Trump decision to cancel refugee children’s soccer & school follows the centuries-old American tradition of cruelty to non-Europeans in the frontier & at the border

By Marc Jampole

Under the leadership of Donald Trump, the Republican Party has graduated from pursuing Ronald Reagan’s politics of selfishness to pursuing the politics of cruelty.

How else to explain this week’s decision by the administration to cancel English classes, recreational programs and legal aid for unaccompanied minors staying in federal migrant shelters?

The excuse for not educating or providing recreation to these innocent victims of violence and environmental upheaval—to which the United States had made a major contribution—is that the influx of immigrants at our southern border has created critical budget pressures. According to U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) PR flack Mark Weber, to save money the Office of Refugee Resettlement has stopped funding programs “not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation.” Sounds as if Trump is using these innocent victims as a bargaining chip with Congress. I wonder if he ever thought of torturing his own children as part of a negotiation?

So what are these kids going to do all day except hang around being hungry and bored? A recipe for getting into trouble, to be sure. And how can they ever hope to navigate our complicated immigration laws and system and reunite with their parents without any legal help?

Nothing short of an audit by Bernie Sanders supporters would convince me that the HHS is so broke that it has to deprive children of recreation, education and hope.  I think it’s not a bargaining chip, just an excuse for ratcheting up the meanness. Those of us who have followed the revelation about Trump’s personal finances understand that he and his cronies are masters of changing what budget numbers say. Remember Trump’s the guy who told the IRS that his assets were worth little to avoid paying taxes at the same time he was pumping up their value to get bank loans.

There are no doubt other places in the border budget that Trump could save money; for example, spending no more than the amount that most experts recommend is appropriate for walls or wall prototypes. That number, BTW, happens to be zero, since most immigration and security professionals have concluded the wall is a stupid idea.

Based on an analysis of other moves that the Trump Administration and the GOP have made recently, I think we can safely assume that the prime motivating factor in ending soccer and school for refugee children is cruelty. It is purposely cruel, as if Trump and his crew want not just to win, but to make it hurt the “enemy” so badly that everyone knows who is boss. They haven’t stopped to think that 12- and 15-year olds are never the enemy and never deserve purposely cruel treatment.

Separating children from their families is an act of cruelty. Criminalizing abortion and making a woman carry a rapist’s baby to full term is cruel. Putting the “Dreamers” into a legal limbo is cruel. Ending special programs to protect refugees from Haiti and El Salvador is cruel. Cutting humanitarian aid to Central American countries is cruel. Proposing cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security is cruel. Then there’s the especially twisted notion of assessing tariffs on Mexican and Chinese products, which will end up hurting the poor and middle class, as prices for virtually everything will go up when companies pass the cost of the tariffs to consumers. The twist of course is that the tariff money collected will make up some of the enormous deficit the GOP created by giving the ultra-wealthy one of the largest tax breaks in history at a time when their taxes were already historically low.

It’s easy to say that when Trump is frustrated, the first thing he does is look for someone to take it out on, and that the more pain he manages to cause, the happier this sick pup becomes.

But blaming the character of Trump alone would ignore the long U.S. history of cruel treatment of people whom white males considered to be inferior to Europeans and of those they encountered at their ever west-moving frontier. British army commander Jeffrey Amherst knowingly gave smallpox-infected blankets to Native American tribes during the Seven Years War, hoping an epidemic of the disease would wipe out whole communities. Cruelty to blacks characterizes the entire history of slavery and post-Reconstruction in the United States. Whether dealing with Native Americans or with supporters of democracy in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, American soldiers (and pioneers) employed rape, pillage, mass murder and displacement as their main tactics. It was if Europeans could only demonstrate their inherent superiority to other ethnic groups by treating these lesser beings as animals.

Historian Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth provides an easy-to-read if hard-to-stomach spectacle of U.S. official and unofficial cruelty to non-Europeans at America’s borders over the past 250 years. Grandin’s two premises are shaky: He avers that the U.S. is the only nation defined by its relationship to its frontier, which ignores the histories of China and Russia (and if one studies the medieval Ottonian dynasty, Germany, too). He also asserts that Trump was able to emerge because of societal anxiety now that the frontier is gone and our borders are closed, which fails to take into account Grandin’s own discussion of Andrew Johnson, the prototype of Trumpism; the strain of Jacksonian racism that still infects U.S. foreign policy; or Grandin’s mini-history of border vigilantism. No matter, the book’s detail makes it worth reading. Two other great books on American frontier cruelty—but  heavy reading slogs—are Richard Slotkin’s seminal Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973) and The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (1985).

The important takeaway from these books for this conversation is the detailed accounts of how, when faced with both humanistic and cruel ways to deal with the peoples encountered on its frontiers, the American way was virtually always to select cruelty. Blaming victims, of course, is always easier and less expensive than trying to help them. For example, the contemporary GOP program—from Reagan onwards—uses victim blaming as a justification for cutting programs that help our poor, elderly and disadvantaged. A supposed inferiority justified the cruel treatment of slaves. It justified Bush II’s creation of our torture program. And it’s instrumental in justifying the inhumane and illegal treatment of refugees and other immigrants at our borders.

Trump’s views resonate with the 20-25% of the population that is white and feels threatened by the demographic shifts in this country that favor groups they deem inferior. We don’t know, but we can assume that many ICE employees and government officials agree with Trump’s cruel approach, something that Grandin suggests. Trump’s administration is not the first time America has pursued an overtly racist program—Andrew Jackson and most of the presidents between him and Lincoln pursued racist domestic and foreign policies; Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the federal government and let the Klu Klux Klan run wild.

No, Trump does not represent an inflection point. Yes, Trump is a monster, but not an especially original one. He continues a long American tradition of racism and racial cruelty, especially to non-European immigrants, refugees and combatants.

Mathematical models for everything from marketing to perusing resumes are making inequality & discrimination against the poor & minorities worse

By Marc Jampole

Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction doesn’t break new ground in its discussion of how computer algorithms discriminate against the poor, minorities and women, making them pay more for loans, shutting them out of jobs, and disrupting their work schedules. Just about everything she writes about we’ve seen in the pages of major newspapers and serious magazines.   

But O’Neil puts it all together in language we can understand and with the rigor of a mathematician who has actually delved into the various assumptions and computations hidden within the digital black boxes that companies use to sort resumes, banks use to give loans, employers use to schedule employees and virtually every consumer company uses to target customers with products and services.

O’Neil does not advocate doing away with all the mathematical models that permeate contemporary American society, only those that threaten our social fabric because of hidden prejudices built into the algorithm or those that purposely exploit or deceive people.

Take the development of U.S. News Report’s top college rankings, which over the past thirty years has engendered a “keep up with the Joneses” competition among status seeking parents, while dramatically changing how universities approach their own development and improvement, pandering to the rating instead of the educational mission of the institution. It has also created a new industry of college selection advisors to help rich and middle class parents get their children into the highest-ranking schools. O’Neil reports that the original mathematical model used as its measures of success those variables in which the schools thought to be traditionally the best had excelled, such as contributions by alumni. Their selection of what to measure not only favored Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the other universities already entrenched at the top of the pecking order, it also led to such obvious distortions as small liberal arts colleges for the wealthy achieving a higher rating than state universities with far-ranging research capabilities and an economically diverse student base such as Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and the University of California Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses.

It’s amazing that one misshapen computer model could do so much damage. But O’Neil analyses a number of such monstrosities, such as the biased models by which school districts evaluate teachers, banks decide which financial services to offer and how to price them, employers analyze resumes without looking at them to decide whom to hire and political campaigns select which messages to send to individual voters. O’Neil calls these models “Weapons of Math Destruction,” or WMD, both clever and accurate.

Many of the problems caused by WMD stem from substituting a simple measurement for a complicated situation, for example when teacher evaluation models substitute test scores for in-class performance to measure teachers’ competence or employment models use credit scores to determine a potential employee’s stability. Another major problem is that many of the models have as their sole purpose the maximizing of profit, regardless of what that means to customers or employees, such as job scheduling models that make employees work split shifts, add or cancel their work hours before the shift begins, and prevent their total hours from exceeding the minimums for receiving benefits. The employer makes more money, while financially strapped employees have to deal with juggling childcare, medical appointments and other aspects of daily life. Then there are the models that instantaneously analyze your Internet browsing history as soon as you get on the website of a financial institution, telling the institution whether to offer you a high or low rate on loans and insurance, based on your “risk.” High risk in this case serves as a euphemism for poor and often, minority.

An anecdote O’Neil tells near the end of the book is particularly scary because it reflects the anti-science, anti-fact bias shared by many corporations and politicians. Despite years of work as a successful mathematician in the private sector, in 2013 O’Neil took an unpaid internship in New York City’s Departments of Housing and Human Service. She was interested in building mathematical models that help, not hurt society. The issue was homelessness. Her team looked over masses of data to figure out what factors led people into homeless shelters and what factors led them to leave and stay out for good.  One of her colleagues discovered that one group of homeless families left shelters never to return—those who obtained vouchers for housing under a federal housing program called Section 8.

Ooopsy! As it turns out, then NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the data king who had made billions of dollars supplying the financial industry with information, didn’t like Section 8 vouchers and had instituted a highly publicized new program called Advantage, which limited Section 8 subsidies to three years. As O’Neil writes, “The ideas was that the looming expiration of benefits would push poor people to make more money and pay their own way.” Yeah, right—they’d finally stop working as a fast food cashier and take a job as a Wall Street lawyer! Of course with rents booming in the Big Apple, the opposite was happening: people lost their vouchers after three years and ended up in homeless shelters.

The Bloomberg administration did not welcome the researcher’s finding and evidently ignored it in future planning. What the Bloomberg Administration wanted to believe literally trumped (pun intended!) what the facts were suggesting: that the cure for homelessness was not unfettered capitalism but providing a helping hand. Ignoring what the research proved corrupted Bloomberg’s approach to reducing homelessness as much as the current Trump administration’s approach to the environment, government regulation, taxation and education is corrupted by its failure to follow the facts.  Corruption and manipulation lie at the heart of what caused institutions to create and apply WMDs.

I vividly remember an example of the corruption of ignoring facts I experienced when I worked for a large public relations agency in 1987. I returned from a Conference Board seminar with a study about the way corporations would employ agencies in the 1990s. The new approach to agency use would make it harder for agencies to make money and force them to engage in more competitions with not just other large agencies, but small boutique firms that specialized in one kind of PR. As soon as I completed my presentation to the staff of our office, our general manager got up and said I was wrong and outlined a rosy view based on no research whatsoever. Of course, the predictions presented at the Conference Board seminar turned out to be right on the money.

Thus, while we must beware weapons of math destruction and devise industry standards for both developing mathematical models and regulating their use, the greater problem is the age-old one best expressed in a quote often attributed to Mark Twain that Figures never lie, but liars figure.

Editorial: Pro-Birth is Not Pro-Life

Say what you will about a woman’s right to choose, but many on the left — nominal supporters of abortion rights — overlooked the vacancy on the Supreme Court in 2016 when they argued about whether they would vote for “centrist” Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. Opponents of abortion kept their eye on the prize, however, and when the election approached, many church-affiliated, anti-choice voters didn’t let the amorality of the Republican presidential nominee get in the way as long as Donald Trump promised to name a judge to the Supreme Court who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion under the “right to privacy” that protects a woman’s freedom to choose an abortion at least until the fetus reaches viability, usually at 24 to 28 weeks.

In 2016, exit polls showed 56% of Trump voters said Supreme Court appointments were the most important factor in their support, while just 41% of Clinton supporters said the Court was the most important issue, Politico noted.

We doubt Trump, who used to support Planned Parenthood, has strong feelings about about abortion rights; his main concern seems to be finding Supreme Court justices who would back him up in his determination to cover up his high crimes and misdemeanors, but if naming anti-abortion judges was the price of the support of evangelical Christians, he was willing to go along. He promised Roe would be erased.

So the abortion foes made their deal with the devil and now they expect to claim their prize. Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, speeded up the process with new rules that let them ram polarizing Supreme Court appointments through on a simple majority vote, allowing the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, as well as 40 circuit court judges, on nearly party-line votes.

Now the right is pushing the extremes of anti-choice legislation. They have abandoned any pretense of concern about the welfare of mothers or their children. When the Alabama Senate approved a bill 25-6 May 14 to make it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion — which Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signed into law — the only exception was in cases where the pregnancy carried a serious health risk to the woman. A proposed exception for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest was defeated 21-11. The state Senate also rejected, 23-6, an amendment that would have required the state to provide prenatal care and medical care for the mother and child in cases where a woman was denied an abortion because of the law. The Senate also rejected an amendment to expand Medicaid to cover working families, despite Alabama having the nation’s highest rate of cervical cancer deaths, and infant mortality rates are among the highest in the nation, while rural hospitals in the state continue to close. So don’t tell us this is a “pro-life” bill. It’s merely pro-forced-birth.

Similar bills have been passed in Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio that ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and Missouri passed one that bans abortion after eight weeks. Two states, North Dakota in 2013 and Iowa in 2018, passed six-week bans that courts struck down, so they retreated to 22-week bans. Arkansas and Utah have voted to limit abortions to the middle of the second trimester, or about 18 weeks.

For what it’s worth, the public does not want a complete reversal of Roe v. Wade. A December 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 28% of US adults said they would like to see the Supreme Court overturn Roe while 69% said they would not. More generally, in June 2017, 57% of US adults said abortion should be legal in all or most cases while 40% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Public support for abortion rights has remained relatively steady in recent decades.

Americans’ views about abortion differ markedly by their political and religious affiliation and educational background, Pew noted. Three-quarters of Democrats, for example, believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, but around two-thirds of Republicans (65%) take the opposite view. Six-in-ten independents say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

While 61% of white evangelical Protestants think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, 67% of white mainline Protestants say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Catholics are more divided, as 51% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases and 42% say it should be illegal.

As if the assault on choice wasn’t bad enough, the right-wing justices who can be counted on to dismantle the Roe decision also are very bad on other progressive and populist issues, such as worker and minority rights, regulation of businesses and environmental protection. Trump seems to leave it to the right-wing Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation to come up with the names, and they have been working to veer the courts right for a generation.

In January 2010, the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United case, overturned laws dating back a century to rein in the corruption of politics by special-interest and corporate money. In June 2013, the Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote in the Shelby County case, overturned an important provision of the Voting Rights Act that the Republican majority said was outdated, which effectively stopped the requirement that certain states and local governments obtain federal “preclearance” before they implement changes to their voting laws or practices. June 2018 the court upheld, 5-4 Ohio’s practice of purging voter rolls, which has become a favorite tactic of voter suppression.

Voters who consider themselves truly pro-life must commit themselves to working not only for successful pregnancies, but also parents’ rights to work for a fair income that provides for adequate food, clothing and housing; the right of every family to have a decent home; the right to health-care for parents and children, the right to child care if both parents are expected to work; educational opportunities for children; and the right to economic security in retirement. These ideas have been knocking around since Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights in January 1944.

If you can’t sign off on these rights, you’re merely pro-birth. And you aren’t impressing Jesus, by the way. He never mentioned abortion, but he had plenty to say about taking care of the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the unclothed, the imprisoned and strangers — and if you consider yourself a Christian, you don’t want to be numbered amongst those who ignored these unfortunates. After all, Jesus was once a refugee who was unjustly executed. The Mammonite preachers who have backed Trump and Republicans, who insist on empowering plutocrats at the expense of working people, might not spend much time on what Jesus actually said, but you can check out what Jesus had to say about the Judgment of the Nations in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25: 31-45.

At least, for Christ’s sake, if you believe in banning abortion, try to promote family planning first, as well as supporting candidates who otherwise support organized labor, voting rights, subsidized housing and nutritional assistance for working poor families, clean air and water, and health care for all so no family needs to fear cancer or other catastrophic medical condition will drive them into bankruptcy.

In any case, we don’t need Trump naming any more Supreme Court justices. Thus endeth the lesson. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2019

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Copyright © 2019 The Progressive PopulistPO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652

Selections from the June 15, 2019 issue

COVER/Marshall Auerback
US-China talks are about much more than trade

EDITORIAL
Pro-birth is not pro-life

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
Remembering Rachel Held Evans

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
We are direct drivers of extinction

DISPATCHES
‘Money laundering’ and ‘The President’;
Trump camp stands against Constitution;
Judge denies Trump’s bid to deny House his financial records;
Audits of rich people plummeted last year;
Trump’s in trouble in battleground states;
Brazilian meat barons got millions from Trump’s farmer bailout;
Wold 'not on track' to stop 1.5 degrees of global warming, UN Secretary General warns;
Gas car sales 'have already peaked and may never recover' as battery prices plunge;
Monsanto hit with $2B verdict in Roundup cancer suit

CHERIE MORTICE 
Farm country: Don’t get fooled again

ART CULLEN
Trump’s folly on trade

JILL RICHARDSON
Reminder: Climate change was no accident

JOHN YOUNG
A mysterious coverup that would make Richard Nixon blush

ALAN MACLEOD 
‘Purity tests’ can be a good thing

SARAH ANDERSON
The reality behind the ‘surging’ US economy

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet 
Fetuses are not children

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Arresting the attorney general

LEO GERARD
The PRO act as a pathway to power: An economy is only as healthy as its workers are empowered

SETH SANDRONSKY 
How citizenship matters

BOB BURNETT
Donald Trump and the measles epidemic

MARTHA BURK
The most dangerous time for women’s rights in decades

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas 
The last journey: Who will pay?

SAM URETSKY
Trump puts hopes on tariffic trade war

GEORGE MILLER
For a Green New Deal that works, look to California

WAYNE O’LEARY
The Trump international

JOHN BUELL
On negotiating with Trump and his allies

JASON SIBERT
Military spending is worth fighting for

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel 
Escaping garbage island

ROB PATTERSON
News and infotainment sources

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson 
Trumpus redactus

FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell 
What about Confederate movie monuments — like ‘Gone with the Wind’?

HECTOR FIGUEROA and BEN BEACHY
Save the planet — with good union jobs

and more ...

Lowering voting age to 16 is a bad idea. Better to raise it—and age at which one can join the military—to 21

By Marc Jampole

Many major media outlets, including USA Today and New York Times have been floating the idea of lowering the voting age to 16.

Bad idea. If anything, we should raise the voting age to 21.

The simple fact of the matter is that the brains of virtually all 16-year-olds are still forming. Their reasoning capacity and their ability to comprehend complex material will keep improving for several years. The brains of many boys continue to develop until well into their twenties.

While there are exceptions, the average 16-year-old is still as much child as adult. A 16-year-old still looks heavily to both parents and peers for approval. Those in the middle and upper classes have not had to work for a living and probably have led sheltered lives. Rich kids and poor kids alike have had a minimum of experience in the real world. Many have irrational crushes on celebrities. Others are in poor control of their emotions. We can’t expect a 16-year-old to make an informed decision about issues or candidates.

The one advantage of giving 16-year-olds the right to vote is that we could register kids in high schools, which would hopefully lead to an increase in the percentage of Americans who vote. But we could also use a mass outreach approach to register young voters at other life stations—as part of registration for college or vocational training. Or better yet, we could extend selective service registration to women (and non-binaries!) and make voter registration part of the process.

I believe that a majority of my dear readers will agree with me that 16 is too young to vote. But my second assertion—that we should raise the voting age to 21—will likely meet with two thumbs down from most. If, however, you put credence in medical science, you should see little difference between voting at 16 and 18. The human mind is still developing at age 18. Although 18 year olds are for the most part much more mature than 16 year olds, they don’t have their acts together as much as they will at age 21. Far from it. Every parent will readily be able to cite examples.

The reason that we allow people to vote at 18 is business. The business of war, which since World War II may be the biggest and most important business that Americans pursue. After all, we have been at constant warfare somewhere around the globe almost continually over the past 70 years. Our annual military budget is about equal to that of all the other countries on Earth combined. We are the primary arms merchant throughout the world; our bombs and guns participate in virtually all of the almost 40 current armed conflicts worldwide.

We gave the vote to 18-year-olds in 1971 in the middle of the Viet Nam War after many Americans—young and old— rightfully pointed out that anyone old enough to die for his or her country should be old enough to vote. At the time I was overjoyed, because I had turned 18 about three months before the 1968 election and was frustrated that I did not have a chance to write in for Eugene McCarthy.

It was about the time that I realized that my hypothetical vote in 1968 should have gone to Hubert Humphrey that I also figured out that in bringing fairness to army enrollments, the United States should have moved the age of combat up and not the voting age down.

The cynical would argue that many young people need the discipline and structure that life in the armed forces provides. Especially for those who go don’t go to college and for the poor, rather than be set adrift in an uncaring economy, 18- and 19-year-olds can “grow up” in the army. This argument supposes that crime and social unrest would increase if we didn’t let young adults, and especially young men with proclivities towards violence, join the army. Once you establish the indispensable social and socialization role of the army for 18-21-year-olds, you have to allow 18-year-olds to vote. Once again, if they’re putting their lives on the line, you have to let them have a say.

But then there’s the ultra-cynical view, the one to which I subscribe. Without the pool of 18-21-year-olds, the armed forces could not fill its ranks. The army grabs kids at the very age when most are still adrift, still sorting out their path in life. They don’t own houses yet, haven’t started families, haven’t had their first full-time job. They have the fewest community ties and the least to lose by serving for a few years in the armed forces. Our armed forces recruitment centers grab them when they are most vulnerable to nonsense about pride and belonging. Primed for the plucking. Just enroll ‘em, train ‘em and send ‘em to a war zone.

Like every military since the rise of organized armies millennia ago, the Armed Forces of the United States of America depends on the 18-21 age group to provide cannon fodder for our military death machine. If raising the voting age to 21 makes us raise the minimum age to join the armed forces to 21, it might cripple out ability to wage wars.

And that would be a very good thing.

World’s largest Electoral Exercise In India

By N. GUNASEKARAN 

In one of the most important elections in the history of India, voters have elected members of India’s Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. As per the Constitution of India, Parliamentary elections should be held once every five years. The 17th general election in 2019 was held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19 across 29 states. More than 8,000 candidates from seven national parties, about 300 state parties, other smaller parties and independents were in the fray. About 900 million citizens were eligible to vote and and they cast their votes to elect 543 members of Parliament. Results are not expected to be announced for several days.

Although elections were held peacefully in many constituencies, there were a number of booth capturing and malpractices in the states like Tripura and violent clashes happened in West Bengal. The Election commission of India was criticized by the opposition for not acting in an impartial manner. Many objections were raised during the election process about the large spending by the candidates for road shows, advertisements, etc., exceeding the amount of money, allowed for spending on candidates’ entire campaign. The Election Commission of India has fixed the limit as seven million rupees ($100,000). And numerous complaints were lodged about bribing the voters.

In the last elections, held in 2014, the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Narendra Modi, had won and assumed office. It was then seen by many political observers as the triumph of Hindu Majoritarianism in Indian politics. They predicted the shift in Indian polity, from the traditional principle of secularism which sought democratically accommodating minorities on an equal footing with Hindu majority. For the past five years, attacks on the rights of minorities and physical attacks by Hindu outfits have increased across the Indian states. So the voters were really concerned about India’s social cohesion. 

This was explained by renowned journalist Prannoy Roy in an  interview with Moneycontrol: “Based on our travels around the villages and small towns of the country, the factor that stands out the most is the level of polarization among Hindu voters that we have rarely seen before.   Voters either love and admire Modi – or dislike Modi intensely. Virtually, no voter is indifferent.” The politically polarized electoral campaign had various issues like performance of Narendra Modi-led government, serious economic problems, nationalism, social discontent, divide on religious identity, etc. The popular perception among the voters was that the BJP-led government have failed to address the alarmingly increasing unemployment and farmers’ distress levels. The majority of the voters are from rural villages. Among them, declining agricultural income, corporate takeover of lands, agricultural unemployment, farmers suicide, etc., were the main concerns.

In 2017, Prime Minister Modi announced a draconian economic measure, called Demonetization. By overnight, his administration banned high-value cash denominations. The government claimed that it was an attempt to combat corruption and tax evasion. But the move crippled small businesses and destabilized India's cash-based economy. Non-formal sector, urban trade and self-employed small industries came to a standstill and millions of workers lost their jobs and livelihoods. The demonetization and other economic policies affected the middle classes, which included a large backward caste population who were historically marginalized and they might have opted to vote for the opposition parties, either the Congress or regional parties,

Recent terrorist attacks in Jammu and Kashmir and subsequent hostilities between India and Pakistan had an impact on electoral campaign.The BJP tried to prop up this issue for its nationalist appeal. However, the economic policies and the economic  slowdown became the main plank and it  may certainly hurt the governing party.

The Indian electoral system is based on a first-past-the-post system, and this system helped the BJP In the 2014 election. It polled 31% of the vote and won 282 out of 543 seats while the Congress got 19.3% with just 44 seats. So small percentages of voters with a swing of even 3 to 4 percent can decide the outcome. To avoid this drawback, there is a long-pending demand, particularly from the Left, to opt for a electoral system of proportional representation.

But in this election, such drawbacks in the system would not be advantageous for the governing party. Most of the media and political commentators believed the BJP could not retain its Lok Sabha majority and the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, many regional parties opposed to BJP and the Left would come forward to form a coalition government. The forming of alliances would be the critical factor  in determining the next government

The BJP’s basic ideology was the Hindu nationalist policies,vcalled Hindutva, which is based on strengthening of old caste and social oppression. the Dalits, who are socially oppressed in the caste hierarchy, and women were affected by these policies.It is expected that higher women turnout and that of other weaker groups may harm the prospects of the BJP 

The national parties have little presence in many states. Hence the role of regional parties have become an important factor in forming the new government.For example, in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and Tamilnadu, the southern state, both together have about 120 seats and neither BJP nor Congress could gain much in these states. India’s federalism demands to heed the democratic aspirations of all nationalities in various states. If the parties come together to form a coalition on the basis of definite people-oriented policies, that could advance the interests of the poor and working people. But the corporate capital interests that drive the policy orientation of many parties may hinder the meaningful federal plurality.

As far as the political narrative of the political parties are concerned, except the Left, no party had constructed an alternative set of policies replacing the ongoing neoliberal policies. Only such alternative policies could be favorable for the betterment of India’s weaker sections among the youth, women, middle class, rural poor and Dalits. 

N. Gunasekaran is a political activist and writer based in Chennai, India.

No one can prove when life begins, which makes it a matter of faith, which means government can’t interfere with a woman’s right to an abortion

By Marc Jampole

The current wave of anti-choice legislation passed in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and elsewhere fills me with a deep sadness for the many victims whom these benighted laws will create. Women who will die or be severely injured in back alley abortions. Men and women whose lives will be made infinitely more difficult or unhappy because they have to raise children they don’t want, can’t afford or are unprepared for. Most of all, my heart breaks for the children of unwanted pregnancies, often born in poverty or with disabilities or raised by parents who didn’t really want them.

The unholy irony of these new laws is that they are passed by elected officials who typically also campaign for cutting food stamps, aid to education, health care for the poor and other programs that help children once they are born.

Like many conservative positions, the extreme anti-choice line is faith based. But there’s a big difference between the rightwing view on abortion and its position on other issues such as immigration and government regulation: we can explode the myths that underlie most of contemporary conservatism with facts, but pro-choicers base their position as much on faith as anti-choicers do.

Facts and analysis disprove virtually all of the rightwing’s assertions. Experts—by which I mean scientists, engineers, economists, sociologists and other researchers not paid by industry—have demonstrated that virtually all the premises supporting the GOP platform run counter to reality.

Some examples: Global warming is occurring and much of it is manmade; its effects will do more harm than good.

Lowering taxes on the wealthy does not create jobs, whereas raising them usually does.

Immigrants lower the unemployment rate and raise the salaries of native-born Americans. Crime rates are lower among immigrants—legal or undocumented—than among native born Americans.

Universal medical insurance would lower the overall cost that Americans pay for healthcare.

Increased government regulations do not decrease jobs or economic activity in the overall economy.

Public schools do a better job of educating students than either private schools or privatized charter schools.

Raising the minimum wage has a meager if any impact on employment rates and tends to lead to higher wages up the employment ladder.

The more guns there are in any society, the more gun deaths and injuries occur.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the point, dear readers.  Research exists that in short order destroys virtually all of 21st century conservatism.

The exception is abortion, for one simple reason: No one really knows when life begins. All we can determine is the point in fetal development when life is viable—able to sustain itself outside the womb. Even that premise is open to some question, as an infant can’t live without the help of adults to feed, shelter and protect it. Common sense would conclude that a newborn is not truly viable. In the 18th and 19th centuries, infanticide was a primary means of birth control in many cultures, including our own.  

I personally believe that a woman should control her own body and therefore should have the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy. But I am also painfully aware that this argument doesn’t really hold muster under close scrutiny. Society often interferes with an individual’s control of its own body. We consider people who mutilate themselves to be emotionally unstable and in need of psychological treatment (unless society approves the mutilation, as with tattoos and or non-corrective cosmetic surgery). We have laws against assisted suicide. Drug laws interfere with the right of women and men to control their own body. We force children to attend school until a certain age. We throw in jail people who sell their bodies or use them as lethal weapons. Society therefore often constrains the bodies of people and could theoretically prevent women from having abortions.

The problem is that no one can say for certain when life begins. At conception?  At a mother’s recognition of the pregnancy? At heartbeat? At viability? No one really knows. Of course, we as a society could agree to a definition of the beginning of life, or, to put it in the center of the controversy, the point at which the rights of the fetus are as strong as or stronger than the rights of the mother.

But wherever we set the beginning of life is completely arbitrary—a first premise, an axiom in mathematics, a principle from which you argue from and never to.

In other words, a matter of faith.

Setting the point after which an abortion should not be performed for any reason is always a matter of faith, belonging to the realm of religion and not science.

Which is the very reason why American governments on all levels must as a matter of constitutional law allow abortions in virtually all cases. The United States has an absolute separation of state and religion. The titleless aristocracy that founded the country adamantly opposed having a state religion or letting the state interfere with the private practice of religion. The judiciary has reconfirmed the principle of the separation of church and state innumerable times.

Those who oppose all abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, practice one faith. Those who want to abort all fetuses that will develop Down’s syndrome or other terrible ailments practice another faith. I’ll leave it to each reader to decide whose religion is more humane, more caring, and more attuned to the needs of society.

But all must agree that it is never the function of government to get involved in ontological disputes between different faiths. Constitutionally, the government cannot and should not have any position on abortion.

That leaves opponents of a woman’s right to control her own body with the traditional options that religions have in the United States. Advertise and proselytize. Convince pregnant women not to have abortions. Go ahead and tell them that all pregnancies are a blessing, even if the baby is never going to be close to normal. (Just don’t do it with lies such as the false myth that women who have abortions are more likely to get cancer.)

The marketplace of ideas is the proper place to discuss abortion, not the legislative halls or the bureaucracies of the administrative branch of government. Whether these new anti-abortion laws are moral depends on one’s religion, but there can be no disputing that they go against the principles upon which we have built our country.