New Delhi, India – The India-Russia ties have received a boost with a $5bn deal that will see New Delhi buy an S-400 air defence system from Moscow despite looming threat of US sanctions.
The deal to purchase the long-range surface-to-air missile systems was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi.
“The sides welcomed the conclusion of the contract for the supply of the S-400 Long Range Surface to Air Missile System to India,” a joint statement said on Friday.
Manoj Joshi, a foreign policy expert, said the deal was “extremely significant” because of its capability of reaching targets “300km away”.
The US has made a law applicable to third countries so it must find the way out. Otherwise, it risks damaging its relationship with India
Manoj Joshi, foreign policy expert
“It means India can take out an aircraft deep inside Pakistan or parts of Tibet. The prime targets are airborne early warning systems and electronic support aircraft which would have a multiplier effect on the capabilities the other side can field,’ said Joshi from the Observer Research Foundation think-tank based in New Delhi.
“It is also politically important in that it signals that India will not abandon Russia as a supplier because of US pressure.”
Under a new US law, purchase of Russian defence equipment invites sanctions, but New Delhi has pinned hopes on a US waiver.
The law, known as the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), threatens to impinge on India’s massive defence trade with Russia.
Experts say India needs the sophisticated S-400 to fill critical gaps in its defence capabilities [Reuters]
China has already been affected by the sanctions for buying weapons from Russia, including the S-400. US officials have also repeatedly warned NATO ally Turkey against its planned deployment of the S-400s.
Modi and Putin signed eight agreements during the Russian president’s two-day trip to New Delhi. The S-400 systems’ deliveries to India will begin in the next two years.
“Your personal contribution to strengthen India-Russian ties have been invaluable. India places top priority on ties with Russia. In today’s fast-changing world, our relationship assumes heightened importance,” Modi told Putin.
New Delhi’s overtures towards Moscow come at a time when India is also facing the heat of a US trade war through hefty import tariffs.
India places top priority on ties with Russia
Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister
Moscow has long been the main supplier of military equipment to India but in recent years, New Delhi has been inching towards the US and Israel for weapons supply.
Russia is biggest military supplier
Modi’s right-wing government has pursued closer ties with Washington since it came to power four years ago. Relations between India and Russia had taken a backseat.
But Russia still remains India’s biggest military equipment supplier, accounting for 62 percentof India’s total weapons imports during the past five years, according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute.
The deal signed on Friday is a setback to US efforts to “isolate” Russia and it would now have to choose between “punishing” India or agreeing to a waiver.
“This would reinforce the continued strength of a Russia-India partnership even amid a growing US-India relationship,” said Michael Kugelman from the Wilson Centre in Washington.
“The deal would also mark a major setback to any US efforts to undercut Russia. For Moscow, the inking of a major defence deal with one of Asia’s key growing powers is no small matter.”
Earlier this week, the US warned India against buying weapons from Russia, with a US State Department official urging “all of our allies and partners to forgo transactions with Russia that would trigger sanctions under the CAATSA”.
“The US has made a law applicable to third countries so it must find the way out. Otherwise, it risks damaging its relationship with India,” said Joshi.
Future of US-India relations
Security analysts in Asia said US’ threat of sanctions is being seen as bullying and would not really deter deals like the one India just inked with Russia.
“The thing to note is that sanctions will only come into place when India makes payments for these weapons which is not likely to happen till much after the deal is signed,” said Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Foreign Affairs Editor at Hindustan Times.
Washington’s plans to hit Russia’s defence trade aren’t really realistic
Vassily Kashin, the Institute of the Russian Far East
“Since April, India has not made any payments to Russia for weapons purchase. One way out for India could be to sign but not pay, wait to see how it plays out between Russia and the US.”
Analysts say Washington’s response to the India-Russia deal will be a major determining factor of the future of US-India relations.
“If the US takes the dramatic step of punishing India, which it describes as a key strategic partner, simply for concluding an arms deal with one of Washington’s foes, then that could raise questions as to how serious the US really is about its partnership with India,” said Kugelman.
“In all likelihood, Washington will find ways to quietly signal its unhappiness about the deal without damaging a relationship that it takes very seriously.”
India’s relations with the US have also been hit by trade frictions, with New Delhi seeking an exemption from higher tariffs on steel and aluminum imports announced by President Donald Trump administration.
India-US trade ties
New Delhi, incensed by Washington’s refusal to exempt it from new tariffs, decided to counter-impose higher import tariffs on some US goods.
Earlier this week, the US president criticised Indian trade tactics as being protectionist.
“India charges us tremendous tariffs. When we send Harley Davidson motorcycles and other things to India, they charge very, very high tariffs,” said Trump.
On Thursday, Reuters news agency quoted shipping data tracker Kpler to point to a cut down on US crude oil purchases, adding that Indian firms were loading up on Iranian oil ahead of the restart of US sanctions next month.
Both India and Russia continue to trade with Iran despite the threat of sanctions although since June Indian refiners have steadily cut purchases of Iranian crude.
Trade volume between India and Russia in 2017 crossed $9bn and Putin announced the two countries are setting an ambitious target of $30bn by 2025.
Last year, Russian oil major Rosneft purchased Indian refiner Essar Oil – the biggest foreign acquisition ever in India – in a $12.9bn deal.
Strategically, Russia has facilitated India’s membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and endorsed India’s long-held demand for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council.
Moscow is also pushing for India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a club of countries controlling access to sensitive nuclear technology.
“Washington’s plans to hit Russia’s defence trade aren’t really realistic,” said Vassily Kashin at the Institute of the Russian Far East.
“The US demanded from a number of countries to unconditionally limit their own sovereignty in choosing partners in arms trade just because the US said so and threatened sanctions,” Kashin said from Moscow.
“Even if we do not take into account the security and economic consequences of bowing to US demands, it would create a terrible precedent. If you let the Americans make the arms procurement decisions for you once, it will happen again and again.”
Putin shakes hands with Modi ahead of their meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi [Adnan Abidi/Reuters]
India has signed a $5bn deal to buy a Russian S-400 air defence system despite a looming threat of sanctions by the US on countries that trade with Russia’s defence and intelligence sectors.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed the deal in New Delhi on Friday and discussed nuclear energy, space exploration and economics.
The two leaders are expected to ink nearly 20 bilateral agreements in areas such as defence, nuclear energy, space exploration and trade.
The Kremlin said the $5bn missile deal was a “key feature” of the agreements. Officials confirmed the deal was signed, after Putin and Modi made no reference to it during a news conference following their talks.
India, Russia formally ink the deal for S-400 air defence system. The bond between both the nation will attain new heights of development.
India has requested a waiver from US sanctions intended to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea and alleged interference in the 2016 US elections.
However, it is unlikely sanctions will be waived.
India’s PTI news agency quoted a US State Department spokesperson as saying the “S-400 air and missile defence system” would be a particular focus for the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).
CAATSA was passed to sanction any country that trades with Russia’s defence and intelligence sectors.
The US did not spare China from sanctions last month, when it purchased Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile systems and fighter jets.
Experts say India needs the sophisticated S-400 to fill critical gaps in its defence capabilities [Reuters]
A former presidential candidate from Mexico’s Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), which ruled uninterrupted for seven decades, has hinted that the 2006 presidential elections might have been rigged.
Roberto Madrazo has said that according to information he had at that time, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – who was elected president in July – was ahead of former President Felipe Calderon during the 2006 elections.
In a radio interview on Wednesday – a day after the country marked the 50th anniversary of the Tlatelolco student massacre – Madrazo said that while the elections were taking place, he could see Obrador’s lead.
“In my preliminary results, Andres Manuel [Lopez Obrador] was winning,” said Madrazo, who was the presidential candidate for the PRI party in 2006.
But he decided not to talk because he didn’t have the complete information, and also because he believed the political cost would have been really high.
“It would have dynamited the political system and the democratic life of the country,” Madrazo told the radio Telereportaje.
The PRI leader’s revealation has caused a stir in Mexico’s political circles.
“It is a sad surprise for our democracy, to learn 12 years later, that during the 2006 elections there was fraud from the state,” PHD Ruben Capdeville, a mexican analyst, told Al Jazeera.
“The election in Mexico was not respected, and if a government that called itself democratic did not respect the election, that democracy was a mockery, a fraud,” he said.
Calderon launched the war on drugs that has killed more than 200,000 people since 2006 [File: Dario Lopez-Mills/AP]
After the 2006 elections, Lopez Obrador had approached the electoral commission to seek a recount of the votes as his party provided evidence of alleged fraud and dirty campaign practices.
“We cannot accept these results,” Lopez Obrador said back in 2006.
“We are going to ask for clarity. We are going to ask for a vote recount, polling place by polling place,” he said.
His request was rejected as the electoral body declined to order a recount.
The official results showed that Calderon from the National Action Party (PAN) beat Lopez Obrador by fewer than 244,000 votes – or a margin of 0.6 percent.
“If the IFE (the federal electoral body) had taken the decision of making a recount as demanded by [Lopez Obrador‘s party] ballot by ballot, I knew it could have been a favourable result for Lopez Obrador, but that was not my fight, to fight,” Madrazo said.
Lopez Obrador and his party had alleged that some polling stations had more votes than registered voters, the ruling party led by Calderon exceeded spending limits, and a software programme was used to skew initial vote-count reports.
AMLO, as Lopez Obrador is popularly known, staged massive protests, with his supporters blocking the capital Mexico City’s major avenue for weeks.
But his party’s demands of vote recount were rejected.
The PAN party, however, dismissed the vote-fraud allegations.
“I represented my party (PAN) in front of the IFE during those elections, and I can tell you the results were very tight,” Jorge Triana, a mexican politician affiliated to the PAN, told Al Jazeera.
“Those elections, practically, split the society in two halves … the difference was really close, we will always have the doubt on whether there were mistakes in the compute system, or not.
“But to say there was fraud that was impossible, each polling station had observers, we had local observers, international observers, citizens trained and participating,” he added.
We will always have the doubt on whether there were mistakes in the compute system, or not
Jorge Triana, a Mexican politician affiliated to the PAN
On Thursday, former President Calderon said he “won the 2006 election, by a very tight margin but I won”.
In an interview with radio programme, Por la manana, Calderon said that Madrazo’s statements were delicate and that if he has any proof, he should furnish it, the reports can still be reviewed because they are in the files of the electoral body.
But many politicians and commentators still believe the 2006 presidential elections were rigged in favour of the PAN party.
“I was also part of the 2006 elections,” Tanech Sanchez, a member of the Congress belonging to AMLO’s Morena party, told Al Jazeera.
“And at least in the federal district I participated in, we found many irregularities in the numbers in the documentation process, and we raised them and apprised the authorities,” Sanchez said.
The top three Mexican presidential candidates during the 2006 election, Felipe Calderon, left, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, centre, and Roberto Madrazo [File: AP Photos]
A turbid electoral history
People in Mexico have long suspected corruption in the political system. Many could not believe the defeat of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas back in the late 80s.
In 1988, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of Mexico’s popular President Lazaro Cardenas decided to run for president in a leftist alliance against the long-ruling PRI.
He was popular in many parts of the country with enormous crowds coming out to cheer him.
Carlos Salinas won the controversial 1988 presidential elections [File: Photo by Sergio Dorantes/Sygma via Getty Images]
After initial tallies suggested Cardenas may be winning, the government suddenly announced that the counting system had failed.
Later the government declared the PRI candidate Carlos Salinas as the winner.
The episode went down in Mexican history as the PRI’s most notorious case of vote rigging. The party was in power from 1929 until 2000.
“Manuel Bartlett, who was Secretary of the Interior and watchdog during those elections, also pointed out that there was fraud,” Capdeville, the mexican analyst, said.
In 1994, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate from the PRI party was assassinated.
During the 1994 election campaign, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) led an uprising of indigenous people, bringing the issue of democracy, inequality and racism to the electoral agenda.
Colosio promised to address the issues raised by the Zapatistas and spoke passionately about transparency, democracy, aid to poor farmers and for respect for the indigenous communities.
In his election speeches, he advocated for opportunities for the young, for a greater role for women, and criticised the government for abuse of power.
His campaign was well-received and boosted Colosio’s popularity, effectively representing a break with President Salinas’ neoliberal policies and a return to a nationalist and social-welfare policy.
On March 23, 1994, a man later identified as Mario Aburto Martinez, went up to Colosio, who was campaigning in Tijuana and fatally shot him in the head.
Although Martinez, a 23-year-old factory worker, confessed to the crime, many Mexicans believed that he was not the mastermind behind the attack, linking the murder to Salinas.
But there was never solid evidence to prove this allegation.
Ernesto Zedillo from the PRI was announced Colosio’s replacement candidate, who went on to win the 1994 presidential elections.
Vicente Fox’s victory in 2000, marked the first time in 71 years that a non-PRI candidate had won the presidency, leading a lot of people to believe that democracy had finally arrived in the country.
“During 2001 we had a democratic transition,” Sanchez, the Congress member from AMLO’s Morena party, said.
“I believe that his period of alternation were initial steps, but right now we are in front of a period of consolidation, and it is Lopez Obrador’s task to give it a consistency, so we can finally consolidate a democratic system,” he added.
Mexican politician Ernesto Zedillo raises his fist in honour of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was killed during the 1994 election campaign [File: Sergio Dorantes/Sygma via Getty Images]
Fast forward 2018
After two previous attempts, and 12 years of waiting, Lopez Obrador finally took power on July 2 after winning the presidential elections by a landslide, setting the stage for what he called the most left-wing government in the country’s democratic history since Lazaro Cardenas in 1934.
“We did fear the possibility of fraud during these elections,” Sanchez said, as he participated actively with Obrador during the campaign.
“But the victory was so overwhelming, the distance between the first and second place was so big, that the system couldn’t consolidate a fraud,” he added.
Thousands of people celebrated his victory in Mexico City’s Zocalo square, where Lopez Obrador spoke after results were announced.
“The new project of the nation will try to seek an authentic democracy,” he said, in a conciliatory speech.
“I want to go down in history as a good president of Mexico.”
But things are not easy, one of his main challenges are the results of a nationwide war on drugs, that has left about 200,000 dead since 2006, when the then President Calderon ordered the military onto the streets.
“Maybe had Obrador been the winner in 2006, maybe we could have skipped this war that has left so many dead .., ” Sanchez, the ruling party legislator, said.
“We don’t know if history could have played out differently, but now, we have the opportunity to compare. After some years, we will have the opportunity to assess Obrador, and his policies, and see with facts whether he managed to build a different country, with a different vision,” Sanchez added.
Lopez Obrador won the 2018 presidential elections by a landslide [File: Irving Solis Morales/Al Jazeera]
Kigali, Rwanda – Bayingana Mark is trying on a crisp white shirt in Biryogo market in Kigali’s Nyariambo district, known for its small-scale traders selling second-hand clothes from all over the world.
Even when worn over his polo, the button-up shirt is too big, but Mark seems certain about buying it. He takes its off and tucks it under his elbow. Around him the market is overflowing in clothes.
Hundreds of shirts and dresses hang from rails, trousers are folded on wooden tables, while hundreds and thousands of other items of clothing are jumbled on cotton sheets on the floor.
But there are few customers.
Mark, a trader and head of Biryogo market, tells Al Jazeera that the lull is down to a government-imposed tax on imported second-hand clothes last year.
“Since the second-hand clothes tax was implemented in Rwanda, business dried up and most people have lost their jobs here,” 39-year-old Mark says.
“Look at this shirt, yes, it’s second hand, but its quality,” he says, unfolding his purchase.
Bayingana Mark, a trader in Kigali, says that many have lost their livelihoods since the taxes on used clothes were implemented [Azad Essa/Al Jazeera]
While used clothing comes from across the globe, including Europe and China, most originates from the US.
According to USAID, the industry employs more than 355,000 people in East Africa, supporting the livelihoods of 1.4 million people.
But it is also seen as one of the primary reasons local textile industries collapsed in the eighties and nineties.
In a bid to resuscitate local manufacturing, East African governments, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, agreed in March 2016 to increase their tariffs on imported used clothes with the intention of phasing them out by 2019.
In the 2016/7 financial year, Rwanda raised the tax on imported used clothes from $0.20 to $2.50 per kilo and to $4 in the next financial year.
This is a political choice which holds the citizen’s dignity at its centre. We ultimately make decisions for ourselves and the Rwandan people.
Ladislas Ngendahimana, political analyst in Kigal
Reaction has been mixed.
Those supportive of the Rwanda’s government’s bullish ambition to develop local manufacturing see the decision as a boon to their trade.
Traders such as Mark and a seller in Murambi village in southern Rwanda, who didn’t want to be named, say the taxes have made used products unaffordable for most Rwandans.
Around the Biryogo market, an entire network of traders have been affected by the tax.
Tailors who altered used clothes and wholesalers and distributors who transported goods to smaller towns and villages across the country are now without work.
According to those who remain, many left to the DRC or Uganda to continue their businesses.
One female tailor who works outside the main Biryogo market, and who asked not to be named, said her clientele had fallen by 60 percent. “We are battling,” she told Al Jazeera.
A question of ‘dignity’
The Rwandan government says the decision to tax used clothes was not just about money. It was also about reclaiming dignity.
“This is a political choice which holds the citizen’s dignity at its centre,” Ladislas Ngendahimana, a political analyst based in Kigali, says of a “Made in Rwanda” campaign.
“We ultimately make decisions for ourselves and the Rwandan people,” he added.
Clare Akamanzi, CEO of Rwanda Development Board (RDB), says that it is the government’s “belief that our citizens deserve better than becoming the recipients of discarded clothes from the western world. This is about the dignity of our people”.
Rwanda is attempting to shed the “dependency” and “third world” labels and wants tobecome a middle-income country by 2020.
But 63 percent of the population still earnless than $1.25 a day.
Some people don’t have a choice between dignity and necessity. They are too poor to be able to care much about that.
Bayingana Mark, trader and second-hand clothes market manager
Rwanda’s insistence on maintaining the import tax and banning used clothing by 2019 has also ruffled feathers outside the country.
At least 20 percent of all used clothes in Rwanda are imported from the US.
The US has repeatedly warned that should the East African community go ahead with implementing import taxes and eventually banning used clothes, they would lose the benefits of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which allows African countries to export certain items to the US without paying duties.
Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya in 2017 separately retreated from the pact to increase import taxes and ban used clothing. But Rwanda refused to join them.
The Rwandan government has reduced tariffs on imported textiles but tailors say it will take some time before price of production is reduced [Azad Essa/Al Jazeera]
In July, the Trump administration partially suspended Rwanda from the (AGOA), effectively taking away the country’s right to export clothing tax-free to the United States.
In so doing, Rwanda joined a legion others, including Canada, the European Union and China, in facing off with Trump’s increasingly belligerent trade policies.
Ahead of the suspension, President Paul Kagame told local media: “Rwanda and other countries in the region that are part of AGOA, have to do other things, we have to grow and establish our industries.”
Opportunity for tailors
Mukanyarwi Serafina cuts through a section of Kitenge cloth in her small tailor shop in the town of Nyamagambe in southern Rwanda.
Serafina told Al Jazeera that she understood why traders selling second-hand clothes would be aggrieved by the taxes.
“But they will change what they do. I know some who are now collaborating with tailors to sell new clothes,” Serafina said.
The 47-year-old tailor said that the move to emphasise new clothes has “opened our eyes and energised our creativity”.
Mukanyarwi Serafina, a tailor in southern Rwanda, says demand for clothing will increase and is looking forward to expanding her skills [Azad Essa/Al Jazeera]
According to the Akamanzi from RDB, the decision to tax used clothing has already helped develop the local textile and shoe industries. Production has increased from $59.5million in 2015 to $70.6 million in 2017.
“It had a policy objective which we see already producing positive results.”
Similarly, tailors around Kigali city are buoyed by the opportunity.
Ngoye Emmanuel, 50, sits in an upper-floor shop of the market. He says it was only a matter of time before everyone got used to the change.
“I am not saying it is not going to be difficult. But I am confident that is an exciting time,” Emmanuel, who tailors clothes for both men and women, tells Al Jazeera.
Teddy Kaberuka, a political analyst in Kigali described the move as “a strategic decision” aiming at boosting and create sustainable economic development.
“In order to break the chain of economic dependency, each country needs to have a long term policy which aim at creating wealth for the country,” Kaberuka told Al Jazeera.
Ngoye Emmanuel, a tailor in Kigali, is pleased the government is supporting local creatives [Azad Essa/Al Jazeera] [Al Jazeera]
Back in the Nyarugenge market, Sindambije Jacque perches on a stool surrounded by colourful dresses and fabric and fiddles with his old teal-coloured sewing machine.
“It is a big opportunity for tailors,” the 38-year-old says. “But no one seems to know how to tackle it.
“I think they should have prepared and nurtured tailors. I don’t think there is any benefit for Rwandans at all.”
While Jacque understands the demand for self-respect, he says the economy does not run on “dignity”.
“My clientele is not going to change. The costs and the prices will remain the same. These are clothes for the elites. Go ask the villagers, what they going through.”
Can production meet the needs of Rwandans?
The C&H factory in Kigali’s Special Economic Zone is bustling with activity. Hundreds of workers cut fabrics, check labels, operate sewing machines, and carefully monitor the “Made in Rwanda” products for their quality.
Originally starting out as an export-oriented manufacturing plant, with most clients from the US and Europe, this Chinese-owned factory has moved into producing garments for the local market. Since the import tax on used clothing was implemented, orders from the US have decreased.
But custom inside Rwanda has increased. C&H has opened a second plant to deal with the rising demand.
“At the moment, we export 80 percent (to the US and Europe) and 20 percent is for the local market. We hope to act like a catalyst for the local manufacturing sector,” Malou Jontilano, marketing director of C&H, tells Al Jazeera.
The Chinese-owned C&H factory has moved into producing garments for the local market [Azad Essa/Al Jazeera]
The questions surrounding Rwanda’s capacity to mass produce affordable clothing for its population is a legitimate one.
Designers and tailors say that given that textiles are still imported from China, Turkey or elsewhere across the continent like Senegal, prices are likely remain high.
Then is the no-small matter of a skilled labour force, capital investment, dependable electricity supply and technology.
In countries like South Africa, bans on used clothing have not been able to save the textile and garment industry from being washed awayby cheap Chinese imports.
Uwamahoro Delphine, who launched her fashion label DelphineZ in 2016, says she welcomes the opportunity the tax afford to businesspeople like her, but recognised the difficulties traders wouldhave to endure.
“I understand that they need to feed their families. It is expensive to create clothes … but when it comes to pride, wearing second-hand clothes is not something anyone wants to do,” she says.
C&H factory has been exporting ‘Made in Rwanda’ clothing and now hopes to produce more for the local market [Azad Essa/Al Jazeera] [Al Jazeera]
Delphine’s designs are a mix of traditional and modern clothing for men and women. Her boutique in Nyamirambo is a full of shirts, jumpsuits and dresses all stitched in Kitenge cloth. She knows that her clothing isn’t for working class Rwandans and says she can only reduce costs if she can access a larger market.
According to Akamanzi, from RDB, the government is not unaware of the challenges and is trying to bring down the cost of production.
She says that government has removed import duties for fabric brought in by clothes manufacturers.
“Furthermore, the government has established funds to support both production and market access for example, the Export Growth Fund, the Industrial Adjustment Facility and the Business Development Fund,” Akamanzi said.
Efforts were also being made to partner with local businesses to train workers.
Kaberuka, the political analyst, says that although Rwanda has created a conducive environment, it will take time to pay dividends.
“For now, we are far from seeing mass production meeting the needs of the population, but since launching the Made in Rwanda campaign, there is a significant increase of local production year by year; more jobs are created for the citizen and the trend will continue,”Kaberuka says.
But it is going to be an uphill task.
Mark, the trader, is clear in that he is not against the “Made in Rwanda” campaign or the prioritisation of Rwandan goods over used clothes from abroad. For him, it is a matter of choice.
“I believe there should be proper competition between Made in Rwanda and second-hand clothes. Some clothing can be found for less than a dollarwhich you can’t find with locally made clothes.
“Some people don’t have a choice between dignity and necessity. They are too poor to be able to care much about that. “
Almost no one in Illinois had more resources to devote to running for governor than J.B. Pritzker. At 53, Pritzker is the billionaire scion of the state’s wealthiest family. His sister, Penny, served as President Barack Obama’s commerce secretary. The family name adorns the University of Chicago’s medical school, Northwestern University’s law school and the gleaming, Frank Gehry-designed band shell in Chicago’s Millennium Park, not to mention the country’s most prestigious prize for architecture. Four of the dozen richest Illinoisans are Pritzkers, according to Forbes. J.B. Pritzker’s share of the family fortune is estimated at $3.2 billion.
And yet when Pritzker started considering whether to challenge Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner in the aftermath of the 2016 election, he asked himself not only the questions that most would-be candidates do — Could he win? How would running affect his wife and children? His business? — but also a question most candidates never consider: Was it even possible to fix the state he’d lead?
Story Continued Below
Illinois — the sixth-biggest state, by population — has seen its credit rating cut to near-junk status in the decade since the financial crisis. Its bonds are now considered as risky as those of Russia and Romania. Its pension system is in worse shape than that of almost any other state. Springfield, the state capital, has grown so paralyzed that Illinois’ own governor compared the state to “a banana republic.” And a bitter standoff between Rauner, a Republican, and Democrats in the state Legislature has left Illinois more than $7 billion in unpaid bills and a sense among the state’s residents and creditors that Illinois might not be governable anymore.
“The state is on the edge of financial collapse,” says Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a good-government nonprofit in Chicago. What scares budget experts the most is that Illinois is facing a fiscal crisis even as the national economy, and the state’s, is roaring ahead. The unemployment rate in Illinois is 4.1 percent. “If there’s a hiccup in the economy, if there is something that’s unexpected, Illinois does not have reserves to basically weather any economic downturn at this point,” Msall says.
When my parents moved to the Chicago suburbs from Missouri in 1976, Chicago was still the country’s second most populous city. It boasted the world’s busiest airport and its tallest skyscraper. In the decades since, as the state’s finances have eroded nearly to the point of catastrophe, Chicago has surrendered its spot as the country’s Second City (if not the title) to Los Angeles. Its murder rate remains stubbornly high, even as those in other big cities have fallen. Companies and fresh college graduates continue to move to Chicago — but there’s also an unmistakable anxiety about the state’s future, even in casual conversations. When I returned to my hometown of Mundelein, in the far Chicago suburbs, last year for Thanksgiving and caught up with high school friends over deep-dish pizza and beer, one friend who’d just bought a house told me that he and his wife weren’t eager to stick around a state whose future seemed bleak.
Even so, Pritzker decided he wanted the job, and with barely a month to go, the governor’s race appears to be his to lose. An NBC News/Marist poll in August found Pritzker leading Rauner 46 percent to 30 percent; a poll conducted by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute late last month had Pritzker up by 22 points. When Rauner won election in 2014, he spent millions of dollars of his own money on the race, but he can’t outspend Pritzker, who’s given nearly $150 million of his fortune to his campaign. (This time around, Rauner has contributed $50 million to his reelection effort.)
The question, it seems, is not whether Pritzker is likely to be Illinois’ next governor, but why he would want the job. Barring a sharp reversal in the polls, he is on track to coast into office. Once he gets there, however, he’ll be confronted with perhaps the most daunting policy challenges facing any governor in the country. Looming over the campaign is not just the question of whether either candidate has a real plan to fix the state, but whether anyone can. At times, the race has taken on an apocalyptic tone. “Defeating Bruce Rauner is critical to the future of our state,” Roberta Lynch, the executive director of AFSCME Council 31, the state’s flagship public employee union, where she’s worked for more than three decades, told me. “I can’t say I’ve ever really felt that way about an Illinois governor’s race.”
Unlike California, Texas or even Minnesota, Illinois isn’t a state with an especially strong identity. Chicagoans, as well as the millions who live in the city’s suburbs, tend to tell people they’re from Chicago, not Illinois. As Pritzker and his running mate, Juliana Stratton, a state representative from Chicago’s South Side whose self-possessed speaking style calls to mind Michelle Obama’s, roared past 8-foot-high cornfields on their navy-and-yellow campaign bus during a swing through downstate Illinois in August, they seemed at times to be reassuring voters not to give up on their home. “I have spent so much time with J.B. traveling this great state — and it is a great state,” Stratton told a roomful of volunteers in Alton, overlooking the Mississippi River, as if they might have doubts.
Tens of thousands of Illinoisans have already left. The state lost more than 33,000 people — more than any other state — last year, more than 26,000 the year before and more than 20,000 the year before that, according to census data. “I’ve got three brothers and sisters,” said Dillon Clark, a 26-year-old Democrat running for a state House seat whom I met during a Pritzker campaign stop in Taylorville. “They all live in Missouri because they get better jobs over there and they pay way less in taxes.” The state prison system is a big employer in Clark’s rural district. He counted more than a dozen prison guards who, frustrated by frozen wages and lagging back pay during the recent budget impasse have left for better jobs in neighboring states. “A lot of people are just unsure what the future holds for the state of Illinois,” he said.
***
The crux of Illinois’ budget problem is simple: State lawmakers guaranteed Illinois teachers, school administrators, bureaucrats and other state workers generous pension benefits, and then failed year after year to sock away enough money to pay for them. The state constitution, meanwhile, makes it almost impossible for lawmakers to take those benefits away. “You can’t promise what you don’t have money to do,” says James Spiotto, a Chicago consultant who’s an expert on state pension issues. “That’s what we did.”
The state’s paralyzing pension problems have been building for decades. In 1989, Republican Gov. Jim Thompson signed a law, late in his fourth term, promising state workers that their pension checks would grow by 3 percent a year, compounded, no matter what. This guarantee has proved enormously expensive, allowing retired state workers’ pension checks to grow faster than the rate of inflation. In the decades since, Illinois’ governors have made sporadic efforts to shore up the state’s pension funds and found their own ways to shortchange them, sometimes at the same time. Republican Gov. Jim Edgar, for instance, crafted a plan while running for reelection in 1994 to ensure the pension systems would be mostly, but not entirely, funded by 2045. But Edgar’s plan let the state avoid the pain of paying more into the pension funds right away by making the state contribute relatively little to the funds in the short term — while Edgar was still in office — and much more down the road. Decades of failure to save enough to pay state workers’ pensions are now squeezing the state budget. Illinois spent 23 percent of its annual budget on pension contributions in the most recent fiscal year and now owes its pension funds more than $129 billion.
Faced with pension promises they can’t keep, other states have found ways to renege on them, and that’s what Illinois tried to do, too. But unlike most other states, Illinois’ constitution stoically declares that pension benefits, once given, “shall not be diminished or impaired.” In 2013, Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, jammed a bill through the state Legislature designed to slowly repair the state’s finances. Among other provisions, the law scrapped the 3 percent compounded cost-of-living increases for some workers. But the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously struck down the law a year and a half later, citing the state constitution’s guarantee. In an opinion, Justice Lloyd Karmeier showed little sympathy for lawmakers’ efforts to cut pension benefits, calling the pension funds’ enormous shortfalls “entirely foreseeable.” While Illinois may find itself in crisis, Karmeier wrote, “it is a crisis for which the General Assembly itself is largely responsible.”
Rauner, a former private equity executive himself worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was elected in 2014 as a reformer who would scrub Illinois’ government of corruption and restore sanity to its finances. “Illinois has become the worst-run state in America,” he told The New York Times days before his election. “I can really shake it up in a way that a standard politician can’t.” Since then, Rauner has watched almost passively as Illinois’ finances have crumbled even further. He refused to blink during a standoff with Michael Madigan, the longtime state House speaker who’s become his bête noire, that left the state without a budget for two years. Illinois stopped paying many of the doctors, dentists and hospitals that provided care to state workers and Medicaid recipients. State universities saw their budgets slashed. By the time Republican lawmakers struck a deal with Democrats last year to pass a budget over Rauner’s veto, the state had racked up almost $15 billion in unpaid bills and nearly destroyed its credit rating. Illinois was forced to shell out more than $1 billion last year just to cover the interest on the bills it paid late.
“It’s heartbreaking,” says Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. Senate, who has campaigned with Pritzker across downstate Illinois. College towns across the state have suffered because of the state’s fiscal woes, he told me. Cities like Carbondale, home to Southern Illinois University, which might typically have 50 homes for sale, now have 250 on the market, he said, as nervous residents flee. “I used to think it’s going to take us a decade to repair,” Durbin told me. “It may take longer.”
When I asked Pritzker to name the last Illinois governor he admired, he had to reach back two centuries.
Decades of inept governance have eroded Illinoisans’ expectations for their governors. Two of the three governors who preceded Rauner in office have gone to prison on corruption charges. One of them, Rod Blagojevich, is still there after being convicted on charges of, among other things, trying to sell a Senate seat after Obama was elected president. He won’t be eligible for release until 2024. (Pritzker was caught on an FBI wiretap, days after the 2008 election, talking to Blagojevich about the possibility of appointing him as state treasurer, a conversation Rauner has used to batter Pritzker again and again.) When I asked Pritzker to name the last Illinois governor he admired, he had to reach back two centuries. “It’s Governor Edward Coles, who really prevented Illinois, way back in the 1820s, from ever becoming a slave state,” he said. That was a pretty important turn and something that was courageous to do at the time.”
***
Pritzker isn’t the richest man in Illinois. That title belongs to Ken Griffin, the founder of a Chicago hedge fund and one of the most prominent Republican donors in the country. Griffin spent heavily to help elect Rauner in 2014 and has kicked in more than $20 million for his reelection campaign. But Pritzker is rich enough — he agreed this week to repay a $330,000 tax break he received for removing five toilets from a vacant mansion to lower its assessed value — that his campaign has had to devise ways to make him seem relatable.
While two-thirds of Illinoisans live in Chicago and its suburbs, Pritzker has made it a priority to campaign downstate, which is largely Republican. The strategy behind it is twofold, says Anne Caprara, Pritzker’s campaign manager. There are Democrats and swing voters — as well as Republicans frustrated with Rauner — downstate, clustered in the St. Louis suburbs and the small and mid-sized cities spread across the prairie: Rockford, Peoria, Decatur. But campaigning downstate is also a good way to reassure voters worried about electing another vertiginously wealthy Chicago businessman four years after sending Rauner to Springfield. “We took a philosophy very early in the campaign that we were going to send him everywhere,” Caprara said. “And I said to him when we first sat down, I think if there’s one thing that’s going to defeat the idea that you’re not gonna work hard or that you’re just coming into this as a billionaire and don’t bring something else to the table, it’s going to be having people actually meet you.”
Pritzker doesn’t seem like a billionaire on the campaign trail. He’s a big man, with dark, almost preternaturally thick hair slightly flecked with gray, and his girth somehow makes him seem less like one of the country’s richest men. With his booming voice, he almost could pass for a local union boss, if not for the Apple Watch on his wrist.
Pritzker’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Pritzker, was a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant who arrived in Chicago with his parents as a child in 1881 and later founded the law firm that began to build the Pritzker fortune. Pritzker and his descendants spent nearly a century assembling a far-reaching empire that included, over the years, businesses as diverse as Ticketmaster and Royal Caribbean Cruises. In the 1970s, the Pritzkers struck up a partnership to renovate the old Commodore Hotel in New York with a young real estate investor, Donald Trump. Trump later sued J.B. Pritzker’s uncle and the family patriarch, Jay, for $500 million in damages, accusing the Pritzkers of cheating him by using questionable accounting methods. Jay Pritzker responded by telling The New York Times, “If you want to see what kind of partner Mr. Trump is, read his book,” referring to The Art of the Deal.
After Jay Pritzker’s death in 1999, J.B. Pritzker and his siblings and cousins fought over control of the Pritzkers’ $15 billion business empire in a battle that was resolved only when they agreed to divide it among themselves. The arrangement turned even more acrimonious when J.B.’s 19-year-old cousin, Liesel, sued her cousins for cutting her out of the deal. The feud landed the Pritzkers in the pages of Vanity Fair in an article headlined “Shattered Dynasty” and was settled only when Liesel and her brother, Matthew, dropped their suits in 2005 in exchange for $900 million. The bitterness seems to have healed somewhat as the Pritzker empire has been subdivided among the cousins. Matthew Pritzker gave $250,000 to J.B. Pritzker’s campaign in June; J.B.’s sister, Penny, the former commerce secretary, told me she talks with J.B. several times a week to advise him on his campaign. “Frankly, that’s long behind us,” she said.
Jay Robert “J.B.” Pritzker was born far from in Illinois, in California, where his father, Donald, had moved in 1959 to help run the newest Pritzker business, the fledgling Hyatt hotel chain. Pritzker talks on the campaign trail about his early interest in progressive politics, spurred by his parents. “My mother was very progressive,” he told me. “And so many of the candidates that we were out advocating for were — back then the word ‘progressive’ hadn’t taken hold, so everybody called them liberal Democrats.” David Goodstein, the prominent gay rights activist, was a close family friend. Senator John Tunney, the California Democrat elected in 1970, sometimes slept at their house. Pritzker campaigned for Senator Ted Kennedy when he challenged President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primary. After college, he moved to Washington and worked on the Hill for Democratic Senators Terry Sanford of North Carolina and Alan Dixon of Illinois. He met his wife while she was working for Senator Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).
Pritzker had little reason to return to California. His father had died of a heart attack in 1972; his mother, Sue, passed away after struggling with alcoholism a decade later, while J.B. was still in high school. So in 1990, he moved to Illinois, where much of his remaining family lived, for law school and stuck around after graduating from Northwestern. After losing the race for an open House seat on Chicago’s North Side in his early 30s, Pritzker devoted himself to philanthropy, in particular efforts to improve early childhood education, and to building a career in venture capital and private equity with his brother, Tony. He invested early in Facebook and other startups. His work brought him into contact with many of the businessmen who encouraged Rauner to run for governor four years ago. “Virtually everybody who’s been in the Chicago investment community has interacted with both of these guys for years,” Howard Tullman, a longtime Chicago businessman who’s the former chief executive of 1871, the Chicago startup incubator that Pritzker helped found, told me. (He’s also the brother of a Rauner donor, Glen Tullman.) Pritzker’s decision to self-fund his campaign has made their lives easier by letting them avoid choosing sides. “Everybody is stepping very lightly,” Tullman said.
Although Rauner and Pritzker are both part of the elite sliver of Illinoisans who are used to lunching in the wood-paneled dining room of the Chicago Club, their passing familiarity with each other hasn’t led to a gentlemanly campaign. Rauner clearly doesn’t like or even respect Pritzker. “He was one of the guys who sort of loafed it and didn’t really chip into the family, didn’t really help run the family business, where all the wealth was created,” Rauner told me. He doesn’t have anything against the rest of the family, he added. “A couple of them are supertalented and I respect them,” he said. “I mean, they’re very accomplished. He is not.”
***
I met Rauner one afternoon in Springfield, at a campaign office in what appeared to be an abandoned strip mall. He is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and rail thin, with blue eyes and thinning sandy hair. He wore cowboy boots, light-colored jeans, a Western shirt open at the collar and a blazer, as well as an enormous belt buckle engraved with the words “JACKSONVILLE, IL.” He looked a little like the actor James Cromwell did in the 1990s, when he played the police captain in L.A. Confidential.
Rauner has warned that Illinois faces a bleak future if he loses. In one of his TV ads, a narrator laments the power of the Democratic machine in Springfield. Then the camera shifts to a lone Harley-Davidson speeding down a rural road as a defiant guitar comes in. “In spite of the odds, millions of us believe in the future our kids deserve, and the possibilities of this great place we still call home,” the narrator says. The camera cuts to a close-up of the motorcyclist’s leather vest. A yellow patch on the left breast reads “GOVERNOR.” “Now, we have a choice,” the narrator says. “We can leave our future to the same corrupt career politicians, or we can fight.” The Harley comes to a stop and the rider’s black boot kicks down the kickstand. Then he whips off his sunglasses.
“I choose to fight,” Rauner says.
During his first campaign, Rauner talked about “bringing back Illinois” if he was elected — the same promise Pritzker is now making in his own TV ads. I asked him whether he thought he’d brought the state back in his first term. “Well, we’ve made progress on it,” he replied. “But we have a long way to go.” He clearly envies the Republican governors of neighboring states, who, unencumbered by Democratic majorities in their legislatures, have been able to pass more of their agendas. Three of them — Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Eric Holcomb of Indiana and Eric Greitens of Missouri — even cut an ad for Rauner last year in which they praised Mike Madigan, Illinois’ state House speaker, for “blocking Rauner’s reforms” and helping to lure jobs to their states. (Rauner’s campaign stopped running the ad after Greitens admitted to an affair; Greitens later resigned rather than face impeachment.) Those states have managed to get on what Rauner calls “the virtuous side of the cycle,” when, he says, cutting taxes and regulations leads to stronger economic growth. “Then you can cut taxes even more,” he said. Illinois, he went on, is stuck in the opposite kind of cycle: a “death spiral.”
Rauner often seems to be running for reelection not against Pritzker but against Madigan, who’s the longest-serving state House speaker in the country’s history. Madigan, who represents a heavily Democratic district on Chicago’s South Side, has served as speaker for all but two years since 1983 and is also chairman of the state Democratic Party. He is arguably the most powerful politician in the state. Rauner himself has made this argument, telling reporters last year that he was “not in charge” of the state’s government. He’s attacked Madigan during the campaign in terms that might raise eyebrows even in Washington, calling him “one of the most corrupt, corrosive elected officials in America.”
Without miraculously removing Madigan from power, though, there’s little reason to think Rauner’s second term would be any different from his first, in which Illinois’ intractable budget problems have grown only more dire. From 2014, when Rauner was elected, to 2017, the most recent year for which figures are available, Illinois’ unfunded pension liabilities rose by nearly $25 billion, hitting $129.1 billion, according to state data. When I asked Rauner why the state’s pension funds were in worse shape now than they were when he was elected, he didn’t seem to understand the question. “No, I don’t think that’s true,” he said, promising to get me some numbers. Alex Browning, a Rauner campaign spokesman, later said in a statement that the governor had made “incremental changes” to the pension funds such as reducing management fees “that he plans to expand upon in his second term.”
Rauner is no longer running on bringing back Illinois so much as keeping it from getting worse. “A lot of businesses are holding their breath to see whether I can win or whether Pritzker wins,” he told me. These companies — which he declined to name — have “come to me and they’ve said, ‘Bruce, we’re here because you won. We’re here as long as you or somebody like you who’s fighting to make us more pro-business [is governor]. But if Pritzker’s in, we’re gone. We’re out of here.’ Many of those. I can keep them here by winning.”
“I feel like I’m the guy with my hands up against the dike,” Rauner told me earnestly. “My thumbs and fingers are all in the cracks trying to hold back the tidal wave of taxes and regulations and corruption that will just lead us to a bad future. Our children will not have a good future. That’s what’s at stake.”
***
When Rauner was first elected, voters in two other blue states elected Republican governors of their own. Four years later, Governors Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland are leading their Democratic challengers by double-digit margins in their reelection campaigns, in marked contrast to Rauner. “They’re better politicians than he is,” David Axelrod, the Democratic consultant who helped elect Obama and who now runs the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, told me. “He’s so shackled by his ideology that he hasn’t been able to do anything.” Rauner’s unwillingness to compromise, Axelrod said, couldn’t work in a state in which Democrats held big majorities in the legislature.
So instead, Rauner has bet his reelection on convincing voters that Pritzker will raise their taxes without fixing the state’s fiscal troubles any more successfully than he has. It’s not a hard argument to make. Pritzker is running as an unabashed progressive, with the confidence of a Democrat running in a blue state in what’s shaping up to be a Democratic year. He’s endorsed raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and creating a state health insurance program modeled on the “public option” proposed by Obama nearly a decade ago. And he has called for raising taxes on the rich by replacing Illinois’ flat income tax of 4.95 percent with a progressive one similar to the federal income tax, under which people who make more money pay higher tax rates.
To sell the idea — which would need to be approved by voters because it requires changing the state constitution — Pritzker has promised to cut income taxes for “the vast majority” of Illinoisans, including “the middle class and those struggling to get to the middle class.” But he’s refused to say where the cutoff line falls between the middle class and those beyond it, or how much more wealthy Illinoisans would pay. His reticence has generated endless questions from the state’s political reporters and fear among the well-off voters of Chicago and its wealthy suburbs that their taxes will skyrocket. “They’re scared to death of it, because they don’t know what that means in actual numbers,” says Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff under Obama, and a former hedge fund executive, who’s running to replace Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
During a debate in Chicago last month, Pritzker dodged a question and three follow-ups from the moderator, Carol Marin, on what tax rates he envisioned under his plan, saying only that “we need to ask the wealthiest people, like Bruce Rauner and me, to pay a higher rate” while cutting taxes on the middle class. Rauner smirked next to him, ready with a riposte.
“Carol, Mr. Pritzker is dodging your question because he doesn’t want to tell the truth to the people of Illinois,” Rauner said. “He is proposing a massive new income tax hike on all the people of our state. He doesn’t want to talk about it because the truth is so painful and politically unpopular.”
Rauner was right in at least one respect. Illinois’ pension problems have festered for so long that any steps toward genuinely solving them — raising taxes, cutting state services, defaulting on the state’s debt or some combination of the three — will be, as he put it, “painful and politically unpopular.” While Illinois’ fiscal troubles have been building for decades, they have reached a breaking point in the years since the recession strained state budget. “The state’s depleted reserves, ongoing budget deficit, severely underfunded pension systems, backlog of unpaid bills, and lack of political consensus on how to proceed leave it ill-prepared to withstand additional stress,” Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency, wrote in a recent report.
Illinois voters seem to sense intuitively that some measure of pain is inevitable. During one stop in August in Bloomington, a college town in the middle of the state, Pritzker strode into his storefront campaign office to cheers from around 70 Democrats who crammed in the long, narrow room, which had old tin ceilings and beaten-up wooden floors. Pritzker tore into Trump, as he had at other campaign stops, and “his silent partner here in the state of Illinois, Bruce Rauner.” But the state’s fiscal troubles were clearly on voters’ minds. As Pritzker worked the crowd after speaking, Michelle Sleevar, 48, an instructional assistant professor of education at Illinois State University with a freshly inked “Nevertheless She Persisted” tattoo on her right forearm, came up to ask a question. Would Pritzker consider taxing Social Security or other retirement benefits as a way to help balance the state’s budget?
Illinois doesn’t tax such benefits, but most other states do. Some budget experts have suggested it as way to help raise money to ease the pension crisis. But standing on the sidewalk afterward as it began to drizzle — an aide opened an umbrella and held it over his head — Pritzker told me he’d ruled out such a tax. He also doesn’t see the state slashing pension benefits to state workers — perhaps unsurprising, given that their flagship labor union has endorsed him. “I think the workers of the state have been put upon enough,” he said. The state will come up with the money, he went on, to pay them what they’d been promised if he’s elected.
Without any detailed numbers, it’s impossible to say whether Pritzker will be able “to finally get Illinois back on track,” as he says in one of his TV ads, or even to make the gargantuan pension contributions Illinois must cough up each year simply to avoid falling further behind. He has proposed ideas for raising revenue in addition to hiking taxes on the rich — legalizing recreational marijuana and sports betting — but he’s also called for spending more on schools and for cutting local property taxes. The state still has to pay off the billions of dollars in unpaid bills left over from the budget stalemate. None of that will be cheap.
When I pressed Pritzker on how he’d manage to make the numbers work, he suggested, in his easygoing way, that he deserved some credit for campaigning on the politically unpopular idea of raising taxes at all. “I’m sure there are consultants out there who would tell somebody not to talk about that,” he said. “But the reality is that people need to know what the things are that you need to do to fix this state, to get it back on track.”
Pritzker is betting, in essence, that Illinoisans are so sick of living in a broken state they’re willing to raise taxes on themselves — or at least on the richest among them. He wouldn’t be the first governor to win such a bet. In 2012, as California confronted its own crippling budget crisis, Democrat Jerry Brown staked his governorship on persuading voters to approve a $6 billion package of tax increases. The ballot measure passed, and California’s fiscal wounds started to heal. Brown easily won reelection two years later, and the state’s credit rating — which was weaker than Illinois’ as recently as 2012 — has rebounded.
So it’s not impossible. But Pritzker’s bet that he can bend Springfield to his will may not be any more successful than the same wager made by Rauner and so many others before him, Axelrod told me. “I think anyone who gets elected governor at this juncture in our history,” he said, “has to view it as a cause rather than a career.”
Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist treating victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Yazadi human rights activist Nadia Murad have been awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.
The pair received the award for their “effort to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”, Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Nobel Committee, announced at a press conference in the Norweigan capital, Oslo, on Friday.
“Denis Mukwege is the helper who has devoted his life to defending his victims,” said Reiss-Andersen.
“Nadia Murad is the witness who tells of the abuses perpetrated against herself and others. Each of them, in their own way, has helped to give greater visibility to wartime sexual violence”
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the prize last year for its work creating the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Palu, Indonesia – It was two hours before sundown and a dozen or so women, some in full black headdress, stood silently in tears watching the men carry the coffin of a family member, whose body was retrieved six days after a deadly earthquake struck this city.
Moments later, a female Christian pastor led the burial rites, while many in the group gestured in Muslim prayer before the white casket – bearing an image of the Last Supper of Christ on both sides and a small cross placed on top – was lowered in a dirt grave, in a patch of a public land by the hillside overlooking Palu and the bay.
Rismawati Hutauruk, 63, was killed when she fell into a crack in the earth that opened up during the disaster, her sister Irma Frans told Al Jazeera.
Irma said Rismawati died a Christian, leaving behind her husband and their two sons who are Muslims, and three daughters, all Christians; as well as siblings of mixed religions. Irma herself is a Muslim.
On the more conservative Muslim island of Sulawesi, where Palu is located, Rismawati’s family may not be the norm. But in that moment of grief during the funeral, sectarian distinctions were the furthest from the minds of her family members.
Rismawati was among the more than 1,550 people killed when the 7.5-magnitude quake rocked the city of 350,000 exactly one week ago. The powerful temblor triggered a cascade of disasters, including a deadly tsunami and widespread soil liquefaction that buried an estimated 1,000 people and homes, while also igniting fires.
More than 2,500 victims were injured with 70,821 displaced and in need of aid.
Rismawati Hutauruk was killed after plunging into the earth that opened up [Ted Regencia/Al Jazeera]
Deadly quicksand
Citing village leaders, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, Indonesia’s disaster management agency spokesman, told reporters late on Thursday victims of the liquefaction – when a quake turns earth to water – in Palu’s Balaroa and Petobo districts could be as high as 1,000. So far, dozens of bodies have been retrieved from both areas. Rismawati was from Balaroa.
Search-and-rescue efforts continued in the two districts on Friday. But volunteers face difficulties in finding people as the buildings are buried in metres of mud and debris. Heavy equipment also risks getting stuck in the mush resulting from liquefaction.
A hundred metres from Rismawati’s burial site, the government dug a mass grave for many of the unidentified victims of the earthquake.
Under the waning afternoon sun on Thursday, several masked volunteers continued to carry body bags, carefully piling them on top of each other in a deep excavation done by a lone backhoe. The smell of rotting flesh swirled around the site. Volunteers told Al Jazeera at least 74 bodies were buried there on Thursday alone.
After volunteers finished hauling the body bags into the mass grave, Asdar Junaidi, an imam and volunteer from local humanitarian group Dompet Dhuafa, led funeral prayers for the deceased.
Since the mass grave was dug, Asdar told Al Jazeera he has led prayers for more than 300 victims. Volunteers from his group are also involved in the different aspects of the humanitarian operation, including medical services, as well as body retrieval and burials.
Imam Asdar, who is from the city of Makassar, said when he heard of the earthquake in Palu he immediately packed his bag to volunteer, knowing his help was needed. In previous disasters in Indonesia – such as the August earthquake in Lombok, where more than 800 people were killed – he also officiated burials.
“I feel a sense of duty to help. It’s my way to give them some dignity in their death, especially in this kind of situation where nobody is claiming their remains,” Asdar said.
“We feel sad about the situation, but this is the best that we can do – to offer them prayers,” regardless of what religion the victims may have, he added.
Volunteers have had to retrieve and bury hundreds of victims to prevent the spread of disease [Ted Regencia/Al Jazeera]
Burial urgency
Azis Tilu – a first army lieutenant leading military volunteers who is recording the number of burials – admitted to Al Jazeera that no DNA testing was being carried out on victims, meaning they will never be identified.
Because of the advanced stage of decomposition, he said there was an urgency to bury the bodies for health reasons, and there was no time to wait for family members to claim the remains.
Among those who witnessed the mass burial on Thursday was Tere Pratiwi, 39, a volunteer from another Indonesian humanitarian group Komunitas Relawan Kemanusiaan (KRK).
A total of nine volunteer members from Tere’s organisation were killed or remain missing following the disaster.
Tere said the KRK members were at a festival near the coast of Palu when the earthquake and tsunami struck. Two bodies have been recovered, while seven staff haven’t been seen since.
Family members pleaded for her to help find their bodies, so she and two others from the group checked on the mass grave seeking any information, without success.
“I was supposed to be there too, because we had agreed to meet at the festival at 8pm,” Tere told Al Jazeera, her face unable to conceal her feeling of resignation. “Then the earth shook.”
Back at the site of Rismawati’s final resting place, her youngest daughter, Lydia, 11, rested her right hand on the mound of dirt as she said her final goodbye. Tears continued to flow from her eyes.
Lydia’s father, Jamaludin, and her siblings sprinkled water on the dry earth where their mother was buried, and then placed a stick on top to indicate its location.
Follow Al Jazeera’s Ted Regencia on Twitter: @tedregencia
Rismawati’s youngest daughter, Lydia, rests her hand on her mother’s grave and says her final goodbye [Ted Regencia/Al Jazeera]
More than ever, the NFL is an offense-driven league. Points are being scored at a record pace. Fans are being dazzled every week by offensive buzz saws in Kansas City and Los Angeles.
If the first game of Week 5 is any indication, another buzz saw is just getting up to speed. It has a deep receiving corps with both vertical threats and chain-movers. A talented one-two punch at tailback. One of the league’s most dominant tight ends.
And a five-time Super Bowl champion and three-time NFL MVP at the controls.
The New England Patriots have long had few problems with moving the ball or scoring points. Tom Brady threw for 505 yards and three touchdowns in Super Bowl LII—which was a loss.
But when the Patriots beat the Indianapolis Colts 38-24 on Thursday night at Gillette Stadium, we witnessed what may have been the first steps from an offense as good as any they’ve fielded since their undefeated 2007 regular season.
In the first half, it was old-home week. The first pass on the first drive was to slot receiver extraordinaire Julian Edelman, who was making his 2018 debut after he served a four-game suspension for violating the league’s performance-enhancing drug policy.
Charles Krupa/Associated Press
There were also the obligatory throws to tight end and laboratory experiment Rob Gronkowski, but the offensive fulcrum in the first half was Super Bowl LI hero James White. An undermanned, tired Colts defense had no answer for him. The Patriots essentially moved the ball at will, and at intermission they were cruising 24-3.
Had things stayed that way, it would have been just another ho-hum thrashing of an inferior opponent by the Patriots. Business as usual in Foxborough.
But a couple of deflections that turned into Brady interceptions allowed the Colts to get back into the game at 24-17.
That’s when things got interesting.
With about nine minutes left to play and the Patriots driving, Brady dropped back to pass. He waited. Then waited some more. Ate some sort of TB12 sprout sandwich. And then uncorked a jump ball toward the end zone…
Where wide receiver Josh Gordon plucked it out of the air for a touchdown.
NFL @NFL
FLASH!
TB12 goes DEEP to @Josh_GordonXII for the TD! #INDvsNE
There’s been no shortage of discussion about what Gordon could bring to the offense from the moment the Patriots acquired him from the Cleveland Browns on September 18. He demonstrated it in a single play: the ability to win 50-50 balls and hurt teams over the top that no other receiver on New England’s roster has.
The highlights weren’t over. After an Indianapolis interception gave New England the ball back, the Pats intended to chew some clock by running rookie tailback Sony Michel off-tackle.
Michel had other ideas—like punching it in for a second straight 34-yard score that put the game out of reach.
NFL @NFL
SONY MICHEL!
34-yard TD run for the rookie RB. #GoPats #INDvsNE
All told, it was a 439-yard offensive explosion in which a handful of players made substantial contributions.
Michel finished with 110 total yards and that score. Edelman’s first game since New England’s last Super Bowl victory resulted in seven catches for 57 yards. White caught 10 passes and found the end zone. Gordon averaged 25 yards a catch. Gronkowski caught six passes for 75 yards.
And then there’s Brady, who threw for 341 yards and three touchdowns and had a rushing score.
The scary part? Gronkowski told the NFL Network’s postgame show that the new-look New England offense is only getting started,
“Just having Edelman come back in this past Monday; he brought the juice,” Gronkowski said. “He brings the juice to the locker room. And that’s what we needed…having Julian underneath. Having Josh Gordon out there. We’re just coming together. We’re just starting to click now. We just gotta keep working hard. Going out to the practice field to develop chemistry with each other and bring it out to the game.”
Charles Krupa/Associated Press
Gronk’s right. The team needed juice. In consecutive losses to Jacksonville and Detroit, New England’s offense looked listless and predictable. Opponents were bracketing Gronkowski and collapsing on White.
The last two games have been a different story, though. A horror story for opposing defensive coordinators.
The Patriots can hurt you in too many ways. Play a soft zone, and Brady will happily chew you to pieces with short passes to White and Edelman—just as the team did in the first half against Indy. Get aggressive against the short stuff, and it’s single coverage for Gordon and Chris Hogan (remember him?).
That isn’t a good way to defend Gordon. As he showed Thursday, sometimes even when he’s covered, he isn’t covered.
And now, as if all that isn’t bad enough, Michel is an emerging talent who can gash teams on the ground.
There’s no way to defend all those weapons at once. And the Patriots have a decision-maker behind center who just so happens to be arguably the greatest quarterback in NFL history.
Think he’s going to find the weak spot? Exploit the area you’ve left vulnerable?
Yeah. Me too.
Steven Senne/Associated Press
This isn’t to say the Patriots are a juggernaut destined to play in yet another Super Bowl. The Chiefs and Jaguars will still have much to say about that. And a New England defense that surrendered 439 total yards to the Colts remains an issue.
But the Kansas City defense makes New England’s bunch look like Jacksonville’s stout unit. And the Jaguars have been inconsistent on offense. Never mind that Blake Bortles and Patrick Mahomes aren’t Tom Brady, who threw his 500th career touchdown pass in Thursday’s win.
After those losses to the Jags and Lions, there were the proclamations and questions that come every time the Pats stumble early in the year. The dynasty is dead. What’s wrong in New England? All that good stuff.
Given what we saw against the Colts, this year’s stumble is no different from the rest—in that it wasn’t as severe as we thought and quite temporary. The Patriots have done what the Patriots always do: They’ve gotten up off the mat and gone back to the business of winning football games.
This year, they’ve done so with an offense that combines old talent and new. Weapons at every level. Conducted by one of the best to ever do what he does.
What’s wrong with the Patriots, on offense at least, is nothing.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Brazil’s far-right presidential frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro has skipped a final television debate in favour of a one-on-one interview just three days ahead of the country’s national and state-level elections.
Bolsonaro’s appearance on Thursday on Rede Record marked his return to the campaign trail after being stabbed while canvassing support last month.
Rede Record is owned by an Evangelical bishop who has publicly backed the former army captain’s bid for office. The interview, which took place at Bolsonaro’s home, coincided with the final pre-election presidential debate at broadcasting competitor Globo Television’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro.
Bolsonaro, who claimed that he couldn’t attend the debate due to his medical condition, vowed to unite the country that he said was divided by the leftist Workers’ Party (PT).
A self-styled political outsider, Bolsonaro has consistently topped opinion polls in the run-up to Sunday’s election and is projected to win up to 35 percent of the vote, according to Datafolha polling institute.
He has made several discriminatory comments on race, gender and sexual orientation and a number of remarks expressing support for the country’s former military government – in power from 1964-85 – which have angered and alarmed tens of millions of Brazilians.
Fernando Haddad, the leftist PT’s replacement candidate for widely popular jailed former president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, is in second place, according to the projection, with about 22 percent support.
If no candidate wins an absolute majority on Sunday, a second-round vote between the top two performers will take place on October 28.
‘Took audiences away’
Fabio Vasconcellos, a coordinator at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) higher education institute, said Bolsonaro’s move on Thursday had two significant effects.
“First it took audiences away from the debate [on Globo] and over to Rede Record, where he was able to speak freely without his adversaries present. It also made his main opponent Fernando Haddad the target of other candidates present at the debate,” Vasconcellos told Al Jazeera.
Haddad, for his part, appeared keen at the Globo debate to direct attention away from Bolsonaro and focus instead on shoring up his support among the PT’s predominantly working class electoral base.
“We are going to get back the reigns of the country. We need to diminish the taxes on the poor and improve the economy to generate more jobs,” said Haddad.
Brazil’s economy has struggled to break out of a fiscal malaise which has weighed on the country since last year when it emerged from its worst recession in recorded history.
More than 12 percent of Brazilians – nearly 13 million people – are jobless, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
‘A third way’
In the debate, other candidates chose a different approach and several asked voters not to succumb to polarisation, which has swelled during this election.
Bolsonaro and Haddad have rejection rates that stand at at least 40 percent, according to Datafolha.
Ciro Gomes, Geraldo Alckmin and Marina Silva – a trio of centrists who have all run for the presidency at least once before and are in third, fourth and fifth respectively according to projections – all appealed to voters to support neither of the two candidates.
Collectively, the trio is not expected to win more than 23 percent of the vote.
“The biggest problem in Brazil right now is that we have two opposite points of view the ones who support Lula on one side and the ones who support Bolsonaro,” Gomes said.
Marina Silva, meanwhile, said she represented a “third way” for the electorate.
“We saw Gomes trying to position himself as an alternative to Bolsonaro and Haddad, with Silva also adopting the same discourse against polarisation,” Vasconcellos said.
“[And] Alckmin was focusing on targeting the PT.”
Ciro Gomes is trailing in third place behind Haddad in Bolsonaro in opinion polls [David Child/Al Jazeera]
Undecided voters
The Globo event traditionally marks a critical moment within Brazilian presidential election cycles, as it is the last debate prior to first-round voting.
Bolsonaro’s no-show is unlikely to weaken his “impenetrable” electoral base but it could reduce his chance of winning support from until now undecided voters, according to Alessandra Alde, a political scientist at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.
“There are voters who are with him no matter what and it is unlikely they would change their mind,” said Alde. “But there is still a portion of voters who are undecided, [and] Bolsonaro not showing up may be poorly viewed by this electorate.”
About five percent of voters, according to Datafolha, are yet to make up their minds on who to back for the country’s highest political office.
About 147 million people are expected to vote on Brazil’s presidency and more than 1,650 other national and state level positions. Participation is compulsory for all “literate” citizens aged 18-70.
There were gasps aplenty when the Los Angeles Dodgers tabbed Hyun-Jin Ryu to start their postseason run rather than longtime ace Clayton Kershaw.
Ryu made sure no gasps turned into angry shouts.
All it took were seven shutout innings over the Atlanta Braves in Game 1 of the National League Division Series on Thursday at Dodger Stadium. With help from home runs by Joc Pederson, Max Muncy and Kiké Hernandez, Ryu walked away from a 6-0 Dodgers win with his first postseason victory since 2013.
Like that, whatever controversy there was over the Dodgers’ snub of Kershaw went out the window.
Mind you, calling it a “snub” was a stretch. For while Kershaw understandably expected to get the ball in Game 1, manager Dave Roberts insisted the ace left-hander came around as soon as the reasoning was spelled out.
“He obviously wanted to pitch Game 1, and expected to,” Roberts said, according to MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell. “But after talking to him and explaining our thoughts, he accepted it, and he just said he’ll be ready to go for the second game.”
Kershaw would have been starting on his regular four days of rest if he’d gotten the Game 1 assignment, but his splits show his regular-season effectiveness went up as his rest increased.
If that holds, Kershaw may turn in a performance to rival Ryu’s in Game 2 Friday. If not, he might get another shot at the Braves in the event of a Game 5. He wouldn’t be on extra rest, but starting him on regular rest in Game 5 beats starting him on short rest in Game 4.
It’s also not as if Kershaw offered a better matchup against the Braves than Ryu. If anything, the opposite was true.
Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
Courtesy of his three National League Cy Young Awards, MVP, five ERA titles and numerous other accomplishments, Kershaw has a reputation as the best pitcher of his era that precedes him.
And yet it’s an open secret that he’s not invincible anymore. The 2.73 ERA he posted in 2018 was his highest since 2010. He’s downplaying a fastball that no longer has above-average velocity. Likewise, his strikeout rate was barely above average this season.
For his part, Ryu has also been downplaying a low-velocity fastball since he reclaimed his status as a regular in the Dodgers rotation in 2017 after two years that shoulder surgery ruined.
He nonetheless put up a 1.97 ERA in 15 starts this season. His walk and home run rates were basically equal to Kershaw’s, and he struck out 9.7 batters per nine innings to Kershaw’s 8.7.
So while Roberts isn’t likely to come out and say it while he and Kershaw are still inhabiting the same planet, Ryu is arguably a better pitcher than Kershaw right now.
Moreover, the 31-year-old promised the approach needed to silence Atlanta’s bats out of the gate.
As MLB Network’s Tom Verducci alluded to during Thursday’s broadcast, Braves hitters like to swing their bats. They had the highest swing rate of any National League team, and they especially loved hacking at first-pitch fastballs (meaning four-seamers and two-seamers):
When it comes to first-pitch fastballs, Kershaw and Ryu couldn’t be more different. The former led with heat 64.4 percent of the time. The latter? Only 41 percent.
Ryu didn’t budge from this formula against the Braves in Game 1. Only 10 of his 25 first pitches (40 percent) were fastballs, and only a handful were in the strike zone:
Image courtesy of BaseballSavant.MLB.com
Braves hitters never got comfortable against Ryu’s backward, inside-out approach. They mustered four hits off him and walked zero times. Ryu struck out eight.
For now, it’s good enough for the Dodgers that Ryu’s mastery led the way to a 1-0 series lead. What could make Roberts’ call look even better in hindsight is if it has a positive effect on Kershaw in Game 2.
It’s fair to question (as Jon Weisman did at Dodger Thoughts) whether Kershaw’s terrible postseason track record is actually that terrible. But everyone and their uncle knows it’s not good, which has to do with how he’s never taken the mound in October under anything less than a glaring spotlight. Only Kershaw himself knows for sure, but it’s fair to wonder how much responsibility that pressure bears for his past failures.
This time, however, things will be a little different when Kershaw takes the bump at Chavez Ravine on Friday.
Nobody will expect the lefty to get the Dodgers off on the right foot. He must only continue what Ryu started. That’s less of a tall task. It may only help him improve on his recent playoff debuts—see his 6.69 ERA in four NLDS Game 1s between 2014 and 2017.
If so, people will have to think twice before second-guessing any further surprises from Roberts.
More importantly, the Dodgers’ 1-0 lead could turn into a 2-0 lead.
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