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Should We Boycott BP?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

As oil dissipates in the gulf and thousands of miles of Gulf waters are reopened for fishing, we are continuing to gradually recover from the massive oil spill. For many Americans, however, the road to recovery may be much more difficult than anticipated—and I’m not just talking about those who work on the Gulf’s waters.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that “BP owns fewer than 2 percent of the 10,000 stations” in the United States, yet BP stations all over the country have been subjected to “boycotts, protests, vandalism, and customer tirades.” According to the Times, BP stations nationwide continue to experience depressed sales.
Unsurprisingly, the effects of consumer anger towards the BP brand have been most noticeable along the Gulf, where at least one station owner reports a loss of 50 percent.
Considering that the oil spill is one of the worst environmental disasters to happen in recent memory, it makes sense that people feel helpless and are looking for someone to blame. But taking out our anger on individual station owners is not the way to get revenge.
Enough people are losing their livelihoods over the oil spill without us harming local businesses. As the Times points out, boycotts do not hurt BP anywhere near as much as they hurt “small, family-owned stores.” Furthermore, many owners are contractually obligated to sell BP gas for 15 to 20 years. Partnering up with a different brand would result in severe penalties, so most have no choice but to stick with BP.
Now that we are several months past the actual event, it’s unacceptable that local station owners are still feeling losses. So continue to buy gas at your local BP station. Meanwhile, focus your time and effort on encouraging energy policy and environmental changes by contacting your congressmen. Or, try volunteering for local environmental organizations. Yes, it’s doubtful that you will work directly on the Gulf, but you will still impact our ailing environment in some way. There are many ways to do something constructive in the wake of this disaster, but driving hardworking people out of business is not one of them. —Shea Connelly

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Why No Child Left Behind is Failing Our Kids

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Joyce Irvine’s six years as principal of Wheeler Elementary School in Burlington, Vt. ended July 1. Irvine was described as “a leader among her colleagues,” working “tirelessly” for the school, often up to 80 hours a week. According to Senator Bernie Sanders, “She seemed to know the name and life history of every child.”

So why was this model principal removed? According to the country’s current education rules, for the Burlington School District to qualify for $3 million in federal stimulus money, “schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.”
That Wheeler is not a high-performing school cannot be disputed. But for a school like Wheeler, with a 97 percent poverty rate and a large number of refugee children, there is little hope for success under No Child Left Behind. The Act measures growth based on standardized tests given each year. Tests all students must take on the same day, regardless of whether they arrived at the school a day earlier from Somalia speaking little English.
This system does not reward schools for student growth on an individual level. If so, Wheeler Elementary would have done quite well, Burlington’s superintendent told the New York Times. Some signs of her success: a decrease in suspensions from 100 per year to seven, a successful new arts curriculum geared towards turning the school into an arts magnet, and an “an influx of new students, so that half the early grades will consist of middle-class pupils this fall.”
Irvine’s case is a perfect example of the failures of our current education system. Under this system none of her successes are recognized. Rather than charting individual student improvement from year to year, our system focuses on the average performance of all students, new and old. This rewards schools with steady populations and few mid-year additions.
How can we expect our schools to improve when our system favors only impossibly rapid improvement and consistent high scores while ignoring districts that are constantly, steadily, albeit slowly growing? As long as these schools are ignored, their growth will continue to be slow. If we could create a system that recognizes gradually improving schools, we could reward these schools in such a way that gradual change would become rapid change.
Under the current system, good schools will continue to be good while schools like Wheeler will continue to struggle. Under the current system, the only hope for schools like Wheeler is administrators and teachers who are willing to devote all they have to improvement when there are so many factors working against them. Unfortunately, under the current system, even that hope is extinguished as schools are forced to choose between desperately needed funds and dedicated administrators.
As Irvine said, the situation became “Joyce Irvine versus millions. You can buy a lot of help for children with that money.” That may be true, but that money can’t buy the dedication and love for her students Irvine displayed. Such principals are one in a million, and the fact that our system has forced her out of the school is a travesty.

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Gay Rights Gets a New Backer…Bill O’Reilly?

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

Monday night’s episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno taught us a very odd lesson: Apparently Bill O’Reilly is now more pro gay rights than President Obama. Confused? Join the club.

Despite the fact that a mere six months ago O’Reilly defended the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy with statements like, “It’s not about anti-gay, it’s about being comfortable in the barracks,” he told Leno, ”President Obama has the power to stop this ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ business. Just sign an executive order. I don’t know why it’s taking so long–it’s not fair. We should stop this nonsense.”
I suppose it’s possible that O’Reilly has become so accustomed to the knee-jerk reaction of criticizing everything Obama does that he forgot what he and Leno were talking about. More likely, however, this is a sign of an overall shift in opinion among the United States population when it comes to gay rights.
Along with O’Reilly, other Republicans and military officials, such as Colin Powell, Ron Paul, and Adm. Mike Mullen, support repealing DADT. Additionally, a February Quinnipiac poll showed 57 percent of Americans are in favor of gay soldiers serving openly in the military.
All of this makes me wonder, what is taking so long? I (dare I say it?) have to agree with O’Reilly. This nonsense has been going on for far too long. Argentina recently became yet another country to make gay marriage legal. Argentina, a country with a largely Catholic and socially conservative population allows gay marriage, and we still don’t even allow gay soldiers to serve openly?
Glenn Greenwald recently wrote in a Salon post, “It’s worthwhile now and then to take stock of the vast disparity between how we like to think of ourselves and reality. When a country with Argentina’s history and background becomes but the latest country to legally recognize same-sex marriage–largely as the result of a population which demanded it–that disparity becomes quite clear.”
I couldn’t agree more. It’s time to consider our current national “values” and decide if we’re heading in a direction that we can be proud of. A direction that embodies our founding principles that all are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Much of the modern, industrialized world has legalized gay marriage and we still have an act in place that explicitly bans it. That should be a clear message that we have a lot of catching up to do in terms of honestly upholding our core values of civil liberty and freedom. —Shea Connelly

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Objectivity in Middle East Reporting: Should CNN Have Fired Nasr?

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior middle east news editor, tweeted: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah …. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” By Wednesday evening she was unemployed. Her twenty years with CNN were over as a result of one tweet.
The mainstream media in the United States is intended to be an unbiased source of information for the public. CNN claims Nasr was fired because “her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.” Sounds fair, right? But the truth is that CNN and the MSM as a whole are no longer unbiased sources of information. When it comes to certain issues, especially those related to Middle East conflicts, the MSM has morphed into a source through which a unified message is delivered to the public neatly hidden in an “objective” package. Middle East biases have become such a part of American reporting that we hardly realize they exist anymore.
In her tweet, Nasr was expressing sadness at the death of a man who is revered by the greater Muslim world as an iconic religious figure. He was a controversial figure, considered by many to be anti-American. But that shouldn’t be surprising considering he was unfairly placed at the top of the Reagan administration’s enemy list.
According to TIME, they ”mistakenly believed he was the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group the U.S. was at war with at the time.” They also believed he was responsible for an attack on a Marine barracks in Lebanon. These same misconceptions led a group of Christian Lebanese army officers to attempt to assassinate him. They thought they were doing the U.S. a favor. The consequence of this “favor”? 80 dead Lebanese civilians.

Fadlallah was far from perfect. Even if he was not guilty of organizing the Marine attack, he was still responsible for creating “a climate for the attack,” as TIME puts it. But few political and religious leaders are untouched by scandal and doubt. The fact remains that he was revered by much of the world, even, to some extent, by parts of the mainstream western world.
Furthermore, Nasr’s tweet was hardly extremist. Nowhere in the less-than-140-character message did she say she agreed with any specific part of his agenda. She simply expressed regret upon hearing of his death and said spoke of her respect for him. It’s perfectly possible to respect someone while not agreeing with them.
If CNN held all of its reporters to the same unbiased standard, then Nasr’s termination would be fair. But it appears that some biased personal opinions are acceptable to CNN while others are not. Wolf Blitzer, for example, is a former AIPAC official. He once publicly declared his pro-Israel stance, shortly before he was hired full-time at CNN. It stands to reason, therefore, that he should not be allowed to do any objective reporting on Israel. He has a clear conflict of interest. Shouldn’t this compromise Blitzer’s credibility even more than Nasr’s tweet compromised hers?
Blitzer’s career has never been negatively affected by his biases, because they’re expected. Pro-Israel sentiments are not considered biases and are perfectly acceptable. Meanwhile, a mild expression of regret upon learning of the death of a controversial Muslim leader admired by millions results in the termination of a 20-year career. Nasr is gone, but CNN remains otherwise unchanged. The mainstream media’s reporting of Middle East issues will continue to be subjective until organizations like CNN are able to recognize the biases that have become ingrained in their everyday reporting. —Shea Connelly

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No More Asylum for Those at Risk?

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Benito Zaldívar was deported to El Salvador last December after his petition for asylum was rejected by the Board of Immigration Appeals. He was murdered eight weeks later, shot in the face while riding his bicycle. Zaldívar had moved to the U.S. in 2003 at the age of 15, fearing for his life after he refused to join a gang that was aggressively trying to recruit him.

Who is to blame for his death? The Board of Immigration Appeals refused to grant his asylum petition because he could not offer sufficient evidence that his life would be threatened by the gang.
“Zaldívar ‘indicated that the gang members threatened to hurt his family if he did not join,’ the judges wrote, ‘but neither the respondent nor anyone in his family has ever been harmed.’” This seems like an odd justification for rejection, considering that the whole point of granting asylum is to prevent people from being harmed. Apparently you must wait to be attacked before your fears are considered legitimate.
Our government is aware that gang violence is prevalent all over Central America, and the gang trying to recruit him, Mara-18, is well-known. You could argue that if Zaldívar didn’t have tangible evidence that he was being targeted, he could have been inventing the entire story. But it’s not as if Mara-18 would be sending text messages and e-mails to potential recruits (“Hey U, join R gang or else”).
The only real evidence Zaldívar could possibly have had to show the Board, therefore, would have been visible scars from previous attacks. Even then he could have been deemed untrustworthy and deported.
By our current laws, then, is anyone granted asylum for gang threats? The answer is rarely. According to the New York Times, as gang violence has grown in Central America over the last decade, it has become increasingly difficult for those threatened to be granted asylum in the United States.
In a 2008 court case, the Board denied a petition from three Salvadoran teens who, like Zaldívar, had fled recruitment. In their case the gang was MS-13, whose influence has become so widespread it even has a known presence in the United States. The reasoning behind the ruling should have drawn more outrage than it did.
“‘Gang violence and crime in El Salvador appear to be widespread, and the risk of harm is not limited to young males who have resisted recruitment,’ the Board found.”
The Board admitted that gang violence is such a problem in El Salvador that every last citizen is at risk. Wouldn’t three teenage boys who had fled the country rather than join the gang (i.e. had severely angered the gang) be significantly more at risk? And yet they were essentially told, go back to your country. You deserve to suffer just as much as everyone else there. The Board apparently believes it is the birthright of all Salvadorans to live in a constant state of fear.
President Obama is reportedly preparing to bring immigration back to the forefront of political debate. His administration is expected to reignite the debate by filing a lawsuit to block Arizona’s new immigration policy. Unfortunately, according to the New York Times, “there is little interest among politicians or the public in seeing the asylum numbers increase.”

I’m going to give politicians and the general public the benefit of the doubt and say there is “little interest” because there is little awareness. Know that Zaldívar’s case is not an isolated incident. And for every person who, like he, is deported and subsequently murdered there are a dozen more who are shipped back to their countries to live in hiding. Perhaps if more people become aware of tragedies like this one, politicians and the public would become interested in asylum reform. The Board made a fatal mistake in deporting Zaldívar, but it doesn’t have to happen again. —Shea Connelly

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