Duke Political Review Vol.1 Issue1 Spring 2014 by Duke Political Review

Duke Political Review Spring 2014 | Volume 1 | Issue 1

Terry Sanford and the Origins of the War on Poverty By Mousa Alshanteer

Obamacare: Contraception, Corporations, and Religion By Shobana Subramanian

How Mexico Overcame a Gridlocked Congress By Connor Phillips

End of the Road for Campaign Buttons? By Will Giles

from the editors’ desk

Duke Political Review

Dear Reader,

Online Managing Editor Ryan Gaylord

It all started as a party conversation between friends. We couldn’t help but notice that, although Duke students had no shortage of interest in politics, our campus had a distinct lack of political publications. We wanted to create not only an outlet for students to display their writing and opinions, but also a means for students to become more interested in politics. So, while this publication had its start at a social event, its true origins are rooted far deeper – in a hope to foster meaningful political dialogue on campus, and in a desire to encourage students to read and write about issues that matter to them.

Chief-of-Staff Abhi Sanka

The Duke Political Review is an entirely student-run publication, presenting the work of undergraduates both in print and online. Our print magazine features longer, more in-depth pieces on contemporary issues. Meanwhile, our website, dukepoliticalreview.org, brings you a constant stream of political commentary and current events analysis in four key areas – United States politics, foreign affairs, North Carolina politics, and political philosophy. All of this is made possible by an incredible staff of the most talented and passionate writers and thinkers at Duke. We would like to thank everyone who has helped us in creating the Duke Political Review. Without your dedicated and insightful contributions, none of this would be possible. First and foremost, thanks go to our founding staff – Online Managing Editor Ryan Gaylord, Web Director Rajan Patel, and Art and Layout Director Natasia Leung. They have put in a great deal of hard work over the year to help make this idea a reality. Additionally, we would like to thank our faculty sponsor Professor Gunther Peck for his guidance and support, and Professor Daniel Magleby for his equally helpful advice. Thanks are also owed to Ben Wofford and the staff at Brown Political Review for their invaluable assistance in walking us through the process of founding a brandnew publication. We could not have found a better role model than your publication, and we look forward to working with you in the future. And, most importantly, thank you for reading DPR and being a part of Duke’s newest undergraduate publication. Let the debates begin.

Best,

Ray Li Editor-in-Chief

Jacob Zionce Editor-in-Chief

Editors-in-Chief Jacob Zionce and Ray Li

Web Director Rajan Patel Art Director Natasia Leung Business Director Russell Crock Associate Business Directors Brigitte Alanis, Momin Ghaffar, Katherine King, Megan Steinkirchner United States Editor Taylor Imperiale World Editor Olivia Wasteneys North Carolina Editor Mousa Alshanteer Political Philosophy Editor Leke Badivuku Deputy United States Editor Ellie Schaack Deputy World Editor Anand Raghuraman Deputy Political Philosophy Editor Mousa Alshanteer Chief Layout Editor Natasia Leung Chief Copy Editor Lia Cromwell Editors-at-Large Lia Cromwell, Jeff Daye, Kimberly Farmer, James Ferencsik, Maxime Fischer-Zernin, Matt Pun, Jay Ruckelshaus, Lauren Silk, Chandni Sinha Das Staff Writers Tara Bansal, MC Bousquette, Steven Brenner, Amani Carson-Rose, Emily Feng, James Ferencsik, Jack Fines, Will Giles, Zach Gorwitz, Matt Hamilton, Gautam Hathi, Ryan Hoerger, Stefani Jones, Courtney Murray, Michael Pelle, Connor Phillips, Natalie Ritchie, David Robertson, Jay Ruckelshaus, Jay Sullivan, Shobana Subramanian, Jessica Sun Front cover photo from the Duke University Archives.

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Contents Spring 2014 | Volume 1 | Issue 1

8 24

Photo from the Duke University Archives.

DISPATCHES

4 The Danger of Political Labels By Jay Ruckelshaus

5 Pick Your Poison: A Preview of India’s Election By Gautam Hathi

7 Ex-felon Disenfranchisement: A Vestige of Jim Crow By Michael Pelle

NORTH CAROLINA

UN Photo by Martine Perret.

UNITED STATES

8 Abandoning the Battlefield: The North Carolina Fund and the Enduring War on Poverty

14 Hobby Lobby and Corporate Religion: The Constitutional Cost of Obamacare

36 Beyond the Gothic Wonderland: Duke, Durham and Inequality in America

24 ‘Canvas’-ing for the Vote: The Lost Art of Political Buttons

By Mousa Alshanteer

By Matt Hamilton

By Shobana Subramanian

By Will Giles

WORLD

29 The Necessity of a Resurgent Democratic Party in the American South By James Ferencsik

19 Mexico’s Banner Year

By Connor Phillips

33 A Territory in Limbo By Ishan Thakore

37 The Modern Libertarian: Is Government the Dark Knight? By Pi Praveen

40 Why the Government Owns Your Genes By Tara Bansal

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DISPATCHES

Dispatches Highlights from dukepoliticalreview.org

The Danger of Political Labels By Jay Ruckelshaus

recently had a conversation with an Australian student in which neither of us knew what the other was saying. We were both speaking English, but it was probably the most unproductive conversation you can imagine. We were ostensibly discussing the merits of the liberal commitment to supporting the welfare state. It was one of those moments I was looking forward to while signing up for the Duke in Oxford program; here was my chance, I thought, to attain enlightenment in an oak paneled room while discussing a subject whose pretension matched that of my environment. And with a foreigner! But it was not to be. I became increasingly confused because he said there was no commitment at all – liberals are only concerned with supporting the free market. I tried explaining that liberals generally favor expanding the welfare state and otherwise checking the unregulated market. After several minutes of fruitless efforts we decided to change the subject. When I returned to my dorm that evening I was still puzzled. I did a bit of research and discovered that, in fact, we were both correct. It turns out that the Liberal party in Australia leans to the right and favors laissez-faire economics. This certainly differs from the American conception of what it means

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to be liberal – that is, to generally endorse market regulation. It is no wonder we were confused; in our conversation the term ”liberal” conferred two essentially opposite meanings. This is problematic. Politics is a complicated enough show as it is. It’s hard to stage debates about substantive issues when we can’t even agree on how to classify them. Political labels, in trying to collect and unify the various components of a single political ideology, very often confuse them. “Liberal” is an excellent example. The modern political label of liberalism (or is it Liberalism…) is a messy amalgam of countless distinct strains of political thought. The classical liberal movement, defined by its respect for individual liberty and equality, took root during the age of Enlightenment. Great thinkers of the liberal tradition like Locke, Mill, and Rawls have each interpreted the demands of liberty and equality differently, and so have each provided slightly different accounts of liberalism. Over time these accounts diverged so extensively that the contemporary threads of “liberal” thought bear little resemblance to each other. Many might be surprised to learn, for example, that American libertarianism and American liberalism share a common philosophical heritage. Given this astounding conceptual diversity – and the spatial and temporal inconsisten-

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cies – the appropriate reaction when someone claims to be a liberal may be one of bewilderment rather than comprehension. Politicians, of course, get a lot of mileage from this conceptual confusion. It’s easy to adopt a label when it’s convenient and quickly abandon it when it’s not. And the vast majority of us don’t even know when it happens. One of the central projects of political philosophy is to cut through rhetoric and expose the true meaning of political concepts and terms. Precise language and deliberate thinking are the tools of the trade. One way political theorists help is by drawing crucial distinctions to prevent labels from claiming conflicting ideas. For example, we can distinguish between classical economic liberalism (free market and private property) and social liberalism (friendly to the welfare state). There is another, more serious danger inherent in the use of political labels – apart from the potential for ambiguity. It relates more to adopting the label of a specific party rather than a philosophy. When citizens adopt a party label – inevitably, in this country, Republican or Democrat – they often commit to following all of the party’s positions. In fact, many people do not consciously adopt a party label at all; the single greatest predictor of party affiliation remains the party affiliation of

DISPATCHES one’s parents. The problem is that the party label can become proactive and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The culture of political labeling thus encourages quick and mindless decision-making. It attempts to substitute for critical thinking by giving people a slate of opinions they can dutifully adopt. But there is no substitute for critical thinking. Instead of forming our opinions around the agenda of our party label, it is crucial that we come to independent conclusions. This is clearly the less convenient way to conduct one’s public life, but given the burden that democracy places on every citizen – to gather evidence in order to rationally frame and revise an opinion on public issues – it is necessary.

In some cases this may be an overreaction. It’s entirely possible that a voter does in fact subscribe to all of the opinions that a particular party endorses, in which case I see nothing wrong with adopting a label and wearing it proudly. But I’m willing to bet that the majority of citizens believe in a political canon whose shape does not always fit into a party’s outline. When used properly, labels are marvelous things – probably even essential. Labels help us to organize the infinite amount of collectible data about the world around us into neat stacks, giving us a conceptual framework that we can use to think more efficiently – what psychologists refer to as schemas. The problem does not lie with labels them-

selves, just our imperfect applications of them. I realize it would be silly to disregard labels altogether; I’m certainly not proposing people begin calling themselves Republicrats or some other unsavory concoction. But still, the essential truth is this: Our political beliefs come in shades of such astounding subtlety that any definitive labeling system is destined to obscure meaning, at best, and prescribe opinions, at worst. We must be careful. The only label we may adopt without worry is that of a Skeptic.  Jay Ruckelshaus is a Trinity sophomore. He is a staff writer and editor at large for DPR.

Pick Your Poison: A Preview of India’s Election By Gautam Hathi

ndia often likes to call itself the world’s largest democracy, and next year the country will once again hold a general election, an event that is truly unparalleled in scope or scale across the world. For some context, The Election Commission of India estimates that over 400 million people voted in the last Indian national election. That’s about three times the number of citizens who voted in the 2012 US Presidential Election. However, as new political players enter the area, this election is shaping up to be a massive source of controversy. On September 13, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which currently controls the second largest block in parliament, put its pieces on the board: It announced Narendra Modi as its candidate for Prime Minister of India. Mr. Modi, the 63-year-old, unmarried, and crisply bearded chief minister from the state of Gujarat, is widely regarded as a powerfully charismatic orator. He

has ruled Gujarat, India’s 10th most populous state, with an iron fist for well over a decade, during which he presided over rapid economic growth. Gujarat’s GDP growth rate from 2010 to 2011 was more than 1.5 times the overall rate for India. Perhaps even more importantly, Modi has developed a reputation for absolute incorruptibility in a country plagued by corruption. He is held up by his supporters as a shining example of what India’s slowing economy and horribly inefficient government desperately needs. After more than a decade of doing little more than causing trouble for the incumbent Congress Party, the BJP hopes that a campaign centered around one person will help them to regain control of the nation. However, Modi has a distinct dark side. He is an avowed Hindu nationalist in a country that has been consistently haunted by deep sectarian divisions between Hindus and Muslims from

its very inception up until the present day. From a young age, Modi has been a member of the RSS, a militant Hindu nationalist organization with a violent past. During his tenure as Gujarat’s chief minister, he presided over some of the worst sectarian clashes in India’s recent history. In 2002, over 1000 people, a large majority of whom were Muslims, were killed in Gujarat during days of communal violence and large scale rioting. Modi was accused of doing little to quell the unrest. In fact, not-so-quiet whispers keep circulating that Modi played an active part in whipping up communal hatred against Muslims, although he vigorously denies anything along those lines. Modi’s reputation has suffered so much that he was denied an entry visa to the United States in 2005 on the grounds that he had supported human rights violations during the 2002 riots. Indeed, even though Modi has been engaged in a years-long effort to trans-

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DISPATCHES form himself from religious partisan to practical job creator, many feel that he still does all he can to favor Hindus over Muslims. Development projects in Gujarat find themselves neatly situated in Hindu areas. The dividing lines between clean and well-kept areas with proper infrastructure and dirt-poor slums in Gujarati cities often fall conspicuously along religious boundaries. And some have pointed out that several Indian states have economic growth rates similar to or even higher than Gujarat’s, suggesting that Gujarat’s economic reputation is more a result of a few high profile industrial commitments to the state from companies such as Tata than real standout growth. As a result, Modi remains one of the most deeply divisive and polarizing politicians in India today; loved by Hindu supporters, distrusted by moderates, and loathed by Muslims. In a country where tensions between Hindus and Muslims are always on a hair trigger, such a record is not only troubling, but also extremely dangerous. The BJP’s strategy of running a campaign centered on Modi would be extremely risky under normal circumstances. But things are different in today’s India. The ruling Indian National Congress party, which traces its roots through the Gandhi-Nehru family back to India’s colonial era, has found itself in a deep rut as of late. After winning a second five year parliamentary term in 2009 on promises of economic reforms and growth, the party has found its agenda stymied by stubborn coalition partners, ineffective administration, and a punishing economic slowdown that has robbed India of the growth upon which it depends. Manmohan Singh, the aged, softspoken Sikh economist and current Prime Minister has developed a reputation for meek ineffectiveness. Although widely believed to have no personal involvement with corrupt practices, he has seen a number of major corruption scandals precipitate around him during his time in office. He was also forced to back down from several efforts to reform the retail sector before finally passing watered-down reforms, losing large amounts of political capital

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and popular support in the process. To cap it all off, the rupee is just leveling out after a major dive. Despite Manmohan Singh’s reputation as a brilliant economist, he hasn’t been able to stop this currency crisis, which has caused prices to soar. Currently, Mr. Singh’s government operates on razor thin parliamentary majorities with shifting coalitions that prevent almost any real governing. Such paralysis does not make for a particularly compelling reelection platform. Then there is the Congress Party’s elephant in the room. As everyone in India knows, Manmohan Singh isn’t really the man who runs his party or his government. The real power lies with Congress’ old aristocracy, the Nehru-Gandhi family. Sonia Gandhi, the matriarch of the family, is the one who

“Things are different in today’s India” gives all the orders within the ruling coalition. Mr. Singh may run the government on a day-to-day basis, but all major decisions go through Ms. Gandhi. Furthermore, it is widely believed she is prepping her son Rahul Gandhi as both the new party leader and Prime Ministerial candidate. The problem is that Rahul hasn’t quite been fitting the “leader” mold. He has vacillated on major issues, refused to deal with speculation of his future political role, and failed to gain the type of popular respect enjoyed by other members of his family. The fact that everyone believes he will soon be taking over doesn’t exactly bolster the current government’s legitimacy either. However, with Modi’s ascendancy and the increasingly gloomy prospects for Congress next year, Rahul may be forced to step up to the plate and do what’s required of him. In mid-September he picked a fight with Manmohan Singh, publicly calling his cabinet’s decision to let convicted criminals remain MPs “complete nonsense.” Many see this move as a way for Rahul to distance himself from the deeply unpopular cur-

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rent government and position himself as a leader. But it will take more than a passing swipe at current leadership for Rahul Gandhi to lead his party to victory and cure it of its current ills. So where does that leave India, the world’s largest democracy? In short, the country must choose between two seemingly bad options. On the one hand, there is the current government: corrupt, incompetent, leaderless, and overdue for a change after a decade in power. Rahul Gandhi is not in a position to take over at this point, and it is quite unclear whether he really wants to or whether he’s being pushed into the limelight by his overbearing mother. On the other hand, there is the Hindu nationalism of the BJP and Narendra Modi. While Modi appears to have a better record than the incumbent government in a strictly administrative and economic sense, putting lighting rods in charge of countries is rarely a good idea. It is considered a virtual certainty that Modi’s candidacy for India’s highest office will provoke riots at some point over the next few months. He is also unlikely to ever have the support or trust of India’s 176 million Muslims. And what sort of awkward conversations are going to happen when Prime Minister Modi visits the United States, which has labeled him a violator of human rights? Either way, India has a difficult choice to make, and there’s certainly no guarantee that things will hold together in either case. Right now, the country is just starting to come off the growth high that has sustained the complacency of its voting based for the past couple of decades. India needs its next government to do well, but at the moment there are very good reasons to be deeply skeptical of all the options on the table.  Gautam Hathi is a Trinity freshman. He is a staff writer for DPR.

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Ex-felon Disenfranchisement: A Vestige of Jim Crow By Michael Pelle

ast November, over two million people voted in Virginia’s gubernatorial election. No ballots, however, were cast by the state’s 350,000 exfelons. Virginia, Florida, Iowa, and Kentucky permanently disenfranchise those with felony convictions, regardless of the crime’s nature. Ex-offenders can only restore their voting rights by directly applying to the governor’s office, a process that takes months or years depending on the state. Fortunately, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell vowed in 2010 to limit the waiting period to sixty days, and newly elected Governor Terry McAuliffe promised to implement automatic rights restoration following release for nonviolent offenders. The situation in Florida is far bleaker. Nonviolent felons must wait five years after the end of their sentences to even apply for rights restoration, and violent offenders must wait seven years. And like many unjust voter suppression laws, ex-felon disenfranchisement disparately affects the black community. According to the Sentencing Project, 7.3% of the voting-age population is disenfranchised in Virginia, but 20.4% of all voting-age blacks are unable to cast ballots. In Florida and Kentucky, over 22% of blacks are barred from the polls due to felony conviction. Similar to the literacy tests of the early and mid-1900s that relied upon a racially biased public school system, ex-felon disenfranchisement derives its impact from racial disparities in criminal justice. During the 1990s, for example, black men were disenfranchised at a rate seven times the national average. Not only do ex-felon disenfranchise-

ment laws disproportionally impact blacks today, but they also have a history steeped in racial discrimination. The laws first became prevalent in the Northeast during the early and mid 1800s. Universal white male suffrage laws swept the region, and ex-felon disenfranchisement quickly followed as a means of curbing the new expansion. The first American laws of the kind were not expressly connected to race, but their use as a tool for disenfranchising social underclasses had been realized. Following the Civil War, nine of eleven Confederate states passed their first ex-felon disenfranchisement law. Many of these early laws specified crimes that lawmakers believed were more often committed by blacks. ‘Black crimes,’ such as larceny, resulted in permanent disenfranchisement, while ‘white crimes’ allowed offenders to automatically regain voting rights. During Virginia’s 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention, Senator Carter Glass promoted new Jim Crow laws, which included ex-felon disenfranchisement provisions: “This plan…will eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county…will there be the least concern felt for the supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.” Modern defenders of these laws fail to take their racial impact and history into account, proposing rationales that are at best ignorant and at worst intentionally deceitful. Some assert ex-felon disenfranchisement statutes prevent crime, but the laws do little to deter misconduct in comparison to the threats of prison and fines. Others argue that we cannot trust ex-felons’ judgment. Such

opposition, however, constitutes a form of viewpoint discrimination previously deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Ex-felon disenfranchisement’s greatest constitutional defense ironically comes from the Fourteenth Amendment. Section Two, which immediately follows the famed Equal Protection Clause, prohibits the disenfranchisement of any male constituent except on the basis of “participation in rebellion, or other crime.” But the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments sought to impose greater racial equality upon the defeated Confederate States. They could not have foreseen the use of Section Two’s language to subvert the equality that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed. Upheld by the Supreme Court through Section Two, ex-felon disenfranchisement policies must now be nullified through policy changes rather than legal challenges. The laws currently in place in Virginia, Florida, Kentucky, and Iowa disenfranchise over 1.5 million individuals who have already paid their debts to society. Constituents in all four of these states must demand automatic rights restoration for felons upon completion of their sentences. Condoning this antiquated practice only perpetuates the racial logic of the Jim Crow Era.  Michael Pelle is a Trinity sophomore. He is a staff writer for DPR.

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President Johnson and Governor Sanford visit NORTH CAROLINA the Marlow family in Rocky Mount, N.C. Photo by Billy E. Barnes.

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NORTH CAROLINA

Abandoning the Battlefield: The North Carolina Fund and the Enduring War on Poverty By Mousa Alshanteer

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NORTH CAROLINA

January 14, 1963, Alabama’s newly-inaugurated governor, George Wallace, declared before an impassioned audience his rallying cry for those opposed to integration. “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny,” he began, “and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow [and] segregation forever.” Four days later, nearly 550 miles away, North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford made an entirely different promise—“to provide leadership for the kind of understanding America needs today,” “to quit unfair discrimination” and “to give all men and women their best chance in life.” Sanford’s heeding the command of Isaiah—“to undo the heavy burdens” of what one contemporary referred to as the poverty-segregation complex “and to let the oppressed go free”—gave rise to a monumental initiative which would inspire Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It was called the North Carolina Fund, and, unfortunately, its legacy and the lessons it inspired have been forgotten in the contemporary effort to rid the state of its poverty predicament. n

“A Condition of Deprivation”

he rise of poverty in North Carolina differed from that of its neighboring states. Since the plantation economy characteristic of the pre-Reconstruction-era South was not rooted in North Carolina, the Civil War did not impact the state’s economy to the extent it impacted those of its neighbors. Accordingly, North Carolina, unlike the rest of the South, had the financial and natural resources necessary to venture into new industries, particularly those of textiles, tobacco, and furniture. Within these industries, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s James Leloudis argues that “public policies such as segregation, disfranchisement, antiunionism, and miserly expenditures on public education effectively maintained a racially divided and low-wage work force,” which, in

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turn, manufactured inexpensive products that were significantly marketable to the state’s neighbors. “From 1900 to 1939, the state increased its value of manufactured products 1,397 percent,” writes former N.C. Insight editor Bill Finger, “far more than any other Southern state except Texas, a close second.” Over time, the state’s manufacturers, such as American Tobacco Company and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, became leading employers in North Carolina. It is no wonder, then, that the mechanization of the state’s key industries— largely a prolonged result of the Sec-

“These are the children of poverty who tomorrow will become the parents of poverty. We hope to break this cycle” ond Industrial Revolution—resulted in significant unemployment and outmigration. Industries no longer needed to hire low-wage workers when new machineries were able to assume their responsibilities. As a result, the percentage of the state’s total workforce in the textile industry, for example, decreased from 19.1 percent in 1960 to 10.3 percent twenty years later. The automation of the state’s industries also led to the emigration of over 250,000 highly skilled, affluent citizens between 1940 and 1950—an event which left behind a population of unskilled workers who were unable to attain gainful employment and eventually succumbed to living in poverty. In “To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to

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End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America,” Robert Korstad and James Leloudis write that, at the time, “37 percent of all North Carolinians lived on less than $3,000 per year in family income, a full $1,000 below the national poverty threshold defined by multiple studies between 1959 and 1963 and later adapted by President Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisors.” “An astonishing 73 percent of North Carolina families lived on $6,000 or less a year,” they continued—“a figure that, by national standards, defined a condition of deprivation.” These circumstances influenced Sanford to establish the North Carolina Fund, a nongovernmental organization tasked with ridding the state of the poverty-segregation complex. “In North Carolina, there remain tens of thousands whose family income is so low that daily subsistence is always in doubt”—“tens of thousands who go to bed hungry…whose dreams will die,” he acknowledged. “These are the children of poverty who tomorrow will become the parents of poverty. We hope to break this cycle,” he continued. “That is what the North Carolina Fund is all about.”

“Unique to Each Community’s Needs”

When Sanford first conceived of the Fund, he did so, as Leloudis notes, “from a position of relative weakness,” as those who objected to his fiscal policy and moderate stance on civil rights had cornered him with their resounding popularity among North Carolinians. It is for this reason that John Ehle, Sanford’s special assistant, advised the governor that any effective anti-poverty program would have to be funded privately, independent from the bureaucracy of state government, where his opponents carried more leverage. Ehle’s advice appealed to Sanford, as one of his predecessors, Governor Charles Aycock, had in mind the same idea when he approached John Rockefeller and Frederick Gates’ General and Southern Education Boards to finance his celebrated school construc-

NORTH CAROLINA

“Citizen Soldiers”

Photo by Billy E. Barnes.

tion campaign. Accordingly, Sanford chartered the North Carolina Fund as a temporary, private, nonprofit corporation that would draw the bulk of its support from philanthropies, such as the Ford Foundation, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. Federal agencies, such as the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Departments of Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare and Housing and Urban Development, also became conduits of funding after the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s Economic Opportunity Act in 1964. After having secured funding and organizing an interracial Board of Directors and Executive Committee comprised of the state’s foremost citizens, Sanford—and his executive director, George Esser—opened offices in urban and rural counties across the state. “This decentralized structure,” according to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Aidan Smith, “was designed to permit each office to coordinate locally administered public and

social services and to assist the poor by developing an approach unique to each community’s needs.” In November 1963, the Fund distributed a pamphlet across the state which invited concerned citizens to propose community action programs to address local instances of poverty. By February, the Fund had received 51 proposals from committees including directors of social welfare agencies, educators, government officials and officers of various civic clubs and charities. Of those proposed, the Fund selected eleven projects spread amongst the western mountains—a region where over 50 percent of residents were impoverished, the eastern counties— in which no fewer than 40 percent of residents were impoverished, and the Piedmont. The first statewide antipoverty agency of its kind, the Fund was tasked not only with demonstrating its effectiveness, but with inspiring the next generation’s leaders to continue fighting the war Sanford started.

To assist the communities in carrying out their projects, the Fund quickly organized the North Carolina Volunteers program, which, during the summers of 1964 and 1965, assigned students from every college and university in the state to racially integrated teams tasked with confronting the realities of the poverty-segregation complex. The volunteers began their summers of service in early June, when they gathered for a brief orientation at Duke University, and were divided into teams and assigned to each of the Fund’s community action programs. As the volunteers settled into their respective communities, they engaged in a variety of tasks, including, but not limited to, conducting dietary surveys with local health clinics, renovating homes, installing sanitary pipelines, tutoring children, counseling high school dropouts and serving as advocates for access to healthcare. Unfortunately, the success of the volunteers was often modulated by the racial tensions of the time. In Harnett County, volunteers renovated a library that had been closed for years and, in the process, allowed for the intermixing of white and black children. In the week after the library’s reopening, influential members of the local committee that had invited the volunteers hastily convened a public meeting and voted twenty to ten to discontinue the volunteers’ work. The volunteers had no other choice but to leave. After witnessing such happenings, the Fund’s Board of Directors became increasingly concerned about the volunteers’ safety and decided to disband the volunteer program. It was time, they believed, to shift course.

“Blessed are the Poor”

hortly after President Johnson declared a War on Poverty, Sanford told a congressional committee that he had come to believe that charity and relief [were] not the best answers to human suffering.”

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NORTH CAROLINA Rather, he continued, “we ought to attempt to find ways to help them work out of their situations of poverty and become self-respecting and self-supporting.” In order to help the impoverished become “self-respecting and self-supporting,” the Fund began, in late 1965, to focus on how best to stimulate effective community organizing. Community organization efforts led by the impoverished, they supposed, would lead to the reformation of the established leadership which propagated the poverty-segregation complex. In Durham, for example, the Fund financed the United Organizations for Community Involvement, an association which organized civil rights marches and strikes, and in eastern North Carolina it financed the People’s Program on Poverty, an association of impoverished sharecroppers, domestic workers and farmers. One of the United Organizations for Community Involvement’s first initiatives was a protest of a decision by Durham school officials to reject federal assistance for public education due to nondiscrimination requirements. The Durham school board eventually gave in and reversed its vote on whether to accept federal funding. The People’s Program on Poverty found success in different ways. At the dawn of the Vietnam War, its founders incorporated a company, Bertie Industries, which secured contracts to manufacture uniforms for the military. The company’s workforce eventually increased to the extent that Bertie Industries became the sixth largest employer in the county and, by the mid1970s, began reporting annual profits over $100,000. “From those exchanges and their own firsthand observations,” Korstad and Leloudis explain, “Fund staff drew one critically important lesson: winning the War on Poverty required that the poor be fully outfitted for battle.” “Above all else, that meant providing the poor with the resources to support their own independent institutions, within which they would develop leadership skills, merge experiential knowl-

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Photo by Billy E. Barnes.

edge with broader understandings of policy, politics, and economics, and build their capacity to engage public life as citizens and constituents rather than as clients.”

“To Sacrifice Innovation”

When the Fund had nearly spent all of its budget, the Ford Foundation commended it for all that it had done: helping “initiate and finance innovative, experimental projects…to better educate the young and give job skills to unemployed adults, to improve health and sanitation in backward communities…to initiate farm coops, and to begin imaginative projects organizing domestic workers, establishing day care centers…training and developing indigenous leaders, and a host of other activities, indispensable to ending poverty.” Though the Ford Foundation offered

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to prolong its financing of the Fund, its leaders refused, for they had conceived the initiative as a temporary and experimental solution. With no intent to allow for the bureaucratization of their experiment, the Fund’s founders allowed their finances to run dry. They refused, as Leloudis explained, “to sacrifice innovation to the very forms of inertia that had for so long crippled the nation’s response to its most needy citizens.” At the end of 1968 the Fund officially concluded its operations, triggering the emergence of independent nonprofit organizations modeled after its community action programs—among them the Foundation for Community Development, which continued the Fund’s legacy of grassroots organizing among the impoverished, the Manpower Development Corporation, which provided resources for employment, and the

NORTH CAROLINA ranked first in the country in manufacturing as a share of its employment. A transition in the state’s economy from a primary focus on traditional manufacturing to a newborn focus on services, however, has caused the state to become among the leaders in the amount of manufacturing jobs lost. The state’s poverty rate increased to 15.1 percent by 2005, 16.3 percent by 2009 and 17.9 percent by 2011. While “the most recent recession… added about 1.8 percentage points to the poverty rate,” writes the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Patrick Conway, “over 2 percentage points of the increase in the poverty rate occurred [even though] the unemployment rate was not rising. “While poverty rates have risen throughout the U.S. in recent years,” he continues, “North Carolina’s rise is larger than that of all but four states,” likely due to the state’s transition to a service-based economy. “A decade ago, we were 26th [highest in the nation with respect to poverty rate]—a little better than average,” writes Gene Nichol, the Director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. “Now we’re 11th, speeding past the competition.” Low-Income Housing Development Corporation, which advocated for the expansion of inexpensive housing. The Fund had clearly succeeded in its objectives.

“Speeding Past the Competition”

ost economists, says the Raleigh News and Observer’s Rob Christensen, contend that the various social programs inspired by the North Carolina Fund—many a part of Johnson’s War on Poverty—effectively reversed poverty in North Carolina. The state’s poverty rate decreased to 20.3 percent by 1969, 14.8 percent by 1979, 13 percent by 1989 and 12.3 percent by 1999, after which it returned to earlier levels, partly due to the same reasons that caused Sanford to put forth his initiative decades ago. At one point in time, North Carolina

“Abandoning the Battlefield”

In their article, “Citizen Soldiers: The North Carolina Volunteers and the War on Poverty,” Korstad and Leloudis explain that, today, North Carolina “faces problems similar to those confronted by Governor Terry Sanford and his colleagues forty years ago: rapid technological change, growing income inequality, smoldering racial hostilities, and a workforce that is increasingly illequipped to meet the challenges of a global economy.” Fannie Flono, a columnist for the Charlotte Observer, explains that a focus similar to that of the North Carolina Fund is necessary to tackle the issues of today. She describes the efforts of Mac Legerton, the co-founder and executive director of the Center for Community Action—a private, nonprofit,

community-based organization which advocates for sustainable development, poverty reduction, and social justice. Legerton’s nonprofit, like the North Carolina Fund, connects public and private organizations in an effort to stimulate grassroots community organization and, unsurprisingly, has lifted many North Carolinians out of poverty. “Solving poverty is not as complex as some make it out to be,” he says. “Most communities just don’t provide all the solutions needed to have a major impact on poverty. The community might have one or two successful model programs,” he continues, “but you need 15 to 20” programs which adequately address issues such as employment, education, health care, housing, and social equity through community organization. After all, that was what the North Carolina Fund was all about. Either unaware or unappreciative of the importance of community organizing, the leaders of this generation wrongly believe that there are merely two possible ways to effect change, writes Korstad: “as the providers of direct service to poor communities or as power brokers in the public policy arena.” Rarely are there initiatives, such as the North Carolina Fund and today’s Center for Community Action, in which the providers of service and the power brokers work together with the impoverished in efforts to address poverty. There is a certain arrogance to it all, an unfortunate belief that the impoverished have nothing to offer in this effort—that those who know nothing about poverty simultaneously know everything about it. That is the reason why we have yet to win the War—not because our infantry is weak, but rather because we have, in the words of Sanford, “abandoned the battlefield.”  Mousa Alshanteer is a Trinity sophomore. He is the North Carolina Section Editor and the Deputy Political Philosophy Section Editor for DPR.

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Hobby Lobby and Corporate Religion:

The Constitutional Cost of Obamacare By Shobana Subramanian

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President Obama greets Speaker John Boehner at his 2011 State of the Union Address, almost a year after the passage of the heavily contested Affordable Care Act. Photo by Pete Souza. SPRING 2014 DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW 15

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a time when all religious conservatives had to fear was free will. Fighting their way out of the nineteenth century’s state-enforced emphasis on social purity, twentieth century women demanded the right to decide when and if they would have children. The birth control campaign came to fruition in 1972, when Eisenstadt v. Baird made contraception legal everywhere in the United States. A year later, Roe v. Wade did the same for abortion. Religious groups regretted the loss of power, but in the end, all was fair—after all, no one had usurped their right to make their own lifestyle choices but had merely granted the same right to others. Now, half a century later, that is no longer true. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), more commonly known as “Obamacare,” has triggered a major backlash from religious conservatives over its section guaranteeing employees “preventive services” under emt is hard to imagine

ployer-provided health insurance. This section allowed the Health and Human Services Department to issue the HHS Mandate, which requires employers to provide their employees with contraception and abortion services as part of their health insurance. Churches and religious organizations are exempt, but almost all for-profit corporations employing more than fifty people must comply, regardless of religious affiliation. Business owners whose religion is against certain methods of contraception must choose to pay the devastating fines imposed by the ACA to uphold their religious beliefs, or go against those beliefs to preserve their livelihood. The legal issue in question is whether the limits placed on Hobby Lobby by the government violate the company’s free exercise of religion, as guaranteed by the First Amendment. To address this issue, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc, in which Kathleen Sebelius, now the former

Kathleen Sebelius, formerly the Democratic Governor of Kansas, was appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services by President Obama. Photo by Pete Souza.

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head of the Health and Human Services Department, challenges the injunction granted to Hobby Lobby by the Tenth Circuit Court. Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft stores, is the perfect example of a religious corporation. The private corporation is owned entirely by the Green family, which has demonstrated its commitment to aligning its business practices with its Christian principles. For example, all Hobby Lobby stores are closed on Sunday in observance of the Sabbath. Christian music is played in the stores, and all employees are offered free religious counseling and access to a chaplain. Company profit is used to purchase full-page evangelical ads in various newspapers, and millions of dollars are given each year to Christian ministries. The family also owns Mardel, Inc., a chain of Christian bookstores. The respondents wish to be exempted from four of the twenty contraceptives listed in the HHS Mandate, as they believe that drugs preventing embryo im-

UNITED STATES plantation, such as Plan B, are equivalent to abortion. The respondents believe that providing their employees with any of the these four contraceptives will make them participants in a practice that directly conflicts with their religious beliefs. They have filed suit under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA), a law passed by Congress in 1993 that requires any government suppression of a person’s religious freedom to pass strict scrutiny. Before the Court considers its case under the RFRA, Hobby Lobby must meet two conditions: First, it must qualify as a “person” in terms of the law; second, the Court must find that the HHS Mandate poses a significant burden on Hobby Lobby’s free exercise of religion. If these two conditions are met, then the government will have to show that the mandate meets the requirements of strict scrutiny—that is, that the law is narrowly tailored, serves a compelling state interest, and is the least restrictive means of furthering that interest. The respondents argue that the mandate fails to meet these standards. Jurisprudence dictates that corporations qualify as legal persons capable of exercising First Amendment rights. The Dictionary Act, Congress’s guidebook of definitions for commonly used legal terms, defines a “person” as including corporations. It is true that corporate personhood does not guarantee a corporation the same rights as a living person—for example, in United States v. Kordel (1970), the Court ruled that corporations do not have Fifth Amendment rights, such as the right against self-incrimination. First Amendment rights, however, have consistently been applied to corporations. In cases such as First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court ruled that corporations have the same freedom of speech rights as natural persons. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]; or abridging the freedom of speech. …” Nothing in the amendment’s structure or language suggests that one right has a broader scope than the other, with

one limited to non-profit organizations while the other is open to all corporations. Citizens United will make it difficult for the Court to deny Hobby Lobby standing under the RFRA. The RFRA’s second requirement for standing is that the mandate must pose a “significant burden” on Hobby Lobby’s free exercise of religion. The government has never questioned the sincerity of Hobby Lobby’s religious beliefs, and therefore the Court cannot either. Ultimately, any law that forces an individual to perform an action that

“Citizens United will make it difficult for the Court to deny Hobby Lobby standing under the RFRA” violates his religious beliefs poses a significant burden on that individual. The courts have never been in the business of determining whether a practice truly violates a religious belief; that is a job for theologians, not judges. If Hobby Lobby believes that offering those four contraceptive medications violates its religion, then the Court will take its word for it and assess the merits of its case under the RFRA. The RFRA has had a significant impact on how the Free Exercise Clause is interpreted by the courts. Prior to the RFRA, Free Exercise Clause cases tended to follow a pattern: Laws banning specific religious practices were often decided using the rational basis test, while laws forcing individuals to take part in practices that violated their beliefs fell under strict scrutiny. The rational basis test, which places the burden of proof on the individual to show that the government has no relevant interest in the law in question, made it acceptable in most cases for the government to ban various religious practices. For example, in Davis v. Beason

(1890), the Court ruled that banning polygamy was an acceptable invasion of Mormons’ religious rights. Almost a century later, the government was granted permission in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1987) to build a road across lands sacred to Native American tribes because, wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, doing so would not force the tribes to engage in any practices “contrary to their belief.” In short, the Court believed that outlawing religious practices did not burden individuals to the same degree as compelling them to act a certain way. In 1993, however, the RFRA rejected that notion by requiring that any regulation of religion meet the standards of strict scrutiny. Three years earlier, the Court had ruled in Employment Division v. Smith that the state of Oregon could ban the use of peyote, a hallucinogen commonly used in Native American rituals. The case sparked public outrage, to which the Democratic majorities of President Clinton’s new Congress quickly reacted by passing the RFRA. The RFRA had precisely the intended effect—as if in reaction to Smith itself, the Court ruled in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal (2006) that the federal government could not ban hallucinogenic substances used in religious rituals. Under strict scrutiny, the government was unable to provide a compelling interest for not granting an exemption for religious purposes. The RFRA has only strengthened the Court’s tendency to favor the individual in cases where the government requires them to perform actions that conflict with their beliefs. In Sherbert v. Verner (1963), Adell Sherbert, a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, was fired when she refused to work on Saturdays, and was denied unemployment benefits. The Court ruled that Sherbert must be granted unemployment benefits because she had been placed in a position of choosing between her faith and her job. Hobby Lobby has been placed in a similar predicament. Under the HHS Mandate, the company must either forsake its religious beliefs or suffer paying $475 million more in

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UNITED STATES annual taxes. Their only other opthe ranks of Citizens United as tion is to pay $26 million more in an infamous extension of corpoannual taxes and eliminate their rate rights. Corporate religion, insurance plan altogether. The like corporate speech before it, government cannot justify not has become a divisive issue in the granting an exemption to religious world of political commentary. for-profit corporations, especially At a time when corporate power when they ask only to be excused has become a symbol of America’s from providing a fraction of the economic troubles, it is too easy to required contraceptives. see corporate religion as yet anIn order to meet the first two other legal loophole exploited by standards of strict scrutiny, the business owners to avoid providgovernment must not only have ing employees with the services to a compelling interest in enacting which they are entitled. the HHS Mandate, but it must But that is an illusion. Anyone also demonstrate that the law who cares about rights, whether is narrowly tailored. However, he is an employer or an employee, the government’s interest in the should have an interest in Hobby “promotion of public health” and Lobby’s Free Exercise rights. The “[women’s] equal access to healthreal fight is not between corporacare services” is too broad, with no tions and employees but between indication of why an exemption to government and rights—in particHobby Lobby and similar corpoular, the right to religion. There is rations would significantly deter A poll conducted by The Washington Post reveals just how no Establishment Clause for busiit. Under its current structure, the unpopular Citizens United was. nesses; secularism as a policy canmandate does not even apply to a not be imposed on private corpovast percentage of the workforce. isted long before the ACA. Congress rations, no matter how desirable Religious employers such as churches could have appropriated greater funds it may be in government. Advocates for are exempt, as are non-profit religious to Title X, rather than campaigning for putting religion aside in the new era organizations. In addition, the mana contraception mandate. The law does of government-sponsored healthcare date does not apply to “grandfathered” not accept political or financial dif- should remember: eparation of church plans—insurance plans that have not ficulty as excuses for sidestepping the and state goes both ways.  changed since the adoption of the ACA. Constitution. The difficulty in having Small businesses, defined as corpora- a state interest as ambitious and undeShobana Subramanian is a Trinity tions with fewer than fifty employees, fined as universal access to contracep- freshman. She is a staff writer for DPR. are also exempt. As a result, it is esti- tion is that even if it is possible, there mated that the mandate only covers one half to two thirds of all Americans. Offering so many exemptions goes “The law does not against the compelling state interest of accept political or all employees having access to contrafinancial difficulty ception, and the mandate is therefore not narrowly tailored. as excuses for Strict scrutiny’s third prong requires sidestepping the the law to be the least restrictive means Constitution” of furthering the state interest. The respondents in Hobby Lobby correctly point out that there are other approaches the federal government could are many ways of achieving it, some of have taken to address public health and which strictly adhere to the Constituwomen’s reproductive rights. For ex- tion and some of which do not. Since ample, the Health and Human Services there are ways of furthering the state Department oversees family planning interest that do not affect Hobby Lobefforts through Title X of the Public by, the HHS Mandate fails yet another Health Service Act. Title X funds are requirement of the RFRA. appropriated to cover services such as If the Supreme Court rules in faPlanned Parenthood, which have exvor of Hobby Lobby, the case will join

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Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has made reform his mission. Photograph from the Presidencia de MĂŠxico.

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MEXICOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S Banner Year

Despite its transition to a free-market democracy in the 1990s, Mexico has remained economically stagnant and politically gridlocked for years, the promise of its reforms unrealized. Last year, all that began to change, thanks to an agreement struck by the most unlikely of allies.

By Connor Phillips

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y any account, 2013 was not a good year for the United States government, with ideological polarization and tactical obstructionism combining to make the first session of the 113th Congress among the least productive in US history. And with midterm elections looming, it seems likely that gridlock will only worsen over the next year. South of the border, it’s a different story. Mexico—a country known to many US citizens only as home to drug cartels and spring breakers—has spent the past year enacting monumental reforms to its economy and political system. And yet Mexico’s government, on the face of it, is even more divided than the US’s, with the legislature split among three major parties, none of which holds a majority in either chamber. How could three ideologically antagonistic parties unite at just the right time to pass a substantial program of legislation? And could the United States benefit from borrowing part of its political model?

A Gradual Process

Although today a democracy, Mexico spent much of the twentieth century under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which emerged out of the 1910 revolution that overthrew then-dictator Porfirio Diaz. The party fulfilled a pressing need: Mexico’s 1917 constitution forbade re-election of government officials (the means by which Diaz had maintained power), so with considerable political turnover some entity was needed to impose order on the process by selecting candidates and aiding their election. The PRI supplied this organization, and its priorities accordingly determined governmental decision-making. Thus, the constitutional provisions designed to avoid a personal dictatorship brought about a corporate one. Although the PRI built a broad political base consisting of interest groups from across Mexican society, divisions eventually emerged. The first, in 1939, resulted in the formation of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), opposed to excessive state involvement in education and the economy. The PAN struggled for its first several decades, as the semi-authoritarian PRI largely refused to relinquish power. By the 1980s, however, Mexico’s socialistic economic model had run into trouble, and the PRI leadership decided to pursue free-market reforms. This initiative had two consequences: first, the PRI’s discontented left wing split off to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and second, negotiations over a free-trade zone with the United States and Canada (which eventually became NAFTA) gave the US leverage to push for democratic reforms in Mexico. Although the PRI retained a primary role in Mexican politics, the other two parties began to make gains, until the PRI finally lost to the PAN in the 2000 presidential election. While the gradual evolution of a democratic system was a major accomplishment, Mexico’s history of authoritarian rule had left it with a highly centralized government and economy. This engendered several problems. First, the PRI’s privatization program left many sectors of Mexico’s economy monopolized and uncompetitive, controlled by personal or family

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Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico almost continuously from 1876 to 1911. Photo by Aurelio Escobar Castellanos.

Billionaire Carlos Slim controls much of Mexico’s telecommunications industry. Photo by José Cruz.

WORLD syndicates such as America Movil, the telecoms company owned by billionaire Carlos Slim. Partly as a consequence, the distribution of wealth and power in Mexico is highly unequal, and it is estimated that just under half of the population (especially the indigenous population) is living in poverty. In part, the high poverty rate stems from a lack of educational attainment: only 36% of Mexican adults have a secondary education, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the powerful teachers’ unions have blocked reform of the corrupt education system. The Mexican state itself is hampered by a variety of issues, from corruption to inefficient tax collection. The state oil monopoly, Pemex, is notoriously outmoded and inefficient, and if the state took less of its revenues, they could be re-invested in developing more of Mexico’s oil reserves, providing another source of economic growth. In addition, drug cartels, while not as pervasive a force as portrayed in the American media, have weakened and corrupted local law enforcement. President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) chose to rely on the military to battle the cartels, which hindered efforts to create functional civil institutions and created an explosion of violence. Clearly, Mexico’s efforts to establish a clean, effective state have not yet come to full fruition. Finally, Mexico’s political model is proving unsuited for the demands of democracy. With all members of the legislature limited to one term, the body as a whole has very little legislative experience or ability. A lack of reelection also meant a lack of accountability for elected officials, and party interests rather than constituency interests predominate. Thus, after the last PRI president, Ernesto Zedillo, departed office in 2000, the legislature essentially gridlocked, unable to address Mexico’s problems. Moreover, even after its largely voluntary departure from power, the PRI still remains the dominant political actor in Mexico thanks to its organizational structure and support from many of the monopolies it helped create. After two succes-

sive PAN presidents (Vincente Fox and Felipe Calderon) were frustrated by PRI obstructionism during their time in office, the PRI returned to power in the 2012 presidential election in the form of the young former governor of Mexico state, Enrique Pena Nieto.

An Impactful Election

Pena Nieto entered office promising to bring about a new era of change, pledging that the PRI had reformed itself, and both other parties proved receptive to his overtures. First, the PRD split with its presidential candidate, the fiery populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, shortly after the election, seeking to rebrand itself as a moderate, pragmatic party. Because Pena Nieto’s campaign rhetoric was closer to that of the PAN than that of the PRD, the PRD

two-thirds majority necessary for constitutional change. He thus approved the meetings with the PRD and PAN. After several months, leaders from all three parties began meeting to hammer out a common legislative program. After fifteen years of stasis, a broad consensus had developed on the types of reforms that needed to be passed. In addition, the small number of negotiators enabled personal rapport to develop among them. By the night of Pena Nieto’s inauguration on December 1, 2012, the final piece of the program (energy reform) was ready to go, and the Pacto por Mexico (Pact for Mexico) had emerged: 95 goals for the government to accomplish before 2015 midterm elections. The most drastic reforms would require Congress and a majority of state governments to ap-

“Mexico’s history of authoritarian rule had left it with a highly centralized government and economy.” leadership was fearful that an alliance between the two parties would marginalize them, and reached out to Pena Nieto in the hopes of striking some sort of deal. The PRD leadership thus met with Pena Nieto’s transition team and suggested a sweeping pact of common legislative goals. Meanwhile, the PAN had finished a disappointing third. If it wanted to accomplish anything, it needed to align with one of the two other parties. Encouraged by Pena Nieto’s campaign promises and his record of cooperation with PAN initiatives while governor, it too began meeting with the transition team. Pena Nieto, who had only received 38% of the vote (Mexico’s election law decrees that whoever gains the most votes in the presidential election wins, whether or not those votes constitute a majority), was eager to follow through on his promise of effectiveness and realized that support from the other two parties could help pass his agenda, especially because it would give him the

prove constitutional changes, to be followed by secondary implementation legislation. Pena Nieto first moved to address Mexico’s education system. His aim was to take on the powerful teachers’ unions, which had developed considerable autonomy and clout during their days as a key PRI constituency. Seeking to end abuses like the selling and inheritance of teaching positions, Pena Nieto proposed an independent government body to evaluate teacher performance. Under the law, teachers would be hired based on merit testing and those who fail evaluations three times would be fired or assigned an administrative position. Although teachers’ unions staged staged a strike against the reforms, they went ahead, albeit with concessions designed to protect teachers’ privacy and enable them to challenge individual evaluation results. Next up was a telecommunications reform aimed at ending monopoly

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The fate of Pena Nieto’s presidency will be decided by the outcome of his reforms. Photo by Chatham House.

power in that sector, passed on June 11. The package of changes made access to telecommunication and information technology a constitutional right (according to the Wall Street Journal, only 32% of Mexican homes currently have computers, and only 26% have internet access). To expand the availability of these technologies, the reform aimed to increase competition by imposing “asymmetric regulation,” or expanded restrictions on the largest telecoms companies, and ending the cozy relationship that hitherto existed among telecoms companies, regulators, and the courts.

The Cracks Begin to Show

With these early successes, Pena Nieto was determined to implement the centerpiece of his agenda—fiscal and energy reform—by the end of December. Different parties, however, had different ideas as to how these interconnected reforms should be imple-

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mented, and translating the optimistic generalities of the Pact into legislative language proved problematic. The PRD focused more on taxes, asserting that raising more revenue directly would help fund social programs and give Pemex greater autonomy, allowing it to invest more in developing Mexico’s oil reserves and thus boosting economic growth. In opposition to this plan, the PAN argued that it was necessary to open up Pemex to foreign investment. Even today, the 1939 nationalization of Mexico’s oil is viewed as a fulfillment of the earlier Revolution’s promise to rid Mexico of foreign influence. The PAN was thus pushing a radical proposal. Pena Nieto tried to split the difference, offering to allow foreign companies to make only profit-sharing agreements with Pemex, but even his reform was controversial. The impending fight over energy reform shaped the second half of the year’s legislation. Fiscal reform was something of a disaster: the PRD was

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largely allowed to dictate the terms of the package, resulting in a less ambitious measure than originally intended that mainly increased taxes on upper income brackets. Alienated by the fiscal reform, the PAN then predicated its support for the energy reform initiative on passage of another component of the pact: political reform. This measure, backed by both the PAN and PRD and supported in principle by the PRI, would allow lawmakers, governors, and mayors to be re-elected for a limited number of terms and increase federal oversight of elections. Such reforms would hopefully limit the power and influence of parties (especially the PRI), allow lawmakers to develop governing experience, and reduce corruption. As energy negotiations continued, the distance between the PAN and PRD was proving unbridgeable. The bilateral talks between the PAN and PRI on political reform alienated the PRD, and it grew suspicious that both parties, which together possessed a

WORLD two-thirds majority in Congress, would also strike a deal on Pemex. For the PRD, as for many Mexicans, protecting Pemex’s monopoly is not only a policy priority—it constitutes an integral part of national sovereignty. Seeing what it believed to be the writing on the wall, the PRD on November 28 thus took the fateful step of exiting the Pact for Mexico and calling for massive protests against the proposed energy reform. As the protests raged outside Mexico’s Congress, the legislative pace within increased from brisk to frenetic. The promised political reform was hastily drafted and passed, albeit in a slapdash state that left many details yet to be determined. With the PRD gone, the enactment of a reform based on the PAN’s vision was almost a foregone conclusion: the constitutional change passed both houses of Congress and was ratified by a majority of state legislatures (mostly controlled by the PRI) within a week. On December 20, 2013, almost seventy-five years after President Lazaro Cardenas closed off Mexico’s oil to foreign investment in perpetuity, his successor Enrique Pena Nieto reopened it with a flourish of his pen. Even enthusiasts were astonished by the sweep of the reform: private companies will be able to contract with Pemex to exploit Mexico’s hydrocarbon reserves, sharing both production and profits. Moreover, the Energy Department will be able to auction off drilling licenses to private companies that will pay taxes and royalties on the oil and gas they extract. The Pact for Mexico may be dead, but its most important fruit is very much alive.

Whither Mexico?

Although these reforms may not be perfect, Pena Nieto has accomplished more in his first year than many other Mexican presidents have done in their entire terms. Still, even greater challenges loom ahead, including Mexico’s economy, which stagnated during the first year of his term, and the drug war, which rages on despite Pena Nieto’s promise to reduce violence. Furthermore, most of his reforms still await secondary legislation to implement them, and all will need to be put into

practice, with most laws scheduled to take effect in 2014. In all likelihood, there will be successes and there will be failures. Tax reform seems to have already been written off, while education reform will probably yield little progress in the short term: even after removing bad teachers, there still remains much to do to improve Mexico’s schools. The success of the economic reforms—telecommunications and energy—depend in large measure on implementation. Pena Nieto’s record of effectiveness as a governor augurs well for his ability to enact these measures in the spirit in which they were intended, but over-

“The manner in which these crucial reforms were enacted was profoundly disquieting.” coming institutional inertia in both areas will not be easy. Political reform, finally, will depend on the extent to which Pena Nieto is willing and able to help his party move past its authoritarian background. For precisely this reason, there was a profound irony buried at the heart of the Pact for Mexico: in attempting to break down the centralization of power within all parts of Mexico’s government and economy, it relied upon and was propelled by the mother of all centralized institutions—the Institutional Revolutionary Party. It was the PRI that gave the reins of power to a corrupt elite, ultimately putting Mexico’s schools, government, economy, and resources in the sorry state they are in today, and refused to cooperate with the PAN for its twelve years in power while it struggled in vain to implement many of the same reforms Pena Nieto has put forward. Moreover, the manner in which these crucial reforms were enacted was pro-

foundly disquieting. There is something fundamentally anti-democratic about politicians in technocratic negotiating sessions setting the course of the country while all the public can do in opposition is spill out into the streets in impotent fury. As much as some of us in America may yearn for an ideal world where high-minded politicians freely join together to pass the initiatives that all recognize our nation truly needs, that is not how our system works, nor should it. Democracy is predicated on the clash of ideas, the opposition of perspectives, the thesis that the correct course should prevail not when the most powerful actors in a state throw their support behind it but when its proponents take their case to the people and triumph in the court of public opinion. Mexico’s misfortune lies not in the fact that its parties battled for so long but instead in the fact that it has become such a top-down society that perhaps its only hope lay in top-down reform. Viewed in this light, the Pact for Mexico becomes not a model for functional democracy, but a fleeting opportunity to remake a society urgently in need of a course correction, born of contingent circumstances and nothing more. Its breakdown was not a tragedy, but the natural course of events if Mexico is to become a full democracy. The biggest question mark hanging over Pena Nieto in 2014 will thus not be any challenge discussed above but the fundamental dilemma that faces him: is he prepared to honor the spirit of his reforms and truly return power to the people, knowing full well that success would dismantle the system that enabled him to gain and wield power, and may very well weaken his own office for the remainder of his tenure? If he decides in the affirmative, he will be remembered as more than a great leader; he will be a transformational one. And 2013 will be remembered as the year when Mexico finally began to escape the shadow of the PRI and move toward a more hopeful future for all.  Connor Phillips is a Trinity freshman. He is a staff writer for DPR.

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Before social media, campaign supporters had only one option to show how much they ‘liked’ their preferred candidate: political buttons. By Will Giles

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he information age has revolutionized the ways in which an individual can show support for her preferred candidate. President Barack Obama has over 38 million likes on Facebook and 40.8 million followers on Twitter while Mitt Romney, despite a year removed from his electoral defeat, still has over 11 million likes and 1.5 million followers. These numbers do not include the many likes and follows of their respective party’s pages, unofficial candidate pages, or issues for the campaign. Showing support is now as simple as changing one’s Facebook profile or cover photo, and an individual can post status updates regarding the campaign to her friends and followers. Similarly, the proliferation of cars also brought about the proliferation of bumper stickers. Inexpensive and easily-removed, bumper stickers provided an easy way to support a candidate. Simply peel and stick to a bumper, and forget about it. It is not uncommon to see many stickers placed on one bumper, creating a collage of political support. While the date is known only to the few of us who collect political items, July 21, 1894 marked the beginning of a transitory period in political support that was just as important as the Internet or cars. On this date, the Whitehead and Hoag Company of New Jersey patented the celluloid political button (Celluloid, a hard type of plastic, is now used in the manufacture of billiard’s balls). To manufacture a button, one simply pressed a circular piece of paper between the celluloid covering and a metal disk, to which a pin was attached. Thus, creativity was only constrained by one’s paper-printing ability. To understand how revolutionary this invention was, we must first look at the prior history of campaign materials. The first American political items were manufactured for George Washington’s Inauguration in 1789. These items were buttons in the truest sense, made of stamped metal and sewn into the lapel or jacket of the wearer. A perhaps apocryphal story states that Washington himself wore a set to his own Inauguration.

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The first “modern” presidential campaign occurred in 1840, as William Henry Harrison faced Martin Van Buren. Each campaign held hundreds of parades and rallies, wrote dozens of campaign songs, and produced numerous campaign slogans, including “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too.” Campaign tokens or medals became prominent items in a campaign supporter’s repertoire. Each was stamped with a portrait of the candidate, as well as a slogan or perhaps imagery from the candidate’s life, such as a log cabin and barrel of cider in Harrison’s case. Usu-

“The sheer number of buttons produced during this period can only be matched by the ingenuity of the designs.” ally, a hole was punched in the top of the token in order for the supporter to wear it around his or her neck. The election of 1860 saw the introduction of the ferrotype badge. Like the campaign token, it had a hole to allow the badge to be worn around one’s neck. However, instead of being minted like a token, the obverse and reverse of a ferrotype contain actual pictures of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates on glass, which was the style of photography at the time. Due to the portraits being on glass, the badges were difficult and expensive to produce and were very brittle. The invention of the celluloid political button by the Whitehead & Hoag Company combined the best qualities of its predecessors: the cheap, massproduction capabilities of tokens with the striking beauty of candidates’ portraits of ferrotypes. Yet, the innovation of celluloid buttons did much more than just syndicate the redeeming at-

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tributes of previous entities; it transformed political campaigns into “Get Out the Vote” (GOTV) machines and created a profitable business for button manufacturers like Whitehead & Hoag. The election of 1896 proved to be the watershed moment for the use of celluloid buttons. The election pitted Republican candidate William McKinley and the Gold Standard against Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan and the Silver Standard. Most of the buttons featured a gold or silver theme; “gold bugs” supported McKinley by wearing buttons with sayings such as “In Gold, We Trust; In Bryan, We Bust!”, while “silver bugs” rallied around Bryan with buttons that promoted a “16 to 1” ratio of silver coinage to gold. It has been estimated many millions of political buttons were produced for this campaign alone. Thus, the ‘Golden Age’ of political buttons, an adage coined by us political items collectors, was inaugurated, lasting until 1916. The sheer number of buttons produced during this period can only be matched by the ingenuity of the designs. Buttons featured every color imaginable, as well as symbolisms and metaphors that cannot be gleaned today by liking a candidate’s Facebook page. I am constantly amazed about how so much beauty and historical significance could have been placed into such a small package; they are truly works of art. After 1916, buttons became more mundane in their colors and schemes. One possible reason for this could be the introduction of the lithograph process. Machines could turn out thousands of these metal buttons per minute, removing the need of printing sheets of paper to be placed in the buttons. Another possible reason is the concentration on the outbreak of World War I in 1917. For whatever reason, there is a remarkable difference between buttons produced before and after 1916, as red, white, and blue became the predominant color design.

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Types of buttons

Just as they are not monolithic in their design, political buttons, also known as campaign badges, pins, or pinbacks, also come in many different types. These are the major distinctions: WORD PIN Contains the names of the candidates or perhaps the campaign slogan (“I Like Ike”) Picture pin Contains a picture of the candidate (usually presidential) Jugate Contains pictures of both the presidential candidate and his running mate Trigate Contains the picture of the presidential candidate, the vice presidential candidate and a picture of a local candidate Coattail Contains a picture of the presidential candidate and a candidate for a local office (senate, governor, etc.)

Collecting Political Buttons he possibilities for collecting political buttons are endless. Possible collecting interests include particular candidates, parties, election years, locals, states, causes, Women’s Suffrage, Temperance, and Prohibition, as well as any category in between. As an example, I collect Charles Evans Hughes, John Nance Garner, ‘Alfalfa Bill’ Murray, Speakers of the House of Representatives, Supreme Court Justices, John Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, and Ronald Reagan. I know someone who collects only gold-colored buttons as well as someone who collects nonpartisan ‘vote’ items. There are enough items and interests for every collector to find his or her own niche, no matter how eccentric their tastes. 99% of all political buttons are worthless. Thus, one must educate himself or herself to discern a good button from a bad button. Generally, picture pins are

who hopes to “ride the coattails” of the candidates popularity Hopeful A button for a candidate seeking nomination before a party’s national convention Local A button featuring a candidate for office that isn’t the presidency or vice presidency (mayor, Congress, etc.) Pre-presidential A local button featuring a candidate who later went on to run for president

Lapel stud Same as a pinback, except has a metal protrusion that slides into a lapel hole Third Party An item from a party that wasn’t from the two major parties at the time. Single Day Event An item from an appearance of a political figure at a fair, parade, event, etc. Flasher Lenticular items that contain multiple images (usually two) where the image changes when viewed from different angles. Also known as flickers or winkies.

Tab A small metal badge with a projection that folds over to place on one’s pocket

worth more than word pins, and jugates are worth more than single picture pins. However, this is not always the case, as a number of clever word pins, such as “Landon-Knox Out Roosevelt” (Alf Landon and Frank Knox were the Republican Candidates in 1936), are highly desirable. Also, pins from 1896 to 1960 are worth more, on average, than newer pins; however, there are always exceptions to this rule. A rare pin, no matter what candidate or year, is going to demand a premium price. Condition means everything in the hobby, as damage greatly affects the worth of a button. A damaged button is usually only considered to be worth about 10% of a pristine example. The rarest candidates to collect are James Cox (Democratic Candidate in 1920), John Davis (Democratic Candidate in 1924), Charles Evans Hughes, and Harry Truman. Other than a few of the most common buttons for these candidates, most pins command a

price of at least $100. A Cox-Roosevelt jugate (Franklin Roosevelt was the Vice-Presidential nominee), so rare that most consider that only 50 promotional items were ever made, commands at least $30,000 and upwards of $100,000. The most popular candidates to collect are Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Harry Truman. The Lincoln campaign produced more items than any of the other three candidates in 1860 combined, but the demand of items of the Great Emancipator is exceptionally high. A new collector must be very careful of reproductions. I, like many other collectors, was fooled early in collecting career by deceptive reproductions. The Hobby Protection Act of 1973 requires that all imitation numismatic and imitation political items sold in, or imported into, the United States be marked with the word “Copy” or the year of manufacture. Generally, this

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Photo by Will Giles.

is marked around the curl of button or placed upon the back. However, many reproductions are not marked, which can deter new collectors from entering the hobby. The best tips to a new collector is to remember that celluloid buttons were not made until 1894 and metal buttons until 1916. Thus, a button featuring a president or candidate that ran before 1896 is automatically a fake; a metal button that features a candidate who ran before 1916 is also a fake. The old adage, “If something is too good to be true, then it is,” remains pertinent. The best decision a collector can make is to join the American Political Items Collectors (APIC). Founded in 1945, the APIC promotes the cultivation and conservation of all historical artifacts and has over 2000 members across the United States. Political button shows, where members set up tables and sale political items, are held

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in numerous locations throughout the country each year, and national conventions are held every two years (The next national convention is being held in Denver this August; mark your calendars!). You could visit thousands of antique stores and flea markets and not see half of the political items featured at these shows.

Political Buttons Today olitical buttons are becoming obsolete, relegated to the status of relic-items that are reminders of the past but serve no current purpose. On the campaign trail in 2012, I saw more stickers on shirts than buttons. The buttons, if there were any, seemed to be advertising the candidates’ online presence rather than the candidates themselves. Unlike an online presence, which is a passive form of support, wearing a campaign button is very active, requir-

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ing one to make a conscious effort to pin a button on clothing. The decreasing use of campaign buttons threatens political involvement and action in the country. As a collector, this is a travesty, as it likely means there will be fewer collectors to sell my collection in the future. Thus, for my heirs’ and democracy’s sake, proudly wear a political button!  Will Giles is a Trinity junior. He is a staff writer for DPR.

President Jimmy Carter meets Governor of Arkansas and future President Bill Clinton. Photo from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

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BACK TO

Blue

The Necessity of a Resurgent Democratic Party in the American South By James Ferencsik

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f you live in the South, you likely live in a single-party state. The once-dominant Democratic Party has become electorally uncompetitive and irrelevant to the governing process. Democrats have a majority in only one chamber of one legislature in the entire region – the Kentucky State House, while Republicans hold supermajorities in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. A Democratic candidate for President has not won a state in the “Deep South,” or original seven Confederate states, in twenty years. Of the thirty Senate races since 2006, Democrats have won eight, six of which were incumbents with sizeable fundraising advantages. The other two faced opponents marred by controversy. The Republicanization of the South has not only harmed Democrats but also hurt the whole U.S. The decline of Southern Democrats has mirrored the general increase in Congressional polarization since 1964. Southern Democrats and, to a lesser extent, Northeastern Republicans once served as the bridge between Republican conservatives and Democratic liberals in Congress. They functioned as the pragmatists and dealmakers that enabled the legislative process to work. The loss of that bridge has turned routine legislative tasks, such as passing a budget, into gargantuan feats. This political gridlock has wreaked enormous, adverse consequences on the United States. While the 113th Congress has not ended, it has already set records as the most polarized and least productive Congress thus far in U.S. history. Last year, the world watched in shock as partisan political differences nearly caused the wealthiest nation on earth to default on its debt. This nightmare of an episode is indicative of a broader shift in American politics. Government shutdowns and fiscal fights have replaced compromise and pragmatism as norms of governance in Washington. To rediscover some common ground in politics, Congress needs more moderates. Considering the South has

been the epicenter of Congressional polarization, those moderates are most needed and most logically to come from the South. For more Southern moderates to get elected to the House and Senate, Southern Democrats must become significantly more competitive. This will have a moderating effect on Republican candidates, in particular, to appeal to the middle. To understand how Democrats can break Republican’s stranglehold on the South, it is necessary to first discern why the South became such a dark shade of red.

More Than Color

The Civil Rights Act did ignite a shift of Southern conservatives from the Democratic to Republican Party. In the 1964 Presidential election, the ma-

“Democrats have gotten caught in a vicious cycle that has hardened Republicans’ grip on the South over time.”

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jority of the Deep South voted for the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater. Since then only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both Southerners themselves, have won in the Deep South as Democrats. However, as recently as ten years ago, many deeply conservative Southern states still commonly elected Democratic Governors and Senators such as Governor Ronnie Musgrove of Mississippi. Up until 2010, Southern Blue Dog Democrats, known for their conservative stances, constituted a significant number of Democrats in Congress. This fact demonstrates that conservatives’ shift to the Republican Party took several decades to occur and is just now ossifying. Clearly, this shift had to do with more than one law forty years ago. In addition to voting for Republican Presidential candidates, Southerners

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began to elect majorities of Republicans in state legislatures across the South. Republicans used those majorities to their advantage. After each census, state legislatures can redraw Congressional districts. Republicancontrolled Southern legislatures created more ideologically lopsided districts, including minority-majority districts, in a process known as gerrymandering. This political tactic created favorable districts for Republicans, creating Republican-heavy Congressional delegations. In North Carolina in 2012, for example, Republicans took fifty-four percent of the electorate and seventy percent of Congressional seats. Considering the House is a common stepping stone for the U.S. Senate and Governors Mansions, Republicans have a much deeper bench of candidates to run statewide than Democrats. Gerrymandering, additionally, shrunk Democrats’ bench by alienating Southern Democrats from the more conservative cultural and political identity of the South. With higher concentrations of liberal voters in “Democratic districts,” more liberal candidates were elected. Consequently, Southern Democratic Congressmen, since the 1970s, have increasingly voted with their more liberal Northern counterparts. Furthermore, minority-majority districts usually elected minority candidates. In Southern states excluding North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, African-Americans hold half of Southern Democrats’ seats in the House of Representatives. Liberal and minority representatives, however, have been historically incapable of winning statewide office. Nearly every elected statewide Democrat since 1964 has been considered a moderate and only one African-American official, Gov. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, has been elected to statewide office since Reconstruction. The only Latinos elected to statewide office have been Republican. It, however, is worth noting that minority representatives are often liberal. Wilder’s victory and Harold Ford, Jr.’s near 2006 Senate victory

UNITED STATES Richard Nixon gives his trademark victory sign as he greets a crowd of voters during the 1968 Presidential election. Photo by Ollie Atkins.

in Tennessee demonstrate that conservative African-American Democrats can be competitive at the state level and ideology can trump race. Nonetheless, the political reality of the South is that gerrymandering has created a much smaller pool of candidates for statewide races. Thus, it is not a coincidence that Southern Senate and Gubernatorial candidates are often related to a former Senator or Governor. In Georgia, for example, Democrats are relying on Michelle Nunn, the daughter of a Senator, and Jason Carter, the grandson of Jimmy Carter, to win statewide despite their general inexperience. While these candidates are generally strong, Democrats cannot consistently recruit these heirloom candidates, requiring a more comprehensive and sustainable strategy for Democrats to regain lost ground. Electoral problems in the South discourage national Democratic strategists from dedicating the requisite money and resources to build a win-

ning political infrastructure in the region. This affects down-ballot races by discouraging potentially strong local candidates from running for office – further shrinking Democrats’ backbench. Ultimately, Democrats have gotten caught in a vicious cycle that has hardened Republicans’ grip on the South over time.

Go South, Win Local

The easy and direct solution to loosening that grip is eliminating gerrymandering. State legislatures could select non-partisan commissions to draw the districts. This would create more competitive districts and force candidates to compete for centrist voters, moderating both Democratic and Republican elected officials. However, Republicans will not do this, because it directly hurts them politically. This means Democrats will have to use other strategies to turn the tide. To win the South, Democrats need a compre-

hensive, long-term strategy that will address some of the more fundamental problems the Party faces. The cornerstone of this strategy must be a renewed focus on winning state assembly, county, and municipal elections. For Democrats to expand its pool of statewide candidates, it must recruit new, dynamic candidates at a local level and give them the political operation to be successful. These candidates must demonstrate they can govern effectively at the local level. This strategy is Southern Democrats’ best shot at separating themselves from Democrats on a national level and regaining political relevancy. This effort is also essential to Democrats winning back the U.S. House. When Republicans captured state legislatures in 2010, they put Democrats at a distinct disadvantage in Congressional races for the next decade. If Democrats can turn the tide and build back majorities by 2020, then they not

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UNITED STATES and dubitable reproductive theonly will have an easier time ory, “partly right.” Kingston has winning the House but also recently declared that poor chilbuilding a corps of moderate dren should sweep the cafeteria Democratic Representatives floor for their subsidized lunch. to run for statewide office in Nunn’s success and the success the South. The good news for of other Democrats are directly Democrats is that a few Demorelated to how well they can crats have already realized this. paint themselves as the pragRecently, Southern Demomatic antidotes to the Tea Party cratic strategists have founded wave. It may not guarantee a the Southern Progress Fund victory, but it will, once again, and the South Forward PAC. make these candidates very Both groups are focused on competitive. preparing, funding, and electThe story of Southern Demoing candidates in local races crats demonstrates that elecand “building a bench.” When tions not only have political conannouncing the creation of the sequences but broader national Southern Progress Fund, the consequences as well. A vibrant Fund’s Director and former republic is a large-scale compeMississippi Governor Ronnie tition of ideas which improves Musgrove declared, “Every day the quality of public discourse we see voters in the South that and policy. America needs a are hungry for more options. more politically competitive The extreme far-right fringe South. It will breed more modof the Republican Party has erate officials from both parties a stranglehold on the South.” Georgia Senate candidate Michelle Nunn speaks at the White and ameliorate the disease of He believes a local first strat- House about volunteerism. Photo by the Corporation of National and Community Service. virulent partisanship. This will egy will break that stranglehold mean a renewed Southern conand “make it okay to be a proud Democrat in the South again.” While may not yield a majority of votes but it servative wing of the Democratic Party, the effectiveness of these particular will make her a very competitive can- which will once again bridge both parties. Republicans from the South will groups has yet to be seen, they, over didate. time, could seriously influence SouthDemocrats need to utilize this mes- focus less on Tea Party challengers and ern politics. The impact of more re- sage across races in the South. If they more on winning the middle and governing effectively. To do this, Demosources and a stronger bench, however, make problem solving and effective will be limited if Democrats cannot efgovernance their focus, they should crats need to build a stronger political infrastructure and backbench of candifectively sell themselves as a viable al- be able to win seats on a local level. dates for statewide races. This requires ternative to Republicans. If they fulfill campaign promises and Southern Democrats need to estabcontinue to hammer home their mes- more resources, more attention, and an overall Democratic push southward. lish a coherent and appealing idensage, Democrats will develop an idenSo, no, the political future of America tity. With the intractable gridlock in tity as problem solvers. In as little as Washington, Southerners, like the rest 8-10 years time, Democrats could have will not be determined in Ohio, Nevada, or Wisconsin, despite what punof the nation, thirst for pragmatic solu- a strong backbench of pragmatic and dits say. It will be determined in the tions to the nation’s problems and for proven policymakers who can compete South.  politicians who get things done. No re- and win statewide. cent candidate has understood this like An influx of Tea Party Republican James Ferencsik is a Trinity freshman. Michelle Nunn. Nunn is campaign- candidates this election cycle will also He is a staff writer for DPR. ing as a “problem solver” and kicked make Democrats’ jobs easier. Nunn, off her campaign with a statewide lisfor example, will face the winner of tening tour titled “What Washington the Tea Party troika of Representatives Can Learn from Georgia.” Nunn is on Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, and Jack point. Nunn has focused her campaign Kingston. All three are known for inon education reform, business com- flammatory remarks. Broun is famous petitiveness, and balancing the budget. for calling evolution, embryology, and She has distanced herself from Obam- the Big-Bang Theory “lies straight from acare and called on Democrats to help the pit of Hell.” Gingrey called Todd reform entitlements. This moderation Akin, the originator of “legitimate rape”

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The Western Sahara is still contested by both Morocco and WORLD the Polisario Front. Photo by Ishan Thakore.

A Territory IN LIMBO By Ishan Thakore

Welcome to Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last colony- the Western Sahara. An uneasy peace teeters here, held by a ceasefire and flickering hopes of a permanent answer. Even though shots are rare, everyone wants to know who really owns the desert.

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tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not hard to enter

the Western Sahara (or Moroccan Sahara, depending on who you ask). Buses from Morocco run frequently to the larger towns like Laayoune, the territorial capital, and besides the frequent requests for your passport and identification, it would seem like these were normal customs and border control precautions. But these routines hide the fact that the territory is Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last colony, and home to its longest running colonial dispute. Each side is literally divided- a series of walls, known as berms, stretch nearly 1400 miles (about the distance from Long Island to Miami) to split the desert. It is surrounded by explosives and minefields, and according to some United Nations (UN) experts, the Western Sahara harbors more mines than anywhere else in the world. A permanent solution to this issue eludes policy makers after decades of accords and cease-fires. While there may be a semblance of normality for some residents, the Western Sahara is an abnormal case on the world stage.

he Western Sahara, wedged under Morocco and bordering Algeria and Mauritania, is one of the least populated regions in the world, and rainfall averages less than 2 inches a year. Its desert is rockier and less picturesque than the endless dunes of other Saharan stretches, while its sandstorms and summer weather are known to be brutal. The Saharawis, its native inhabitants, used the area nomadically and thrived on caravan trading. European incursions eventually divided up Morocco between France and Spain, but the end of the French protectorate in 1956 led Madrid to cede part of its holdings to Morocco. By the 1960s, Spain began investing in its Saharan stretch, through phosphate extraction and fishing. As colonization faded from fashion, UN Resolution 2229 (1966), as well as the Resolution 2983 (1972) clearly stated the right to self-determination, or voting for independence, for residents in the Spanish Sahara. In 1971, activists founded the Polisario Front, or the Frente Popular para la Liberacion de Saguia el-Hamra y Rio de Oro, to lead the effort for a free Western Sahara. Polisario countered Spanish rule with military finesse and raided Spanish bases.

Who owns the desert?

Polisarioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vision did not mesh with that of Moroccan King Hassan II, who harbored a vision a la Manifest-Destiny that would have Morocco stretch from the Mediterranean to Mauritania.

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WORLD Both Morocco and Mauritania claimed some parts of the desert, and in 1974, upon Morocco’s request, the UN General Assembly authorized the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to determine who the Western Sahara really belonged to. By October 1975, the ICJ found that no reasonable claim could be made by either Morocco or Mauritania to the Western Sahara. At the same time, a report by a UN visiting mission found Polisario to be the dominant political force there, with most residents in favor of independence. While the ICJ decision shut the door on any legal premise to inhabit the Western Sahara, it did not deter Hassan. By manipulating parts of the ICJ ruling, Hassan leveraged public support and Islam’s holy color to stage a “Green March” to rid Morocco of “colonialist infidels.” On November 6th, 1975, 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians walked past the Spanish-Moroccan border into a small demilitarized zone, pre-negotiated by Spain in anticipation of the event. Spain, already in disarray because of Dictator Francisco Franco’s impending death, ceded the territory less than two weeks later. The Madrid Agreement laid out a three party transitional authority (Morocco, Mauritania, and Spain) to govern the Sahara until Spain could withdraw in February 1976. Spain also received fishing rights and a stake in phosphate production.

The Polisario guerilla campaign quickly proved too much for Mauritania, which capitulated in 1978. Morocco took over and embarked on a long and expensive desert war to stamp out Polisario. By 1991, Morocco had deployed 250,000 troops to subdue the region, dropped napalm and phosphorus to batter settlements, and built walls to section off its territory. With the dividers, 80% of the territory was under Moroccan control, which included the region’s lucrative phosphate and fishing reserves.

Searching for a Solution

As the conflict wore on, a renewed diplomatic thaw between Morocco and Algeria in 1988 created some hope for a political answer. A 1991 UN-brokered cease-fire was the first step towards a

“By 1991, Morocco had deployed 250,000 troops to subdue the region, dropped napalm and phosphorus to batter settlements, and built walls to section off its territory.”

The Conflict Begins

With Spanish withdrawal, Polisario created an international political presence to further its goals. It announced its own state, the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), to rule Western Sahara, which was eventually recognized by the African Union in 1984. As Morocco and Mauritania military forces consolidated their territories, Saharawi refugees flooded into Algeria- there were some 50,000 in there by the end of 1976, according diplomat Erik Jensen. That is nearly half of the Western Sahara’s original inhabitants, and many still live in these camps today. The same year, Morocco severed diplomatic ties with Algeria, which was now linked in the conflict as a fervent supporter of Polisario.

referendum based solution, but UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar could not achieve a consensus between Polisario and Morocco. MINURSO, or the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, began in April 1991 with a mandate to hold a vote, set for January 1992, but disagreements over who should vote hampered the effort from the beginning. Polisario believed that the voter list should be tied to Spain’s 1974 territorial census, which counted mostly Saharawis who would overwhelmingly support independence. Morocco, alarmed by this possibility, wanted to add nearly 100,000 Moroccan squatters to the list to push the vote towards inclusion. UN

efforts to mediate the list dragged on for years. To galvanize the mission, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed James Baker, former US Secretary of State, as his personal envoy to the Western Sahara. Baker’s efforts led to the 1997 Houston Agreement, which created a list of 86,000 eligible voters. Morocco, again unhappy with the list, bogged down the process in appeals. Scrapping the Houston Accords, Baker proposed the Baker Plan, which would create a partially independent Western Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty. The plan was rejected by both sides and led to the second Baker plan, proposed in 2003, reviving the idea of a referendum to decide if the territory would be free, autonomous or integrated with Morocco. Algeria and Polisario accepted the plan but Morocco rejected it, noting that any plan with independence was unacceptable. Baker resigned shortly afterwards, and all UN referendum efforts ended there.

Stalemate

The loss of Baker was a setback for the Polisario, as was a lucrative 2006 fishing deal between the European Union and Morocco which included Western Sahara waters. It was a sign that the international community was having fewer reservations over Moroccan rule in the Western Sahara. Morocco submitted its own autonomy plan in 2007, and while the US deemed it “serious and credible,” it did not offer any real freedom to the Saharawi people. Previous examples of autonomous states do not provide a warm precedent- Serbia revoked Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, triggering a NATO military campaign. In 2008, Peter van Walsum, the new envoy to the Western Sahara, declared that “an independent Western Sahara is not a realistic proposition.” The United Nations failure to broker peace stems from conflicting interests and hardened positions by each side. On the Security Council, The United States and France have a vested stake in appeasing Morocco- a regional and stable ally in Arab North Africa, known as the Magrehb, and a country with good Israeli relations. For the West,

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MINURSO Team on Patrol in Western Sahara. UN Photo by Martine Perret.

a new independent state would not be viewed as a Polisario victory, but rather as a source of instability and a haven for terrorists. In 2010, violent demonstrations occurred near refugee camps in Laayoune, the capital, while some reports indicate that Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) may be recruiting in Algerian camps. Washington remains silent after most of its efforts failed, but it recognizes the importance of Morocco as a strategic ally. The U.S. is unlikely to endanger that relationship by supporting independence. As a result, a zero-sum game has entrenched both sides. Morocco will only accept autonomy or integration, while Polisario will only take independence and a referendum. Morocco stands to lose millions in economic development if the territory goes up to a vote, including the $42 million fishing port it opened in Dakhla. The abundant natural fishing and phosphate resources provide much needed revenue to the Kingdom, while the chance of finding oil could be a boon for the energy-poor Morocco (it imports 95% of its petroleum). But many Moroccans are also tied to the Western Sahara after decades of state media campaigns ingraining it in the national consciousness. It is now a matter of national identity, even if the territory never truly was “Moroccan.” Polisario has a vested territorial and

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ancestral stake in the conflict, and anything less than independence would be a loss and setback for decolonization efforts worldwide. It is, after all, legally entitled to a vote by the ICJ and the UN. The Saharawi people, many of whom have grown up in Algerian refugee camps, still lack a permanent home. Algeria would also lose some authority as a regional power if the territory is secured by Morocco. However, there is much to gain by a compromise. Regional Maghreb security is already threatened as AQIM grows in influence, especially in Mali. A unified Maghreb can bring stability and form regional partnerships for economic development. In total, the conflict has cost 2 GDP points every year for the Maghreb, according to the French daily Le Monde. The New York Times reported Morocco spends $1 million a day on the conflict, money that could be spent to help alleviate its growing income gap. Morocco’s border with Algeria is still closed, shutting the door on possible trade with Algeria’s goods-poor market. The African Maghreb Union (AMU), which could allow for thriving regional trade, is crippled by disagreements over the Western Sahara. While the Polisario should remain wary of any solution with Morocco, it may have to reluctantly agree on autonomy. It can reasonably accept a

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well-crafted autonomy proposal that respects its cultural differences, and one that is thoroughly decentralized to allow Saharawi control. Autonomy would allow for refugees to return home, and the territory might finally be resettled by Saharawis. It seems unrealistic that independence is still a viable option, especially as the Western Sahara continues to be developed. There is some hope that positions are softening: Morocco, which amended its Constitution in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, has redistributed some authority from the King to the Parliament, which might be more responsive to deals. A growing sense of economic urgency and political discourse can bring both parties back to the table for a comprehensive settlement. But until this can be accomplished, Africa’s last colony will continue to atrophy as a territory in limbo.  Ishan Thakore is a Trinity junior.

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The Modern Libertarian

Is Government the Dark Knight? By Pi Praveen

hen Senator Russ Feingold (D – Wisconsin) voted against the Patriot Act in 2001, he was the only senator to do so. Ninety-eight senators voted ‘Yea’ and one abstained as national outrage against the perpetrators of September 11th grew stronger and stronger. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence had both been unable to pre-emptively intercept Al-Qaeda’s plans. Incensed, they wanted the tools necessary to apprehend the perpetrators. Feingold stood firmly against public opinion—which, like the Bush administration, called for swift, decisive retribution. Before the U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft brought forth the Patriot Act, the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act limited the scope of surveillance to the suspects themselves. With the Act, and the expansion of the surveillance mandate to persons at all linked to a suspect, unwitting and innocent Americans were brought into the sphere of the government’s drive towards a new and improved national security. President Bush lauded the Patriot Act’s expanded powers as “new tools to fight the present danger.”

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Protester at Occupy Wall Street. Photo by Timothy Krause.

The public, still shell-shocked by the September 11th attacks, agreed with him in 2001. But, as the years passed, support has diminished with astonishing rapidity. To current voters, the danger seems less present, and the expanded powers have begun to look less like tools—and more like weapons.

n a lot of ways, the Nolan brothers’ “The Dark Knight” parallels the dynamic between the Federal government and the American public over the years. There is powerful scene in which Mr. Fox and Bruce Wayne part ways after a long partnership. Mr. Fox has thus far been more than willing to dissemble and collaborate as he builds lethal capabilities for Wayne’s alter ego, Batman. He cannot, however, stomach Batman’s newest, secret capability: a sonar-enabled contraption that uses cell-phone signals to create a virtual map of Gotham, while simultaneously monitoring each and every call made around the city. Lucius

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Fox calls it “beautiful…unethical…dangerous.” He says it is “too much power for one person.” Increasingly, Americans are coming around to Mr. Fox’s view in their opinion of government’s expanded powers. Two separate streams – coming from traditionally opposing political ideologies, as any promising third party faction does – are coming together to assert that the U.S. Government’s efforts to protect its Gotham have gone too far. The first group is led by elite antiestablishment Tea Party figureheads like Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. These senators come to Libertarianism from a principled stance, declaring smaller government the highest ideal. Their message, however, is distinct from the traditional Republican plea for small government in that it also rejects enlargement of military power that Republicans traditionally support. As favorability towards the wars reaches an all-time low, Tea Partiers point to the costs of military expansion: the

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dangers of big government in the sky above should drones be allowed into American airspace, the high budget deficits that are a consequence of expensive foreign entanglements, the loss of freedom that results from increasing surveillance. For Paul and Cruz and the rest of the Tea Party/Libertarian cohort, government is too big, too powerful, too cumbersome. When the face of government is the TSA or the NSA, as it has often been in recent years, the case for such an argument is made easy. A second group, a more motley cross-section of typically left-leaning American youth, has begun to mobilize around a different iteration of Libertarianism. This group came into being as a political force when the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts were introduced on the floor of Congress, and it reached maturity when information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program was leaked. It differs from the Paul/Cruz rhetorical machine in that its revulsion towards

UNITED STATES government overreach stems from the very real, sudden realization of lack of privacy in each citizen’s daily life rather than the consistent consideration of pure libertarianism’s lofty ideals. In this case, the political elite in DC does not drive the public’s concerns; the 4.5 million signatures on Google’s anti-SOPA/anti-PIPA were garnered by capitalizing upon grassroots indignation. This petition and others like it led eighteen Senators to change their position on the acts. This youthful generation comes from a time in which paranoia guided American politics. To us, a universe in which there is near-universal support for an enormously expanded surveillance state is nearly unfeasible. Without the pressing danger, the expanded powers of government are difficult to justify.

n “The Dark Knight,” it is made clear that Gotham has wanted and needed Batman, especially in times of attack, strife, and upheaval—just as the US supported expanded governmental security powers post-9/11. But then, Gotham backtracks, experiencing periods of middling societal introspection when confronted with the threatening magnitude of Batman’s power. Like Batman says, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” This is what has happened to the United States’ policy-machine post9/11. The ideologues on soapboxes tell Gotham and America that they must vilify Batman and the administration’s security strategy in totality. But then, what would happen when the next Joker or Bane arrives on the scene, or we suffer the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11? Lucius Fox was disgusted with Batman’s new invention to monitor calls because it represented something far beyond Batman’s job description, as Gotham’s public understood it. There was no space to add it to Batman’s arsenal, just like libertarians argue that there is no space for SOPA, PIPA, or the NSA’s tactics within the administration’s security apparatus because the public did not sign up for them. Yet with the Joker on the loose, Fox uses

the apparatus. Just this once, he promises. Then, he resigns and destroys the device. But movies end, and reality does not. In the real world, we must ask: what happens the next time lives are lost because Fox didn’t trust the city’s protectors with increased power to protect? Moreover, the U.S. government’s new powers simply cannot be destroyed at the push of a button like Batman’s apparatus can. New security technologies cannot simply be removed from the equation. How can we, instead, optimize their usage? In the midst of their protests, it is evident that neither

“The central question, then, is how to achieve a security apparatus that is powerful enough to protect against threats yet not powerful enough to pose one itself.” Feingold nor Paul is offering up a wellthought out plan for integrating NSA and drone capabilities into the government’s arsenal so much as they are asserting a rhetorical argument around the very ethics behind their existence. Meanwhile, we are largely removed from the dangers that the newfound security powers were developed to protect against—9/11 and the following wars are too far away in time and distance. Ideologically, both factions are united in that they simply don’t take the capacity for real and present danger into account. Practically, though, there’s a security arms race. Because there is an inherent desire to expand power, those countries that do not continue to innovate with

new ways to expand security capabilities will inevitably fall behind. Libertarian rhetoric around security is often accused of being simplistic. In response to SOPA/PIPA indignation, the White House declared: “Rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do. Ask yourself what’s right.”

he American public will always embrace its civil liberties, but every now and then, a tragic event comes that reintroduces a salient, motivating fear of the enemies of the American state. The central question, then, is how to achieve a security apparatus that is powerful enough to protect against threats yet not powerful enough to pose one itself. How can we temper the dynamic between the two? Recent calls for America to stand down, to essentially retreat into isolationism as a criticism of big military and governmental overreach, have been packaged increasingly attractively as a form of protection for those of us back home. But Batman’s exile from Gotham is only attractive so long as Gotham is not in immediate danger and so long as Batman represents a danger in and of himself. We cheer when Batman and his terrifying power disappear as their motivating threat does at the end of the second movie. Similarly, having spent some blessed time apart from salient threats, factions are uniting in a push for the U.S. Government to follow Batman’s lead. And maybe it should. But we should all be wary of forgetting that the series is a trilogy. Danger will come again, and when it does, we may need to call for the Dark Knight’s return.  Pi Praveen is a Trinity sophomore. She is a staff writer for DPR.

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Why the Government Owns Your Genes

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By Tara Bansal

Artwork by Jessica Yu

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In the dawn of genetic testing, get ready to be told what you can and can’t do with your DNA. The race towards better understanding the genome is being slowed down by a world in which researchers cannot patent it, companies cannot analyze it, and you cannot understand it.

“…Today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to…cancer, and then take action.” Last May, Angelina Jolie wrote a highly publicized editorial in the New York Times about her preventative double mastectomy after learning of her high genetic predisposition for breast cancer. After her mother died of ovarian cancer at age 56, Jolie underwent genetic testing that showed she had a mutated BRCA1 gene which, doctors estimated, gave her an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer. These types of genetic testing and preventative surgery have become increasingly more affordable. Genetic testing has not only become more common over the past de-

child’s full genome. Going to a genetic counselor could become as routine as going to the dentist. The market is already concentrated with research companies such as 23andMe and Pathway Genetics, which boast “accurate and affordable” tests for as low as $99 that can determine gene defects from DNA extracted from a saliva sample. These tests can ascertain an incredible amount of information from our DNA: our ancestry, relations to distant family, and most importantly, our likelihood of developing diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Type 2 Diabetes, or certain cancers. This information can help us alter our lifestyles or begin preventative medical measures. Genetics are an integral part of our lives—both literally and figuratively.

“Going to a genetic counselor could become as routine as going to the dentist.”

cade, but some researchers have also predicted a world in which it will be ubiquitous: it could become routine procedure at birth to sequence your

Genetic research has advanced at a dramatic pace since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Fast forward just five

decades and the scientific community saw the completion of the Human Genome Project, an international consortium that cost over three billion dollars. It presented a fully sequenced genome of DNA so that scientists could determine which DNA sequences were responsible for specific human traits, creating an entirely new field of medical diagnostics.

De-patenting Gene Patents

e are now living in an age in which genetic testing is evolving, growing simultaneously more refined and more common—as evidenced by the slew of personal genomic testing kits available. Due to the rapid nature of technological progress, the US government has spent the past year regulating the previously unfettered industry, often removing scientific autonomy to ensure patients’ safety. While geneticists and politicians have the same health goals—providing patients with the best medical diagnosis and treatment— they have come into considerable amounts of conflict. As genetic testing becomes more ordinary, federal intervention is expected to as well. Specifically, this past June the Su-

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UNITED STATES a comprehensive methodology to betpreme Court narrowed the scope of tion in genetic testing of all types. patentable genetic material in the case Even though we as a consumerist so- ter understand how 23andMe is deterAssociation for Molecular Pathology v. mining genetic likelihood of diseases ciety find benefit in our expanded abilMyriad Genetics. Myriad Genetics, a ity to inexpensively conduct these tests, and for what the company is using the federally funded research corporation, it is important that we consider at least genetic information. patented their finding of BRCA1 and One of the main criticisms of firms some autonomy of scientists over their BRCA2 “breast-cancer genes” in 1994 intellectual property. Not only is the like 23andMe is that these companies and 1995 respectively. By sequencing use consumers’ DNA to make discovfederal government limiting the exclua patient’s genome, Myriad could look sivity rights of companies like Myriad eries on genetic links and then to file for mutations in these genes and deterpatents. Another concern is that geGenetics, but it is also enforcing promine an individual’s likelihood of de- cedural transparency within these genetic mutations do not always result in veloping breast and ovarian cancer. netic firms. The US government has a the development of a particular illness. Nonetheless, Myriad enforced their long history of restricting marketing For example, in breast cancer screenexclusivity of BRCA testing, going ings, the existence of BRCA1 mutations claims, and the scientific community is so far as to send cease and desist letonly leads to the development of breast no exception. ters on the basis of patent infringecancer 55 to 65 percent of the time, and ment to researchers, such as those at The FDA’s Biggest Fears BRCA2 mutations only 45 percent of the Genetic Diagnostic Laboratory Come True the time. The FDA fears that patients who discover they have at the University of gene mutations will Pennsylvania, for testautomatically undergo ing samples for BRCA. “The FDA fears that patients who This monopoly allowed preventative surgeries discover they have gene mutations Myriad to charge prethat may not be necesmium fees—hindersary. will automatically undergo ing patients’ ability to Even so, this injuncpreventative surgeries that may be diagnosed or seek tion came as a shock out a second opinion. to the genetics comnot be necessary.” Certainly a question of munity, many of whom claimed that bureauboth the monopoly’s lecracy and politics were gality and morality had restricting the potential to be raised. Thus, the and the promise of geAssociation for Molecunetic testing. While these studies can3andMe is the most promilar Pathology filed a lawsuit to remove not guarantee complete diagnosis, they nent in a new line of startup Myriad’s access to this patent. can often provide valuable information companies that are marketAfter AMP won the case on the Fedto mitigate general medical risks and ing your own genes to you. eral circuit, the Supreme Court agreed have already been successfully used by to hear it as well. In a 9-0 decision, the This Google-backed company has semillions of patients. Some researchquenced the genomes of over half a Supreme Court struck down patents ers claimed that to fully eliminate the on human genes, and thus monopolies million people who voluntarily provide their samples and consent to its being FDA’s voiced threat, the US governon genetic testing. In the affirmative incorporated into a larger database. ment would have to entirely restrict inopinion, Justice Thomas wrote, “…We terpretation of genetic variants. hold that a naturally occurring DNA While this practice is relatively clear However, the FDA’s cease and desist segment is a product of nature and not in presentation and is sound from a letter to 23andMe published on their patent eligible merely because it has legal standpoint, most consumers will website on November 22nd is most fasbeen isolated.” While all objects are not fully understand the implications cinating because it do not truly disparof their consent: that 23andMe has the technically “products of nature” in their age the method of genetic testing itself origin, the court ruled that patentable right to patent and profit from mutaso much as discuss the threat of how tions discovered in their genes. products must specifically be syntheticonsumers might perceive the results. On November 22nd 2013, the FDA cally altered for “utility, novelty, and issued a warning cease and desist letnon-obviousness”. …[Medical] risks are typically This decision has implications for the ter to 23andMe, claiming that the gemitigated by International Normalnetic tests were not medically proven removal of over 3000 non-expired isoized Ratio (INR) management under to be entirely accurate and could result lated DNA patents and countless other a physician’s care. The risk of serious in patients pursuing inadequate or inpatents on genetic sequences of differinjury or death is known to be high appropriate medical procedures. The ent organisms. By removing patents on when patients are either non-complicompany kept private its specific meththe unaltered genome, the Supreme ant or not properly dosed; combined ods for testing. The FDA has asked for Court allowed for increased competi-

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UNITED STATES of testing as well. To make genetic testing truly universal, many geneticists are pushing a platform in which insurance companies should be mandated to provide genetic tests and the subsequent preventative surgeries to those who are at risk. But, determining “at risk” individuals can often be difficult: having one family member with breast cancer is not automatically indicative of increased risk, and doctors might approach the necessity of testing differently. Moreover, some health insurers such as Cigna have claimed that genetic testing will only be covered for those that reap a direct “medical benefit,” in order to eliminate patients testing just for the

tions on personal testing companies, patients must rely on a medical professional to provide them with the more costly versions of these resources. Genetic testing is by no means perfect, but its rapid growth and immense potential are just some of many reasons The FDA seems most concerned with why it is likely to become one of the a patient’s assessment of his or her permost important medical diagnostic desonal health outside the confines of a vices of this decade. Given this, as testmedical office and the consequential ing capabilities expand, the scientific actions. 23andMe responded on Decommunity should expect its autonomy cember 5th saying it would continue in the patenting and sale of their devicproviding consumers with the raw data es to become increasingly restricted by but would no longer market health federal provisions. claims or interpretations of this data. So I pose to you, the reader, some Nonetheless, this may not satisfy the questions: To what lengths should we FDA as consumers themselves will still be willing to go to universalize genetic be allowed to run analtesting? Does it make yses of their testing refinancial sense to invest sults using online tools. in diagnostic tools for “the scientific community should 23andMe repreillnesses such as cancer expect its autonomy in the sents the general trend or research their treatwithin the scientific ments? Would genetic patenting and sale of their devices community towards testing create a world to become increasingly restricted the democratization of in which scientists are genetic information. barred from claiming by federal provisions.” This conflict illustrates ownership over their the contrast between discoveries and anxious political health estabpatients overinvest in lishments such as the preventative medicine American Medical Asor would an expansion sociation, Food and Drug Administrasake of testing. Basically, a patient with of this research create a more successtion, or United States Department of family history of an illness such as Alful medical field? While it may be diffiHealth and Human Services, and the zheimer’s disease who orders a test will cult to perfectly gauge the implications “techno-populist” engineers that are still have to pay out of pocket since no of genetic testing, learning our A’s, C’s, creating new methods of assessing per- known treatment for Alzheimer’s exists T’s, and G’s could be more difficult than sonal health. Once again, the inherent and accordingly the patient would not we may have anticipated.  consumerism of the western economy receive a direct medical benefit. encourages us to expand our availabilCurrently, Medicare only covers testTara Bansal is a Trinity freshman. She ity to inexpensive genetic tests but we ing for patients who have already been is a staff writer for DPR. must consider the federal governments diagnosed with cancer, rending the intentions in restricting our access. preventative nature of genetic testing useless. The Affordable Care Act lists Defining “Sick” BRCA testing as the only preventane of the remaining de- tive care genetic testing and even then bates between the scien- BRCA tests are only available for elitific community and the gible patients—those with much highpolitical sphere is the gov- er-than-average chances of breast or ernment’s role in enforcing insurance ovarian cancer based on a pre-existing companies to cover the sometimes- family history. The scientific communicostly genetic tests. Currently, insurty is putting pressure on policymakers ance providers generally cover tests to further expand mandates on insurdone for genetic disorders in fetuses ance companies to allow more patients, and newborns. For those with family even those with lower risk, to safely dehistory of certain illnesses, insurance termine their genetic susceptibility. Escompanies often subsidize most or all pecially considering the FDA’s restricwith the risk that a direct-to-consumer test result may be used by a patient to self-manage, serious concerns are raised if test results are not adequately understood by patients or if incorrect test results are reported.

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Beyond the Gothic Wonderland Duke, Durham and Inequality in America By Matt Hamilton

Jordan High School. One of its teachers, Brian McDonald, called it “abysmal” to teach in North Carolina. Photo by Matt Hamilton. DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

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he achievement gap is often presented as the fundamental problem in American education. It is a popular narrative and it is undoubtedly compelling. Affluent schools drastically and consistently outperform poor schools. Income inequality – the buzzword of contemporary domestic politics – is reinforced and perpetuated by deep inequalities in education along socioeconomic divides. It is an easy problem to understand. It is a far harder to conceptualize effective solutions – largely because the problem is chicken and egg; a Catch 22. Poverty is a significant impediment to learning. But, education is the turnkey to social mobility and escaping poverty. Income inequality is an impetus for the growing achievement gap in American, and simultaneously the achievement gap reinforces income inequality in America. Do we have to target poverty to lessen the achievement gap? Or, do we need to diminish the achievement gap in order to alleviate poverty? Where do we start? Where do we focus? How do we stop a powerful feedback loop? The juxtaposition between Duke and Durham provides a clear and acute microcosm of the systemic and deepening inequality in American education. It is a starting point to facilitate critical thinking about ways to ameliorate the self-reinforcing problems of educational and economic inequities. In thinking about this article, I spent some time in Durham Schools. If I was going to write about the achievement gap in Durham, it was vitally important to expose myself to the school system I was writing about. Beyond the gothic wonderland, Durham provides a far different vignette of education in America than Duke. Much has recently been made of the policy shift in North Carolina – and rightfully so. Teacher tenure will soon disappear, teacher pay has fallen to 46th in the nation, and average investment per pupil is considerably below the national average. Brian McDonald, social studies teacher at Jordan High School, called it “abysmal to teach in this state.” While

the profession remains fulfilling, he -like many of his colleagues -- is forced to work two part time jobs to support his family. The adversity faced by Jordan’s McDonald, does not only stem from statewide political circumstances. More so, the challenges he faces in the classroom are tremendously profound: even in his Advanced Placement classes at Jordan, which is one of Durham’s flagship institutions, he faces three consistent problems: “attendance, motivation and literacy.” But, if Durham is spending more than average per student, why are the results lagging behind the rest of the state? Why is “literacy” still a fundamental problem, even in an AP class-

“One in every four Durham children lives in poverty.” room at one of Durham’s top schools? There was a theme stressed by McDonald that also emerged in each of my conversations with stakeholders in Durham schools: poverty places an enormous strain on students and emerges as a difficult barrier to overcome. The barrier of poverty is never intractable, but it is always substantial. 61.9% of Durham’s 32,384 public school children are eligible for free or reduced priced lunches. To qualify for free lunches, a student must come from a family that earns less than 130% of the federal poverty level; for reduced priced lunches, the family must earn under 185% of the poverty level. One in every four Durham children lives in poverty. Sixteen percent of Durham’s homeless – a population that has nearly doubled since 2001 – are children. In each of these conversations, a

unique stress was placed on the role of the University in partnering to target the achievement gap. Principal Matthew Hunt of Northern High School said that, “we want to know that Duke is committed to Durham Schools.” And, by every indication Duke is wholeheartedly committed. The East Durham Children’s Initiative is a new organization modeled after Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. It works in a 120-block area in one of East Durham’s poorest neighborhoods. The Initiative is creating a pipeline of services and community partnerships to work intimately with students from birth until college in order to supplement their education. Education does not just happen in the classroom. And, especially amidst poverty, effective education requires immense support services: summer programming, mental health services, parent aid such as home visiting nurses for newly born children, and healthy, nutritional food. EDCI is engaging a community to assure it is wholeheartedly dedicated to student success and aware of its possibility given community-wide commitment. Simultaneously, it is equipping the community with the resources that are vital to achieve such success by working closely with Durham Schools to coordinate its support services. David Reese, the organization’s President and CEO, said that the organization – now in its third year of full implementation – is seeing upward trends. It is “moving the needle” in the community. “Child abuse and neglect rates are already down,” said Reese, and the zone now has the “lowest crime rate in East Durham.” He called poverty the “one and true obstacle,” but students can have success, he said, “if we engage parents and build community.” To this point, Duke has been instrumental in EDCI’s progress: it is providing vitally important levels of human capital as the Initiative takes root, expands and evaluates its impact. It is equally instrumental in many of the initiatives of Durham Public Schools commented Durham Assistant Superintendents Dr. Deborah Polen-Pitman

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The University of Colorado Boulder is piloting a new system to formally integrate socioeconomic status into admissions considerations. Photo by Inga Munsinger Cotton.

and Dr. Terri Mozingo. It is, by all accounts, a vital and beneficent partner. Investing in the community is a vital step, but it isn’t an absolute solution. It is naïve to think the problem of inequality is solely external and not institutional. Providing human capital to the community will help address poverty and the achievement gap, but fostering human capital at the University amongst traditionally more vulnerable populations is necessary for a substantial long-term impact on social mobility – given the vital role of college education in fostering social mobility. Duke University prides itself on its need blind admissions policy. It rightfully takes great satisfaction in admitting students who prove worthy and capable of attending the institution no matter what socioeconomic status they come from. Throughout the past years, the University’s commitment to

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financial aid has grown – now spending $130 million annually on financial aid. And yet, only fifty-seven percent of Duke students qualify for need based financial aid; forty-three percent of Duke’s students are deemed capable of paying nearly $60,000 a year to attend the institution. In spite of a need-blind admissions policy, access to Duke is skewed towards the affluent, in large part because they have access to more resources and better schools growing up. As much as Duke exalts its diversity, students attending the institution are disproportionately wealthy. A recent report by Dr. John Jerrin analyzed the socio-economic statuses of students at “elite” universities. The lowest quartile of income distribution – so called “disadvantaged students” – comprises only five percent of the student body at elite universities, whereas the highest quartile of income distribu-

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tion – so called “advantaged students” – represents sixty percent of the students at elite universities. Jerrin also quantified the benefits of higher education in America for the individual and the state. Beyond the countless intangible benefits of higher education, receiving higher education causes an individual to make an average of $400,000 more in their lifetime and has an extra value of roughly $250,000 for the state. Higher education drastically increases an individual’s wealth, but access to higher education disproportionately belongs to those who are already economically “advantaged.” Duke is no exception to Jerrin’s findings. To an extent, this is an inevitable problem. But, it is also a problem the institution quietly, and passively accept in spite of its festering growth. It is endemic, corrosive and self-reinforcing. We speak in platitudes about how

NORTH CAROLINA education is the escape from poverty – the turnkey for social mobility and conduit for the American dream – but we often ignore how socioeconomic status is the primary determinant of educational opportunities. Duke can, to an extent, provide resources to Durham as a means of taking responsibility for deepening inequality. But, it can also empower students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds with an unparalleled opportunity for social mobility. It can help students overcome deficiencies in educational opportunities they faced, and therefore provide an escape from poverty. So long as Duke remains an institution that – in drastic proportions -- disproportionately accepts and caters to the wealthiest Americans, it tacitly accepts, enshrines and perpetuates deep inequalities, in spite of all it does to fight such inequalities with its resources. The question emerges as to how to facilitate greater diversity without sacrificing Duke’s emphasis of admitting the most driven and talented students. How does the institution balance its social responsibility to actively facilitate social mobility with its continued commitment to attracting students from the highest-achieving academic backgrounds? Recent studies suggest that when measuring socioeconomic diversity is properly integrated into the admissions process, the goals are not mutually exclusive. The choice does not have to be between merit and diversity. Two metrics developed at University of Colorado Boulder – the disadvantage and overachievement indices – provide a means to tangibly quantify how students have preformed relative to their socioeconomic background. Using these nuanced metrics – which consider a student’s family, school and community a school group up in – students are categorized by how their academic achievement measures in relation to their socioeconomic backgrounds. It is a means to explain how students overcome circumstances and barriers beyond their control – and it provides admissions officers with another data point in a holistic admissions process

to understand how a student has preformed in context with their socioeconomic backgrounds. At University of Colorado, these indices have yielded higher rates of socioeconomic diversity, and indirectly, higher rates of racial diversity. To this point, students admitted with the employment of these indices have preformed well in their college setting. Gaertner has found that “On average, class-based admits (kids who wouldn’t be accepted without the disadvantage & overachievement indices) perform slightly worse than typical undergraduates.” But, this is to be expected given their status as borderline candidates for admission. More importantly and surprisingly, though, students identified

“The choice does not have to be between merit and diversity.” specifically through the overachievement index have preformed better than the average student with “higher GPAs, credit hours earned, and graduation rates.” The indices provide institutions with a sense of how students have preformed relative to their circumstances, and as such, they give a more rounded context to predict how students might be able to thrive in an elite academic setting with immense opportunities. More so, Gaertner believes the indices are capable of succeeding in a highly selective academic environment like Duke. Research, he points out, demonstrates that “highly selective schools give little or no admissions preference to socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants.” It is within this context that Duke can emerge as a unique and innovative leader. “Of course, Duke

serves a small proportion of America’s undergraduates and can’t solve the inequality problem on its own. But Duke is also an engine of innovation and upward mobility, and given its prestige Duke is in a position to send a stronger message and set a more visible example than most other schools.” Duke’s race based affirmative action policy is a good starting point to create a diverse campus and help students overcome societal inequalities. But, it alone does not foster social mobility: the average income of minority students, according to a 2010 Chronicle report, remains over twice the average of the mean national income. More so, at no point during the period of 19942008 did the percentage of Duke students who came from families below the US median income exceed 15%. Duke must vigorously seek to expand its applicant pool to more disadvantaged students and it must quantify a student’s performance relative to their background in order to expand the number of competitive applicants from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. If social mobility is the byproduct of higher education, Duke must intensify its commitment to fostering greater socioeconomic diversity. The efforts, to this point, have fallen short. Until elite institutions take more robust strides to counteract the current severe imbalance of socioeconomic diversity, it will propagate serious inequalities, no matter how much it invests its human capital in addressing poverty and the achievement gap. The commitment must be credible both internally and externally – to providing its human capital to disadvantaged communities while also investing in disadvantaged communities by providing more opportunities to integrate their brightest into our institution. This multifaceted approach is a vital step towards solving the feedback loop of economic and educational inequality – and universities are at the center of it.  Matt Hamilton is a Trinity sophomore. He is a staff writer for DPR.

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