Sarah Kendzior

For Quartz, I wrote about restrictive new voter ID laws that may disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of non-white voters in swing states, potentially handing a victory to Donald Trump. I encourage you to circulate this article. Voter disenfranchisement is an issue people can take action on now, by helping voters navigate the laws and procure the proper ID before the election. We can also work on challenging the laws as other states consider passing them. Excerpt:

Missouri’s law will not be passed in time to impact the 2016 race. But it is part of a growing trend of states that have passed or moved toward restrictive voter ID laws as America’s population grows increasingly diverse. In 2016, 17 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Of these states, Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin have been identified as swing states. Others are newly ambiguous: Texas, a state that has voted Republican since 1980, is now less of a sure bet. After GOP frontrunner Donald Trump proclaimed Mexicans “rapists” in the summer of 2015, applications for citizenship and voter registration among Texan Latino immigrants soared, and polls have shown a tight race. But will the new voters be able to cast their ballots? Under current regulations, an estimated 771,300 Texan Latinos, many of them recent immigrants, lack the required ID.

Read the whole thing at Quartz

For the Chronicle of Higher Education, I wrote about the retirement crisis in academia, but it applies to US workers generally:

America’s contingent faculty are not alone in their predicament. According to the National Institute on Retirement Security, 92% of working households in the US do not meet conservative retirement savings targets for their age and income. 45% of working households have no retirement savings at all. The average amount a working household with retirement savings has is $3000. For households with members closest to retirement, the average amount is $12,000.

In short, adjuncts are part of a broader crisis that has decimated the middle class since the 2008 financial collapse. According to the Federal Reserve, 57% of Americans said they’d used some or all of their savings in the Great Recession. The Great Recession led to an economic restructuring in which part-time and contingent labor – “the gig economy” – replaced full-time jobs; the number of low-wage jobs soared while the number of middle and high-wage jobs decreased; and long-term unemployment forced Americans who did have retirement savings to drain them to survive. Contingent faculty are among the many temps, contractors, and freelancers whose ranks have risen since 2008, most of whom lack 401Ks or other pension plans.

Adjuncts are doubly disadvantaged in this economy, as in addition to receiving low wages and no benefits, they are far more likely to carry high student debt. The average amount owed by an advanced degree recipient is $61,000. It is difficult for a tenure-track, salaried professor to pay off such high debt, but for the adjunct, who on average is paid $2700 per course, it is likely impossible.

Burdened by the debt of the past, struggling to survive in the present, contingent faculty often cannot fathom saving for the future.

Read the whole thing at the Chronicle for Higher Education

For Quartz, I wrote about how the phrase “anti-establishment” has lost all meaning:

The 2016 election is unprecedented on a number of levels. The two candidates with the most delegates, Clinton and Trump, are the two least-favorably rated front-runners in American history. They are disliked not only by the traditional opposition, but by members of their own party. Left-wing websites like Salon are encouraging readers to vote for Trump against Clinton and right-wing Fox News is encouraging voters to back Clinton against Trump. The number of independents voters has soared since 2008, and now stands at a record 43%, constituting the largest group of voters.

With party loyalty flagging and reliable alliances hard to come by, the only consistency in the 2016 election has been a bipartisan loathing for “the establishment”—an entity each candidate desperately tries to distance themselves from. But in an election powered by voters weighing the lesser of two evils, does speaking out against the establishment–whatever that is—really mean anything anymore? And if not, why does the act of doing so continue to enjoy such widespread appeal?

Find out at Quartz!

Since the fall of 2015, I’ve been predicting that Trump would win not only the GOP nomination but the general election. This claim was dismissed as paranoid and pessimistic, but unfortunately I was right. I do think the general election will be close, so there is no reason to stop trying to prevent this demagogue from obtaining office. I would very much like to be wrong.

But here is why I don’t think I am:

In 2008, the United States plunged into a massive recession from which it never recovered. Unemployment soared, full-time careers were converted to part-time gigs and middle-class jobs were replaced by low-paid positions. In the midst of this financial collapse, Donald Trump achieved popularity as the host of the reality-television series The Apprentice.

His catchphrase was “You’re fired.” And Americans loved him for it.

This is the psychology of Donald Trump. He sells the suffering of others as a salve to the wounded. The smartest thing any candidate can do in the 2016 election is run on American pain. That is the U.S. growth industry in an era of economic decimation, war recovery and racial strife.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who seeks to continue Barack Obama’s legacy, or Bernie Sanders, who offers hope through sweeping change, Mr. Trump homes in on anguish. He assures Americans that their fate is not their fault. He pledges to end their pain. And he does so by promising the public persecution of the most vulnerable citizens: ethnic, religious and racial minorities.

In Mr. Trump’s campaign, long-time losers – the mostly white industrial workers whose jobs began to disappear in the Reagan era – are promised to become instant winners, through means he has yet to articulate. The rest will be fired: denounced, deported, devalued. Mr. Trump redefines America through the politics of exclusion. He is tearing the country apart, and he will likely win what is left of it in November.

Read the whole thing at the Globe and Mail

For Quartz, I wrote about the geography of the unequal economic recovery in the US. Coastal cities with thriving economies have become unaffordable for the average worker; heartland cities that are affordable have few jobs, and most Americans cannot afford to move:

In effect, we have two American economies. One is made up of expensive coastal zip codes where the pundits proclaiming “recovery” are surrounded by prosperity. The other is composed of heartland regions where ordinary Americans struggle without jobs. Over 50 million Americans live in what the Economic Innovation Group calls “distressed communities”—zip codes where over 55% of the population is unemployed. Of those distressed communities, over half are in the South, defined generously by the census as the region stretching from Maryland and Delaware to Oklahoma and Texas. The rest tend to live in Midwest rust belt cities that have long suffered from economic decline, like Gary, Indiana and Cleveland, Ohio. It is nearly impossible for Americans of the latter group to move to the cities of the former group—or to work in the industries that shape public perception of how the economy is going.

The result is the populist rage that has consumed the 2016 election, whether from left-leaning supporters of Sanders or right-learning supporters of Trump.

The unequal geographic recovery has put the average American in an impossible situation. Most cities that have thriving economies—coastal cities like New York or San Francisco, for example–have become exorbitantly expensive over the past decade, with rents tripling or even quadrupling, forcing lower-income residents to flee to the exurbs. Cities where rent is cheap—Midwestern cities like St. Louis, Missouri, or Southern cities like Jackson, Mississippi–have some of the worst economies in the country, ranking in the bottom ten of Brookings’ 2016 study on 2009-2014 job growth.

Read the whole thing at Quartz

For Quartz, I wrote about the very misleading 5% unemployment rate, a statistic which discounts 1) the long-term unemployed and the lowered labor participation rate 2) the explosion of the low-paying, unreliable “gig economy” 3) the proliferation of low-wage jobs in place of middle-class jobs with benefits:

There are three main reasons the vaunted economic recovery still feels false to so many. The first is the labor participation rate, which plunged at the start of the Great Recession and discounts the millions of Americans who have been out of work for six months or more. The second is “the 1099 economy,” a term The New Republic’s David Dayen coined to refer to the soaring number of temps, contractors, freelancers, and other often involuntarily self-employed workers. The third is a surge in low-wage service jobs, coupled with a corresponding decrease in middle-class jobs.

Employment statistics in particular have a habit of eclipsing the real story. As any worker will tell you, it is not the number of jobs that matters most, but what kind of jobs are available, what they pay, and how that pay measures against the cost of living. The 5% unemployment rate, other words, is hiding the devastating story of underemployment, wage loss, and precariousness that defines life for millions of Americans.

Since 2008, the labor participation rate has fallen from a high of 67.3% in 2000 to 62.6% today. That 62.2% represents a 38-year low, which puts Bloomberg’s claim of a 42-year-low in joblessness in perspective. The jobless number is “low” only because more people are no longer considered to be participating in the workforce.

Read the whole thing at Quartz

For the Globe and Mail, I wrote about the New York primary, in a piece published the day before. The piece discusses not only the candidates — three of whom are personally connected to New York — but the elitism and expense that has transformed the city since I moved away in the mid-2000s:

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years,” the novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote in 1939.

This year, three of the four major presidential candidates are either from, or represent, New York City: Bernie Sanders, the humbly born Brooklynite who fled for Vermont in 1968; Hillary Clinton, the Illinois-born First Lady who overcame “carpetbagger” stigma to serve two terms as New York’s Senator; and Donald Trump, the quintessential New York tycoon, born a millionaire in Queens, now a billionaire in Manhattan.

The fourth major candidate, Ted Cruz, made a disparaging remark on “New York values,” which he defined as “socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage, focus around money and the media” but which some viewed as coded anti-Semitism.

Who belongs to New York? What does it mean, in an era when gentrification and the soaring cost of living have forced New Yorkers to flee their hometown, to be a “real new Yorker”?

As New Yorkers prepare to vote in the April 19th primary, the candidates stand as uneasy reminders of how a metropolis once synonymous with reinvention became an island of impossibility. To complain that the city has lost its soul is a New York cliché. But it is difficult to understate the extent of the city’s transformation over the past 15 years, as rents tripled and quadrupled, as historic black neighbourhoods turned white, as homelessness increased and the New York homeless worked multiple jobs.

New York has narrowed, like Americans’ options. While often viewed in the heartland as an affluent anomaly – the gleaming Capitol to the rust belt’s District 12 – New York shares the same problems as the rest of the country.

Candidates like Mr. Cruz who depict New York as detached from the mainstream ignore that New Yorkers, too, are struggling. Their struggle is less obvious only because so many New Yorkers have been forced to leave their homes in the city to survive. One can still belong to New York, in spirit, but fewer can belong in New York, because New York has priced them out.

Read the whole thing — Clinton, Trump, Sanders: Who Really Belongs to New York? — at the Globe and Mail

It was another rough year for Uzbekistan, with entrenched corruption, forced cotton labor, and an economy weakened by the Russian remittance crisis among the key trends. My report for Nations in Transit is out today. Here is an excerpt:

Despite the government’s isolationism, Uzbekistan’s economy is dependent on Russia through its heavy reliance on migrant labor remittances. The Russian currency crisis and tightening of work restrictions for Central Asian migrants negatively impacted Uzbekistan’s economy, prompting a black market currency crisis in the fall. Uzbekistan also bore the international fallout from presidential daughter Gulnara Karimova’s corruption scandals in the telecommunications industry, which drove away major international investors like the Swedish telecoms giant TeliaSonera. Karimova remained under house arrest for all of 2015, while both her business associates and the state officials who prosecuted them were arrested under allegations of corruption. The arrests of Karimova’s prosecutors, many of whom had served in the national security services, signaled an internal power struggle among Uzbek elites.

In October, US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Uzbekistan, prompting international human rights groups to implore him to convince the Uzbek government to release political prisoners. Shortly after Kerry’s visit, political prisoner Murod Juraev, held since 1995, was released in what appears to be a token gesture. Uzbekistan’s other political prisoners remain incarcerated while harassment, arrests, and abuse of Uzbekistan’s few remaining human rights activists continued throughout the year. In July, the State Department upgraded Uzbekistan from Tier 3 to Tier 2 in its annual human-trafficking report due to an alleged cessation in the use of child labor in the cotton fields. Uzbek citizens and activists noted that while child labor may have lessened, adults were still being forced to work the fields under brutal conditions. Although overseen by local authorities, the forced cotton labor industry is an apparatus of the state. In October, local officials in the Ferghana region allegedly instructed laborers to glue white tufts of cotton back onto their bolls to give an impression of a bountiful harvest in anticipation of a visit by Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev.

In March, President Karimov was reelected for a fourth presidential term with 90 percent of the vote, despite a constitutional amendment that limits the presidency to two terms. Karimov’s opposing candidates sang Karimov’s praises during their own campaigns, and the election was criticized as unfair and unfree by international organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Throughout 2015, the government continued to target Uzbekistan’s few remaining human rights activists, subjecting them to torture, sexual assault, forced hospitalization, and persecution of their families. Pious Muslims were also targets of state harassment, as security services forced women to remove their hijabs and banned children from religious celebrations.

Independent media remained nearly non-existent, but social media proved a lively avenue through which Uzbeks documented the harsh conditions of daily life, particularly the use of forced labor in the cotton industry. Social media campaigns showcased mounting frustration among Uzbeks and in some cases, a willingness to protest their plight, with the most popular campaign involved Uzbeks proclaiming “We are not afraid” to state officials. But protest on the ground remained minimal, as most Uzbeks are primarily concerned with surviving in a weak economy made more vulnerable by the Russian economic crisis.

Read the full report at Nations in Transit. I encourage you to check out the other country reports as well.

Most articles about why people vote for Donald Trump get their answers from two places: polls, with no follow-up questions but lots of speculation as to the “real meaning”; and rallies, where reporters interview the die-hards. Trump fans are rarely covered in the regions where their candidate has the most support. To remedy that, my collaborator Umar Lee and I drove to Metropolis, IL, the official home of Superman, now decimated by economic ruin — and a Trump stronghold. Here is what we found:

In the center of Metropolis, Illinois, a town of 6,465 people bordering Kentucky, is a giant statue of Superman. Below the statue of Superman is an inscription: “Truth – Justice – the American Way”.

Once a thriving blue-collar industrial center, Metropolis has been decimated by factory closures, the 2008 financial collapse and concerns over air and water contamination from the Honeywell uranium plant. Its community has lost faith in truth and justice. But they are seeking a new American way, and they believe they have found it in another strongman: Donald Trump.

Metropolis – selected by DC Comics in 1972 as the official hometown of Superman – is the seat of Massac County. On 15 March, Trump swept the Massac Republican primary with 44% of the vote.

Signs for Trump are everywhere. They are in the balconies of boarded buildings with shattered windows in the decaying town square. They are in front of the trailers where residents moved after they lost their homes during the 2008 mortgage crisis. They dot the roads to Harrah’s casino, the biggest business in Metropolis, where locals spend what little they have left in the hope of getting more.

A county plaque in the historic district explains that Massac is short for “Massacre” because “its citizens [were] nicknamed ‘massacrers’, for sometimes being the rowdy remnants of the early days of the Fort”. The Fort was built in 1757, but Metropolis residents are no happier today. They are furious with politicians and overwhelmed by financial despair. Superman brings the town tourists, but he cannot save residents from the pain of everyday life. But maybe, they say, Trump can.

“The government gives the companies breaks but not enough to keep jobs here,” explains Edward “Catfish” Kuhn. “Trump hit the nail on the head with the illegal alien issue. Maybe now they’ll move those jobs back.”

Kuhn has lived in Metropolis since 1983. He got the nickname “Catfish” because he used to be a champion fisherman, but he cannot fish much any more: the local river was contaminated by the uranium plant. Fish are not all that died in Metropolis. Kuhn used to work at Goodyear, but like many big companies in southern Illinois, it closed.

When we met Kuhn, he was selling what he claimed to be meteorites at the bar of Harrah’s casino. It’s how he makes a living these days, he explained.

Read the whole thing at the Guardian.

For the Globe and Mail, I wrote about anti-Trump protests and the potential danger of cable news exploitation as they become increasingly violent. An excerpt:

Mr. Trump’s seeming encouragement of riots, along with inflammatory remarks like offering to pay the legal fees of fans who attack demonstrators, had led some to condemn anti-Trump protesters as playing into the GOP front-runner’s hands. “Black Lives Matter protesters may help elect Donald Trump president,” argued James Robbins in USA Today. Other pundits stated that demonstrations were a waste of time and energy, a botched election strategy that only gives Mr. Trump fodder to demonize his opponents.

What those who condemn anti-Trump protests miss is that the protests are about more than Donald Trump. They are not about electoral strategy, but everyday survival. They reflect concerns and grievances from those who are already suffering under local officials whose practices mirror Mr. Trump’s proposed policies: aggressive police who persecute black citizens, xenophobes who cry for Latino workers to leave the U.S., bigots who see every Muslim as a potential terrorist.

It is not a coincidence that the first major Trump disruptions were in St. Louis and Chicago, cities that have been in near constant protest for two years against sanctioned acts of local brutality.

At the St. Louis rally, which I attended, the faces were familiar. They were the same protesters who took to the streets in Ferguson: a diverse array of activists – black, Muslim, Latino, white – who saw in Mr. Trump a familiar threat elevated to a national level. They protested not only against Mr. Trump, but for each other – to proclaim that his hateful rhetoric would not be tolerated and that citizens would protect each other were he to come to power. Theirs was not an act of aggression, but a declaration of defence.

Read the whole thing, The trump card for U.S. cable news: Riots, ratings and rallies, at the Globe and Mail.