Day: February 17, 2024

By Huricihan Islamoglu 

The Israel-Hamas confrontation is spreading to the wider Middle Eurasian region. This marks a turning point in the on-going reconfiguration of geopolitics in Middle Eurasia. Israel is fighting Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen, the latter disrupting maritime trade through the Red Sea which carries nearly 30% of the world’s maritime container trade and 12% of its oil.

What will the geopoliticisation  of the Gaza War mean? Beyond the shaky internal politics and desperation in these two communities, it speaks to new tensions in the global economy where relations among states and economic actors, including mega-corporations, are being reshaped.

Such rearrangements involve challenging the U.S.-led Western dominance of the post-war period, the rise of China, and Russia’s status as a resource-rich region opening to the global economy. It also means the sidelining of the international rules-based order underwritten by international organizations, among them the UN albeit dominated by the West. Israel was firmly positioned in that alliance. Thus, when it defied the UN sanctioned Oslo Accords or the peace process with Palestinians (in the territories Israel occupied in 1967), its behaviour could be overlooked or reprimanded as was the case under the Obama administration, when such behaviour interfered with the larger policy objectives of the U.S. in the Middle East.

Multiple actors are now in the vortex of the reconfiguration: Israel and Türkiye, once allies in the Western alliance, are growing independent of it. Keeping them company are China, Iraq and multinational oil and commercial interests.

The big game-changer for Israel is its turn eastward to secure a place for itself in the emerging configuration of powers in the global economy and politics. In the new arrangement, Israel’s alliance with the West is increasingly one among many multilateral engagements.   

For instance, Israel is presently a major technology partner for China in the context of its Belt and Road Initiative.  To see this, one only has to look at how Chinese perception of Israel has changed. Israeli studies are no longer classified as “enemy studies” but “area studies.” Closer to home, Israel has normalized its relations with the Gulf states and was in process of cementing them before the Gaza War. Saudi Arabia was to be a deterrent against Iran, while securing markets for its high-tech war industries in this security-obsessed region. Israel also has economic relations with Egypt and Jordan as an exporter of gas to these countries—which may explain the rather subdued response of both Cairo and Amman to Israel’s continued bombing of Gaza.

China, annoyed by regional squabbles, circumvented this regional line against, and isolation of, Iran by securing an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore diplomatic relations.   China continues to show its preference to remain above the fray in the present war despite the disruption of shipments of manufacturing goods from Shanghai to Rotterdam across the Red Sea by Houthi forces. Its response took the form of an anodyne statement made by its foreign ministry spokesperson at a press conference[1], urging all sides to play a “constructive and responsible role.” Beijing simply does not want to get involved in the conflict between the Houthis, who control much of Yemen including the capital city of Sanaa, nor does it see itself in competition with theU.S.in securing the safety of the Red Sea trade. It is content to leave the policing to the U.S. and those of its allies who have chosen to take part in Operation Prosperity Guardian.

Regarding Middle Eastern trade corridors and oil and gas pipelines, Israel is in competition with Turkey. Ankara claims to be forming a hub connecting gas pipelines from Azerbaijan, Iran, and Caucuses to the Blue Stream Pipeline from Russia (and extending to the Balkans and the Adriatic Sea). The construction of Blue Stream  led to a close collaboration between Russia and Türkiye in which the former sought to make up for lost sales to Europe. As a step toward energy independence, in 2023 Türkiye  began exploring gas reserves off its Black Sea coast.

While Türkiye has close ties with Azerbaijan (it is an ally of Azerbaijan in itswar with Armenia), so does Israel, which has a major economic presence in the country. Alongside Kazakhstan and countries in West Africa, Azerbaijan provides Israel with oil. Israel achieved independence from foreign gas through discoveries in the 2000s of offshore natural gas reserves on its Mediterranean coast. Presently two major oil fields (Leviathan and Tamar) provide for the domestic market as well as export markets in its immediate neighbourhood.  A projected East Mediterranean pipeline will further allow for the export of Israel’s reserves to southern Europe via Greece and Italy. The status of a third field, Gaza Marine, 20 miles off the Gaza coast is also being considered though Israel expresses concern that it may become a revenue source for Hamas. Confusion over who owns the field (between Royal Dutch Shell which acquired it in 2016 or the Palestinian Authority) has proven a further setback.

Oil companies (including Chevron) operating in Israel’s offshore natural gas fields are among the primary supporters of the Netanyahu governments over two decades, shaping the present regulatory environment. Oil interests are apprehensive about any changes which may be introduced by a successive Israeli government. This may be a factor which the Biden administration will have to take into account in its criticism of Netanyahu and the latter’s defiance. Decisions taken by major shipping companies, including Maersk, to travel round the horn of Africa in order to avoid Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping have driven transport costs up.

Northern Iraq is another region of contention among different powers in the region. The U.S. has long wanted a Kurdish corridor encompassing northern Iraq where an autonomous Kurdish region was established following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, running down to the Mediterranean coast to northern Syria. Kurdish militia recruited and trained by American army officers were successful in ousting ISIS from the region. The militia includes the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist group with a long and painful history of terrorist activity in Turkey, which itself has a significant Kurdish population of 15 million, about 20% of its population[2]. Currently, the Turkish army is fighting the PKK, still under U.S. tutelage, in the northern Iraq-northern Syria corridor, despite Türkiye’s membership in NATO.

The Kurdish corridor includes rich oil fields. Türkiye has an interest in the region’s, a pipeline branching off from the Baku-Tbilsi-Ceyhan Pipeline Project[3]. The pipeline reaches from Azerbaijan via south-eastern Anatolia to Kirkuk (in northern Iraq) where Türkiye has good relations with the government of the Kurdish autonomous region. Israel also has a presence in northern Iraq where it has been reported to engage in real estate purchases since the establishment of the Kurdish autonomous region. [4]

Recently Türkiye has been negotiating with the Iraqi government for an alternative to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which will connect India to Europe via Haifa in Israel, bypassing Türkiye. A furious President Erdogan threatened to part ways with the EU saying, “there can be no corridor without Turkey.”[5] Instead, he has proposed—with the UAE and Qatar —for a transport corridor from Basra in Iraq.[6].

The leaders of Türkiye and Israel were on the verge of a reconciliation, with visits scheduled to their respective countries last September. Now they are at loggerheads, especially in relation to the U.S. veto of a second cease-fire in support of Israel. In response, Erdogan reiterated his position on the necessity for developing countries to be included in the UNSC and to be given voting power, with the motto, “the world is bigger than five.” Using the rules-based international order as a reference, pointing to where those rules fall short but remaining within its bounds, allows Erdogan to stay above the fray in Middle Eurasia politics where differences are increasingly settled through resort to war.

Thus the reality of Middle Eurasia speaks to an environment of intense competition among the developing economies of the region (Israel, Türkiye, Iran, Russia) and their national security imperatives. This is also an environment of strong states equipped with high tech armies and with priorities for domestic economic and social development. These governments can and do take the initiative in their dealings with transnational powers/actors such as the U.S. and China as well as the mega-corporations. There are no fixed camps or stable alliances; interdependencies are formed especially on the basis of economic interests as, for instance, has been the case between Israel and its former enemies of Egypt and Jordan. A new era of ruthlessly pragmatic, extremely fluid relations of overlapping interests is now being established.

About the author: Huricihan Islamoglu is a former Visiting Fellow, Gateway House.

Source: This article was written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

References

[1] “Spokesperson’s remarks,’ Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Gambia, 12 January 2024, http://gm.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/wjbfyrth/202401/t20240112_11222952.htm

[2] Ömer Taşpınar and Gönül Tol, ‘Turkey and the Kurds: from Predicament to Opportunity,’ Brookings, 22 January 2014, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/turkey-and-the-kurds-from-predicament-to-opportunity/

[3] International Finance Corporation, ‘The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline Project.’ September 2006, https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/174011468016223078/pdf/382160ECA0BTC1LOE0201PUBLIC1.pdf

[4] It is not new territory for Israel: Jews had played an important role in Iraq for a century; newly independent Iraq’s first finance minister, Sassoon Ezkell, was a Jew^[4]. That ended after the establishment of Israel and Palestine conflict, and in 1951 about 125,000 Iraqi Jews (over 75% of the population) were flown to Israel to escape persecution^[4].

[5] Atilla Yeşilada, ‘Erdoğan angry at India-Middle East-Europe corridor — ‘no corridor without Turkey’, P.A. Turkey, 14 September, 2023, https://www.paturkey.com/news/erdogan-angry-at-india-middle-east-europe-corridor-no-corridor-without-turkey/2023/

[6]  Alex Blair, ‘Turkey moves against Europe with trade corridor alternative to IPEC,’ Railway Technology, 20 September 2023, https://www.railway-technology.com/news/turkey-alternative-india-middle-east-trade-corridor-plan/?cf-view

By Imran Ahmed and Muhammad Saad Ul Haque

On 5 August 2019, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah announced to the parliament that the President had signed a decree abrogating Article 370 of the Constitution, which had given the people of Indian-occupied Kashmir substantial autonomy. Shah, a close aide of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and one of the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), argued that Article 370 was anti-women, detrimental to the state’s development and the reason behind poverty in the region. He also maintained that “Article 370 was the root of terror in Jammu and Kashmir. It is time for it to go… if it doesn’t go today, we can’t remove terrorism from Jammu and Kashmir.”

Prominent Kashmiri political leaders of the time, Omar Abdullah and Mehboob Mufti, were vocal about their outrage over the government’s decision. Both leaders questioned the legal validity of the abrogation and implicated the BJP in causing further dissent in Kashmir. While the BJP and many of its allies were supportive of the move to abrogate Article 370, the official Congress’ position was to condemn the decision. The Congress’ stance was further echoed at the time by the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party, Janata Dal, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Trinamool Congress Party and the Nationalist Congress party. The abrogation of Article 370 escalated tensions and sparked nationwide dissent. In Kashmir, the government limited political mobilisation and civil liberties, with internet shutdowns and restrictions on medical and educational access. Fast forward to the December 2023 Supreme Court verdict – the atmosphere in Kashmir Valley remains tense.

Zafar Choudhary, a Kashmiri political commentator and author, noted his disillusion stating, “There is no ground left now. There used to be a ground around which the people would revolve now that ground is not there.” The feelings of many Kashmiri Muslim residents towards the Supreme Court verdict are the same as that of the 2019 decision to abrogate Article 370 – fear, anger and shock. According to Irshad Ahmad, a university student from Srinagar, there was an overt threat to the people, and when referring to the government said, “…[it has] retained draconian preventive detention laws, so clearly, Kashmiris have the right to be cynical about whatever the Indian government wishes to do here.”

Kashmiri reactions toward the Supreme Court Verdict are indicative of the uncertain situation on the ground. Perhaps the most pressing issue is the upcoming elections due in April/May 2024. Recent events have eroded trust and confidence in the Indian democratic system. The Supreme Court verdict has also exacerbated local anxieties of state centralisation over Kashmiri matters. Moreover, leading up to the G20 summit in India, Kashmir saw continued scufflesbetween separatists and Indian security services in Srinigar. In the last one year, militants from the valley have increased the frequency of their attacks against Indian security forces.

Despite the BJP’s pledge to create additional job opportunities for Kashmiri residents, the state’s unemployment rate surged to 18.3 per cent at the beginning of this year, surpassing the national average of eight per cent. In December 2023, Kashmir experienced an 80 per cent rain deficit, heightening worries among farmers and officials about water shortages and food security. Currently, there is grave concern among Kashmiris about the effects of climate change on their tourism and agricultural productivity. The winter period, which usually sees a lot of snow that contributes to a tourist industry primarily linked to winter sports, has gradually become less cold which is having detrimental economic implications for the Kashmiris. The unpredictability of the weather is affecting the farmers and fruit growers, and contributing to an increasingly vulnerable agricultural sector.

Additionally, a 2020 domicile law allowing non-Kashmiri residents to settle permanently and own land has raised concerns among Kashmiris that they will be discriminated by these settlers and in effect become second-class citizens. The approaching elections carry significant consequences for Kashmiris. Having navigated an unpredictable political landscape in recent years and grappling with uncertainty regarding their constitutional status, the people of Kashmir find themselves with a lack of local leadership. With the tenure of panchayats in Kashmir reaching their term end, and a call for elections looking unlikely, there are concerns among local village leaders about a lack of representation for Kashmiris to deal with local problems. All these issues contribute to the complex and uncertain future of Kashmir.

• About the authors: Dr Imran Ahmed is a Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research institute in the National University of Singapore (NUS). He can be contacted at iahmed@nus.edu.sg. Mr Muhammad Saad Ul Haque is a research analyst at the same institute. He can be contacted at msaaduh@nus.edu.sg The authors bear full responsibility for the facts cited and opinions expressed in this paper.
• Source: This article was published by Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS)

Iran’s regime goes to great lengths to twist the truth and present a false image of itself. And it spends huge amounts on propaganda efforts to create an illusion of popular support for the despotic rule of the mullahs. Meanwhile, even the regime’s own officials and insiders are warning about the threat of popular uprisings and widespread boycotts in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

These days, different social strata in Iranian cities are demanding basic living standards from the regime. A common slogan that is being repeated in protests is, “We haven’t seen justice, only lies.”

For forty-five years, “only lies” have been used to preserve the regime’s hold on power.

The regime is using the anniversary of the 1979 revolution as an annual showcase of its latest deception and falsehoods. State media and government-affiliated experts predicted that only regime loyalists would participate in the regime’s rallies.

However, this year, the regime broke its own records in staging pro-government rallies and creating an impression of participation. But the reality, as reported by reporters of PMOI website, paint a different picture.

Tehran

February 11, 2024

“At 8:30 am, I took the bus towards the Navvab-Azadi intersection to gather information for my report. When we reached Jomhuri Square, the bus was stopped. They told us to disembark right there. The passengers inside the bus, each preoccupied with their own tasks, began to express their frustration and discontent with the inconvenience. However, it was to no avail. Everyone was forced to disembark, creating a mass of people on the streets. These individuals unintentionally became subjects of the spectacle wherever they went, and the cameras were in pursuit.

“I walked from there to Navvab intersection and then directly from Forsat Street towards Enghelab Street. The streets were filled with officers, both in uniform and plainclothes. They had closed off all the routes leading to Enghelab Street to prevent any vehicle from passing through. I walked a little further and saw a group of people in civilian clothes having breakfast. I entered Enghelab Street and headed towards Valiasr intersection. From the other side of the street, I went towards Azadi Square.

“At that time, there was no news yet. People were being brought in one by one, and they were walking in a procession, in a march. Previously, they would set up stalls on one sidewalk. But this year, both sidewalks were lined with stalls selling sandwiches, lentil soup, and other foods. Those who had come were either members of the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards or students from schools, or they were from the outskirts of Tehran and distant cities, and some were even homeless individuals. Amidst this crowd, I also saw a group of Afghans who had arrived by bus. I had seen their buses in Jomhuri Square and the surrounding streets of Enghelab and Azadi.

“Suddenly, I saw a few young girls born in the 1990s and 2000s walking without the forced hijab. One of them had a short open-front jacket that reached her waist, with a hat and long disheveled hair. Another girl had heavy makeup on, with a style that would have drawn attention if seen on the metro, unequivocally would be beaten to death.

“They had blocked the pedestrian bridges to prevent anyone from going towards the street. This forced people to pass through the makeshift camps set up on the bridges to create the impression of a larger crowd in the middle of the street. I took the escalator between the BRT station and Enghelab Street to go up towards Azadi Square. However, the electricity was cut off, so I had to climb the escalator manually. The pedestrian bridge was right in front of the building of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Some Basij members and plainclothes Revolutionary Guards were standing there, blocking the other side of the bridge, which led to the other side of the street. I filmed scenes from both directions while I was up there. The scenes were quite captivating, with no resemblance to a march or protest. Even the regime supporters and hired participants were fewer compared to the previous year. Afterward, I went back down and walked among the crowd towards the pedestrian walkway.

“They had gathered a group of people, both from themselves and from the outskirts of Tehran. They all rushed to the food stalls, trying to grab as many food items as possible. They eagerly grabbed fruit juices, cakes, lentil soup, porridge, semolina, and anything edible that was available.”

Through these efforts, the regime seeks to display its legitimacy, as acknowledged by its leaders themselves, who admit that the regime’s security depends on the support of the masses and their presence at the ballot boxes. The current situation is very critical for the regime, as it realizes its survival and durability are contingent upon a favorable electoral outcome, which indicates popular acceptance and legitimacy.

These empty and futile tricks no longer have the power to sustain this fragile, bankrupt, and crumbling regime, which has been pushed to the brink of collapse by the relentless blows of uprisings and the presence of rebellious youth. The deplorable conditions prevailing in Iran leave no prospect other than overthrow. The conditions themselves echo the cry for the end of Iran’s calamitous era.

By Tony Schick and Conrad Wilson, Oregon Public Broadcasting

(ProPublica) — It’s a scene police say plays out all too frequently in downtown Portland.

An officer hands someone a $100 ticket for possessing the deadly narcotic fentanyl and a card with a treatment hotline number. Call this number, the officer says, and the ticket goes away. The person caught with fentanyl never calls. The ticket goes unpaid.

“We’ve talked to exactly two people that have actually called that number,” said Sgt. Jerry Cioeta of the Portland Police Bureau. He said last year his bike squad handed out more than 700 tickets “and got absolutely nowhere with it.”

This is the day-to-day reality of Oregon’s unusual experiment in decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl.

Ballot Measure 110, approved by voters in 2020, created a new role for law enforcement in Oregon. While there’s evidence people living with addiction in the state are increasingly finding their way into treatment, the failure to turn police encounters into successful on-ramps to rehab has been cited by critics as prime evidence the measure isn’t working. Oregon lawmakers, noting an ongoing rise in overdose deaths, are now looking to restore jail time for drug possession.

But Oregon’s political leaders themselves played central roles in failing to deliver on the potential for law enforcement to connect people with lifesaving services under the new measure, documents and interviews with a wide array of people involved in the system indicate.

The Legislature, the court system and the bureaucracy under two governors ignored or rejected proposed solutions as seemingly straightforward as designing a specialized ticket to highlight treatment information. They declined to fund a proposed $50,000 online course that would have instructed cops how to better use the new law. They took no action on recommendations to get police, whose leaders campaigned against the ballot measure, talking with treatment providers after decriminalization passed.

Leaders involved in the process pointed to the rapid timeline for implementing the measure amid the pandemic, among other developments, as a factor hindering what they could accomplish.

Both a leading critic of Measure 110 and its most prominent supporter agree that leadership failures took away any chance for Oregon to truly test the measure’s potential.

Tera Hurst, of Oregon’s Health Justice Recovery Alliance, a nonprofit that represents many of the addiction service providers the measure now funds, said law enforcement and providers needed to be brought together to talk in order to translate its vision into reality.

“The people who are literally on the ground were not really engaged in the beginning to say, ‘How do we make this work?’” Hurst said.

Mike Marshall, director of the rehab and prevention advocacy nonprofit Oregon Recovers, said he considered the threat of jail an important motivator and didn’t want voters to pass Measure 110. But once they did, he was dismayed that state officials didn’t step forward to fulfill the measure’s goals.

“They didn’t see that the voters gave them this really imperfect tool but were committed to reducing substance use disorder rates and increased access to treatment,” Marshall said.

“Instead,” he said, “they simply tried to do the least amount of work to administer it to the letter of the law.”

Voters made the broad intent of Measure 110 clear when 58% approved it in November 2020.

“People suffering from addiction are more effectively treated with health care services than with criminal punishments,” the ballot measure declared. The measure emphasized that this new health care approach for people living with addiction “includes connecting them to the services they need.”

The measure earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for treatment and replaced criminal penalties with $100 fines, which would be voided if the recipient underwent an assessment of their rehab needs. Further details were left to the Legislature and the governor.

Hurst, whose group had campaigned for Measure 110, had ideas. 

Three days before the measure took effect in February 2021, Hurst emailed the office of then-Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat in a state where Democrats also dominate the Legislature. 

Hurst’s email contained a “blueprint” for Measure 110 implementation, capturing what her coalition of service providers believed the governor’s staff had agreed to in previous conversations.

The blueprint called for the state agency in charge of training and certifying police to issue a bulletin to all departments laying out how Measure 110 would affect the way officers work.

It called for the state judicial department to print up a specialized new ticket for drug possession, replacing Oregon’s generic “uniform citation” that is used for speeding and other traffic offenses. This one would prominently feature a treatment hotline number and say the fine could be waived after a screening to determine the person’s needs for social or medical services.

And the blueprint said hotline operators should be responsible for notifying the court when a person completed a screening for treatment. 

None of those items in the blueprint came to pass. Police hit the streets with the old traffic citation that said nothing about treatment making the ticket disappear.

Hurst kept trying. She said she had weekly meetings with Brown’s staff in which she urged the governor’s advisers to convene law enforcement, state agencies and treatment providers to figure out how to make the $100 citations work. She recalled raising the issue at least five times, to no avail.

If a collaborative group couldn’t be convened, then Hurst wanted Brown’s office at least to direct the police on the role they needed to play in implementing the law. For example, she recommended informing officers where to find detox beds, peer counseling or other services, and how to guide people to those services.

Brown’s office told The Oregonian/OregonLive in October 2021 that she was “exploring” options such as new police training.

But Oregon’s Department of Public Safety Standards and Training, which trains law enforcement, confirmed in February that it has offered police no instruction on how Measure 110 works other than to update information for new recruits on when drug possession is a violation, misdemeanor or felony.

The Oregon Health Authority, the agency that voters required to “administer and provide all necessary support to ensure the implementation of ” Measure 110, developed no programs to inform police of the expanded services available to people they ticketed.

The agency told OPB and ProPublica its role was limited to “technical and logistical support” for the citizens’ panel that decided how to spend treatment funding. The agency said that under legislation fleshing out details of the citation system after the measure passed, “there is no role for OHA to coordinate with law enforcement.”

Brown addressed the troubled Measure 110 rollout in a 30-minute interview with the news organizations last week. 

The former governor said she supported the initiative but that many factors limited her administration’s options when it took effect in 2021.

Oregon was recovering from its deadliest wildfire season on record. Law enforcement was emerging from violent Portland street clashes that followed the murder of George Floyd and coping with calls for police reform that ensued. COVID-19 vaccinations were finally on their way, and her office chose to focus on supplying shots and reopening schools.

“This initiative, happening when it did, was the perfect storm,” she said.

In addition, Brown said, the measure’s authors didn’t provide Oregon elected officials an adequate framework to make implementation successful.

“This was a theory that was put into practice in a state that was probably one of the least prepared to be successful,” Brown said, noting that before Measure 110 passed Oregon was rated among the worst states for treatment access.

Brown recalled — and Hurst did not dispute — that Measure 110 supporters asked her not to be involved in selecting a citizens’ panel that would decide how new treatment funding should be spent. But she also confirmed her staff met weekly with the measure’s proponents to discuss other aspects of the rollout.

Asked about the specific steps advocates said they urged her to take on the citation system and whether these would have helped, Brown said, “I can’t speak to that.”

In January 2023, the month Brown left office, the Oregon Secretary of State released an audit critical of the Measure 110 rollout. It said the citizens’ panel overseeing new treatment funding had been far too slow in delivering the money and the health authority had not provided the panel with adequate support.

The audit also flagged inconsistencies in how law enforcement issued tickets and a lack of communication with treatment providers. It said “steps to unify the statewide process for issuing class E citations and promoting the hotline should also be taken.”

Gov. Tina Kotek, the Democrat who took over from Brown, defended Measure 110 forcefully during her 2022 campaign and vowed to fix problems with how the measure was implemented.

The health authority under Kotek managed to speed up funding to treatment providers as promised, according to a December 2023 audit by the Secretary of State.

But the same audit found that the problems with the citation and hotline system persisted.

Hurst, of the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, said she gave Kotek the same recommendations as her predecessor. A spokesperson for Kotek, Elisabeth Shepard, declined to address why these steps weren’t followed. Instead, she pointed to expanded funding and oversight for treatment.

Unlike Brown, the new governor did propose new funding to train police about Measure 110. The online course was tucked into Kotek’s first budget at a cost of $50,000.

Lawmakers declined to fund it. They believed any new money should go toward treatment instead, a spokesperson for the Senate Democratic leadership office said recently. 

It wasn’t the only time the Legislature rebuffed some of the same ideas passed over by Oregon’s governors for making decriminalization work.

According to a summary of comments from a series of 2021 meetings on how to implement the measure, a working group of leading lawmakers, law enforcement, health officials and Measure 110 advocates at least briefly discussed additional training for law enforcement.

“Yes to training,” the summary quotes a member from the state Department of Justice as saying. A department spokesperson said the member was Kimberly McCullough, the agency’s legislative director.

“Training is important for officers to have trust in the system,” McCullough said, according to the summary. “I think the more they learn about the purpose of the law and the importance of their role in getting people to an assessment, the better.”

But the group working on the bill to implement Measure 110 ultimately decided against a training proposal, the summary document shows, partly because of cost and partly because members believed law enforcement agencies were already planning their own Measure 110 training.

The next year, 2022, a Senate committee overseeing Measure 110 implementation heard testimony from addiction and drug policy experts at Stanford and Oregon Health & Science universities that the state’s ticketing system was failing to get people into treatment and needed an overhaul. But the committee didn’t take action in response.

Hurst said members of the same committee in 2023 briefly considered granting advocates’ requests to gather service providers and police to develop a better citation system, but that it didn’t happen.

Legislation passed that year mainly focused on speeding up the rollout of treatment services. It also authorized promotional campaigns to raise the visibility of the hotline number, but it did not mandate that police use citations with the phone number printed on them.

To this day, the Oregon Judicial Department — the state’s third branch of government that includes the courts — has not created a specialized Measure 110 ticket. Phil Lemman, deputy state court administrator, said by email that a ticket targeting only Measure 110 violators would require legislative authorization. Lemman said even a change like adding the drug hotline number to the state’s existing traffic citation is a lengthy process requiring state Supreme Court approval. Court officials were also concerned the hotline number might change, he wrote.

The 2023 bill intended to smooth out the implementation of Measure 110 called for state auditors to assess the kind of training law enforcement was getting. It did not offer money for training.

Lawmakers had delivered one change to the ticketing system that advocates sought. A bill passed in 2021 eliminated any penalty for failure to either obtain treatment or pay the $100 fine. 

The combined result of all the legislative efforts on Measure 110 was to leave Oregon with no carrot and no stick to steer people into treatment.

“Hindsight always gives you a better view of what has come before you,” said Sen. Floyd Prozanski, the Senate judiciary chair who led the legislative effort to implement Measure 110, when asked why he and other lawmakers didn’t take further action.

He said lawmakers should have taken more time to set up both outreach and proper incentives for treatment at the outset. 

Oregon could have avoided the problems that ensued, he said, if he and others had acknowledged “We’re not ready for opening up this concept without building the infrastructure that’s needed.”

In the absence of a ticketing system that made sense, the outcome was predictable.

In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.

Part of the bottleneck was that police were not eager to issue citations for drug possession. 

“Why would I do that?” one officer told researchers from Portland State University in 2021. 

Another criticized the $100 fine as being low. “Lower than somebody failing to use a turn signal,” the officer was quoted as saying.

Police gave out only about 2,500 citations a year, compared with the roughly 9,500 arrests they made annually in years before Measure 110.

The problem, Marshall believes, is that nobody told the police why they remained relevant to addressing drug use after Measure 110 passed.

“We never trained the cops on ‘Look, this is the value of we’re going to go from prosecuting people who use drugs to intervening on people who use drugs,’” Marshall said. “‘This ticket system is a process for that. And so let’s get as many tickets out there as possible, and then let’s use that ticket and that interaction to connect people to the services they need.’”

Treatment providers wanted to ensure that when officers issued the occasional citation, they at least had some way to tell recipients about treatment — even if the information wasn’t on the ticket. Lines For Life, the hotline operator, printed its phone number on thousands of wallet cards for the police.

It didn’t go smoothly.

When officials at the Portland Police Bureau placed an order with Lines For Life for 5,000 wallet cards, the organization told them the cards had been sent five months before. 

The police bureau later found them sitting unused.

The Oregon Health Authority has touted a continuous and substantial increase in people accessing treatment for substance abuse disorder in each quarter from 2022 to 2023. Other state and federal treatment statistics from before and after Measure 110 passed seem to show a less consistent rise over a longer period of time, and a health authority spokesperson did not address how to interpret the other data when asked.

But regardless of the bigger picture on treatment, critics began to cite hotline phones that seldom rang and ignored citations as evidence that decriminalization had failed.

By late last year, the backlash gained momentum. Wealthy business owners put $700,000 behind a new ballot initiative to make drug possession the highest level of misdemeanor, punishable with up to a year in jail.

With polls showing public sentiment turning against Measure 110, the governor and lawmakers who’d previously opposed recriminalization warmed to the idea. They developed legislation with a variety of sweeteners for attending treatment while restoring the threat of jail time as further incentive. Kotek has signaled she would sign a bill reinstating criminal penalties.

“People need to be able to walk down the street and make sure people aren’t using drugs in front of them,” Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber told OPB in January. 

“There has been a change in the mood of the electorate,” Lieber said. “They realize that things are not working.”

Measure 110 supporters point to research that says data does not support the idea that recriminalizing drugs would have an effect on Oregon’s rise in fentanyl overdoses. Deaths have been on the same high trajectory as in neighboring states before and after Measure 110 took effect. Many people suggest that Oregon could create other consequences for skipping out on treatment, short of jail.

Or Oregon leaders could implement Measure 110 the way backers say they’ve always wanted.

It might look like the pilot program between police and health workers that was on display in December on a downtown Portland sidewalk. Cioeta, the Portland sergeant who’s been frustrated by how few people have called for help after getting a ticket, was a big part of the effort.

“If we have one person that actually goes into treatment today, that’s one more than the 700 that we’ve had not going to treatment at all,” he said as he set out in a police cruiser to support Portland’s bicycle patrol on the project’s firstday.

The patrol soon encountered a man who gave his name as Joseph, who lay curled in a sleeping bag, sick from fentanyl withdrawal. (The man asked OPB and ProPublica not to publish his full name to protect his medical privacy.)

An officer asked if he was interested in treatment, and Joseph said yes. The officer called a nearby outreach worker from the nonprofit Mental Health and Addiction Association of Oregon, who arrived and sat down on the sidewalk.

“How’s it going, Joseph? My name’s Ryan.”

“I feel terrible, and I’m really cold,” Joseph told him.

The outreach worker placed a call while the police officer stood by watching.

“Ryan, we’ll be right here if you need something,” the officer told the outreach worker.

Within an hour, Joseph buckled himself into a blue sedan that would drive him to detox. 

He completed it and, about a month later, was continuing his recovery in an intensive outpatient program in Portland.

If you have information to share about how police, treatment providers and others are approaching Oregon’s drug crisis, please contact OPB reporter and ProPublica distinguished fellow Tony Schick at aschick@opb.org or 503-977-7784. We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

Source: This article was published by ProPublica

Recent headlines for the January jobs report indicate a robust economy. But a more thorough look reveals challenges for Americans.

One recent headline proclaimed “Voters are finally noticing that Bidenomics is working.” But just 30 percent of Americans think the economy is doing well. When asked who would handle the economy better, people give former president Donald Trump a 22-point advantage over President Biden.

Challenges include increasing part-time employment in recent months, declining household employment in three of the last four months for a net decline of 398,000 job holders, mounting public debt burdens, and declining real wages, which have fallen by 4.4 percent since January 2021. 

Why these results? Bidenomics is based on costly Keynesian boom-and-bust policies. With so much whiplash, it’s no wonder people are conflicted about the economy.

In the latest jobs report for January, a net increase of 353,000 nonfarm jobs from the establishment survey appears robust, as it was well above the consensus estimate of 185,000 new jobs. But let’s dig deeper. 

Last month, household employment declined by 31,000, contradicting the headlines. The divergence of jobs added between the household survey and the establishment survey has widened since March 2022. This period coincides with declining real gross domestic product in the first and second quarters of 2022 (usually that’s deemed a recession, but it hasn’t been yet). Indexing these two employment levels to 100 in January 2021, they were essentially the same until March 2022, but nonfarm employment was 2.5 percent higher in January 2024.

While this divergence mystifies some, a primary reason is how the surveys are conducted. 

The establishment survey reports the answers from businesses and the household survey from individual citizens. The establishment survey often counts the same person working in multiple jobs, while the household survey counts each person employed. This likely explains much of the divergence, as many people work multiple jobs to make ends meet. The surge in part-time employment and more discouraged workers underscores the fragility of the labor market.

Though average weekly earnings increased by 3 percent in January over a year prior, this is below inflation of 3.1 percent. Real average weekly earnings had increased for seven months before falling last month. And there had been declines in year-over-year average weekly earnings for 24 of the prior 25 months before June 2023. These real wages are down 4.4 percent since Biden took office in January 2021.

As purchasing power declines, mounting debts become more urgent. 

Total US household debt has reached unprecedented levels, with credit card debt soaring by 14.5 percent over the last year to a staggering $1.13 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2023. Such substantial growth in debt raises concerns about the current (unsustainable?) consumption trends, business investment, and a looming financial crisis.

The surge in mortgage rates to over seven percent for the first time since December and rising home prices exacerbate housing affordability challenges, particularly for aspiring homeowners. An integral component of what some consider the “American Dream,” housing affordability is a major factor discouraging Americans. 

The euphoria surrounding the January 2024 jobs report is misplaced. Policymakers should heed these warning signs and enact meaningful reforms to address root causes. 

Biden’s policy approach undergirds most of these difficulties. Bidenomics focuses on his Build Back Better agenda that picks winners and losers by redistributing taxpayer money for supposed economic gains through large deficit spending. 

We haven’t seen an agenda of this magnitude since LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s or possibly since FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. Both were damaging, as the Great Society dramatically expanded the size and scope of government, contributing to the Great Inflation in the 1970s, and the New Deal contributed to a longer and harsher Great Depression.

Just since January 2021, Congress passed the following major spending bills upon request of the Biden administration: 

• $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021
• $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in November 2021
• $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022
• $1 trillion Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022

These four bills will add nearly $4.3 trillion to the national debt. But at least another $2.5 trillion will be added to the national debt for student loan forgiveness schemes, SNAP expansions, net interest increases, Ukraine funding, PACT Act, and more. In total over the past three years, excessive spending will lead to more than $7 trillion added to the national debt, which now totals $34 trillion — a 21 percent increase since 2021. There seems to be no end to soaring debt with the recent discussions of more taxpayer money to Ukraine, Israel, the border, and the “bipartisan tax deal,” collectively adding at least another $700 billion to the debt over a decade.

Record debts accrued by households and by the federal government (paid by households) are not signs of a robust economy. This will likely worsen before it improves, as household savings dry up. And with interest rates likely to stay higher for longer because of persistent inflation, debts will crowd out household finances and the federal budget.

The Federal Reserve has monetized much of this increased national debt over the last few years by ballooning its balance sheet from $4 trillion to $9 trillion and back down to a still-bloated $7.6 trillion. This helps explain persistent inflation, massive misallocation of resources, and costly malinvestments across the economy, keeping the economy afloat yet fragile. 

Excessive deficit spending weighs heavily on future generations, saddling them with unsustainable debt levels they have no voice in. Today, everyone owes about $100,000, and taxpayers owe $165,000, toward the national debt. Of course, these amounts don’t include the hundreds of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities for the quickly-going-bankruptwelfare programs of Social Security and Medicare. 

Future generations will be on the hook for even more national debt if Bidenomics continues and Congress doesn’t reduce government spending now. This is why the national debt is the biggest national crisis for America. We’re robbing current and future generations of their hopes and dreams.

Fortunately, there’s a better path forward if politicians have the willpower. This path should be chosen before we reap the major costs of a bigger crisis. I’ve recently outlined what this should look like at AIER. 

In short, we need a fiscal rule of a spending limit covering the entire budget based on a maximum rate of population growth plus inflation. There should also be a monetary rule that ideally reduces and caps the Fed’s current balance sheet to at least where it was before the lockdowns. My work with Americans for Tax Reform shows that had the federal government used this spending limit over the last 20 years, the debt would have increased by just $700 billion instead of the actual $20.2 trillion. That’s much more manageable and would point us in a more sustainable fiscal and monetary direction. 

Together, fiscal and monetary rules that rein in government will help reduce the roles that politicians and bureaucrats have in our lives so we can achieve our unique American dreams. If not, we will have wasted many dreams on Bidenomics that can make things look good on the surface, but cause rot underneath.

This article was published by AIER

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