Winter 2015

CPR

vol. xiv no. 4

columbia political review

They Know You’re Reading This CPR LOOKS AT SURVEILLANCE featuring interviews with

Ethan Zuckerman and Bernard Harcourt read more at cpreview.org

Plus Inside: Policy Prescriptions For California’s Water Shortage................p. 14 Mexican Frustration with Government Corruption Grows....................p. 21 1

follow us @CPReviewOnline

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Editor’s Note

Volume XIV, no. 4

masthead: Editor-in-Chief Publisher Managing Editors

Web Editor Senior Editors

Arts Editor Copy Chief

Gregory Barber Omeed Maghzian Joshua Fattal Tommaso Verderame Stewart Shoemaker Asha Banerjee David Blackman Jamie Boothe Daniel Brovman Yeye Kysar Brina Seidel Sophie Wilkowske Jason Zhu Anushua Bhattacharya Sofi Sinozich

Assistant Copy Editors

Angela Chen Michael Greenberg Amanda Kan Bronwen Chan

Design Editors

David Blackman Alejandra Oliva

I

’m not sure what possessed me, as a freshman in college, to think I could go ahead and write a 2000-word article on Scottish independence -- much less publish it in a place where my new classmates could read it. But a senior editor with this publication would run with my idea, seeing it from nascent pitch all the way to print and kicking off an undergraduate career spent with CPR. Two years later, on the eve of Scotland’s referendum, I’d publish an article written by that same senior editor as our cover story; he’d essentially pummel my argument into the ground.

But that’s all part of this magazine’s sense of possibility: a space for debates and arguments that otherwise might not otherwise find a home on this campus, founded on a belief that Columbia students are capable of not only writing, but guiding each other to incredible long-form journalism.

Our latest issue is a testament to those principles. Columbia student-writers examine topics ranging from the nuances of Burmese politics to the experiences of fellow students grappling with the balance between work and school. In our centerfold, students and experts offer a comprehensive examination of the current state of surveillance, including conversations with Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT Media Lab and Bernard Harcourt, a critical theorist at Columbia Law School.

This issue is sadly the last for the 14th editorial board. Tremendous thanks to Stewart Shoemaker, who has raised the bar of our website to mirror the spirited debate of CPR’s pages; Tommaso Verderame and Josh Fattal, my indispensable partners throughout editorial process; Alejandra Oliva, who has transformed the design of this publication over the last two years; and Jamie Boothe and Jason Zhu, passionate voices both in their edits and at our board meetings. I’d also like to thank Omeed Maghzian, who has been everything you could ask for as both a publisher and a friend during a year of transitions, and to wish him luck next year as a senior editor.

Congratulations as well to incoming editor-in-chief David Blackman and the amazing team he’s assembled for CPR’s 15th volume. I’m tremendously excited to see what they’ll do with this ever-evolving publication.

But mostly I just hope they’re better than we were at puns.

CPRegards, Greg Barber Editor-in-Chief

Artists: Lauren Espeseth Kevin Wu Lucy Jakub Vivian Qiao

(pp. 15-16) (pp. 19) (Cover, pp. 26-27) (pp. 21-22)

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed herein belong to their authors and do not necessarily

reflect those of the Columbia Political Review, of CIRCA, or of Columbia University.

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An affiliated publication of:

WINTER.2015 table of contents Features

Cover Story

14 Water Pressures

Policy Prescriptions for California’s Drought

8 They Know You’re Reading This

Examining U.S. Surveillance Policy

By Sam Schipani

Featuring Student Voices and

Interviews with Ethan Zuckerman

and Bernard Harcourt

18 Sinking the Internship

Are Unpaid Internships Disrupting Education?

By Julie Moon

By The Numbers:

21

It Was the State

Mexican Frustration with 100%: Percent of California experiencing at Corruption Grows least partial drought according to U.S. Drought Monitor

By Catalina Piccato

21,000:

Briefing: Burma 4 Myan-Marred Relations Cooling Relations Between

China and Burma

By Maren Killackey

Briefing: US Foreign Policy 23 Obama’s Stick: Big Enough?

Students Gauge Obama’s

Foreign Policy Legacy

Number of casualties in Mexico’s ongoing drug war since Peña Nieto took office

150,000:

Number of Burmese refugees currently living in Thailand

$1,000,000,000+: The value of goods exchanged between China and Burma annually.

24%: Percent increase in college interns over the last two years

20%:

Portion of the Jordanian budget spent on energy subsidies

3,000,000:

Number of refugees living within Jordan’’s borders, nearly 50% of the population.

By Ankeet Ball and Max Bernstein

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Myan-Marred Relations Cooling Relations Between China and Burma

By Maren Killackey

W

hen President Thein Sein of Burma announced on September 30, 2011 that he was suspending construction on the Myistone Dam “to respect the people’s will,” Chinese officials were “shocked,” “surprised,” and “utterly unpre4

pared” to handle such a democratic decision. The $3.6 billion project, brainchild of the state-owned China Power Investment (CPI), would have delivered 90 percent of the potential 6,000 megawatts generated to cities in China’s Yunnan province. But it also would have

columbia political review :: winter 2015 flooded an area the size of Singapore (26,238 hectares), displacing up to 12,000 people in 47 villages.

Even before construction was suspended, approximately 2,500 people had already been pushed from their homes. A corporate social responsibility report released by CPI-controlled Ayeyawady Confluence Hydropower Co. (ACHC) late last year was denounced as propaganda by the dam’s opponents, one of whom added, “We, the Kachin people, are not enjoying the benefits [of the dam]… Everything China did was for their own good name. They are trying to improve their reputation…”

Burmese antipathy towards the Chinese is anything but new. Though state relations between Burma and China had been pauk phaw (fraternal) since the 1950s—Burma being “the only friendly non-Communist territory through which Chinese Communists [could] come and go”—relations began to sour in the late ‘60s. When the Cultural Revolution began in China in 1966, reverberations through Burma’s Chinese community resulted in retaliatory legislation from the Burmese government, who forbade students from wearing Mao badges and reciting Mao’s sayings. On June 22, 1967, a group of school children at the Rangoon No. 3 National Elementary School defied the regulations, resulting in a fight between students and faculty. The brawl eventually ended, but students continued to wear badges and recite quotations. Burmese mobs launched attacks on various Chinese institutions in Rangoon, which by June 27 escalated into a full-blown riot. Dozens of Chinese associations were destroyed, 31 members were killed, and several diplomats were assaulted.

Beijing made five demands and used the Burmese Communist Party, an opposition group founded by leading Burmese nationalists, to undermine government leader

General Ne Win, calling him “the Chiang Kai-shek of Burma.” Rangoon ignored China’s demands and asserted the BCP had no right to interfere in Burma’s internal affairs.

Diplomatic ties were cut and Rangoon took measures to weaken China’s influence within the country. It was not until Deng Xiaoping visited Burma in 1978 that relations were fully normalized.

briefing ers, and missiles. China became the Burmese army’s largest weapons supplier, and remained so through the 1990s.

This de facto support for the tatmadaw (Burmese armed forces) won China no friends among several ethnic minority populations (particularly the Kachin and the Shan) on whose land it extracted resources. Armed conflict between ethnic groups and the state have colored Burma’s political landscape since 1949.

Between 1961 and 1989, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), operating in its namesake state, grew from a small band of 100 guerillas to a sophisticated army of 21 battalions. While the Shan State Army had less success, it still experienced widespread support, especially in the Shan’s political and economic heartland along the Burma-China border. Control by insurgents didn’t stop the Chinese from trading in cross-border regions, and it wasn’t until the Burmese army recaptured those territories in a 1987 offensive that Beijing decided to trade directly with Rangoon.

Having lost a significant source of revenue, armed ethnic groups redoubled their resolve against the Burmese army. Between 1987 and 1994, counter-insurgency campaigns against both ethnic and communist groups along the border triggered an exodus of refugees into China and India.

In 1994, the government of Burma brokered a ceasefire agreement with several major armed groups.

But rather than address the needs of ethnic Kachin and Shan whose lives had been disrupted by fighting, the government allowed what was left of the local economy to be eroded by an influx of Burmese and Chinese firms. Small businesses shuttered and migrant workers brought in from China worsened already high unemployment rates.

Twenty percent of Kachin state’s land was set aside for mining and

“Deserved or not, reform in Burma has been called Obama’s “greatest foreign policy success,” but recent events suggest the situation might again be de-stabilizing.”

As China sought greater economic modernization in later parts of the 20th century, its policy towards Burma shifted from supplying political support to emphasizing trade. By 1985, China-Burma trade was at an estimated $1 billion (USD) a year – not including revenues derived from narcotics trafficking through Burma’s slice of the Golden Triangle. In 1988, the Burmese junta abandoned the Burmese Way to Socialism, which had by this time proved disastrous economically, and implemented several market liberalization reforms. But this was at the very moment the international community made the junta’s ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) a pariah in response to its brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in August of that year. When China was sanctioned as a result of similar brutality taken against its own student protesters in 1989, interdependence between the two countries increased. Military aid in particular rose dramatically, the Chinese providing $2 billion (USD) in technical support and material goods, including jet fighters, tanks, ammunition, naval vessels, armored personnel carri-

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briefing the Burmese government announced plans to build seven dams along the N’Mai and Mali Rivers, which would be financed, of course,

by China.

This decision only exacerbated the tension in the region. On June 8, 2011, the KIA intimidated a member of the Burmese army at the Tarpein Hydropower Project, a joint venture between the Burmese Ministry of Electric Power and Chinese Datang Hydropower Developing Company. On June 9, the Burmese army attacked a strategic KIA post at the location of yet another Chinese-funded hydropower dam, effectively violating the 17-year old ceasefire.

Chinese participation in the Burmese economy—and civil conflict—at the people’s expense has delegitimized Beijing in the eyes of Burmese citizens. China has argued it is providing employment and crucial infrastructure to a truly underdeveloped region. However, ethnic minority activists are skeptical that the benefits of China’s economic activity in Burma will trickle down as far as officials claim. As the Myitsone Dam episode shows, popular opposition to Chinese presence has weakened Beijing’s pull vis-à-vis Naypyidaw (Burma’s post2006 capital). But what’s perhaps

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columbia political review :: winter 2015 most indicative of this diminished position is that China’s foreign policy towards Burma appears to be inoperable in a non-authoritarian context. Several scholars have noted that Burma’s political and economic reforms have only complicated relations with China, not to mention that Naypyidaw has improved relations with several countries, chief among them, the United States The United States broke diplomatic ties with Burma in 1990 and ramped up rhetoric against the Burmese state throughout the 2000s. Sanctions were imposed

by Washington, first in 1990, but again in 1997, 2003, 2007, and 2008. It was thanks to the United States that Burma became an isolated state and had no choice but to accept deals offered by China and its ilk. But as of 2009, things began to change.

The SPDC started attempting to engage with the United States diplomatically around 2006, but the September 2007 crackdown on anti-regime protests, the response to the 2008 cyclone (in which the U.N. Responsibility to Protect principle was very close to being invoked) and the neither free nor fair 2010 elections made it difficult for Washington to accept friendlier

terms. Instead, the United States maintained a “road map” strategy, where unless progress was made towards realizing the US vision of a “unified, peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Burma that respects human rights,” relations had to remain icy.

Still, though little progress had been made towards those objectives, the Obama administration decided to revisit its Burma policy and institute a strategy of “pragmatic engagement.” Initially, China seemed indifferent to a closer relationship between the United States and Burma; it was aware its interests might be hurt by democratization, but was glad to have the blame for perpetuating a brutal regime toned down. Yet when the Obama administration suggested its foreign policy would “pivot” (rebalance) to Asia in 2011, many in Beijing began to see the changing US-Burma relationship as part of a larger “containment” policy.

Indeed, concern among Chinese policy analysts grew as relations between the United States and Burma improved at a dazzling pace, starting with quasi-civilian President Thein Sein’s inauguration that same year. Thein Sein’s somewhat reform-minded agenda—freeing political prisoners, easing press

columbia political review :: winter 2015 censorship, allowing Aung San Suu Kyi to run for and assume office—enabled the United States to incorporate more carrots into its Burma policy without invoking criticism from the American electorate. So while alarm bells rang for the Chinese at the announcement of the Myistone Dam project’s suspension, the United States was pleased—not least because it had funded the very civil society groups that secured this outcome.

In addition to advocacy and peer pressure tactics, the United States has tried to promote democracy in Burma by funding several educational, political, and cultural initiatives.

From 2000-2010, the State Department financed a scholarship program for Burmese refugees to study at Indiana University. In 2009, a diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in Yangon reported, “with [U.S. government] support the Burma Laws Study Group trained 20 peasants and laborers from Rangoon Division and Rakhine State on labor laws and rights in Rangoon before sending them back to their home communities to conduct labor workshops.”

Earlier that year, the Embassy in Jakarta sponsored a speaker symposium and photo exhibition in order to “increase public awareness on the Burma human rights situation and democracy struggle.” Many cite this sort of support as crucial to the opposition movement in Myanmar, without which it might not have the social capital or technical capability to challenge the regime.

In September 2013, the Chinese newspaper Renmin Ribao stated, “Following its opening, Myanmar has become a main battleground for the world’s major powers, and the Myitsone project has become a bargaining chip in the resulting geopolitical struggle… Some analyses point out that Western countries… will first have to ruin the Sino-Myanmar relationship in order to expand their influence in Myan-

mar and demonizing the Myitsone project is an opening.”

On the other hand, some argue the United States’ policy towards Burma does not have to exclude China necessarily. In fact, as recently as January 2014, the United States and China listed Burma as an area for possible cooperation.

This announcement suggests the idea implied by the Renmin Rib-

briefing progress, a strategy that will only work if the international community operates in concert.

Going forward, there seem to be three potential trajectories in the triangle of US-Burma-China relations. First, there’s the rather pessimistic outlook that Chinese firms will operate on the assumption that as long as they pay their rent, they don’t have to make actual concessions to the communities in which they work. Second, there’s the more optimistic view that the United States and China will specialize their development activities without ever coming into conflict. Last, there’s the more nuanced perspective that the United States and China will have to engage in a dialogue about what kind of social, political, and economic environments they want to emerge in Burma. Democratization is a messy process that sows some political instability, but enabling autocracy is a bad reputation to have in this day and age.

At the time of writing, Aung San Suu Kyi, parliamentarian and chair of Burma’s National League for Democracy, is set to make her first official visit to China. Presently, the motivation for the trip is unclear, but its outcome will undoubtedly be an indication of the future Burma-China relations. Will Aung San Suu Kyi, a favorite of the West, remain an outspoken champion of political freedom? Or will she acquiesce to China’s terms in the name of securing much-needed development assistance? The United States must wait with bated breath.•

“Chinese participation in the Burmese economy—and civil confllict the people’s expense has delegitimized Beijing in the eyes of Burmese citizens.” ao’s statement, that involvement in Burma is a zero-sum game, should be somewhat qualified. In fact, it is entirely plausible that China could carry on with its infrastructure projects, while the United States exports technical advice on governance and financial systems, things the Burmese have complained “the Chinese were unable, or unwilling to provide.”

Deserved or not, reform in Burma has been called Obama’s “greatest foreign policy success,” but recent events suggest the situation might again be de-stabilizing. Dozens of peaceful political prisoners remain in jail and many that have been freed are subject to rearrest at any point. The death of a journalist in military custody last October became a symbol of the government’s renewed “war on the press.”

Burmese refugees in Thailand, of which there are 150,000, are still too fearful to return home.

To a certain degree, the Burmese government has demonstrated a willingness to accept external involvement in its economic and political affairs. As the humanitarian situation in the country remains uncertain, it will be necessary to condition assistance on concrete

Maren Killackey is a senior in Columbia College studying political science. She’s interested in international relations and comparative politics, and semi-regularly writes a CPR web column on Southeast Asian politics. She can be reached at: msk2187@columbia.edu 7

cover story

columbia political review :: winter 2015

They Know You’re Reading This CPR Looks at Surveillance It’s been more than one year after Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing broad government surveillance, and most Americans are no longer surprised to hear that their online activity can easily be monitored. Revelations about surveillance are no longer front-page news. But what are the practical ramifications and consequences of living in a surveillance-saturated society?

The people who grapple with that question in this feature represent different interests and backgrounds: they come from disciplines as divergent as law, media, technological development, and politics. They by turns liken the current surveillance system to an organic assemblage, an Orwellian network, and a manipulative amusement park. They examine corporate surveillance, government surveillance, and the increasingly blurred line between the two. They argue variously that surveillance negatively impacts tech company profits, confidence in the government, the ability of the individual to develop fully, and fundamental human rights.

These students, professors, and practitioners offer diverse responses to the question of what it means to live in a surveillant society. Common to all of these responses, however, is a belief that surveillance as it exists now is a troubling phenomenon, and one that requires thorough examination and thoughtful response.

Peter Prak CUCR

T

he NSA scandal from last year outraged many about the extent of government surveillance of the American people. The revealed fact that the National Security Agency has been collecting information on all phone calls inside and into the U.S. through the major carriers shocked us, and angered us quite appropriately. However, now that the revelation and associated outrage have passed, it is time to assess the damage and see what can be done about it.

There are several reasons why government surveillance is dangerous. Of course, violation of the law (i.e. The Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on searches) is itself troubling. Unfortunately, mere violation of the law by officials is not rare enough to concern us.

It seems that there are three dangers stemming from government surveillance. The first is that it gives the government great ability to enforce unjust and intrusive laws. The second is that it gives the government access to personal information which could, for example, be embarrassing if exposed on the whim of the surveillance official. The third is that it permits a particular abuse of government power: selective enforcement of minor laws.

The first danger is one that anyone who has studied history will be concerned about. Given, however, that which laws are just and which unjust comprises the majority of political debate in its entirety, it is

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more significant that it makes the nation hair-trigger for the execution of blatantly unconstitutional policies and regime changes.

The second danger is one limitedly posed by metadata collection, since whom one calls and for how long can only be minimally embarrassing. However, phone calls to exes or strangers are known to be signs of, for example, marital infidelity, and so de-personalizing such data for low-level contractors is imperative to prevent a perverse incentive to snoop.

The third danger should be what most concerns us in modern America. Harvey Silverglate, in his book “Three Felonies a Day,” estimates that the average person commits 3 crimes per day due to inevitable legal ignorance. If officials can catch all minor crimes, their whims alone will determine punishment. It is one thing to use secret data collection to thwart terrorists – it is quite different (and much more Orwellian) to use it to stop someone from scalping sports tickets.

The president has said on multiple occasions that such NSA spying has prevented dozens of terrorist attacks. This, if true, means that we cannot afford to simply discontinue it. Given its obvious dangers however, increasing oversight through reform of the secret FISA court is necessary – a court with no accountability is not a court at all. Such steps must be taken to ensure we continue to live in an America that is both safe and free. •

columbia political review :: winter 2015

cover story

Student Perspectives Rasmi Elasmar ADI

T

he NSA’s mass surveillance programs are an abuse of government power on a scale never before practiced.

Without a warrant, the NSA collects private data about every aspect of our lives through our smartphones and computers. The program has destroyed trust in US tech companies. Some companies like Google are implementing more advanced encryption by default to protect user data from mass surveillance, because it’s better to trust in the math of encryption than it is to trust a reckless government agency. Tech company profits aside, the program has destroyed trust in our own government. The Bill of Rights protects against warrantless searches, and the NSA’s collection of our personal data is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. The precedent must be set that our digital information is just as private as any other possession we own that requires a warrant to be searched. Our rights are slowly being dissolved before our eyes, and although the technological solutions to this problem will be put into place to protect our data as discontent over the programs grows, political solutions are the only way we can actually regain any trust in our government. •

Alison Schlissel The Roosevelt Institute

P

rivate companies collecting consumer data is nothing new. However, contemporary data collection is much more comprehensive and potentially invasive. One possible policy solution is to mandate consumer consent.

Digital data collection and aggregation is useful for marketing purposes because it provides low-cost, easy methods to access consumer information. However, the potential risks for consumers include the loss of privacy and the misuse of personal information. There are companies that specialize in this business. For example, Axicom, one of the largest database brokerage companies, creates profiles based on over 1,500 data points, including education, type of car, and stock portfolio. In turn, these data points are supposed to help predict consumer behavior, and are then sold to other companies. Although these data collection companies can help in regards to personalizing the smartphone experience, they can also be pernicious forces. For example, there is an ongoing congressional investigation involving nine big data companies, in light of a scandal that one database brokerage company, Experian, sold sensitive consumer information to an identity theft service in Vietnam.

The trends indicate that there will be more privacy legislation in the future. The United States’ response has been in favor of private company self-regulation to balance consumer needs with business needs for information. The most recent legislation in this policy area has a narrow focus, with the last truly comprehensive bill being the Electronics Communication

Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986. The ECPA is not sufficient because it mostly pertains to government surveillance, largely excluding private companies, and has further loopholes. For example, there is more regulation for devices containing wires than wireless devices, which leaves smartphone users vulnerable.

The Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, currently in Congress, attempts to fix definitional issues that would help close the loopholes of the ECPA. Although an important first step, the bill again covers mostly to government surveillance.

One moderate step towards protecting consumer privacy is through promoting consumer awareness.

This awareness rests upon the assumption that companies give consumers clear and easily accessible information of what they are collecting and the implications of using that data. Senator Franken recently proposed a bill that would require consent before collecting geolocation data. Although not a complete solution, it could pave the way to more transparent communication between consumers and private companies.

Although digital data collection is a convenient way for private companies to collect data, it has the potential of putting consumers at risk by exposing their sensitive data. The current legislation, though outdated, has the potential for improvement with the possible passage of the GPS Act and additional safeguards.

It is possible to strike a balance between the evolving needs of private companies and the rights of consumers. • 9

cover story

columbia political review :: winter 2015

Expert Opinions The following two interviews were conducted by Sophie Wilkowske with experts on the changing nature of surveillance.

Ethan Zuckerman, on this page, is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, where he also researches. He is interested in the roles of new media in activism and technology in international development, and also studies attention in mainstream and new media. His latest book is Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection.

Bernard Harcourt, on the next spread, is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. He studies social and political theory and punishment. His most recent books include The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order and Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience.

Ethan Zuckerman SW: What are some ways that average Internet users are being surveilled that they might not know about?

EZ: So, almost every webpage we’re encountering these days, and certainly any webpage that hosts advertising, is storing information about our visit, and it’s essentially reporting to a third-party server that is compiling the other websites that we’ve been to. This might just be a way of getting what people call psychographic information about us—here are the sort of sites that we look at. But sometimes, sites have a way of turning this into demographic information. If I’m reading ESPN and Reddit, I’m probably male, and between 18 and 25. Sometimes they can do it explicitly, by seeing that you went to this social networking site, you logged on with this identity, and they can link those identities together. I suspect that most web users know that a network like Facebook is reading their emails, reading their posts, and then is targeting ads to them. But I think that most people don’t know about this third-party aspect, where simply surfing the web is probably creating a trace. There’s unfortunately even more sinister things out there. There’s this system called “browser fingerprinting,” where these websites are trying to identify the very specific configuration of the web browser that you’re using. And it turns out that there are enough variables in how your web browser is set up—what fonts you have in your system, what plugins you have—that it’s almost as unique as a fingerprint, and it may turn into an individually identifiable space.

What’s happened is the commercial web as we know it is now about as far as one could imagine from an anonymous space. My colleague Matt Stempeck was just pointing out to me that this isn’t just a theoretical threat, it isn’t just a blurring of the boundaries. It’s actually a practical threat. One of the things we learned 10

in the NSA revelations was that the NSA was requisitioning ad network tracking information, to find out who was reading what websites. So this notion of the surveillant assemblage, that I’m trying to promote here, is that it doesn’t have to be the NSA guy with his headphones on, listening in on your phone calls… It may be the combination of all the different commercial databases revealing information about who you are and what your habits are.

SW: Could you talk more about this idea of the “surveillant assemblage”?

EZ: I’m new to the paper, but it’s published by at the University of Alberta, who are wicked smart (Kevin D. Haggarty and Richard V. Ericson, “The surveillant assemblage”). They basically argue that the ways we think about surveillance aren’t actually very adequate for the modern age—that this notion of Orwellian surveillance, where some personal informant is watching you for though crime, doesn’t parallel us very well, and that this Foucauldian notion of the panopticon, a much more sophisticated model of surveillance, still doesn’t actually work very well. Because surveillance here isn’t trying to discipline you, it isn’t trying to change your behavior. All it’s really trying to do is have as accurate a data double of you as possible, to have this sort of data-body that it can act on, which is as close as possible to a shadow of you. And so, the trick with that model of surveillance is that anything that observes you can become part of that system. We didn’t even get in to some of the spooky stuff about smart cities. New York announced yesterday that they’re planning on turning all of these payphones into open Wi-Fi hotspots. Yay, open Wi-Fi! But of course, the model that they’re going to use to support the free open Wi-Fi is targeted advertising, and it would not at all be surprising to see them doing things like storing the MAC address, the unique hardware address of your phone, as you pass by. You end up with a profile that may not know you by name, but sure as hell knows that you attend Co-

columbia political review :: winter 2015 lumbia, that you live ten blocks away in Morningside Heights, and that you frequent this particular establishment in this particular neighborhood.

SW: A lot of people, as you’ve mentioned before, are not at all surprised by surveillance revelations, because surveillance through various corporate measures has become normalized. Do you think there’s a compelling reason they should be worried about it anyways?

EZ: So, my argument, to the extent that I’m trying to make it in this talk, is that the danger is that corporate surveillance immunizes us to other forms of surveillance. I think, what I sort of expected to happen with the Snowden revelations was people saying, “Yeah, absolutely, I knew that corporations were doing this, but I can’t believe the government is doing this with taxpayer oversight!” And what I’ve been trying to figure out is why there hasn’t been that shocked response.

There has been in some quarters—in the quarters that I hang out in, people are really outraged. But it hasn’t turned into a widespread popular movement. One argument is that people who are twenty years younger than I am, who literally grew up through twenty years of this technology emerging and becoming more surveillant, may just simply have a different sense of surveillance than I do. I still have, somewhere in the back of my head, this sense that the Net’s supposed to be anonymous, and that while it’s trying at every turn to become less anonymous, I should be able to sort of carve out and protect myself. If your first experience of the Net was Facebook, where the first thing you do is show up with your real name, as opposed to my first experience with the Net, which were MOOs and Usenet, where the important thing was to come up with a cool handle that no one would know was you, that’s a really different picture of how this space works. And what I’m a little worried about is that I do think that we may have trained a generation of people who’ve grown up on a surveilled Net to expect that form of surveillance in public space.

cover story themselves other than surveillant advertising is key.

And I think it’s some combination of, unfortunately, the paywall subscription, voluntary donation, if there are ways to do micropayments that are less surveillant, perhaps… But most methods of micropayment are incredibly surveillant. BitCoin is a perfect surveillance mechanism, which is really awkward because it’s loved by anonymity types. As long as you can keep it clear from your real identity it’s secure, but it actually is a perfect transactional record, which makes it an amazing surveillant system. But I think the first thing we have to get, is we need plausible, non-surveillant business model alternatives.

The second thing we need is regulation. We actually need to sort of look at this space and say, “Yes, it’s amazing that you can fingerprint my browser, and figure out exactly who I am based on how I logged onto Facebook. You shouldn’t do that. And in fact, we’re going to make it legally complicated for you to do that.”

I think that would be a very smart thing to start building into these systems. It would be really nice if we started seeing surveillant-resistant alternatives. Some of those are going to be sites like Pinboard, which says, “I’m going let you keep bookmarks, I’m not going to advertise to you, I’m not going to keep personal data on you. I am going to charge you five bucks when you sign up for the service, but I’m going to build a new business model and demonstrate that it’s possible as an alternative.” Because you can imagine a Google making Gmail available for fifty bucks a year, and encrypting everything on the drive and not targeting to you, and that would be a great way to go.

I don’t have a ton of faith that Brazil and Germany are somehow going to magically come up with this. I actually think it’s going to be a combination of bottom-up changes, coming from competitive companies in this space, coming from initiatives of these companies.

One of the things that actually makes me really optimistic is that there are people inside these companies who woke up in the wake of the NSA and are trying to do the right thing. Google is trying to get Gmail to work with PGP. And they’re now pitching to companies saying, “Yeah, we don’t want your plaintext emails on our servers, we want it encrypted end-to-end, and we want to make it really easy for you to do it.” Facebook—Facebook!—just announced that they’re working with Tor, to make Facebook available via Tor. That’s frickin’ amazing! So that actually leaves me feeling somewhat hopeful that we will see some good stuff happening. •

“We may have trained a generation of people who have grown up in a surveilled net to expect that form of surveillance in public space.”

SW: Finally, what sort of alternative vision of governance do you see as a solution? Is a more regulated Internet, like what Brazil and Germany are working on, the right direction?

EZ: So here are two or three things that I think we could do. I think the first thing you need is an alternative business model. I think finding ways for important civic institutions like the Guardian to support

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cover story

Bernard Harcourt SW: Should the average citizen be concerned about surveillance? Why or why not?

BH: Yes. I think that’s an easy yes. Most of us don’t even realize the pervasive extent to which we are surveilled, both by commercial entities and by our own and other governments. When you put together all of the different forms of surveillance that are taking place right now, most people would be shocked to know how transparent they are.

SW: The question is, why be concerned? I would categorize the response under three general headings.

BH: The first is that there is a collapse of the boundary between commerce and government surveillance, between the sphere of the state and of society. That collapsing, which is reflected by fact that so much of government surveillance feeds off of commercial surveillance, is dangerous in a number of ways. It’s problematic first because we have traditionally tried to use the separation of state and society as a way to protect individuals, and to allow them to pursue their own life projects. As the differences collapse, it’s less easy to create spaces for individuals to develop on their own.

Also, as those spheres collapse, they become all the more powerful. They become practically invincible, daunting in their combined strength. When commercial enterprises work with government surveillance and govern themselves through their own forms of surveillance, you get to a point where the individual has practically no ability to resist the forces that are effectively governing them. In many of the documents that were revealed by Edward Snowden, we’ve seen large corporations like Microsoft working hand-inhand with the F.B.I. or the National Security Agency, in order to give the intelligence services greater access to personal data through the ordinary software that we use, like Outlook e-mail or the SkyDrive storage.

The second is that, as we start to feel more and more surveilled, we start to lose parts of our self. There’s a term that sociologists and other critical thinkers used to use, about the way in which surveillance technologies produce subjects, shape subjects, and can have effects on the self. I’m thinking of Erving Goffman, for instance, in his book, Asylums, who described the way in which an institution like an asylum or a prison or a convent or a monastery or a boarding school can shape our subjective beings. Goffman described it in terms of the “mortification of the self”: the idea being that these institutions had, as part of their mission, the objective of mortifying the self. The prison is a good example: part of the acculturation, part of becoming a prisoner, 12

columbia political review :: winter 2015 is losing part of your identity. I think that pervasive surveillance, by all of the institutions that we interact with, has the same effect of mortifying the self.

The third is that digital surveillance has a punitive dimension to it. As a result, our ordinary digital existence is becoming, more and more, similar to a form of electronic monitoring, more and more like a form of punishment, really. That is very troubling.

SW: Were you surprised by the amount of shock that followed the Snowden revelations?

BH: I’m surprised that there has been such a general acceptance of our new society of surveillance. What’s interesting about a lot of these forms of surveillance is that they work best when they’re not known, or when they’re not at the forefront of our consciousness. For example, the marketing that uses information that’s been captured from people on the Internet, those technologies function better when the individuals don’t realize they’re being targeted on the basis of surveillance.

This makes it strange that we would let ourselves forget about the surveillance.

We should know this from media cycles: topics “trend” in the media, and on the Internet, and then disappear as a result of other topics trending. What’s strange is that we so easily let the news fade into the past, that it only surfaces once in a while with a big disclosure and then passes. What’s odd about this is that you would think, knowing what we know about how surveillance works, that there would be greater vigilance on our part, that we would resist more the forgetting of what we know. That’s what I find most puzzling. It makes us, in a way, complicit with surveillance—which we certainly are, first and foremost because we are giving so much of our information so freely, so voluntarily.

This raises the dual dimension of our complicity.

Not only are we complicit because we take such little precaution in trying to protect our information. Most of us use Gmail, even though we know it’s one of the most intrusive and surveilling technologies. So on the one hand, there’s this complicity because it’s easy, it seems cheap, or inexpensive, or even free, and it’s efficient, and you can get it done in a second and you don’t have to worry about getting bills… And then there’s the other complicity, which is that we are so easily distracted into forgetting that we’re being surveilled. That seems even more puzzling to me.

SW: How do you see the distinction between corporate and government surveillance? Is there a distinction? Is one more important than the other?

BH: I think we’ve been historically conditioned to fear government surveillance because of the government’s power to punish, and to be less suspicious and cautious or careful about commercial surveillance, because we tend to associate commercial surveillance with adver-

columbia political review :: winter 2015 tising and consumption. We tend not to mind being the target of advertising as much as we tend to mind being the target of punishment. I would say that the distinction is important because it has the effect of lowering our vigilance in the face of commercial surveillance, which ultimately becomes government surveillance when the intelligence agencies get access—as they do pretty freely—to the commercial information regarding our personal data. The distinction is important because it feels today as if the intelligence services have figured out our weakness, which is to allow all kinds of surveillance and targeting in the consumer context, and can use that in the personal realm to gain the kind of information that would be hard to get from a conventional government informant system.

SW: How do you visualize the current system of surveillance? Is there a good parallel to the way that surveillance happens?

BH: I have in my mind this idea that the architecture of surveillance resembles an amusement park, or a theme park, that is trying to maximize flows of consumption by getting people to buy, visit, spend as much as possible through very deliberate forms of queuing and merchandizing and maximizing flows of people through certain spaces—by getting them to give up their personal information through consumption. This space is all about buying things, using your credit card, giving your email away, trying to get a discount, using a frequent buyer card… all of which renders you transparent to commercial interests.

The architecture may be that of the duty-free luxury shops at the airport. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in a lot of airports now, the high-end duty-free consumption—the wine and cheese and candy and perfume—they’ve created it as a space that you have to go through in order to get to your gate. It used to be that there were stores on the side, but now, physically, you have to walk through this space that is managed to maximize the seduction of these objects so that you will consume and in the process, give away your data, reveal your desires, render yourself transparent. Those duty-free shops make me think of digital surveillance, as a place that manipulates our own pleasures.

cover story media to surveil suspects and entrap them. The second has to do with this convergence that I mentioned earlier, the convergence on the one hand of living a digitally surveilled life—an ordinary surveilled life—and on the other hand of living an electronically monitored life.

It feels as if, more and more, those two forms of existence are starting to resemble each other. On the punishment side, because of cost-cutting measures and because of economic instability and budget deficits, a lot of states are having to consider alternatives to physical incarceration and are turning to forms of digital monitoring. But what’s surprising to me is the extent to which those forms of digital monitoring resemble our ordinary lives, in the sense of being tracked by GPS or being located or having one’s emails read or having everything about our behavior known. That convergence raises the specter that digital surveillance might substitute for forms of punishment, in the sense that if we are completely exposed and tracked and followed, it’s almost as if there might not be a need to physically punish us. We know what people are doing, we know what their behaviors are. You are being followed.

Now, this may sound futuristic, but of course if one could then control behaviors better, knowing what all of our behaviors are, then it seems as if we could digitally monitor and digitally control, suppress, et cetera, behaviors. Then there would no longer be any need for conventional forms of punishment.

“I have in my mind this idea that the architecture of surveillance resembles an amusement park.”

SW: You’ve spoken a lot about punishment as a product of surveillance. How does surveillance intersect with crime, and with punishment?

BH: I’d say that there are a number of ways in which the surveillance issues intersect with punishment issues.

The first has to do with the way in which security or law enforcement are turning more and more to social

SW: Do you think that there is necessarily a trade-off between security and privacy?

BH: I would say that’s a false dilemma. I tend to think that it is too simple, too obvious to be really true. I tend to think that in the crime and punishment context, we always tend to view everything through a simplistic lens of “due process versus security,” which is the very same lens through which we look at these questions of “privacy versus security.” The mission of the new Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought is precisely to question those dominant, common-sensical, overly simplistic ways of thinking—those shared belief systems that hide so much.

Security is an artifact of how people feel about their political surroundings and their life expectations, and those may not be related, in the conventional way we think they are, to privacy. In other words, lack of privacy or transparency, or the fact that you can’t have secrets, is generally thought of as the “trade-off” necessary to enhance security, when in fact there might not be a correlation between the two. It could be that having a full, autonomous, private self that is fulfilled would do a lot more toward creating a secure environment.• 13

columbia political review :: winter 2015

features

Water Pressures

Policy Prescriptions for California’s Drought

I

By Sam Schipani

t was a cloudy day in Northern California when Tim Stroshane, a consultant at the Bay Area’s Environmental Water Caucus, was showing me around one of the reservoirs outside of San Francisco. It was winter, supposedly a wetter time in Northern California, but from our vantage point the reservoir looked like a small pond.

“We used to use the water in this reservoir to stop wildfires,” he told me.

“Well, what would you use now?”

I asked. He could only shrug.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, California is more than a year’s worth of water short in its reservoirs. As of July 2014, the whole state was declared to be suffering some level of drought, while 58 percent of the state reached the driest levels on the U.S. Drought Monitor’s scale. As the drought rounds out its tenth year, scientists have started to question whether California is entering a period of “megadrought,” which could persist for decades and spell catastrophe for the state’s residents.

While the problem of water scarcity is an environmental one, it affects the structure of daily life to such an extent that it must be addressed through policy. National policies for environmental action can be effective for overarching environmental issues. But, the issues of water scarcity are very regional and therefore warrant a state specific response. Until now, California’s water scarcity problem has been most broadly addressed through Governor Jerry Brown’s executive order in April 2014. While the text declares California to be in a “state

of emergency,” the content of the order inadequately responds to the emergency it pronounces. Besides the prevailing rhetoric of “should” and “encouraging,” most of the measures focus on the decisions of consumers in water consumption, such as turning off decorative water fixtures and limiting outdoor watering of lawns. These measures miss not only the bigger picture of California’s water scarcity, but also the grander opportunity for policy and technological creativity in the face of constraints.

The optimal way to tackle the issue of water scarcity in California is not simply by pressuring consum-

a template for responding to the urgent water scarcity issue. The state legislature passed restriction on groundwater pumping in July 2014 to encourage the use of recycled water and storm-water capture as a way of heightening efficiency in water usage. While groundwater is an important part of California’s water system and regulating groundwater is essential to any water scarcity rehabilitation strategy, the new laws give agencies five to seven years to develop plans and until 2040 to implement them. Rather than these anemic measures that catapult real reform into the distant futures, solutions should be provided today. Any feasible solution should be two-pronged: first, imposing regulations, and then offering more water-friendly alternatives to buoy the California economy for long-term adjustment to the changing environment.

Consumer habits aside, the sectors of the economy that face the greatest need for long-term adjustment when confronted with the constraints of water scarcity are those of agriculture and energy.

The state’s policy would be strengthened if water usage policies of large-scale agricultural companies were more adequately and specifically addressed. Agriculture uses 77 percent of California’s freshwater supply, and is therefore the first sector that should be tackled through policy. There has been some discussion of reforming agricultural practice in existing policy, whereby the Department of Food and Agriculture will provide financial incentives for farms to invest in more water and energy friendly irrigation

“California’s state government has the ability and obligation to curtail waterintensive farming.”

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ers, but rather by enacting water restrictions on producers, particularly those in large-scale agriculture and energy production. These solutions alone will not solve the water scarcity crisis, and they should be done in conjunction with, rather than in place of, residential restrictions on landscape water use. In fact, imposing a stricter payment system for residents on water use could ultimately lead to problems for lower socioeconomic classes, leaving the consumption habits of the wealthiest relatively untouched. Imposing constraints on these producers may hurt the economy in the short term, but it will also help to develop

columbia political review :: winter 2015 treatment and distribution systems.

While reforming irrigation practices is an important start, it is not sufficient when the crops themselves require more water than should be allocated in a time of crisis. Despite market demand, water-intensive crops should not be grown in water scarce regions. For example, almonds make up 10 percent of the state’s agriculture product, and each individual almond requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce. Citrus, alfalfa, and the iconic avocados are similarly water intensive and occupy a large share of California’s agricultural product. Meat and dairy production is significantly more water intensive than vegetable production, with many hidden points of water consumption embedded in the amount of vegetables animals require to stay alive. Moreover, California is the fourth largest producer of beef in the United States, each pound of which requires 2,500 gallons of water to produce. Califor-

nia may have a wealth of land, but other states that are less popular for cattle production have better conditions – Wyoming, for example, has an abundance of cheap land, an ample water supply, and is itching for the kind of economic boom a burgeoning beef industry could supply.

Happy cows may come from California, but at what cost?

California’s state government has the ability and obligation to curtail water-intensive farming. In the current mandates, there are no provisions for alternating crops or putting restrictions on meat and dairy production. Enacting such measures would be complicated by the fact that California provides most of the produce for the rest of the United States, but properly adapting to water scarcity must become the new reality for California. Crops like spinach, sorghum and various beans are more appropriate for a water scarce environment. Even vineyards and exotic cactus-borne

features fruits, like dragon fruit, are less water intensive than most of California’s current cash crops and more appropriate in the dry Southern areas of California. While people on the East coast may miss having ready access to avocados during the year, everyone bears some of the burden for shifting climactic conditions if they are to be effectively addressed.

Though rallying support for such a measure could be difficult, as farmers likely will not want to change their short-term profitable habits, the implementation would be less difficult with government support, as existing farms can be converted to a different cycle of crops in the next growing season. Education would be key, especially if farmers have grown used to the cycles of a particular crop for the entirety of their careers, but such education is important to the new climate. The adjustment period may provide a shock to some farmers, but this is another area where the government could be subsidizing those who are making the transition to water sensitive crops.

Demand for the crops would be a matter of strategy – it was clever campaigning that made relatively unknown foreign fruits like acai and pomegranates “super fruits” and made household staple.

The markets may suffer at the outset, but they will 15

features hurt even more if water-scarce conditions destroy entire crops without producers being prepared.

In comparison to agriculture, energy and industry do not currently take up a large piece of California’s energy pie – only about 1 percent in comparison to agriculture’s 77 percent. However, California’s energy future is moving towards more water-intensive prospects, and the relationship between water and energy cannot be ignored. In general, water and energy are extricable themes – water requires a lot of energy for things like domestic heating, while energy production is highly water intensive for processes of extraction, cleaning, and steam generation. Energy intensivity is precisely the problem with desalination as a solution to the drought, as the process requires an immense amount of energy to conduct. Furthermore, California is currently experiencing a hydraulic fracturing boom,

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columbia political review :: winter 2015 with around 53 percent and growing of energy production coming from natural gas. While the growth

two and five million gallons of water.

While some hydraulic fracking companies claim to treat and clean the water after it has been mixed with chemicals, the refinement procedure involves shipping tankers filled with untreated water over long distances to specialized plants after allowing the untreated water to sit in artificial “ponds” for extended periods of time. Much of this water is not cleaned at all, and is instead contained in steel tanks until it can be stored long-term by deep injection in oil and gas waste wells.

Furthermore, the subterranean fracturing process can contaminate groundwater sources, which provide 30-46 percent of California’s water supply. This is not the kind of risk the state should be taking in times of extreme drought. Currently, fracking processes are exempt from the Clean Water Act in what is known as the “Halliburton

“Each ‘frack’ can use between 2 and 5 million gallons of water.” promises to bolster the economy, “fracking” is a water intensive energy production process. Fracking certainly consumes less water than do the steps for extracting and cleaning coal, but the process also uses water to which is pumped underground at high pressure to fracture rock and release trapped oil and gas. Much of that water flows back out, carrying with it the toxic chemicals used in the fracking process, as well as toxic materials flushed from the fractured rock. Each “frack” can use between

columbia political review :: winter 2015 loophole,” which means that many of the regulations governments can put on other industries, fracking is able to squeeze past. A stricter hand by the California state government could set a new precedent not only for the way fracking is treated in the water-scarce California, but also in the rest of the United States. California should work towards these innovations now rather than later.

Other states have already attempted regulations on fracking industries with some success, but more in terms of public awareness of the chemical processes than the water use itself. Wyoming became the first state to require full disclosure of fracking chemicals, which was set forth in a rule approved by the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. At least two other states have followed Wyoming’s lead. California has a law, AB 591, pending to a similar effect. Some states have pending laws that would prevent fracking near public water supplies, while others have enforced temporary moratoria on fracking. Currently, the Division of Oil and Gas of the California Department of Conservation does not monitor, track or regulate hydraulic fracturing. The situation now is not merely environmental and health related, but also economic, for if fracking compromises water supply even further, California is in for a whole host of new issues in its water scarcity struggle.

Conversely, wind and solar production use much less water than fracking and fossil fuel production.

California has a long legacy of supporting renewable technology – in 2009, 11.6 percent of all electricity came from renewable resources such as wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and small hydroelectric facilities. However, large hydroelectric plants generated another 9.2 percent of the state’s electricity, which will become increasingly problematic through the drought, as the state looks for solutions to sup-

plement hydroelectric production.

Putting government restrictions on fracking as an alternative may help other renewable energy industries to grow. There are some barriers to implementing these policies. The free-market mentality says that restrictions will prevent disincentivize producers, and are therefore harmful. However, not only would putting water restrictions on energy production help cut back state water use on a large scale, but it would also promote innovation. Over 20 years ago, the Porter hypothesis predicted that government regulation could promote innovation. It is

features out in the Pacific this October, and the annual snow cycle is unlikely to mitigate matters either. Even California’s skiing industry has suffered from the serious reduction to the snowpack. As the odds stack up against California, there needs to be long term adaptation and we should take advantage of this opportunity to focus our resources in solving the problem.

Though the prognosis of “megadrought” may seem melodramatic, California’s water scarcity reality should warrant a touch more commotion and attention than public officials have prescribed. While the desiccated reservoirs only required shorter showers during my time in San Francisco, the implications of water scarcity are much more complicated for the state’s residents and should not be ignored by its leaders. As Tim Stroshane emphasized during our time together, if water redistribution does not happen soon, California may not be able to recover from the impacts of a natural disaster of such magnitude and duration. Merely shrugging off the issue is not sufficient in a time of crisis when the legislature has the opportunity to effect innovative adaptability and increased resilience to the exigencies of the contemporary world. •

“From a policy perspective, it should be easier to monitor the behavior of large corporations than individual actors.” time to put the idea to the test.

Agriculture and energy may not seem inherently similar, but they are both large-scale water intensive processes that the government has some ability to control. Together, the processes use over 1.5 trillion gallons of California’s water every year. Though free-market capitalists would balk at the idea of regulating industries in this way, arguing that the allocation of water will happen optimally without the government hand, people’s market decisions have a larger impact than they could possibly predict when buying avocadoes on the other side of the continent. On the macro-scale of a policy perspective, it should be easier to monitor the behavior of large corporations than individual actors. The grander scope of the drought is ever pressing, as the El Niño storm that should have brought a well-needed punch of rain to the state fizzled

Sam Schipani, CC’15, hails from Northern Virginia, though she mentions the fact that she was born in Queens pretty much any opportunity she gets. She is majoring in Sustainable Development with a concentration in Political Science and loves to travel. Sam may be the only self-proclaimed “city girl” who thinks working in agricultural policy sounds like the most exciting job in the world. For more ramblings on the ecological state of the world, she can be reached at: ss4121@columbia.edu.

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features

columbia political review :: winter 2015

Sinking the Internship

Are Unpaid Internships Disrupting Education?

By Julie Moon

E

ve Goldenberg, CC’17, a native New Yorker, came to Columbia with the dream of becoming a screenwriter.

In her first semester, she enrolled in a formal acting class and once a week, took the subway downtown to continue her study of improv theater. By the spring of her freshman year, however, Goldenberg felt far away from her dream.

She’d started interning at a media and entertainment startup in Midtown in the hopes of “boosting [her] experience” for a potential job in the industry after college.

She was familiar with the pros and cons of the unpaid internship: as an ambitious young woman, she had interned twice during the last two summers of her high school years. Now, though, Goldenberg was coming to the conclusion that “internships take a lot out of you.”

Originally undertaken by graduates seeking to position themselves for a full-time job, internships are now an increasingly popular commitment among students during their time in school. While Columbia’s Center for Career Education would not divulge data, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), 68 percent of America’s college seniors are interning before they graduate (half of them for no pay). These numbers reflect a steady increase; in 2012, only 55 percent were interning. As demonstrated by reform initiatives like Intern Justice and Mayor Bill De Blasio’s July bill granting rights to unpaid interns, unpaid internships are clearly an entrenched socioeconomic injustice. While many students intern 18

during the summer, Goldenberg’s internship was one that lasted for an entire academic semester. Why are so many college students, at Columbia and elsewhere, choosing to intern not merely in the summer, but while they are in school?

How are semester-long pre-professional commitments affecting students’ lives as undergraduates?

In accordance with the College’s mission statement, which unlike those of peer schools, emphasizes career mobility, Columbia administrators advocate semester-round internships. Columbia College Dean of Academic Affairs Kathryn Yatrakis emphasized their educational value. “There’s no doubt you learn from internships,” she said.

“At the college, we want to provide students with a theoretical framework for this learning, so that they understand the work they do at internships.” Dean of Advising Monique Rinere similarly advocated semester-round internships: “[C] ollege itself has become a much more integrated experience. I don’t think it’s rarified... it’s not like an

ized knowledge that simply isn’t available, in Dean Rinere’s words, in the classroom. However, by advocating interning while in school as “the best possible mix of all”, they ignore the tremendous disruption that it can inflict on students’ on-campus education. As long as university administrators blindly advocate these pre-professional opportunities, the pressure to participate in them during the academic year as well as the summer will only mount. Among the seven Columbia College seniors interviewed for this article, each one had completed at least five internships by their fourth year on campus.

The Columbia administration is overwhelmingly uncritical of internships in comparison to its peer institutions. Harvard Bureau of Study Counsel (BSC) assistant director Ariel Phillips said that “Harvard generally discourages students from doing internships during the school year.” The BSC, an affiliate of the school’s undergraduate advising, career services, and mental health services offices, is not only a substantial resource for students struggling with the pressures of careerism, it also guides students to question their very notions of “success” and “failure.” One of their worksheets, titled “Something’s Gotta Give: Pruning and Prioritizing for the Overcommitted,” asks the student to list the commitments that give bring them true fulfillment: “A connection with a deeper commitment often manifests as an enlivened, peaceful, or grounded state of being.” For students at Stanford who

“Internships restrict students’ access to a real liberal arts education.”

Ivy Tower, anymore. It’s more of a ‘this is life’ kind of experience,” she said.

Deans Yatrakis and Rinere are right to point out the educational value of internships. With or without pay, many offer special-

columbia political review :: winter 2015

feel the pressure of aligning their school life with a future career, the university has a similar resource for dealing with stress: the Stanford Resilience Project.

Initiatives like the BSC and the Resilience Project are examples of how universities can allay the pressure of pre-professionalism and instead advocate self-reflection and emotional intelligence to their students. Their success is somewhat negligible: BSC’s workshop attendance ranges from zero to twenty undergraduates every semester, and the Resilience Project’s effectuality can only be gauged by its website use. But at least the resources are there. Columbia’s administration ought to make similar efforts to recognize the success epidemic underlying the internship arms race.

The constant pressure to pursue internships is so detrimental to a student’s academic life because of the enormous gap between the education offered by an internship and the education that occurs on

campus. In order to understand this gap, it is important to know the legal framework of this issue.

The US Department of Labor’s Fact Sheet on Internship Programs Under The Fair Labor Standards Act distinguishes between the two types of learning an internship can provide: educational or training. This categorization essentially confirms that, unlike a school or even a traditional apprenticeship, an internship does not guarantee an education. Moreover, students who end up in a “training” type of internship gain skills that they could learn in any environment, unlike the specialized knowledge unique to every degree program.

It would seem that while students are in school, there is no reason to simultaneously do a “training” type of internship.

Of course, students on explicitly pre-professional tracks are an exception to the general idea that the skills learned at an internship do not complement what is learned in the classroom. For pre-law and

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pre-med students, internships are unambiguously helpful as an extension of one’s educational experience, as the Department of Labor puts it. “[T]aking organic chemistry, biology with Professor Mowshowitz for example—that stuff is great, and you’re learning the basics of the science that you need to know to become a physician,” said Brianna Olamiju, CC’15, president of the Charles Drew Pre-Medical Society. “But in my view, there’s nothing that compares to the clinical exposure a summer internship can provide.”

For liberal arts majors, however, the problem with semester-round internships is not merely that they complicate the work-life balance-they restrict students’ access to a real liberal arts education. Each of the dozen of students interviewed from Columbia College recounted the toll interning took on their academic life. Sociology major Alana Waldmann ’14 said she was “cracking” the spring semester of her sophomore year when she was 19

columbia political review :: winter 2015

features taking six academic classes, in addition to an internship at Doctors Without Borders with a minimum requirement of 20 hours a week. Alana would often be too exhausted to make the class that was on the same day as her internship. It’s notable that Alana experienced anxiety about internships even during a study abroad program, during the fall semester of her junior year: “I got really nervous while I was abroad because… I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get an internship, not being able to interview in person.”

English major Simon Garrett ‘15 said that because of his sixteen-hour internship at a media start-up downtown, he was unable to complete the readings for his five literature seminars like he usually did. “This is the first semester that...like, I skipped Barchester Towers and I felt awful about it,” he fretted. Simon knew this potentially endangered his postgraduate plans; as his performance in seminar sometimes dipped, he was anxious about receiving adequate recommendations for possible research fellowships after school.

Human rights major Grace Bickers ’14 stopped going to some classes altogether when she was interning for a UN organization in the spring of her junior year. “I had a SEMINAR that I stopped going to,” she told me with a disbelieving smile.

“I felt terrible. TERRIBLE… I like being a student…[but] I didn’t learn anything. Why was I even here?”

Columbia grad and former Yale professor William Deresiewicz addresses precisely this question in his latest book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. He argues that the primary purpose of an undergraduate education isn’t to get you a job (“You need to get a job, but you also need

to get a life”), nor even to help you become a true intellectual (though that’s certainly part of it). The pri-

of labor is a basic job requisite (though according to NACE’s latest report, only 50 percent of internships in direct employment).

But do we really have to let the internship-- paid or unpaid-infringe upon our education?

Surely, attending college to figure out, in the words of Columbia professor Mark Lilla, “just what it is that’s worth wanting” isn’t such a bad idea.

A sixteen-hour professional commitment on top of five academic courses made it impossible for Goldenberg to pursue the passions she thought she would in college. Midway into our interview, Goldenberg declared that an internship isn’t worthy of displacing undergraduate life: ““From now on, I’m only going to do summer internships,” she said.

“That way, I can have both worlds.

‘Cause I want to enjoy school…

Like, I love film class.” Her eyes lit up as speaks about watching Citizen Kane in Introduction to Film Theory. “When do you ever have the opportunity to take, East Asian culture, and learn about that? Like, I’d never get that chance. Or, Asian American cinema. French philosophy…”

The twenty million undergraduate students at Columbia and the rest of America’s colleges all deserve to get an education uninterrupted by pre-professionalism.

The “intern economy”, as Time editor Jim Frederick prophesied it fifteen years ago, is the reality of our country’s workforce today. But students shouldn’t have to sacrifice their education to enter it-- and it’s the responsibility of our top universities to teach them just that. •

“Columbia’s administration ought to make efforts to recognize the ‘success epidemic’ underlying the internship arms race.”

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mary end of an undergraduate education is to help you start finding yourself: “if only since that is the one with whom you have to spend the rest of your life”. Cliche as it sounds, Deresiewicz’s argument resonates because it is precisely this process of self-development that semester-round internships interferes with. How can students even begin to contemplate their inner passions when they’re struggling to balance five classes, a sixteen-to-twenty hour internship downtown, and (a semblance of) a social life?

Slamming a popular argument that going to college purely to study what one loves is “indulgent” or somehow immoral, Deresiewicz writes, “The dull predictability of prescribed elite career paths is, if nothing else, repugnant as a moral spectacle.” Most importantly, Deresiewicz’s book offers the proof of experience. He tells countless stories of graduates who treated college singly as a gateway for a career only in the end, in the words of Harvard’s dean of admissions, William R. Fitzsimmons, to “give the impression that they are dazed survivors of a bewildering life-long boot camp...often [saying] that they missed their youth entirely, never living in the present, always pursuing some ill-defined goal.”

What is more credible than the paths of those before us? It is true that in our post-Recession economy, an elitist and exploitative form

Julie Moon is a sophomore in Columbia College studying philosophy. She’s interested in education systems both in America and abroad. She can be reached at: jhmoon612@gmail.com.

features

columbia political review :: winter 2015

It Was the State

Mexican Frustration with Corruption Grows

By Catalina Piccato

T

he disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26th, 2014 lit the fuse that by November 8th was igniting the doors of Mexico City’s National Palace. Thousands of protesters gathered in the Zocalo of Mexico City, chanting “Fue el Estado”: “It was the State.” As the ornate baroque wood of the Palace, witness to almost four centuries of Mexican politics, was consumed in flames, the protesters’ cries were vindicated. The image created by a few instigators legitimized the protesters’ chant by its dramatic and symbolic force – for watching the magnificent edifice of the federal government in flames, it seems obvious, almost intuitive: yes, it was the state.

However, looking away from the flames and into the ashes of Ayotzinapa – those of the bodies of the 43 students and the metaphorical ones of the Mexican government’s legitimacy – it becomes more difficult to understand and justify such a statement. The meaning of “the state” in the context of Mexico has become extremely cloudy after the events of Ayotzinapa, which saw the blending and collusion of local authorities, extra-legal groups, and party politics on a level rarely seen before. In fact, the very power of Ayotzinapa is articulated in “Fue el Estado” as referring to multiple levels of the political spectrum. The use of this national analytical category and international protest narrative may have significant implications

outcome edy, as well of Mexi-

on t h e of this tragas the future can politics

“Guerreros Unidos regularly paid off the mayor for his cooperation.” and democracy. Such an ambiguous and apolitical slogan does not adequately explain the tragedy of

Ayotzinapa. “Fue el Estado” ignores links between different levels of governance and chains of complicity, preventing the direct judgment of those responsible for the killings in its sweeping generalizations. Though it may express the emotions of thousands, it will likely only lead to a rebellious spiral – a dead end – and future collective frustration instead of concrete political change. The burning doors do not invite future constructive debate between the Mexican government and its people. Thus, careful and complete understanding of “the state’s” involvement in Ayotzinapa allows for a targeted governmental response to the disappearance of the 43 students, as well as more productive public mobilization and activism.

Thousands of protesters gathered in the city center the night of November 6th in response to the most recent press conference held by the Attorney General’s office earlier that afternoon, where Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam presented a report on the Ayotzinapa investigation. According to the official narrative, on September 26th, the mayor of Iguana, José Luis Abarca, ordered a direct attack on the Ayotzinapa students, allegedly in an effort to prevent them from disturbing his wife’s political event. After the students were fired on by municipal police, which resulted in six deaths, the remaining students were openly handed off to members of the local drug band, Guerreros Unidos, who loaded them into trucks and drove off. Three days prior to 21

briefing the press conference, the fugitive mayor and his wife were detained by a unit of federal police in a rundown abandoned house in the working-class district of Iztapalapa in Mexico City. Attorney General Karam then related that, according to the recently acquired testimony of the drug gang members, the 43 students had been burned in a garbage dump in Colula, Guerrero for over 15 hours. Their remains were collected in plastic bags and then dumped into the nearby river; some of these bags have been located, containing teeth and bone remains. The ashes of the garbage dump were sent by the federal government to a laboratory in Austria where they hope to extract mitochondrial DNA in order to verify the identities of the students. Perhaps most tragically, the 43 students of Ayotzinapa are the latest casualties of violence linked to organized crime in Mexico that has, to date, claimed almost 100,000 lives in Mexico. The several mass graves discovered in the same state of Guerrero during the past two months through the Iguala investigation, as well as the others found in the past, attest to the perpetual state of crisis that Mexico has existed in for the past two decades. The entire country has become a graveyard of bodies and souls of the living that languish in sadness and anger. However, these emotions have never before ignited federal buildings in the nation’s capital. It is the role of the “state” that Karam represents, at all levels, which lit the flame.

The tragedy in Ayotzinapa is rooted in both a long historical 22

columbia political review :: winter 2015 context and a contemporary setting of drug-related violence in Mexico. If anything about the Iguana mass-killings is surprising, its setting in the state of Guerrero certainly is not. The state of Guerrero has been plagued by extreme social inequality, poverty, and an almost total lack of political stability practically since its establishment. These systemic conditions should not be overlooked in an

analysis of crime: they are often the very drivers of criminal behavior, factors that hasten the transition from being a young student to being a member of a drug cartel. Notably, on the day of the attack, the students from Ayotzinapa were on their way to gather donations for their crops and education.

Dr. Carlos Illades, a Mexican historian and correspondent for Nexos magazine, describes Guerrero’s

history as a series of violent cycles of social mobilization, repression by the part of the state, and creation of vigilante groups. The longstanding tradition of social mobilization is represented by the local teachers’ college, the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, whose alumni include many famous guerrilla leaders, and which has maintained strong Marxist roots.

The school frequently came into conflict with the state government, particularly during the tenure of Governor Angel Aguirre, who resigned approximately one month after the disappearance of the students due to growing pressure from demonstrations. The federal army is often involved in repressing mobilized groups and guerrillas, as are other local authorities. When violence against the citizens of Guerrero is not perpetrated by the state apparatus, it often is by criminal organizations. Guerrero’s role as a leading producer of heroin-yielding poppies and marijuana and its strategic position in the drug trade have only served to augment the social instability of the state. Moreover, the recent break-up of the Beltran Levy cartel into clashing criminal groups further transformed Guerrero into a stage of violence and unrest.

The local drug gangs in Guerrero do not seek to appropriate political power for themselves, but rather to execute several state functions, including the provenance of security and justice given the inability of the state to do so.

This was the context in which Mayor José Luis Abarca was elected in 2012. Supported by a leftist coalition of parties, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) politician won the election by a large margin. His time in office was characterized by total opacity and nepo-

columbia political review :: winter 2015 tism of the lowest kind. Prior to the kidnappings, there were 11 members of the Abarca family employed by the state government, who were collectively receiving hundreds of thousands of pesos each month.

His marriage to María de los Angeles Pineda symbolizes his link to organized crime: her father and four brothers are all members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel. The New York Times recently reported that Mexican federal officials said Guerreros Unidos regularly paid off the mayor for his cooperation and role as a cartel operative and that the municipal police acted as a muscle for both the mayor and the gang.

Last year, Abarca was charged with the triple murder of leaders of local group Union Popular de Iguala. In Iguala, the collusion between organized crime and local authorities was more obvious than ever before.

As a result of their association with this family, and their role in covering up its criminal behavior, the PRD is now seen as an active participant in one of the most shameful events that Mexico has ever experienced, which has subsequently all but destroyed the myth of a modern left wing in Mexico. The centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has fared just as as badly after Ayotzinapa, as President Enrique Peña Nieto has become the face of the “Estado” which is loudly decried throughout the country. President Peña Nieto has been pushing for numerous reforms that aim to promote economic development and reintegrate Mexico into the global market. This is what his administration has called a “Mexican Moment”: a series of economic campaigns that seek to restore the government’s legitimacy and to shift the narrative from a potential failed state scenario to a rising nation. Primarily targeting the financial, telecommunications, and energy sectors, the reforms aim to present Mexico as a hub for innovation and development. Within a few months of his 2012 election, Peña Nieto was said to be “saving

Mexico” in Time, and reports about Mexico started shifting from its decaying national stability to the rapid improvement in its economy.

However, the administration’s late and inefficient response to the disappearances of Ayotzinapa demonstrated the illusion and failure of this policy to compensate for the ongoing violence in Mexico. The remaining political party, the rightwing National Action Party (PAN), still stands as the standard-bearers of the failed drug war and corruption. In the face of the crisis of violence in Mexico, there does not exist a political party capable of peacefully and productively expressing the frustration of Mexican society. All three of the parties have failed in the face of Ayotzinapa to provide viable and concrete political dialogue on structural changes that clearly need to be implement-

“All three of the major parties have failed in the face of Ayotzinapa.” ed in the country. There is no government discourse that responds to the magnitude of the crisis in a serious attempt to provide a viable solution to the current problems of Mexico.

In short, the police forces, the army, political parties, prosecutor’s offices, the intelligence apparatus, local governments, and the federal government are responsible, by omission or commission, for a major crime at the hands of the Mexican state. In the wake of these terrible events, reforming and rehabilitating the Mexican state is necessarily the most important goal. This rehabilitation requires, above all, justice: a clear articulation and punishment of those responsible, at all levels of the society.

Neither political forces, nor state institutions, nor civil society have

briefing managed to open a public space to restore bridges to dialogue, deliberation, or proposal and development of initiatives and strategies that give a specific sense of purpose and aim for change. It is necessary to transcend fear and indignation in order to enumerate specific reforms, for this is what true justice depends on in Mexico. The huge public outcry against impunity and for the rule of law is overwhelmingly the lesson to be drawn from Ayotzinapa.

Seldom has there been inserted so clearly and with such urgency on the national agenda a need for genuine reengineering of the structure of accountability throughout the country, especially in the primary levels of government. The judicial power has a great responsibility at this time to begin charging those responsible for the disappearance of the 43 students and for the countless of other murders and disappearances that preceded them – this includes the criminal gangs who perform violence as well as public officials who engineer such heinous crimes.

To enable this these reforms, dialogue is certainly important. Political leaders, political parties, and social activists have a responsibility to articulate clear and reasonable demands from the government for the sake of the mourning populace, and for the sake of their future. We have yet to see what the outcome of these rapidly spreading movements will be in Mexico, and whether they will translate into votes in future elections. If, indeed, “fue el estado,” it is now the role of the civil state to try them accordingly. •

Catalina Piccato is a sophomore in Columbia College majoring in Political Science/Economics and minoring in Latin American Studies. She was born in Mexico City, Mexico, but has lived in New York City most of her life. She can be reached at: cp2468@columbia.edu 23

Obama’s Stick: Big Enough?

Students Gauge Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy

T

he 2014 midterm elections have made bleaker the already subdued possibilities of domestic policy for the Obama administration in its closing two years. Hence, Ankeet Ball and Max Bernstein have turned their attention to Obama’s foreign policy.

What doctrine constitutes Obama’s foreign policy thus far? What options are left to Obama in his final two years to complete foreign policy goals and strengthen American power abroad? What will be Obama’s legacy in foreign policy?

Ankeet Ball looks at these questions retrospectively, and suggests that Obama has accomplished much, but that these achievements are overshadowed by the immensity of the hopes Obama brought with him in 2008; far from being the liberal idealist we imagined, the “Obama Doctrine” has been a muddled triage in response to six years of immense challenges. Max Bernstein looks prospectively, at what still might be done to make American foreign policy more coherent moving forward. Together, they provide a compelling briefing on American foreign policy in the Obama Administration.

Mission Unaccomplished: Obama’s Foreign Policy, a Retrospective

A

t the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, comedian Seth Meyers joked that Barack Obama’s biggest threat in the 2012 presidential election was 2008 Barack Obama.

Three years later, as the legacy of the Obama presidency begins to take shape, historians are already speculating on Obama’s place within the annals of American history.

Obama’s legacy is more tenuous than ever in the wake of the 2014 Midterms. Obama does not even have support from the party that nominated him for the presidency in the first place. Considering his domestic woes, Obama should fix his gaze abroad.

The world has changed dramatically since Obama took office.

Bush-era missions in the Middle East have ended, numerous regimes have fallen in the Middle East, technology has changed the nature of warfare, and crises are emerging the world over. Obama 24

By Ankeet Ball

could end his presidency on a triumphant note by shoring up U.S. foreign policy.

The problem with the “Obama Doctrine” is that – it isn’t clear what it is. Past presidents have come into the White House equipped with a well-defined foreign policy. In a 2007 speech, Obama emphasized ending the Iraq War and strengthening the alliances and partnerships needed to meet common challenges and confront common threats. Obama has effected these goals to a degree – the Bush-era Iraq War has come to a close, burgeoning defense spending has produced the world’s most advanced army, and Obama has opted for multilateral cooperation in the face of world threats. On these counts, Obama has received some warm praise.

But other foreign policy failures belie these small successes.

Most of the president’s decisions have lacked any united (and coherent) philosophy. Unfortunately,

Obama’s foreign policy has been a frustrating “one-step-forward, twosteps-backward” process, where achievements leading in a vague direction are overshadowed by substantial failures.

When the United States relinquished military responsibility in Iraq, ISIS militants quickly established a strong foothold. In the face of ongoing violence in the Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine, Obama has issued a series of (empty) threats. This sustained non-action has strained relationships that Obama worked hard to cultivate earlier in his presidency.

Obama’s handling these crises has prompted criticism from across the political spectrum. Senator John McCain, for example, has lamented the failure of American foreign policy to tackle the world’s issues from a position of strength, sneering at Obama’s habit of “leading from behind.” He reserved his harshest criticism for the States’ vacillating responses to ISIS and

briefing

columbia political review :: winter 2015 the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Syria has evoked a bevy of criticism. Obama has failed to act time and again. Congress, for its part, recently passed a bill regarding the arming and training of Syrian rebels, though its response too was delayed. For the last few years, Bashar al-Asaad’s unchecked reign of terror has made a laughing stock of Obama’s effete foreign policy.

When questioned by a Washington Post journalist as recently as November 2014 about whether or not there was an active discussion on any plans regarding Bashar al-Assad, Obama answered with a stern “no.” Conservatives like McCain have every reason to denounce this as a categorical failure.

Democrats, too, have questioned Obama’s effectiveness at achieving world stability, and have started distancing themselves from the president. In 2012, former president Jimmy Carter rejected Obama’s drone strikes in Middle Eastern target nations, referring to them as “cruel and unusual” and constituting a violation of human rights. Other liberals, too, criticize Obama’s drone policy as haphazard and half-baked, and increasingly make their concerns known.

Hillary Clinton has heavily criticized American foreign policy since resigning as Secretary of State.

When asked about her days in the Obama Administration, Clinton simply remarked, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an or-

ganizing principle.”

What happened to the promises of tireless American effort towards promoting liberal ideals and creating a more peaceful world? Upon election in 2008, Barack Obama showed the promise of ushering in a new age in the wake of a global economic crisis and the errors of the Bush Administration. Obama’s promise to end a nine-year war in Iraq helped win him the White House, and yet Iraq arguably faces deeper troubles now than it did in 2008. Obama promised to reassert American dominance in an unstable world – and yet, the United States continues to blunder as nations start to look to other powers such as China and Russia for aid.

Today, Obama is isolated, and it looks as if he will remain so for his remaining two years in office.

His few foreign achievements are probably little solace in the face of broader failures. Yet, the president has the resources to at least partially restore his legacy.

Even though he lacks public approval, Obama can now act freely without the worry of election looming, now that the midterms have passed. He can reach across the aisle to new Republicans demanding a proactive, tougher stance on a range of international issues, and work with them to achieve crucial foreign policy goals. Some of the more Hawkish members of the Republican Party might actually respond. The issues of a possibly nuclear Iran, a rampant ISIS, and

a sovereignty-infringing Russia remain for Obama to deal with. If Obama approaches in a way befitting of the strength and the prestige of the United States and leaves behind his policy of decisive inaction, there is still yet hope for a memorable conclusion to the Obama presidency.

Barack Obama owes it to his successor to leave to him (or her) a more peaceful and stable world than the one that exists today. The president promoted a message of hope during the 2008 campaign – Barack Obama made us believe in a United States that was always capable of more, a United States that would pursue corruption and combat injustice worldwide. Obama’s foreign policy approach seems worlds apart from these campaign promises, but there is yet time. • Hailing from New Jersey, Ankeet Ball, a Junior in Columbia College, is majoring in Economics-Political Science with a concentration in American Studies. He is an aspiring appellant lawyer and wishes to eventually enter into a life of politics and public service. If you’re looking for Ankeet, he can be found on a stage, performing for a Columbia theatrical production, watching a Barclays Premier League Game, or crying in a fetal position because he can never physically meet Abraham Lincon.

It might be easier to reach him at: ab3755@columbia.edu

More Than Nothing Stupid: Where We Go From Here

T

wenty-first century American foreign policy has proved a study in contrasts. The Bush era were years of decisiveness and determination.

The U.S. policed the world, unapologetically pushing its values and often bullying other countries into submission. Even before Obama took office in 2009,

By Max Bernstein

he radically altered the dialogue and the country’s global image.

His philosophy of international relations, which administration officials have described as “leading from behind,” has been fairly consistent since then: The United States must engage the world not solely as a leader but as a member of the global community. By mobi-

lizing American resources to help parties in need, he believes the United States can promote eventual self-reliance the world over; it is more important for countries to resolve region-specific issues using their own institutions and resources.

As the sixth year of the Obama presidency comes to a close, the 25

briefing benefits of this doctrine, as well as the reasons for maintaining it into the future, have become quite apparent. The United States must develop stronger relationships and recognize that in an integrated, globalized world, it needs to operate cooperatively. In the case where strong U.S. leadership is needed, it is much easier to do so in an international community that is not instinctively skeptical of American intentions.

Recent events the world over, however, have made Obama a lightning-rod for criticism. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said recently, “When the United States steps back and speaks softly, nobody listens.” Rice is right to criticize some instances of (apparent) U.S. apathy, but it is telling that she cites “speaking softly” as part of the problem. If any feature of the president’s policy has succeeded, it is speaking softly – respecting the views and interests of other countries, with consensus-building as the goal.

If there is any reason why Obama acted so passively, it is because his foreign policy was designed to prevent as much as possible the abject failures of the Bush Administration.

While this may be understandable, the results have been worrisome: The Obama a d ministration’s foreign policy has proved to be “rudderless” mess that “oscillates random26

columbia political review :: winter 2015 ly between passivity and frantic but ineffectual action,” as Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks wrote.

Such a view is espoused by increasingly more poli-

ticians from across the aisle.

The most difficult aspect of assessing the president’s foreign pol-

icy is that it is somewhat hard to define – what does “leading from behind” really mean? Under pressure to offer a more comprehensive explanation of what guides U.S. action abroad, Obama offered a refined mantra: “Don’t do stupid stuff.” On the one hand, it has real appeal: The U.S. should not do “stupid stuff” like getting caught in wars it should not be in, lacks strategies for, and cannot sustain. Yet, it is plain that American foreign policy needs to be more assertive and directed. Equally problematic is the president’s inability to articulate what the country’s foreign policy amounts to other than avoiding misfortune.

For all his faults, at least Bush could claim to be working in the Wilsonian tradition of American foreign policy—fighting so that the world might “be made safe for democracy.” Whether he was aiming for the right goal or not, Bush’s foreign policy had form.

Going forward, Obama must develop a coherent foreign policy, consistent with the exigencies of the 21st century. Specifically, it needs two foundational pillars: a general code of conduct (functionally equivalent to “leading from behind” or “don’t do stupid stuff”) and a specific, actuating goal (like making the world safe for democracy).

With regard to that first pillar, Bush and Obama hold polarized views—suggesting at least that a

columbia political review :: winter 2015 balance might be struck between them. Fortunately, a previous American president, Theodore Roosevelt, already identified such a balance more than a century ago.

Roosevelt’s code is etched into the American conscious thanks to his favorite proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” It is clear that if Bush failed to speak softly, Obama has failed to wield his stick.

The continuously unfolding situation in eastern Ukraine is a paradigmatic case of Obama’s light hand. As Putin sprang into action in Ukraine, frightening NATO allies in Europe, Obama was, again, slow to act decisively and supplied feeble rhetoric. European anxiety and lack of faith in the U.S. ran so high that Radoslaw Sikorski, former foreign minister of Poland, described

his country’s ties to the U.S. as “worthless.”

The case for a harder American stance amounts to much more than allaying European unease. As Obama eloquently explained, “Abroad, American leadership is the one constant in an uncertain world.” Allies and enemies alike must know that their actions will elicit an American response. Awareness of this fact was instrumental in maintaining stability in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the context of the Big Stick Doctrine, this illustrates the necessity of having

and comfortably wielding the big stick—lending the threat of force, if necessary, to support reasonable positions.

Of course, using too heavy of a hand is undesirable – witness Iraq post- the Bush led invasion.

The costs to doing so can be extreme. Choosing in which cases to bring American might to bear is, of course, difficult. For example, the Syrian crisis presented a tremendous challenge without any obvious role for the U.S. to play. In evaluating most global conflicts, the president’s driving concern should not be a matter of strategic ideals (that is, leading from behind versus dominating) so much as a matter of practical ends. More simply: The president must simply decide what is worth fighting for. This is the aforementioned “actuating

briefing goal”—the second pillar of foreign policy.

Again, Bush had a clearly defined actuating principle. While noble and in-concert with American precepts, the Bush-Wilsonian Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is now outmoded and dangerous.

The aftermath of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan make this clear.

Consequently, the U.S. needs to establish a new actuating purpose that reflects both the evolving 21st century geopolitical realities and core American values. That purpose must entail maintaining stability so as to create a world conducive to international cooperation and trade, the spread of the ideals embodied in the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the military hegemon with global reach, the United States has already effectively assumed the position of defender of the world order. Should it choose to abdicate that lofty role in the future, a further deterioration of order will ensue. Not only will the U.S. pay a heavy price but its al lies and, worst of all, its ideals may well crumble against oncoming forces that only the United States can stem. • Born in New York City, Max Bernstein is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in Political Science and History. Having spent his entire life here, he considers himself an aficionado of all things NYC, and will readily get in an argument with you over the best places to go here. Max spends most of his free time between reading presidential biographies, watching Vice News and scouring the Internet looking for interviews with foreign policy experts.

He is a registered Democrat and an enthusiastic supporter of the President. He can be reached at: mpb2147@columbia.edu 27

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CPR

columbia political review