One Hell of a Year: 2017 nightmare

2017 was a year that felt like a century thank from the brat 45 to Mother Nature. Here is some of the highlights of the year.

Fight for the Freedom of Press

Reports released this week from Reporters Without Borders, also known as Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), reveal an overall decline in the killings of journalists worldwide in 2017 compared with previous years. But both organizations warn that some of the reasons for this downward trend are not cause for celebration. RSF counted 50 professional reporters killed in the line of duty ― its lowest tally in 14 years ― in addition to the deaths of 15 citizen journalists and media workers. CPJ recorded 42 intentional slayings of journalists, the lowest such number since 2008.

Both RSF and CPJ, which conduct their research independently, had listed Syria and Mexico among the deadliest countries when their reports were published on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively. Both CPJ and RSF found that the number of female journalists killed in 2017 at least doubled since last year.

The decrease of press worker deaths this year could be due in part to greater global efforts to protect reporters, but has also been driven by journalists’ self-censorship. Fearful for their lives and safety, many are fleeing dangerous nations or changing professions, which fuels a cycle of impunity for press freedom predators.

Authoritarian regimes have also cracked down on dissent by detaining and thus silencing their critics, which has also contributed to fewer deaths in 2017. The number of reporters incarcerated for their work hit a record high this year, according to another recent CPJ report. It found that 262 journalists were jailed as of Dec. 1. For the second year in a row, more than half of those detained are being held in just three countries: China, Egypt and Turkey, with the the latter country imprisoning the most journalists.

Mother Nature’s fury

Mother Nature hit us hard this year. The tail end of summer was marked by devastating natural disasters. In 2017, we had the deadliest, costliest and most active hurricane season on record while also facing record-breaking wildfires in California. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria ravaged areas of the United States and the Caribbean in late August and September. Hurricane Harvey brought catastrophic flooding to Houston that destroyed thousands of homes and buildings. Only weeks later, a terrifyingly powerful Hurricane Irma gained power on a course toward St. Martin and Florida. Then Hurricane Maria made landfall in the Caribbean in late September, wiping out parts of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Months later, many Puerto Ricans are still without electricity or clean water. The damage to the island’s infrastructure and economy will take years to repair.

South of the border, Mexico suffered a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on Sept. 19. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto estimated the quake was felt by 50 million people, Reuters reported. The death toll rose to more than 360 after first responders spent days searching through the rubble of about 100 collapsed buildings. 

Despite these catastrophes, climate change denial continues to occur in the highest levels of government. Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement in June, and his leadership on the issue has been a devastating blow to decades of scientific research and global unity on the climate fight. Luckily France is leading the EU and China leading the world in going green.

Trump’s presidency

Oh boy...

The Trump administration spent much of 2017 attempting to overhaul several Obama-era policies and usher in widely challenged changes to immigration, LGBTQ rights and health care.

Banning transgender people from the military (though courts have put this on hold) and the news reported last week that the Centers for Disease Control has been told by the Trump administration to ban in budget documents words and terms like “transgender,” “fetus” and “science-based,” plays to evangelicals ― whose support for Trump has dropped by 17 percent in a recent Pew poll ― but horrifies most Americans who can see signs of a turn toward fascism.

Last week, Trump also claimed that Republicans had “essentially” repealed Obama’s Affordable Care Act through the GOP tax bill. While the tax plan does eliminate the ACA’s individual mandate, it leaves many essential parts in place. Trump’s proclamation comes after Republicans’ several failed attempts to pass legislation overturning the ACA outright. 

In the final weeks of the year came the repeal of net neutrality, pushed forward by FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. The repeal rolls back Obama-era regulations that classified the internet as a public utility and required internet service providers to treat all of the data traveling on their networks equally.

Trump’s 2016 win ― without the popular vote and with Russian interference, Hilary Clinton’s hubris combined with a poorly run campaign and James Comey’s recklessness ― was a fluke in which he won the Electoral College by less than 85,000 votes in three states; his base has shrunk (and slowly keeps eroding) and nothing is bringing it back. By placating some aspects of the base ― like evangelicals ― with the aforementioned actions, he’s actually scaring away others in the base, and GOP leaders see this. From Virginia to Alabama, they know the blue wave is building into a possible tsunami next fall. 

They will use every sleazy tactic at their disposal, from voter suppression and ID laws to looking the other way of more possible Russian interference, but it may not be enough to overcome the wave.

Undoing the catastrophic damage that Trump and the GOP have created since the start of the Trump presidency will take years. Some of it may be impossible to undo, something the GOP is banking on.

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: “Paradise Papers” (Nov. 5)

Journalists from 96 media organizations across the world worked together to investigate over 13 million leaked documents that revealed elaborate offshore assets of politicians and corporations. The investigation, known as the “Paradise Papers,” concluded that such assets allowed the high-profile figures and companies to dodge millions of dollars in taxes.

The Paradise Papers “raise serious questions about the integrity of our tax system and the ability of the top one percent to rig it in order to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else,” Sanders wrote in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee last month.

HuffPost: “Millennials Are Screwed” (Dec. 14)

The impending financial doom facing most millennials has been a hot topic for the past few years, but no report has laid out the disaster quite as effectively and hauntingly as HuffPost contributor Michael Hobbes.

Hobbes explained how decades of irresponsible political and corporate decisions have led this generation into a downward spiral of financial ruin. One in five millennials live in poverty, according to the report, and people ages 26 to 34 are more likely than any other age bracket to not have health insurance.

Some lawmakers called on Congress to make a more concerted effort to help millennials, including Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose cornerstone issue is tackling wealth inequality.

“This is the direct result of an economy built to maximize corporate profits and protect the assets of the wealthy—an economy that is rigged against working class people who also cannot count on a stable safety net like generations before,” Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote in a Facebook post.

Clashes between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un: The Nuclear Standoff That Rattled 2017

Days after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, he received a stark warning from America’s then leader, Barack Obama. In their first and only meeting, Barack Obama told his successor that North Korea ― a volatile nation hell-bent on nuclear proliferation ― would pose the biggest foreign challenge his administration would face.

Here is a little background about North Korea. North Korea, official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (abbreviated DPRK), is a country in East Asia constituting the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang is the nation's capital and largest city. To the north and northwest, the country is bordered by China and by Russia along the Amnok (known as the Yalu in China) and Tumen rivers; it is bordered to the south by South Korea, with the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two.

Why North Korea developed nuclear weapon? Blame President George W. Bush and the Iraqi War. The international environment changed with the election of U.S. president George W. Bush in 2001. His administration rejected South Korea's Sunshine Policy and the Agreed Framework. The U.S. government treated North Korea as a rogue state, while they subsequently redoubled their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons in order to avoid the fate of Iraq. America’s enthusiasm for regime change weighed particularly heavily on DPRK officials: they cited Afghanistan, Iraq, and especially Libya, whose dictator negotiated away his nuclear and missile programs, only to be ousted a few years later by his erstwhile friends.

Trump, who has dedicated much of his presidency to erasing Obama’s legacy, seemed to heed this advice, briefly. After rarely mentioning North Korea during his election campaign, he swiftly elevated the issue to his primary foreign policy concern (and later declared an end to Obama’s “era of strategic patience” with the rogue state).

But under Trump’s leadership, the past year has seen brewing tensions between Washington and Pyongyang soar to unprecedented levels with a specter of nuclear war. Economic sanctions in response to a series of North Korean missile launches escalated into a direct exchange of heated insults and threats between Trump and Kim Jong Un, the hermit kingdom’s hostile dictator.