opened on national television.

His goal: to establish whether Bolívar died of arsenic poisoning instead of tuberculosis in 1830, as historians had long accepted. In each case, investigators failed to find evidence of foul play.

This suspicious tradition only intensifies when focused on Argentina.

Juan Duarte, the older brother of the legendary Eva Perón, committed “suicide” in 1953, nine months after his sister died of cancer. His death came at the perfect moment to remove him from the increasingly tangled web of corruption scandals and accusations of providing assistance in smuggling Nazis into Argentina in which Duarte found himself. Like Nisman over 60 years later, police also found Duarte alone with a bullet in his head. Historians still do not agree on the real cause of his death. In yet another occurrence Héctor Febres, the executive officer of one of the most notorious death camps for political prisoners during the Dirty War, was inexplicably found dead by cyanide poisoning in his prison cell in 2007.

However, the fatal episode that Nisman’s death has most recalled in the minds of Argentines is that of Carlos Menem Jr., President Menem’s son.

Menem Jr. died in a helicopter crash one year after the AMIA attacks. At the time, his mother claimed he had been killed, instigating yet another exhumation. Investigators found no answers. Mr. Menem, now 84 and a senator, continues to stick to his wife’s story.

In a more detailed search of Nisman’s apartment following his death,

Almost a month after Mr. Nisman’s death, federal prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita took up the case and alleged that his colleague’s findings merited examination. He requested that federal judge Daniel Rafecas charge Cristina with attempting to obstruct Mr. Nisman’s investigation. On February 26, Judge Rafecas rejected Nisman’s allegations against Cristina, saying there was no evidence of any crime and subsequently closed the investigation. On March 19, federal prosecutor Germán Moldes asked an appellate court to overturn Judge Rafecas’ decision. At the time of the publishing of this article, it is unclear when the court will issue its ruling.

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Offender-Funded Justice

By Serena Taj

Journalists and human rights organizations have closely documented the correlation between poverty and prison time. The United States, largely as a result of its mass incarceration policies, boasts the largest prison population in the world, and a disproportionate segment of this population has lived beneath the poverty line. Moreover, researchers have demonstrated that convicted felons face severe limits on earning potential after being released –a trend that often inspires ruthless patterns of recidivism. Recently, however, attention has also been drawn to the ways in which the justice system exploits the poor in response to exceptionally minor offenses that do not warrant prison time.

The War on Crime of the 1970s and the War on Drugs of the 1980s launched a funneling of resources, financial and otherwise, to American law enforcement agencies and prisons in order to buttress policies of mass incarceration. However, the court system, particularly at the municipal level, did not benefit from such an influx of support. The result of this disparity has been what some have termed “an offender-funded justice system” that unfairly burdens America’s poorest citizens.

The story of Thomas Barrett is emblematic of this particular manifestation of wealth-based inequality in the justice system. Mr. Barrett, 53, was arrested in April of 2012 for the theft of a $2 can of beer from a convenience store in Augusta, Georgia. Homeless and unable to pay the $200 court fine, Mr. Barrett was placed under the probationary supervision of Sentinel Offender Services, a private firm, for 12 months.

During this time, he was ordered to pay the fine in installments and to wear an electronic monitoring anklet.

Mr. Barrett could not afford to pay the $80 startup fee that Sentinel demanded for the monitoring device, and spent over a month in jail as a result. Upon his release from prison, Mr. Barrett was required to pay Sentinel $400 each month—$40 in probation fees and $360 for the cost of the monitoring anklet. He was able to secure nearly $300 each month by selling his blood plasma on a biweekly basis until his deteriorating health prevented him from doing so.

Despite his efforts, at the end of one year he found himself in nearly $1,000 of debt after his initial offense of stealing a $2 can of beer. At this point, Sentinel threatened to have him jailed once again—not for his original crime, but for his inability to meet the demands of the payment system.

Fortunately for Mr. Barrett, his case attracted the interest of an Augusta attorney who has been working to challenge the legality of Sentinel’s payment collection methods. But Mr. Barrett’s case is far from unusual.

Mr. Barrett is one of thousands of American citizens who are faced with

accumulating court fees and the threat of jail if they are unable to pay those fees. Someone in a better financial situation than Mr. Barrett, having committed the same crime, would have paid the $200 fine and moved on with his or her life. Compared to the case of Mr. Barrett, who had to sell his bodily fluids in order to keep up with steadily mounting fees, how has such a payment structure been able to perpetuate itself in a system that claims to promote equal justice for all?

In efforts to ensure a functioning court system in the absence of proper funding, municipal districts have resorted to imposing fines on those who become involved in the courts. Some of the fees imposed upon offenders include pre-trial incarceration fees, public defender application fees, and probation fees. For those have the resources to pay these fines, the financial burden imposed upon them is contained. But for those who cannot afford to pay for these mandatory “services”, additional fines are imposed, such as interest fees and late fees—in other words, poverty penalties.

Thus, not only do court-imposed fees unfairly burden the indigent in terms of income proportionality, but they also serve as a thinly-veiled poor tax for those who are forced to decide that feeding their children is more important than fulfilling a bureaucratic function. In these scenarios, the poorest of offenders often find themselves in vicious cycles of debt, not unlike Mr. Barrett did.

These consequences are not limited to those in the financial realm, which are certainly devastating in their own right. Public defender application fees often deter indigent offenders from seeking legal representation. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that all persons, regardless of income, are entitled to legal representation in criminal cases. Nonetheless, people who cannot afford to pay these application fees often choose to forego legal counsel.

This is a decision that can have brutal repercussions in a legal system that is built upon inaccessibility to the layperson. When Mr. Barrett was first arrested, he chose not to pay the $50 fee that was required to apply for a public defender. This is a decision, he says, that he now regrets.

The legality and ethics of offender-funded justice continue to be debated. The fiscal gap between law enforcement and the court system is undeniably vast and places a severe burden on municipal districts, leaving them with difficult decisions to make. However, what is immediately clear is that offender-funded justice in its current state unfairly disadvantages America’s poor. It is time for municipalities to recognize that this system, which consciously prevents lower-income Americans from receiving the fair and proportional punishment that they are entitled to, is neither a sustainable nor an acceptable solution. n

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that take these antibiotics will see no benefit and will become slightly more immune to the antibiotics every time they are used to treat an illness. 1 in 8 people will also experience severe side effects to the antibiotics.

The solution seems obvious: If genes are the key to determining which medications will work for which individuals, why don’t we sequence the genomes of individuals? In the past 15 years, the cost of producing an entire human genome has gone from $20,000 to $1,000, making something that was once the subject of sci-fi novels a reality. This is also the answer President Barack Obama proposed during his State of the Union speech in January. The overall goal of the President’s Precision Medicine plan is to make medicine and healthcare more streamlined by using genes to eliminate medical waste. If we can sequence everyone’s unique DNA, doctors can tailor medications specifically to a patient’s genes. This not only means that the medication that an individual takes will be more effective, but lowers the risk of harmful side effects and makes it less likely that the individual will take medication that won’t work for him/her.

Over the past few weeks, Obama has released a comprehensive plan for the allocation of funds within what will ultimately be a $215 million investment in precision medicine. The breakdown of spending is as follows: $70 million to the National Cancer Institute to scale up efforts to identify genomic drivers in cancer and apply discoveries to more effective treatments; $10 million to the FDA to develop databases needed to store information about Precision Medicine; and 15 million to the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) to develop standards and requirements to address privacy concerns. The National Institute of Health will spend the final $130 million on the creation of a database of genetic information. Initially, the database will hold the genetic data for over 1 million recruits as a part of the pilot phase of this program. However, the program has potent implications if it is enacted on a wider scale.

With these efforts to have genetic coding be the new norm in healthcare, it no longer seems farfetched that there may one day be a database of all of our genotypes. This could have a huge impact on individuals with a history of genetically inherited diseases. For example, if it was no longer optional for individuals with a family history of Huntington’s to get tested for the HD gene, it would become common place to deny health care or life insurance to these individuals based on their DNA. Our genotype consists of every piece of DNA that is in our body. Not every gene that is a part of our genotype is expressed. This is another way of saying that heredity is a game of probability. A certain gene increases the probability that an individual will display a certain behavior or symptoms of a certain disease. If knowledge about individual genomes was freely available, people would be denied all kind of opportunities based on the possibility that they would become sick or suffer from a mental illness. Imagine living in a world where one could be rejected from a public education because his or her DNA shows there is a chance of a schizophrenic episode during college.

Granted, participation in Obama’s genetic sequencing and databasing plan is completely voluntary and involves allocated funds to guarantee preservation of privacy and anonymity within the databasing of genetic information. Despite these precautions, similar technologies have been subject to a slow erosion of privacy protections in the past. Cell phones, for example, have become less and less private and more subject to government observation in the name of the “common good.” The Precision Medicine program is a huge step forward in terms of lowering health care costs and effective treatments. It takes full advantage of a new technology that can be used to save lives. However, it also has the possibility to ruin lives if the proper precautions are not put in place. It is thus necessary to take a pause at this moment in time, while this type of healthcare is still in its infancy, to discuss what safeguards will be put in place to ensure that our own genes cannot be used against us. n

Healthcare: The Next Generation

By Maeve Morse

Huntington’s disease (HD) is notoriously deadly. No cure and high rates of heritability make it a death sentence not only for the individual diagnosed, but also for immediate family members. Huntington’s hides inside a person’s genotype, and generally expresses itself when a person reaches 30-50 years of age. It causes the loss of mental faculties and physical control, which progresses over 10-15 years until the weakened individual succumbs to death through complications. Under current regulations, it is the choice of the individual to get tested. Most people choose not to.

They can make this choice because genetic testing is not a requirement for healthcare, public education, or government positions. But, what if genetic testing was required for all of this, and more?

The world of medication has always been a calculated gamble. Despite common misconceptions, not all patients benefit from the drugs that they are prescribed. Drugs work for people based on the information in their genetic code and without healthcare providers’ knowledge of a patient’s genetic code, it is a game of chance to see if a drug is compatible with a specific genotype to treat a certain disease. In the pharmaceutical world, the chances of a drug working for a particular person are referred to as the number needed to treat, or NNT. This number represents the number of people that need to take the drug in order for one person to see the intended benefit from that drug. In a perfect world, every drug would have an NNT of 1. In other words, everyone that took the drug would see the intended results. Unfortunately, it is not unusual to see drugs with NNTs in the triple or even quadruple digits. For example, of the 2,000 people at risk for heart attacks over the next two years who take aspirin every day as a preventative measure, only one individual will actually experience the preventative benefits of the medicine.

Under the present system, there are currently hundreds of thousands of people taking drugs that won’t do anything for their condition. In the context of a drug like aspirin, which is relatively inexpensive and exhibits few negative side effects, this may not seem problematic. However, many drugs that are more expensive and have a higher risk of damaging side effects still have high NNTs. For example, taking antibiotics for a radiologically diagnosed sinus infection has an NNT of 15. Fourteen out of every 15 people 27

The American Homefront: Understanding the Militarization of Our Nation’s Police

By Derek Kang

Over the last eight months, police forces across the United States have undergone increasingly vociferous criticism for what many believe to be racially motivated uses of force. Most recently, the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have galvanized the American public into questioning the accountability, institutions, and practices of American law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, the subsequent protests have only added to the polarized cacophony of domestic politics, entrenching both side’s views of each other as either “jackbooted thugs” or “professional rioters.” Thus, the accusation that the police have become more militarized holds little meaning when the term is hurled as an insult or without restraint. However, the salient issue of an evermore aggressive police force cannot afford to be lost in the emotionally-charged fervor of the national debate, as it affects the most fundamental aspects of American society: our constitutional right against unlawful search and seizure, and our societal responsibility to draw the fine line for law enforcement between ensuring security and restricting liberty.

Defined as the process by which civilian police forces model themselves after the methods and structure of the military, the “militarization of the police” is a phenomenon most associated with the rise of SWAT, or Special Weapons And Tactics teams. Established by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1966, the first SWAT teams emerged as a defensive response to rare high-risk scenarios involving hostage rescue, active shooters, dignitary protection, and citywide unrest. These volatile situations required a level of training, expertise, and marksmanship that the average patrol officer could not be expected to possess and the formation of these specially trained units would ultimately save the lives of civilians and policemen alike. The early successes of the LAPD’s SWAT team led other metropolitan police departments to form similar units, a trend that rapidly accelerated with the War on Drugs.

Beginning in 1981 under the Reagan administration, combating drug use and trafficking became “a high priority national security mission of the Department of Defense (DoD).” Under then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, the military assumed major responsibilities in drug interdiction efforts and interfacing with foreign militaries to target manufacturers.

However, due to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, banning the military from operating on US soil, the burden of prosecuting the War on Drugs at home fell on local law enforcement and forever transformed the role of SWAT teams.

Over the next two decades, SWAT teams found themselves fundamentally changing in training, number, equipment, and utility.

Unable to operate domestically, yet mandated to address this national security threat, the military exerted considerable influence through cross training with budding SWAT teams all across the United States. While SWAT teams had always been paramilitary in nature as a consequence of their work, the extent to which they interacted with and ultimately patterned themselves after their military counterparts was unprecedented.

The scale of this expansion is reflected in the sheer number of SWAT teams now operating in the United States. Whereas in the 1970s, only the largest metropolitan police departments could afford to field SWAT teams, the obsession to vanquish drugs in America resulted in the massive provision of federal funds to even the smallest police forces. In cities with populations under 50,000, the percentage of police departments with SWAT teams exploded from 13% to 89% in less than 20 years. Lacking any form of oversight, SWAT teams were established at such a breakneck pace that the National Tactical Officer’s Association (NTOA) found their quality to range from “highly capable to only marginally capable.”

Furthermore, legislation such as the highly controversial DoD 1033 Program has only fueled the changing character of SWAT teams as police departments gained unparalleled access to military-grade equipment.

Intended “for use in counter-drug activities” and later for counterterrorism, over $5.1 billion USD in military equipment has been allocated to more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies since 1997. In addition to innocuous items such as cold weather gear and office equipment, police departments are also eligible to receive grenade launchers, amphibious armored personnel carriers (APC’s), and Mine-Resistant AmbushProtected (MRAP) vehicles. Despite the potentially dangerous nature of these warfighting materials, there is remarkably little program oversight with a 2003 DoD audit finding “incorrect or inadequate documentation in about three-quarters of the [records] analyzed.” Two years later, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the program had lost “hundreds of millions of dollars in reported lost, damaged, or stolen excess property.”

Even beyond the training and equipment provided by the military, SWAT teams have found themselves adopting an entirely new set of responsibilities far beyond their original duties. No longer used as a last resort in only the most dire of circumstances, SWAT teams have been increasingly repurposed for routine narcotics searches and in extreme cases, patrolling the streets in full tactical gear. Presently, only 7% of national SWAT deployments fall under the original mission criteria while over 80% are related to drug offenses. These deployments have also taken

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on the door searches, throwing people on the ground, making them see red… Many of the arrests were done with a boot on the head, in front of his woman… You’ve created a blood debt when you do that.” Perhaps the United States lacks the same concept of “blood debt” that exists in Mosul, but in both countries, community relations are irreparably destroyed in the process. In a lesson that is unnervingly applicable to SWAT teams conducting drug raids in America, military officials quickly learned that “a raid that captures a known insurgent may seem like a sure victory, but the… second- and third-order effects can turn it into a long-term defeat if our actions humiliate the family, needlessly destroy property, or alienate the local population from our goals.”

Lastly, the DoD 1033 Program requires a major overhaul in how gear is allocated to the 17,000 participating law enforcement agencies. While the program has proven remarkably useful in providing discounted essentials such as ammunition, communications devices, and office equipment, a minority of law enforcement agencies have taken advantage of it either for personal benefit or for reckless abandon. The unconstrained provision of warfighting material such as grenade launchers or mine-resistant vehicles must be curbed and limited to departments demonstrating both capability and necessity. Doing so would also limit the hemorrhaging of hundreds of millions of dollars and would necessitate the repossession of materials in unqualified and unnecessary hands.

The continuing trend of police militarization directly contradicts the major strides taken by police departments nationwide to adopt more professional practices. The lack of adequate training standardization, cherry-picked use of military tactics, and unfettered access to military equipment has resulted in paramilitary policing units with enormous discrepancies in quality, efficiency, and necessity. Ironically coined in the same year as the first SWAT teams, Abraham Maslow’s 1966 Law of the Instrument appears all the more appropriate: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” n

on a more militaristic approach as SWAT teams serve “no-knock” warrants at an alarming rate.

Meant to be used if there is a belief that the suspect will escape, harm bystanders, or destroy evidence, “no-knock” warrants enable SWAT teams to forcibly enter a home without first announcing their presence.

Although their existence is certainly necessary, these warrants are similar to SWAT teams in that they were intended to be used sparingly and with careful consideration. In the frenzied decades-long pursuit for narcotics, such restrictions have fallen to the wayside as the number of “no-knock” warrants skyrocketed by more than 1600% over a 30-year period. Regularly obtained on the word of unreliable informants, “no-knock” warrants have had deleterious consequences with innocent bystanders being killed or wounded, wrong houses being raided, and police officers being killed by armed homeowners.

In examining the enormous pressures and changes SWAT teams have undergone in the last 30 years, there arises a clear need to reorient and restructure their methods of operation for the 21st century. First, as identified by the NTOA and numerous law enforcement publications, the enormous variance in quality and training of SWAT teams must be addressed. Regardless of the fact that the NTOA recommends that SWAT teams train 200-250 hours annually, it is estimated that more than half of all teams train less than 50 hours, calling into question what actually constitutes a SWAT team. Without the barest of minimum training requirements, any law enforcement agency can form a SWAT team irrespective of capability, and in doing so, jeopardize the lives of those they have been charged to protect and serve. Training standardization exemplifies the original purpose of SWAT teams: saving lives.

Second, the longstanding relationship between SWAT teams and the military should not be demonized. In conducting the Global War on Terror, the US military learned many hard-fought lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan, lessons that SWAT teams could greatly benefit from as well. According to renowned counterinsurgency (COIN) expert, Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, “You have got to stop these middle of the night knock

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The Building Blocks of the Future Google Presents the Modular Smartphone

By Kayla Kaufman

On January 14, at the second Project Ara Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, Google developers proposed a plan for the future of sustainable technology. The tech giant announced the impending release and production of Spiral 3, an improved version of Spiral 1 that was the firm’s first attempt at a modular phone. With estimates that 2015 will see almost 2 billion smartphone users worldwide, tech companies are searching for the “next big thing” to further their influence in the rapidly growing market.

Described as a “Lego-like” smartphone, the Ara device is extremely customizable with block-like pieces that can easily be removed or replaced by customers. The phone is similar to Dutch designer Dave Hakkens’ Phonebloks, an idea that went viral on several social media outlets last year, but lacked the follow-through and funding necessary for mass production.

Instead, the website has now become a medium through which supporters of a modular smartphone can exchange ideas and opinions.

The modular phone concept has received both significant praise and criticism. Many applaud the model for its low price – sources say the basic Ara will begin at $50 – and for its sustainability. With the ever-increasing disposability of goods, and only an 11% recycling rate, The Electronics Take Back Coalition concluded that “some 20 to 50 million metric tonnes of e-waste are generated worldwide every year, comprising more than 5% of all municipal solid waste”.

A modular phone allows customers to replace the broken “block” rather than have to dispose of the entire device, significantly reducing e-waste. According to DoSomething.org, 80-85% of electronic waste is not recycled, but instead disposed of in landfills and incinerators. The waste makes up only 2% of landfills but accounts for 70% of toxicity in the environment. Large amounts of waste are also illegally exported to India, Africa, and Asia, ending up in scrap yards where severely underpaid workers are forced to extract the valuable metals from the discarded objects. This rapidly growing waste stream could easily be quelled with the introduction of Project Ara. Criticism began during the first Project Ara Conference, when Spiral 1 would not turn on for the audience. Others have talked about the belowaverage battery life. For this reason, Google has decided to only release the Ara pilot device in Puerto Rico, a smaller-scale setting compared to a full-sized international release.

When questions arose as to the decision to use Puerto Rico as the testing site, developers at Google explained that the island, a United States commonwealth, has several desirable qualities that make it an ideal location for the test-run of their newest device – the primary reason being the immense “mobile penetration” of the island. According to data sources, about 75% of the island receives primary access to the Internet from phones rather than computers. Moreover, the commonwealth status allows Google to technically operate in the United States while still benefitting from Puerto Rico’s free trade zones. These zones easily enable Google to import pieces for the device from all over the world for a lower cost than importing from the continental United States. The other benefit of testing in Puerto Rico is the diversity of cellular service providers; there are several American staples such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, as well as Latin American carriers like Claro. The University of Puerto Rico has also registered its 11 campus locations to ATAP Multi-University Research, a program that will allow Google to access laboratories and professors with ease and flexibility.

Puerto Rican service providers are thrilled to be involved with Project Ara’s pilot run. Josué González, president of Open Mobile, one of the most popular carriers on the island, said, “we are very proud that Google and Project Ara have selected us to test run their pilot. This is, without a doubt, excellent news for our clients and for all of Puerto Rico, since we will be the first in the world to experience this new platform of the future.”

Google announced they would be selling the phone in travelling vans, similar to the recently popular food truck model. They hope this strategy will make people feel more comfortable buying the product, and help them understand the flexible nature of its design. The smartphone will also be available online. As for the production of the device, Google already has several developers working on chips and other elements of the phone.

Spiral 3 is still in the process of being produced and is missing test-runs before its release. The company said it would release 30-50 models in late 2015.

The release of Project Ara marks a revolutionary moment in technological history. If the product is successful, this habitually consistent market will experience its first major change since the introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007. Spiral 3 could change the conceptual notion of a smart device. n

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Photography Credits Front Cover: Photo by Justin Shead, Page 2: Photo by Mark Pizzi, Page 4: Photo from Wikimedia Commons, Page 5: Photo by M. DeFreese, Page 6: Photo by Josep Ma. Rosell, Page 7: Photo by Annaliese McDonough, Page 8: Photo by M. DeFreese, Page 1013: Photo by Justin Shead, Page 14: Photo by Mario Draghi, Page 16-19: Photo by Valentina CalĂ , Page 20: Photo John Cooper, Page 23: photo courtesy of The Ministry of Culture of Argentina, Page 24-25: Photo by flickr.com user jmalievi, Page 26: Photo

by Joe Gratz, Page 27: Photo courtesty of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Page 28-29: Photo by Jaeger Moore, Page 30: Photo by Maurizio Pesce, Page 31: Photo by flickr.com user dreamingyakker, Back Cover: Photo by Gwenael Piaser 31

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