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I've Seen the Antarctic's Untouched Beauty. There's Still Time to Protect It |
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Tuesday, 16 October 2018 08:18 |
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Bardem writes: "This area still remains one of the least-touched regions on the planet. Right now, we have an opportunity to protect it."
Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise in Charlotte Bay, Antarctic peninsula. (photo: Christian Åslund/Greenpeace)
I've Seen the Antarctic's Untouched Beauty. There's Still Time to Protect It
By Javier Bardem, Guardian UK
16 October 18
The ocean is threatened by climate change, pollution and fishing. I urge world leaders to agree to establish a sanctuary
 thought it would be cold. Not just cold, but colder than anything I had experienced in my life. I had visions of bedraggled explorers in blizzards with ice-covered beards.
But standing there, in the bright Antarctic sun, watching creaking blue icebergs, penguins bursting in and out of the water, I felt utterly content in this glistening wilderness.
What I hadn’t thought about was the dark. And not the dark of night – although as a European, that brought a dazzling new astronomy of the southern hemisphere to me – but the dark of the deep, icy, ocean depths. I was going almost half a kilometre down to the Antarctic seafloor.
It was back in January of this year, and I had joined a Greenpeace research expedition as part of a campaign to create a vast Antarctic ocean sanctuary. At 1.8m square kilometres, it would be five times the size of Germany. If it’s created, which it could be when governments meet in the next few weeks, it would be the largest protected area anywhere on Earth. I am one of two million people who want it to happen.
Scientists on the ship were using tiny submersibles to go where humans had never been before to explore ecosystems we know so little about: deep habitats they had been looking at on screens all their working lives but had never seen with their own eyes. The excitement was more arresting than the cold of the Antarctic summer.
So there I was, descending, in a small, two-person submarine to the frontiers of human knowledge. The light faded, and the sea around us turned a heavy blue. As we sank to hundreds of metres below the surface, I was surrounded by a thick blackness. It was a colour that I had no idea the ocean could turn. Pitch black.
A torch at the front of the submarine shone like a night-light for a child afraid of the dark. It showed the way to the seabed.
The sight as it came into view was staggering. Out of the dark and freezing depths emerged a moving, crawling, vibrant mass of life.
The temperature is so low that vegetation barely survives down here. Nearly everything is an animal: bizarre and ghostly icefish that are semi-transparent; sea spiders that look like something out of a science-fiction film; colourful, tendrilled, feather stars, basket stars, corals, sponges.
I’m told that more people have been to the moon than have been to the bottom of the Antarctic ocean. Maybe that’s apocryphal, but it certainly feels like it. We know precious little about this alien environment, which is why it is so crucial to protect it before it is too late.
Emerging back into the light at the surface, the bubbles of the submarine hull clearing, it was like waking from a dream, the intangible creatures of the abyss left far behind.
I had truly seen the light and the dark of the Antarctic. At its surface, penguin colonies stretch for miles on snow-capped islands, with millions of breeding pairs across the region, raising their chicks in this inhospitable environment. Enormous whales surface all around, feeding on huge pink clouds of the small shrimp-like krill, which nearly all wildlife here relies on. Fur seals and elephant seals lounge on drifting blocks of ice. While below, another world goes on existing in dark vitality.
So often, we lament the destruction of the environment once it has taken place. And it is true that wildlife in the Antarctic is facing threats from climate change, pollution and industrial fishing. But this area still remains one of the least-touched regions on the planet.
Right now, we have an opportunity to protect this place. The governments responsible for conservation of the Antarctic’s waters meet in Hobart, Australia, in the second half of October. What better conservation of the Antarctic ocean could there be than the creation of the largest protected area on Earth at its heart, in the Weddell sea. It would put the area off-limits to future human activity, protect wildlife such as penguins, seals and whales, and help to tackle climate change.
I am proud to stand as one person in a movement of more than two million that has come together this year to demand world leaders protect the Antarctic.
Most of these people will never visit the Antarctic, but their passion for protecting it inspires me. Across the world, people have written to their politicians; they have encouraged their friends and family to take action; they have dressed up as penguins and danced on ice to raise awareness from the streets of Buenos Aires to Beijing; they have installed penguin sculptures from Johannesburg to Seoul. This is a global movement for a region that belongs to us all.
Now, as governments prepare to meet at the Antarctic ocean commission there are millions of eyes watching them and urging them to act. To secure the Antarctic for future generations. To allow its abundance of wildlife to flourish and its migratory species to thrive between the world’s oceans. To help create healthy oceans that contribute to global food security. To preserve the Antarctic ocean’s functions as one of the world’s largest carbon stores. Because, truly, what happens in the Antarctic affects us all.
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Three Colliding Problems Leading to a New Economic Disaster |
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Monday, 15 October 2018 13:48 |
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Taibbi writes: "The soaring stock market has been the crux of Donald Trump's argument for the competence of his reign. It might be his favorite tweet subject, outside the 'Failing New York Times.' But since the market hit an all-time high on October 3rd, Trump has shifted his tweets to other subjects. This makes sense, given that it took a nasty dive."
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, 12 October 2018. (photo: Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/REX Shutterstock)
Three Colliding Problems Leading to a New Economic Disaster
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
15 October 18
Last week’s stock sell-off was merely the beginning of what’s to come
 he soaring stock market has been the crux of Donald Trump’s argument for the competence of his reign. It might be his favorite tweet subject, outside the “Failing New York Times.”
Trump on August 18th: “Longest bull run in the history of the stock market, congratulations America!” August 24th: “Our economy is setting records on every front.” September 11th: “Where are the Democrats coming from? The best economy in the history of the country would totally collapse if they ever took control!”
But since the market hit an all-time high on October 3rd, Trump has shifted his tweets to other subjects. This makes sense, given that it took a nasty dive. The worst was a two-day sell-off in the middle of last week, during which the Dow Jones Industrial average dropped 1,377 points.
On Friday, the Dow opened with a big round of buying, then plunged again, then wobbled all day before finally ending 287 points up. This allowed the financial world to spend the weekend relief-boozing instead of planning for The End.
Maybe the stock market isn’t about to crash in the next 10 minutes. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be scared to our marrow over the future.
The sell-off last week was likely just a mild preview of what will happen once the blunt contradictions of Trump’s major economic moves — crazy even by his standards — set in.
“We’re fucked,” a market analyst friend of mine put it this weekend. “It’s all baked in the cake already.”
You don’t have to be a financial expert to see the irreconcilability of these three problems:
1. Fed tightening
Under Trump, the Federal Reserve is trying to end a decade-long party. Massive programs of money-printing and low-to-zero-interest rate lending were implemented to keep markets moving after the 2008 disaster. Terms like “unlimited liquidity” began to catch on to describe the level of central bank support the financial world could expect in the post-crash universe.
Programs like Quantitative Easing in the U.S. (and analogs in Europe and Japan) had central banks pumping an extra $12 trillion or more into the economy over the past decade. The cash was supposed to trickle down to the rest of us in the form of real-world investment. But the vast sums of free money pumped into the economy produced dependably unimpressive economic growth overall (prompting headlines like, “$12 trillion… for this?”).
Who benefited instead? You may be surprised to learn it was the financial sector!
QE and “ZIRP” (Zero Interest Rate Policy) allowed big companies to borrow recklessly and gorge themselves on buybacks of their own stock, which had the twin consequences of driving down bond prices and sending the stock market soaring.
The central banks of the world are finally trying to end the madness. The Fed is taking about $50 billion out of the economy every month, and now raising rates not just above zero, but close to (and perhaps even beyond!) neutral. The free-money era is over. Once the European and Japanese central banks follow suit, the net effect worldwide will go from “easing” to “quantitative tightening” in 2019.
Trump must be cursing his bad luck. After 10 years of Fed policy that turbocharged bank-sector profits and defined “austerity” as a thing for poor people, he’s now got a terminally cheery Fed chief in Jerome Powell who keeps insisting the economy is finally healthy enough to start re-introducing the concept of pain to Wall Street.
“A wide range of data supports a positive view,” Powell said earlier this month following a rate hike.
After last week’s sell-off, Wall Street analysts whined and pointed the finger at Powell, implying that he was causing this mess by cutting off the magic money-tap too early.
“The current dip in confidence can be allayed were the Federal Reserve to signal it is easing off its quantitative tightening and rates rises,” Jasper Lawler, research head at London Capital Group, wrote during the plunge last Thursday.
Trump agrees. He’s ripping the Fed for raising interest rates, as in, why do we have to come back to Earth now?
“I don’t want to slow it down even a little bit, especially when we don’t have the problem of inflation,” Trump said last week.
If the Fed turns off the rocket boosters entirely, he’s in trouble because…
2. Trump’s tax cuts depend on monster growth
When Republicans rammed through the administration’s tax-cut package, more than a few analysts warned that the cuts were based on too-rosy projections of economic growth.
Groups like the Tax Policy Center warned, “Trump’s tax cuts would drive new activity at first, but… the impact would be blunted in later years by rising deficits, forcing more federal borrowing.”
A year later, the Trump administration has indeed had to sharply increase the scale of federal borrowing in order to cover the shortfall in expected tax revenue.
Few noticed when the Trump Treasury borrowed $488 billion in the first quarter of this year, beating the record of $483 billion set in the first quarter of 2010, when the economy was still recovering from a crash. There was talk that the Treasury would roughly quadruple the number of T-bills issued in 2018 versus 2017.
If you’re wondering where all those deficit hawks in the Trump White House (like Mick “bring on the default” Mulvaney) and in the Republican Party (like Paul “It would take me too long to go through all of the math” Ryan) were when the national debt shot past $21 trillion for the first time last year, that’s a good question.
This is part of the reason Trump wants Fed rates lower. He doesn’t want to have to pay interest on the giant sums he will inevitably have to borrow to pay for his idiotic tax cuts.
“I think the Fed has gone crazy,” he seethed, adding that “they seem to like raising interest rates, [when] we can do other things with the money.”
Rising interest rates also hurt Trump’s own bottom line. The prez supposedly owes $300 million to Deutsche Bank, and interest payments there go up or down in accordance with Fed policy.
“I’m paying interest at a high rate because of our Fed,” he admitted.
It should be noted that even presidents whose personal fortunes are not massively affected by Fed policy have traditionally stayed mum about central bank moves. Trump’s comments broke two decades of presidential silence about Fed policy.
So we have a Fed-tightening colliding with a ballooning public-borrowing need. Awesome! To this we add a third factor:
3. Trump’s tariffs
Here’s how dumb Donald Trump is. First, he announces a massive unnecessary tax cut that can only be paid for by unsustainably high growth. Almost immediately, he has to increase national borrowing to pay for it.
The traditional Treasury note supply goes up right away, but even that’s not enough to pay the nut. In fact, this week — October 16th, to be exact — the government is going to debut a brand-new two-month Treasury bill, through which it hopes to raise $30-$35 billion immediately.
So we’re going to have to sell more and more Treasury notes. On whom do we depend most of all to buy those notes?
That’s right: China, which holds about $1.2 trillion in Treasury notes and about $1.5 trillion in U.S. debt overall.
In any trade war with China, the United States would seem to have an advantage. We import a lot more of their goods (last year, about $524 billion in Chinese products) than they import of ours (about $188 billion of U.S. exports). But all of this is moot if China suddenly stops buying U.S. debt, or even just slows down a bit.
Experts claim to think this is unlikely, given China’s own dependence on U.S. Treasuries as a safe destination for its trillions in foreign exchange reserves.
Bloomberg over the summer wrote, “Treasuries are nearly as crucial an underpinning to China’s economic plumbing as America’s.” They quoted a Goldman Sachs analyst who added: “We don’t see any evidence that China is planning to use Treasuries as part of its trade negotiations.”
But what if Trump’s big populist gambit announced in September — slapping 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese products — hurts the Chinese economy to the point where they can’t afford to keep subsidizing our exploding debt? What if it just dulls their enthusiasm for doing so?
Under Quantitative Easing, we were inventing huge sums of cash to lend to ourselves, with the Fed buying as much as $45 billion in Treasuries every month. This time last year, the Fed had $2.5 trillion in Treasuries on its balance sheet.
Now that source of funding is drying up, and we’re in a trade war with our other major borrower, and Trump thought this was the time to bet our national economic health on a tax giveaway.
Who comes up with these ideas?
As we’ve seen in recent decades, even smart people are fully capable of driving the American economy off a cliff. What happens when the dumbest administration in history gets a turn at the wheel? Maybe last week wasn’t the time to start panicking. But that moment can’t be far.
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Minority Rule Does Not Have to Be Here Forever: Arguing That the Framers Intended It Is Specious and Ignorant of History |
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Monday, 15 October 2018 13:45 |
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Bouie writes: "Calls to transform the Senate, or create new states, or even 'pack the court' aren't attacks on norms; they are Americans doing the hard work of crafting a democracy that works for them, of taking seriously the idea that the Constitution exists for us, not us for the Constitution."
Framers of the U.S. Constitution. (image: Slate/Howard Chandler Christy)
Minority Rule Does Not Have to Be Here Forever: Arguing That the Framers Intended It Is Specious and Ignorant of History
By Jamelle Bouie, Slate
15 October 18
Arguing that the Framers intended it is specious and ignorant of history.
 central architect of the Constitution, James Madison was deeply sensitive to the threat majorities posed to minorities. On important social questions, “[N]o other rule exists … but the will of the majority,” he wrote in 1785 while a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, “but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.” Our governing document shows this sensitivity in its structure, which diffuses powers across multiple institutions, creates opportunities for representation at each level of government, and attempts to stymie passionate majorities in favor of deliberative ones. But Madison wasn’t a minoritarian; he believed majorities, properly structured around consensus, had the right to govern.
That belief should inform our understanding of the present, where the Republican Party holds all three branches in Washington despite less-than-majority support among the public at large.
This was dramatized by the recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh was nominated by a minority president who lost the national popular vote by 3 million ballots. Unpopular from the start, Kavanaugh’s standing collapsed in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s credible allegation of sexual assault. He was confirmed by a narrow majority of the Senate representing just 44 percent of all Americans, and more Americans opposed his confirmation than supported it. Now aligned with four other conservative justices—including one nominated by his patron and two others by a president who also entered the White House with minority support—Kavanaugh will likely back jurisprudence that enables voter suppression and extreme partisan gerrymandering, allowing the Republican Party to strengthen its anti-majoritarian hold on power.
With Kavanaugh’s confirmation, an electoral minority is now essentially dictating the terms of constitutional interpretation, thanks to two institutions: the Electoral College—which favors the geographical distribution of supporters, not the total number—and the Senate, which creates huge disparities of representation. (A majority of Americans are represented by just 18 senators.) While there’s no clear relationship between partisanship and state size—some small states are heavily Democratic, some large ones are heavily Republican—the present configuration of state partisanship makes the GOP Senate majority a minority of the overall population.
Even the House of Representatives no longer conforms fully to principles of majority representation—because of gerrymandering, come November, Democrats will have to win the House by at least 7 points to claim a majority of seats. At least one report says Democrats need to win by double digits to gain a majority. By contrast, Republicans could win just 45 to 46 percent of the overall House vote and still hold on to the lower chamber.
“Minority rule” on this scale is unprecedented in recent American history, and many liberals are either concerned or angry. “I am very far from being a majoritarian or populist democrat,” wrote political theorist Jacob Levy on Twitter, “But it’s a problem for democratic government if the majority can’t gain entry anywhere.” The conservative response to this liberal discontent is to scoff. Dismissing arguments for a rethinking of the structure of American democracy, National Review provides the traditional explanation for the Senate and Electoral College: “The design of the Senate recognizes the status of the states as real governing entities with their own prerogatives under the Constitution. Like the equally hated Electoral College, the Senate ensures that flyover country isn’t ignored. It reflects the dizzying geographic diversity of a continental nation and promotes national cohesion by giving every corner of it a voice.”
Conservative writer Lyman Stone goes even further: “The thing you have to remember is that not only did the Founders fully understand the issue with lopsided state (populations), the foundations of our legislative system were specifically designed to under-represent populous states. The Senate’s malapportionment is intended.” Activist and commentator Erick Erickson writes, “The founders systematically put in place checks on the majority, which they viewed as a mob.”
Conservatives aren’t just channeling a familiar narrative—that the system was meant to stymie majority action—they are making a case that minority rule reflects the original intentions of the Framers of the Constitution. For them, minority rule is a legitimate outcome produced by a sacred process not subject to dispute. But this rests on a vision of the framing of the Constitution that ignores the fierce disagreements that rocked the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
To say, for example, that the Framers consciously built minority rule into the Senate is to ignore the actual debates around the structure of the chamber, which show fierce disagreement leading to a tepid compromise between two sides, one advocating proportional representation and the other backing equal representation of the states. Madison flatly rejected the latter. “[W]hatever reason might have existed for the equality of suffrage when the Union was a federal one among sovereign States … it must cease when a national [government] should be put into place.”
On its first vote, the committee responsible for designing the chamber agreed on proportional representation. The Senate’s “cooling function”—its ability to be more deliberative—would rest not on equal representation, but on its smaller size and longer terms of office for members. (It’s worth mentioning as well, in discussions over state sovereignty, that Madison wanted to give the Senate a veto over state legislation.)
When small state representatives pushed for equal representation—which had been a feature of the Articles of Confederation—Madison and other advocates of proportional representation in the Senate responded with sharp arguments against. Madison dismissed the fear that large states would gang up on their smaller counterparts, pointing to cultural and economic differences among large states. “In point of situation they could not have been more effectually separated from each other by the most jealous citizen of the most jealous state.” Madison even made the pointed—and to modern ears, familiar—argument that the real division between the states was North and South, free and unfree. He summarizes the point in his notes from the convention, in which he “contended that the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves.”
Benjamin Franklin, another opponent of equal representation of states, pushed back against the idea that small-state citizens would be burdened under proportional representation. “The Interest of a State is made up of the interests of its individual members,” he said. “If they are not injured, the State is not injured.” Pennsylvania’s James Wilson was more prophetic: “Equality of votes among the States will subject the majority of the People & Property to be governed by a minority of each.” This, he said, was “too palpable an error, too great a Defect in the Constitution to permit the expectation of public harmony & Happiness.”
But small-state representatives wouldn’t budge, using the threat of exit to force compromise. In Federalist No. 62, Madison says it is “superfluous” to justify the Senate according to republican principles. Instead, it is the result “of a spirit of amity.” Rather than lose the small states from the union, “the advice of prudence must be to embrace the lesser evil.”
Put simply, key voices anticipated the problems the Senate might pose for governance and democratic representation. That future Americans, to whom the Framers entrusted the republic and its maintenance, might seek reform to solve those problems is not an attack on the intent of the Constitution. It is in keeping with the debates around its creation.
The same is true for those who seek a stronger majoritarianism in the operation of American governance. Conservative claims that the Framers “feared the mob” also miss the nuance in their arguments. In Federalist No. 10, Madison acknowledges—as he had in the past—that popular government is vulnerable to “an interested and overbearing majority.” But he then pivots to his crucial insight. The problem isn’t majorities per se—which are capable of acting in the interests of the whole—it’s the “factious spirit in public administration.” And what are “factions”? He defines them as citizens “who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” (By Madison’s standards, if there is a “mob” in today’s politics—a faction “adversed to the rights of other citizens,” it’s the Republican Party, caught in the grip of demographic panic, ideological extremism, and growing authoritarianism.)
Madison argues that the nation would be able to deal with minoritarian factions—the majority can just outvote them. Majoritarian factionalism is trickier. There, the solution is a large polity that includes a number of diverse interests that can diffuse the power of faction. Barring that, diversity itself acts as an obstacle to the formation of factional majorities—there are too many interests operating for their own gain for an “overbearing” majority to coalesce.
What’s key is that Madison wants majorities to govern—he believes it to be the central principle of republican government. But his concern was building sustainable majority rule, where the losers of political conflict aren’t excluded from governance, full stop.
Lurking behind arguments about “minority rule” is a more fundamental dispute about the structure of American democracy. Was it set in stone with the ratification of the Constitution, or is it subject to reform and revision, to meet the changing sensibilities and beliefs of Americans? Understanding the debates around the Constitution—of the degree to which the Framers and ratifiers struggled with complex and unanticipated questions whose answers weren’t easily forthcoming—helps us see how the process and theory behind the document suggests Americans ought to question institutional design when it conflicts with principles of majority rule and representation of the whole. Faced with a government that resolutely represents a minority of Americans, the proper response is the kind of constitutional debate that conservatives have dismissed out of hand.
Indeed, looking at the whole of American history thus far, we shouldn’t think of the “framing” as a singular event that began in 1787 and ended with ratification. The “framing” of the Constitution is continuous, an ongoing process by which Americans revise their understanding of the republic in fits, starts, and occasional moments of revolutionary action. The Reconstruction Amendments that abolished slavery, established equal protection, and gave black men the vote transformed the relationship of individual to state, of state to nation. The 17th Amendment, which established direct election of senators, enshrined much of Madison’s vision for the chamber, making it a body for national deliberation where each member represented individual citizens, not their states per se. The 19th and 26th amendments expanded the electorate, greatly widening the sphere of democracy. The civil rights laws of the 1960s operated in similar ways, enshrining the principle of racial egalitarianism even as we struggle to make it a reality.
If, in the first decades of the 21st century, partisanship, polarization, and demographic change have made our democracy increasingly unrepresentative—if millions of Americans fear the prospect of judicial supremacy in opposition to their lives and freedoms—then they’re right to take a page from the Framers and work to align our institutions with our democratic beliefs, convictions, and intuitions.
Calls to transform the Senate, or create new states, or even “pack the court” aren’t attacks on norms; they are Americans doing the hard work of crafting a democracy that works for them, of taking seriously the idea that the Constitution exists for us, not us for the Constitution.
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FOCUS: Gloria Steinem Had to Convince Her Male Editors That Women Want Power |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=49192"><span class="small">Rebecca Traister, The Cut</span></a>
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Monday, 15 October 2018 12:43 |
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Traister writes: "Not long after she published 'Women and Power,' Steinem experienced what she’s likened to a feminist awakening at an abortion speak-out and began to write about the women’s movement."
Gloria Steinem. (photo: Richard Saker/Observer)
Gloria Steinem Had to Convince Her Male Editors That Women Want Power
By Rebecca Traister, The Cut
15 October 18
Job: Writer and activist
Founded: The National Women’s Political Caucus with Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Bella Abzug
Once: Went undercover as a Playboy Bunny
 hen the editors at New York were starting to put together this issue, they realized that almost exactly 50 years earlier, the magazine had published a story by Gloria Steinem titled simply “Women and Power.” The main point of the piece was that women want power, but since they can’t get it through work or in public life, they date and marry for it. “Sponge-like, women acquire the status (even, temporarily, some of the power) of the man they’re with,” Steinem wrote. “So much so that it’s part of every girl’s experience to be treated as two entirely different people just because she’s changed escorts.” Ironically, Steinem says today that she didn’t want to write the piece but that her boss, Clay Felker, pushed her to do it.
“I argued with Clay about it,” she says. “His premise was that women thought men were sexy just because they had power, and I disagreed with that. I told him that I thought that was a fantasy of men in power. So I tried to make it more about the fact that women wanted power in the first place.” Or, as she wrote then: “A lot of men, and a surprising number of women, believe the sexual segregationist argument that women aren’t interested in power at all; that something in their genes makes them prefer to be ordered about … That turns out to be no more fundamentally true than all the other past myths: that women enjoyed sex less than men, for instance.”
At the time, Steinem was one of New York’s only female writers, no doubt because she was already a journalistic star. Her first big article, written for Esquire, was about the Pill. “It was new and revolutionary, and Clay, who was an editor at Esquire then, was fascinated with the sexual aspect of it. And I got fascinated with how it was developed, how it was an outgrowth of the whole movement for birth control, the science. When I turned in the story, Clay told me I’d performed the incredible feat of making sex dull. I could see what he meant, and I remember by the time I finished the piece I thought that, yes, the Pill was likely to liberate women sexually. My last line was something like ‘The problem may be there are too few sexually liberated men to go around.’?”
Not long after she published “Women and Power,” Steinem experienced what she’s likened to a feminist awakening at an abortion speak-out and began to write about the women’s movement. “I remember Tom Wolfe or Clay or whoever saying to me, ‘You worked so hard to be taken seriously. Don’t get involved. Don’t be one of those crazy women.’ I thought, But I am one of those crazy women,” she says. “As a freelancer, I couldn’t be fired, but I did get frustrated pitching stories about the women’s movement. One editor said to me, ‘Yes, we can publish your story saying women are equal. But then we’d have to publish one right next to it saying women are not.’?”
Eventually, Steinem and a group of other female writers published the inaugural issue of Ms. (which was printed as a supplement to New York). One of Ms.’s early pieces was about sexual harassment. Surprisingly enough, that makes Steinem feel relatively hopeful. “The consciousness levels today, and the numbers of people you have to fight it, are huge,” she says. “When we did a cover story on sexual harassment in 1977, we used puppets, because we didn’t want to be too shocking. So we had a male puppet with his hand down a female puppet’s shirt — and they still took us off newsstands.”
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ivilians in Yemen are not starving, they are being starved. Let it be known that the worst famine on our watch is wholly manmade by Yemen’s conflict parties and their international sponsors. 
