2. READ: Lost Children Archive. A novel by by Valeria Luiselli.
4. READ: There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. A book by Ali Noorani.
5. READ: What the first 24 hours on U.S. soil looks like for detained immigrants.
6.LOOK: Our 2018 photo essay in the midst of a rally outside the gates of Tornillo, Texas.
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
Becoming Prosumers Of Energy
by Ruth Santiago
February 16, 2019
This interview with Ruth Santiago, a lawyer who works with community and environmental groups in southeastern Puerto Rico, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
How do you think of energy democracy?
Energy democracy stems from the effects of energy coloniality and how certain jurisdictions have been used for extractive and exploitative practices and have become sacrifice zones for operations that create great wealth for other people over time.
How did you get involved in this work?
I got involved because of proximity. We have this saying in one of the groups I work with that says, "The environment unites us and identifies us." Not just the subtropical dry forest, and mangrove forest, and salt flats, and offshore cays, but also things that impact that environment – they also unite us and define us.
I was raised to a certain extent in Salinas. I spent my formative, adolescent years here. I was born in the South Bronx, my parents were part of the return migration to Southeastern Puerto Rico. They were from a municipality that's a little bit further east of Salinas, but very similar in many ways in terms of being part of the sugarcane monoculture, a high concentration of Afro descendent people, and real situations of struggle and survival. They decided to return to Puerto Rico when I was 12. I was raised along this Southeastern coast on and off from that time. One of my memories of growing up here as an adolescent was the Aguirre Power Complex being built in the early 70s. It was something that came to us. We did not come to the nuisances. Nuisance was built where we are.
The government of Puerto Rico tried Operation Bootstrap. Rapid industrialization and a very intense industrialization program that affected Guayama with industry coming in. First, light manufacturing and then the petrochemical industry. Then, pharmaceuticals, which are still very present. These energy plants were meant to serve more than the communities. These big, central station, fossil fuel plants were meant to provide energy to those heavy industrial uses that consumed and required a lot of energy.
What we saw in two places in Southern Puerto Rico, one here in Salinas and the other over in Guayanilla in Southwestern Puerto Rico, was how the power plants were set up very close to the petrochemical industries. We had the Phillips Puerto Rico Core Petro Refinery. Aguirre Power Complex was basically in service to that and other heavy industrial users. People were told they would get jobs. They said, "Oh, we're going to generate upwards of 2,000 jobs." People were a little skeptical and concerned about how that would impact the possibility of safe fishing at least. They were told it would not be impacted. Ultimately, what happened was Phillips did not generate anything close to 2,000 jobs and folded after a few decades, but did leave a terrible legacy of contamination to air, water, and land. People lost a lot of their ability to do the subsistence fishing even.
Aguirre Power Complex came in stages. They had two power plants in one. In 1972, they set up what was known as the Thermoelectric Plant. Again, people were told they’d get jobs from this. Again, the plant does not hire many local residents. It’s estimated there was 20-25% local hires, and the rest came from all over, anywhere but Salinas and Guayama. The same thing with the Combined Cycle units, because as I said, it's two plants in one.
At the dawn of the 20th century Puerto Rico got its first coal-burning power plant and the only coal-burning power plant that was established by AES. They're a Delaware corporation with their headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, but they do business all over the world. In November 2002, they started a brand-new, so called clean-coal power plant. It's been disastrous. Again, people were told, this is going to be beneficial in terms of stimulating the local economy and bringing down the electric rates. None of that happened. What has happened is that people are getting more and more exposed to pollutants and heavy metals and public health is being impacted.
Your work seems two-fold. One is dedicated to producing energy that is actually clean and that will not leave a legacy of toxicity. The other is in trying to invert the power structure of how that energy is produced and sold. Correct?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Can you talk about your work in both areas and how they come together?
We have done a lot of resistance work, and a lot of work to promote community alternatives on energy and sustainability issues. There's a long history of activism here. I became more active in energy issues around 2003. We started participating in the monitoring of the Aguirre Power Complex and how it impacts public health, air quality, and water. Both the sea water and the potable water. The only source of potable water here is the South Coast Aquifer. That was monitoring.
We started participating in different administrative proceedings with a group called Comite Dialogo Ambiental, the Environmental Dialogue Committee. Then we participated in proceedings against PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, but also the AES Corporation.
I've done both administrative proceedings and litigation in courts related to different impacts from those plants, and most recently a company called Excelerate Energy out of Texas was proposing to build what they call an offshore gas port and a marine natural gas pipeline, that we just defeated. It would have been running right through the middle of Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and impacted corals and seagrass beds and offshore cays and all kinds of things, and the ability of people to do subsistence fishing and ecotourism and otherwise just use and be in the environment.
We've done a huge amount of work with respect to the coal combustion residuals or coal ash waste related to the AES Power Plant. The coal ash waste is a concentration of heavy metals, toxic heavy metals that were being spread all over, and is now being accumulated at the AES Power Plant site in Guayama, Puerto Rico.
That summarizes the energy resistance work that we've done. In terms of going beyond resistance and seeking to build the solutions and the alternatives, we've done a lot of environmental education, both with Comite Dialogo Ambiental Inc. and another group, an umbrella organization called, Eco Development Initiative.
Prior to the hurricane in conjunction with IDEBAJO and a community board called Junta Comunitaria del Poblado Coqui, in Salinas, we helped start what is known as the Coqui Solar project. It's a community solar initiative. It was started with lots of workshops and consultation and collaboration with professors, like Efrain O’Neill from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, which is the technical campus here.
It was, for years, before the hurricane, quite a struggle to get people to understand, to want to move towards solar energy, especially rooftop solar communities. It was going very slow. We were certainly doing the education work and the policy work, but not getting very far on the ground in terms of actual implementation of the first steps, the pilot project for the solar community. But right after the hurricane when it became clear to, I think, everyone in Puerto Rico and probably anyone familiar with Puerto Rico that the current electric grid does not work for the people of Puerto Rico. People have been much more receptive to the Coqui Solar project and initiatives of solar communities and other alternatives to central station, fossil fuel generation.
Can you tell me how a solar community works?
That's something that's being developed right now. The way people in Coqui Solar envision it is people who have the appropriate rooftops, usually cement, which is not the case for everyone, are able to come together to think about and work on generating energy using PV systems on their rooftops. It's certainly much more than just everyone in the community having PV equipment. This is beyond just a technological solution. It's about the social agreements necessary to make that energy and that technology serve community needs in the most efficient way.
Are you seeing a lot of progress in new ways of approaching energy? From the community, but also from a municipal government level?
That's really hard to answer. Certainly with the mind set and attitudes. There's much more receptiveness to the things that we've been talking about for years about solar communities. That has definitely changed and there's a lot more interest and it's a very dynamic situation with respect to energy. After the hurricane, honestly, people realized we're basically on our own here and the government, local, federal, municipal, comes to help us. We have to figure out these solutions.
We're seeing a lot more on the formal scale. A group called ACONER, the Association of Renewable Energy Consultants and Contractors, say they're doing five to six times the number of installations they were prior to the hurricane.
Things have definitely changed. We don't know exactly how much.
There is what can be called, lip service. A lot of lip service about renewable energy which is dangerous, especially with the government of Puerto Rico. They're saying they're adopting the 100% renewable energy goal for 2050, and I think 50% by 2040, but their actions are promoting lots of natural and fracked gas. It's a tricky situation in that sense because you hear everyone saying we adopt renewable energy, but not only are they putting the money elsewhere, they're also talking about a kind of renewable energy that's not community-based,.
What we're seeing is that the government is being pushed by every energy company you can imagine. It seems everyone has an interest in doing some kind of project here, including at utility scale. That it is not the same as the kind of alternatives we're talking about in terms of solar communities.
Why is this an urgent issue for you right now?
We saw here in Puerto Rico, that it's a matter of life or death. People need to take this into their own hands, energy by and for the people. Become more than just passive consumers but actual producers of energy and control their means of production.
We knew before the hurricanes, and we experienced it afterwards. This huge and deadly hurricane was compounded by this terrible electric infrastructure system. It's not serving the people of Puerto Rico in a real way. Maybe that was the best we could do at some point, but that's no longer the situation here and we an opportunity to do things differently. To do better. Much better.