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stoweboyd · 5 years

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2019-01-23 - Daybook

There's so much passing my desk, I can't keep up.

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Panic is on the agenda at Davos – but it’s too little too late | Aditya Chakrabortty

Pity the poor billionaire, for today he feels a new and unsettling emotion: fear. The world order he once clung to is crumbling faster than the value of the pound. In its place, he frets, will come chaos. Remember this, as the plutocrats gather this week high above us in the ski resort of Davos: they are terrified.

Whatever dog-eared platitudes they may recycle for the TV cameras, what grips them is the havoc far below. Just look at the new report from the summit organisers that begins by asking plaintively, “Is the world sleepwalking into a crisis?” In the accompanying survey of a thousand bosses, money men (because finance, like wealth, is still mainly a male thing) and other “Davos decision-makers”, nine out of 10 say they fear a trade war or other “economic confrontation between major powers”. Most confess to mounting anxieties about “populist and nativist agendas” and “public anger against elites”. As the cause of this political earthquake, they identify two shifting tectonic plates: climate change and “increasing polarisation of societies”.

In its pretend innocence, its barefaced blame-shifting, its sheer ruddy sauce, this is akin to arsonists wailing about the flames from their own bonfire. Populism of all stripes may be anathema to the billionaire class, but they helped create it. For decades, they inflicted insecurity on the rest of us and told us it was for our own good. They have rigged an economic system so that it paid them bonanzas and stiffed others. They have lobbied and funded politicians to give them the easiest of rides. Topped with red Maga caps and yellow vests, this backlash is uglier and more uncouth than anything you’ll see in the snow-capped Alps, but the high rollers meeting there can claim exec producer credits for the whole rotten lot. Shame it’s such a downer for dividends.

[...]

I can think of no better metaphor for the current disarray of the Davos set than the fact that Emmanuel Macron – surely the elite’s platonic ideal of a politician, with his eyes of leporid brightness, his stint as an investment banker and his start-up party – cannot attend this week’s jamboree because he has to stay at home and deal with the gilets jaunes. It’s a bummer when the working poor spoil your holiday plans.

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How Companies Secretly Boost Their Glassdoor Ratings | Rolfe Winkler and Andrea Fuller let us in on the Glassdoor secret: any game will be gamed.

Glassdoor has become an important arbiter of employee sentiment in today’s highly competitive job market. A Wall Street Journal investigation shows it can be manipulated by employers trying to sway opinion in their favor.

[...]

In the summer of 2017, SpaceX recruiter Brittany Jacobson sent emails encouraging employees to post reviews in order to make Glassdoor’s “Best” list, said a person familiar with the effort. Workers were offered free SpaceX mugs for completing their review, said the person.

That followed a push in 2016, according to a second person, who said that SpaceX’s human-resources chief, Brian Bjelde, had taken notice of negative reviews that complained about SpaceX’s long hours and poor management.

SpaceX employees flooded Glassdoor with 180 five-star reviews in October 2016. In most months that year, it earned less than a dozen five-star reviews. It had other spikes in 2017 and 2018.

Some months with high numbers of reviews came after interns were recruited, according to the first person familiar with the effort. They provided more than 84% of five-star reviews in July 2016 and in August 2017. Glassdoor allows users to filter out certain employee categories, such as interns and contractors.

Ms. Jacobson took credit for the campaigns on her LinkedIn profile, writing that she executed “company-wide employer branding campaigns” on Glassdoor, increasing the number of reviews by more than 1,000, raising the company’s overall rating to 4.4 stars from 3.8 and resulting in SpaceX landing on Glassdoor’s “Best” list two years in a row.

Same story with SAP, Bain, etc.

#wfd

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I Have a Dream | John Hagel

#readlater

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The Real future of the Platform Economy: Citizen Entrepreneurship and a Market Reset | Simon Cicero

#readlater

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Thingification | Euan Semple's glorious brevity:

The process of thingification (turning a useful idea into the latest thing and thereby rendering it useless) appears unstoppable. In the context of work it happened with collaboration, innovation, and creativity. It is even happening with disruption! It happened with blogging, it happened with YouTube, it's happening with podcasting.

All these potentially powerful attempts at building a new world using new tools being rendered safe by assimilation into the old.

Is this inevitable, or can we each do our bit to stop it happening? Being careful with our use of language, particularly jargon. Checking our intent and resisting bandwagons. Ignoring the most blatant attempts at cooption and manipulation.

Every time someone calls themselves a "social media influencer" an angel dies.

Snap.

#wfd

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CEOs' curbed confidence spells caution | PwC's 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey shows that 2018's confidence has run into headwinds [emphasis mine]

Reality check -- Last year saw a record jump in optimism regarding global growth prospects in 2018, and this exuberance translated across regions. This year, by contrast, saw a record jump in pessimism, with nearly 30% of CEOs projecting a decline in global economic growth, up from a mere 5% last year. CEOs also reported a noteworthy dip in confidence in their own organisations’ revenue prospects over the short (12-month) and medium (three-year) term. If CEOs’ confidence continues to be a leading indicator, global economic growth will slow down in 2019.

Look inside-out for growth -- Across the survey rang a general theme of hunkering down as CEOs adapt to the strong nationalist and populist sentiment sweeping the globe. The threats they consider most pressing are less existential (e.g. terrorism, climate change) and more related to the ease of doing business in the markets where they operate (e.g. overregulation, policy uncertainty, availability of key skills, trade conflicts). When asked to identify the most attractive foreign markets for investment, CEOs are narrowing their choices and expressing more uncertainty.

Mind the information and skills gaps -- In addition to the fault lines developing geopolitically, CEOs are working to bridge the gaps in their own capabilities. Organisations are struggling to translate a deluge of data into better decision making. There is a shortage of skilled talent to clean, integrate, and extract value from big data and move beyond baby steps toward artificial intelligence (AI). One of the more striking findings in this year’s survey was the fact that — despite billions of dollars of investment and priority positioning on the C-suite agenda — the gap between the information CEOs need and what they get has not closed in the past ten years.

Uh-oh.

See CEOs Freak Out, in process.

#wfd

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I've fallen behind on Esko Kilpi's contributions:

Living with paradoxes – Esko Kilpi – Medium

Biology, Blockchains and Quantum Physics – Esko Kilpi – Medium

I am not I – Medium

#readlater

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Design Unbound. Designing for Emergence in a White Water World | Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown

I need to get a review copy

#readlater

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Crisp's Blog » Bootstrapping a Working Agreement for the Agile Team | I like this approach to consent-based voting.

#wfd

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Using Neuroscience to Make Feedback Work and Feel Better | David Rock, Beth Jones, and Chris Weller:

Research has found roughly 87 percent of employees want to “be developed” in their job, but only a third report actually receiving the feedback they need to engage and improve. The reason for the gap is hardly a mystery: Typical feedback conversations are about as pleasant as a root canal. Managers dread them because it’s often unclear what kind of feedback the employee wants or needs, and employees dread them because even light criticism can feel like an assault on their status and credibility. Indeed, West and Thorson’s new study found that receivers’ heart rates jumped enough to indicate moderate or extreme duress in unprompted feedback situations.

[...]

Research is suggesting that by switching from giving feedback to asking for it, organizations can tilt their culture toward continuous improvement.

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Psychologists have come to label this phenomenon “brittle smiles.” It happens when people try to adhere to a “culture of niceness,” as West calls it, even though they really want to speak or act more candidly and critically. So they overcompensate. They smile too much and become overly positive in their speech.

To West’s mind, asking for feedback is the best way to avoid brittle smiles and the culture of niceness. “When you ask for feedback, you’re licensing people to be critical of you,” she says. “It may feel a little more uncomfortable, but you’re going to get honest, more constructive feedback.”

[...]

West says it’s up to employees to equip their managers with the right kinds of questions — a help-them-help-you approach to feedback, she says. These can include “Could you please give feedback on my presentation skills?” or “Should I have spoken up more in yesterday’s meeting?” The tactic helps managers avoid what relationship psychologists call “kitchen sinking.”

In kitchen sinking, “You say one thing that sucks, and then you pile everything else on that sucks,” West says. When employees ask for explicit feedback, they give their manager clearer boundaries.

[The essay also includes a pull quote on Mental Contrasting, that is a good standalone takeaway.]

#wfd

#feedback #mentalcontrasting

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After the Storm | Ben Ehrenreich

The son of Barbara Enrenreich

#readlater

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“The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging | A long, sad story with no real lessons to be learned.

#livejournal

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US government v Silicon Valley: Oracle said to owe $400m to women and minorities | Technology | The Guardian

#readlater #wfd

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How leaders are navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution | Deloitte

A year ago, Deloitte’s inaugural survey assessing private and public sector readiness for the Fourth Industrial Revolution observed a “tension between hope and ambiguity.” We found while executives conceptually understood the profound business and societal changes Industry 4.0 may bring, they were less certain how they could take action to benefit. The Fourth Industrial Revolution enables an increasingly globalized world, one in which advanced technologies can drive new opportunities, diverse ideas can be heard, and new forms of communication may come to the fore (for a detailed definition of Industry 4.0, see What is Industry 4.0?). But how are leaders adjusting? Our new survey suggests many who think they are ready may still not be as prepared as they need to be. But the good news is leaders seem to be gaining a much deeper understanding of Industry 4.0, are increasingly aware of the challenges before them, and are viewing the actions needed to succeed more realistically.

Our latest survey polled more than 2,000 C-suite executives across 19 countries, coupled with select interviews. The goal was to uncover how leaders are taking effective action, where they are making the most progress, and what sets the most effective leaders apart.

Executives express a genuine commitment to improving the world. Leaders rated “societal impact” as the most important factor when evaluating their organizations’ annual performance, ahead of financial performance and customer or employee satisfaction. In the past year, three-quarters of respondents said their organizations took steps to make or change products or services with societal impact in mind. Many are motivated by the promise of new revenue and growth, but leaders are split on whether such initiatives can and will generate profit.

Executives are struggling to develop effective strategies in today’s rapidly changing markets. Faced with an ever-increasing array of new technologies, leaders acknowledged they have too many options from which to choose and, in some cases, they lack the strategic vision to help guide their efforts. Organizational influences also challenge leaders as they seek to navigate Industry 4.0. Many leaders reported their companies don’t follow clearly defined decision-making processes, and organizational silos limit their ability to develop and share knowledge to determine effective strategies.

Leaders continue to focus more on using advanced technologies to protect their positions rather than make bold investments to drive disruption. Although many of the businesses that have made investments in technology are seeing payoffs, others are finding it difficult to take the step toward investing—even as digital technologies are engendering more global connections and creating new opportunities within new markets and localized economies. Challenges include being too focused on short-term results and lacking understanding, business cases, and leadership vision. Leaders acknowledge the ethical implications inherent with new technology, but few companies are even talking about how to manage those challenges, let alone actively putting policies in place to do so. Further, business leaders and governments continue to wrestle with how to regulate Industry 4.0 technologies.

The skills challenge becomes clearer, but so do differences between executives and their millennial workforces. Last year, most leaders (86 percent) thought their organizations were doing enough to create a workforce for Industry 4.0. This year, as more leaders recognize the growing skills gap, only 47 percent are as confident in their efforts. On the bright side, twice as many leaders indicate their organizations will do what they can to train their existing employees rather than hire new ones. And they’re more optimistic than last year that autonomous tech will augment, rather than replace, humans. But research from Deloitte Global’s annual millennial survey suggests leaders and employees (particularly younger ones) differ on which skills are most needed and who is responsible for developing them.

I guess all the consulting companies are writing reports for Davos.

#readlater

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#daybook

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nebris · 5 years

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The first global city

High in the Andes, Potosí supplied the world with silver, and in return reaped goods and peoples from Burma to Baghdad

In 1678, a Chaldean priest from Baghdad reached the Imperial Villa of Potosí, the world’s richest silver-mining camp and at the time the world’s highest city at more than 4,000 metres (13,100 feet) above sea level. A regional capital in the heart of the Bolivian Andes, Potosí remains – more than three and a half centuries later – a mining city today. Its baroque church towers stand watch as ore trucks rumble into town, hauling zinc and lead ores for export to Asia.

Elias al-Mûsili – or Don Elias of Mosul, as he was known – arrived in 17th-century Potosí with permission from Spain’s Queen Regent, Mariana of Austria, to collect alms for his embattled church. Potosí silver, Don Elias believed, would stave off the Sunni Ottomans and Shiite Safavids who battled for control of Iraq, periodically blasting Baghdad to smithereens with newly scaled-up gunpowder weapons. Just as worrisome to Don Elias were fellow Christians, schismatics with no ties to Rome.

The great red Cerro Rico or ‘Rich Hill’ towered over the city of Potosí. It had been mined since 1545 by drafted armies of native Andean men fuelled by coca leaves, maize beer and freeze-dried potatoes. When Don Elias arrived a century and a quarter later, the great boom of c1575-1635 – when Potosí alone produced nearly half the world’s silver – was over, but the mines were still yielding the precious metal.

By 1678, native workers were scarce and the output of the mines dwindling. Yet in the city’s royal mint, Don Elias marvelled at piles of ‘pieces of eight’, rough-hewn precursors of the American dollar, fashioned by enslaved African men. He saw them ‘heaped on the floor and being trampled underfoot like dirt that has no value’. For a long time, Potosí’s medieval technologies kept producing fortunes, if on a smaller scale.

On Potosí’s main market plaza, indigenous and African women served up maize beer, hot soup and yerba mate. Shops displayed the world’s finest silk and linen fabrics, Chinese porcelain, Venetian glassware, Russian leather goods, Japanese lacquerware, Flemish paintings and bestselling books in a dozen languages. Votive African ivories carved by Chinese artisans in Manila were especially coveted by the city’s most pious and wealthy women.

Pious or otherwise, wealthy women clicked Potosí’s cobbled streets in silver-heeled platform shoes, their gold earrings, chokers and bracelets studded with Indian diamonds and Burmese rubies. Colombian emeralds and Caribbean pearls were almost too common. Peninsular Spanish ‘foodies’ could savour imported almonds, capers, olives, arborio rice, saffron, and sweet and dry Castilian wines. Black pepper arrived from Sumatra and southwest India, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, cloves from Maluku and nutmeg from the Banda Islands. Jamaica provided allspice. Overloaded galleons spent months transporting these luxuries across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. Plodding mule and llama trains carried them up to the lofty Imperial Villa.

Potosí supplied the world with silver, the lifeblood of trade and sinews of war – and as Don Elias knew, the surest means to propagate the Roman Catholic faith. In turn, the city consumed the world’s top commodities and manufactures. Merchants savoured the chance to trade their wares for hard, shimmering cash. The city’s dozen-plus notaries worked non-stop inventorying silver bars and sacks of pesos, loaded onto grumbling mules for the trans-Andean trek to the Pacific port of Arica or for the much longer four- to six-month haul south to Buenos Aires. In the rainy season rivers swelled, and in the dry season livestock died of thirst between scant watering holes.

Mule trains returning from the Pacific brought merchandise and mercury, the essential ingredient for silver refining. Most mercury came from Huancavelica in Peru, but the Spanish Habsburgs also tapped mines in Almadén (La Mancha) and Idrija (Slovenia). From Buenos Aires came slavers with captive Africans from Congo and Angola, transshipped via Rio de Janeiro. Many of the enslaved were children branded with marks mirroring those, including the royal crown, inscribed on silver bars.

Soon after its 1545 discovery, Potosí gained world renown, but central European mines also flourished after 1450, faltering only before Potosí hit its stride in the 1570s. Silver was discovered in Norway in the 1620s, but not enough for export. The Iwami silver mines of southwest Japan, developed in the 1520s, exported substantial silver via the port of Nagasaki after 1570, first by the Portuguese and then, between 1641 and 1668, by the Dutch. The main exporters of Japanese silver however were the Chinese. Scholars dispute the numbers, but Iwami was not quite another Potosí.

As early as the 1530s, Mexico exported silver too, and considerable amounts of it. Yet Mexico’s many mining camps – Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Taxco, Pachuca, Real del Monte and the namesake San Luis Potosí – peaked only after 1690. In the 18th century, the Mexican peso or ‘pillar dollar’ took the world by storm. Even in the Andes of South America there were other silver cities (or towns) besides Potosí, including Oruro and Castrovirreyna in Peru. But no silver deposit in the world matched the Cerro Rico, and no other mining-refining conglomeration grew so large. Potosí was unique: a mining metropolis.

Thus Don Elias, like others, made the pilgrimage to the silver mountain. It was a divine prodigy, a hierophany. In 1580, Ottoman artists depicted Potosí as a slice of earthly paradise, the Cerro Rico lush and green, the city surrounded by crenellated walls. Potosí, as Don Quixote proclaimed, was the stuff of dreams. Another alms seeker, in 1600, declared the Cerro Rico the Eighth Wonder of the World. An indigenous visitor in 1615 gushed: ‘Thanks to its mines, Castile is Castile, Rome is Rome, the pope is the pope, and the king is monarch of the world.’ A 1602 Chinese world map identified the Cerro Rico as Bei Du Xi Shan, or ‘Pei-tu-hsi mountain’.

For all its glory, Potosí was also the stuff of nightmares, a diorama of brutality, pollution and crime. What Don Elias might not have known in 1678 was that Potosí’s reputation – and with it the Spanish Empire’s – had a generation earlier suffered mightily. In 1647, amid royal bankruptcy, King Philip IV dispatched a former inquisitor to unravel a massive debasement scheme that had metastasised inside Potosí’s royal mint. The plot corrupted nearly every official within 1,000 miles. Even Peru’s viceroy was suspected of complicity. Potosí’s debased coins, mostly pieces of eight, hit world markets after 1638, and before long merchants from Boston to Beijing were rejecting Potosí coins. The fountain of fortune had become a poisoned well.

It took more than a decade to hunt down and punish the great Potosí mint fraud’s culprits and to restore the coinage to proper weight and purity. A new design debuted to signal the new coins, but winning back global trust in Potosí silver took decades. Into the 1670s, even as Don Elias took donations in exchange for sermons in Syriac, Sumatran pepper-growers balked at coins stamped with a ‘P’.

Like the Bernard Madoff scandal of the 2000s, the Potosí mint fraud of the 1640s tells an interesting if not universal story. Nobody wanted to admit that they had been deceived. For Spain’s King Philip IV, the mint fraud – an inside job – was a world-class embarrassment and a sign of the decline of his empire’s fortunes. The global flood of bad coins hurt everyone, rich and poor. Genoese, Gujarati and Chinese bankers suffered ‘haircuts’, merchants worldwide forfeited precious ties of crosscultural trust, and soldiers throughout Eurasia saw their pay halved or worse.

Almost a century before Don Elias visited Potosí, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo revolutionised world silver production. Toledo was a hard-driving bureaucrat of the Spanish empire – and he more than any single man transformed Potosí from a hardscrabble mining camp into a bona fide city. It was a colossal undertaking, but one suited to the ambitions of King Philip II, the first European monarch to rule an empire upon which the sun never set. Toledo reached Potosí in 1572, anxious to flip it into the empire’s motor of commerce and war.

By 1575, the viceroy had organised a sweeping labour draft, launched a ‘high-tech’ mill-building campaign, and overseen construction of a web of dams and canals to supply the Imperial Villa with year-round hydraulic power, all in the high Andes at the nadir of the Little Ice Age. Toledo also oversaw construction of the Potosí mint, staffed full-time with enslaved Africans. Its first coins were hoarded, higher in silver content than they were supposed to be, and overweight.

Toledo’s successes came with a steep price. Thanks to the viceroy’s ‘reforms’, hundreds of thousands of Andeans became virtual refugees (those who survived) and, in the search for timber and fuel, colonists denuded hundreds of miles of fragile, high-altitude land. Implementation of a new technology, mercury amalgamation, introduced from Mexico on the viceroy’s orders, fouled the region’s air and streams. The city’s smelteries belched lead and zinc-rich smoke, guarantees that its children would suffer lifelong stupefaction.

Environmental hazards multiplied as the city boomed, and with these ills came murderous social conflicts, vagabondage, sex-trafficking, gambling, political corruption and general criminality. Epidemics swept the city every few decades, culling the most vulnerable. How did people respond to this lawlessness and chaos? How could they live in such an iniquitous and foul place? In what might be termed the ‘Deadwood paradox’, bonanza brought out the worst in people even as it also provoked startling acts of liberality. It was, after all, the city’s generosity, its profligate piety, that brought Don Elias to Potosí, all the way from Baghdad.

The Habsburg kings of Spain cared little about Potosí’s social and environmental horrors. Potosí silver, for them, was an addiction: deadly and inescapable. For more than a century, the Cerro Rico fuelled the world’s first global military-industrial complex, granting Spain the means to prosecute decades-long wars on a dozen fronts – on land and at sea. No one else could do all this and still afford to lose.

A steady flow of Potosí silver – or, rather, the promise of silver futures – rendered the Spanish Habsburgs’ otherwise absurd dreams possible. Then, all of a sudden, it didn’t. Even before the mint fraud of the 1640s, which helped bankrupt the crown, large quantities of Potosí silver slipped away, siphoned off by the empire’s friends and enemies alike: foreign bankers, contraband traders, pirates. At the same time, silver’s abundance stunted other parts of Castile’s internal economy. Some joked that the Habsburgs had discovered the magic formula for turning silver into stone.

The great Potosí bonanza, source of price disruptions, fiscal crises and costly building projects all over Europe, mostly fuelled commercial and imperial expansion in Asia. Throughout the 17th century, Dutch, English and French merchant-colonists, followed by a few intrepid Italians and Scandinavians, jockeyed with each other and with the embattled Spanish and Portuguese for a space at the great Asian table. All that Asia wanted, beyond tips on gun design, was silver. Europeans steered or inflected some of this pan-Asian trade and empire-building, but not most of it.

Often forgotten were the many thousands of Asian and African merchants and bankers based in Mombasa, Mocha, Mosul, Gujarat, Aceh, Makassar, Canton and many other port cities, including European-controlled Goa, Batavia, Madras, Macau and Manila. In the 17th century, these ‘country traders’, as Europeans called them, moved and lent more Potosí silver than all Europeans combined. Chinese diasporic trading communities in Southeast Asia alone controlled a large share of this global business.

Asian emperors were another matter. Mughals such as Akbar and Shah Jahān, or the Safavid Shahs Abbās I and II, or the Ottoman Sultans Murad III and IV, ruled tributary states whose size and diversity more than matched the empires of the Iberians. Northern Europeans, Dutch ambitions notwithstanding, were far behind. Just as the Spanish Habsburgs began squaring off against the French and English, the ‘gunpowder’ monarchs of the Middle East and South Asia scooped up satellite kingdoms and principalities, propelled to a degree by Potosí silver.

And what about China? As the Potosí mint fraud reverberated, the Ming Dynasty collapsed. The tipping point came in 1644, but the historic Qing takeover was hardly instantaneous. Both Qinqs and Mings spent massively as China’s economy shuddered from war and famine. Ming subjects scrambled for slivers of silver to ward off invading soldiers or to buy passage to freedom. Even a debased peso was a gift of heaven.

When Don Elias visited in the 1670s, Potosí had seen better days. But it was without qualification a global city, a site of suffering but also of wonder, a showcase of technological innovation and cultural sophistication. In the 1970s, proponents of dependency theory, most famously Eduardo Galeano in Open Veins of Latin America (1971), held up Potosi as the tragic exemplum of third-world underdevelopment, a hollowed-out periphery. Yet in its own day, Potosí was a recognised centre. A 1640 manual by Alvaro Alonso Barba, its great metallurgist, was translated and republished for centuries. Numerous painters, poets and playwrights made the city home. In the decades before the great mint fraud, potosinos challenged the king, proclaiming that he (and the world at large) needed them more than vice versa.

The end came not as spectacular implosion but as irreversible decline. Lower taxes and the imposition of a harsher labour regimen lifted silver production in the later 18th century, but the mines were deep and mercury expensive. Technological fixes failed. Simón Bolívar reached a beaten-down but jubilant Potosí in 1825, but British capitalists – close on the Liberator’s heels – could not revive the mines. It was local entrepreneurs and smallscale miners and refiners, many of them indigenous, who kept Potosí alive to the end of the 19th century using archaic but trusted technologies, including the methods of Barba.

By the time that the American historian Hiram Bingham visited the former Imperial Villa in 1909, Potosí had less than a 10th of the population it had boasted three centuries before. A colonial precursor to Bingham’s 1911 ‘discovery’ of Machu Picchu, the old Imperial Villa struck the professor as a silent spectre, not a typical US ghost town but rather a ‘super-sized’ object lesson in the vanity of Catholic Spain’s global ambitions. By this time, mineral rushes had helped to produce cities such as San Francisco and Johannesburg, but nothing quite compared for sheer audacity with the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a neo-medieval mining metropolis perched in the Andes of South America.

Today, almost 500 years after its discovery, Potosí’s Cerro Rico continues to supply the world with raw metals, a bit of silver and tin, but mostly lead and zinc. Half-processed ores wend their way through town and across the mountains and the Altiplano, to refineries in China, India, South Korea and Japan. The city has grown considerably in recent decades, now surpassing its colonial population (and severely straining its water supply). Has Potosí come full circle or is it stuck in the same rut? Will the sale of metallic mud to Asian manufacturers do more for ordinary folks than what was done by the silver-hungry Spanish, British or Yankees?

Potosí remains a globally connected city, a cog in the world economy, a regional magnet for migrants, a space for self-reinvention. Yet recalling its Habsburg heyday, the Imperial Villa of Potosí was famous not only for its mineral bounty but also for its artistic production, its political heft, its piety. Despite their own troubles, the city’s inhabitants gave Don Elias a small fortune in silver to fund his quixotic project in ‘Babylon’. Potosí also remained infamous for its pollution, its round-the-clock workingman’s horrors, its perennial violence, its corruption. Potosí was a mountain of silver that changed the world even as the world changed it. After five centuries of globalisation and exploitation, we can look back on this unique city’s history and ask what, in truth, it means to be ‘worth a Potosí’.

https://aeon.co/essays/potosi-the-mountain-of-silver-that-was-the-first-global-city

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oselatra · 6 years

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Battling to retake Arkansas's 2nd Congressional District

Combs, Dunkley, Tucker and Spencer battle to take on Republican incumbent French Hill in Arkansas's 2nd Congressional District.

The much-touted blue wave expected nationally is unlikely to hit Arkansas this election cycle. Republicans have supermajorities in the state House and Senate and hold all seven constitutional offices and the state's six congressional seats. Democrats are expected to make gains in the state legislature, but not even the most hopeful party faithful expect Dems to retake control of either chamber. All the Democratic candidates running for constitutional office are seen as long shots. Ditto for most of the congressional races. There's pretty much one realistic shot for Arkansas to offer its own ripple in the blue wave: the 2nd Congressional District.

There, both national and local party leaders and members of the insurgent populist wing of the party see a golden opportunity to return the district to Democratic control for the first time in almost a decade. Odds still favor U.S. Rep. French Hill of Little Rock, the two-term Republican incumbent, but national prognosticators like the Cook Political Report have moved the seat from "Likely Republican" to "Lean Republican" in recent months.

That's partly because Democrats have performed better than expected in special elections in similarly red districts across the country. In March, Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb scored a narrow upset in a Rust Belt congressional district that President Trump won by almost 20 percentage points in 2016. In April, a race in a reliably red House district in suburban Phoenix, Ariz., turned out to be surprisingly close: Though Republican Debbie Lesko won by five points, Trump's margin of victory in 2016 was 21 points.

The president's party is typically vulnerable during midterm elections, and the toxicity of Trump's personal brand among Democrats and many independents may motivate high turnout among voters opposed to the president. Trump remains very popular among Republicans, but he's not on the 2018 ballot. The same politics of division and resentment that Trump exploited to win the White House is now fueling intense enthusiasm within the Democratic base — as evidenced by the crowded primary field in Arkansas's 2nd District.

Four Democrats are running for the chance to take on Hill (Libertarian Joe Swafford of Maumelle is also running for the seat). State Rep. Clarke Tucker, who was recruited by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which identified the district as one the party could flip, is the clear frontrunner. The other three candidates — Paul Spencer, a teacher and activist; Gwen Combs, a teacher and activist; and Jonathan Dunkley, director of operations at the Clinton School of Public Service — each peg themselves as more progressive than Tucker and brand him as an "establishment" candidate. They also speak disparagingly about the DCCC, which has taken licks in progressive circles for forcefully inserting itself in Democratic primary contests. A victory in the primary for Tucker will end the same way it did for Conner Eldridge, Pat Hays, Mark Pryor, Mike Ross and other recent moderate Democratic candidates, they say — with a loss in the November general election.

A May 6 poll from Talk Business/Hendrix College found Tucker favored by 41 percent of the likely Democratic primary voters. Trailing him were Combs with 11 percent, Spencer with 10 percent and Dunkley with 6 percent. That left 32 percent who did not know. The big question ahead is whether Tucker can grab enough undecided voters to top 50 percent and avoid a run-off on June 19. Early voting began May 7. Election day for the primary is May 22.

Like many other Democratic primaries across the country, the 2nd District contest echoes the 2016 matchup between Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.). But the four-way nature of the race somewhat complicates the "establishment vs. outsider" narrative seen in other places. The Sanders-leaning wing of the party has so far failed to coalesce around a single alternative to Tucker. Maybe that's because many Democrats in Arkansas are still Clinton loyalists and favor a more moderate candidate, or maybe it's simply because progressive activists are less well-organized here than other places.

Whoever prevails will face a candidate in Hill who is likely to have a massive campaign war chest, but also one who has done nothing to separate himself from an unpopular president. Hill voted to end the Affordable Care Act, supported the tax plan that provided an income tax cut bonanza to corporate America and voted against supporting disaster aid for Puerto Rico. That won't hurt him with the Republican base, but it could be a different story with independents. An April poll from Public Policy Polling — a Democratic firm — showed Hill's margin of support fell slightly when voters were presented with information about the failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the GOP tax cut bill.

In two elections, Hill has never won his home county. Pat Hays, the former mayor of North Little Rock, received 54 percent of the vote in Pulaski County in his race against Hill in 2014. In 2016, despite having little name recognition and money, former Little Rock School District board president Dianne Curry earned 50 percent in the county. Political scientist Jay Barth, who writes a column for the Arkansas Times, has imagined a narrow potential pathway to victory for the successful Democratic candidate. It would take a massive Democratic turnout in Pulaski County, which might be helped by interest in a crowded Little Rock mayoral race, and successfully peeling away suburban voters in places like Conway, Bryant and Searcy who've grown disillusioned with a party led by Trump.

Combs, Tucker, Dunkley and Spencer each say they're the candidate who can chart that course in November.

Money is the root of all political evil

Paul Spencer and French Hill attend the same church. They've known each other for 18 years, the amount of time Spencer has taught history and American government at Little Rock Catholic High School for Boys. Hill is an alumnus of Catholic, and he and Spencer each have sons who are seniors at the school. (Spencer doesn't teach either boy.)

Spencer said he'd always thought of Hill as "sensible in a lot of ways. But after he got elected, I think a lot of his sensibilities went away." Spencer said he doesn't know why Hill, who was opposed to Trump in the presidential primary, "drank the Kool-Aid" and supported the president's agenda.

"To say, 'Go ahead and repeal and replace [the Affordable Care Act],' and pass this crazy tax plan and don't say anything about the travel ban? ... The only thing I can assume is the promise of greener pastures." Hill, who was a banker before joining Congress, had been rumored to be under consideration for deputy secretary of the treasury and a spot on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Spencer is running for Congress because he believes big money has corrupted American politics. Every major issue today can be viewed through that lens, he said. Take the Republicans' attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act: "That's not an insurance issue, it's a money in politics issue," Spencer said. "If you want clean water, you got to get the money out. If you want clean elections, you got to get the money out."

Spencer, 51, grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, where the steel industry dominated the local economy. "Everything was unionized — AFL-CIO, United Mine Workers," Spencer said. "When mills would go on strike, the bus drivers would go on strike, the schools would go on strike. I learned the value of solidarity very early in life. When you come from that labor kind of background, a lot of time that's all you have."

Spencer said his father, a mechanic in a small diesel garage, used to send him out to the highway with a five-gallon bucket to pick up coal that fell off trucks headed to the mills to use to heat the family's house. "We didn't live in good straits growing up. No one really did in that town. We didn't realize we were poor until someone around us pointed it out."

Drumming was his escape. Spencer spent years as a professional session musician in Boston and Pittsburgh, making more than he does now as a teacher. But he longed to be a professor and got his B.S. in anthropology from Franciscan University in Steubenville, where he met his wife, an Arkansas native. They moved to Arkansas in what was supposed to be a quick stopover. That was 19 years ago. Spencer and his wife have three teenage sons. They live on 15 acres in Scott, in a house they built together. They grow pecan trees and raise honeybees.

This is Spencer's first bid for office, but he's been an activist since 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that political spending is protected under the First Amendment in the Citizens United case.

"I remember I woke up after the Citizens United decision and said to myself, 'This is a real piece of shit.' If you cut your teeth on the Constitution, you know how it's supposed to work. Then you see the potential for unfettered spending in elections, and you wake up in this cold sweat."

Spencer said he "never made a conscious effort to get involved [in activism]. It's just like you see someone drowning, you jump in and save them." He became involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement in Little Rock in 2011, lecturing the group on the same topics he teaches in American government classes — "the Constitution and corporate personhood and things like that."

His time with the Occupy movement led him to chair Regnat Populus, a ballot question committee named after the state's motto, "the people rule." It sought to put a wide-ranging ethics law on the ballot that would have limited the effects of money on politics. It failed to make the ballot after a paid canvassing firm did not gather the number of signatures needed to place the measure before voters.

Spencer later worked to influence the passage of Amendment 94 to the Arkansas Constitution, which banned direct corporate contributions to state candidates and extended the amount of time former legislators must wait to serve as lobbyists. (The law left a few massive loopholes, which Spencer has been critical of.) Spencer also worked with primary opponent Tucker on an ethics package Tucker sponsored in the General Assembly. Spencer said he admires Tucker, but believes that by accepting money from political action committees and by working with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he's abandoned important values.

"What I teach my kids is that anybody who wants to serve their country can do it," Spencer said. "It shouldn't be predicated on the small nucleus of insiders from Washington, or the Heights for that matter, who anoint you. We shouldn't have to go through the tollgate of democracy to do what we want to do to serve our communities, and I think that's what the DCCC has become, unfortunately."

Spencer, whose website is cantbuypaul.com, has made the refusal to accept donations from PACs a centerpiece of his campaign. So far he's raised $251,479 from more than 4,000 donors across the country, according to the most recent campaign finance records, filed March 31. He's spent $131,155 and has $120,324 cash on hand.

Spencer's fundraising has been substantially helped by his inclusion in the Great Slate, a fundraising campaign started by Tech Solidarity, a 501(c)4 organization of tech workers, largely from the San Francisco Bay Area. The Great Slate includes 10 first-time "progressive" candidates with day jobs, "an excellent campaign team, and a clear path to victory in a poor, rural district." In the first quarter of 2018, the Great Slate raised $753,865 for the candidates. David Simon, the creator of HBO's "The Wire" and "The Deuce," also hosted a fundraiser for Spencer and a few other like-minded candidates in New York and has contributed $4,000 to Spencer's campaign. Spencer had never heard of Simon before.

That fundraising haul has allowed him to hire a campaign staff of 17 and pay canvassers $15 per hour, in keeping with his call for a $15 federal minimum wage.

Spencer has advertised widely online and in print, but spokesman Reed Brewer said the campaign would not run TV ads. "The effectiveness of television ads in recent elections — especially primaries — has been proven to be marginal at best, and a waste of funds at worst," he said.

Spencer has rolled out extensive additional policy proposals. He supports Sanders' Medicare for All bill, universal housing vouchers for households with income of less than $54,000, the elimination of $1.4 trillion in student debt and establishing a system of banking within the U.S. Postal Service to reach the 88 million Americans who lack the minimum amount of money to open an account at a traditional bank

All of those proposals would stimulate the economy and pay for themselves, Spencer said. Eliminating the layers of profiteers that siphon away Americans' health care dollars before they reach medical providers — including insurance companies, lawyers, lobbyists, pharmacy benefit managers and advertising agencies — and moving to a single-payer health care system would especially be a boon, Spencer said, saving the country, by his estimate, around $500 billion annually.

Spencer has pledged that, if elected, he would only serve for three terms and then return to teaching and farming. That he doesn't have further political ambitions makes it easier for him to advocate for average Arkansans through policies that, while unconventional, would dramatically improve their lives, he said.

Meanwhile, Combs and Dunkley cite Spencer's position on abortion as disqualifying.

Spencer is pro-life. "I believe that human life begins at conception and I believe that an unborn child is a human being," he said. Poverty is responsible for some 40 percent of abortions, he said. "I can work to fight poverty; I have no desire to fight against the law that is already on the books now in regard to abortion."

Spencer said he supports the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funds from being spent on abortion except to save the life of a woman or in cases of rape or incest. He also said he supports banning abortion at fetal viability, wherever "medicine determines." (The viability threshold is almost inevitably a political determination as well as a medical and scientific one. Courts have generally determined viability to be between 24 and 28 weeks, though some state legislatures, including Arkansas's, have successfully defined viability at 20 weeks.) Spencer said he supports Planned Parenthood and would not vote to deny it Medicaid funding.

Spencer said Democrats in Arkansas understand his position. Some have said, "You can't have any opposition to abortion, or you're dead in the water," Spencer said. "That [attitude] might work in Brooklyn, but it's not going to work here." He said he's encountered a lot of Democrats outside Pulaski County in the 2nd District who are pro-life.

Marching on

Gwen Combs said she's running for Congress because she believes we need to return to a more representative democracy.

"I believe in government of the people, for the people, and we just don't have that in Washington now. I'm the only woman, the only veteran and the only [public school] teacher running for this seat, and I think that gives me the ability to relate to almost everyone."

Combs, 43, of Little Rock, is a gifted and talented teacher at Stephens Elementary School in the Little Rock School District. The school is 93 percent black, 2.2 percent Latino and 87 percent low-income. Questions her students asked her during the 2016 presidential campaign compelled her into activism, she said.

"Leading up to the election, one [of my students] asked me, 'If Donald Trump is elected, will I be deported?' And another asked me, if Donald Trump was elected, would he be murdered. That was the point when I said, 'I really have to be noisy about this.' "

After the election, Combs read about the planned Women's March in Washington, D.C. "I was inspired by it, but it was something I knew I couldn't do as a teacher. I don't have the money [to travel] and couldn't take the time off." From there, she created a Facebook event for a Women's March in Arkansas, which an estimated 7,000 people attended.

The success of the Little Rock march inspired Combs to work to sustain the movement. She created a Facebook group, originally called Be the Change Alliance and later March on Arkansas. It was meant to be a clearinghouse for progressive Arkansas activists. That effort connected Combs to a trainer from Housing Works, a New York-based nonprofit that fights AIDS and homelessness, who taught Combs and others how to "bird dog," or as Combs explained it, "when you pester your legislator, and you do it with intense focus and with a direct ask."

During the health care debate last year, Combs traveled with a small group to Washington to meet with Republican Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton. She only got face time with Cotton, who lectured the group on his positions, Combs said, before she interrupted him to say, "We really want you to listen to us."

"We laid it out and tried to make it real to him because I don't think he has a clue about what it's like to be a regular, everyday person," Combs said of Cotton.

On July 28, shortly after Boozman and Cotton voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act without replacing it on, Combs filed to run for Congress.

Politics is something Combs "never saw coming," she said. She grew up in southwestern Ohio, born to a teenage mother and a machinist father, both of whom were first-generation high school graduates. Combs left Ohio on a full-ride scholarship to New Mexico State, but she said she didn't have the support system to be successful in college at that point in her life and her scholarship funding ran out. So, she decided to follow both of her grandfathers' examples and join the military.

In the Air Force, she was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, where she was a communications and navigation systems specialist. While in the Air Force, she married and became a first-generation college graduate, earning two associate degrees. After she was honorably discharged, and with a young son in tow, the Air Force sent her family to the Little Rock Air Force Base. Once there, she earned a master's degree in gifted education from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She's taught for 11 years, 10 in the LRSD.

Even though Combs declared around the same time as Spencer, she's been far less successful at raising money. She had raised $25,760, spent $18,172 and had $7,587 cash on hand as of March 31.

"We can't compete financially," she acknowledged. "That's almost more golden to me because I think the amount of money that's spent on political campaigns is obscene, and it's offensive to the communities we live in and we're purporting to serve." But Combs said she's used to working on a shoestring: "I'm a teacher, I'm used to not having much of a budget. I grew up poor. I'm used to not having much of a personal budget. I can get stuff done."

Her staff is made up of all volunteers, all of whom have full-time jobs. That's what representative democracy should look like, she said. Combs has life experience that looks like the average voter, she said.

"I had a family member struggle with addiction. I had a family member die of suicide. I've had a family member homeless. I've had a family member unemployed and injured on the job. Those are things that really give me some perspective and allow me to relate and allow me to have some deep, deep empathy for people. If you're removed from a scenario, you can hear about it all day, but you can't understand what it's like."

Combs supports Medicare for All, expanding federal funding to ensure that all Americans get top-quality education from pre-K to employability, moving toward debt-free college, establishing a $15 minimum wage, closing gun loopholes, repealing the Dickey Amendment that prevents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying the health impacts of guns and providing a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers.

Combs said she might not have entered the race if Spencer wasn't pro-life and in support of the Hyde Amendment. She said she would work to repeal it and preserve abortion rights. "When you talk about Medicare for All but maintaining the Hyde Amendment instead of working to repeal it, you have a situation where you might have health care for all, but not for women," she said.

How would she pay for the progressive policies she's advocated on behalf of? One idea: "Our expenses for nuclear armament are absurd. We could pull back on that and put money into areas that help people instead of endangering people," Combs said.

The frontrunner

State Rep. Clarke Tucker said he first started thinking about running for Congress when the House passed the American Health Care Act last summer. Then he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. "The prospect of having access to care with a preexisting condition without dying or going bankrupt became a lot less abstract," he said.

Tucker said he's also running because he wants to restore "courage, heart and decency" to the political process. "It takes courage to stand up to special interests when you're in office when they're trying to put pressure on you, to party leadership and your colleagues when they want you to vote in a certain way. ... It also takes heart, because you have to really care about the people you represent and have compassion and loyalty for them. And decency is just totally gone from the political process."

Tucker, 37, is a seventh-generation Arkansan. He's married with two children. Tucker's father, Rett Tucker, is a longtime downtown developer. Tucker graduated from Central High School, where he was student body president, and later received degrees from Harvard University and the University of Arkansas School of Law. He practiced law at Quattlebaum Grooms & Tull until February, when he quit to focus on this congressional run.

After winning a hard-fought state House campaign for District 35 against Republican Stacy Hurst in 2014, Tucker emerged as a rising star in the state Democratic Party over the course of his two terms in the House, even though the party was in the decided minority.

Though much of his legislation was stymied by Republicans — including a broad ethics and campaign finance package and a bill that would have made a spouse or dating partner convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence ineligible to own or purchase a firearm — he can still point to significant accomplishments.In 2016, he helped craft the legal language in a complicated legislative gambit to convince hold-out senators to reauthorize Medicaid expansion, which provides health coverage for nearly 300,000 Arkansans. During the last session, he was the House sponsor of the most significant package of criminal justice reform legislation in years. Tucker focused on a provision that established Crisis Stabilization Units, where people experiencing behavioral health problems could go, rather than to jail. Thanks to the law, Arkansas will soon have five CSUs throughout the state.

Tucker said his experience differentiates him from his primary opponents. "I have a demonstrated ability to get things done in a meaningful way for the people I represent in difficult political circumstances. I also have demonstrated an ability to win a difficult race in a tough political climate."

His opponents, in turn, brand him the establishment candidate and say he's too much of a centrist.

"I think there's a false choice right now between people who are willing to work with the other side of the aisle to get things done and people who are passionate," Tucker said, perhaps looking ahead to a general election battle with Hill for moderate voters. "I think you can be passionate and willing to work with the other side of the aisle. That's how I would describe myself. I think a lot of times [Democrats and Republicans] have common goals, and it's just a matter of getting them together."

If elected, Tucker said, he would not support U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi as party leader. "I've been frustrated with the leadership in both parties. I think we need to move in a different direction," he said. He sees plenty of common ground to be found between the parties. Two examples, he cited: infrastructure, including increased rural access to high-speed internet, and immigration.

Of the latter, he said, "I think most Americans want to have a secure border, and they want to have an immigration process that does not pose a security threat to people who live here. ... I think the overwhelming majority of Americans recognize that DREAMers are just as American as anyone who was born here. They have a lot to contribute to the country, and we need to have a path to citizenship for them and keep their families together."

Tucker would like to close gun loopholes and extend federal background checks on gun purchases. He wants to see federal support for expanded pre-K and after-school and summer programs. He supports tuition relief for those who enter public service and wants Congress to pass a law to allow people to refinance college debt. "There's no legit reason" for it to be the only kind of debt you can't refinance in the U.S., he said.

Studies have shown that high quality pre-K reduces the likelihood of becoming a teen parent by 40 percent, Tucker said. That ties in to his position on abortion. "I believe most of us want there to be as few abortions in our society as possible," he said. "The evidence shows that making access to care illegal or more difficult does not actually reduce the number of abortions, it just makes them more dangerous for the mother. I believe that care should always be safe for the mother and that the better approach to reducing the number of terminated pregnancies is to reduce their cause, and that is unintended pregnancies. ... At the end of the day, this is the most intensely personal and difficult decision a person could ever make, and so it's one that should be made between a woman, her doctor, her family and her God — not the United States Congress."

Tucker has drawn criticism from his opponents for not fully embracing Medicare for All, but he said he believes "health care is a right." Instead of the single-payer plan, Tucker supports a plan from Senate Democrats Michael Bennet (D-Co.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) dubbed Medicare X, which would leave existing health care sources in place while phasing in a public option.

"Everyone has the right to access quality, affordable health care. I think there is a lot of value in providing Medicare as an option. That helps close the accessibility gap. But where we are today, I have trouble forcing people into that route. We have, depending on the estimate you look at, between 150 and 170 million who get insurance from their employer. I think it's fair to say that some, maybe not all, of those people like their health care plan. I like the approach of phasing this in, especially with rural areas. We can learn as we go. Giving people more choices drives down cost."

Tucker downplays the role of the DCCC in recruiting him to run and helping him raise funds, something he's been successful at doing: Despite not entering the race until February, he had raised $505,412 as of March 31. He had spent $60,574 and had $444,838 cash on hand. So far, Tucker is the only candidate to run television ads.

"Over 90 percent of our dollars came from individuals," Tucker said. "People are excited about our campaign. That's what's driving it. My focus is on the 2nd District in Arkansas."

'It's not enough'

Jonathan Dunkley's call to run for Congress came from his 9-year-old daughter. As he was doing her hair one day, she challenged him: What are you doing to make the world better? Dunkley said he reminded her of his extensive volunteer work, the nonprofit he founded aimed at North Little Rock's high school students in living in poverty and his work for the Clinton School of Public Service, but she said, "It's not enough, Dad, Trump is president!" Dunkley announced his candidacy Feb. 20.

Dunkley, 38, works as director of operations at the Clinton School. He lives in Little Rock and is married with two daughters. Born in Independence, La., he grew up in Kissimmee, Fla., just south of Orlando. He started college at Louisiana State University, but transferred to Philander Smith College, where he was student government president.

After college, he worked at ITT Tech, which he said gave him an insight into the predatory practices of for-profit colleges (and helped him pay off his own college loans). He also interned in the office of Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe and earned a master's degree in public service from the Clinton School. His service project at the Clinton School was with the Ministry of Education in Belize, with which he has continued to work on service-learning projects for undergraduates. After graduating from the Clinton School, he returned to the Beebe administration, where he helped administer American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. From there, he spent five years heading the John H. Chafee Foster Care to Independence program for youth and young adults leaving the state foster care system, which was part of the state Department of Human Services.

In 2013, he founded International Development Services Inc., the nonprofit that targets North Little Rock High School kids who receive free or reduced lunch. The nonprofit works to help youth plan for their future and think in a global context. Dunkley stepped away from day-to-day operations of the organization last year.

Dunkley pitches himself as the most progressive candidate in the race. He said he admires Bernie Sanders and supports the Medicare for All framework for which Sanders has advocated. "Making money shouldn't be the goal of health care; the goal should be access to quality, affordable care," he said. He wants to increase federal funding for Pell Grants and work-study programs to move toward debt-free higher education. Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour is another goal.

To pay for those initiatives, he supports legalizing cannabis for recreational use and taxing it. A tax on marijuana could generate billions of dollars, he said. He doesn't want to legalize other drugs, but said he would like to see the country move away from criminalizing addiction. Targeting government waste is another way he envisions paying for new programs.

Although Dunkley is critical of the Republican tax bill passed last year, he said he would not push to restore corporate tax rates to previous levels. "I think it's inappropriate [that Congress lowered the rate to 21 percent], but I'm not shocked. When we elect bankers and corporate leaders to Congress, who else are they going to look after but their buddies? But I don't see it beneficial in the primary for me to have that as my big issue."

Dunkley supports abortion rights. "My mother was 17 when she conceived me. I'm thankful she carried me to term, but I'm also thankful she had a choice to make and it was her decision. These folks who refer to themselves as pro-life, they care about the birth of the child, but talk to them about feeding the kid, talk to them about educating the kid, talk to them about housing the kid, you hear a whole different narrative [from them]: 'That's the parent's responsibility.' "

If elected, Dunkley would be Arkansas's first black congressman, but he said he hasn't made race an issue in the campaign. "I'm hopeful that people will see me over my skin."

Dunkley has lagged in fundraising. His campaign staff is made up of all volunteers. He had raised $19,845, according to the most recent campaign finance records. That includes a $10,000 loan he made to the campaign. He has spent $19,124 and has $970 cash on hand. "We're on a shoestring budget," he said. "Ninety-five percent of my effort is getting out the vote." He said he tells people, "If you vote and get me through May, we'll get all the money we need" because his candidacy would be a national story.

Dunkley said he's running for Congress rather than a local office because the national Democratic Party is badly in need of young rising stars. He looks up to Sanders and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), but notes Sanders is 76 and Warren is 68.

"Republican-lite is going to lose in November," Dunkley said. Establishment politics don't excite the Democratic base, Dunkley said, and he views Tucker as "establishment as it gets. ... I just don't see him in tune with the average Arkansan."

Dunkley sees himself as part of a movement. "We're the future of American politics. If it's not me, it's the next generation of young people coming behind me with the same message. They understand we have emerging industries we have to tap into. They understand we're saddled with student loan debt. They understand that health care costs are unsustainable and outrageous for most."

Battling to retake Arkansas's 2nd Congressional District

#Battling to retake Arkansas's 2nd Congressional District

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