Category Archives: Left Turn

A Quiet Coup: South Africa’s largest social movement under attack

http://zapagringo.blogspot.com/2010/06/in-shadow-of-2010-world-cup.html

A Quiet Coup
South Africa’s largest social movement under attack

by Toussaint Losier

Originally published in Spanish at Desinformémonos
An earlier version of this article appeared in Left Turn Magazine

At roughly 11:30pm on September 26th, a group of 30 to 40 men – survivors are still unsure about the actual numbers –surrounded the community hall in Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. Brandishing sticks, machetes, and automatic weapons and echoing the language of the state-sponsored internecine political conflict that tore through South Africa during the last years of apartheid, the mob launched an attack on a meeting of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) Youth League taking place inside the hall. In the melee that followed, over a dozen people were injured, with four people left dead [two people initially thought dead were later found in hospital – there were two deaths] and the attackers left in control of the hall.

When called to the scene, the local police only took statements from those who now held the hall and arrested eight members of the settlement’s representative governing body, the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC), regardless of whether or not they had been in the settlement the night of the attack. The next morning, the mob that had attacked the community hall returned to the settlement with police and African National Congress (ANC) officials and proceeded to destroy and loot over two dozen shacks, all of them belonging to the elected members of the KRDC.

“We are under attack,” offered a press statement jointly released by the KRDC and AbM a week later. “We have been attacked physically with all kinds of weapons – guns and knives, even a sword. We have been driven from our homes and our community. The police did nothing to stop the attacks despite our calls for help.”

The statement continued: “What happened in Kennedy Road was a coup – a violent replacement of a democratically elected community organization. The ANC have taken over everything that we built in Kennedy Road. We always allowed free political activity in Kennedy and all settlements in which AbM candidates have been elected to leadership. Now we are banned.”

Neoliberal policy

With the African continent’s largest economy and one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, South Africa is considered by most to be a model middle-income developing country. Yet, it is nation wracked by a series of interlocking crises, from the epidemics of rape and HIV/AIDS to those of landlessness and poverty. Much of this has worsened since the mid-1990s, when then President Nelson Mandela voluntarily adopted neoliberal economic policies, in contrast to the ANC’s long held goals of nationalization and socialism. While these macroeconomic policies helped to create a small black middle class, they also contributed to ever growing inequality, with the average black citizen earning an eighth of their white compatriot in 2007. Today, South Africa is considered the most unequal country in the world, ranking lower than Occupied Palestine on the UN’s Human Development Index.

At the same time, South Africa, with its rich history of political struggle and labor militancy, also has one of the world’s highest per capita protest rates. Over the past several years, the country’s largest social movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (Zulu for “people based in shacks”) has led it fair share of these actions. Emerging in 2005 in the Kennedy Road settlement during the course of a dispute over housing with the local ANC city councilor, the shackdwellers movement has grown to include over 10,000 paid up members in more than thirty informal settlements throughout the province of KwaZulu-Natal.

For the first two years of its existence, AbM’s mobilization efforts were met with state violence and political repression. In 2005, for example, police illegally banned their permitted demonstration and then attacked residents of the Foreman Road when they took to the streets. A year later, police arrested the movement’s President and Vice President on their way to a radio interview, beating and torturing them while in custody. In 2007, police shot at their peaceful marches. Later, the Kennedy Road Six, five of whom were elected members of the KRDC, won their release from jail after their hunger strike (all charges against them were later dropped for lack of evidence). Yet, in spite of these obstacles, some of the South Africa’s poorest citizens have built a democratic and non-partisan organization, impressive as much for its grassroots accountability and internal democracy, as its success in ensuring the participation of shackdwellers in the upgrading of their settlements.

Several weeks after the attack in Kennedy Road, this success continued when the South African Constitutional Court ruled in AbM’s favor in striking down the KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act. Passed by the province in late 2007, the bill gave the provincial minister the power to compel municipalities and private landowners to evict shackdwellers from occupied land and set the time frame in which these actions would occur. If allowed to stand, the act would have served as a template across the country. While the court only found the section giving the provincial housing minister wide latitude in initiating eviction proceeding against shack settlements [to be unconstitutional], the decision remains a major victory in the poor people’s struggle for land and housing. Still in hiding, AbM’s President S’bu Zikode said the court decision “had far-reaching consequences for all the poor people in the country.”

State impunity

In the weeks that followed this attack, Kennedy Road residents reported that those who carried them out had been left to patrol the settlements, intimidating them and threatening their leaders. ANC Branch Executive Committee officials replaced the KRDC with their own local governing body. Fearing further violence, key leaders of AbM fled the settlement and went into hiding. In the following months, AbM members who did not leave Kennedy Road have been intimidated and assaulted for not coming to ANC meetings. Few have been able to open cases against ANC members because of the support of the police and senior ANC officials. Several of these officials have publicly spoken of the government’s move to liberate’ the community from AbM and their willingness to “jail people to get development going.” There are now allegations that those who participated in the attack have not only received positions in settlement committee formed after the attacks, but were also rewarded with cash from the ANC.

Following this logic, police would continue to target KRDC members, arresting 13 in total and charging them with murder and aggravated assault. At each of their bail hearings, the local ANC officials have mobilized busloads of their members, who physically threatening AbM’s supporters and demand that the ‘Kennedy Road 13’ not get bail. For more than two months, the ‘13’ had their bail hearing postponed for lack of evidence. It was only after, the Bishop of Rubin Phillip of the local Anglican diocese and other church leaders denounced their continued detention as a “complete travesty of justice” that all but five were released from prison on bail. It was only on May 14th, roughly eight months since the arrest, that the court gave the case docket to the defense attorney for the accused, including the five members still in prison, political prisoners awaiting a political trial. The trail is set to begin on July 12, a day after the 2010 World Cup tournament ends in South Africa.

While ANC officials have sought to criminalize their actions, AbM has consistently identified violence, assaults and harassment directed against them as politically motivated. This perspective has proved even more prescient as the ANC recent success in the April 2009 KwaZulu-Natal provincial elections have made it possible for local ANC officials to eliminate what they have long taken to be a potential political threat. With many of their leaders now prison or still in hiding, AbM members can still not operate openly in Kennedy Road, but continue to organize in secret inside and meet every Sunday outside of it. AbM President S’bu Zikode, who was made homeless by the attacks on Kennedy Road, offered these thoughts during a university lecture entitled “Democracy on Brink of Collapse” given in October 2009: “To some leaders democracy means that they are the only ones who must exercise authority over others. For some government officials democracy means accepting anything that is said about ordinary men and women.”

“With the attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo in Kennedy Road,” he maintained, “we have now seen that this technocratic thinking will be supported with violence when ordinary men and women insist on their right to speak and to be heard on the matters that concern their daily lives. On the one side there is a consultant with a laptop. On the other side there is a drunk young man with a bush knife or a gun. As much as they might look very different they serve the same system – a system in which ordinary men and women must be good boys and girls and know that their place is not to think and speak for themselves.”

This need for ordinary men and women to think and speak for themselves is ever more pressing as South Africa prepares for the 2010 World Cup. Across the country, the government has spent millions constructing or refurbishing sports stadiums for the matches that will be played in June and July, while millions remain without access to adequate housing, potable water, and other basic services. Rather than fulfilling the promise of employment and equitable development, the World Cup has thus far provided a shot in the arm of city planners and real estate speculators who have sought to bar informal trading from Central Business Districts and clear ever-growing shack settlements to the peripheries of the city. Yet AbM has maintained its opposition to this version of democracy. In spite of a heavy police presence, several thousand members and their supporters marched in downtown Durban on March 22nd, calling not only for housing, but also human rights and justice. On May 14, as a delegation from the London Coalition Against Poverty delivered a message of solidarity to the South Africa High Commission, echoing AbM’s calls the outstanding charges against its members to be dropped and for an independent commission to investigate the attacks in Kennedy Road. Having already built up international solidarity through trips to Britain and the United States, AbM members travelled to Italy in late May to meet with other social movements, draw attention to the plight of African migrants workers in Italy, and to explain what the World Cup means for the poor in South Africa.

To make good on this goal, a branch of AbM in the Western Cape province (AbM WC) recently announced the launch of their ‘Right to the City’ campaign to develop a program of action for the World Cup. Already the province has a backlog of over 400,000 people in need of housing. In May 2009, members of this branch assisted backyard dwellers, those renting a shack on someone else’s property, to occupy prime government land in Cape Town. In response, the city’s Anti-Land Invasion police unit illegally evicted them from the land, confiscating their materials, and assaulted and arrested those it perceived to be leading the occupation. It was only after filing a court injunction against further evictions and launching other protests, including a road blockade, were those in need able to claim the land.

In the days leading up to the World Cup, AbM WC is once again demanding that the government provide quality houses for the poor inside the city, rather than tin shacks on the city’s outskirts, as has become the norm in the province’s capital of Cape Town. In addition to boycotting the World Cup, AbM WC has vowed to build shacks outside the city’s soccer stadium just before cup’s first match to draw the attention of the rest of country and the international community of needs of the poor. Unlike the attacks in Kennedy Road, how the government responds to the actions of South Africa’s militant poor will be on display for the world to see.

For more information, visit the websites of Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. Together with the Rural Network and the Landless Peoples Movement, these organizations make up the Poor Peoples Alliance.

Sekwanele! – Social Movement Struggles for Land and Housing in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This article is published in the current issue of Left Turn magazine in the United States of America.

Sekwanele! [Enough is Enough!]: Social Movement Struggles for Land and Housing in Post-Apartheid South Africa
By Toussaint Losier

Amabhulu anyama
Asenzeli iworry
[The black capitalists]
[Are making us worry]
– Chorus of a contemporary protest song, sung in Xhosa

In the predawn hours of Saturday, September 13th, 2008, a devastating fire tore through the thousands of wood and zinc shacks that make up the Foreman Road informal settlement in Durban. Sparked by an unattended candle, the fire spread quickly and raged for hours.

With only one water tap serving nearly 8,000 tightly packed residents, there was little people could do but warn their neighbors and move to safety to watch their houses burn. It would take several hours to put out the fire. Among the smoldering debris, residents would later find the body of Thembelani Khweshube, 30, who had been asleep when his shack caught fire.

“I wish that somebody could save us from this misery,” lamented Funeka Nokhayingana to a local reporter from the Durban Mercury amidst the charred zinc and the damp ash. “I have lost everything in the fire – my identity document, my children’s birth certificates, uniforms and school books. It hurts me to raise my children in such conditions, but I don’t have a choice because I have nowhere else to go.”

Far from a rare occurrence, these shack fires have become an increasingly frequent phenomenon in post-apartheid South Africa, as the numbers of shack settlements have continued to grow. There have been an average of ten shack fires a day over the past five years, with someone dying in a shack fire almost every other day. In the eThekwini municipality where the Foreman Road settlement is located, there is roughly one shack fire a day.

Not long after the wreckage had finally begun to cool, the residents of Foreman Road held a community meeting to collectively assess their situation. Rather than accepting the city’s offer of relocation, residents resolved to immediately begin rebuilding their shacks using whatever materials could be salvaged from the ruins. Working with others member of Abahlali baseMjondolo (Zulu for shack dwellers), a social movement based in more than 40 shack settlements, residents put out a press statement the same day, calling for emergency food, temporary shelter and building materials. At the same time, their statement also placed the destruction of more than 70 percent of their settlement in a broader political context:

“Shack fires are a crisis. They are not something normal. The government must stop blaming the victims every time there is a fire. We have to treat the fires as a crisis. We have to act against the real causes of the fires. The main cause is that people don’t have electricity. Other causes are that people don’t have enough taps or any fire hydrants to fight the fires. The short term solution is to electrify the shacks and provides taps, fire hydrants and access roads. The real solution is to upgrade the settlements with proper brick houses.”

But far from assisting in rebuilding efforts, municipal officials instead arrived at the settlement with bulldozers the following day. In response, the Foreman Road AbM mobilized to halt the municipality’s plans, threatening to blockade the entrance to the settlement Road and calling on legal advocates to halt this unlawful action. “Foreman Road is our home,” reiterated AbM after threatening to destroy any bulldozers that entered the settlement. “We are urbanites. We live and work and school here. We will not be moved. If the City will not give us building materials we will rebuild the settlement ourselves. This land is ours.”

From Racial to Class Apartheid

In many ways, AbM’s successful response to the threatened demolition of Foreman Road is rooted in the long history of South Africa’s liberation politics. From the land occupations organized by the squatters movements of the 1940s to the rent boycotts coordinated by the civic movements of the 1980s, urban land struggles have figured prominently in popular opposition to apartheid, and before that, racial segregation and settler colonialism. Yet, AbM’s calls for adequate housing and land redistribution are also very much linked to recent developments that continue to make South Africa the most unequal country in the world despite of the end of apartheid.

In 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the leading patron of the African National Congress’ (ANC) armed struggle, provided a moderate faction of the apartheid state with an opportunity to seek a negotiated solution to the impasse created by domestic unrest, international isolation, and prolonged economic crisis. The subsequent release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and other liberation forces initiated a protracted process of public negotiation with the apartheid Nationalist Party, a process that would ultimately lead to the creation of a fully democratic constitution.

Parallel to these negotiations, however, were a series of informal negotiations on economic issues between key ANC members and the corporate leaders. To ensure a political settlement with the apartheid regime, ANC leaders ultimately abandoned their professed commitments to wealth redistribution and conceded to the corporate sector’s call for a neoliberal macroeconomic approach to economic development as the best solution to the problems facing the country’s poor.

“The terms of this settlement,” argues economist Sampie Terreblanche, “were such that the poorest half of the population has, [since 1994], become entrapped in a new form of oppression: a state of systematic exclusion and systemic neglect by a democratically elected government and the modern sector of the economy respectively. It is therefore not surprising that the situation of the poorest half of the population has deteriorated over the past eight years.”

Political Liberation or Economic Liberalization

On the eve of the 1994 elections, which would sweep Nelson Mandela to power as the first black President of South Africa, the non-white majority of the country faced dreadful living conditions. Whether they were in hostels or mine compounds, shack settlements or dilapidated township housing, they were often far from the cities and their places of work. With up to 13.5% of all households living in shack settlements, the country faced an estimated backlog of 3.3 million homes, impacting 15 million people. Moreover, this need for housing was growing at a rate of 200,000 units per year.

In response, the ANC-led alliance of worker and civic organizations proposed a variety of solutions, most prominently the 1993 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). In addition to other issues, the RDP called upon the government to play a key role in a massive housing program that would not only meet basic needs, but also create jobs, redistribute land, and drive economic development. RDP proposed spending at least 5% of the national budget on the construction of 350,000 houses per year to eliminate the backlog over a 10-year period.

But once elected, the ANC government failed to live up to its campaign promises, as commitments to neoliberal trade agreements and the paying-off of apartheid-era debt quickly overruled its social democratic proposals. In 1996, the ANC reiterated earlier agreements with South African capital and the International Monetary Fund by formally adopting the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy as its economic program.

Reflecting a neoliberal approach to development, GEAR has promoted market deregulation, fiscal discipline, wage restraints, and the privatization of government services. In place of redistributive policies, GEAR relies on foreign direct investment and integration into the world market to ‘trickle down’ benefits to the poor and working class. As a result, the government has largely relied on bank-financing and private construction firms to meet the vast housing backlog.

Under GEAR, the provision of housing has gone from a central element of economic development to a marginal social service. In just the first five years of ANC governance, housing has become less of a priority, dropping from 3.4 to 1.6 percent of total budget allocations. Moreover, the reliance on the private sector for low-income housing construction has meant that while the government has approved 2.4 million state subsidies for low-income housing construction, most of the homes that have been built have failed to meet the government’s own standards.

Following his April 2007 tour of South Africa, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, Miloon Kothari, concluded that new homes “have been hastily constructed, poorly planned, and designed without any consultation with local authorities and residents. These houses were unfortunately inadequate to meet the housing needs of their inhabitants.” Efforts by residents to raise concerns with their local officials have consistently proved fruitless while increasingly militant housing protests have resulted in mass evictions and arrests.

The social effects of this market-oriented approach can also be seen in government efforts to increase access to other basic service. Access to electricity and clean water has been expanded to much of the poor black majority since the country’s first democratic elections, but at the same time services that were once provided to the white population through public utilities have now been either contracted out to foreign companies or for-profit model. Not only has this led to high service charges, but also the use of prepaid water and electricity meters, and mass disconnections for those unable to pay.

Popular Resistance

Over the past decade, these neoliberal policies have sparked waves of popular revolt, often during the months leading up to elections. In 2004-5, for instance, there were an average of 16 protests per day, roughly 13 percent of them illegal. In addition to raising community grievances, independent researcher Richard Pithouse notes that these protests “were aimed at trying to subordinate local party structures and representatives to popular power,” challenging the top-down control asserted by the ANC and other political parties.

When these protests have been channeled outside of party structures, they have, at times, provided opportunities for the development of grassroots social movements. In 2000, for instance, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) was founded in response to water and electricity disconnections. Later that year, a series of violent evictions and water cutoffs in the Coloured and African townships on the outskirts of Cape Town led to the growth of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC).

Inspired in part by Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, SA’s Landless Peoples Movement (LPM) was established in 2001 to mobilize the urban and rural poor for substantial land reform. Similarly, Abahlali baseMjondolo emerged out of a 2005 road blockade by residents of the Kennedy Road informal settlement protesting their local councilor’s repeated failures to provide them with formal housing.

Based in poor and working class communities, each of these movements have had to negotiate their reliance on more well-resourced individuals and NGOs, and the attendant efforts to control the movement’s agenda. In spite of their differences, each of these movements has made use of both legal and illegal action as a means to build power, not only to force a change in policy, but also radically reorient the logic of post-apartheid governance back to the bottom-up approach promised during the course of the liberation struggle.

Building a Poor People’s Movement

Several weeks prior to the massive fire in Foreman Road, AbM released a new research report, “The Big Devil in the Jondolos: The Politics of Shack Fires.” Confirming what residents had long known, this report cast settlements like Foreman Road as “poor people’s solution to a lack of affordable housing, especially in cities.” In eThekwini municipality, for instance, a third of the population, roughly 920,000 people, live in shacks. Across the country, roughly one in six of all South African households live in shacks.

In addition, the Shack Fire Report listed the lack of security of tenure, use of cheap but highly flammable building materials, limited access to water, and reliance on candles and paraffin lamps as factors contributing to the crisis of shack fires. The report also noted that since 2001, the municipality’s refusal to electrify shacks has heightened the risks.

Furthermore, the report noted that the municipality had pursued a campaign of armed de-electrification against settlements, particularly targeting communities mobilizing behind AbM. For instance, when AbM convened a mass march again Durban Mayor Obed Mbala for basic services like electricity in 2007, police violently broke up their protest using rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons. Five months later, when AbM announced its plans to challenge the legality of the KwaZulu-Natal province’s Slums Act, police entered the Kennedy Road settlement and cut more than 300 electricity connections. Two days after this mass disconnection, a fire in Kennedy Road destroyed fifteen shacks and left 25 people homeless, demonstrating links between electricity disconnection shack fires.

On September 22, AbM convened a City Wide Shack Fire Summit in Kennedy Road, a last minute change of venue from Foreman Road. While municipal officials failed to attend, shack dwellers from all over Durban participated as well as delegates from the AEC, the LPM’s Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal branches, the Rural Network, and the eThekwini region of the South African National Civic Organizations (SANCO).

Reiterating the need for the government to address the rash of shack fires as a national emergency, those in attendance also rejected the top down approach of NGOs, academics, and municipal officials as undemocratic. Poor communities, they agreed, must be able to debate their own solutions and determine their own future. Calling for a solidarity among poor people across the country, delegates resolved to take suggestions for regular marches and a national defiance campaign against illegal electrification back to their social movements.

At the end of the summit, AbM, AEC, LPM, and the Rural Network also announced their formation of a Poor People’s Alliance to coordinate their joint actions. In many ways, this new partnership is an outgrowth of a two year-old Action Alliance between the AEC and AbM.

Formed in response to their shared concerns over the dominance of left academics and NGOs in social movement politics, this alliance has provided these two movements with a base from which they have deepened their politics of popular participation and mass action from below and to the left. In July 2008, for instance, these two movements joined together to help launch an AbM Western Cape movement, to directly address the concerns of residents of Cape Town’s numerous informal settlements.

“We are calling it the Poor People’s Alliance so our people can identify with it,” explained AEC Chairman Ashraf Cassiem. “It is a solidarity alliance. If there is an action in one place, [we] will carry it forward in another area. It must be people-orientated. It must be action-based, as opposed to an NGO that sits in the office.”

This new alliance is also an outgrowth of a principled stance these movements have taken against party politics and electoral participation. In late 2003, the AEC joined the LPM’s initial call for a nation-wide No Land! No Vote! campaign calling for a moratorium on evictions and immediate land redistribution. Grounded in widespread frustration with the limited change achieved during ten years of full democracy, the campaign called for a return to mass action in place of reliance on political parties.

In spite of the repression with which the state has responded to them, AbM joined the AEC’s election boycott, helping to develop it into a “No Land! No House! No Vote!” campaign during the months prior to the 2006 municipal elections. When AEC members held an Election Day march in Cape Town, the AbM sponsored an UnFreedom Day celebration, now an annual event held on the holiday marking the country’s first democratic elections.

“The community has realised that voting for parties has not brought any change to us – especially at the level of local government elections,” explained AbM President S’bu Zikode in 2006. “At local level who ever wins the elections will be challenged by us. We have been betrayed by our own elected councillor. We have decided not to vote.”

Even though there has been no formal decision as to whether this new alliance will provide the structure for a boycott of the upcoming 2009 Presidential election, these new partnerships should provide for greater connection of urban land struggles with movements for sustainable rural development.

Government Betrayal

While controversial in the eyes of ANC allied-civic organizations and trade union coalitions, these election boycotts have tapped tangible feelings of betrayal within poor communities, while strategically undermining the ANC’s political dominance in highly competitive elections in Durban and Cape Town. Moreover, these campaigns draw on a long tradition of mass non-participation in the institutions of the apartheid system to directly implicate the ANC government’s adoption of the corporate sector’s neoliberal agenda.

This neoliberal agenda remains largely intact in spite of the upset election of former South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma as ANC President in the party’s December 2007 elections. Emerging largely unscathed from his 2006 rape trial, Zuma had been able to garner support from key constituencies within the ANC, including the ANC Youth League, the SA Communist Party, and the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU). While some of his supporters have used his bid for the party presidency to push for more redistributive economic policies, Zuma’s control of the ANC has been overshadowed by continued power struggles between himself and Mbeki over control of the party.

These power struggles have continued in anticipation of Zuma’s upcoming corruption trial- culminating in a court judgment dismissing the case on a technicality, Mbeki’s forced resignation as South African President in September 2008, and his replacement by Zuma’s deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe. In response, supporters of Mbeki have left the ANC to create a new party, Congress of the People (COPE), to challenge the ANC under Zuma in the upcoming Presidential elections in 2009.

“For us, it is of no concern that the ANC has split up,” Ashraf Cassiem of the AEC argues.” It doesn’t have any direct effect because the policy and procedure of the government remains the same. It doesn’t matter what platform they use, because everything remains the same. Our communities will still have to be dealing with these policies the same way we have in the past.”

Yet, the changing political landscape presents both challenges and opportunities for South Africa’s militant poor. After the Foreman Road fire, local officials restricted emergency aid just to those with ANC cards. Increased partisanship threatens to further divisions among communities and co-opt local leaders. Nevertheless, LPM and AEC have already taken advantage of the installation of new pro-Zuma provincial officials to push for an increased provision of housing.

Moreover, it unclear whether these power struggles will create openings for a shift away from the current trend of relocating shack dwellers to permanent settlements, termed Temporary Relocation Areas (TRAs), on the urban periphery, towards the upgrading of settlements and adequate public housing demanded by these movements. And with South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup serving as further pretext for the creation of cities that meet the desires of the rich, the need for popular struggle grows greater each day.

Toussaint Losier is a Chicago-based writer, artist, and activist. He is currently researching the history of mass incarceration at the University of Chicago. Much thanks to Kerry Chance, David Jenkins, and Raj Patel for their input on this article.