‘I’m a very spiritual person!’ Eurovision winner Loreen on fear, fame, family and fighting for human rights
Imeet Loreen in what I know, from meeting Sam Ryder here last year, is the fleeting habitat of the Eurovision elite – the Langham hotel in central London. Opposite the BBC, it is perfectly placed for the wave of broadcast interviews that ensue, and the ideal environment – subtle luxury in neutral tones – to be totally overwhelmed. The 39-year-old shouldn’t be overawed, though, since she has won before, in 2012, making her the first woman to win twice in the competition’s history.
Loreen’s winning entry for this year, Tattoo, has already been streamed 60m times on Spotify alone and, as I type, it is only Monday. A mere 48 hours after the event, it’s also the ninth most downloaded Eurovision song ever and it will go higher. If you haven’t heard it, it’s a well-executed piece of pop balladeering, with traces of Katy Perry to draw you in before it takes over with its own distinctive brio.
It is my sincere belief, though, that what might seem like overexcitement – Loreen’s energy and verve, huge hand gestures, expressive face and air of delight – aren’t in response to what happened in Liverpool at all. This is just her personality. Jagged fringe, metrelong tiny plaits snaking out of her regular hair like rope, puckish, childlike body language (cross-legged one minute, dancing the next), lovely dimpled face; she keeps beaming at me like an old friend.
Loreen originally said no to being Sweden’s entry for a second time. “I’m a bit purpose-driven, so I thought: ‘What’s my purpose here? What can I give you guys?’ But whenever I said no, there was this dense energy around me.” She looks at the ceiling, shoots her eyes back at me knowingly, and murmurs “spiritual person”, as if she’s telling me a story and footnoting it at the same time. Looking back at the ceiling, she continues, “Universe? Seriously? Is this the way you want me to go?” If she were 5% less self-mocking and vaudeville, it would be annoying; as it is, she is incredibly fun to watch, and that’s before she even starts performing.
She’s been living like an athlete since October, she says, because Tattoo, between the crescendos and the primal, sinewy dancing, was extremely demanding: “I mean, I’m lying in a bed of sand. My nails are made out of stone. There is the sky. There is the mist, there is the wind.” This is all useful clarification, since I did not get that she was communing with the earth. “The only thing I don’t have is water. But then again, I sweat!” Her tone turns serious. “We’ve created a pretty messy world, haven’t we? With all this information? Where do we ground ourselves?” I’m nodding enthusiastically, yes, nails made of stone, that sounds right. She shrugs, grinning. “What can I say, I’m a very spiritual person. I’m a nomad from the Atlas mountains.”
On that: she was born Lorine Zineb Nora Talhaoui in Stockholm and both her parents were first-generation immigrants from Morocco. Her mother arrived in Sweden at 14 with nothing, fleeing an arranged marriage. She met a man and had Loreen, the eldest of six, when she was 16. Loreen hares off briefly to tell me about her great-grandmother: “Her husband got killed in the war, she was beautiful, she was also very young. The family wanted her to remarry. She didn’t want this. So she dressed up as a man, took her two children and fled to Algeria.” At this point Loreen is using her hair to mimic a litham, the face covering of the nomadic men of north Africa. “She raised her children, still dressed up as a man. I have a picture of her with a gold tooth. The women in my family fought really hard to get me to where I’m at.”
Back to Stockholm, 1989: her mother now has six children and is still only 22, and Loreen’s parents split up. “I had to grow up pretty fast,” she says, “because we had to help each other out. We didn’t have any family in Sweden. There are so many things I didn’t understand because I was raised by a child myself. Still, today, I won’t know: is Christmas the 24th or the 23rd?” It was a hard scrabble and the family was very poor. There were upsides, though: “The beautiful thing when you’re raised by a young person is that it’s hard to be judgmental because nobody’s taught you how, you know? ‘That’s wrong’ or ‘that’s right’.”
When Loreen was 13, her mother married again: “He came in with this very weird energy. You’re raised by a single mother, this is a very powerful, determined woman. And then this big, soft, Swedish Santa Claus arrives. My mother was all about surviving. My stepfather was more like, ‘Maybe we should just calm down a little bit. Relax, enjoy the small moments, this connection, here. Everything doesn’t have to be a struggle.’ I think he taught us how to show love.” That was really not the direction I was expecting, from “very weird energy”.
One sibling is an artist, another a surgeon, another works in marketing, another has his own business. She makes a pretty indisputable points about migrants and refugees, grounded in first-hand experience. “You want to have a purpose as a person, you want to feel like you matter. You don’t want to sit around and not do anything. When we have our immigrants coming in to Sweden, we just make them sit there and wait. Let them have a purpose. Let them be a part of this society. This is really important. Otherwise there’s segregation. How do you build up a confidence, where people think, ‘I earned this. I did this’?”
Singing, in the bathroom and in church, was the only way Loreen found any moments to herself as a child. In the melee of five siblings, “it was a sanctuary, something I had for myself.” So when she took her voice to Swedish Idol in 2004, “it was so painful”, she remembers. “Somewhere I knew it was necessary, I guess – I didn’t even know how a microphone worked … I didn’t know what it was like to be judged, singing was so private. But that shock, what came out of it, I realised I needed to understand all of this. As a woman, you have to know your stuff. Otherwise people will come along and say, ‘Darling, we’ll fix this for you, you don’t have to worry.’ I want to be in control.” She’s still very much the self-taught maverick and doesn’t understand why people do vocal arpeggios before they go on stage. “If you were going boxing, you wouldn’t exercise for a couple of hours before,” she says. “Your body would say, ‘Come on, give me a break.’”
In 2005, she released her first single, The Snake, and presented a show on Swedish TV. “I wasn’t that good, I honestly sucked at it.” She then spent a number of years as a segment producer and director for reality TV shows before entering Melodifestivalen in 2011, a song contest almost as old as Eurovision, which determines Sweden’s entry. It does this quite effectively – they have now won seven times, to make them, jointly with Ireland, the contest’s most successful country. “I was shitless scared. But I did it, because I knew it was necessary. If you look at my performance [in Melodifestivalen], I was hiding. This is the subconscious mind: the big dress, the body language, people were like, ‘That’s very artistic’, which it was, but I was hiding. The moment I feel fear, I have to go in. Because I don’t want fear to control my life.”
Loreen was unusual in 2012’s Eurovision, for a few reasons; the song, Euphoria, is pretty good and made the UK charts in its own right, staying there for many weeks after the contest. No shade on this magnificent spectacle, but the winning entries are often pretty kitsch and don’t work out of context. The competition that year was held in Baku, Azerbaijan, and she had a meeting with a local activist group that she had found through Civil Rights Defenders, a Swedish NGO that supports grassroots organisations. Azerbaijan has a history of imprisoning political activists. The country’s government was enraged by Loreen, lodging the familiar complaint, that she had “politicised” Eurovision. Swedish diplomats defended her. “I knew exactly what I was going to do because I believe that there is nothing more important than human life. What did they want me to say? ‘Fuck a human life. People can have misery and struggle – it’s not important because I’m going to sing my bloody song’? How is that even possible?”
Later the same year, she performed in Belarus and met the wife of Ales Bialiatski, the incarcerated pro-democracy activist who went on to win the Nobel Peace prize, while still in detention, 10 years later. “I don’t like the word ‘political’,” Loreen says. “It’s so small – I wish there was a bigger word for it. My people use music as a very powerful tool – you can create movements with it, depending on what type of energy you have. How can that not be political? Look at the Kalush Orchestra,” she says, referring to last year’s Ukrainian Eurovision winners. “This song brought a lot of hope to the Ukrainians.”
She was performing in Ukraine the night before the Russians invaded, and performed in a fundraising gala for Ukraine less than a month later. Explaining her commitment to various causes – she’s also campaigned for girls’ education in Afghanistan, and inalienable children’s rights – she points to her upbringing. “Seeing what I’ve seen in my life, I’ve seen poverty, I’ve seen pain in all different ways. There are good things and bad things about being raised by a single mother.”
To return to the politics of Eurovision, one thing it’s been incredibly good at is establishing international norms around LGBTQ+ visibility: from Paul Oscar, the first openly gay contestant in 1997, to Dana International, the first trans performer, who won in 1998, to Krista Siegfrids kissing her female backing singer on stage in 2013, there has long been a very clear message that nobody was going to hide to spare the feelings of bigots. Turkey, according to its broadcaster, no longer enters Eurovision because of its gay and transgender contestants. And while the Hungarian broadcaster hasn’t said as much openly, Hungary has been absent since 2020, which is coincidentally when Viktor Orbán intensified his open persecution of the LGBTQ+ community, instituting a ban on LGBTQ+ content in schools or kids’ TV the following year. Loreen came out as bisexual in 2017, although “the reason why people know about that”, she says, “is because a newspaper asked me a question, and I answered, ‘Love is where you find it.’ The journalist said, ‘So, you’re bisexual?’ And I said, ‘I guess I am, because love is where you find it. Love is love. It has not much to do with this [gestures towards to her pudenda] so much as this [clasps heart].’ She thinks she might subconsciously have been drawn to Eurovision because of the “acceptance, because I love the values of Eurovision. I love the fact that it doesn’t matter what back
ground you have – as long as you come with love and respect, you’re allowed to be there.”
Loreen is, of course, Sweden’s ultimate darling right now: on Tuesday there was a victory march in her honour. She brought the trophy home in time for the 50th anniversary of Abba’s 1974 win; there are already rumours that the group will perform at next year’s competition. She’s philosophical about the adulation. “You can be a favourite, and then it’ll flip. You’re up, you’re down. I have a ground rule:
I don’t want to know what people are saying, I don’t want to know the positive, I don’t want to know the negative. If they say I suck, of course I’m going to care. If they think I’m the greatest, that’s too much pressure. I don’t want to go on that rollercoaster.” Triumph and disaster, adulation and critique, are just the natural rhythm of life, she concludes: “The way it works, daylight, night, we get born and then we die, it’s really hard to dodge that.”
I am not a spiritual person, but I have to say, I like the whole package, from the stone fingernails to the stoic acceptance of death. Our time together has come to an end and she is rushing out to get a cab to soak up more Eurovision glory. “Thanks, you have a nice vibe,” she says. “No, no, no,” I reply. “The nice vibe is all you.”
Loreen’s single Tattoo is out now.
an imminent attack on the US consulate and a residential compound in Karachi. Taken to Black Site Cobalt in Afghanistan, Baluchi immediately had his beard and head shaved and a medical professional performed the intake. Deemed healthy, he had “no apparent medical contraindications for enhanced measures”. When the US took him in mid-2003, Baluchi weighed 141lb.
By late 2003, his weight had dropped to 119lb. Initially starved of food for four days, Baluchi was given two cans of Ensure. Meanwhile, CIA headquarters sent his interrogators a list of approved techniques to be used on him: “the facial slap, the abdominal slap, walling, the stress position of standing with his forehead against the wall, the stress position of kneeling with his back inclined toward his feet, water dousing, cramped confinement, and sleep deprivation in excess of 72 hours”.
Those were the “enhanced” techniques, but other techniques, considered “standard”, didn’t need headquarters’ approval. Among them were “isolation, sleep deprivation not to exceed 72 hours, reduced caloric intake (as long as the amount is calculated to maintain the general health of the detainee), deprivation of reading material, use of loud music or white noise (at a decibel level calculated to avoid damage to the detainee’s hearing), and the use of diapers for limited periods (generally not to exceed 72 hours or during transportation where appropriate)”.
Baluchi underwent all of it, often at the same time. The lead interrogator explained that his way of using sleep deprivation was to keep Baluchi naked and standing in total darkness while blasting music by Eminem “to humiliate the detainee and make him uncomfortable in the cold”. Baluchi also described the use of music as an instrument of his torture. “I [was] suspended from the ceiling, my hands above my head. I was completely naked. It was very cold. Even that was not enough for them,” he wrote. “So they added the element of blasting music 24/7, nonstop, for months and months.”
He identified one song in particular, My Plague, by the American heavy metal band Slipknot (“Kill you, fuck you, I will never be you” is one refrain). Going through his mind “was the conviction that I was about to be killed. It was just a matter of when. I was counting every second, every minute, and on many occasions I thought I was already dead.”
He was also repeatedly doused with cold water, a procedure separate from “waterboarding”, yet still “outside the bounds of what we were supposed to be doing”, as one interrogator notes. The “water the interrogators used was excessively cold and some of it had ice in it”, a CIA report states.
Baluchi described the procedure as being pushed down on a tarpaulin, after which “one man poured ice water on my face” and “four men at the corners of the sheet would raise and lower the corners to move the ice water to different parts of my body”, eventually forcing the water on his chest “so that I would try to suck in air but breathe in water instead”. The effect was traumatizing. “I was sure they were going to finally kill me and wrap me up in the sheet,” he wrote.
Perhaps the most shocking element of his treatment is how Baluchi became a training prop for interrogators for multiple techniques but especially for “walling”. This is when a detainee is placed in front of a wall designed to have some flexibility to it. A rolled-up towel is put around his neck, and the interrogator holds the towel and then shoves the detainee “backward into the wall, never letting go of the towel”. The technique is meant to produce a great “noise” and frighten the detainee. “The ‘goal’ was to bounce the detainee off the wall,” one interrogator notes.
To gain “certification” as interrogators, student interrogators “lined up” to “wall” Baluchi, who was kept naked during the process. The trainees would take turns “walling” Baluchi but sessions typically “did not last for more than two hours at a time”, because “fatigue would set in for the interrogator doing the walling”.
“They smashed my head against the wall repeatedly,” Baluchi wrote in court filings. “As my head was being hit each time, I would see sparks of lights in my eyes. As the intensity of these sparks were increasing as a result of repeated hitting, then all of [the] sudden I felt a strong jolt of electricity in my head. Then I couldn’t see anything. Everything went dark and I passed out.” He notes that “after this particular head injury I lost my ability to sleep ever since”.
‘He is a different person now’
The first 25 minutes of the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty enacts a similarly gruesome interrogation of a suspect named “Ammar”, a character who shares the biographical details of Baluchi. The film-makers worked closely with the CIA on the film, and the character of Ammar “is modelled after Ammar Baluchi”, states a declassified CIA draft memorandum. In fact, the CIA provided the film-makers with the very details of Baluchi’s treatment that the government was withholding from his defense team at the time on the grounds that the details were classified.
In the film, Ammar is shown as either a brooding monster or a pathetic bag of pain. Then, after 96 hours of sleep deprivation and a clever little CIA bluff (along with a meal of “hummus, tabouli and I don’t know what that is”, to quote his interrogator), Ammar begins talking and reliable information floods out of mouth. A CIA report, on the other hand, tells us something else about how things really happened. While he was labeled as “hard corps” [sic] and “defiant” by some interrogators, it was clear to many others that Baluchi simply told his handlers what they wanted to hear.
Interrogators expressed concern that Baluchi was “blurting out information and making it up because he wanted Agency officers to stop” water dousing him. Baluchi “was afraid to tell a lie and was afraid to tell the truth because he did not know how either would be received”, according to the CIA. He was also petrified that he would be killed once he stopped providing information. “Agency officers,” a CIA report notes, “focused more on whether Ammar was ‘compliant’ than on the quality of information he was providing.”
Baluchi’s real-life interrogators also held many opinions about his character. What emerges is a picture of a sensitive, animated, and intelligent young man. While he is twice called a hypochondriac and once histrionic, he is also labeled as “bookish”, “a philosopher, thoughtful, rational and logical”, and “one of the more cooperative, likable, and even gentle detainees”. One interrogator who “describes her circumstances as very ‘odd’” says she found herself “sitting across from a terrorist who was responding to her as though he could be a graduate school student in the United States”.
In mid-2004 and at a different black site, Baluchi fainted in his cell. At one point, he told his captors of his difficulties reading texts. At another, he described how, after being “walled” by interrogators, “he could not recall complete memories because he tended to daydream”. By early 2006, a medical assessment noted his “attention difficulties” while concluding that “there is no evidence of any significant or prolonged mental harm”.
But later assessments tell a different story. Between 2015 and 2020, four different medical professionals, sent by his defense team, determined that Baluchi’s torture has had long-term consequences, including brain damage from the “walling”. The damage inflicted by torture has “seriously diminished” Baluchi’s “psychological functioning and has left him with mild to moderate Traumatic Brain Injury and moderate to severe anxiety, depression, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, notes one neuropsychologist.
“I feel like my body and mind are deteriorating,” Baluchi wrote in 2014. “I am well educated and speak several different languages, but I can no longer read or concentrate. It is difficult for me to write letters, and at times I can’t even track a conversation. I am always exhausted, yet I can’t sleep.”
“When you sit with him and talk to him, you can see there was a person who existed before he was tortured,” Alka Pradhan, one of the lawyers on Baluchi’s defense team, told me. “He can sort of access that person. He knows that person. He has memories of that life as that person. But he is a different person now, and this is very difficult to explain to people who have not sat in a room with a torture victim.”
Calls for ‘a rapid conclusion’
In December 2021, Brig Gen John Baker, who headed the Military Commission Defense Organization for more than five years, testified before the Senate judiciary committee. “The only path to ending injustice in the military commissions – for the accused detainees, for the country, and above all for the victims of 9/11 and the other crimes currently on trial at Guantánamo – is to bring these military commissions to as rapid a conclusion as possible,” which for Baker means “a negotiated resolution of the cases”, he said.
James Connell III, the lead defense counsel for Baluchi, agrees. “Right now, the only option on the table that will bring judicial finality is some kind of negotiated resolution,” he told me, stating that the defendants in the 9/11 trial “are so damaged that they can barely participate in their court”.
Ted Olson was the solicitor general of the United States in 2001. His wife, Barbara, was killed on 9/11 when her plane was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon. Olson, too, believes a negotiated settlement is the best path forward. “The US must bring these legal proceedings to as rapid and just a conclusion as possible,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in February 2023. “True justice seems unattainable. The best the US government can do at this point is negotiate resolutions of the remaining Guantánamo cases.”
Yet, Guantánamo has remained open through four presidencies, and during that time, prisoners who have been convicted of no crimes have continued to age, their bodies and minds spiraling downward in post-torture deterioration. If opening Guantánamo was a politically brazen act in the months following 9/11, bringing the military commissions to an end would be the politically courageous one. Stakeholders from all sides of the case appear united in the view that the military commission has failed and that plea agreements must follow. All that’s needed is the political will.
But does the will exist? That’s the question looming, for more than a year, over this quiet courtroom on a remote corner of a far-away island. Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to offer only silence on what ultimately is its decision as a presidential election approaches. This lack of political resolve means defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges and legal advocates are all learning the very skill that the defendants and the victims’ families have honed over the last 20 years. They’re all waiting.
On a late afternoon in March, I spoke with a group of Somali women wearing colorful headscarves and waving enthusiastically over a WhatsApp video call. They were standing in a small green room – their very own warehouse. Smiling faces crowded in front of the camera, seemingly eager to show off their new workspace.
Beeyo Maal, which means the “milkers of frankincense”, is based in Erigavo, a major city in the self-declared republic of Somaliland, and it was registered as a business with Somaliland’s ministry of trade and tourism in January. Jaamac has never held a meaningful leadership role before, she said, and as chair of the cooperative, she hopes to cultivate a caring and respectful work environment.
The floors are dusty with frankincense resin and the roof is corrugated aluminum, but, unlike their old warehouse, this one has running water and a toilet – no longer do they have to rely on the kindness of neighbors to let them go to the bathroom. Overflowing bags of frankincense sit in corners, and the women scoop handfuls of unsorted resin, holding them before the camera for me to see.
The British-based charity Horn of Africa has been involved since the collective began – the charity’s director, Amina Souleiman, came up with the concept and helped the women acquire the warehouse, obtain their first frankincense resin, and register for a business license. The warehouse is rented through the year, according to Souleiman.
Women in Somaliland rarely own frankincense trees, since traditional law dictates they be passed down to male heirs. This system has marginalized women to sorting, which is one of the lowest-paid positions in the industry. “I want the women to really have the opportunity to buy the resins themselves and then to sell it themselves,” Souleiman said.
Wages are paid weekly through a mobile money service called Zaad. NimoAbdi Salah, the cooperative’s treasurer, said she hopes to teach basic math and money management skills to some of the cooperative’s members. At 23, she’s younger than some of the other women in managerial roles. It’s not easy for women to be leaders in Somaliland, but she has “big dreams”, she said.
Right now, the women are buying from Somaliland harvesters, and selling sorted incense for burning and chewing in local markets. Eventually, they hope to sell their product more widely online – and even internationally. The women also hope to expand from just incense to marketing frankincense creams, lotions and soaps.
The women are paid $1 to $1.50 for sorting about 2lbs of resin, totaling about $5 a day, they say. For Asli Maydi, they were making just over $1 a day. Though they’re earning more now, a fair wage would be $15 a day, based on what they would need to support themselves and their families, Souleiman said.
It will take time for them to grow their customer base and reach their goal wages, Salah said. For now, women are investing any extra money they have back into the business – primarily to buy more frankincense from harvesters.
Shots fired
It is unclear if the sorters’ former employer, Asli Maydi, is still in business – many women stopped working with Asli Maydi when frankincense harvesting slowed during the pandemic. Its owner, Barkhad Hassan, appears to have left the country, according to his social media posts. Hassan has posted several times since the Fuller Project published its original story in January, including several videos of him firing weapons at a shooting range. On 17 February, he shared a video of himself holding a gun. The caption read: “I know my enemy and they will die painfully and suffer a lot for sure. Sooner or later.” He also posted a photo of Anjanette DeCarlo, one of his alleged sexual assault victims, describing her as his exgirlfriend and threatening to post nude photos of her. (He has no such photos of her, unless they are digitally altered, DeCarlo said.)
Other alleged victims of Hassan and his associates are still in hiding, Souleiman said. “They haven’t got back to their normal life,” she said. “He’s making a lot of threats … It’s really disturbing.”
Hassan denied posting threats on social media. In an emailed statement, he noted: “Somaliland is plagued by extreme poverty, a corrupt government and a lack of institutions,” and he claimed that the allegations against him were “fabricated by those looking to advance their own economic and political interests”.
He declined to say whether Asli Maydi was still in operation, but he said his work “will not stop”.
When asked if it was still working with Asli Maydi, doTERRA said in an email that it had “suspended its operations in Somaliland and will not reopen its operations until it is satisfied that it is appropriate to do so”.
In a statement, the company announced it had appointed the law firm Sidley Austin to lead an independent investigation into the allegations of substandard working conditions and sexual assault. Thus far, doTERRA said it “has not uncovered anything of substantial concern” but expressed disappointment “that on-the-ground investigations have not yet been completed due to interference from certain clan and political officials as well as regional violence which has led to safety concerns for our employees”.
Sidley Austin will advise doTERRA and its supplier to implement workplace training on fair working conditions, sustainable practices and sexual harassment. DoTERRA also noted “a hotline has been established and will soon be operational” for workers to lodge complaints.
DeCarlo, a sustainability consultant who formerly worked as a contractor for doTERRA, said no one from doTERRA had contacted her since the Fuller Project published its investigation, in which she alleged Hassan had raped her in 2018. In its January statement, the company suggested that she contact law enforcement – as doTERRA acknowledged that the company itself did “not have the authority or investigative powers needed to fully investigate these allegations”.
“It kind of felt like being assaulted again, to be honest,” she said. (DoTERRA said it did contact DeCarlo but she did not respond.)
Otherwise, DeCarlo said, life is good. She is teaching in the sustainable innovation MBA program at the University of Vermont, and since her sexual assault experience went public, her students have “leaned in harder to everything that I teach them, knowing that I have been through stuff trying to uncover injustices in the supply chain”.
She has published in scientific journals and started co-writing a book. With her consultancy company and her project Save Frankincense, she has continued her sustainability work, including teaming up with harvesters to track the tapping of individual frankincense trees, delineate their farms by GPS coordinates and ensure reliable payments.
“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Wow, you’re still here?’ Like that’s a surprise,” she said. “I strongly believe I was assaulted to be stopped … If I stopped, then they win. He wins.”
In the years since the assault, she has found renewed purpose in her work, and has only recently started to “feel like myself again”, she said .
“I’m still here,” DeCarlo said. “Because there’s work to do.”
‘This is ours’
Back in Erigavo, things are not perfect, the women say. Sorters still walk to work, in some cases as long as two hours each way. Wages remain low. And sorting still involves backbreaking labor, which can lead to health problems.
But “at least this is ours”, Jaamac said.
The freedom is inspiring, said Fatima Mohamoud Mohamed. She’s worked in frankincense for more than four decades, since she was an eightyear-old apprentice to her mother. Mohamed can still remember the first paycheck she ever received. “I bought a pair of flip-flops,” she said. They weren’t the best quality – her feet were still scratched by thorns – but they gave her “some comfort”, she said. “That meant a lot to me.”
She hopes she can replicate that feeling for the other women in the cooperative, though in more meaningful ways. For example, she wants to set up retirement funds for the women.
“We can build our future,” Mohamed said, “and the future of other women.”
the debt really started to grow in the 80s, after Ronald Reagan’s huge tax cuts. Without as much tax revenue, the government needed to borrow more money to spend.
During the 90s, the end of the cold war allowed the government to cut back on defense spending, and a booming economy led to higher tax revenues. But then, in the early 2000s, the dotcom bubble burst, leading to a recession. George W Bush cut taxes twice, in 2001 and 2003, and then the US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan increased spending by as much as nearly $6tn over the course of the war.
When the 2008 Great Recession started, the government had to bulk up spending to bail out banks and increase social services as the unemployment rate hit 10%.
When the unemployment rate returned to its pre-recession levels, in 2017, a major tax cut was passed under Donald Trump. The debt rose by $7.8tn while he was in office.
And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The US government passed a series of stimulus bills to offset the worst of the pandemic’s impacts that ultimately totaled $5tn.
What are the main contributors to federal government spending?
The biggest chunk of US government spending goes to mandatory programs, such as social security, Medicaid and Medicare, which comprise nearly half of the overall annual budget. Military spending takes up the biggest chunk of discretionary spending, taking up 12% of the budget. Other big-ticket items include spending on education, employment training and services and benefits for US veterans.
Why isn’t Congress raising the debt ceiling?
On 26 April Republicans passed a bill in the House that would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5tn but mandated $4.8tn in spending cuts over a decade. Given the stakes, Democrats have refused to negotiate spending cuts over the debt ceiling. Lawmakers including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have argued that Republicans should bring forth spending cuts during budget negotiations, not over the debt ceiling.
Still, Republicans seem adamant on using the high-stakes timeline toward default to pressure Democrats into agreeing to spending cuts. They did this successfully in 2011, when Democrats agreed to spending cuts 72 hours before the government defaulted. This time around, with neither side budging, a continued stalemate could bring the US economy closer to disaster.