Progressive Activists Are Pushing the Democratic Field on Political Reforms

By Osita Nwanevu, The New Yorker

04 April 19

ince the midterms, Democrats have turned much of their attention toward political reforms. H.R. 1—a package of proposals that included public financing for political campaigns, an end to gerrymandering in federal elections, automatic voter registration, and a federal holiday on Election Day—was among the first major bills passed by the new Democratic House majority. Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost Georgia’s gubernatorial election amid reports of widespread voter suppression, was chosen to deliver the response to this year’s State of the Union and used a portion of it to address the issue. And, in recent weeks, the party’s 2020 hopefuls have been queried on several dramatic reforms being floated by progressives, including expanding the Supreme Court and eliminating the Senate filibuster.

Such reforms were the focus of Monday’s “We the People” forum in Washington, organized by progressive groups and unions, including the Center for Popular Democracy, Communications Workers of America, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and the Service Employees International Union (S.E.I.U.). “This event comes as attacks on our democracy are specifically aimed at limiting the participation of working and low-income people, and people of color,” the groups said in a statement. Eight Democratic candidates—Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren—left the campaign trail to offer the energetic crowd of activists and organizers their thoughts on those problems. All have endorsed a slew of the ideas that activists at the event talked up, including granting statehood to Washington, D.C., restoring voting rights to ex-felons, and automatic voter registration.

One of the day’s most broached topics was the Electoral College. Most of the Democratic candidates have expressed support for its abolition. On Tuesday morning, Gillibrand joined fellow-senators Brian Schatz, Dick Durbin, and Dianne Feinstein in introducing a constitutional amendment on the matter—which, like most proposed constitutional amendments, is unlikely to pass.

During a Q. & A. session, a teacher and progressive activist named Kim Baker asked O’Rourke if he would support eliminating it. “I feel like the system is rigged—where everyday voters’ votes don’t count,” she said. “And I feel like two of the last three Presidents ascending to the White House despite losing the popular vote is something that cannot be tolerated in this country anymore.”

The affable O’Rourke—the only male candidate of the day not dressed in a suit and tie—agreed, and told Baker about his difficulties explaining the current system to his children. “Yes, let’s abolish the Electoral College,” he said. “This is one of those bad compromises we made at Day One in this country.” He continued, “And there are many others that we can think of, and they are all connected, including the value of some people based on the color of their skin. There is a legacy and a series of consequences that have persisted and remain with us to this day.”

O’Rourke’s progressive bona fides have been debated aggressively online, but at the forum he was received warmly. Unsurprisingly, though, the room greeted Sanders and Warren with the most enthusiasm. Warren, spry and animated, was cheered on as she attempted to finish her remarks on her anti-corruption package, as Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” played to bring her speech to a close. In her question-and-answer session, Warren explained that her proposed measures—which include a lifetime ban on lobbying for former federal elected officials and judges and a temporary ban on lobbying for former federal employees, among other reforms—would address the influence of money in politics well beyond campaign finance. “We talk about campaign-finance reform, and we should—campaign-finance reform is important,” she said. “But understand: money seeps through this town a lot more than just in campaigns. It’s here all the way. It’s here with the lobbyists. It’s here with the lawyers. There’s not a decision that gets made in this town over on Capitol Hill that there’s not somebody in the room watching out for the wealthy and the well connected.”

Bernie Sanders took the stage in front of a sea of smartphones held aloft and chants of his name. He spent much of his speech celebrating the impact that his advocacy and last campaign have had in moving Democratic-policy discourse to the left. “Four years ago, when I ran for President and some of us were talking about raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, we were told we were crazy,” he said. “It was a radical idea—remember that?” Sanders has been less enthusiastic, however, about some of the more radical ideas that are currently gaining currency in progressive circles, including expanding, or packing, the Supreme Court. “What my worry is is that the next time the Republicans are in power they will do the same thing,” he said. “And so I think that is not the ultimate solution. What I do think may make sense is, if not term limits, then rotating judges to the appeals court as well—letting them get out of the Supreme Court and bringing in new blood.”

Sanders has been similarly ambivalent about eliminating the Senate legislative filibuster to facilitate the passage of progressive legislation. In an interview with CBS in February, Sanders dismissed the idea. He more recently told the Washington Post that he supports “filibuster reform and making it much harder for any one senator to bring the Senate to a halt” but said that “major legislation can be passed by majority vote through the budget-reconciliation process.” (This is partly true. The budget-reconciliation process can be used to pass spending- and revenue-focussed measures that do not expand the federal-budget deficit beyond a ten-year window. Certain critical components of ambitious proposals, like Sanders’s vision of Medicare for All, would likely fail to meet those requirements.)

Sanders’s wariness about the filibuster was shared by Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker. “I need to see progress in my lifetime,” an activist named Rachel Maiore told Booker. “The future of my children, the future of everybody’s children, absolutely depends on it. But we know that these life-or-death policies will face a sixty-vote threshold in the Senate—a reality that allows for relentless Republican obstruction.”

Booker solemnly reassured and redirected her. “I feel that same sense of urgency,” he said. “But let me tell you what I worry about.” If not for the filibuster, he said, the Republican Senate and House majorities would have succeeded in their efforts last year to defund Obamacare. He went on,“They could have defunded Planned Parenthood. They could have taken away a woman’s right to choose. You’ve seen Donald Trump’s budget—they could have taken away Medicare, cut it by billions of dollars.”

In fact, the filibuster was not the obstacle to the Republican Obamacare-repeal effort. It failed because McConnell couldn’t secure fifty-one Republican votes to pass a repeal bill gutting Obamacare’s budgetary provisions under the reconciliation process. Similarly, the filibuster did not prevent Republicans from enacting drastic cuts to Medicare, which also would have been possible under reconciliation. Republicans simply lacked political will to do so—Medicare cuts are politically radioactive, and the idea of endangering the program was, in fact, central to Republican rhetoric attacking Obamacare. The passage of new abortion restrictions at the federal level—which would require overcoming the filibuster—would be similarly dangerous for the party and could face constitutional challenges besides. Booker’s argument also neglected the possibility that Republicans might eliminate the filibuster themselves, as President Trump has urged repeatedly over the course of his term, the next time they hold full control of government. On Wednesday, Mitch McConnell changed Senate rules to allow the Republican majority to expedite the confirmation of lower-level nominees, a move that eliminated the sixty-vote threshold initially needed to approve the accelerated timeline and signalling that the filibuster—eliminated for non-Supreme Court nominees by Democrats in 2013 and eliminated for Supreme Court nominees by Republicans in 2017—may already be on its last legs.

Rather than justify his claim, Booker suggested that Democrats could organize and campaign their way to a sixty-seat majority—“Texas is a blue state already,” he said to cheers—and boisterously challenged activists to rise to the examples set by past social movements. “This is America!” he shouted. “We know our history! This is a time to stand up! To speak up! To rise up! Because, when we stand as Americans—when we join together, and fight together, and work together—no filibuster can stop us! We ushered in civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and, in this era, if we organize again, we are going to bring a progressive agenda to this country and move it forward for everyone, no matter who’s in the Senate!”

Those movements, as Booker knows, were sustained by decades of dogged activism and were met with innumerable defeats and disappointments before they ultimately succeeded. They also tell Democratic voters nothing whatsoever about how a Cory Booker Administration would pass Medicare for All or a Green New Deal, in the exceedingly likely event the Democrats hold fewer than sixty Senate seats.

To the extent that Democrats have engaged with the appetite for political reforms, they have done so by endorsing ideas that the next Democratic President will probably be unable to see through, like the elimination of the Electoral College, or ideas that, while achievable and well grounded, like automatic voter registration or campaign-finance reform, do not resolve the main challenges to Democratic policymaking. The primary obstacle to the next Democratic President’s agenda will be the anti-majoritarian institutions and norms that shape federal policymaking. These could conceivably be altered by a Democratic President and Congress, but in ways, such as eliminating the filibuster and expanding the Supreme Court, that the Democratic Presidential candidates have mostly refused to explicitly endorse. Progressive activists have yet to truly penalize the 2020 contenders for their reticence. But, as the promises made by the candidates grow bolder by the week, we can expect more questions, like the toughest ones posed Monday, about how, exactly, they intend to keep them.

Chernobyl's Disastrous Cover-Up Is a Warning for the Next Nuclear Age

By Kate Brown, Guardian UK

04 April 19

Before expanding nuclear power to combat climate change, we need answers to the global health effects of radioactivity

n 1986, the Soviet minister of hydrometeorology, Yuri Izrael, had a regrettable decision to make. It was his job to track radioactivity blowing from the smoking Chernobyl reactor in the hours after the 26 April explosion and deal with it. Forty-eight hours after the accident, an assistant handed him a roughly drawn map. On it, an arrow shot north-east from the nuclear power plant, and broadened to become a river of air 10 miles wide that was surging across Belarus toward Russia. If the slow-moving mass of radioactive clouds reached Moscow, where a spring storm front was piling up, millions could be harmed. Izrael’s decision was easy. Make it rain.

So that day, in a Moscow airport, technicians loaded artillery shells with silver iodide. Soviet air force pilots climbed into the cockpits of TU-16 bombers and made the easy one-hour flight to Chernobyl, where the reactor burned. The pilots circled, following the weather. They flew 30, 70, 100, 200km – chasing the inky black billows of radioactive waste. When they caught up with a cloud, they shot jets of silver iodide into it to emancipate the rain.

In the sleepy towns of southern Belarus, villagers looked up to see planes with strange yellow and grey contrails snaking across the sky. Next day, 27 April, powerful winds kicked up, cumulus clouds billowed on the horizon, and rain poured down in a deluge. The raindrops scavenged radioactive dust floating 200 metres in the air and sent it to the ground. The pilots trailed the slow-moving gaseous bulk of nuclear waste north-east beyond Gomel, into Mogilev province. Wherever pilots shot silver iodide, rain fell, along with a toxic brew of a dozen radioactive elements.

If Operation Cyclone had not been top secret, the headline would have been spectacular: “Scientists using advanced technology save Russian cities from technological disaster!” Yet, as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. No one told the Belarusians that the southern half of the republic had been sacrificed to protect Russian cities. In the path of the artificially induced rain lived several hundred thousand Belarusians ignorant of the contaminants around them.

The public is often led to believe that the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a depopulated 20-mile circle around the blown plant, safely contains Chernobyl radioactivity. Tourists and journalists exploring the zone rarely realise there is a second Chernobyl zone in southern Belarus. In it, people lived for 15 years in levels of contamination as high as areas within the official zone until the area was finally abandoned, in 1999.

In believing that the Chernobyl zone safely contained the accident, we fall for the proximity trap, which holds that the closer a person is to a nuclear explosion, the more radioactivity they are exposed to. But radioactive gases follow weather patterns, moving around the globe to leave shadows of contamination in shapes that resemble tongues, kidneys, or the sharp tips of arrows.

England, for example, enjoyed clear weather for several days after the Chernobyl accident, but rain started on 2 May, 1986 and fell heavily on the Cumbrian fells – 20mm in 24 hours. On the uneven, upland terrain, radioactive fallout pooled in rivulets and puddles. The needles on radiation detectors at the Sellafield (formerly Windscale) nuclear processing plant went upwards alarmingly, 200 times higher than natural background radiation. From 5 becquerels a square metre, radiation levels in topsoil spiked to 4,000 bq/m². Kenneth Baker, the then environment secretary, issued assurances that the radioactive isotopes would soon be washed away by rain.

Two months later, however, levels rose yet higher to 10,000 bq/m² in Cumbria and 20,000 bq/m² in south-western Scotland, 4,000 times higher than normal. Scientists tested sheep and found their levels of caesium-137 were 1,000 becquerels per kilogram – too high for consumption. In the midst of general anxiety, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fish and Food (MAFF) issued temporary restrictions on the sale of meat for 7,000 farms.

The early predictions of caesium being washed from upland soils proved optimistic. The mineral-starved native plants efficiently drank up radioactive isotopes. Tiny micro-fungi moved caesium-137 from the roots to plant tips, where grazing sheep fed.

Researchers added months, then years, to their predictions of how long the radioactive caesium would linger in the environment. Eventually, restrictions remained in place for 334 farmers of north Wales for 26 years.

As researchers monitored Chernobyl radioactivity, they made a troubling discovery. Only half of the caesium-137 they detected came from Chernobyl. The rest had already been in the Cumbrian soils; deposited there during the years of nuclear testing and after the 1957 fire at the Windscale plutonium plant. The same winds and rains that brought down Chernobyl fallout had been at work quietly distributing radioactive contaminants across northern England and Scotland for decades. Fallout from bomb tests carried out during the cold war scattered a volume of radioactive gases that dwarfed Chernobyl.

The Chernobyl explosions issued 45m curies of radioactive iodine into the atmosphere. Emissions from Soviet and US bomb tests amounted to 20bn curies of radioactive iodine, 500 times more. Radioactive iodine, a short lived, powerful isotope can cause thyroid disease, thyroid cancer, hormonal imbalances, problems with the GI track and autoimmune disorders.

As engineers detonated over 2,000 nuclear bombs into the atmosphere, scientists lost track of where radioactive isotopes fell and where they came from, but they caught glimpses of how readily radioactivity travelled the globe. In the 1950s, British officials detected harmful levels of radioactive caesium in imported Minnesota wheat. The wheat became radioactive from US bomb tests in Nevada, 2,500km from the Minnesota wheatfields. But over the years, scientists failed to come to an agreement on what the global distribution of radioactivity in the food chain did to human health. When the Chernobyl accident occurred, experts in radiation medicine called for a long-term epidemiological study on Chernobyl-exposed people. That study never occurred. After Fukushima, Japanese scientists said what Soviet scientists asserted after Chernobyl – we need 20 years to see what the health effects from the accident will be.

Fortunately, Chernobyl health records are now available to the public. They show that people living in the radioactive traces fell ill from cancers, respiratory illness, anaemia, auto-immune disorders, birth defects, and fertility problems two to three times more frequently in the years after the accident than before. In a highly contaminated Belarusian town of Veprin, just six of 70 children in 1990 were characterised as “healthy”. The rest had one chronic disease or another. On average, the Veprin children had in their bodies 8,498 bq/kg of radioactive caesium (20 bq/kg is considered safe).

For decades, researchers have puzzled over strange clusters of thyroid cancer, leukaemia and birth defects among people living in Cumbria, which, like southern Belarus, is an overlooked hotspot of radioactivity from cold war decades of nuclear bomb production and nuclear power accidents.

Currently, policymakers are advocating a massive expansion of nuclear power as a way to combat climate change. Before we enter a new nuclear age, the declassified Chernobyl health records raise questions that have been left unanswered about the impact of chronic low doses of radioactivity on human health. What we do know is that as fallout from bomb tests drifted down mostly in the northern hemisphere, thyroid cancer rates grew exponentially. In Europe and North America, childhood leukaemia, which used to be a medical rarity, increased in incidence year by year after 1950. Australia, hit by the fallout from British and French tests, has one of the highest incidence rates of childhood cancer worldwide. An analysis of almost 43,000 men in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, showed that sperm counts dropped 52% between 1973 and 2011.?

These statistics show a correlation between radioactive contaminants and health problems that are similar to those that materialised in Chernobyl-contaminated territories. A correlation does not prove a causal link. These statistics do, however, invite a lot of questions; questions that scientists and stakeholders should tackle before we enter a second nuclear age.