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Leadership After COVID: Now, It’s the Women’s Turn

Women-led nations are doing better than male-led nations in handling COVID-19.

To all the men out there who recoil at that statement, get over it. It’s true. And new research backs it up. According to a study of 194 countries by two economists based in England, Supriya Garikipati and Uma Kambhampati, women-led nations like New Zealand, Germany, Denmark, Taiwan, and Finland have recorded fewer deaths than those led by men, like the United States, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Even at the local level, we can see the impact of structural patriarchy on pandemic-related policymaking. In Honolulu, for example, Mayor Kirk Caldwell recently issued an executive order opening beaches, hiking trails and parks for solo, by-yourself activities. If you’re a single mother struggling to manage a crumbling economy and your children’s virtual learning environment, forget about taking your kids to the beach for a 15-minute break.

Just drop 5-year-old Johnny off by the forest and tell him to take a hike. Baby’s first solo adventure. What could go wrong?

It’s easy to dismiss Caldwell’s decision as a lapse in judgement intended to make enforcement of social distancing requirements easier for law enforcement. Yet, one has to ask: if more women who understand the difficulties of motherhood were involved in municipal decision-making, would the executive order have looked different?

I submit that it would have and that it’s just one example of the problems that patriarchy causes in dealing with the crisis. Take two case studies in leadership, the United States and New Zealand. In the U.S., President Donald Trump is currently making headlines for reportedly downplaying the impact of the coronavirus for political effect. This comes as the U.S.’s COVID-19 death toll nears 200,000 and case count surpasses 6.5 million, while the economy sputters and teachers die in prematurely reopened classrooms. This is what Trump calls “winning.”

In contrast, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern–who gave birth while running her country–immediately responded to the COVID threat by implementing measures to contain community spread. New Zealand’s borders were locked down to travelers. Her government implemented science-based actions that pivoted from managing to eliminating the disease because of testing limitations at the onset of the virus, which led to the nation being COVID-free for 100 consecutive days. To uplift the economy, New Zealand is investing NZ$175 million into arts and cultural programming and calling for the creation of thousands of green jobs.

President Trump and U.S. leaders don’t have a viable economic recovery plan. The U.S. House of Representatives–led by a woman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi–has been pushing for a major relief bill to help state governments meet their social obligations, provide a second robust stimulus payment to all residents, and deliver significant financial assistance to essential employees. But the Senate–led by a man, Sen. Mitch McConnell–is only interested in targeted relief that boosts the bottom lines of private businesses.

We can all think of women who failed at the task of leadership, like U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who is using the COVID crisis to defund public schools and push for the institution of voucher programs. (Side question: can schools use vouchers to purchase guns to fight off potential grizzly bear attacks, as DeVos warned about during her confirmation hearing?) For further reference, see former British Prime Minister Theresa May, who adheres to the paternalistic ideology of “one-nation conservative” and is best known for her Brexit buffoonery.

Women-led nations have grappled with their legacies of patriarchy and gender discrimination thoroughly enough to entrust a female to be their national leader. That’s axiomatic, but it also suggests that those countries are open to embracing democratizing norms and policies, like economic recoveries meant to advance the common good. They’re less likely than male-dominant polities to be steeped in pandemic denialism and have their top political leaders propound COVID conspiracies, as Trump does on a daily basis.

Numerous studies have shown that women are more empathetic than men. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, when female leaders implement policies that put compassion before competition. While many nations engaged in fear-mongering over immigration throughout this decade, German Chancellor Angela Merkel ensured that nearly a million refugees entering Germany were guaranteed their basic human rights. As the U.S. allows unemployment insurance to expire for tens of millions of people who have lost their jobs, Prime Minister Ardern is guiding New Zealand in implementing comprehensive wage subsidies and deferring mortgages until March 31, 2021.

Jacindamania is a direct challenge to male domination. Though the media fawns over the “resolute ordinariness of her existence,” her impact on the international political community is anything but quotidian. Her exceptional skill in flattening New Zealand’s COVID curve has positioned her as a central figure in flattening patriarchal social hierarchies. Her female counterparts in the club of national leaders are doing the same. They’re not interested in token gestures of progress. Rather, they’re crafting new models of gendered leadership that are proving–not that they need to prove anything to anyone–to be more effective in addressing the most pressing issues to today, from the coronavirus to climate change to economic inequality.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the global response to the pandemic. Our economic, political, and public health systems will be changed forever. If we want those changes to be a sign and signal of our commitment to human dignity, then we need to empower women to sit at the heads of the tables they’ve been forced to set for centuries.

They should have been sitting there all along.

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The Flame of Racial Violence Must Be Extinguished

I’m heartbroken. Again.

Yesterday, Patrick Crusius, a connoisseur of MAGA-style anti-immigrant bigotry, walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire. At the end of his murderous rage, Crusius had killed at least 20 people and injured 26 others, including an infant child.

An infant child, who hadn’t been captured by the radical racism that’s ascended to this country’s presidency. Whose life is instead snuffed out by it.

According to media reports, Crusius, who claims to have been inspired by the Christchurch shootings in New Zealand that left 51 dead, published a “manifesto” online, in which he detailed his hatred of immigrants and parroted white nationalist fear-mongering about “ethnic displacement” and “race mixing.” Crusius also maintained a Twitter account that included posts that contained a “BuildTheWall” hashtag, as well as photos of guns used to spell out the name “Trump.”

Sadly, the El Paso attack was just the day’s nightmarish opening salvo. Just a few hours later, another white man gunned down at least 25 people in Dayton, Ohio, slaughtering 9 and wounding 16. It’s the new normal in our nation. There have been more mass shootings in the United States, in 2019, than there have been days in the year: 251 shootings in 215 days.

Yesterday’s Texas killing is the second racially-motivated massacre in a week, coming on the heels of a white supremacist shooting spree at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California that left three dead. This is homegrown terrorism. It’s tearing the fabric of our nation into broken threads.

Yet, as prior atrocities have proven, Congress will fail to respond to this tragedy with compassionate legislation because the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the terrorist organization known as the National Rifle Association. Nevermind that most NRA members support sensible gun regulations, like comprehensive background checks. Nothing will be done because those who speak for the NRA talk loudly and carry a big, gas-operated Kalashnikov. Probably more than one.

And because the murders are the fulfillment of the modern GOP’s grotesque agenda.

Sure, that’s a bold statement to make. When the President of the United States engages in eliminationist rhetoric on an almost daily basis, though, we shouldn’t be surprised that his most disillusioned and delusional followers act out the brutality of his words as if they are a political prophecy. Trump’s claim to the Oval Office has always been predicated upon stoking racial resentment for electoral gain, as if he’s attempting to undo over a century of cosmopolitan progress. His presidency, itself, reveals how phantasmic that progress has been for tens of millions of Americans, who remain hold fast to the fantasy that a slavelike society can be resurrected.

Millions of Americans supported Trump’s racist questioning of President Obama’s birth certificate, a thinly veiled accusation that Obama was not “one of us.” Millions of Americans cheered when Trump called for ending birthright citizenship via executive fiat. Millions of Americans believe that the country would be better if minorities went “back to where they came from,” meaning not just places beyond U.S. borders, but spaces of social inferiority, where protests about discrimination and abuse can be easily silenced.

Back to the poor side of town, they mean. Back to segregated schools. Back to the plantations.

Toxic white patriarchy is traumatizing our national community, from sea to blood soaked sea. As Jenifer Wright wrote for Harpers Bazaar in February of 2018, “We live in a culture that worships men with guns. You can probably think of many off the top of your head–John Wayne, Indiana Jones or James Bond come immediately to mind. They’re all men who get what they want.”

Young white men who commit mass murder seem to believe that the world hasn’t given them the benefits to which they feel entitled–status, money, sexual gratification. Now, however, that umbrage has been given a scapegoat: the other of color, who crosses the border or stalks the neighborhood to steal the macho pleasures that bigoted barbarians covet. These aren’t prizes to be won, according to the budding racist. They’re rights of citizenship being taken by non-citizens, by aliens, by those who are targets of Trump’s totalitarian taunts.

Our federal institutions are too paralyzed by corporate cronyism to protect our safety. That doesn’t mean we can’t take matters into our own hands. We can lobby for gun control at our local legislatures and city councils. We can organize our neighborhoods to counteract the influence of big gun money in local elections, putting up pro-safety candidates against Second Amendment fetishists.

We can advocate for civic education initiatives that empower students to become agents of change. We can call out school curricula that downplay struggles to overcome minority suppression. For that matter, we can better educate ourselves on the legacy of those struggles–from the Black Codes and Jim Crow to Stonewall and the battle to overturn quota systems and barriers to Dreamer success–so that we can more easily see the humanity in our neighbors and build continuums of care for one another.

We can cast a ballot against anyone who campaigns by fanning centuries-old flames of hatred and fear, which have burned the soul of America since the founding of the nation.

We must not read more victims than necessary into our heart of darkness. We’ve already sacrificed far too much. Ending the bloodshed will require grappling with hurtful truths. Living the changes needed to secure a ceasefire may be hard. But the opportunity to heal a country that is once again reeling from the mindless menace of violence is, as ever, within our grasp.

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The Water Theft Bill Is Neocolonial Nonsense

Last Thursday, House Bill 1326, relating to water rights theft, appeared dead. Now, less than 72 hours later, it appears to have gained new life.

This bill is undead. It’s truly a zombie bill, stalking Hawai’i the way the walking dead creep through the ruins of Atlanta.

As we prepare for legislative Judgement Day to arrive this coming Tuesday, it’s worth recognizing why this issue exists in the first place. Alexander and Baldwin’s political press for continued water diversion didn’t merely arise from a 2016 Circuit Court ruling that prohibited the company from using revocable permits to authorize permanent redirection of stream water in East Maui.

On the contrary, it’s about the struggle for two things that have defined the history of the islands for the last 125 years: land and power. It’s the latest skirmish in the colonial conquest of Hawai’i, which reached its pinnacle with the overthrow of the kingdom in 1893 and hasn’t stopped trampling on Hawaiian sovereignty and working people ever since.

Alexander and Baldwin launched its lust for capital as one of the Big Five companies that held oligarchic control of Hawai’i’s economy during the Territorial Era. Its founders, Samuel Thomas Alexander and Henry Perrine Baldwin, were the children of medical missionaries who came to the islands in 1831 to “civilize” and Christianize the Hawaiian people.

Shortly after establishing the business that came to be known by the two-letter acronym A&B in 1870, Alexander and Baldwin purchased 561 acres of land on Maui, the site of the company’s first forays into sugarcane cultivation. A&B’s sugar operations produced profits that allowed it to expand into other industries, including pineapple farming, railroad transport, shipping (in 1908, A&B purchased a portion of the Matson Navigation Company), and, following World War II, real estate and land development.

Along with the other notorious Big Five companies, A&B came to control all aspects of Hawai’i’s economic and, in turn, political life, from agriculture to tourism to banking. To maintain their power, the overwhelmingly haole leaders of A&B were ruthless in their pursuit of money. Contracted immigrant laborers were subjected to deplorable conditions and perpetual racial discrimination on Big Five plantations, eventually leading to dozens of strikes and labor stoppages during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century.

While worker solidarity eventually led to the creation of local labor organizations, like the Higher Wage Association, wartime inflation outpaced any wage gains earned by plantation laborers. Companies like A&B marched greedily forward, using their legislative dominance and law enforcement to stymie any attempts by unions to gain footing on King Sugar’s lands, until changes to federal labor law forced them to address workers’ longstanding grievances.

Even a decade after statehood, Alexander & Baldwin’s financial authority was paramount. In 1969, the company purchased all remaining, outstanding shares in Matson, making the shipping company a wholly owned subsidiary of A&B. Even in 2012, when Matson was eventually spun-off as its own publicly-traded company, its board and management were stocked with A&B executives, who remain in key positions to this day.

A&B–perhaps a better designation would be A$B, given their oligarchic history and status as one of Hawai’i’s largest campaign contributors–has always put profit before people, beginning with their post-annexation opportunism. Its shareholders literally benefit from the commercialization of land that is only held in private hands because of their company’s machinations to dispossess Native Hawaiians of their political homeland and, later, deprive plantation workers of basic human rights.

How else do we explain A&B’s corrupt deal with Mahi Pono, which serves as the catalyst for HB 1326? In 2018, A&B sold its Central Maui sugar land to Mahi Pono upon the promise that the company would divert 30 million gallons of water per day until 2026 to those lands or pay $62 million. Yet, those permits expire this year, something both A&B and Mahi Pono knew when the deal was finalized.

They knew they’d have to demand an extension from the State Legislature to keep stealing water from Maui streams. They simply couldn’t fathom that the lawmakers they’d purchased on the campaign market would be unable or unwilling to deliver another blow to the public trust. They made a deal on the faulty premise that the Legislature was completely under their control, as it has always been since the days following the overthrow.

That’s just arrogance. Unmitigated hubris.

And with hubris comes the fall. Hopefully, A&B’s descent will begin on Tuesday, with members of the State Senate rejecting any attempt to resuscitate HB 1326 from its political grave.

Even if the bill passes, though, it has lifted a tide of we, the people, who stand firm against colonial injustice. It is only a matter of time before that tide washes away A&B’s self-serving exploitation and sends stream waters surging in the direction they were meant to flow.