ACT – Radio Free

The Paranoia of Officialdom: Age Verification and Using the Internet in Australia

Binoy Kampmark — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 02:37:32 +0000

Australia, in keeping with its penal history, has a long record of paranoid officialdom and paternalistic wowsers. Be it perceived threats to morality, the tendency of the populace to be corrupted, and a general, gnawing fear about what knowledge might do, Australia’s governing authorities have prized censorship.

This recent trend is most conspicuous in an ongoing regulatory war being waged against the Internet and the corporate citizens that inhabit it. Terrified that Australia’s tender children will suffer ruination at the hands of online platforms, the entire population of the country will be subjected to age verification checks. Preparations are already underway in the country to impose a social media ban for users under the age of 16, ostensibly to protect the mental health and wellbeing of children. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 was passed in November last year to amend the Online Safety Act 2021, requiring “age-restricted social media platforms” to observe a “minimum age obligation” to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from having accounts. It also vests that ghastly office of the eSafety Commissioner and the Information Commissioner with powers to seek information regarding relevant compliance by the platforms, along with the power to issue and publish notices of non-compliance.

While the press were falling over to note the significance of such changes, little debate has accompanied the last month’s registration of a new industry code by the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. In fact, Inman Grant is proving most busy, having already registered three such codes, with a further six to be registered by the end of this year. All serve to target the behaviour of internet service companies in Australia. Not all have been subject to parliamentary debate, let alone broader public consultation.

Inman Grant has been less than forthcoming about the implications of these codes, most notably on the issue of mandatory age-assurance limits. That said, some crumbs have been left for those paying attention to her innate obsession with hiving off the Internet from Australian users. In her address to the National Press Club in Canberra on June 24, she did give some clue about where the country is heading: “Today, I am […] announcing that through the Online Safety Act’s codes and standards framework, we will be moving to register three industry-prepared codes designed to limit children’s access to high impact, harmful material like pornography, violent content, themes of suicide, self-harm and disordered eating.” (Is there no limit to this commissar’s fears?) Under such codes, companies would “agree to apply safety measures up and down the technology stack – including age assurance protections.”

With messianic fervour, Inman Grant explained that the codes would “serve as a bulwark and operate in concern with the new social media age limits, distributing more responsibility and accountability across eight sectors of the tech industry.” These would also not be limited in scope, applicable to enterprise hosting services, internet carriage services, and various “access providers and search engines. I have concluded that each of these codes provides appropriate community safeguards.”

From December 27, such technology giants as Google and Microsoft will have to use age-assurance technology for account holders when they sign in and “apply tools and/or settings, like ‘safe search’ functionality, at the highest safety setting by default for an account holders its age verification systems indicate is likely to be an Australian child, designed to protect and prevent Australian children from accessing or being exposed to online pornography and high impact violence material in search results.” This is pursuant to Schedule 3 – Internet Search Engine Services Online Safety Code (Class 1C and Class 2 Material).

How this will be undertaken has not, as yet, been clarified by Google or Microsoft. The companies have, however, been in the business of trialling a number of technologies. These include Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography, which permits people to prove that an aspect of themselves is true without surrendering any other data; using large language models (LLMs) to discern an account holder’s age based on browsing history; or the use of selfie verification and government ID tools.

Specialists in the field of information technology have been left baffled and worried. “I have not seen anything like this anywhere else in the world,” remarks IT researcher Lisa Given. This had “kind of popped out, seemingly out of the blue.” Digital Rights Watch chair, Lizzie O’Shea, is of the view that “the public deserves more of a say in how to balance these important human rights issues” while Justin Warren, founder of the tech analysis company PivotNine, sees it as “a massive overreaction after years of police inaction to curtail the power of a handful of large foreign technology companies.”

Then comes the issue of efficacy. Using the safety of children as a reason for censoring content and restricting technology is a government favourite. Whether the regulations actually protect children is quite another matter. John Pane, chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), was less than impressed by the results from a recent age-assurance technology trial conducted to examine the effect of the teen social media ban. And all of this cannot ignore the innovative guile of young users, ever ready to circumvent any imposed restrictions.

Inman Grant, in her attempts to limit the use of the Internet and infantilise the population, sees these age-restricting measures as “building a culture of online safety, using multiple interventions – just as we have done so successfully on our beaches.” This nonsensical analogy excludes the central theme of her policies, common to all censors in history: The people are not to be trusted, and paternalistic governors and regulators know better.

The post The Paranoia of Officialdom: Age Verification and Using the Internet in Australia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

ACLU Calls for Voting Rights Protections Amid Reintroduction of John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act

Newswire Editor — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:41:33 +0000

Today, members of the U.S. Senate formally reintroduced the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA), a critical piece of legislation aimed at restoring and bolstering key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) that have been dismantled over the last 12 years, most notably by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

“We have spent the last decade fighting the unraveling of one of our nation’s most transformative civil rights achievements,” said Molly McGrath, director of the ACLU’s National Director of Democracy Campaigns. “The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is essential — not just to reverse the damage, but to proactively protect every voter from race-based discrimination and modern-day voter suppression. As we face threats to so many freedoms we hold dear, we must preserve the essential right to vote and therefore the ability to hold our elected officials accountable.”

Named in honor of the late civil rights hero Congressman John Lewis, the bill seeks to re-establish preclearance, the federal government’s authority to review and block discriminatory changes to voting laws in jurisdictions with a record of voting rights violations. It also expands that review to cover nationwide threats to voting access, such as discriminatory voter roll purges, restrictive voter ID laws, and polling place closures that disproportionately impact communities of color and people with disabilities.

Since Shelby, which nullified the VRA’s preclearance provision, states across the country have enacted a vastly growing number of anti-voter laws targeting historically disenfranchised and underserved communities. The reintroduction of the JLVRAA comes at a pivotal time, as American democracy continues to face coordinated assaults on access to the ballot box. The bill outlines a modern preclearance coverage formula based on recent voting rights violations and creates greater transparency for potentially discriminatory voting changes.

It has been 60 years since Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, when John Lewis and hundreds of peaceful protestors were brutally attacked for demanding voting rights, and the enactment of the VRA that followed because of those protests. Those gains are under threat now more than ever. The JLVRAA honors that legacy and recommits us to the promise that all eligible voters — regardless of race, zip code, or background — deserve an equal voice in our democracy.

A copy of this press release can be found here: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-stresses-need-for-federal-voting-rights-protections-amid-senate-reintroduction-of-john-lewis-voting-rights-advancement-act

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Gaza: Global community must act amid reports of starvation of journalists, says IPI

Pacific Media Watch — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:07:41 +0000

By Jamie Wiseman

The International Press Institute (IPI) has joined calls for urgent action to halt the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza as global news organisations warn that their journalists there are experiencing starvation.

Israel must immediately allow life-saving food aid to reach journalists and other civilians in Gaza, IPI said in a statement today.

“The international community must also put effective pressure on Israel to allow all journalists to enter and exit the territory and to document the ongoing catastrophe,”it said.

In an unprecedented joint statement this week, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, BBC News, and Reuters — four of the world’s leading news agencies — said their journalists on the ground “are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families”.

The news outlets added: “Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in warzones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them.”

Separately, Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement that journalists on the ground “now find themselves fighting for their own survival” due to mass starvation.

Harrowing accounts
AFP and Al Jazeera journalists shared harrowing accounts of conditions on the ground.

One AFP photographer was quoted as saying, “I no longer have the strength to work for the media. My body is thin and I can’t work anymore.”

Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza correspondent said he was “drowning in hunger”.

In an interview with NPR, AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd said that the news agency had been working to evacuate its remaining contributors from Gaza, which requires Israeli permission.

The dramatic warnings come as more than 100 international humanitarian organisations said that mass starvation in Gaza was now threatening the lives of humanitarian aid workers themselves, while the civilian death toll continues to rise.

Gaza under siege — a journalist reports on daily survival Video: Al Jazeera

Meanwhile, Israel continues to refuse to allow international reporters into Gaza to report and cover the war and humanitarian situation independently, obstructing the free flow of news and limiting coverage of the humanitarian crisis.

The ongoing conflict has taken a devastating toll on journalists and media outlets in Gaza.

Highest media death toll
Since October 2023, at least 186 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza — Al Jazeera puts the figure as at least 230 — the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon, according to monitoring by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

This is the largest number of journalists to be killed in any armed conflict in this span of time.

Independent investigations such as those conducted by Forbidden Stories have found more than a dozen cases in which journalists were intentionally targeted and killed by the Israeli military — which constitutes a war crime under international law.

IPI has made repeated calls, in conjunction with its partners, urging the international community to take immediate measures to protect journalists and allow unimpeded access to the strip from international media.

Today, IPI has strongly and urgently reiterated these calls, as humanitarian conditions in Gaza rapidly deteriorate and as journalists and other civilians face man-made starvation.

The international community must use all diplomatic means at its disposal to pressure Israel to ensure the safe flow of food aid to journalists and other civilians, said IPI in a statement.

“The response by the international community in this critical moment could be the difference between life and death. There is no more time to lose,” IPI said.

RSF warnings over Gaza
In Paris, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reports that for nearly two years it has warned about the precarious conditions faced by journalists in Gaza — which are deteriorating day by day.

Over the past 20 months in Gaza, more than 200 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army, including at least 46 slain while doing their job,” RSF said today in a statement.

“In addition to bombs, forced displacement, and dire humanitarian conditions, Gaza’s journalists, who are the only ones able to document what is happening in the besieged and closed-off enclave, can no longer find food,” the statement said.

“In response to this catastrophe, RSF reiterates its call to open up Gaza to foreign journalists and lift the blockade, in a joint appeal with over 200 media outlets and organisations from around the world.”

Jamie Wiseman is a journalist of the Vienna-based International Press Institute.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The Civilized World Must Act Immediately over Mass Starvation in Gaza

Gideon Polya — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:32:38 +0000

Over 23 horrific months the people of Gaza (47% children before the present Gaza Massacre) have suffered bombing, shooting, burying under rubble, near-total devastation of homes and infrastructure, and substantial deprivation from water, food, shelter, fuel, electricity, medicine, and medical care. The mass murder of 680,000 Gazans by violence and imposed deprivation has now transmuted to man-made famine and mass starvation that has galvanized the global conscience.

As estimated from data published by a succession of expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet, 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths that is under-reported 10 fold by Western Mainstream media. In impoverished countries about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation are those of under-5 year old infants (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country). It is estimated that the 680,000 dead Gazans (28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million) included 380,000 under-5 year old infants, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men (Gideon Polya, “Gaza Genocide By Numbers: Apply BDS Over 0.7 Million Gaza Deaths From Violence And Imposed Deprivation”, 4 July 2025 ).

Now the surviving Gazans are suffering man-made famine and mass starvation while the world looks on. This crime has been perpetrated many times in history, notably in the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death in 1942-1945 for strategic reasons in Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Odisha by the British under fervent Zionist Winston Churchill with food-denying Australian complicity) (for details of this and some 70 other genocide and holocaust atrocities see Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial & the crisis in biological sustainability”).

The World’s major powers must (a) order Apartheid Israel to immediately leave the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as demanded by the International Court of Justice), (b) immediately provide life-sustaining food and medical services to Gaza (as demanded of any Occupier for its Occupied Subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” by Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), and (c) immediately impose rigorous Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its racist supporters, notably the US and neo-Nazi Germany, until reparations and war crimes trials are delivered.

28 countries (all European except for Japan) have issued a statement demanding aid to Gaza, an immediate end to the killing and condemning the Zionist Israeli-imposed killing, deprivation, starving and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and Palestine. Words are cheap but something is better than nothing. Of these 28 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK) only 9 actually recognize the State of Palestine (Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Slovenia, and Spain). France will recognize Palestine at the September UN General Assembly.

Notably absent from this list of 28 concerned countries were the Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, neo-Nazi Germany and the perpetrator, nuclear terrorist and genocidally racist Apartheid Israel itself. The US has supplied most of Israel’s weaponry, supplied the bombs and bullets that have killed 28% of Gaza’s pre-war population, and vetoed any action by the UN Security Council. Neo-Nazi Germany has supplied 30% of Israel’s weapons imports and like the US, the UK and Australia has a rotten record of persecuting humanitarians demanding human rights for Palestinians.

Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of Apartheid Israel and is complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways and lies for Apartheid Israel in 35 ways but has merely applied sanctions against 2 far-right Israeli extremist politicians – something is better than nothing. The Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, UK, German and Australian Governments assiduously refrained from criticizing Apartheid Israel for the nearly 2 years of the Gaza Massacre and actively sought to hide the horrors of the Gaza Genocide by hysterical and false campaigns alleging “antisemitism” by anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarians demanding equal and full human rights for the sorely oppressed Palestinians.

Australians are repeatedly told by Zionists and the fervently pro-Zionist Australian Labor Government and Coalition Opposition that there has been an asserted increase in “antisemitism” in Australia. A Jewish Zionist “Antisemitism Envoy” and a Christian Egyptian Australian “Islamophobia Envoy” were appointed to inform the government. Antisemitism occurs in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism and anti-Arab anti-Semitism (including Islamophobia) but these 3 key terms (and indeed about 80 related terms) were not mentioned in the recently released “[Antisemitism] Special Envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism” sent to the Australian Government.

I individually addressed the following Letter to major Mainstream Australian media under the Subject heading “Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews” and copied it to all Federal and Victorian State MPs (however, it was not published and the Silence has been Deafening in Australia):

Dear Editor,

For 3 decades I have been researching “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” of subjugated peoples in the global South due to European-imposed war and hegemony, with the findings reported in a thousand huge and exhaustively referenced articles and 9 huge books (this including massively updating editions). However Google the phrase “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” and you will find that the West simply doesn’t want to know, even though UN demographic data show that 1,500 million people have died avoidably from deprivation since 1950, 70% of them under-5 infants.

Data published by expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet indicate that 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths. In Australia (as well as the US and UK) this carnage has been under-counted by a factor of 10 and deliberately masked by a massive “antisemitism hysteria” campaign that now threatens a McCarthyist curb on free speech in Australia. Also ignored by Mainstream Australian media and politicians are 30 ways Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews (anti-Zionist Jews) is entrenched in Zionist-perverted Australia (cc Mps).

Yours sincerely, Dr Gideon Polya

The post The Civilized World Must Act Immediately over Mass Starvation in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

Leaked document reveals proposed law revisions in NZ, as Western defence of Zionist genocide threatens Pacific

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 05:41:20 +0000

SPECIAL REPORT: By Mick Hall

A leaked document has revealed secretive plans to revise terror laws in New Zealand so that people can be charged over statements deemed to constitute material support for a proscribed organisation.

It shows the government also wants to widen the criteria for proscribing organisations to include groups that are judged to “facilitate” or “promote and encourage” terrorist acts.

The changes would see the South Pacific nation falling in line with increasingly repressive Western countries like the UK, where scores of independent journalists and anti-genocide protesters have been arrested and charged under terrorism laws in recent months.

The consultation document, handed over to the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties (NZCCL), reveals the government has been in contact with a small number of unnamed groups this year over plans to legally redefine what material support involves, so that public statements or gestures involving insignia like flags can lead to charges if construed as support for proscribed groups.

As part of a proposal to revise the Terrorism Suppression Act, the document suggests the process for designating organisations as terror groups should be changed by “expanding the threshold to enable more modern types of entities to be designated, such as those that ‘facilitate’ or ‘promote and encourage’ terrorist acts”.

The Ministry of Justice has been contacted in an attempt to ascertain which groups it has been consulting with and why it believed the changes were necessary.

NZCCL chairman Thomas Beagle told Mick Hall In Context his group was concerned the proposed changes were a further attempt to limit the rights of New Zealanders to engage in political protest.

‘What’s going on?’
“When you look at the proposal to expand the Terrorism Suppression Act, alongside the Police and IPCA conspiring to propose a law change to ban political protest without government permission, you really have to wonder what’s going on,” he said.

A report by the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) in February proposed to give police the right to ban protests if they believed there was a high chance of public disorder and threats to public safety.

That would potentially mean bans on Palestinian solidarity protests if far right counter protestErs posed a threat of violent confrontation.

The stand-alone legislation would put New Zealand in line with other Five Eyes and NATO-aligned security jurisdictions such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Beagle points out proposed changes to terror laws would suppress freedom of speech and further undermine freedom of assembly and the right to protest.

“We’ve seen what’s happening with the state’s abuse of terrorism suppression laws in the UK and are horrified that they have sunk so far and so quickly,” he said.

More than 100 people were arrested across the UK on suspicion of supporting Palestine Action, a non-violent protest group proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government earlier this month.

Arrests in social media clips
Social media clips showed pensioners aggressively arrested while attending rallies in Liverpool, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol and Truro over the weekend.

Independent journalists and academics have also faced state repression under the UK’s Terrorism Act.

Among those targeted was Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley, who had his home raided and devices seized in October last year as part of the opaque counter-terror drive “Operation Incessantness”.

Independent journalist Asa Winstanley . . . his home was raided and devices seized in October last year as part of “Operation Incessantness”. Image: R Witts Photography/mickhall.substack.com

In May, the country’s Central Criminal Court ruled the raid was unlawful.

Journalist Richard Medhurst has had a terror investigation hanging over his head since being detained at Heathrow Airport in August last year and charged under section 8 of the Terrorism Act. Activist and independent journalist Sarah Wilkinson had her house raided in the same month.

Others have faced similar intimidation and threats of jail. In November 2024, Jewish academic Haim Bresheeth was charged after police alleged he had expressed support for a “proscribed organisation” during a speech outside the London residence of the Israeli ambassador to the UK.

Meanwhile, dozens of members of Palestine Action are in jail facing terror charges. The vast majority are being held on remand where they may wait two years before going to trial — a common state tactic to take activists off the street and incarcerate them, knowing the chances of conviction are slim when they eventually go to court.

‘Targeted amendments’
The document says the New Zealand government wants to progress “targeted amendments” to the Act, creating or amending offences “to capture contemporary behaviours and activities of concern” like “public expressions of support for a terrorist act or designated entities, for example by showing insignia or distributing propaganda or instructional material.”

Protesters highlight the proscription of Palestine Action outside the British Embassy at The Hague on July 20. No arrests were made following 80 arrests by Dutch police the week before. Image: Defend Our Juries/mickhall.substack.com

It suggests that the existing process for proscribing an organisation is slow and cumbersome, noting that: “Specific provisions need to be followed to designate entities not on a UN list, but the decision-making process is lengthy and the designation period is short. This impacts timely decision-making and the usefulness of designation as a tool to prevent terrorism.”

It proposes to improve “the timeliness of the process, by considering changes to who the decision-maker is” and extending the renewal period from three to five years.

The document suggests consulting the Attorney-General over designation-related decisions to ensure legal requirements are met may not be required and questions whether the designation process requiring the Prime Minister to review decisions twice is necessary. It asks whether others, like the Foreign Minister, should be involved in the decision-making process.

Beagle believes the secretive proposals pose a threat to New Zealand’s liberal democracy.

“Political protest is an important part of New Zealand’s history,” he said.

“Whether it’s the environment, worker’s rights, feminism, Māori issues, homosexual law reform or any number of other issues, political protest has had a big part in forming what Aotearoa New Zealand is today.

Protected under Bill of Rights
“It’s a right protected by New Zealand’s Bill of Rights and is a critical part of being a functioning democracy.”

The terror laws revision forms part of a wider trend of legislating to close down dissent over New Zealand’s foreign policy, now closely aligned with NATO and US interests.

The government is also widening the definition of foreign interference in a way that could see people who “should have known” that they were being used by a foreign state to undermine New Zealand’s interests prosecuted.

The Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Bill, which passed its first reading in Parliament on November 19, would criminalise the act of foreign interference, while also increasing powers of unwarranted searches by authorities.

The Bill is effectively a reintroduction of the country’s old colonial sedition laws inherited from Britain, the broadness of the law having allowed it to be used against communists, trade unionists and indigenous rights activists.

Republished from Mick Hall in Context on Substack with permisson.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

World Court rules countries failing to act on climate may be violating human rights law; UN Security council debates Gaza war, humanitarian crisis – July 23, 2025

KPFA — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

World Court rules countries that don’t act on climate crisis may be liable for violating human rights law;
UN Security Council debates Gaza crisis amid questions over role of UN, humanitarian law;
Civil disobedience at Wells Fargo offices in SF, NYC protest bank dropping DEI, climate goals;
California AG asks judge to put LA juvenile detention facilities into receivership over poor conditions, abuse of power;
Florida AG investigating restaurant that held LGBTQ pride event;
UN says food deprivation, shattered health system leading to catastrophic birth outcomes for pregnant women and newborns

The post World Court rules countries failing to act on climate may be violating human rights law; UN Security council debates Gaza war, humanitarian crisis – July 23, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

CPJ welcomes defamation decriminalization in Malawi

CPJ Staff — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 20:03:06 +0000

Lusaka, July 21, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the Malawi Constitutional Court’s landmark July 16 ruling striking down section 200 of the penal code criminalizing defamation.

“Malawi’s Constitutional Court has taken a monumental step towards protecting press freedom and affirmed that criticism and dissent are essential to democracy by ruling criminal defamation to be unconstitutional,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in Nairobi. “Authorities should immediately comply with the judgment, and other laws that may unduly restrict the work of journalists must also be reformed.”

In a unanimous decision, three constitutional court justices ruled that the defamation law was a “disproportionate and unjustifiable limitation on constitutional freedom,” according to a summary of the judgment reviewed by CPJ.

The ruling follows social media influencer and activist Joshua Chisa Mbele’s 2022 legal challenge of criminal defamation charges for his remarks about a military official.

In its decision, the court ordered that no further prosecutions on criminal defamation charges be brought under the law.

The Malawian chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa and other civil society organizations urged the government not to appeal the ruling and to reform other laws that restrict free expression. Section 60 of Malawi’s penal code criminalizes publishing false news, with penalties of fines or up to two years in jail, and the 2016 Electronic Transactions and Cyber Security Act makes unauthorized transmitting data or information punishable by a fine of 2,000,000 Malawian kwacha (USD $1,153) and a 5-year imprisonment.

In 2022, Malawi amended its Protected Flag, Emblems, and Names Act of 1967, to decriminalize insults against the president but retained prison time for those convicted of insults to flags or protected emblems.

Malawi Attorney General Thabo Chakaka Nyirenda did not respond to CPJ’s calls or text messages for comment on the court’s decision.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Our Revolution Slams Congressional Passage of GENIUS Act as a Gift to Trump’s Corruption and the Crypto Lobby

Newswire Editor — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:34:34 +0000

Today, Our Revolution, the nation's largest grassroots progressive organization, condemned the passage of the GENIUS Act by Congress, calling it a dangerous handout to crypto billionaires and a green light for Donald Trump’s growing web of self-dealing and corruption.

The bill, essentially written by the crypto industry itself, will deregulate stablecoins, legalize anonymous crypto donations in U.S. elections, and allow elected officials, including Trump, to personally profit from speculative assets. Its passage comes just days before Trump is set to host a private gala for the top buyers of his $TRUMP meme coin, a cryptocurrency venture already making his family millions.

As one of the most vocal national organizations warning about the risks posed by the GENIUS Act, Our Revolution has mobilized thousands of grassroots members to sign petitions, attend town halls, join national organizing calls with Senators Warren and Merkley, and protest outside Trump’s meme coin gala at his Virginia golf club.

“The passage of the GENIUS Act is a stark escalation of kleptocracy and oligarchy in America,” said Joseph Geevarghese, Executive Director of Our Revolution “This bill wasn’t just influenced by crypto billionaires, it was written for them, and passed with bipartisan complicity. While politicians normalize self-dealing and financial elites consolidate power, we hear almost nothing from the media about how this corrupt system is steamrolling democracy and deepening inequality. It’s working-class people who pay the price, while anonymous speculators and political insiders get richer and more unaccountable by the day.”

As Our Revolution previously warned, the GENIUS Act amounts to a billionaire-backed power grab—crafted to benefit Trump’s inner circle and the crypto elite. Crypto speculators spent more than $200 million on the 2024 election, making the industry the largest lobbying force in U.S. politics today. Now, they’re cashing in.

Our Revolution mobilized its national network against the bill, with over 10,000 grassroots members signing a petition demanding Democrats vote no. Despite this outcry, 16 Democrats joined Republicans in the House to advance the legislation—just as Trump prepares to reward anonymous investors with access to political power.

The organization warns that this legislation sets a dangerous precedent: one where political influence is auctioned off to unregulated and untraceable financial actors, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle normalize profiteering from public office.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

CPJ, Freedom House urge U.S. gov to maintain Cameroon’s ineligibility for trade benefits

CPJ Staff — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 21:51:41 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists and Freedom House called on the U.S. government to maintain Cameroon’s ineligibility for preferential trade benefits ahead of its July 18 African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) review hearing, citing Cameroon’s continued repression and imprisonment of journalists in a joint comment.

Cameroon is consistently among Africa’s worst jailers of journalists, with five journalists—Amadou Vamoulke, Manch Bibixy, Thomas Awah Junior, Tsi Conrad, and Kingsley Fomunyuy Njoka—currently behind bars in violation of international law, according to CPJ’s annual prison census.

To meet AGOA eligibility requirements, reviewed by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, sub-Saharan countries must meet statutorily defined criteria, several of which relate to human rights. Given the ongoing detention of the journalists and the country’s poor press freedom record, CPJ and Freedom House said that Cameroon does not fully meet these criteria.

Read a copy of the comment in English here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

NZDF not considering recruiting personnel from Pacific nations

APR editor — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 02:24:43 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) is not considering recruiting personnel from across the Pacific as talk continues of Australia doing so for its Defence Force (ADF).

In response to a question from The Australian at the National Press Club in Canberra about Australia’s plans to potentially recruit from the Pacific Islands into the ADF, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said he “would like to see it happen”.

“Whether Australia does it or not depends on your own policies. We will not push it.”

READ MORE: Other Pacific defence policy reports

RNZ Pacific asked the NZDF under the Official Information Act (OIA) for all correspondence sent and received regarding any discussion on recruiting from the Pacific, along with other related questions.

The OIA request was declined as the information did not exist.

“Defence Recruiting has not and is not considering deliberate recruiting action from across the Pacific,” the response from the NZDF said.

Australia Defence Association executive director Neil James said citizenship needed to be a prerequisite to Pacific recruitment.

Australian citizen
“Even a New Zealander serving in the Australian military has to become an Australian citizen,” James said.

“They can start off being an Australian resident, but they’ve got to be on the path to citizenship.

”They’ve got to be capable of getting permanent residency in Australia and citizenship.

“And then you’ve got to tackle the moral problem — it’s pretty hard to ask foreigners to fight for your country when your own people won’t do it.”

James said he thought people might be “jumping at hairs” at Rabuka’s comments.

Unlike Samoa’s acting prime minister, who has voiced concern over a brain drain, both Papua New Guinea and Fiji have made it clear they have people to spare.

Ross Thompson, a managing director at People In, the largest approved employer in the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme, said if the recruitment drive does go ahead, PNG nationals would return home with a wider skill set.

‘Brain gain, not drain’
“This would be a brain gain, rather than be a drain on PNG.”

He’s spoken with people in PNG who welcome the proposal.

”PNG, its population is over 10 million . . . We’re proposing from PNG around 1000 could be recruited every year.”

Minister Rabuka joked Fiji could plug Australia’s personnel hole on its own.

“If it’s open [to recruiting Fijians] . . . [we will offer] the whole lot . . . 5000,” he said, while noting that Fiji was able to easily fill its quota under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme.

“The villages are emptying out into the cities. What we would like to do is to reduce those who are ending up in settlements in the cities and not working, giving way to crime and becoming first victims to the sale of drugs and AIDS and HIV from frequently used or commonly used needles.”

Thompson was also a captain in the Queen’s Gurkha Engineers of the British Army and said he was proud to have served alongside Fijians.

Honour serving
“I had the honour to serve with a number of Fijians while deployed overseas; they’re fantastic soldiers.

“This is something that’s been going on since the Second World War and it’s a big part of the British Army.”

From a recruitment perspective, he said PNG and Fiji would be a good starting point before extending to any other Pacific nations.

”PNG has a strong history with the Australian Defence Force. There’s a number of programmes that are currently ongoing, on shared military exercises, there’s PNG officers that are serving in the ADF now, or on secondment to the ADF.

“So I think those two countries are definitely good to look up from a pilot perspective.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Solidarity, From ACT UP to Palestine #shorts

Laura Flanders & Friends — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 13:03:54 +0000

This content originally appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends and was authored by Laura Flanders & Friends.

A Battle for Humane Consciousness in a War Against Truth: Exposing the Dark Arts of War

Paul Haeder — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:04:12 +0000

The total liberation and unification of Africa under an All-African Socialist Government must be the primary objective of all Black revolutionaries throughout the world. It is an objective which, when achieved, will bring about the fulfillment of the aspirations of Africans and people of African descent everywhere. It will at the same time advance the triumph of the international socialist revolution, and the onward progress towards world communism, under which, every society is ordered on the principle of –from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
— Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah

Jeremy Kuzmarov was kind to spend an hour with me, since I am much more polemical and hyperbolic than his measured writing belies. I’ve written numerous times why it is I am now switched to write THAT way, and there is no need for me to defend my rhetoric and utilizing some of the 11 forms of propaganda Edward Bernays and Goebbels and Madison Avenue and Hasbara Industry deploy.

We talked about his new book, Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the US Trajectory from Bush II to Biden, Clarity Press, Inc., 2023.

Here, this book is divided into thirteen chapters and provides a comprehensive overview of Clinton’s foreign policy across the globe. Utilizing archival research from the Clinton Presidential Library, oral history interviews, alongside a plethora of newspapers and scholarship focusing on the 1990s, Kuzmarov provides succinct overviews of high-profile and well-known events, such as genocide in the Balkans and in Rwanda, and lesser-known case studies such as the administration’s disastrous reworking of the Russian economy or Clinton’s support for dictators in Africa. Kuzmarov makes the salient point that despite rhetoric to the contrary, Clinton was never interested in human rights or humanitarianism when it came to intervention. Rather, the administration was quick to set aside human rights when it served its interests.

With those Clinton years, we have had the perfect caldron of the witch’s and devil’s brew of a slim-ball, a Cecil Rhodes and Chatam House rodent, and not America’s first Black or Republican president, Clinton working his dark arts with the neo-cons and neoliberals and the imperialists.

Here’s the book’s blurb:

During the 2016 presidential election, many younger voters repudiated Hillary Clinton because of her husband’s support for mass incarceration, banking deregulation and free-trade agreements that led many U.S. jobs to be shipped overseas. Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the Trajectory from Bush II to Biden, shows that Clinton’s foreign policy was just as bad as his domestic policy. Cultivating an image as a former anti-Vietnam War activist to win over the aging hippie set in his early years, as president, Clinton bombed six countries and, by the end of his first term, had committed U.S. troops to 25 separate military operations, compared to 17 in Ronald Reagan’s two terms. Clinton further expanded America’s covert empire of overseas surveillance outposts and spying and increased the budget for intelligence spending and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot which promoted regime change in foreign nations.

The latter was not surprising because, according to CIA operative Cord Meyer Jr., Clinton had been recruited into the CIA while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and as Governor of Arkansas in the 1980s he had allowed clandestine arms and drug flights to Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries (Contras) backed by the CIA to be taken from Mena Airport in the western part of the state. Rather than being a time of tranquility when the U.S. failed to pay attention to the gathering storm of terrorism, as New York Times columnist David Brooks frames it, the Clinton presidency saw rising tensions among the U.S., China and Russia because of Clinton’s malign foreign policies, and U.S. complicity in terrorist acts.

In so many ways, Clinton’s presidency set the groundwork for the disasters that were to follow under Bush II, Obama, Trump, and Biden. It was Clinton―building off of Reagan―who first waged a War on Terror ridden with double standards, one that adopted terror tactics, including extraordinary rendition, bombing and the use of drones. It was Clinton who cried wolf about human rights abuses and the need to protect beleaguered peoples from genocide to justify military intervention in a post-Cold War age. And it was Clinton’s administration that pressed for regime change in Iraq and raised public alarm about the mythic WMDs―all while relying on fancy new military technologies and private military contractors to distance US shady military interventions from the public to limit dissent.

We spent a lot of time looking at the history of Covert Action Bulletin. We talked about language, the so-called alternative press, what real liberalism was and how liberalism now is an evil spin factory of the neoliberal variety.

- controlled opposition
- limited hangout

Discredit, disrupt, and destroy
Operation Paperclip
ECHELON
MKUltra
DARPA

The list goes on and on and on. Phoenix Program? We know Covert Programs need Covert Action.

LANGUAGE. That whole concept of people berating me for reading CAM articles, for citing guys like William Blum or Douglas Valentine or Jeremy, it’s all based on the language of the oppressed, the amnesiac, colonized, lobotomized, brainwashed, miseducated, anesthetized.

The idea of the CIA being the premier agency of no good, murder incorporated, full of machinations on economic hits and country destabilization.

Yes, the Mossad has taken CIA and British intelligence agencies up a few notches, but we both agree that this was planned, or part of the plan.

You can go to Covert Action Magazine and hit any number of topic arenas you might fancy as your primary interest: social justice issues including intervention, war, covert action, intelligence, political economy, imperialism, labor, repression, surveillance, media, racial justice, sexism, environmentalism, and immigration

By Chris Agee

CovertAction Magazine began publishing in 1978 as a newsletter called Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB) and later as CovertAction Quarterly (CAQ). The magazine developed a following not as a conspiracy-theory-related publication, but as a source for reliable, consistent, and accurate investigative reporting.

Originally, CAIB was a watchdog journal that focused on the abuses and activities of the CIA, yet it has gradually evolved into a more general, progressive investigative magazine.

CAIB was cofounded and copublished by Ellen Ray, William Schaap, and Louis Wolf, along with former CIA agents such as James and Elsie Wilcott, and Philip Agee, author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary and On The Run.

Following in the tradition of CounterSpy Magazine (1973-1984)—with whom the founders of CAIB had originally worked—highlights of CAIB included the notorious “Naming Names” column, which printed the names of CIA officers under diplomatic cover. These were tracked through exhaustive research in the State Department Biographic Register and various domestic and international diplomatic lists.

This column, and others like it, came to an end in 1982 when the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. CAIB had to end the “Naming Names” column, but more significantly, the act required that magazines such as CAIB be more wary about the names they published within the articles of their contributors. This was particularly significant after December 1975 when Richard S. Welch, a CIA station chief, was assassinated in Athens, Greece. CounterSpy was criticized by both the CIA and the press for its exposure of the agent’s name.

While almost every issue focused on the CIA and its activities in regions like Central America and Southeast Asia, CAIB also covered the CIA interference in the domestic media and on university campuses, as well as a wider range of domestic and international political issues. Occasionally, CAIB dedicated entire issues to surveillance technologies, the U.S. prison system, the environment, Mad Cow disease, AIDS, ECHELON, media cover-ups, Iraqi sanctions, and the so-called “war against drugs.”

Contributing authors have included intellectuals, writers, and activists such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Sara Flounders, Philip Agee, John Pilger, Ramsey Clark, Leonard Peltier, Allen Ginsberg, Diana Johnstone, Laura Flanders, Edward S. Herman, and Ward Churchill.

In 1992, with Issue 43, CAIB changed its name to CovertAction Quarterly (CAQ). As a 64 to 78-page magazine published four times a year, the publication became fondly known as the magazine “recommended by Noam Chomsky; targeted by the CIA.” CAQ had a reputation for beating to the punch more mainstream standard-bearers, such as the New York Times.

In 1995, it covered the genocide in Rwanda and U.S. complicity in those events, years before any other publication cared to notice; it ran in-depth investigative articles on the rise of homegrown militias before the Oklahoma bombing; and it was the first U.S. publication to reveal the existence of ECHELON (the security agencies’ surveillance software).

CAQ was the regular recipient of the annual Project Censored awards for the Top 25 Censored Stories.

Twenty-eighteen was the 40th anniversary of the founding of CovertAction and its publisher Covert Action Publications, Inc. Former writers and publishers of CAIB and CAQ relaunched as CovertAction Magazine (CAM).

The relaunch team also intends to publish several books including an annual compilation of the best of CAM, an encyclopedia of espionage and a republication of CIA Diary: Inside the Company and On The Run by Philip Agee, volumes which will include Philip Agee’s iconic articles and papers.

The relaunch team is headed up by the co-founder, publisher and writer, Louis Wolf, as well as our tried and true investigative journalists, professors, organizers, funders, proofreaders and legal representation. The expanded team includes Chris Agee, William Blum, Jack Colhoun, Michel Chossudovsky, Mark Cook, Jennifer Harbury, Bill Montross, Immanuel Ness, James Petras, Karen Ranucci, Stephanie Reich, Hobart Spalding, Victor Wallis and Melvin L. Wulf, all of whom worked with, and/or wrote for, the magazine in the past.

New talent that has come on board for the relaunch include Sam Alcoff, Steve Brown, Tom Burgess, Hester Eisenstein, Victoria Gamez, David Giglio, Josh Klein, Maureen LaMar, Michael Locker, and Chuck Mohan, to name a few.

All together, the expanded team specializes in a variety of social justice issues including intervention, war, covert action, intelligence, political economy, imperialism, labor, repression, surveillance, media, racial justice, sexism, environmentalism, and immigration. See our masthead for more details.

The archives will illustrate the beginnings of the hard copy newsletter/magazine — Archives /CovertAction Magazine.

Interestingly enough, Jeremy has had his hit entry into the propaganda machine, Canary Mission, updated after his article appeared both on his Substack and in CAM: On the One-Year Anniversary of October 7, It is Clear We Were Not Told The Truth

Imagine that title’s subordinate first clause being replaced by any number of topics

On the One-Year Anniversary of the Planned SARS-CoV2 pandemic
On the One-Year Anniversary of the USS Liberty
On the One-Year Anniversary of September 11
On the One-Year Anniversary of Gulf on Tonkin
On the One-Year Anniversary of War on Terror
On the One-Year Anniversary of US Patriot Act
On the One-Year Anniversary of Bush, Biden, Obama, Trump Administrations
On the One-Year Anniversary of / / /

Pearl Harbor?

Sinking of the Lusitania?

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Here’s Jeremy’s ending to that article:

In that case, a British commission uncovered that the Lusitania—carrying more than 100 American passengers from the U.S. to Europe (over 1,000 died overall)—was rigged with explosives, though the destruction of the ship was blamed on Germany.

Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, withheld rescue boats to maximize the number of deaths. The aim was to generate enough outrage for the U.S. public to want to go to war against Germany.^[5]

Evidence indicates that Benjamin Netanyahu has adopted the same strategy of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in sacrificing the lives of his own people in order to arouse enough anger to generate support for war.

Roosevelt and Churchill are today regarded as national heroes in their respective countries, though Netanyahu is likely to go down in history as a villain, along with his American sponsors. This is because the Israelis have failed to earn a heroic victory against Gaza and have horrified much of the world with the atrocities that they have committed.

Overview

Jeremy Kuzmarov spread anti-Israel conspiracy theories during Israel’s war against Hamas. He has also expressed hatred of Israel and is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

These Mitzvah Elves, man, this fucking Canary Mission putting thousands of good honest thinkers onto their web site to incite hatred and deplatforming and doxing and you name it:

Continuing with the hateful Canary Mission:

Hatred of Israel

On June 8, 2017, Kuzmarov published an article titled: “Six-Day War A Turning Point In Passionate Attachment To Israel.”

In the article, Kusmarov wrote how the Six-Day War transformed “Israel into an occupier” of “historic Palestine (West Bank and Gaza).”

Kuzmarov further stated in his article:

“The myth of Israel as a humane and embattled David fighting the Arab Goliath has been debunked in recent years, with world opinion expressing growing sympathy for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.”

Read: Who is behind Canary Mission’s anonymous anti-Palestinian blacklisting website? by Hamzah Raza and Max Blumenthal·August 22, 2018

We talked about education, the movement within higher education to suppress and single out and even fire peace activists fighting to expose the lies of Israel, AIPAC, Jewish ties to genocide, both within Israel and outside it.

He’s an adjunct professor at Tulsa Community College, and he says his students in his history courses are for the most part open to learning and getting deep into the reveal, that is, to look at the real history of America, to get to the underbelly and to question their own blinded brainwashing and the grand and meta-hyper narratives of this land tis of thee.

My show, Finding Fringe, airs Wednesdays, 6 pm PST, this one with Jeremy is all the way to Sept. 3. Above is a great line-up via Zoom Doom, with amazing people I have followed over the past few years.

Topics of Discussion:

Operation Timber Sycamore – Unpacking the U.S.-backed CIA program and its impact.
Empowering al Qaeda – Examining how covert foreign support fueled extremist groups
Genocide of Syrian Minorities – Investigating the targeted violence against ethnic and religious communities

Featured Speakers:

Dan Kovalik – Human rights lawyer and author
Fiorella Isabel – Investigative journalist and analyst
Ben Arthur Thomason – Researcher and peace advocate
Vanessa Beeley – War correspondent and independent journalist

Tickets: Just $25! All proceeds support CAM’s independent investigative journalism and fundraising initiatives.

*****

Support CAM and send an email to KYAQ and thank them for running my hour-long weekly shows:

6 pm to 7 Wednesdays

July 2 will be Freedom Farms. Working the soil when leaving incarceration — https://freedom-farms.org/

July 9, reintroducing Sea Otters to Oregon with Chanel Hason, Elakha Alliance — https://www.elakhaalliance.org/

July 16, Nigeria, Madu Smart Ajaja, from Houston, talking about his country Nigeria.

Will Potter, Green is the New Red and his newest book, Little Red Barns, July 23: Animal rights and gag laws and designating farm animal rights folk as terrorists. == https://www.willpotter.com/

July 30 local woman, from Waldport, fighting the City Manager and road crew, Teresa Carter.

August 6 Wisconsin’s Draconian probation provisos on steroids, and other issues around the prison industrial complex with Kelly Kloss.

Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies, and with CELDF, and an environmental sanity warrior. 13 August. — https://celdf.org/ Biocentric with Max Wilbert

Taylor Yount, with her new book, My Sutured Mind: Poems of Healing Beyond Trauma, with local Ukrainian artist, Veta Bakhtina, artwork. August 27.

September 3, Jeremy Kuzmarov, author of five books, his latest being, Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the US Trajectory from Bush II to Biden and managing editor of Covert Action Magazine — https://covertactionmagazine.com/

Zachary Stocks, Executive Director, Oregon Black Pioneers September 10 == https://oregonblackpioneers.org/

My interview June 27 with Jeremy Kuzmarov.

*****

I’m not sure if CAM has had Amaju Baraka on as a guest or writer, but I highly recommend his most recent interview here:

Black Alliance for Peace Condemns the U.S. and Israeli Final Solution for Gaza and the West Bank
Justice Demands Action against Zionism, not Hypocritical Rhetoric from the States of the “West”

Just as Nazi Germany sought the total elimination of Jewish life, the state of Israel, with full U.S. support, is now openly pursuing the systematic annihilation of the people of Gaza, the acceleration of mass displacement in the West Bank, and the denial of Palestinian nationhood itself. Those who dare to speak out are vilified, censored, or stripped of their livelihoods, ensuring complicity through coercion. The Black Alliance for Peace rejects this moral and political blackmail. True solidarity demands courage—refusing to be silenced or pacified as we witness, document, and resist this ongoing genocide. History will judge not only the perpetrators but also those who stood by in cowardly silence…

Those with the power to do so can either take such measures or abdicate their humanity. Palestine will not be free until Zionism, along with all white supremacist ideologies, is defeated. BAP will continue to do everything in its power to ensure the final defeat of global white supremacy that is materially grounded in imperialism.

We Stand With Iran 19 June 2025 By A-APRP

The illegal zionist state of Israel started bombing Iran on Friday, June 13th, 2025. The aerial bombing coincided with the assassination of a number of scientists, generals and civilians. This unprovoked, criminal assault was accompanied by sabotage of government facilities, drone attacks on civilian infrastructure and the unleashing of internal cells loyal to the west, determined to dismantle the Iranian state. Taken as a whole the military assault is eerily reminiscent of the 2011 attack on Libya that killed Muammar Gaddafi and devastated Africa’s most progressive nation state.

This is all done to ensure US dominance in the region under the pretext of stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The capitalist mainstream media, the US Government, and Israel are claiming Israel is protecting itself from a powerful nuclear neighbor. But a careful analysis reveals a quite different reality. Firstly, Israel is the state that possesses nuclear weapons. They are aggressors claiming to be victims. Secondly Israel is nothing more than a proxy of US led imperialism, which wants to economically and militarily dominate the region. This is part of the imperialist plan to dominate the world.

The zionist state of Israel was created to serve the interests of imperialism by establishing an imperialist fortress in Western Asia.

Last Gasp Of A Dying Monster (The Imperialist Military Assault)

Imperialism (through the zionist entity in Israel) instituted regime change in Syria, and executed genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Iran supports the Palestinians with arms, money, training and material. Iran is now being targeted for regime change.

We must also take note that these Imperialist/zionist forces are not confining their military activity to one country or region. While a new war rages in Iran, imperialism creates ongoing conflicts of various types in the Western Sahara, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, DRC, Sudan, Guinea Bissau, the Alliance For Sahelian States (which includes Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso), Venezuela, Nicaraqua, Cuba, North Korea, Haiti, Russia, China and other places throughout the world. This is in fact an imperialist policy of Full Spectrum Domination.

The U.S. has at least 45 military bases surrounding Iran and the US has already threatened Iran declaring,“If Iran attacks any U.S. military bases we will bomb Iran with the likes they have never seen”. After lying about their involvement in the attacks on Iran by Israelis the US president went on to say, “We gave them a chance to negotiate a peace agreement and they wouldn’t agree to our terms.” So, now they will have to come to the negotiation table and agree to our terms.”

This is how the dying capitalists/imperialists act in their last stage of existence. They engage in multiple wars, terrorism and genocide as they are declining. They try to kill, terrorize as many people and nations as possible. But, they have been losing militarily, economically and politically everywhere. Including losing the propaganda war around the world.

…

The Significance of Pan-Africanism

A new wave of anti-neo colonial resistance that is sweeping Africa is reshaping oil and gas politics, challenging imperialist dominance, and aligning with the BRICS led push to “de-dollarize” the world’s economy. This movement is driven by youth uprisings, military coups, formation of alliances, and rising ideological awareness that imperialism is the enemy of humanity.

*****

Dan’s a regular CAM columnist: The War on Iran Has Been Long in the Making, and the U.S. Is Already a Party to It

This is one measure of the talent and deep thinkers over at CAM: Daniel Kovalik graduated from Columbia University School of Law in 1993. He then served as in-house counsel for the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO (USW) until 2019.

While with the USW, he worked on Alien Tort Claims Act cases against The Coca-Cola Company, Drummond and Occidental Petroleum—cases arising out of egregious human rights abuses in Colombia.

The Christian Science Monitor, referring to his work defending Colombian unionists under threat of assassination, described Mr. Kovalik as “one of the most prominent defenders of Colombian workers in the United States.”

Mr. Kovalik received the David W. Mills Mentoring Fellowship from Stanford University School of Law and was the recipient of the Project Censored Award for his article exposing the unprecedented killing of trade unionists in Colombia.

He has written extensively on the issue of international human rights and U.S. foreign policy for the Huffington Post and Counterpunch and has lectured throughout the world on these subjects. He is the author of several books including The Plot To Overthrow Venezuela, How The US Is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil, which includes a Foreword by Oliver Stone; The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran; and with Jeremy Kuzmarov, Syria: Anatomy of a Regime Change.

Michael Parenti:

Jeremy and I talked about that, calling people like CAM writers and readers “nuts”, conspiracy nuts. Imagine that, so, these lobbies, these collective K=Street organizations and their legal squads/associations/groups, no, there are no conspiracies to COVER UP there!

Total number of registered lobbyists in the United States from 2000 to 2024

Yeah, so billions a year spent by lobbies — just call them protection rackets or overt and covert organizations/cartels representing not just special interest a or b, but collectively, representing the entire fucking corporations and groups just in one arena:

Nah, not undue influence? In 2024, the groups that spent the most on lobbying were the National Association of Realtors, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Hospital Association, and the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America.

1,517 (55.04%)

The number of pharmaceutical/health product lobbyists in the United States and the percentage who are former government employees, as of June 1, 2025.

You thought it was offensive weapons companies? Why, when the Military Mercenaries have their own taxpayer paid for mafia —

Military Departments:

Responsible for organizing, training, and equipping land forces.

Department of the Navy: Includes the Navy and Marine Corps, responsible for sea-based and amphibious operations.

Department of the Air Force: Responsible for air and space operations.

Other Key Components:

Joint Chiefs of Staff:

A group of high-ranking military officers who advise the President, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Council on military matters.

Unified Combatant Commands:

Eleven regional or functional commands responsible for military operations in specific areas or for specific functions. Examples include U.S. Central Command, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and U.S. Cyber Command.

Defense Agencies:

Various agencies that provide specialized support to the military departments and combatant commands, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Do these agencies below need lobbies? They are already built into the system:

Department of Justice:

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): Investigates violations of federal law, including terrorism, cybercrime, and organized crime.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA): Enforces federal drug laws and combats drug trafficking.
United States Marshals Service (USMS): Protects the federal judiciary, apprehends fugitives, and manages seized assets.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF): Enforces federal laws related to alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives.
Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP): Manages the federal prison system.

Department of Homeland Security:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP): Secures US borders and enforces customs laws.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): Enforces immigration and customs laws.
U.S. Secret Service (USSS): Protects national leaders and investigates financial crimes.
U.S. Coast Guard (USCG): Enforces maritime laws and conducts search and rescue.
Transportation Security Administration (TSA): Secures transportation systems.
Federal Protective Service (FPS): Protects federal buildings and property.

Other Federal Agencies:

U.S. Capitol Police: Protects the U.S. Capitol Building and grounds.
Amtrak Police Department: Provides law enforcement services for Amtrak’s national passenger rail system.
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Investigation: Investigates tax fraud and other financial crimes.
Military Criminal Investigative Organizations: Each branch of the military has its own investigative service (e.g., NCIS for the Navy, OSI for the Air Force).
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Police: Protects DIA facilities and personnel.

Some conspiracy, uh?

Organizations within the Department of Defense:

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): Provides military intelligence to warfighters, policymakers, and defense planners.
National Security Agency (NSA): Focuses on signals intelligence (SIGINT) and cybersecurity.
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA): Provides geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), including imagery and mapping.
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO): Develops, acquires, launches, and operates reconnaissance satellites.
Army Intelligence: Provides intelligence support to the US Army.
Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI): Provides naval intelligence to the US Navy.
Air Force Intelligence: Provides intelligence support to the US Air Force.
U.S. Space Force Intelligence: Provides intelligence for space operations.
Marine Corps Intelligence: Provides intelligence for Marine Corps operations.
Coast Guard Intelligence: Focuses on maritime threats and homeland security.

Other key agencies:

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): A civilian foreign intelligence service responsible for gathering, processing, and analyzing intelligence related to national security.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Intelligence and Analysis: Focuses on homeland security intelligence.
Department of Energy Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence: Deals with nuclear proliferation and energy-related intelligence.
Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research: Provides foreign policy intelligence to the State Department.
Department of the Treasury Office of Intelligence and Analysis: Focuses on financial intelligence related to national security.
Drug Enforcement Administration Intelligence Program: Focuses on drug-related intelligence.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Counterintelligence Division: Investigates foreign espionage and other threats to national security.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI): Oversees and coordinates the activities of the entire Intelligence Community.
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC): A component of the ODNI, focused on counterterrorism intelligence.

War is a Very Expensive and Devil’s Bargain — The BIG LIE.

Now now, I really did not go off topic. CAM, Covert Action Magazine. Open it up, man. Just put in the Google “Ukraine and Covert Action Magazine.” Do that for any topic. “Covert Action Magazine and Gaza.” Etc.

Jeremy is a simple guy who believes in truth, and he questions the narratives and the agencies that are the mafias and cartels protecting the agencies, who are just economic hitmen, in that Racket, sir, Gen. Butler.

“Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.”
― I.F. Stone

It would have been a hell of a conversation with Jeremy and Stone (R.I.P.):

To write the truth as I see it; to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; and to seek, as best I can to bring healing perspectives to bear on their terrible hates and fears of mankind, in the hope of someday bringing about one world, in which men[and women] will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.
― Isidor Feinstein Stone

Listen to my interview with Jeremy of CAM here, KYAQ.

The enduring quality of the myth of the addicted army in many respects demonstrates America’s long-standing inability to come to terms with the moral consequences of the Vietnam War. By reimagining their soldiers as victims and the U.S. military defeat as a “tragedy,” Americans were able to deflect responsibility for the massive destruction and loss of life inflicted on the people of Southeast Asia and thus to avoid serious reconsideration of the ideological principles that rationalized the American intervention. The silencing and demonizing of dissenting voices, including antiwar GIs typecast as psychopathic junkies, aided in this process.”
— Jeremy Kuzmarov in “The Myth of the Addicted Army”

With remarkable continuity, police aid was used not just to target criminals but to develop elaborate intelligence networks oriented towards internal defense, which allowed the suppression of dissident groups to take place on a wider scope and in a more surgical and often brutal way. In effect, the U.S. helped to modernize intelligence gathering and political policing operations, thus magnifying their impact. They further helped to militarize the police and provided them with a newfound perception of power, while schooling them in a hard-line anticommunism that fostered the dehumanization of political adversaries and bred suspicion about grass-roots mobilization…… Although the U.S. was not always in control of the forces that it empowered and did not always condone their acts, human rights violations were not by accident or the product of rogue forces betraying American principles, as some have previously argued. They were rather institutionalized within the fabric of American policy and its coercive underpinnings.
— Jeremy Kuzmarov in “Modernizing Repression: Police Training, Nation-Building and the Spread of Political Violence in the American Century,” Diplomatic History, April 2009

The post A Battle for Humane Consciousness in a War Against Truth: Exposing the Dark Arts of War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Antoinette Lattouf win against ABC a victory for all truth-tellers

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 05:49:36 +0000

By Isaac Nellist of Green Left Magazine

Australian-Lebanese journalist and commentator Antoinette Lattouf’s unfair dismissal case win against the public broadcaster ABC in the Federal Court on Wednesday is a victory for all those who seek to tell the truth.

It is a breath of fresh air, after almost two years of lies and uncritical reporting about Israel’s genocide from the ABC and commercial media companies.

Lattouf was unfairly sacked in December 2023 for posting on her social media a Human Rights Watch report that detailed Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

READ MORE: Other Antoinette Lattouf media freedom reports

Justice Darryl Rangiah found that Lattouf had been sacked for her political opinions, given no opportunity to respond to misconduct allegations and that the ABC breached its Enterprise Agreement and section 772 of the Fair Work Act.

The Federal Court also found that ABC executives — then-chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor, editor-in-chief David Anderson and board chair Ita Buttrose — had sacked Lattouf in response to a pro-Israel lobby pressure campaign.

The coordinated email campaign from Zionist groups accused Lattouf of being “antisemitic” for condemning Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The judge awarded Lattouf A$70,000 in damages, based on findings that her sacking caused “great distress”, and more than $1 million in legal fees.

‘No Lebanese’ claim
Lattouf had alleged that her race or ethnicity had played a part in her sacking, which the ABC had initially responded to by claiming there was no such thing as a “Lebanese, Arab or Middle Eastern Race”, before backtracking.

The court found that this did not play a part in the decision to sack Lattouf.

The ABC’s own reporting of the ruling said “the ABC has damaged its reputation, and public perceptions around its ideals, integrity and independence”.

Outside the court, Lattouf said: “It is now June 2025 and Palestinian children are still being starved. We see their images every day, emaciated, skeletal, scavenging through the rubble for scraps.

“This unspeakable suffering is not accidental, it is engineered. Deliberately starving and killing children is a war crime.

“Today, the court has found that punishing someone for sharing facts about these war crimes is also illegal. I was punished for my political opinion.”

Palestine solidarity groups and democratic rights supporters have celebrated Lattouf’s victory.

An ‘eternal shame’
Palestine Action Group Sydney said: “It is to the eternal shame of our national broadcaster that it sacked a journalist because she opposed the genocide in Gaza.

“There should be a full inquiry into the systematic pro-Israel bias at the ABC, which for 21 months has acted as a propaganda wing of the Israeli military.”

Racial justice organisation Democracy in Colour said the ruling “exposes the systematic silencing taking place in Australian media institutions in regards to Palestine”.

Democracy in Colour chairperson Jamal Hakim said Lattouf was punished for “speaking truth to power”.

“When the ABC capitulated to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby . . . they didn’t just betray Antoinette — they betrayed their own editorial standards and the Australian public who deserve to know the truth about Israel’s human rights abuses.”

Noura Mansour, national director for Democracy in Colour, said the ABC had been “consistently shutting down valid criticism of the state of Israel” and suppressing the voices of people of colour and Palestinians. She said the national broadcaster had “worked to manufacture consent for the Israeli-US backed genocide”.

Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance chief executive Erin Madeley said: “Instead of defending its journalists, ABC management chose to appease powerful voices . . . they failed in their duty to push back against outside interference, racism and bullying.”

Win for ‘journalistic integrity’
Australian Greens leader Larissa Waters said the ruling was a win for “journalistic integrity and freedom of speech” and that “no one should be punished for speaking out about Gaza”.

Green Left editor Pip Hinman said the ruling was an “important victory for those who stand on the side of truth and justice”.

“It is more important than ever in an increasingly polarised world that journalists speak up and report the truth without fear of reprisal from the rich and powerful.

“Traditional and new media have the reach to shape public opinion. They have had a clear pro-Israel bias, despite international human rights agencies providing horrific data on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people around Australia continue to call for an end to the genocide in Gaza in protests every week. But the ABC and corporate media have largely ignored this movement of people from all walks of life. Disturbingly, the corporate media has gone along with some political leaders who claim this anti-war movement is antisemitic.

“As thousands continue to march every week for an end to the genocide in Gaza, the ABC and corporate media organisations have continued to push the lie that the Palestine solidarity movement, and indeed any criticism of Israel, is antisemitic.

“Green Left also hails those courageous mostly young journalists in Gaza, some 200 of whom have been killed by Israel since October 2023.

“Their livestreaming of Israel’s genocide cut through corporate media and political leaders’ lies and today makes it even harder for them to whitewash Israel’s crimes and Western complicity.

“Green Left congratulates Lattouf on her victory. We are proud to stand with the movement for justice and peace in Palestine, which played a part in her victory against the ABC management’s bias.”

Republished from Green Left Magazine with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Inti Raymi returns as an act of resistance

Michael Fox — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 19:13:04 +0000

For hundreds of years, the Spanish banned the Incan Festival of the Sun—the Andean New Year. But since the middle of the 20th century, Inti Raymi has been back.

Today, communities, cities, towns and even universities hold Inti Raymi celebrations. They make offerings, light fires and incense. They say prayers to Pachamama and Inti, the sun. They sing and dance.

And it’s not just a celebration. It is an act of resistance.

This is episode 50 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review.

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

To see exclusive pictures and video of Inti Raymi celebrations in Quito, Ecuador, you can visit Michael Fox’s Patreon: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also follow his reporting and support his work and this podcast.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

In honor of the 50th episode of Stories of Resistance, we would like to take a moment to thank everyone who has worked hard to make this podcast happen and to all of those who have supported this podcast series.

In particular, Michael and Nadia Murphy, Sam Dodge, Ben Dangl, Kevin Zolitor, Hallo Pip!, Marc Becker, Jennifer from ASAP Manufacturing, Todd Haydel, Phil and Sue Cortese, Supapan Kanti, Michael and Maryann Fox, Josh Weinberg, Dot Goodman, Gary Tempus Jr, Tom Fox, Eric Kinzler, Jim Chomas, and Greg Wilpert. Also, a particularly huge shout out to Grahame Russell, Cara Orscheln, Judy Hughes, and Global Exchange for your tremendous support.

Transcript

Report from Tehran: Iranians View U.S. Strikes on Key Nuclear Sites as “Act of War”

Democracy Now! — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:55:28 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Lessons from Vieques: Resisting U.S. Militarism, Building Unity

Aaron Kirshenbaum — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:30:23 +0000

Around two years ago, I watched a puppet show, created by a group of eight to 16-year-olds at the summer camp where I worked, about the eviction of the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. After I conducted a few brief workshops reviewing the island’s history of military occupation and contamination, the campers immediately grasped the importance of the decades long struggle to evict the U.S. Navy, which they represented with a puppet of a venomous snake; on the other hand, they used the iconic native Puerto Rican frog, the coquí, to depict participants in the popular uprising against the U.S. military.

This May marked 22 years since the US Navy was evicted from the island of Vieques. The story of Vieques should be understood by us organizers, just as it was by these campers through their puppet show, as we seek to build an anti-militarist climate movement that breaks down silos between supposedly separate organizing spaces. As we seek to build an anti-militarist climate movement and shape the global narratives in upcoming events, looking at Vieques’ past and present history is crucial.

Vieques is an island off the coast of mainland Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony since 1898, in a state of limbo where Boricuas (Puerto Ricans) have U.S. citizenship but cannot vote, and at the same time, are unable to pursue self-determination through independence. Vieques was long exploited by wealthy landowners and the U.S. mainland’s economy for sugar production. In 1941, the Navy seized Vieques, with the goal of creating a colonial outpost in the Atlantic Ocean to mirror its base occupying Hawai’i, Pearl Harbor, in the Pacific. The island’s population of 10,000 was then forced to relocate to a small area of the island. Some wealthy landowners sold their land, while the U.S. government confiscated other plots of land for “public” use.

For over 60 years, the U.S. Navy used Vieques as a bomb testing site, scorching the crust of the island by dropping around three million pounds of napalm, depleted uranium, and other toxic chemicals onto the land. Many of these bombs would then go on to be used on the people and soil of Palestine, itself a deadly testing ground for the U.S. war machine. Despite the extraordinary levels of chemical pollution, there was no hospital on the island. Additionally, the 1920 Jones Act restricted Puerto Rico to importing only U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-operated, and U.S.-crewed cargo. This stranglehold continues to make any resources for the island extremely expensive.

These were clear-cut conditions. The U.S. empire was poisoning the island and cutting it off from necessary goods, demonstrating Puerto Rico’s broader colonial status. In 1999, Daniel Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian employee of the naval base, was killed by an accidental off-target bomb. This was the spark of a protest movement made up of tens of thousands of people demanding the U.S. military leave the island. Protest tactics included encampments in the bomb range, graffiti, destruction of military property, and marches that included every sector of society, including religious leaders, fishers, environmental activists, students, and labor leaders. It also included leaders who were independence activists, statehood advocates, and advocates for commonwealth status.

In 2001, President George Bush announced that the naval base would be closed. In May 2003, the U.S. Navy left the island and, ironically, converted the former base into a nature reserve. While the U.S. government has stalled for two decades in its promises of clean-up, this was a moment of victory. This monumental achievement was brought about by as wide an array of groups as the base impacted. By uniting in a popular struggle against U.S. militarism, the people of Vieques showed the world that the naval base had absolutely no business continuing to occupy their land. This moment was also considered a massive touchstone in the fight for a free and independent Puerto Rico.

This isn’t to say that these tactics, this moment, or this rubric for what constitutes victory can be applied to every situation. But we can learn a lot about movement building and breaking out of what can appear to be separate organizing spaces. This was a win for independence, environmentalists, survival, and sovereignty. It’s pretty simple: wherever the U.S. war machine is active, the fight against it and for sovereignty is the fight for the land.

So why isn’t this mirrored within the belly of the beast? Sometimes it is, in the examples of protests to stop the building of Cop City in Atlanta and in protests against the construction of new prisons. But when we discuss “the climate movement” and “the anti-war movement,” we must address why they’re institutionally separated through organizations, slogans, and targets. It’s no mystery – we can go down the list: funding, “pragmatism,” societal conditioning, greenwashing, internalized racism.

With COP, the U.N. Climate Conference, less than six months away, it’s time to clarify our targets and identify the flashpoints of struggle. However toothless, co-opted, and irredeemable the annual “diplomatic” event is, with countries around the world cyclically refusing to take any meaningful action to address the climate crisis, it is also an event where the world’s climate movement plays a large role in shaping narratives, either in the conference itself or in people’s counter-conferences.

We must call attention to Puerto Rico – how it has been used for NATO training to continue escalation in the environmentally catastrophic Ukraine war, and how it has served the U.S.’s claim of Latin America and the Caribbean as its so-called backyard through its role in the U.S. Southern Command. Just as U.S. militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines has been used to claim the Asia-Pacific in its escalation against China. We must trace the deadly supply chain of the bombs tested on Vieques, which have since been used to decimate entire communities in Palestine, destroying the local and global environment. And we must highlight the poisoning of the soil in Vieques, where residents are 27% more likely to be fighting cancer than the rest of Puerto Rico, and 280% more likely to be fighting lung cancer specifically. The same empire that poisoned Vieques now strangles Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with sanctions, blocking their ability to address the climate crisis effectively. These sites of struggle for national sovereignty are just as much about our collective survival.

This year, at COP and in every climate space, our only hope is to learn from and center the past and present struggle in Vieques and everywhere else bearing the brunt of U.S. militarism, to clearly understand where our enemies converge, and to act accordingly because one thing that we can learn from Vieques and from the eight to 16-year-old campers telling Vieques’ story is that it’s clear when something is a venomous snake.

The post Lessons from Vieques: Resisting U.S. Militarism, Building Unity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Kirshenbaum.

Report from Tehran: Iranians View U.S. Strikes on Key Nuclear Sites as “Act of War”

Democracy Now! — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 12:12:53 +0000

Israel and Iran continue to exchange fire, just days after the United States entered the war by bombing three key nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday. President Trump ordered the attack on the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan facilities without seeking congressional approval, in a move that could spread further violence across the Middle East. We speak with two Iranian scholars who have taken part in the country’s previous nuclear negotiations. “Iranians see the United States as the aggressor, as helping the Israeli regime slaughter Iranians,” says University of Tehran professor Mohammad Marandi. “There’s anger across the board.” The U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran are an “obvious” and “clear violation of international law and regulations,” says Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a visiting researcher at Princeton University who served as spokesperson for Iran in its nuclear negotiations with the European Union from 2003 to 2005.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

CPJ: European Union must act now on Gaza

CPJ Staff — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 04:00:00 +0000

CPJ wrote an open letter on Wednesday, June 18, urging European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas to propose a suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

On May 20, the European Union committed to reviewing the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which sets out the EU’s legal and institutional framework for political dialogue and economic cooperation with Israel. Kallas is expected to present the review to EU member states at the next meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council on June 23.

CPJ’s letter calls for the EU to take “decisive action” by preparing “an immediate proposal for the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement” in light of the “overwhelming” evidence of abuse against the press and crimes against international law.

The full letter can be found here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

With new Senate legislation, Congress is one step closer to gutting the Inflation Reduction Act

Zoya Teirstein — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 23:36:17 +0000

When the U.S. House of Representatives passed President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” last month, gutting former President Biden’s landmark 2022 climate law almost in its entirety, all eyes turned to the Senate. The upper chamber of Congress must pass its own version of the bill to be reconciled with the House text before anything can get the president’s signature and become law.

On Monday, the Senate Finance Committee released legislative text that showed just how willing Senate Republicans are to follow in the House’s footsteps. The results offer little reassurance to climate advocates.

“Senate Republicans want to get credit for their version being less extreme than House colleagues,” said Seth Nelson, deputy communications director for the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. “The emissions goals that President Biden laid out cannot be fulfilled if this stands as is.”

Biden’s 2022 law aimed to put the U.S. on the path to net-zero emissions primarily by doling out generous tax credits to companies who build carbon-free sources of power; the GOP majority that took control of the House of Representatives this year has aimed to phase out these credits as soon as possible. But while the Senate text is less drastic, extending existing tax credits for energy sources like nuclear, geothermal, and battery storage into the 2030s, it maintains a rapid phase-out of federal support for the two main pillars of the energy transition: wind and solar power. The Senate also showed no mercy for climate-conscious consumers, proposing to eliminate generous federal subsidies for adopting energy-efficient technologies, like heat pumps and rooftop solar panels, as well as electric vehicles.

Robbie Orvis, a senior director for modeling and analysis at the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation, said that while the Senate text is meaningfully different from the House version, it “may still end up very close to the same point on emissions.”

Indeed, if the Senate text is passed and signed by the president, the Finance Committee’s cuts — particularly the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in estimated tax credits for wind and solar — make it far less likely that the U.S. will get anywhere close to the emissions reductions forecasted as a result of Biden’s law. That legislation was projected to bring U.S. emissions down by close to 50 percent from their 2005 peak by 2035, putting the country within close reach of its goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Now, Democrats and environmentalists are facing the possibility that they were overconfident in the staying power of their biggest victory of the past decade.

“I think a lot of single-issue climate groups woefully overestimated the salience of climate and the tax credits for individual members of Congress,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way.

When Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, in 2022, the theory underpinning the largest climate spending legislation in world history was that Republicans, should they wrest back control of Congress, wouldn’t vote to repeal a bill that funnels billions of dollars into the less-developed parts of the country where plans for factories like new battery manufacturing plants sprung up shortly after the law’s passage — the same parts of the country that are more likely to be represented by Republicans. That theory didn’t hold up in the House of Representatives last month, when moderate Republicans — representing districts receiving the vast majority of the clean energy benefits of the IRA — voted to effectively repeal the legislation in a massive budget reconciliation bill that aims primarily to extend and deepen the large tax cuts that President Trump pursued during his first term as president.

The theory had better success in the Senate — but not the way that Democrats were hoping. So far the Senate has preserved the parts of the bill that could lead to high-profile factory openings and permanent jobs — support for things like battery manufacturing facilities and nuclear power plants — but not the stuff that is likely to have the greatest impact on emissions: installing more and more wind and solar power to crowd out fossil fuels in the U.S. energy mix. In terms of building political support for climate action, Democrats may be learning that there is no substitute for persuading their opponents that the ends of their energy policies — bringing emissions down to net-zero — are just as desirable as the means of creating jobs and building out a more diversified and efficient energy system.

Preemptive Strike or Act of War? Israel Attacks Iran Amid Sinking Global Support for Assault on Gaza

Democracy Now! — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 14:30:10 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Preemptive Strike or Act of War? Israel Attacked Iran Amid Sinking Global Support for Assault on Gaza

Democracy Now! — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 12:14:42 +0000

Israel is intensifying its war on Iran, bombing the headquarters of the country’s national TV network on Monday and assassinating another top military leader. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also suggested killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran has responded with barrages of long-range missiles targeting Israel. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has shown little interest in containing Israel’s assault, posting on social media that “everyone should immediately evacuate” the capital Tehran.

“How can a city, a metropolis of 10 million people, suddenly evacuate? And to where?” says Iranian American journalist Negar Mortazavi. She notes that while Iran has long insisted its nuclear program is civilian in nature, these attacks could push the leadership into militarizing it and pursuing nuclear weapons.

We also speak with Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg, who says the war on Iran has allowed Israel’s establishment to “draw the world’s attention away from Gaza,” countering rising domestic and international criticism. “Netanyahu felt the global sentiment shifting … and because of that, he attacked Iran.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Issa Amro: Youth Against Settlements – ‘life is very hard, the Israeli soldiers act like militia’

APR editor — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 07:11:35 +0000

RNZ News

Palestinian advocate Issa Amro has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for his decades of work advocating for peaceful resistance against Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The settlements are illegal under international law — and a record 45 were established last year under cover of the war on Gaza,

Advocacy against the settlements has seen Amro become a target.

He is based in the occupied West Bank, in Hebron — a city of about 250,000 mostly Palestinian people. He founded Youth Against Settlements.

He paints a picture about what daily life is like.

“Our life in West Bank was very hard and difficult before October 7 [2023 – the date of the Hamas resistance movement attack on southern Israel]. And after October 7, life became much harder. . . .

‘Daily harassment, violence’
“So there are hard conditions. No jobs. No work. No movement in the West Bank. Schools are affected . . . There is daily harassment and violence — they attack the Palestinian villages, they attack the Palestinian cities, they attack the Palestinian roads.

“In my city Hebron, it has got much, much harder. People are not able to leave their homes because of the closure of the checkpoints. The [Israeli] soldiers are very mean and adversarial . . .

“The soldiers close the checkpoints whenever they want. In fact, the soldiers act like militia, not like a regular army.

“My house was attacked in the last 20 months . . . ”

At least 55,104 people, including at least 17,400 children, have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza. At least 943 Palestinians, more than 200 of them minors, have been killed in the occupied West Bank.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Donald Trump Signs Reversal of State Clean Car Standards, Selling Out Americans to Polluters and Unraveling Clean Air Act Protections

Newswire Editor — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 18:21:37 +0000

Today, Donald Trump signed Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions to repeal three California clean vehicle programs: Advanced Clean Cars II, Advanced Clean Trucks, and Heavy-Duty low-NOx Omnibus.

In response, Sierra Club Clean Transportation for All Director Katherine García released the following statement:

“The Trump administration’s attack on clean air and clean vehicles only benefits the fossil fuel industry, leaving Americans to foot the bill with higher fueling costs, limited vehicle choices, and more pollution. Instead of investing in electric vehicle manufacturing here in the U.S. and leading us towards a healthier future, the administration is dead set on pushing us backwards and ceding EV innovation and leadership to China. The Sierra Club will continue to fight for clean transportation solutions across the country.”

Background on the clean vehicle programs and CRA votes:

The EPA granted waivers to California for these three programs through congressionally-granted authority under the Clean Air Act. For nearly 50 years, California has had the authority to establish vehicle pollution standards that are more protective than the federal standards, and states have had the explicit right granted under the Clean Air Act to protect their residents’ health by choosing California’s standards.

The Senate votes on May 22 were an unlawful use of the CRA, and inconsistent with decades of precedent, decisions by the Government Accountability Office, and the Senate Parliamentarian. The CRA does not apply to “adjudicatory orders” or “rules of particular applicability” like waivers, as the Government Accountability Office determined in 2023 and recognized again in March. The Senate Parliamentarian also confirmed earlier in April that the CRA cannot be used to repeal the waivers.

All three programs help to improve air quality for Californians, as well as for residents in many other states that have adopted the programs. See Sierra Club’s state tracker here.

Advanced Clean Cars II: The ACC II program allows California to enforce vehicle emission standards stronger than the federal government’s which the state needs to comply with federal air quality standards and curb health-harming vehicle pollution for its residents. California has severe problems meeting the federal ozone air quality standards, and reducing vehicle pollution is essential since vehicles are the largest source of ozone precursors in the State. Twelve other states and the District of Columbia have adopted the program as well under the authority of the Clean Air Act.

Advanced Clean Trucks: The ACT program requires manufacturers to increasingly sell a certain number of zero-emission trucks and buses in California, ramping up gradually over time to reach 40-75% sales requirement for zero-emission trucks and buses in 2035. Ten other states have adopted the program as well.

Heavy-Duty low-NOx Omnibus: The HDO program helps to cut smog-forming nitrogen oxides from heavy-duty vehicles in California by setting more stringent air pollution emissions standards (eventually requiring a 90% cut in NOx emissions from model year 2027 engines), improving testing requirements for engines, and extending engine warranties. Nine other states have adopted the program as well.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Donald Trump to Sign Reversal of State Clean Car Standards, Selling Out Americans to Polluters and Unraveling Clean Air Act Protections

Newswire Editor — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 17:54:46 +0000

Today, Donald Trump signed Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions to repeal three California clean vehicle programs: Advanced Clean Cars II, Advanced Clean Trucks, and Heavy-Duty low-NOx Omnibus.

In response, Sierra Club Clean Transportation for All Director Katherine García released the following statement:

Background on the clean vehicle programs and CRA votes:

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Scorsese reflects on ‘spiritual act’ of making film about the Dalai Lama

Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 17:14:09 +0000

NEW YORK — The making of Martin Scorsese’s 1997 Oscar-nominated film Kundun was a “spiritual act” and a “very personal and special project,” the legendary filmmaker said at a rare public screening of the film on the big screen at the Tribeca Festival in New York.

Friday’s screening was part of global celebrations honoring the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday. Kundun chronicles the early life of the Tibetan spiritual leader, from his discovery as the 14th Dalai Lama as a young child in Tibet to his escape into exile in India at age 23 following the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.

“The experience of making Kundun changed my life for the better in many different ways," Scorsese told the audience at New York’s SVA Theatre, where Kundun — meaning “presence” in Tibetan, a reverent title for the Dalai Lama — screened in its original 35mm format before hundreds of attendees, including Scorsese fans and members of the Tibetan community.

Film director Martin Scorsese speaks at the SVA Theatre ahead of the screening of his film, Kundun, about the Dalai Lama’s early life during the Tribeca Festival in New York June 6, 2025.

(Sonam Zoksang)

The film represents a dramatic departure from the director’s typical crime epics like Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). Unlike those acclaimed works, Kundun remains largely inaccessible on major streaming platforms, making the screening at Tribeca a coveted experience for film enthusiasts.

“It’s a big blindspot in a filmmaker whose work I have seen most of and is hugely influential in my love for cinema and the work I do,” Giovanni Lago, a New York-based writer and podcaster, told RFA. “For some reason, you can’t find it on streaming apps. You can’t find it online … So to see it on film at Tribeca with Martin Scorsese himself introducing it is just the perfect recipe.”

Following the film’s completion, the Chinese government pressured Disney to shelve the project entirely. While Disney ultimately gave the film a limited Christmas release in 1997, the company’s then-CEO Michael Eisner publicly apologized for the production.

Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated film Kundun about the Dalai Lama is screened at the SVA Theatre at the Tribeca Festival in New York on June 6, 2025.

(Tsejin Khando)

“The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it,” Eisner said at the time. “I want to apologize, and in the future, we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening,” he said.

Even today, Kundun is not available on major streaming platforms, including Disney’s own service, Disney+. Disney did not immediately respond to RFA’s request for comment.

“The Chinese government has consistently suppressed all the films about the Dalai Lama produced in the West … because if these films were shown in China, mainland audiences would gain a more genuine understanding of who the Dalai Lama really is,” Kunga Tashi, Tibetan liaison officer at the Washington-based office of Tibet’s government-in-exile, told RFA.

In this April 30, 1998, photo, from left to right: Richard Gere, director Martin Scorsese, the Dalai Lama and screenwriter Melissa Mathison hold hands at an awards ceremony honoring Scorsese and Mathison for their work on the film "Kundun."

(Matt Campbell/AFP)

China banned Scorsese, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, and even her then-husband Harrison Ford — who had no direct involvement in the film — from entering the country. This reflected Hollywood’s complex relationship with China, where access to the lucrative Chinese market often trumps artistic expression. Similar bans affected actor Brad Pitt for his role in Seven Years in Tibet (1997) and Richard Gere for his Tibet advocacy.

“Given that China has consistently sought to restrict and suppress the distribution and screening of this film … I believe this screening at the financial capital of the U.S. is a great win for the Tibetan race, and a matter of pride and joy for me as a Tibetan,” Tara Lobsang, a Tibetan entrepreneur and artist based in New York, told RFA.

A spiritual journey

Making Kundun was a profound spiritual journey for Scorsese, a Roman Catholic who a few years earlier courted religious controversy and even faced death threats for The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Mathison, who wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), brought Scorsese the script for Kundun, setting the director on what he described as his own “spiritual exploration.”

Martin Scorsese with the members of the original cast and crew of Kundun at the screening of his 1997 film on the Dalai Lama’s early life at the Tribeca Festival in New York on June 6, 2025.

(Sonam Zoksang)

“I was really always intrigued by Tibetan Buddhism and the nature of Tibetan culture,” Scorsese reflected. “It seemed very far from my experience. But making films was always, for me, a path to discovery: discovery of new forms of expression ... of different cultures, (and) different ways of existing.”

Scorsese finalized the script with Mathison after consulting with the Dalai Lama himself in a meeting at Mathison’s Wyoming home, emphasizing the project’s authenticity and reverence.

But the film’s production proved as challenging as its subject matter was sensitive for China.

Scorsese, who later traveled to Dharamshala, India, to meet the Dalai Lama again ahead of the making of the film, initially set his sights on shooting the movie in various places in India, but the team ran into a “lot of bureaucracy” and finally settled on Morocco, where Scorsese had shot The Last Temptation of Christ.

Using the Northern Sahara Desert and Atlas Mountains, along with specially constructed sets – to depict the Dalai Lama’s winter and summer palaces, the Potala Palace and the Norbulingka, and the streets of Tibet’s capital Lhasa – the crew painstakingly created a convincing illusion of Tibet in Morocco.

Hundreds of Tibetans, including monks from the Dalai Lama’s Namgyal Monastery and performers from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamsala, traveled to Morocco, working alongside a multilingual crew who hailed from more than half-a-dozen nations.

Tencho Gyatso, the President of the International Campaign for Tibet, presents a Tibetan ceremonial white silk scarf to Martin Scorsese at the screening of Kundun at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York on June 6, 2025. Gyatso, who is the Dalai Lama’s niece, also portrayed the Tibetan spiritual leader’s mother, her own grandmother, in Kundun.

(Sonam Zoksang)

“We were dealing with seven languages on set – Tibetan, English, French, Italian, (Hindi), Arabic, and Berber – just to say ‘action.’ But once we got one word down, we figured the rest out,” Scorsese recalled, drawing laughter from the audience at the screening.

The screening at Tribeca marks one of the first events on the Compassion Rising World Tour — a global movement launched by the Washington-based advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday and his vision of a more compassionate world.

“As the Dalai Lama approaches his 90th birthday, we are not just celebrating a life — we are celebrating a force of compassion that has touched every corner of the world,” said Tencho Gyatso, president of the International Campaign for Tibet. “His message is a call to awaken the best in humanity: courage without anger, strength without violence, and love without limits. This global tribute is our collective effort to carry that light forward.”

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese and the Dalai Lama pose with the "Light of Truth" award before ceremonies for the International Campaign for Tibet's annual Light of Truth award in New York, April 30, 1998. Scorsese received the award from the Dalai Lama for his film "Kundun."

(Bebeto Matthews/AP)

Gyatso – who is the Dalai Lama’s niece and had portrayed his late mother, Gyalyum Chenmo, or her own grandmother in the film – told RFA the event was special as it kicks off the 30-day countdown to the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday on July 6, 2025, and launches the 2025 Year of Compassion in honor of the Dalai Lama’s storied life and achievements.

Many other original cast members, including Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong and Gyurme Tethong who played two of the three actors who portrayed the Dalai Lama at different ages in the film, were also present at the screening.

The making of Kundun was as much a “spiritual act” for the Tibetan cast members, advisors, artisans and crew members, as it was for Scorsese himself, the director said.

“They really weren’t acting; they were really being, they were existing in the film,” he said. “Whenever I was shooting at a 100 degrees in the heat and troubled, I’d look up and I’d see them and they grounded me and re-inspired me every day. Their devotion to their culture, keeping the culture alive after their country had been taken away from them is overwhelming.”

Martin Scorsese, center, with Jane Rosenthal of Tribeca Enterprises, left, and actor Michael Imperioli, at the screening of Scorsese’s Kundun at the Tribeca Festival in New York, June 6, 2025.

(Tenzin Pema/RFA)

Scorsese reflected on the experience of filming with Tibetans who were non-professional actors and a crew that spoke a myriad languages in a country with a culture that was far-removed from the one being filmed about.

“It was stunning. We were making a film about Buddhism and Buddhists in a Muslim country directed by a Catholic. I mean, basically, we all worked in harmony because we had a common goal, which made our major cultural differences beside the point,” he said.

For Scorsese, the film remains deeply personal.

Shortly after its completion, his mother passed away and his daughter Francesca was born.

“Out of Kundun came our wonderful daughter Francesca," he said. “It’s a very, very personal, very, very special project for me. And I hope that the generosity of spirit that we shared is evident in the picture itself when you see it.”

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan.

The Spectacle of a Police State: This Is Martial Law Without a Formal Declaration of War

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:46:10 +0000

In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal.

What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.

Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.

This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.

When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.

This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.

This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.

Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain in place to safeguard communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.

By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.

Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.

These two events—the federalization of the National Guard deployed to California in response to protests and the president’s lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital—bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.

Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).

This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.

Yet this is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.

As we have warned before, this tactic is a familiar one.

In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes often invoke national emergencies as a pretext to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.

This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them.

It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, broadcast control, and discourage resistance before it even begins.

Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.

America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.

Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.

What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.

We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.

Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down, lock down, and bring in its biggest guns.

This is how it begins.

Trump’s use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.

Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.

While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.

This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle.

By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: This is about raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.

The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as a form of governance.

We are at a crossroads.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest through force, spectacle, and fear.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.

The post The Spectacle of a Police State: This Is Martial Law Without a Formal Declaration of War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Israel’s seizure of Gaza Freedom Flotilla called a ‘blatant act of international piracy’

Jake Johnson — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:11:54 +0000

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 9, 2025. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Israeli forces early Monday boarded the Madleen, a United Kingdom-flagged vessel carrying humanitarian aid, and detained its crew members as they sought to deliver food, children’s prosthetics, and other supplies to Gaza’s besieged and starving population.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said in a statement that the Madleen was “unlawfully boarded, its unarmed civilian crew abducted, and its life-saving cargo—including baby formula, food, and medical supplies—confiscated.”

Huwaida Arraf, a human rights attorney and Freedom Flotilla organizer, said that “Israel has no legal authority to detain international volunteers aboard the Madleen” and argued that Israel’s naval blockade violates the International Court of Justice’s “binding orders requiring unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza.”

“These volunteers are not subject to Israeli jurisdiction and cannot be criminalized for delivering aid or challenging an illegal blockade—their detention is arbitrary, unlawful, and must end immediately,” said Arraf.

Heidi Matthews, an assistant professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada, echoed Arraf, writing on social media that “the world is watching Israel attack a civilian boat carrying no weapons—only humanitarian aid—flying a U.K. flag in international waters and carrying humanitarians of many nationalities.”

“Israel has precisely zero authority to do so under any law,” Matthews added.

“If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry on Monday derided the Madleen as a “selfie yacht” and said the vessel is “safely making its way to the shores of Israel” after the country’s forces boarded the boat, which set sail from Sicily on June 1. The foreign ministry added that there are other “ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip”—but Israel’s military has been tightly restricting the flow of food and other assistance, pushing the enclave toward famine.

Among the vessel’s dozen passengers are Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament.

“If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel,” Thunberg said in a video posted online by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. “I urge all my friends, family, and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me and the others as soon as possible.”

SOS! the volunteers on 'Madleen' have been kidnapped by Israeli forces.
Greta Thunberg is a Swedish citizen.
Pressure their foreign ministries and help us keep them safe!

Web: https://t.co/uCGmx8sn8j
X : @SweMFA
FB : @SweMFA
IG : swedishmfa#AllEyesOnMadeleen pic.twitter.com/76Myrg2Bnz
— Freedom Flotilla Coalition (@GazaFFlotilla) June 9, 2025

Zeteo‘s Prem Thakker reported that “before connection was lost, video from the vessel showed some form of white substance sprayed upon the vessel.”

“Passengers reported the unknown liquid came from drones flying overhead, while the ship’s radios began being jammed,” Thakker wrote.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called Israel’s seizure of the Madleen “a blatant act of international piracy and state terrorism.”

“We call on governments—especially western governments funding Israel’s genocide and Arab Muslim governments watching it happen—to show an iota of the courage demonstrated by those on the Madleen by using every tool at their disposal to force an end to the genocide,” said Awad.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, wrote that “while Madleen must be released immediately, every Mediterranean port should send boats with aid, solidarity, and humanity to Gaza.”

“Breaking the siege is a legal duty for states, and a moral imperative for all of us,” Albanese added.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jake Johnson.

‘Act responsibly for humankind’ – Palau president on deep sea mining order

APR editor — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 03:40:44 +0000

By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist

Palau’s president says the US order to fast-track deep sea mining is not a good idea.

Deep sea mining frontrunner The Metals Company (TMC) has since confirmed it will not apply for a mining licence through the International Seabed Authority (ISA), instead opting to apply through US regulations.

Surangel Whipps Jr. said the high seas belongs to the entire world so everyone must exercise caution.

READ MORE: Other seabed mining reports

“We should be responsible, and what we’ve asked for is a moratorium, or a temporary pause . . . until you have the right information to make the most important informed decision,” Whipps told RNZ Pacific.

Whipps said it’s important for those with concerns to have an opportunity to speak to US President Donald Trump.

“Because it’s about partnership. And I think a lot of times it’s the lack of information and lack of sharing information.

“It’s our job now as the Pacific to stand up and say, this direction could be detrimental to all of us that depend on the Pacific ocean and the ocean and we ask that you act responsibly for humankind and for the Pacific.”

US seabed policy
Trump’s executive order states: “It is the policy of the US to advance United States leadership in seabed mineral development.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was directed to, within 60 days, “expedite the process for reviewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in areas beyond national jurisdiction under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act”.

Pacific Islands Forum Leader’s retreat 2024 in Vava’u, Tonga. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis

It directs the US Science and Environmental Agency to expedite permits for companies to mine the ocean floor in the US and international waters.

The Metals Company has praised the US deep sea mining licensing pathway.

In a press release, its chief executive Gerard Barron made direct reference to Trump’s order, titled “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources”.

He said he was heartened by its call “for a joint assessment of a seabed benefit-sharing mechanism” and was certain that “big ocean states” like Nauru would continue to play a leading role in the deep sea mining industry.

There are divergent views on deep sea exploration and mining in the Pacific, with many nations, civil society groups, and even some governments advocating for a moratorium or outright ban.

Exploration contracts
However, Tonga, Nauru, Kiribati and the Cook Islands have exploration contracts with mining representatives.

Vanuatu’s Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu told RNZ Pacific in 2023 that Vanuatu’s position is for no deep sea mining at any point.

“We have a lot to think about in the Pacific. We are the region that is spearheading for seabed minerals,” he said.

The Cook Islands has sought China’s expertise in seabed mining through “high-level” discussions on Prime Minister Mark Brown’s February 2025 trip to China.

Nauru President David Adeang (left) with Cook Islands PM Mark Brown at the opening of the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, in August 2024. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis

Whipps said “you have to give [The Metals Company] credit” that they have been able to get in there and convince Donald Trump that this is a good direction to go.

But as the president of a nation with close ties to the US and Taiwan, and the host of the PIF Ocean’s Commissioner, he has concerns.

“We don’t know the impacts to the rest of what we have in the Pacific — which is for us in the Pacific, it’s tuna [which] is our biggest resource,” Whipps said.

“How is that going to impact on the food chain and all of that?

“Because we’re talking about bringing, first of all, impacting the largest carbon sink that we have, which is the oceans, right? So we say our islands are sinking, but now we want to go and do something that helps our islands sink.

“That’s not a good idea.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

New Zealand’s foreign policy stance on Palestine lacks transparency

APR editor — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 11:49:02 +0000

COMMENTARY: By John Hobbs

It is difficult to understand what sits behind the New Zealand government’s unwillingness to sanction, or threaten to sanction, the Israeli government for its genocide against the Palestinian people.

The United Nations, human rights groups, legal experts and now genocide experts have all agreed it really is “genocide” which is being committed by the state of Israel against the civilian population of Gaza.

It is hard to argue with the conclusion genocide is happening, given the tragic images being portrayed across social and increasingly mainstream media.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has presented Israel’s assault on Gaza war as pitting “the sons of light” against “the sons of darkness”. And promised the victory of Judeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism.

A real encouragement to his military there should be no-holds barred in exercising indiscriminate destruction over the people of Gaza.

Given this background, one wonders what the nature of the advice being provided by New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to the minister entails?

Does the ministry fail to see the destruction and brutal killing of a huge proportion of the civilian people of Gaza? And if they see it, are they saying as much to the minister?

Cloak of ‘diplomatic language’
Or is the advice so nuanced in the cloak of “diplomatic language” it effectively says nothing and is crafted in a way which gives the minister ultimate freedom to make his own political choices.

The advice of the officials becomes a reflection of what the minister is looking for — namely, a foreign policy approach that gives him enough freedom to support the Israeli government and at the same time be in step with its closest ally, the United States.

The problem is there is no transparency around the decision-making process, so it is impossible to tell how decisions are being made.

I placed an Official Information Act request with the Minister of Foreign Affairs in January 2024 seeking advice received by the minister on New Zealand’s obligations under the Genocide Convention.

The request was refused because while the advice did exist, it fell outside the timeline indicated by my request.

It was emphasised if I were to put in a further request for the advice, it was unlikely to be released.

They then advised releasing the information would be likely to prejudice the security or defence of New Zealand and the international relations of the government of New Zealand, and withholding it was necessary to maintain legal professional privilege.

Public interest vital
It is hard to imagine how the release of such information might prejudice the security or defence of New Zealand or that the legal issues could override the public interest.

It could not be more important for New Zealanders to understand the basis for New Zealand’s foreign policy choices.

New Zealand is a contracting party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Under the convention, “genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they [the contracting parties] undertake to prevent and punish”.

Furthermore: The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide. (Article 5).

Accordingly, New Zealand must play an active part in its prevention and put in place effective penalties. Chlöe Swarbrick’s private member’s Bill to impose sanctions is one mechanism to do this.

In response to its two-month blockade of food, water and medical supplies to Gaza, and international pressure, Israel has agreed to allow a trickle of food to enter Gaza.

However, this is only a tiny fraction of what is needed to avert famine. Understandably, Israel’s response has been criticised by most of the international community, including New Zealand.

Carefully worded statement
In a carefully worded statement, signed by a collective of European countries, together with New Zealand and Australia, it is requested that Israel allow a full resumption of aid into Gaza, an immediate return to ceasefire and a return of the hostages.

Radio New Zealand interviewed the Foreign Minister Winston Peters to better understand the New Zealand position.

Peters reiterated his previous statements, expressing Israel’s actions of withholding food as “intolerable” but when asked about putting in place concrete sanctions he stated any such action was a “long, long way off”, without explaining why.

New Zealand must be clear about its foreign policy position, not hide behind diplomatic and insincere rhetoric and exercise courage by sanctioning Israel as it has done with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

As a minimum, it must honour its responsibilities under the Convention on Genocide and, not least, to offer hope and support for the utterly powerless and vulnerable Palestinian people before it is too late.

John Hobbs is a doctoral candidate at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS) at the University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The Inevitable Souring: Elon Musk Falls Out with Donald Trump

Binoy Kampmark — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:10:49 +0000

Sandpit politics is rarely edifying, and grown toddlers taking their fists to each other is unlikely to interest. But when they feature US President Donald Trump and the world’s wealthiest man, the picture alters. Disputes are bound to be on scale, rippling in their consequences.

No crystal ball was required regarding the eventual sundering of the relationship between Trump and Elon Musk. Here were noisy, brash egos who had formed a rancid union in American politics, with Musk lending his resources and public machinery to The Donald, knowing he could also have sway in the Trump administration as a “special government employee”. That sway took the form of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), a crude attempt to right the wrongs of misspending in government while politicising the public service. Awaking from a narcotised daze, Musk decided to focus on his floundering companies, notably Tesla, and step back from the inferno. In doing so, he expected “to remain a friend and adviser, and if there’s anything the president wants me to do, I’m at this service.” Gazing at the raging inferno that is Trumpian policy, that convivial attitude has all but evaporated.

For one thing, Trump’s proposed tax breaks and increases in defence spending, espoused in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, seemed to undermine the very premise of DOGE and its zealous mission of reducing government spending. The legislation promises to slash $1.5 trillion in government spending but increase the debt limit by $4 trillion. “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning last month. Such a plan merely inflated, not reduced, the budget deficit. “I think a bill can be big or beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.”

This month, Musk became even more irritable. His temper had frayed. “I’m sorry, I just can’t stand it anymore,” he barked on his X platform on June 3. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.” He continued to heap shame on members of Congress “who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

On June 5, Trump expressed his disappointment “because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill”, leaving open the possibility that the billionaire might be suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Musk had “only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the [electric vehicle] mandate.”

A blow was in the offing, coming in the form of a post on Truth Social: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised Biden didn’t do it!” Musk’s embittered retort: “Such an obvious lie. So sad.” He also proposed, in light of the President’s announcement, the decommissioning of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, vehicles used by NASA to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The ripples were finally getting violent.

Musk then decided to do what he called dropping “the really big bomb”. Trump, he revealed, “is in the Epstein files. This is the real reason they have not been made public.” Given Musk’s estranged relationship with reality and its facets, this can only be taken at face value. It’s a matter of record that Trump, along with a fat who’s who of power, knew the late Jeffrey Epstein, financier and convicted sex offender, for many years.

The trove of government documents known as The Epstein Files has offered the easily titillated some manna but, thus far, few bombs. On February 27, US Attorney General Pamela Bondi released what were described as the “first phase” of files relating to the financier and “his exploitation of over 250 underage girls at his homes in New York and Florida, among other locations.” In an interview with Fox News on February 21, Bondi revealed that Epstein’s client list lay “on my desk right now.”

Trump’s response to Musk’s latest gobbet of accusation proved almost melancholic. “I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.” He went on to praise “one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”

In characteristically bratty fashion, Musk went on to share a post agreeing with the proposition that Trump be impeached and replaced by the Vice President, J.D. Vance, advocate “a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle” (a touching billionaire’s wish), and predict “a recession in the second half of this year” caused by Trump’s global tariff regime.

In the scheme of things, Trump has survived impeachment, prosecution, litigation, and a divided US electorate that gave him a majority in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Like a Teflon-coated mafia don, he has made compromising people a minor art. Musk, compromised in his support and having second thoughts, can only go noisily into the confused night.

The post The Inevitable Souring: Elon Musk Falls Out with Donald Trump first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Trump’s Palantir-Powered Surveillance Is Turning America Into a Digital Prison

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:00:09 +0000

Call it what it is: a panopticon presidency.

President Trump’s plan to fuse government power with private surveillance tech to build a centralized, national citizen database is the final step in transforming America from a constitutional republic into a digital dictatorship armed with algorithms and powered by unaccountable, all-seeing artificial intelligence.

This isn’t about national security. It’s about control.

According to news reports, the Trump administration is quietly collaborating with Palantir Technologies—the data-mining behemoth co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel—to construct a centralized, government-wide surveillance system that would consolidate biometric, behavioral, and geolocation data into a single, weaponized database of Americans’ private information.

This isn’t about protecting freedom. It’s about rendering freedom obsolete.

What we’re witnessing is the transformation of America into a digital prison—one where the inmates are told we’re free while every move, every word, every thought is monitored, recorded, and used to assign a “threat score” that determines our place in the new hierarchy of obedience.

The tools enabling this all-seeing surveillance regime are not new, but under Trump’s direction, they are being fused together in unprecedented ways, with Palantir at the center of this digital dragnet.

Palantir, long criticized for its role in powering ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and predictive policing, is now poised to become the brain of Trump’s surveillance regime.

Under the guise of “data integration” and “public safety,” this public-private partnership would deploy AI-enhanced systems to comb through everything from facial recognition feeds and license plate readers to social media posts and cellphone metadata, cross-referencing it all to assess a person’s risk to the state.

This isn’t speculative. It’s already happening.

Palantir’s Gotham platform, used by law enforcement and military agencies, has long been the backbone of real-time tracking and predictive analysis. Now, with Trump’s backing, it threatens to become the central nervous system of a digitally enforced authoritarianism.

As Palantir itself admits, its mission is to “augment human decision-making.” In practice, that means replacing probable cause with probability scores, courtrooms with code, and due process with data pipelines.

In this new regime, your innocence will be irrelevant. The algorithm will decide who you are.

To understand the full danger of this moment, we must trace the long arc of government surveillance—from secret intelligence programs like COINTELPRO and the USA PATRIOT Act to today’s AI-driven digital dragnet embodied by data fusion centers.

Building on this foundation of historical abuse, the government has evolved its tactics, replacing human informants with algorithms and wiretaps with metadata, ushering in an age where pre-crime prediction is treated as prosecution.

Every smartphone ping, GPS coordinate, facial scan, online purchase, and social media like becomes part of your “digital exhaust”—a breadcrumb trail of metadata that the government now uses to build behavioral profiles. The FBI calls it “open-source intelligence.” But make no mistake: this is dragnet surveillance, and it is fundamentally unconstitutional.

Already, government agencies are mining this data to generate “pattern of life” analyses, flag “radicalized” individuals, and preemptively investigate those who merely share anti-government views.

This is not law enforcement. This is thought-policing by machine, the logical outcome of a system that criminalizes dissent and deputizes algorithms to do the targeting.

Nor is this entirely new.

For decades, the federal government has reportedly maintained a highly classified database known as Main Core, designed to collect and store information on Americans deemed potential threats to national security.

As Tim Shorrock reported for Salon, “One former intelligence official described Main Core as ‘an emergency internal security database system’ designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.”

Trump’s embrace of Palantir, and its unparalleled ability to fuse surveillance feeds, social media metadata, public records, and AI-driven predictions, marks a dangerous evolution: a modern-day resurrection of Main Core, digitized, centralized, and fully automated.

What was once covert contingency planning is now becoming active policy.

What has emerged is a surveillance model more vast than anything dreamed up by past regimes—a digital panopticon in which every citizen is watched constantly, and every move is logged in a government database—not by humans, but by machines without conscience, without compassion, and without constitutional limits.

This is not science fiction. This is America—now.

As this technological tyranny expands, the foundational safeguards of the Constitution—those supposed bulwarks against arbitrary power—are quietly being nullified and its protections rendered meaningless.

What does the Fourth Amendment mean in a world where your entire life can be searched, sorted, and scored without a warrant? What does the First Amendment mean when expressing dissent gets you flagged as an extremist? What does the presumption of innocence mean when algorithms determine guilt?

The Constitution was written for humans, not for machine rule. It cannot compete with predictive analytics trained to bypass rights, sidestep accountability, and automate tyranny.

And that is the endgame: the automation of authoritarianism. An unblinking, AI-powered surveillance regime that renders due process obsolete and dissent fatal.

Still, it is not too late to resist—but doing so requires awareness, courage, and a willingness to confront the machinery of our own captivity.

Make no mistake: the government is not your friend in this. Neither are the corporations building this digital prison. They thrive on your data, your fear, and your silence.

To resist, we must first understand the weaponized AI tools being used against us.

We must demand transparency, enforce limits on data collection, ban predictive profiling, and dismantle the fusion centers feeding this machine.

We must treat AI surveillance with the same suspicion we once reserved for secret police. Because that is what AI-powered governance has become—secret police, only smarter, faster, and less accountable.

We don’t have much time.

Trump’s alliance with Palantir is a warning sign—not just of where we are, but of where we’re headed. A place where freedom is conditional, rights are revocable, and justice is decided by code.

The question is no longer whether we’re being watched—that is now a given—but whether we will meekly accept it. Will we dismantle this electronic concentration camp, or will we continue building the infrastructure of our own enslavement?

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we trade liberty for convenience and privacy for security, we will find ourselves locked in a prison we helped build, and the bars won’t be made of steel. They will be made of data.

The post Trump’s Palantir-Powered Surveillance Is Turning America Into a Digital Prison first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Not a pro-Pakistan rally in Kerala, these videos are of Indian Union Muslim League’s protests against Waqf Act

Ankita Mahalanobish — Thu, 29 May 2025 17:15:59 +0000

A video of men in green jerseys sloganeering in Malayalam is being dubbed as pro-Pakistan activism in Kerala by social media users. In the video, the men are waving green flags that have a crescent moon and a star.

X user Anoop Antony Joseph (@AnoopKaippalli), former national secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), BJP’s youth wing, shared the video on April 19, 2025, with a snide comment on secularism in the state. (Archive)

‘Secular Kerala!’ pic.twitter.com/4C8kirSuOy

— Anoop Antony Joseph (@AnoopKaippalli) April 19, 2025

The post had garnered 145,000 views at the time of writing this.

Pro-Right X user, Raushan Sinha (@MrSinha_), also shared the video, urging people to notice the jersey, flags, and the Islamic slogans. “No this isn’t Pakistan, or Bangladesh but Kerala…. Yes an Indian state…We are doomed,” he wrote. (Archive)

Look at their clothes, flags, Islamic slogans….
No this isn’t Pakistan, or Bangladesh but Kerala…. Yes an Indian state…

We are doomed…pic.twitter.com/HyO98HvvwW

— Mr Sinha (@MrSinha_) April 19, 2025

The post had racked up over 800,000 views at the time of writing this.

Note that Alt News has fact-checked misinformation shared by this user on multiple occasions.

Another X account, Rocket Scientist (@Rockumon), shared the purported video and alleged that the men in the video wore wearing Pakistan-linked jerseys, waved Pakistani flags, and yet Kerala is called secular. (Archive)

The dress is Pakistani, the flag is Pakistani, the soul and voice echo Pakistan — all in the name of religion. Yet they still call it secular Kerala. pic.twitter.com/GDqrutlCIT

— Rocket Scientist (@Rockumon) April 19, 2025

Pakistan-based X user @lmrankhanISP1, whose account is currently withheld in India, shared a similar video on April 25, claiming that Kerala stood with Pakistan. The slogans used by demonstrators in this video were slightly different from the ones above. (Archive)

Alt News received several requests to fact check the video and claims on WhatsApp (+91 7600011160).

Click to view slideshow.

Fact Check

We first asked someone familiar with the language to translate what the sloganeering was referring to.

It roughly translates to:

“We are raised in green
Let us say it clearly
We are CH’s blood
We are CH’s kids
We are the kids from/of Panakkad
Green indeed, we are green
We are raised in green
Let us say it clearly
We are CH’s kids
We are CH’s blood
Muslim League… Muslim League…”

The person who translated this also told us that CH here refers to C H Mohammed Koya, former leader of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML).

Slogans in the second video shared by the Pakistan-based account translate to:

“The star of Panakkad that god created for this community
Ya Sayyad Sadiq Ali Thangal, you
Lead us with courage…”

Sayyad Sadiq Ali Thangal is the leader of IUML in Panakkad. Thus slogans used by the demonstrators in both videos have no mention of Pakistan.

Second, we took a close look at the jerseys in the two videos and found “Arangadi” written on them. This is a village in the Kanhangad municipality of Kasaragod district in Kerala. So, the jerseys don’t have a Pakistan link.

Thirdly, the green flags in the demonstrations were of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) and not Pakistan. The Pakistan flag, while also green and bearing the crescent moon and star, has a white band on the left.

Fourthly, to understand what the demonstration in the videos was about, we did a reverse-image search on some key frames. This led us to an Instagram account @arangadi_official_page that had uploaded a video on April 16, 2025, with the caption ‘Kozhikode’. Note that this is the official page of the IUML Arandagi and the video was identical to the one shared by the Pakistan-based account.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ARANGADI (@arangadi_official_page)

While going through this Instagram page, we also found a video shared on April 25 where the same people in the viral clip are seen from a different angle. The caption translates to, “It’s sad to see so many idiots who don’t even know which (is the) league’s flag (and which) is Pakistan’s. Try to comment only after you understand what this demonstration is for. The idiots are misleading you, be careful ”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ARANGADI (@arangadi_official_page)

We compared the viral clip and the one on this page for clarity below:

We also found a poster shared by the same account on April 15, 2025, asking people to join a rally against the amendment of the Waqf Act the following day (April 16).

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ARANGADI (@arangadi_official_page)

To corroborate that the demonstration was related to the passage of the Waqf Bill (now Act), we looked for news reports from around that time. A Times of India report said that on April 16, the IUML staged a major Waqf protection rally in Kozhikode. Note that there were nationwide protests against the Waqf Amendment Bill around that period. On April 16, Maktoob Media also reported that many people joined the IUML protest against the new Waqf law in Kozhikode.

So, the rally or demonstration was related to the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, that was approved by the Parliament in the first week of April. It had nothing to do with Pakistan.

To sum up, the two viral clips showing men in green jerseys and waving green flags sloganeering are not of a pro-Pakistan demonstration in Kerala but of protests by members of the Indian Union Muslim League, Arangadi. The protests were regarding the amendments to the Waqf Board and Council that was approved by the Parliament. Also, the flags in the footage are IUML flags, not Pakistan and the jerseys, too, are unrelated to the neighbouring country.

The post Not a pro-Pakistan rally in Kerala, these videos are of Indian Union Muslim League’s protests against Waqf Act appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.

Why NZ must act against Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide

APR editor — Wed, 28 May 2025 23:36:17 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Ian Powell

When I despairingly contemplate the horrors and cruelty that Palestinians in Gaza are being subjected to, I sometimes try to put this in the context of where I live.

I live on the Kāpiti Coast in the lower North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Geographically it is around the same size as Gaza. Both have coastlines running their full lengths. But, whereas the population of Gaza is a cramped two million, Kāpiti’s is a mere 56,000.

The Gaza Strip . . . 2 million people living in a cramped outdoor prison about the same size as Kāpiti. Map: politicalbytes.blog

I find it incomprehensible to visualise what it would be like if what is presently happening in Gaza occurred here.

The only similarities between them are coastlines and land mass. One is an outdoor prison while the other’s outdoors is peaceful.

New Zealand and Palestine state recognition
Currently Palestine has observer status at the United Nations General Assembly. In May last year, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of Palestine being granted full membership of the United Nations.

To its credit, New Zealand was among 143 countries that supported the resolution. Nine, including the United States as the strongest backer of Israeli genocide outside Israel, voted against.

However, despite this massive majority, such is the undemocratic structure of the UN that it only requires US opposition in the Security Council to veto the democratic vote.

Notwithstanding New Zealand’s support for Palestine broadening its role in the General Assembly and its support for the two-state solution, the government does not officially recognise Palestine.

While its position on recognition is consistent with that of the genocide-supporting United States, it is inconsistent with the over 75 percent of UN member states who, in March 2025, recognised Palestine as a sovereign state (by 147 of the 193 member states).

NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon . . . his government should “correct this obscenity” of not recognising Palestinians’ right to have a sovereign nation. Image: RNZ/politicalbytes.blog/

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government does have the opportunity to correct this obscenity as Palestine recognition will soon be voted on again by the General Assembly.

In this context it is helpful to put the Hamas-led attack on Israel in its full historical perspective and to consider the reasons justifying the Israeli genocide that followed.

7 October 2023 and genocide justification
The origin of the horrific genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the associated increased persecution, including killings, of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank (of the River Jordan) was not the attack by Hamas and several other militant Palestinian groups on 7 October 2023.

This attack was on a small Israeli town less than 2 km north of the border. An estimated 1,195 Israelis and visitors were killed.

The genocidal response of the Israeli government that followed this attack can only be justified by three factors:

The Judaism or ancient Jewishness of Palestine in Biblical times overrides the much larger Palestinian population in Mandate Palestine prior to formation of Israel in 1948;
The right of Israelis to self-determination overrides the right of Palestinians to self-determination; and
The value of Israeli lives overrides the value Palestinian lives.

The first factor is the key. The second and third factors are consequential. In order to better appreciate their context, it is first necessary to understand the Nakba.

Understanding the Nakba
Rather than the October 2023 attack, the origin of the subsequent genocide goes back more than 70 years to the collective trauma of Palestinians caused by what they call the Nakba (the Disaster).

The foundation year of the Nakba was in 1948, but this was a central feature of the ethnic cleansing that was kicked off between 1947 and 1949.

During this period Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

The Nakba – the Palestinian collective trauma in 1948 that started ethnic cleansing by Zionist paramilitary forces. Image: David Robie/APR

During the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or forced to flee. Initially this was through Zionist paramilitaries.

After the establishment of the State of Israel in May this repression was picked up by its military. Massacres, biological warfare (by poisoning village wells) and either complete destruction or depopulation of Palestinian-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods (which were then given Hebrew names) followed

By the end of the Nakba, 78 percent of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel.

Genocide to speed up ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing was unsuccessfully pursued, with the support of the United Kingdom and France, in the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. More successful was the Six Day War of 1967, which included the military and political occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Throughout this period ethnic cleansing was not characterised by genocide. That is, it was not the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying them.

Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began in May 1948 and has accelerated to genocide in 2023. Image: politicalbytes.blog

In fact, the acceptance of a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine) under the ill-fated Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995 put a temporary constraint on the expansion of ethnic cleansing.

Since its creation in 1948, Israel, along with South Africa the same year (until 1994), has been an apartheid state. I discussed this in an earlier Political Bytes post (15 March 2025), When apartheid met Zionism.

However, while sharing the racism, discrimination, brutal violence, repression and massacres inherent in apartheid, it was not characterised by genocide in South Africa; nor was it in Israel for most of its existence until the current escalation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

Following 7 October 2023, genocide has become the dominant tool in the ethnic cleansing tool kit. More recently this has included accelerating starvation and the bombing of tents of Gaza Palestinians.

The magnitude of this genocide is discussed further below.

The Biblical claim
Zionism is a movement that sought to establish a Jewish nation in Palestine. It was established as a political organisation as late as 1897. It was only some time after this that Zionism became the most influential ideology among Jews generally.

Despite its prevalence, however, there are many Jews who oppose Zionism and play leading roles in the international protests against the genocide in Gaza.

Zionist ideology is based on a view of Palestine in the time of Jesus Christ. Image: politicalbytes.blog

Based on Zionist ideology, the justification for replacing Mandate Palestine with the state of Israel rests on a Biblical argument for the right of Jews to retake their “homeland”. This justification goes back to the time of that charismatic carpenter and prophet Jesus Christ.

The population of Palestine in Jesus’ day was about 500,000 to 600,000 (a little bigger than both greater Wellington and similar to that of Jerusalem today). About 18,000 of these residents were clergy, priests and Levites (a distinct male group within Jewish communities).

Jerusalem itself in biblical times, with a population of 55,000, was a diverse city and pilgrimage centre. It was also home to numerous Diaspora Jewish communities.

In fact, during the 7th century BC at least eight nations were settled within Palestine. In addition to Judaeans, they included Arameans, Samaritans, Phoenicians and Philistines.

A breakdown based on religious faiths (Jews, Christians and Muslims) provides a useful insight into how Palestine has evolved since the time of Jesus. Jews were the majority until the 4th century AD.

By the fifth century they had been supplanted by Christians and then from the 12th century to 1947 Muslims were the largest group. As earlier as the 12th century Arabic had become the dominant language. It should be noted that many Christians were Arabs.

Adding to this evolving diversity of ethnicity is the fact that during this time Palestine had been ruled by four empires — Roman, Persian, Ottoman and British.

Prior to 1948 the population of the region known as Mandate Palestine approximately corresponded to the combined Israel and Palestine today. Throughout its history it has varied in both size and ethnic composition.

The Ottoman census of 1878 provides an indicative demographic profile of its three districts that approximated what became Mandatory Palestine after the end of World War 1.

Group	Population	Percentage
Muslim citizens	403,795	86–87%
Christian citizens	43,659	9%
Jewish citizens	15,011	3%
Jewish (foreign-born)	Est. 5–10,000	1–2%
Total	Up to 472,465	100.0%

In 1882, the Ottoman Empire revealed that the estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine represented just 0.3 percent of the world’s Jewish population.

The self-determination claim
Based on religion the estimated population of Palestine in 1922 was 78 percent Muslim, 11 percent Jewish, and 10 percent Christian.

By 1945 this composition had changed to 58 percent Muslim, 33 percent Jewish and 8 percent Christian. The reason for this shift was the success of the Zionist campaigning for Jews to migrate to Palestine which was accelerated by the Jewish holocaust.

By 15 May 1948, the total population of the state of Israel was 805,900, of which 649,600 (80.6 percent) were Jews with Palestinians being 156,000 (19.4 percent). This turnaround was primarily due to the devastating impact of the Nakba.

Today Israel’s population is over 9.5 million of which over 77 percent are Jewish and more than 20 percent are Palestinian. The latter’s absolute growth is attributable to Israel’s subsequent geographic expansion, particularly in 1967, and a higher birth rate.

Palestine today (parts of West Bank under Israeli occupation). Map: politicalbytes.blog

The current population of the Palestinian Territories, including Gaza, is more than 5.5 million. Compare this with the following brief sample of much smaller self-determination countries — Slovenia (2.2 million), Timor-Leste (1.4 million), and Tonga (104,000).

The population size of the Palestinian Territories is more than half that of Israel. Closer to home it is a little higher than New Zealand.

The only reason why Palestinians continue to be denied the right to self-determination is the Zionist ideological claim linked to the biblical time of Jesus Christ and its consequential strategy of ethnic cleansing.

If it was not for the opposition of the United States, then this right would not have been denied. It has been this opposition that has enabled Israel’s strategy.

Comparative value of Palestinian lives
The use of genocide as the latest means of achieving ethnic cleansing highlights how Palestinian lives are valued compared with Israeli lives.

While not of the same magnitude appropriated comparisons have been made with the horrific ethnic cleansing of Jews through the means of the holocaust by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Per capita the scale of the magnitude gap is reduced considerably.

Since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (and confirmed by the World Health Organisation) more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed. Of those killed over 16,500 were children. Compare this with less than 2000 Israelis killed.

Further, at least 310 UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) team members have been killed along with over 200 journalists and media workers. Add to this around 1400 healthcare workers including doctors and nurses.

What also can’t be forgotten is the increasing Israeli ethnic cleansing on the occupied West Bank. Around 950 Palestinians, including around 200 children, have also been killed during this same period.

Time for New Zealand to recognise Palestine
The above discussion is in the context of the three justifications for supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians strategy that goes back to 1948 and which, since October 2023, is being accelerated by genocide.

First, it requires the conviction that the theology of Judaism in Palestine in the biblical times following the birth of Jesus Christ trumps both the significantly changing demography from the 5th century at least to the mid-20th century and the numerical predominance of Arabs in Mandate Palestine;
Second, and consequentially, it requires the conviction that while Israelis are entitled to self-determination, Palestinians are not; and
Finally, it requires that Israeli lives are much more valuable than Palestinian lives. In fact, the latter have no value at all.

Unless the government, including Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, shares these convictions (especially the “here and now” second and third) then it should do the right thing first by unequivocally saying so, and then by recognising the right of Palestine to be an independent state.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

EU must make media reforms a reality in European Democracy Shield

CPJ Staff — Tue, 27 May 2025 14:31:45 +0000

May 27, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges the European Commission to call on member states to provide both financing and political will to defend media freedom as it moves forward with its European Democracy Shield initiative.

Public consultations for the proposed Shield, which European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in 2024, closed on May 26.

The Commission has stated that defense of the press will be an “important part” of the initiative, which seeks to address foreign interference online, and counter disinformation and information manipulation, as well as other threats to democratic processes.

During its 2019 to 2024 term, the European Commission stepped up its defense of media freedom, with actions including:

The 2024 European Media Freedom Act to stop media capture by vested interests;
A 2022 Directive and Recommendation to limit the use of vexatious lawsuits filed to censor critical reporting, known as SLAPPS, or Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation;
The 2021 Recommendation on journalists’ safety, which guides member states on how to protect journalists.

“Brussels has created the tools for strengthening media freedom in Europe, but journalists need to see that they work,” said CPJ Deputy Advocacy Director, EU, Tom Gibson. “The European Democracy Shield should provide a clear roadmap to push existing reforms forward. EU member states should respond with both financial commitments to ensure its success and renewed political will to save journalism in Europe.”

The impact of recent initiatives has yet to be seen. As CPJ noted in its 2023 report, “Fragile Progress: The struggle for press freedom in the European Union”, improved and sustained action from Brussels is needed to ensure member states deliver on the reforms.

The question of Europe’s political will coincides with a dire financial outlook for the media worldwide, including a shift to digital platforms and declining advertising revenues. The Trump administration’s withdrawal of U.S. financial support has plunged many independent media outlets in Europe into crisis.

Negotiations over the EU’s 2028 to 2034 budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework, are likely to be tense, in part because of diverging outlooks from member states and economic pressures.

Read CPJ’s full recommendations to the European Commission on the European Democracy Shield here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Plea for UN intervention over illegal PNG loggers ‘stealing forests’

APR editor — Tue, 27 May 2025 12:18:02 +0000

RNZ Pacific

A United Nations committee is being urged to act over human rights violations committed by illegal loggers in Papua New Guinea.

Watchdog groups Act Now! and Jubilee Australia have filed a formal request to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to consider action at its next meeting in August.

“We have stressed with the UN that there is pervasive, ongoing and irreparable harm to customary resource owners whose forests are being stolen by logging companies,” Act Now! campaign manager Eddie Tanago said.

READ MORE: Other PNG logging reports

He said these abuses were systematic, institutionalised, and sanctioned by the PNG government through two specific tools: Special Agriculture and Business Leases (SABLs) and Forest Clearing Authorities (FCAs) — a type of logging licence.

“For over a decade since the Commission of Inquiry into SABLs, successive PNG governments have rubber stamped the large-scale theft of customary resource owners’ forests by upholding the morally bankrupt SABL scheme and expanding the use of FCAs,” Tanago said.

He said the government had failed to revoke SABLs that were acquired fraudulently, with disregard to the law or without landowner consent.

“Meanwhile, logging companies have made hundreds of millions, if not billions, in ill-gotten gains by effectively stealing forests from customary resource owners using FCAs.”

Abuses hard to challenge
The complaint also highlights that the abuses are hard to challenge because PNG lacks even a basic registry of SABLs or FCAs, and customary resource owners are denied access to information to the information they need, such as:

The existence of an SABL or FCA over their forest;
A map of the boundaries of any lease or logging licence;
Information about proposed agricultural projects used to justify the SABL or FCA;
The monetary value of logs taken from forests; and
The beneficial ownership of logging companies — to identify who ultimately profits from illegal logging.

“The only reason why foreign companies engage in illegal logging in PNG is to make money,” he said, adding that “it’s profitable because importing companies and countries are willing to accept illegally logged timber into their markets and supply chains.”

ACT NOW campaigner Eddie Tanago . . . “demand a public audit of the logging permits – the money would dry up.” Image: Facebook/ACT NOW!/RNZ Pacific

“If they refused to take any more timber from SABL and FCA areas and demanded a public audit of the logging permits — the money would dry up.”

Act Now! and Jubilee Australia are hoping that this UN attention will urge the international community to see this is not an issue of “less-than-perfect forest law enforcement”.

“This is a system, honed over decades, that is perpetrating irreparable harm on indigenous peoples across PNG through the wholesale violation of their rights and destroying their forests.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Legal academic says Samoa’s criminal libel law should go after charge

APR editor — Thu, 22 May 2025 09:24:44 +0000

By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

An Auckland University law academic says Samoa’s criminal libel law under which a prominent journalist has been charged should be repealed.

Lagi Keresoma, the first female president of the Journalists Association of Samoa (JAWS) and editor of Talamua Online, was charged under the Crimes Act 2013 on Sunday after publishing an article about a former police officer, whom she asserted had sought the help of the Head of State to withdraw charges brought against him.

JAWS has already called for the criminal libel law to be scrapped and Auckland University academic Beatrice Tabangcoro told RNZ Pacific that the law was “unnecessary and impractical”.

“A person who commits a crime under this section is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding 175 penalty units or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 months,” the Crimes Act states.

JAWS said this week that the law, specifically Section 117A of the Crimes Act, undermined media freedom, and any defamation issues could be dealt with in a civil court.

JAWS gender representative to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said Keresoma’s arrest “raises serious concerns about the misuse of legal tools to independent journalism” in the country.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson called on the Samoan government “to urgently review and repeal criminal defamation laws that undermine democratic accountability and public trust in the justice system”.

Law removed and brought back
The law was removed by the Samoan government in 2013, but was brought back in 2017, ostensibly to deal with issues arising on social media.

Auckland University’s academic Beatrice Tabangcoro . . . reintroduction of the law was widely criticised at the time. Image: University of Auckland

Auckland University’s academic Beatrice Tabangcoro told RNZ Pacific that this reintroduction was widely criticised at the time for its potential impact on freedom of speech and media freedom.

She said that truth was a defence to the offence of false statement causing harm to reputation, but in the case of a journalist this could lead to them being compelled to reveal their sources.

The academic said that the law remained unnecessary and impractical, and she pointed to the Samoa Police Commissioner telling media in 2023 that the law should be repealed as it was used “as a tool for harassing the media and is a waste of police resources”.

Tonga and Vanuatu are two other Pacific nations with the criminal libel law on their books, and it is something the media in both those countries have raised concerns about.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 13 May 2025 22:22:07 +0000

Few modern political figures have done more to prompt spontaneous national discussions about the Bill of Rights and constitutional limits on government power than Donald Trump—if only because he tramples on them so frequently.

Indeed, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.

Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.

First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest, and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and threatening to revoke media licenses to blacklisting law firms, threatening universities with funding cuts for not complying with the government’s ideological agenda, and detaining foreign students for their political views, Trump has treated constitutional protections not as guarantees, but as obstacles.

Second Amendment (right to bear arms): Trump has shown an inconsistent and, at times, authoritarian approach to gun rights, summed up in his infamous 2018 statement: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” At the same time, Trump has encouraged the militarization of domestic police forces, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and standing armies—a contradiction that cuts against the very spirit of the amendment, which was rooted in distrust of centralized power and standing militaries.

Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures): Trump’s expansion of no-knock raids, endorsement of sweeping surveillance tactics, sanctioning of police brutality and greater immunity for police misconduct, and the use of masked, plainclothes federal agents to seize demonstrators off the streets have revived conversations about privacy, unlawful searches, and the right to be secure in one’s person and property.

Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments (due process and equal protection): Perhaps nowhere has Trump’s disregard been more dangerous than in his approach to due process and equal protection under the law. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that neither citizens nor non-citizens can be deprived of liberty without fair procedures. Yet Trump’s Administration has repeatedly floated or enacted policies that sidestep due process, from the suggestion that he could suspend habeas corpus to the indefinite detention of individuals without trial, and openly questioned whether non-citizens deserve any constitutional protections at all.

Even the Sixth (right to a fair and speedy trial) and Eighth Amendments (protection against cruel and unusual punishment) have found new urgency: Trump has promoted indefinite pretrial detention for protesters and immigrants alike, while presiding over family separations, inhumane detention centers, and support for enhanced interrogation techniques. Trump has also doubled down on his administration’s commitment to carrying out more executions, including a push to impose the death penalty for crimes other than murder.

Tenth Amendment (states’ rights): The Tenth Amendment, which preserves state sovereignty against federal overreach, has been tested by Trump’s threats to defund sanctuary cities, override state public health measures, and interfere in local policing and elections. His efforts to federalize domestic law enforcement have exposed the limits of decentralized power in the face of executive ambition.

Fourteenth Amendment (birthright citizenship): No clause has been more aggressively misunderstood by Trump than the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His push to strip citizenship from children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents (birthright citizenship) ignores over a century of legal precedent affirming that citizenship cannot be denied by executive whim.

Article I, Section 8 (commerce and tariffs): Trump’s use of tariff authority provides another example of executive power run amok. Although the Constitution assigns Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and used them as political leverage. These actions not only undermine the constitutional balance between the branches but also weaponize trade policy for political ends.

Article I, Section 9 (Emoluments Clause): Trump’s disregard for the Emoluments Clause—a safeguard against presidential profiteering—brought this obscure constitutional provision back into the public eye. Between continuing to profit from his private businesses while in office and his reported willingness to accept extravagant gifts, including a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, he has raised urgent ethical and legal concerns about self-dealing, corruption and backdoor arrangements by which foreign and domestic governments can funnel money into Trump’s personal coffers.

Article I, Section 9 (power of the purse): Trump has trampled on Congress’s exclusive power over federal spending, attempting to redirect funds by executive fiat rather than operating within Congress’s approved budgetary plan. He has also threatened to withhold federal aid from states, cities, and universities deemed insufficiently loyal.

Article II (executive powers): At the heart of Trump’s governance is a dangerous misreading of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, to justify executive overreach and the concept of an all-powerful unitary executive. He has repeatedly claimed “total authority” over state matters, wielded executive orders like royal decrees in order to bypass Congress, and sought to bend the Department of Justice to his personal and political will.

Historical Emergency Powers and Legal Precedents: Trump has also breathed new life into archaic emergency powers. He invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rounding up, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants without due process. He has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically in order to deal with civil unrest, raising the specter of martial law cloaked in patriotic language.

In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn’t.

Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?

For starters, anyone taking public office, from the president on down, should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. And if they violate their contractual obligations to uphold and defend the Constitution, vote them out—throw them out—or impeach them.

“We the people” have power, but we must use it or lose it.

Trump may have contributed to this revival in constitutional awareness, but as we warn in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the challenge isn’t just knowing our rights—it’s defending them, before they’re gone for good.

The post Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 13 May 2025 22:22:07 +0000

Indeed, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.

Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.

In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn’t.

Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?

“We the people” have power, but we must use it or lose it.

The post Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Martial Law Disguised as Law and Order: The Oldest Trick in the Authoritarian Playbook

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Wed, 07 May 2025 00:29:51 +0000

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison

We are being frog-marched into tyranny at the end of a loaded gun. Or rather, hundreds of thousands of loaded guns.

Let’s not mince words: President Trump’s April 28 executive order is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: martial law masquerading as law and order.

Officially titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” this order is a “heil Hitler” wrapped in the goosestepping, despotic trappings of national security.

Don’t be fooled by Trump’s tough-on-crime rhetoric, cloaked in patriotic language and the promise of safety.

This is the language of every strongman who’s ever ruled by force.

The White House claims the order will “empower state and local law enforcement to relentlessly pursue criminals and protect American communities.” But under this administration, “criminal” increasingly includes anyone who dares to exercise their constitutional rights.

The order doesn’t merely expand policing—it institutionalizes repression.

It sets us squarely on the road to martial law.

If allowed to stand, Trump’s executive order completes our shift from a nation of laws, where even the least among us had the right to due process, to a nation of enforcers: vigilantes with badges who treat “we the people” as suspects and subordinates.

Without invoking the Insurrection Act or deploying active-duty military forces, Trump has accelerated the transformation of domestic police into his own paramilitary force.

With the stroke of his presidential pen, he has laid the groundwork for a stealth version of martial law by:

Expanding police powers and legal protections;
Authorizing the DOJ to defend officers accused of civil rights violations;
Increasing the transfer of military equipment to local police;
Shielding law enforcement from judicial oversight;
Prioritizing law enforcement protection over civil liberties;
Embedding DHS and federal agents more deeply into local policing.

All of this has occurred without congressional debate, judicial review, or constitutional scrutiny.

For years, we have watched as the government transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military: outfitted with military hardware and trained in battlefield tactics.

However, this executive order goes one step further—it creates not just a de facto standing army but Trump’s own army: loyal not to the Constitution or the people but to the president.

This is the very danger the Founders feared: a militarized police force answerable to a powerful executive, operating outside the bounds of the law.

This is martial law without a declaration.

Today, law enforcement is equipped like the military, trained in battlefield tactics, and given broad discretion over who to target and how to respond. But these are not soldiers bound by the laws of war. They are civilian enforcers, wielding unchecked power with minimal oversight.

And they are everywhere.

Armored vehicles on neighborhood streets. Flashbang raids on family homes. Riot police in small towns. SWAT-style teams deployed by federal agencies. Drones overhead. Mass surveillance below.

We are fast approaching a reality where constitutional rights exist in name only.

In practice, we are ruled by a quasi-military bureaucracy empowered to:

Detain without trial;
Punish political dissent;
Seize property under civil asset forfeiture;
Classify critics as extremists or terrorists;
Conduct mass surveillance on the populace;
Raid homes in the name of “public safety”;
Use deadly force at the slightest provocation.

In other words, we’ve got freedom in name only.

It’s the same scenario nationwide: in big cities and small towns alike, militarized “warrior” cops—hyped up on power—ride roughshod over individual rights by exercising almost absolute discretion over who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence has already ensured that unarmed Americans—many of them mentally ill, elderly, disabled, or simply noncompliant—will continue to die at the hands of militarized police.

From individuals shot for holding garden hoses to those killed after calling 911 for help, these tragedies underscore a chilling truth: in a police state, the only truly “safe” person is one who offers no resistance at all.

These killings are the inevitable result of a system that rewards vigilante aggression by warrior cops and punishes accountability.

These so-called warrior cops, trained to act as judge, jury, and executioner, increasingly outnumber those who still honor their oath to uphold the Constitution and serve the public.

Now, under the cover of executive orders and nationalist rhetoric, that warrior mentality is being redirected toward a more dangerous mission: silencing political dissent.

Emboldened by Trump’s call to reopen Alcatraz and target so-called “homegrown” threats, these foot soldiers of the police state are no longer going to be tasked with enforcing the law—they will be deployed to enforce political obedience.

This is not a theory. It is a reality unfolding before our eyes.

We are living in a creeping state of undeclared martial law.

The militarization of police and federal agencies over recent decades has only accelerated the timeline toward authoritarianism.

This is how freedom ends—not with a loud decree, but with the quiet, calculated erosion of every principle we once held sacred.

We’ve come full circle—from resisting British redcoats to submitting to American forces with the same disdain for liberty.

Our constitutional foundation is crumbling, and with it, any illusion that those in power still serve the public good.

For its part, Congress has abdicated its role as a constitutional check on executive power, passing sweeping authorizations with little scrutiny and failing to rein in executive overreach. The courts, too, have in the past sanctioned many of these abuses in the name of national security, public order, or qualified immunity. Instead of acting as constitutional safeguards, these institutions have largely become rubber stamps.

Indeed, the president, Congress, the courts, and the police have come to embody the very abuse the Founders fought to resist. Only now are the courts beginning to show glimmers of allegiance to the Constitution.

This is not about partisanship. This is about power without restraint.

As tempting as it is to place full blame on Trump for this full-throttle shift into martial law, he is not the architect of this police state. He is its most shameless enabler—a useful frontman for the Deep State in its ongoing war on the American people.

As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.

We ignore these signs at our peril.

The post Martial Law Disguised as Law and Order: The Oldest Trick in the Authoritarian Playbook first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

National Nurses United urges passage of Medicare for All Act

Newswire Editor — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:35:19 +0000

Registered nurses with National Nurses United (NNU) are reaffirming their support for the Medicare for All Act, following the bill’s reintroduction in Congress today by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the U.S. Senate and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) in the U.S. House of Representatives.

NNU members have long supported efforts to achieve guaranteed health care for every person in the United States, through a single-payer system that provides health care based on patient needs, not industry profits. The legislation comes at a critical time when vital lifesaving health care programs, like Medicaid and Veterans Health Administration benefits, are at risk of being completely gutted.

“Nurses are fighting for a future in which our patients’ health is put first always and that’s why we are proud to continue our support for Medicare for All,” said Nancy Hagans, RN and NNU president. “When we guarantee health care for all, corporations and billionaires will no longer be able to deny anyone the care that they need. In the richest country on earth, nobody should have to be forced to choose between taking their medications and putting food on the table. Yet countless families are pushed to the breaking point while greedy corporations charge astronomical, ludicrous fees for care that is every patient’s right to receive.”

The Medicare for All Act builds upon and expands Medicare to provide comprehensive benefits – primary care, vision, dental, prescription drugs, mental health services, home and community-based care, and more – to every person. In addition to allowing patients to have the freedom to choose the doctors, hospitals, and other providers they wish to see without worrying about whether a provider is in-network, the bill would also allow the health care system to negotiate drug prices and reduce exorbitant administrative waste.

Currently, 85 million people in America are either uninsured or underinsured, a number that stands to grow exponentially if Congressional lawmakers choose to gut, rather than defend and strengthen, the country’s public health infrastructure.

“The goal of the current administration and their billionaire buddies is to pile on endless cuts and attacks so that we become too demoralized and overwhelmed to move forward,” said Bonnie Castillo, RN and executive director of NNU. “Registered nurses and our allies don’t step back but step up, during pandemics, climate emergencies, and authoritarian regimes. We won’t let them threaten public services like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security or try to eliminate federal workers’ protected union rights. As patient advocates, it is our duty to fight for a system that prioritizes people over profits. So even on our hardest days, we won’t stop fighting for Medicare for All.”

“The American people understand, as I do, that health care is a human right, not a privilege and that we must end the international embarrassment of the United States being the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all of its citizens,” said Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). “It is not acceptable to me, nor to the American people, that over 85 million people today are either uninsured or underinsured. Today, there are millions of people who would like to go to a doctor but cannot afford to do so. This is an outrage. In America, your health and your longevity should not be dependent on your wealth. Health care is a human right that all Americans, regardless of income, are entitled to and they deserve the best health care that our country can provide.”

“It is a travesty when 85 million people are uninsured or underinsured and millions more are drowning in medical debt in the richest nation on Earth,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) . “We don’t suffer from scarcity in America, we suffer from greed. That’s most clear in our broken healthcare system, which is why we need Medicare for All. People deserve and want comprehensive health care that covers mental health, long-term care, reproductive care, dental, vision and hearing, all without copays, private insurance premiums, sky high deductibles or other hidden fees. Health care is a human right, that is exactly why it’s time to pass Medicare for All.”

“Every American has the right to health care, period. If you’re sick, you should be able to go to the doctor without being worried about the cost of treatment or prescription medicine. Too many families must decide between putting food on the table and getting medical care that they desperately need,”said Representative Debbie Dingell (MI-06). “A health care system that ties coverage to employment will always leave patients vulnerable. It’s flat-out wrong and Medicare for All would put a stop to it. We’ve been fighting this fight since the 1940s, when my father-in-law helped author the first universal health care bill. It’s time to get this done.”

For more information on the Medicare for All Act, please refer to NNU’s fact sheet.

In addition to the Medicare for All Act, NNU members are advocating for the following federal legislation:

NURSE STAFFING STANDARDS FOR HOSPITAL PATIENT SAFETY AND QUALITY CARE ACT, sponsored by Rep. Jan Schakowsky: There are no federal mandates regulating the number of patients a registered nurse can care for at one time in U.S. hospitals. As a result, registered nurses (RNs) are consistently required to care for more patients than is safe, compromising patient care and negatively impacting patient outcomes. These dangerous conditions are causing thousands of RNs to leave the hospital bedside. This legislation would improve patient care and increase nurse retention by setting mandated, minimum RN-to-patient staffing ratios.
THE WORKPLACE VIOLENCE PREVENTION FOR HEALTH CARE AND SOCIAL SERVICE WORKERS ACT, sponsored by Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Rep. Joe Courtney: Violence against nurses and other health care workers in hospitals and other health care facilities is a growing epidemic across the United States. Nurses report being punched, kicked, bitten, beaten, choked, and assaulted on the job — and some have faced stabbings and shootings. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the hazard of workplace violence, with nurses reporting an increase in violent incidents on the job since the beginning of the pandemic. The Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act would mandate OSHA to promulgate a standard that would require all covered employers to develop and implement prevention plans to reduce workplace violence incidents. The Workplace Violence Prevention bill passed the House of Representatives in both the 116th and 117th Congress with significant bipartisan support.
THE RICHARD L. TRUMKA PROTECTING THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE (PRO) ACT, sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Bobby Scott: A union gives workers the ability to act together to advocate for safe working conditions, to improve their wages and benefits, and to protect their workplace rights through collective bargaining and concerted activity. For registered nurses, union advocacy and representation allows us to focus on what we do best: caring for our patients. Attacks on unions and the right to unionize have hurt efforts to improve the lives of working families. Current labor law does far too little to protect and allow workers to exercise our right to join a union. The PRO Act is an important step to protect workers’ rights to organize a union and to stop employers’ attacks so that every worker can organize without fear of retaliation. The PRO Act passed the House of Representatives in the 116th and 117th Congress with bipartisan support.
THE VA EMPLOYEE FAIRNESS ACT, sponsored by Rep. Mark Takano: Section 7422 of Title 38 of the U.S. Code limits the collective bargaining rights of certain Veterans Affairs (VA) clinical professionals, including registered nurses. This section restricts the ability of registered nurses to speak out about poor working conditions and to resolve disputes with management. As a result, the quality of patient care can deteriorate and problems in VA facilities can go unaddressed. The VA Employee Fairness Act would improve patient care in VA hospitals by expanding the collective bargaining rights of registered nurses and other clinicians employed by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). The VA Employee Fairness Act passed the House of Representatives in December 2022 with bipartisan support.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Māori leaders urge UN to act stronger on NZ’s ‘regressive’ policies

APR editor — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:36:05 +0000

By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson in New York

Claire Charters, an expert in indigenous rights in international and constitutional law, has told the United Nations the New Zealand government is pushing the most “regressive” policies she has ever seen.

“New Zealand’s policy on the Declaration (on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) sits alongside its legislative strategy to dismantle Māori rights in Aotearoa New Zealand, which has received global attention for its regressiveness,” said Charters.

Charters (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi and Tainui) made the comment during an address last week to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII).

While in New York, Charters organised meetings between senior UN officials, New Zealand diplomats, and Māori attending UNPFII.

The officials included the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights, Dr Albert Barume, Sheryl Lightfoot, the Vice-Chair of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), and EMRIP Chair Valmaine Toki (Ngāti Rehua, Ngātiwai, Ngāpuhi).

Charters said the New Zealand government should be of exceptional concern to the UN, given that the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, had publicly expressed his rejection of the declaration.

In 2023, Peters’ party NZ First announced it would withdraw New Zealand from UNDRIP, citing concerns over race-based preferences.

In the same year, Peters claimed Māori were not indigenous peoples.

“New Zealand’s current government, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs specifically, has expressly rejected the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It has committed to not implementing the declaration,” said Charters.

Indigenous people’s forum at the United Nations. Video: UN News

Charters invited the special rapporteur to visit New Zealand but also noted that the government ignored EMRIP’s request for a follow-up visit to support New Zealand’s implementation of UNDRIP.

She also called on the Permanent Forum to take all measures to require New Zealand to implement the declaration.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

Claire Charters presenting her intervention on the implementation of UNDRIP – this year’s theme for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigneous Issues. Image: Te Ao Māori News

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In Defense of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act

Jeffrey H. Altschul — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 05:53:58 +0000

Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia – Public Domain

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is under attack. It’s not the first time. The rationale for these attacks has remained the same for the last 50 years: Section 106 compliance is slow, expensive, and unpredictable; it hinders economic growth and kills jobs. All of this comes easy to its detractors; none of it is true.

Section 106 requires federal agencies to assess the effects of their actions that involve lands they administer, permits they provide, and licenses they grant on historic, archaeological, and cultural properties listed in or eligible to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and, to the extent possible, minimize harmful effects to these significant places. The rules governing Section 106 have been in place since 1974. The path toward compliance is well-worn and easy to follow. So why the attacks?

Who Cares?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the fight over Section 106, let’s start with three broader questions: Do Americans care about preserving their history? Do Americans want historic places protected and preserved? Do Americans want taxpayer money spent on historic preservation? The best answers to these questions come from polls taken over the last 25 years (Ipsos 2018, 2023; Ramos and Duganne 2000; Shannon 2014). Consistently, between 80 percent and 90 percent of respondents state that archaeological sites and historic buildings are important to them. In the latest poll (Ipsos 2023), 64 percent responded that archaeological site preservation should be a priority of the federal government, with 77 percent replying that there should be laws to protect archaeological sites and only 5 percent desiring no laws. Most respondents want federal funding for the protection of sites to increase and 80 percent want more land associated with archaeological sites to be set aside and preserved.

It’s one thing to answer a poll, it’s another to act on those beliefs. “So, what do Americans do on their vacations and how do they spend their money?” For many, the answer is visiting archaeological and historic sites. For example, since it opened in 1908, Mesa Verde National Park has hosted about 37 million visitors, with an average of more than 500,000 annually for the last 60 years. Gettysburg National Military Park was established in 1934 and has been visited by more than 136 million visitors, with an average attendance for the last 65 years cresting more than 1 million annually.

Perhaps surprising to some, one of the most visited National Historic Parks (NHP) is the San Antonio Missions, which since 1983 has preserved four of the five Spanish Missions near San Antonio (the fifth, the Alamo, is the best known and most visited but is not part of the park and not included in the visitation numbers). The San Antonio Missions NHP has been visited by more than 42 million people, easily exceeding an average of 1 million visitors a year since its inception.

But it’s not just the most famous parks that receive visitors. In my home state of Arizona, there are 19 national parks (NP), monuments, historic sites, and memorials administered by the National Park Service (NPS) (Table 1). Of these, 11 are national monuments, historic sites, or memorials (collectively, termed “NM” below) focused around archaeological or historic sites. In 2024, more than 1.6 million people visited these 11 NMs (NPS 2025), spending about $167 million and accounting for about 1,650 jobs (Flyr and Koontz 2024). In all, the archaeological and historical NMs account for about 20 percent of all NPS visitation in Arizona and more than 10 percent of the money spent and jobs created at NPS units in the state.

One of the parks in Arizona is the Grand Canyon, which by itself accounts for more than half of all visits, money, and jobs to Arizona NPS units. If we exclude the Grand Canyon National Park, then archaeological and historical NMs are responsible for about 45 percent of all visitations, money, and jobs at NPs and NMs in Arizona. Some may scoff at the size of the numbers, but it’s important to remember that many archaeological and historic NMs are in rural parts of the state, where the dollars generated and the jobs created at these units are extremely important to local businesses and communities. Also, some of the archaeological and historical NMs are hard to get to (for example, you need to hike a 3-mile loop to get in and out of Fort Bowie).

No matter how difficult, Americans keep coming. With their money and their time, Americans overwhelmingly declare that they enjoy visiting and learning about the past at archaeological and historical sites. They come alone, with their families, their friends, their schools, and their churches. They are awed by what Americans have done and are inspired to dream about things they might do.

Back to Section 106

Section 106 seeks to balance the interests of project proponents and land developers with protecting the historic fabric of this country. Those who contend that Section 106 is an impediment to development tend to be those with an economic interest. They provide anecdotal evidence of particular projects in which Section 106 compliance was maddeningly slow and outrageously expensive. They never, however, analyze Section 106 actions in a systematic and comprehensive manner, since such an evaluation shows a very different story.

Table 2 is derived from a report on the cumulative impact of the Historic Preservation Fund for the period 2001-2021, commissioned by the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers (PlaceEconomics 2023:22). It shows that for the first two decades of the 21st century, the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) in 59 jurisdictions made about 4.3 million decisions related to Section 106 undertakings. Nearly 80 percent of these decisions were findings that either no historic properties were found in the project area or that those that did exist were not sufficiently significant to warrant any action. In short, about 3.4 million projects brought before SHPOs were dealt with quickly and cheaply, with the project proponent or developer free to proceed in less than 30 days (often in less than a week). In addition, many federal agencies, in partnership with SHPOs and other consulting parties, have made agreements that exclude a vast number of small-scale projects from Section 106 reviews, which have minimal potential to adversely affect the National Register listed or eligible properties. These Section 106 agreements are effective tools that streamline and expedite a wide range of development projects.

About 900,000 projects were found to include a significant property and/or have an adverse effect on such a property. Most of these were altered, redesigned, or withdrawn so that the historic property or properties were not harmed and the proponent was free to proceed or move on to another project without having spent lots of money or wasted considerable time. Of the millions of Section 106 undertakings, less than 0.5% resulted in an agreement document among the SHPO, federal agency, affected Native American tribes, project proponent, local jurisdictions and communities, and other interested public groups on how to resolve the project’s harmful effects on significant historic properties. In 21 years, less than 20,000 agreement documents were signed in the 59 SHPO jurisdictions, or less than 20 per year in the entire country. What do these 20 projects have in common? They contained properties of historical and cultural value to our nation, local communities, Native American tribes, and descendants. The Section 106 agreement documents protected the values embedded in those places while allowing development to proceed.

Safeguard or Obstruction

There are two views of Section 106. Many in the development community view it as a regulation that inhibits economic progress. They argue that the Section 106 process is used by opponents to stymie or kill projects, particularly large and controversial ones. In contrast, local and descendant communities maintain that Section 106 provides them with one of the few means by which they have any say in development decisions. Even with Section 106, however, these groups maintain that the playing field is unequal, with development holding the stronger hand.

Each view has some truth to it, and each overstates the harm that regulations cause them. I have been involved with more than 1,000 Section 106 projects in the last 50 years. The vast majority were uncontested and noncontroversial. The results documented the past, protected significant places, and expedited economic development. There were also a handful of controversial projects, in which passions became inflamed, the proponents and opponents talked past each other, and the agreement reached was in name only, with both sides feeling that they had been shorted.

Critics of Section 106 point to these controversial projects as evidence that the regulation doesn’t work, that it neither protects significant places nor allows the country to build needed infrastructure or improve property. Yet this view is wrong on the facts and mistaken in where it places the blame. Section 106 is a procedural law that does not establish a required outcome. The federal agency with jurisdiction over a project has the final decision, which in almost every case is to allow the project to proceed.

As a country, we want economic development that betters our lives and strengthens our communities. Development that offers a brighter future must be grounded in our shared past. Killing Section 106 would do nothing to further our aspiration to balance economic development with historic preservation. It would not even speed up development. Instead, it would ensure that historic preservationists, who otherwise welcome the opportunity to work with developers, would become entrenched opponents. Heritage strikes at the heart of a community’s ethos, so few land battles stir more passion. Section 106 negotiations can be intense, irate, and irreconcilable, but they take place within a structure designed to make sure everyone is heard and all viewpoints considered. With it, even the most controversial projects move forward. Without it, battle lines form at development sites with no one emerging unscathed.

Let me be clear, development projects proceed not in spite of but because of Section 106. Without the Section 106 regulations, local and descendant communities would have no voice to ensure that development is in keeping with their values and their past. Their only recourse would be to sue. Litigation would be everything critics say about Section 106 and then some—excruciatingly slow, extremely expensive, and unpredictable.

We Can Still Do Big Things

In 1999, Statistical Research, Inc. (SRI), the cultural resource management consulting firm my wife and I founded, was awarded a five-year contract to provide historic preservation services on the U.S. Air Force portion of the Barry M. Goldwater Range (BMGR). Located in the region of Southwest Arizona known as the Papaguería, the main military mission of the BMGR is to train fighter pilots. At the time when we were awarded the contract, the commanding officer took me aside and quietly, but firmly, said, “You’re free to do all the research and studies you want as long as the fighters continue to fly. The day that archaeology stops one flight will be your last day on the BMGR.”

Today, SRI continues to provide CRM services on the BMGR. In more than 25 years, not a plane has been grounded; not a flight has been aborted; not a mission has been altered because of archaeology. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been inventoried, thousands of archaeological sites have been recorded, hundreds of test excavations have been conducted, and several large-scale excavations have been completed. Native Americans from multiple tribes have joined archaeologists and the U.S. Air Force personnel on scores of site tours. Tribes have inventoried the BMGR for traditional properties and sacred sites, and with almost no exception, these areas have been avoided by military training. More than a bookshelf of technical reports have been written and thousands of artifacts cleaned, analyzed, and stored. Articles, books, and lectures for professional and non-professional audiences have been written or presented.

There are those on the right and the left who argue that we can’t do big things in this country. That Section 106 is choking off growth. But thousands of fighter pilots, many of whom went off to war to defend this country, were trained without interruption, while below, archaeologists and Native Americans worked together to document thousands of years of human occupation of the Papaguería.

There are those who will grant that the process works but still argue that the archaeology and history of places like the Papaguería are not critical to the history of the United States. The BMGR lies in one of the hottest, driest deserts in the United States. Who in their right mind would live here? And, really, who cares?

One hot summer day, in exasperation, I asked these very same questions. Accompanying me in the field that day was Joe Joaquin, an elder of the Tohono O’odham Nation as well as a Marine veteran of Korea and Vietnam. Joe looked around and then, with a wry grin, looked at me, “Who wouldn’t want to live here?” And then more seriously he went on, “These mountains hold our stories, the valleys [are] our ancestral sites, as O’odham people, we are put on this earth to take care of them, and without them we lose who we are. You have the skills and knowledge to find these places, which we don’t have. What you do is important.”

Joe has long since passed away, though his words still reverberate in me. Training fighter pilots is paramount to the defense of this country. But we can do that and still honor an obligation to the first people of the land. The path to doing so is clear. It’s called Section 106.

References

– Flyr, M., and Koontz, L. (2024). “2023 National Park Visitor Spending Effects: Economic Contributions to Local Communities, States, and the Nation.” Science Report NPS/SR-2024/174. National Park Service, Fort Collins, Colorado.

– Ipsos (2018). “American Perceptions of Archaeology.” Report commissioned by the Society for American Archaeology.

– Ipsos (2023). “American Perception of Archaeology.” Report commissioned by the Society for American Archaeology.

– National Park Service (NPS) (2025). NPS Stats (National Park Service Visitor Use Statistics).

– PlaceEconomics (2023). “The Cumulative Impact of the Historic Preservation Fund.” Report commissioned by the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers.

– Ramos, Maria, and Duganne, David (2000). “Exploring Public Perceptions and Attitudes about Archaeology.” Report prepared by Harris Interactive for a coalition of professional societies and federal agencies.

– Shannon, Sandra (2014). “A Survey of the Public: Preferences for Old and New Buildings, Attitudes about Historic Preservation, and Preservation-Related Engagement.” MA thesis, School of Architecture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

The post In Defense of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey H. Altschul.

Trump signs ‘deeply dangerous’ order to fast-track deep sea mining

APR editor — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:38:41 +0000

An ocean conservation non-profit has condemned the United States President’s latest executive order aimed at boosting the deep sea mining industry.

President Donald Trump issued the “Unleashing America’s offshore critical minerals and resources” order on Thursday, directing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to allow deep sea mining.

The order states: “It is the policy of the US to advance United States leadership in seabed mineral development.”

NOAA has been directed to, within 60 days, “expedite the process for reviewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in areas beyond national jurisdiction under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act.”

Ocean Conservancy said the executive order is a result of deep sea mining frontrunner, The Metals Company, requesting US approval for mining in international waters, bypassing the authority of the International Seabed Authority (ISA).

US not ISA member
The ISA is the United Nations agency responsible for coming up with a set of regulations for deep sea mining across the world. The US is not a member of the ISA because it has not ratified UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

“This executive order flies in the face of NOAA’s mission,” Ocean Conservancy’s vice-president for external affairs Jeff Watters said.

“NOAA is charged with protecting, not imperiling, the ocean and its economic benefits, including fishing and tourism; and scientists agree that deep-sea mining is a deeply dangerous endeavor for our ocean and all of us who depend on it,” he said.

He said areas of the US seafloor where test mining took place more than 50 years ago still had not fully recovered.

“The harm caused by deep sea mining isn’t restricted to the ocean floor: it will impact the entire water column, top to bottom, and everyone and everything relying on it.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Tamara Pearson: Writing as an act of resistance

Michael Fox — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 17:17:24 +0000

Tamara writes. She writes in her tiny apartment in bustling Puebla, Mexico, where street vendors hawk vegetables and fruits, clothes, and electronics. Where their calls ring like birdsong and the sound of city traffic bellows low like a bassoon, or a didgeridoo.

Tamara writes beautiful phrases, linking adjective and metaphor. Inventing words, painting pictures of alebrijes and butterflies and magic. But her stories are not fanciful. They are not fast-food fairy tales or strip-mall Coca-Cola Inc.-brand fables meant to lull you to sleep and to buy their products.

Tamara’s stories have an edge. They have a point, chiseled over years. They are stories of grit. They are stories of truth. Where the hero is not an impossibly brawny white uniform-wearing man, but an elderly migrant; a homeless grandmother, fleeing violence, picking her way forward, following the breadcrumbs left by an unjust system made not for her, but for the rich. For the elites. For the wealthy tourists, with their expensive cameras, who speak loudly in foreign languages in countries they only visit to say they’ve visited, and eat their food and buy their trinkets and return home to brag.

But Tamara’s protagonists also have their superpowers. They have magic. They see mystical creatures. They paint their own worlds, just like Tamara’s pen, or keyboard stroke.

Tamara writes of injustice. She writes of inequality. She writes of poverty. Then she volunteers at a migrant shelter. She marches with the Indigenous defending their homeland, fighting foreign water companies or mining corporations. She meets. She organizes. She speaks, softly. In a throng of people, she is often the one behind the lens of a camera. Tamara carries both powerful words and silence, in the same breath. This is her superpower. She knows both when to listen and to speak. A potent potion few heroes wield.

Global inequality is her Lex Luthor. Her Joker. Her Darth Vader. This system that permits some countries, and thereby some people, to hold so much power over the rest. This system that decides who needs to fight to survive and who gets to spend their days binge watching Netflix. Who will be educated. Who should travel. Who should live and who should die. All decided by what side of a fence they were born on. What mountainside. What distant shore. What tiny dot on the planet their mothers birthed and raised them.

This global caste system — that is her greatest antagonist. And she fights it daily the only way she knows how. With the very essence of her soul.

###

Tamara Pearson is an Australian-Mexican writer and journalist. You can check out her work on her website ResistanceWords.com. I’ll add a link in the show notes.

Her latest novel, Eyes of the Earth, is a journey of magical realism about a 73-year-old homeless refugee in Mexico. Definitely check it out.

As always, I’m your host Michael Fox. This is Stories of Resistance, a new podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.

As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.

This is Stories of Resistance—a new podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Check out Tamara Pearson’s original publications for The Real News Network here, and follow her work at resistancewords.com. She tweets at x.com/pajaritaroja.

You can find Tamara Pearson’s latest novel, Eyes of the Earth, at resistancewords.com/novel-the-eyes-of-the-earth/

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting, and support at patreon.com/mfox.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

Refugee. Dissident. Enemy of the State. Would ICE Have Crucified Jesus?

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:48:49 +0000

Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places [like the CECOT prison]. It’s not big enough.

— President Trump on his desire to send American citizens to a megaprison in El Salvador, beyond the reach of U.S. courts and the Constitution

It has begun, just as we predicted, justified in the name of national security.

Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of the Constitution, at least for select segments of the population. A hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.

This is what it looks like when the government makes itself the arbiter of who is deserving of rights and who isn’t.

Here is what we know: one segment of the population at a time, the Trump Administration is systematically and without due process attempting to cleanse the country of what it perceives to be “undesirables” as part of its purported effort to make America great again.

This is how men, women and children are being made to disappear, snatched up off the streets by press-gangs of plainclothes, masked government agents impersonating street thugs.

Presently, these so-called “undesirables” include both undocumented and legal immigrants—many labeled terrorists despite having no criminal record, no court hearing, and no due process—before being extradited to a foreign concentration camp in an effort to sidestep judicial oversight.

By including a handful of known members of a vicious gang among those being rounded up, the government is attempting to whitewash the public into believing that everyone being targeted is, in fact, a terrorist.

In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints, characteristics and behaviors that could be considered “dangerous.”

Thus, without proof, a sheet metal worker has been labeled a terrorist. A musician has been labeled a terrorist. A makeup artist has been labeled a terrorist. A cellular biologist has been labeled a terrorist. A soccer player has been labeled a terrorist. A food delivery driver has been labeled a terrorist.

Unfortunately, the government’s attempts to dehumanize and strip individuals of their inalienable rights under the Constitution by labeling them criminals and “terrorists” is just the beginning of the dangerous game that is afoot.

It’s only a matter of time before American citizens who refuse to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates are classified as terrorists, denied basic rights, and extradited to a foreign prison.

That time is drawing closer.

Indeed, Trump has repeatedly spoken of his desire to be able to send American citizens—whom he refers to as “homegrowns,” as in homegrown terrorists—on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s mega-prison, where conditions are so brutal that officials brag the only way out is in a coffin. His administration is currently trying to find a way to accomplish that very objective.

We’re not quite there yet, but it’s coming.

What we are witnessing is history repeating itself in real-time: the widening net that ensnares us all. In other words, it’s only a matter of time before anyone who is not fully compliant gets labeled a terrorist.

A prime example of how the government casting its net in ever-widening circles can be seen in the government’s sudden decision to target academics in the U.S. on work and student visas who have been critical of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 50,000 people (nearly a third of them under the age of 18), as threats to national security.

Given Trump’s eagerness to take ownership of the Gaza strip in order to colonize it, build resorts and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”—at taxpayer expense—it should come as no surprise that the Trump Administration is attempting to muzzle any activities that might stir up sympathy for the Palestinians.

Thus, the government is classifying any criticism of Israel as antisemitic and equating it with terrorism.

Under such a broad definition, Jesus himself would be considered antisemitic.

So you can add antisemitic to the list of viewpoints that could have one classified as a terrorist, rounded up by ICE, stripped of the fundamental rights to due process and a day in court, and made to disappear into a detention center.

Mind you, the government isn’t just targeting protest activities and expression that might have crossed over into civil disobedience. It’s also preemptively targeting individuals who have committed no crimes but whose views might at some point in the future run counter to the government’s self-serving interests.

This is precrime taken to a whole new level: targeting thoughts, i.e., thought crime.

The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

As German pastor Martin Niemöller lamented:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

You see how this works?

Let’s not mince words about what’s happening here: under the guise of fighting terrorism, the U.S. government is not just making people disappear—it is making the Constitution disappear.

When rights become privileges, the Constitution—and the rule of law—becomes optional.

We are almost at that point already.

Trump’s list of “the enemies from within” is growing in leaps and bounds.

The list of individuals and groups being classified as anti-American gets bigger by the day: Immigrants, both legal and undocumented. Immigration attorneys. Judges. Lawyers. Law firms. Doctors. Scientists. Students. Universities. Nonprofits.

Given what we know about the government and its expansive definition of what constitutes a threat to its power, any one of us who dare to speak truth to power could be targeted next as an enemy of the state.

Certainly, it is easy to remain silent in the face of evil.

What is harder—what we lack today and so desperately need—are those with moral courage who will risk their freedoms and lives in order to speak out against evil in its many forms.

Throughout history, individuals or groups of individuals have risen up to challenge the injustices of their era. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.

And then there was Jesus Christ who not only died challenging the police state of his day but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

It makes you wonder how Jesus—a Palestinian refugee, a radical, and a revolutionary—would have fared in the American police state under a Trump regime.

Would Jesus—who spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—have been snatched up in the dead of night, stripped of any real due process, made to disappear into a detention center, and handed a death sentence when he was delivered into a prison where the only way out is in a wooden box?

Consider that the charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious.

Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.”

After Jesus was formally condemned by Pilate, he was sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.” The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry.

This radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, is not the politically mute, humble and obedient one whom Trump praised in his presidential proclamation.

Almost 2,000 years after Jesus was crucified by the police state of his era, we find ourselves confronted by a painful irony: that in the same week commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus, a Palestinian refugee who was killed by the police state for speaking truth to power, the U.S. government is prosecuting Palestinian refugees who are daring to challenge another modern-day police state’s injustices, while threatening to impose widespread martial law on the country to put down any future rebellions.

President Trump has hinted that he could invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would allow the president to use the military on American soil.

This would in effect be a declaration of martial law.

Trump has already authorized the military to take control of the southern border, which puts parts of the domestic United States under martial law.

What comes next?

Trump has long speculated about using his presidential powers under the Insurrection Act to direct the military to deal with his perceived political opponents, whom he likens to “the enemy from within.”

As Austin Sarat writes for Salon: “The president alone gets to decide what constitutes an ‘insurrection,’ ‘rebellion,’ or ‘domestic violence.’ And once troops are deployed, it will not be easy to get them off the streets in any place that the president thinks is threatened by ‘radical left lunatics.’”

So where do we go from here?

History offers some clues.

Exactly 250 years ago, on April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began with a “shot heard round the world.” It wasn’t sparked by acts of terrorism or rebellion—it was triggered by a government that had grown deaf to the cries of its people.

What we don’t need is violence in any form—by the people or their government.

What we do need is a revival of moral courage.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are desperately overdue for a reminder to our government: this is still our country.

Or, as Thomas Paine so powerfully put it: “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”

The post Refugee. Dissident. Enemy of the State. Would ICE Have Crucified Jesus? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Theodore Roosevelt: Moral Critic of Oligarchy

William Manson — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 16:01:47 +0000

After he lost the 1912 presidential election on the Progressive Party ticket, Roosevelt wrote his lengthy Autobiography. His insights on “the malefactors of great wealth”–and the urgent need to regulate and/or dismantle them–remain as perspicacious as ever.

Regarding a sycophantic judge who had written to a prominent finance-capitalist that he was “willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion to serve your vast interests,” Roosevelt commented on the judge’s “wholly inexplicable reverence for the possession of a great fortune as such. He sincerely believed that business was the end of existence… and the bigger the business, the more he desired to favor it” (p. 50). Roosevelt noted as well “the largely unconscious way in which the courts had been twisted into the exaltation of property rights over human rights” (p. 251).

During his first term as president, recognizing the inadequacy of the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), Roosevelt successfully pursued the dissolution of the Northern Securities railroad oligopoly (J.P. Morgan and others), as well as the American Tobacco and Standard Oil monopolies. (As to the latter, under Republicrat Clinton in the Nineties, oil giants were allowed to merge, once again–as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, etc.).

Commenting on the folly of the single-minded pursuit of great fortunes, on the actual uselessness of massive personal wealth far beyond one’s needs–and on the public’s absurd reverence for the super-wealthy–Roosevelt commented that he was “simply unable to make myself take the attitude of respect toward the very wealthy men which such a multitude of people evidently really feel…. I wholly fail to see where any real enjoyment comes from a dozen automobiles…and a good many different homes luxuriously upholstered” (p. 243-244).

Finally, anticipating the danger of a “Citizens United” type of corporate take-over of electoral democracy, Roosevelt noted that “those artificial individuals called corporations become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality…. It is necessary that laws be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes” (p. 257, 329).

All quotations from: The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, edited by Wayne Andrews, Scribner’s (New York), 1958.

The post Theodore Roosevelt: Moral Critic of Oligarchy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

US House committee passes Uyghur Policy Act, again

RFA Uyghur — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 20:34:21 +0000

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee this week approved bipartisan legislation to support Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities subject to human rights abuses by China.

The Uyghur Policy Act is the latest legislative effort to protect the rights of persecuted Muslim minority. The U.S. government has determined that China’s treatment of Uyghurs amounts to genocide.

The bill is co-sponsored by nine Republicans and Democrats led by Rep. Young Kim and Rep. Ami Bera, who are the chair and ranking member respectively of the House sub-committee for East Asia and the Pacific.

The legislation calls on the State Department to respond to abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – the Uyghur homeland inside China -- and push back on Chinese Communist Party efforts to silence Uyghur voices, and to develop a strategy to close detention facilities and political reeducation camps.

It also requires the U.S. secretary of state to oversee human rights-related policies to preserve Uyghurs’ ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic identities.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the bill on Tuesday. It faces various legislative hurdles before it becomes law, including passage by the full House and Senate.

The legislation was passed by the House of Representatives in both of the past two congressional terms without advancing further.

The last Congress renewed separate legislation, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, that authorized sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for genocide against Uyghurs. Another law, passed in 2021 and which has had the most impact, makes it illegal to import products used Uyghur forced labor into the United States.

Also this week, the World Uyghur Congress, the main global umbrella group advocating for Uyghurs, said it had filed a legal complaint in Paris against three French subsidiaries of major Chinese companies: Dahua Technology France, Hikvision France, and Huawei France.

The submission, made by prominent French human rights lawyer, accuses the three Chinese companies of complicity in crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Uyghurs by allegedly helping to build and maintain a mass surveillance system.

RFA has reached out to three companies in France for comment.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Uyghur.

‘Delusional’ Treaty Principles Bill scrapped but fight for Te Tiriti just beginning, say lawyers and advocates

APR editor — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 07:18:21 +0000

By Layla Bailey-McDowell, RNZ Māori news journalist

Legal experts and Māori advocates say the fight to protect Te Tiriti is only just beginning — as the controversial Treaty Principles Bill is officially killed in Parliament.

The bill — which seeks to redefine the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi — sparked a nationwide hīkoi and received more than 300,000 written submissions — with 90 percent of submitters opposing it.

Parliament confirmed the voting down of the bill yesterday, with only ACT supporting it proceeding further.

The ayes were 11, and the noes 112.

Social media posts by lawyer Riana Te Ngahue (Ngāti Porou), explaining some of the complexities involved in issues such as the Treaty Principles Bill, have been popular. Image: RNZ/Layla Bailey-McDowell

Riana Te Ngahue, a young Māori lawyer whose bite-sized breakdowns of complex issues — like the Treaty Principles Bill — went viral on social media, said she was glad the bill was finally gone.

“It’s just frustrating that we’ve had to put so much time and energy into something that’s such a huge waste of time and money. I’m glad it’s over, but also disappointed because there are so many other harmful bills coming through — in the environment space, Oranga Tamariki, and others.”

Most New Zealanders not divided
Te Ngahue said the Justice Committee’s report — which showed 90 percent of submitters opposed the bill, 8 percent supported it, and 2 percent were unstated in their position — proved that most New Zealanders did not feel divided about Te Tiriti.

“If David Seymour was right in saying that New Zealanders feel divided about this issue, then we would’ve seen significantly more submissions supporting his bill.

“He seemed pretty delusional to keep pushing the idea that New Zealanders were behind him, because if that was true, he would’ve got a lot more support.”

However, Te Ngahue said it was “wicked” to see such overwhelming opposition.

“Especially because I know for a lot of people, this was their first time ever submitting on a bill. That’s what I think is really exciting.”

She said it was humbling to know her content helped people feel confident enough to participate in the process.

“I really didn’t expect that many people to watch my video, let alone actually find it helpful. I’m still blown away by people who say they only submitted because of it — that it showed them how.”

Te Ngahue said while the bill was made to be divisive there had been “a huge silver lining”.

“Because a lot of people have actually made the effort to get clued up on the Treaty of Waitangi, whereas before they might not have bothered because, you know, nothing was really that in your face about it.”

“There’s a big wave of people going ‘I actually wanna get clued up on [Te Tiriti],’ which is really cool.”

‘Fight isn’t over’
Māori lawyer Tania Waikato, whose own journey into social media advocacy empowered many first-time submitters, said she was in an “excited and celebratory” mood.

“We all had a bit of a crappy summer holiday because of the Treaty Principles Bill and the Regulatory Standards Bill both being released for consultation at the same time. A lot of us were trying to fit advocacy around summer holidays and looking after our tamariki, so this feels like a nice payoff for all the hard mahi that went in.”

Tania Waikato, who has more than 20 years of legal experience, launched a petition calling for the government to cancel Compass Group’s school lunch contract and reinstate its contract with local providers. Image: Tania Waikato/RNZ

She said the “overwhelming opposition” sent a powerful message.

“I think it’s a clear message that Aotearoa as a whole sees Te Tiriti as part of this country’s constitutional foundation. You can’t just come in and change that on a whim, like David Seymour and the ACT Party have tried to do.

“Ninety percent of people who got off their butt and made a submission have clearly rejected the divisive and racist rhetoric that party has pushed.”

Despite the win, she said the fight was far from over.

“If anything, this is really just beginning. We’ve got the Regulatory Standards Bill that’s going to be introduced at some point before June. That particular bill will do what the Treaty Principle’s Bill was aiming to do, but in a different and just more sneaky way.

‘The next fight’
“So for me, that’s definitely the next fight that we all gotta get up for again.”

Waikato, who also launched a petition in March calling for the free school lunch programme contract to be overhauled, said allowing the Treaty Principles Bill to get this far in the first place was a “waste of time and money.”

“Its an absolutely atrocious waste of taxpayers dollars, especially when we’ve got issues like the school lunches that I am advocating for on the other side.”

“So for me, the fight’s far from over. It’s really just getting started.”

ACT leader David Seymour on Thursday after his bill was voted down in Parliament. Image: RNZ/Russell Palmer

ACT Party leader David Seymour continued to defend the Treaty Principles Bill during its second reading on Thursday, and said the debate over the treaty’s principles was far from over.

After being the only party to vote in favour of the bill, Seymour said not a single statement had grappled with the content of the bill — despite all the debate.

Asked if his party had lost in this nationwide conversation, he said they still had not heard a good argument against it.

‘We’ll never give up on equal rights.”

He said there were lots of options for continuing, and the party’s approach would be made clear before the next election

Kassie Hartendorp said Te Tiriti Action Group Pōneke operates under the korowai – the cloak – of mana whenua and their tikanga in this area, which is called Te Kahu o Te Raukura, a cloak of aroha and peace. Image: RNZ

Eyes on local elections – ActionStation says the mahi continues
Community advocacy group ActionStation’s director Kassie Hartendorp, who helped spearhead campaigns like “Together for Te Tiriti”, said her team was feeling really positive.

“It’s been a lot of work to get to this point, but we feel like this is a very good day for our country.”

At the end of the hīkoi mō Te Tiriti, ActionStation co-delivered a Ngāti Whakaue rangatahi led petition opposing the Treaty Principles Bill, with more than 290,000 signatures — the second largest petition in Aotearoa’s history.

They also hosted a live watch party for the bill’s second reading on Facebook, joined by Te Tiriti experts Dr Carwyn Jones and Tania Waikato.

Hartendorp said it was amazing to see people from all over Aotearoa coming together to reject the bill.

“It’s no longer a minority view that we should respect, but more and more and more people realise that it’s a fundamental part of our national identity that should be respected and not trampled every time a government wants to win power,” she said.

Looking to the future, Hartendorp said Thursday’s victory was only one milestone in a longer campaign.

Why people fought back
“There was a future where this bill hadn’t gone down — this could’ve ended very differently. The reason we’re here now is because people fought back.

“People from all backgrounds and ages said: ‘We respect Te Tiriti o Waitangi.’

“We know it’s essential, it’s a part of our history, our past, our present, and our future. And we want to respect that together.”

Hartendorp said they were now gearing up to fight against essentially another version of the Treaty Principles Bill — but on a local level.

“In October, people in 42 councils around the country will vote on whether or not to keep their Māori ward councillors, and we think this is going to be a really big deal.”

The Regulatory Standards Bill is also being closely watched, Hartendorp said, and she believed it could mirror the “divisive tactics” seen with the Treaty Principles Bill.

“Part of the strategy for David Seymour and the ACT Party was to win over the public mandate by saying the public stands against Te Tiriti o Waitangi. That debate is still on,” she said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

House Passes Modern Day Poll Tax in SAVE Act

Newswire Editor — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:20:15 +0000

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the SAVE Act (HR 22), legislation that will make it significantly harder and more expensive for tens of millions of American to vote in elections. Under the proposed legislation, every American would have to provide in-person proof of citizenship to register to vote and update their voter registration. Additionally, the SAVE Act would make it impossible for Americans to register to vote by mail, end voter registration drives, and end online voter registration for 42 states.

Statement of Common Cause President & CEO Virginia Kase Solomón

Let’s call the SAVE Act what it is: a modern-day poll tax. This legislation is a direct attack on every American citizen, preventing tens of millions of people from exercising our constitutional right to vote.

If this bill becomes law, millions of hardworking Americans will have to either shell out money getting the right papers to prove their citizenship or have no say in the next election for congress and president.

Proof of citizenship potentially disenfranchises 69 million married women whose new last names do not match their birth certificate, Republican voters who are less likely than Democrats to have passports to prove citizenship and would erect significant voter registration hurdles for the service men and women protecting our country overseas.

But that is the point of this bill: to make it so difficult to vote that many people will give up on voting all together. Every U.S. Senator who cares about protecting our right to the ballot must vote down this poll tax in any form. Common Cause and our 1.5 million members will make sure every Senator hears from the people that this bill is dead on arrival.

To read the “Myth v. Fact” Common Cause one-pager distributed to House offices, click here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ACLU Condemns House Passage of Anti-Voter SAVE Act, Calls on Senate to Reject It

Newswire Editor — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:17:29 +0000

The American Civil Liberties Union condemns the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of the SAVE Act, legislation that would require in-person documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote—an unnecessary and discriminatory measure that would effectively end online and mail voter registration, disenfranchise millions of eligible voters and destabilize election administration nationwide.

The SAVE Act echoes failed and unconstitutional laws like Kansas’s proof of citizenship requirement, which purged over 30,000 eligible voters and was struck down in federal court. This legislation would especially harm naturalized citizens, voters with low incomes, voters of color, Native American voters, rural voters, and first-time voters—many of whom lack easy access to a passport or birth certificate. It would also threaten the voting rights of as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name but whose birth certificate does not match. By demanding burdensome documentation and triggering erroneous voter roll purges, the SAVE Act also threatens the ability of even long-time registered voters to stay on the rolls and participate in elections.

In a statement, Molly McGrath, director of the ACLU’s national democracy campaigns, said:

“The SAVE Act is a dangerous and unnecessary attack on voting rights that could block millions of eligible citizens from voting. We are already challenging President Trump’s unconstitutional executive order that seeks to impose similar restrictions through the Election Assistance Commission—an illegal overreach that threatens to upend our elections. This isn’t about protecting voters or our elections, it’s about politicians who want to protect themselves and pick and choose their voters. But that’s not how democracy works. The Senate must reject this bill and instead ensure that every eligible citizen can easily cast their ballot.”

The ACLU urges the U.S. Senate to reject the SAVE Act and reaffirm its commitment to a fair, inclusive, and accessible democracy for all Americans.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

House Passes SAVE Act; Brennan Center Reacts

Newswire Editor — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:16:41 +0000

Today the House passed the SAVE Act, H.R. 22, a bill that would require American citizens to show a birth certificate, passport, or another document proving their citizenship when they register to vote. Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, had the following comment:

“The House has just passed one of the worst pieces of voting legislation in American history. The Senate must stop it. The SAVE Act would put voting out of reach for millions of American citizens. It should not become law.”

Background

More than 21 million American citizens don’t have the documents required by the SAVE Act readily available. The bill would effectively eliminate forms of voter registration that millions of voters rely on: registering by mail, online, and through voter registration drives would no longer be possible. The SAVE Act would also create chaos for election administration by imposing significant burdens on election officials and disrupting the systems that keep our elections running smoothly.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Congressional Republicans’ SAVE Act Would Codify Donald Trump’s Anti-Voting Power Grab

Newswire Editor — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:15:22 +0000

Today, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will vote on dangerous legislation that would make it harder for Americans to make their voices heard at the ballot box. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act sets up onerous barriers to deter American citizens from participating in our democratic process. Despite a well-documented lack of evidence of voting fraud, Congressional Republicans’ bill is their latest attempt to rationalize debunked conspiracies that dangerously question the integrity of our electoral system. It comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s executive order, which attacked voting by mail and allowed Elon Musk to access private personal information– all while the conservative-controlled Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments in a case threatening the Voting Rights Act.

“Congressional Republicans’ anti-voting legislation is a power grab to silence the voices of American citizens – full stop,” said Accountable.US Executive Director Tony Carrk. “Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their allies in Congress are attacking voting by threatening Americans’ ability to vote by mail, allowing Musk’s DOGE to access sensitive personal information, and kneecapping states’ ability to run free and fair elections. Worst of all, their crusade paves the way to toss out legal votes and undermine election results that they don’t like. It should send a chill down the spine of every American.”

Republicans’ SAVE Act would impose document requirements which would make it harder for millions of Americans to vote. A recent study from the Center For Democracy And Civic Engagement showed that at least 11% of voting-age citizens didn’t have or would have difficulty finding documents to prove their citizenship – with older and younger Americans, as well as infrequent and low-income voters most impacted. The document barriers would also be restrictive for military voters who currently serve in armed uniform.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

NAACP Condemns Reintroduction of SAVE Act

Newswire Editor — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:02:08 +0000

Statement from NAACP President Derrick Johnson on the reintroduction of the SAVE Act:

"Instead of lowering costs as he promised, Donald Trump and his MAGA flank are focused on gutting our democracy. Voting is the foundation of our democracy. Our families and communities thrive when every voter — regardless of race, income, or zip code — has the freedom to participate in elections and have a say in the decisions that shape their lives. "The SAVE Act is nothing more than voter suppression disguised as voter protection. The burdensome requirements disproportionately target voters in historically marginalized communities, amplify systemic inequalities, and aim to silence millions. "If Congress is truly dedicated to protecting the right to vote, it will pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Instead of undermining the freedom to vote, we should be investing in policies that expand access to voting, modernize election systems, and ensure that every vote is counted."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Why Human Rights Watch Is Urging Frontex to Act #WithHumanity

Human Rights Watch — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:14:32 +0000

This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

America Has Become Anti-American

John Rachel — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:35:28 +0000

Because I live in Japan and post articles which are critical of America, I am often accused of being anti-American. The truth is both counter-intuitive and disturbing.

I haven’t changed, but America certainly has.

America has become anti-American!

The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. Yet reporters are now being intimidated and threatened with arrest and incarceration. Whistleblowers who try to expose fraud, corruption, and waste in government by making available in public news media forums information of value to American citizens, are likewise harassed and prosecuted.

The Constitution requires the government to promote the general welfare. Yet the benefits of our economic wealth are accruing to a tiny elite while poverty is still pervasive and the majority of the population scrambles to make ends meet. Among the 34 highly developed nations in the world, America ranks 17th in terms of life satisfaction — happiness — the key factors for its low ranking being massive income inequality and excessively long hours spent on average in the work place. In terms of health care and life expectancy, for the richest country in the world, America ranks abysmally low, with longevity actually declining.

The Constitution guarantees equal representation of its citizens. Yet, the electoral system has become corrupted by unverifiable e-voting, grotesque gerrymandering of districts, and torrents of money in politics, which only guarantees the voices of average voters will be drowned out and their participation in our democracy marginalized.

The Constitution guarantees the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, and right of trial by jury before peers, yet starting in 2001 by using the endless War on Terror as an excuse, patently unconstitutional legislation has been effected — Patriot Acts I and II, FISA, and the NDAA which Obama signed into law on New Years Eve 2011 while America was preoccupied with celebrating the holidays, which have regularly been renewed ever since — now placing every citizen at risk for arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention with no access to legal counsel.

The Constitution guarantees equality before the law. Yet rich elite white collar criminals wreak havoc on our economy breaking countless laws and go free, while petty crimes by regular citizens — especially people of color — result in harsh and disproportionate prosecution and punishment.

The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech, including dissent against questionable policies. Yet, we see individuals protesting the cruel, malevolent and systematic killing of Palestinians by Israel, harassed, persecuted, and prosecuted by establishment authorities, who apparently consider the slaughter of between 50,000 and 200,000 mostly innocent Palestinians, including women and children — horrific war crimes which those in power indisputably support — necessary and laudable. U.S. support for this genocide mocks the principles we hold dear and have at least until now defined us as a people.

The Constitution specifies that the power to wage war is exclusively the responsibility of Congress. Yet the president as Commander-in-Chief as often as not ignores the constitutional limits as well as those contained in the War Powers Act, using the military purely at his own discretion. This wanton abuse of military power results in the unnecessary deaths of our citizens in uniform, while at the same time counter-productively foments enormous animosity and mistrust across much of the planet.

Our legal framework via the Posse Comitatus Act has long barred the use of the military for law enforcement but vast and sophisticated surveillance by federal security agencies, the militarization of local police forces, and their handshake agreements with federal agencies, puts us all under the iron fist of enforcement agencies like the NSA and operatives of the Pentagon itself.

I could go on. But that might offend some people.

Sometimes the truth can be so anti-American.

The post America Has Become Anti-American first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

Sierra Leone’s counterterrorism bill called ‘significant threat to press freedom’

CPJ Staff — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:54:32 +0000

Abuja, March 31, 2025–Sierra Leonean President Julius Maada Bio should not sign the country’s counterterrorism bill into law and must ensure any new legislation will not be used to target the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Monday.

“President Julius Maada Bio should not assent to Sierra Leone’s terror bill without ensuring that sections hostile to press freedom are amended,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa regional director, from New York. “Sierra Leone’s lawmakers and executive should safeguard the rights to press freedom and free expression as part of their work to protect their country against the threat of terrorism.”

Sierra Leone’s parliament passed the proposed Counterterrorism Act, 2024, on March 11, and the measure is expected to be signed into law by President Bio, according to information on the parliament’s Facebook page and the deputy speaker of parliament, Ibrahim Tawa Conteh, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app on March 28.

The bill, which CPJ reviewed, includes sections that put journalists at risk of prosecution for their work. Notably, Sections 17(f) and 32(f) both criminalize sharing information that the sender “knows” to be false or for which the sender “has reasonable grounds to suspect to be false.” The sections are punishable by life in prison and 15 years in prison, respectively. Moreover, Section 4 of the bill would allow authorities unfettered powers to “request and obtain information, where it considers it necessary, from any person or authority.”

Similarly, a Sierra Leone Association of Journalists analysis of the bill found “its broad language and harsh penalties pose a significant threat to press freedom and civic expression in Sierra Leone.” Local media have also raised concerns.

Reached by phone, presidential spokesperson Yusuf Keketoma Sandi dismissed CPJ’s concerns about the bill as “unjustifiable.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Senator Whitehouse and Congresswoman Dean Introduce the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act

Carole King - Mike Garrity — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 05:53:20 +0000

Custer-Gallatin National Forest next to Yellowstone National Park – photo by Custer-Gallatin National Forest.

On Thursday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Madeleine Dean reintroduced the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act in the U.S. Senate (S. 1198) and in the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 2420) with fifteen original cosponsors across both chambers.

The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act will designate approximately 23 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in the Northern Rockies as wilderness. NREPA (Ner-EEpa) will preserve a vital ecosystem and watersheds in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Eastern Washington, and Oregon. It will also preserve biological corridors that are essential for biodiversity of native species.

We are so proud of Senator Whitehouse and Congresswoman Dean for standing up for a climate solution that protects public land, water, and interconnected species ranging from tiny insects, birds, and fish to mammals, plants, bushes, and huge trees with massive root systems that store carbon.

These legislators know that removing the words ‘climate change’ from government studies and documents won’t make the world cooler in any sense of the word. They know that forests are the best carbon storage device in the world. And without NREPA’s protection, the photo below shows what’s been happening in our national forests.

Helena National Forest land owned by all Americans – photo by Vicki Anfinson

NREPA saves the federal government millions of dollars annually by reducing wasteful subsidies to the logging industry. It also closes unintended legal loopholes that have left many of the areas protected by the Clinton Roadless Rule vulnerable to clearcutting and roadbuilding.

By introducing NREPA, Congresswoman Dean and Senator Whitehouse are saying NO to the timber industry executives and others who misinform the public while enriching themselves. And Senator Whitehouse and Congresswoman Dean are saying YES to preserving carbon storage and slowing climate change.

Simply by designating existing roadless areas as Wilderness, NREPA protects the environment, fights climate change, creates jobs, and saves taxpayers millions of dollars in logging subsidies.

It is time to start protecting ecosystems, which will keep species from going extinct.

The post Senator Whitehouse and Congresswoman Dean Introduce the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Carole King - Mike Garrity.

Uyghur Human Rights Protection Act — Prioritizing Uyghur asylum cases | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 01:58:19 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

Indian journalist arrested for covering protest on alleged financial irregularities

CPJ Staff — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 19:50:38 +0000

New Delhi, March 27, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the arrest of journalist Dilwar Hussain Mozumdar for reporting on a protest over alleged financial misconduct at a bank run by northeastern India’s Assam state government.

On March 25, Mozumdar, a reporter with the local digital outlet The CrossCurrent, covered a protest outside Assam Co-operative Apex Bank, after which he was summoned to Panbazar police station in Guwahati, Assam’s largest city, and arrested.

“The arrest of Dilwar Hussain Mozumdar is a blatant attempt to intimidate and silence independent journalism,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “Authorities must immediately release Mozumdar, drop any pending charges against him, and cease using legal harassment to muzzle journalists reporting on issues of public interest.”

The CrossCurrents has been consistently reporting on financial issues at the bank, where Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is a director.

A Press Club of India statement and a Facebook post by Mozumdar said that the journalist questioned the bank’s managing director, Dambara Saikia, and then received a call from the police as soon as he left the bank, telling him to report to the station.

Authorities have filed two cases against Mozumdar. In the first, a security guard at the bank accused him of making offensive and derogatory remarks, in violation of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, The CrossCurrent’s editor Arup Kalita told CPJ.

In the second, Saikia alleged that Mozumdar unlawfully entered the bank’s office, attempted to steal documents, disrupted operations, and threatened employees, Kalita added.

Mozumdar was granted bail in the first case and was scheduled for release on Thursday. However, he was rearrested by the police in connection with the second case, Kalita said. Mozumdar plans to apply for bail in the second case on Friday.

At a news conference on Thursday, Chief Minister Sarma denied that press freedom had been violated, defended Mozumdar’s arrest, and said that those working for independent online portals were not real journalists as they lacked state accreditation.

CPJ’s emails to Assam police and the Assam Co-operative Apex Bank requesting comment did not receive any responses.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Endangered Species Coalition Responds to Republican-led Congressional Attacks on Endangered Species Act and Gray Wolves

Newswire Editor — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 17:28:53 +0000

oday, the Republican-led House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries will consider legislation that would dramatically weaken the widely popular Endangered Species Act (ESA) and strip protections for gray wolves in 48 states.

The first bill — the “ESA Amendments Act of 2025” — would gut the critical protections that the ESA provides for thousands of imperiled species, upend the scientific consultation process (which has been the cornerstone of American species protection for 50 years), slow listings to a crawl while fast-tracking delistings, and allow much more exploitation of threatened species and shift their management out of federal hands to the states, even while they are still nationally listed.

The second bill — the so-called “Pet and Livestock Protection Act of 2025″ — would reissue the first Trump administration’s delisting of the gray wolf across most of the U.S. and bar judicial review of that action. In 2022, a federal court reversed this delisting, after conservation groups challenged it.

In addition to the Republican-led Congressional attacks on the ESA and gray wolves, the Trump administration recently terminated hundreds of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees — nearly 5 percent of the agency’s workforce — which is already critically understaffed. Without those employees, it will be even harder for disappearing vulnerable species to receive crucial protections, and for vitally important ecosystems across the U.S. to remain intact.

In response to attempts to undermine the ESA and delist gray wolves, organizations from across the country sent a letter to HNR leadership outlining opposition to the bills. Additionally, groups from the Endangered Species Coalition issued the following statements:

“These attempts to weaken the Endangered Species Act, or to go around it by picking off species like the gray wolf, represent a fundamental disconnect between a small number of legislators and millions of Americans,” said Earthjustice legislative director for lands, wildlife, and oceans Addie Haughey. “The ESA — and the iconic species it protects — enjoys immense support across the political spectrum. If these bills move forward, Congress will be acting against popular will and ignoring science to sacrifice the wildlife we love and the ecosystems we rely on.”

“Congressman Westerman’s bill would eviscerate the Endangered Species Act and push imperiled species to extinction,” said Ellen Richmond, senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. “The Endangered Species Act is the backstop for our nation’s wildlife already at the brink of extinction and this bill would sanction their swift descent into nothingness. We urge our representatives in Congress to listen to the American public’s overwhelming support for the Endangered Species Act and reject this disastrous bill which does nothing to strengthen wildlife protections and instead reverses decades of conservation success.”

“We are in a biodiversity crisis, and Congress is playing with fire. These bills would accelerate extinction at a time when we can least afford it,” said Josh Osher, public policy director for Western Watersheds Project. “The Endangered Species Act isn’t just about saving wolves, grizzlies, or sea turtles—it’s about protecting the ecosystems that sustain us all. Weakening these protections pushes our planet further into collapse. Congress must open its eyes and reject these reckless attacks before it’s too late.”

“These extreme bills would gut protections for wildlife under the Endangered Species Act. They are being introduced against a backdrop of sudden and indiscriminate firings across the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, robbing these agencies of the experts who implement these crucial protections based on the best available science,” said Susan Millward, executive director and chief executive officer for the Animal Welfare Institute. “These assaults on wildlife protections come at a time of staggering biodiversity loss, and imperiled species don’t have the luxury of waiting out these political games.”

“Extinction is forever,” says Katherine Miller, Country Director for FOUR PAWS USA. ” If we allow the protections afforded by the ESA to be weakened and undermined by legislation like this, the consequences of these decisions will reverberate for generations. The ESA protects both iconic native species like Bald eagles and non-native species like Bengal tigers. It has also protected millions of acres of habitat, ensuring a livable planet for all of us.”

“The ESA Amendments Act of 2025, introduced by Representative Westerman, is severely out of step with how most Americans view and support wildlife protection. It prioritizes big industry and special interests ahead of decades-long, science-based protections that work,” said Chris Allieri, executive director and founder, NYC Plover Project. “Radicals in Congress are fast-tracking extinction and looking to severely weaken, if not entirely remove, bedrock environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

“The Endangered Species Act is one of the country’s most popular and successful conservation laws, and Donald Trump wants to throw it in the garbage to pad the bottom lines of his corporate supporters,” said Bradley Williams, Sierra Club’s Deputy Legislative Director for Wildlife and Lands Protection. “Since Day One of his administration, Trump has shown again and again that he wants to hand over control of our public lands and waters to billionaires and corporations. Imperiled wildlife will suffer the consequences. For more than 50 years, the United States has made amazing progress bringing species back from the brink of extinction. It’s because of the ESA that species like the grizzly bear and bald eagle are living symbols of America and not just photos in a history book. If Trump and his allies in Congress get their way, that progress won’t just come to a screeching halt – it could be completely reversed.”

“For decades, the Endangered Species Act has been a critical lifeline in preventing the irreversible loss of our nation’s wildlife. Legislation like H.R. 845 and H.R. 1897 would undermine this powerful tool against extinction and jeopardize ongoing recovery efforts of our iconic native species, like the gray wolf.” said Jennifer Eskra, Director of Legislative Affairs at Humane World Action Fund “At a time of growing biodiversity loss, it is essential that legislators prioritize science over politics and stand with the millions of Americans who support the ESA.”

“The Endangered Species Act is one of America’s most respected and successful conservation laws. Unfortunately, Representative Westerman’s ESA amendments are crafted for greedy billionaires clinging to a 19th-century vision of plundering the planet,” said Endangered Species Coalition National Policy Director Jewel Tomasula. “This bill would devastate the sea turtles people love to see at the beach, the bumblebees that pollinate our food crops, and the spotted owls that indicate healthy forests. This bill would destroy wildlife and wild places, not protect them.”

“These reckless attacks on the Endangered Species Act and gray wolves are nothing more than a giveaway to industry at the expense of our nation’s most imperiled wildlife,” said Joanna Zhang, endangered species advocate at WildEarth Guardians. “Gutting protections for species on the brink of extinction is not reform—it’s a death sentence. Americans overwhelmingly support the ESA because it works, and we urge our representatives in Congress not to stand by while Trump and his allies try to dismantle one of our most effective conservation laws.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

PNG ‘test ban’ blocks Facebook – governor Bird warns of tyranny risk

Pacific Media Watch — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 02:07:16 +0000

By Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent

The Papua New Guinea government has admitted to using a technology that it says was “successfully tested” to block social media platforms, particularly Facebook, for much of the day yesterday.

Police Minister Peter Tsiamalili Jr said the “test” was done under the framework of the Anti-Terrorism Act 2024, and sought to address the growing concerns over hate speech, misinformation, and other harmful content online.

Tsiamalili did not specify what kind of tech was used, but said it was carried out in collaboration with the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC), the National Information and Communications Technology Authority (NICTA), and various internet service providers.

READ MORE: Other Facebook reports

“We are not attempting to suppress free speech or restrict our citizens from expressing their viewpoints,” Tsiamalili said.

“However, the unchecked proliferation of fake news, hate speech, pornography, child exploitation, and incitement to violence on platforms such as Facebook is unacceptable.

“These challenges increasingly threaten the safety, dignity, and well-being of our populace.”

However, government agencies responsible for communications and ICT, including NICTA, said they were not aware.

‘Confidence relies on transparency’
“Public confidence in our digital governance relies on transparency and consistency in how we approach online regulation,” NICTA chief executive Kilakupa Gulo-Vui said.

“It is essential that all key stakeholders, including NICTA, law enforcement, telecommunications providers, and government agencies, collaborate closely to ensure that any actions taken are well-understood and properly executed.”

He said that while maintaining national security was a priority, the balance between safety and digital freedom must be carefully managed.

Gulo-Vui said NICTA would be addressing this matter with the Minister for ICT to ensure NICTA’s role continued to align with the government’s broader policy objectives, while fostering a cohesive and united approach to digital regulation.

The Department of Information Communication and Technology (DICT) Secretary, Steven Matainaho, also stated his department was not aware of the test but added that the police have powers under the new domestic terrorism laws.

Papua New Guinea’s recently introduced anti-terror laws are aimed at curbing both internal and external security threats.

Critics warn of dictatorial control
However, critics of the move say the test borders on dictatorial control.

An observer of Monday’s events, Lucas Kiap, said the goal of combating hate speech and exploitation was commendable, but the approach risks paving way for authoritarian overreach.

“Where is PNG headed? If the government continues down this path, it risks trading democracy for control,” he said.

Many social media users, however, appeared to outdo the government, with many downloading and sharing Virtual Area Network (VPN) apps and continuing to post on Facebook.

“Hello from Poland,” one user said.

East Sepik Governor Allan Bird said today that the country’s anti-terrorism law could target anyone because “the definition of a terrorist is left to the Police Minister to decide”.

‘Designed to take away our freedoms’
“During the debate on the anti-terrorism bill in Parliament, I pointed out that the law was too broad and it could be used against innocent people,” he wrote on Facebook.

He said government MPs laughed at him and used their numbers to pass the bill.

“Yesterday, the Police Minister used the Anti-terrorism Act to shut down Facebook. That was just a test, that was step one,” Governor Bird said.

“There is no limit to the powers the Minister of Police can exercise under this new law. It is draconian law designed to take away our freedoms.

“We are now heading into dangerous territory and everyone is powerless to stop this tyranny,” he added.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Maryland’s Second Look Act clears State House—is relief for longterm prisoners imminent?

Mansa Musa — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 17:31:39 +0000

Maryland’s Second Look Act has passed the State House, and now awaits a vote in the Senate. The bill would allow prisoners to request judicial review of their sentences after serving 20 years of prison time. Advocates say Maryland’s prison system is in desperate need of reform; parole is nearly impossible for longterm inmates, and clear racial disparities in arrest and incarceration are immediately evident—72% of Maryland’s prisoners are Black, despite a state population that is only 30% Black. Meanwhile, opponents of the Second Look Act charge that the bill would endanger state residents and harm the victims of violent crimes. Rattling the Bars digs deeper, speaking with activists, legislators, and formerly incarcerated people on the real stakes and consequences of the Second Look Act.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Jheanelle K. Wilkins (Maryland State Delegate, District 20):

Colleagues, I rise in support of this legislation, the Maryland Second Look Act, but it may not be for the exact reason that you would think. For me, this legislation is about justice. Was justice served in this sentence? We know that in Maryland, Black residents are 30% of the population, but 72% of our prisons. Our own Maryland data tells us that Black and Latino residents are sentenced to longer sentences than any other group or any other community. I’m not proud of that. Was justice served? For us to have a piece of legislation before us that allows us the opportunity to take another look at those sentences for people who were 18 to 25 years old when convicted, for us to have the opportunity to ask the question, if justice was served in that sentence, why would we not take that opportunity colleagues? If you believe in fairness, if you believe in making sure that our justice system works for all, then colleagues, you will proudly vote yes for this bill.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. According to press releases published by the Maryland Second Look Coalition and the ACLU, “The Maryland House of Delegates passed The Second Look Act on March the 17th, recognizing the urgent need for reform in a state with some of the nation’s most pronounced citizen disparities.” The Second Look Act, House Bill 853, passed a final vote in the House. The vote was 89 yeas and 49 nays. Now, the bill will move over to the Senate, where it has until April 7 to pass. Delegate Linda Foley, representing the 15th District, who voted yes on the bill, sent a statement to The Real News Network providing some critical context. “The Maryland Second Look Act follows many other states, including California, Oklahoma, Colorado and New York, to allow a judicial review of sentences. The Second Look Act allows the individual who was convicted between the ages of 18 and 25 years old to request a review of their sentence by the court after serving 20 years in prison.”

Delegate Foley goes on to cover the details of what this bill achieves. She states, “It’s important to note the critical safety measures in the Maryland Second Look Act. The bill does not guarantee release of any individual. It allows an individual who was convicted between the ages of 18 and 25 years old to request a review of their sentence by the court only after serving 20 years in prison. A judge must evaluate individuals based on strict criteria, including the nature of their original crime, threat to the public, conduct while incarcerated, statements from the witnesses, et cetera. The court may only reduce a sentence if it finds an individual is not a danger to the public and that a reduction of their sentence is in the interest of justice.”

Recently, I spoke with two members of the Maryland Second Look Coalition, William Mitchell, a formerly incarcerated community activist, and Alexandra Bailey, a two-time survivor of sexual violence, about the organizing they are doing around the bill, and why it’s important to support The Second Look Act.

William Mitchell:

The Second Look Coalition is a group of people who come from all different backgrounds, some being returning citizens, some being people in the political realm, some being professors, and we all support what we call The Second Look Act. The Second Look Act is essentially, when an inmate has served 20 years day for day, the judge would have the authority to possibly review that inmate’s sentence, to see if the sentence is still warranted after the person has done tons of things to change their life.

Alexandra Bailey:

The Second Look is a mechanism that is being considered all across the country, and the reason it’s being considered all across the country is because America, for a long time, has led the world in incarceration, and part of the reason that we’ve led the world in incarceration is because we have a hammer and we think everything is a nail. We’ve addressed everything from poverty, trauma, veterans’ PTSD, domestic violence survivors’ responses, young children who are led astray by giving them lengthy prison terms, and we know that this doesn’t keep us safer. This has been statistically proven. If you’re a survivor of violent crime as I am, I think the one thing that all of us would agree on is that we want no more victims. We want a safer society. We want people to be okay so that everyone can be and stay okay.

The first criminal offense that I ever lived through happened when I was a minor. It was a sexual offense, and the person who perpetrated that against me is serving a life without the possibility of parole sentence. I was plagued with the pain of this for many years, for a lot of my childhood and early adulthood, and as I came to my faith and came to forgiveness, what I wanted was to understand why this had happened. I reached out to the person who harmed me, and what I learned is that he had also been harmed. He also had been sexually victimized as a young person, really had nowhere to turn in order to gain support, and lived out the natural consequences of pain, PTSD, lack of health and support, mental health support, and I ended up caught in that cycle of violence.

What I say is, we need to get way upstream on the cycle of violence. Everyone, from those who are remorseful inside to those who are advocates for survivors, as I am, we have the same goal, and the only way that we’re actually going to address that is by taking our resources away from a public safety concept that we know doesn’t work, which is mass incarceration, and transferring it where it should have been, when the person who harmed me suffered his victimization. If that help had been there, if he had been able to go to a crisis center, receive the mental health support that he need, have the education and access that would have allowed him to divert his life and recover from his own trauma, I more than likely would not have been traumatized.

As a survivor, I’m here promoting Second Look because actually, if you take a look around at who our peer recovery specialists are, who our violence interrupters are, our credible messengers, the people who are out getting in the way of other people’s victimization, it is our returning citizens who have kept the peace not just in prison, but are now keeping the peace outside, and based on my own faith, I believe that people who are remorseful deserve a chance at forgiveness. We all deserve a second chance. Also, from a practical standpoint, if my goal is that nobody suffers from what I suffered from, then the people who are best suited to help me, unfortunately in many instances, are currently behind bars.

Mansa Musa:

Brian Stevenson says, we’re not our worst mistake. All right, William, let’s unpack the Second Look, because earlier, we talked about how this allows for a person, the bill that’s being proposed, and you can go over the bill that’s being proposed, after a person has served 20 years, they’re allowed to petition the court for a modification, or to review their sentence, and take certain factors into account. Why can’t they do it anytime? I know under Maryland’s system, don’t you have the right to modification sentence? Don’t you have a right to a three-judge panel? Explain that for the benefit of our audience that doesn’t know the criminal justice system, and understand that.

William Mitchell:

Our Maryland rules, specifically it’s Maryland rule 4-345, subsection E, what it does is, it allows for a judge to have the authority to review a sentence, but that reviewing power is only from five years from the imposition of the sentence. Meaning, if you have a lengthy sentence, no judge is really going to consider, within five years, if you have a lengthy sentence for maybe a serious crime, if you’ve changed your life. Most people’s thoughts on it are, if you’ve committed a heinous crime or something that’s bad in public view, you need to sit for a long time, which may be true. Some people transition, grow and mature at different stages and different ages. My crime, I was 23, so I really wasn’t developed. I had a very immature mindset, though an adult technically, by legal standards, I was still very immature. The law right now, as it sits, say you get 50 years for an attempted murder. You’re 20 years old, it occurred when you were on drugs, maybe you were gang affiliated, family structure was broken.

And then what happens is, you sit in prison, and right now, as the law stands, you could go into prison, take every program, become a peer specialist, work to transform everybody that comes through that door, and unless you are collaterally attacking the legality of your sentence, there is no legal means for somebody to have a judge look at their case for compassionate reasons, or to see if the very system, because the Maryland Department of Correction, their job is to correct criminalistic behavior, but right now you have a department that is supposed to be correcting it, and if they do, there is no legal avenue for you to bring it to the judicial branch and say, “Hey, DOC has done her job. This behavior has been corrected. Now, what’s the next step?”

The system was set up many years ago to punish, to correct behavior, and then in that correction or rehabilitation, to allow the person to assimilate back into the community as a productive member. That has been taken away over the years because one law is added on top of another law, which moots out the point of the first law, and before you know it, you can’t get out. For me, I had a 70-year sentence. That means I would have to serve half of the sentence, 35 years, before I could go for parole. Meaning, I committed a crime, intoxicated at 23, coming out of a broken background, and I would have had to have been 53 to show the parole board the first opportunity to say, “Hey, I’m worth a second chance.” Most people age out of criminalistic behavior, number one, and number two, if you commit in your 20s, by the time you’re 30 something, you don’t even think like that.

I always bring this point to anybody’s mind, whether an opponent or an advocate, nobody can say that they are the same person they were 20 years ago. I would like to meet somebody if they can stay the same from 20 years ago, because just life in general will mature you or change you. Right now, there’s just no way to bring it before the judge or a judicial body, to get any relief. Even if you change your life, right now, you’re pretty much stuck in prison until, if you have parole, you might get the opportunity to possibly get relief.

Mansa Musa:

Alexandra, talk about what you look for in this particular narrative, because as William just outlined, we do a lot of time, we don’t have the opportunity to get relief. We do good works while we’re incarcerated, and we have no way of having that good work brought to the attention of someone that can make a decision. Talk about that.

Alexandra Bailey:

Well, Second Look is just that, it’s just a look. It is not a guarantee of relief. It is not a get out of jail free card. It is literally a mechanism whereby, after two decades of incarceration, where the criminological curve shows us that most people have aged out of crime, that you can petition a judge to show your rehabilitation, and the survivor of your offense or their representatives get to be part of that process. Some of the most miraculous moments that I’ve ever seen are those moments of forgiveness. There’s this false story that goes around, that what prosecutors are doing is giving permanent relief to victims. I’m going to give them, in William’s case, 50 years before anybody can even say hi, and that’s going to heal you. That’s going to make you feel better.

Mansa Musa:

That’s what you mean by permanent relief?

Alexandra Bailey:

That’s what they would say. It’s permanent relief. We are making sure that this person stays safe permanently. Now, there are some people who do not rehabilitate, but in my experience, they’re very much in the minority. The people who do rehabilitate, like I said, they’re the ones raising other people in the prison, getting them out of criminal behavior, and all we’re asking is that the courts be able to take a look. When the survivor steps into that room, and I’ve witnessed this, and actually receive the accountability, the apology, the help that they need from the system, that is where the healing comes in. It’s rarely through punishment. You know that this is true because I watch survivors who have not moved on a single day from the day that this happened to them, and if you’re reliving that trauma day by day, what that tells me is that you haven’t received the mental health counseling, support, grief support that you needed. Why don’t we focus on that and rehabilitation, as opposed to permanent punishment?

To what William was saying, the criminological curve tells us that people age out of crime. Crimes are more often than not committed by young people who very frequently are misguided, and that is certainly true for Maryland, with a particular emphasis on the Black and Brown community. There was actually a national study that was done of survivors, which I was actually interviewed for, 60% of us who have survived specifically violent crimes are for more rehabilitation and second chances than we are for permanent punishment. Permanent punishment doesn’t get us to what it is that we need, which is a safer society, a more healed society, a society that when things are going wrong for folks, there is a place for them to turn. Our lack of empathy and kindness is not serving us.

Mansa Musa:

Also, I had the opportunity to talk to Kareem Hasan. Me and Kareem Hasan were locked up together in the Maryland penitentiary. He’s talking about some of the things that he’s doing now that he has gotten a second chance. I’m outside of 954 Forrest Maryland Penitentiary. I’m here with Kareem Hasan, who’s a social activist now, both us served time in the Maryland Penitentiary. When did you go into the Maryland pen?

Kareem Hasan:

1976, at 17 years old.

Mansa Musa:

All right, so you went in at 17, I went in at 19. When you went in the pen, talk about what the pen environment was like when you went in there.

Kareem Hasan:

Well, when I went in the penitentiary, like you asked me, the first day I went in there, I walked down the steps and it was just confusion. I was like, “Where am I at now?” People were running everywhere, all you hear is voices and everything. It was like you were in the jungle.

Mansa Musa:

Now, what type of programs did they have to offer when you went in there?

Kareem Hasan:

Well, when I went in there, they had a couple of programs, but I wasn’t too interested in the programs because I was still young and wild, running wild. I wasn’t even thinking about educating myself. All I was thinking about was protecting myself, because of all the stories I heard about the penitentiary.

Mansa Musa:

Right. All right. Now, how much time did you do?

Kareem Hasan:

I did 37 years.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, you did 37. I did 48 years. When I went in the penitentiary, they had no programs, like you say, and everything we were concerned with was protecting ourselves. When did you get out?

Kareem Hasan:

I got out in 2013, on the first wave of the Unger issue.

Mansa Musa:

The Unger issue is the case of Merle Unger versus the state of Maryland, that dealt with the way the jury instruction was given at that time, it was unconstitutional. I got out under Unger. When Unger first came out, what did that do for you in terms of your psyche?

Kareem Hasan:

Oh man, that really pumped me up.

Mansa Musa:

Why?

Kareem Hasan:

Because I saw daylight.

Mansa Musa:

And before that?

Kareem Hasan:

Before then, man, I was gone. I was crazy. I wasn’t even looking to get out, because I had a life sentence.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Didn’t you have parole?

Kareem Hasan:

Yes, I went up for parole three times.

Mansa Musa:

And what happened?

Kareem Hasan:

First time, they gave me a four-year re-hear, and then the second time, they gave me a two-year re-hear with the recommendation for pre-release and work release.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

Then they come out with life means life.

Mansa Musa:

Glendening was the Governor for the state of Maryland at that time.

Kareem Hasan:

Yeah, he just snatched everything from me, snatched all hope and everything from me.

Mansa Musa:

Hope, that’s where I want to be at, right there. When Unger came out, Unger created Hope.

Kareem Hasan:

Unger created hope for a lot of guys, because when it first came out, I think it was Stevenson.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

I had it in my first public conviction in 1981.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

But they said it was a harmless error.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Kareem Hasan:

And then, Adams came out, and then, everybody kept going to the library, and everybody was running back and forth. Everybody was standing in those books, because they saw that daylight, they seen that hope.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

And then, when Merle was fortunate enough to carry it all the way up the ladder to the courts, the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, they made it retroactive.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

All that time we were locked up, it wasn’t a harmless error. They knew it, but they just kept us locked up.

Mansa Musa:

And you know what? On the hope thing, you’re supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act. You’ve been going down to Annapolis, supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act. Why are you supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act?

Kareem Hasan:

Look at me. I’m a second chance, and everything I do, I always refer back to myself. I’m looking at these young kids out here in the street, and when I talk to them, they relate to me. I need more brothers out here to help with these kids out here, because y’all see how Baltimore City is now. These young kids are off the chain, and they need somebody that’s going to give them some guidance, but they’re going to listen to a certain type of individuals.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

They’re not going to listen to somebody that went to school, somebody that’s a politician or something like that. They’re looking for somebody that’s been through what they’ve been through and understands where they at, because that’s all they talk about.

Mansa Musa:

When you went into Maryland Penitentiary back in the 70s, you said ’77?

Kareem Hasan:

’76.

Mansa Musa:

You had no hope?

Kareem Hasan:

Oh, no. I had a fresh life sentence.

Mansa Musa:

Right. When Unger came out, then we had legislation passed to take the parole out the hands of the governor, that created hope. Then we had the Juvenile Life Bill, that created hope. Your case, had you not went out on Unger, you’d have went out on Juvenile Life, because they were saying that juveniles didn’t have the form, the [inaudible 00:22:12] to do the crime. Well, let’s talk about the Maryland Second Chance Act. Based on what we’ve been seeing and the support we’re getting, what do you think the chances of it passing this year?

Kareem Hasan:

I think the chances are good, especially the examples that we set. We let them know that certain type of individuals, you can let out. Now, there’s some people in there I wouldn’t let out, but the ones we’re talking about will help society, will be more positive for the society, especially for Baltimore City, and we need that.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Kareem Hasan:

The Second Chance Act is something that I support 100%.

Mansa Musa:

What are some of the things you’re now doing in the community?

Kareem Hasan:

Well, I have an organization called CRY, Creating Responsible Youth.

Mansa Musa:

What is that?

Kareem Hasan:

It’s a youth counseling and life skills training program, where we get kids, we come to an 11-week counseling course. After they graduate from the counseling course, we send them to life-scale training courses such as HVAC, CDLs, diesel training, and things of that nature. The program is pretty good, and I’m trying to get up off the ground more, but I need some finances.

Mansa Musa:

How long have you had this idea, and how long has it in existence thus far?

Kareem Hasan:

Well, when I first got the idea, I was in the Maryland House of Corrections, because we had a youth organization called Project Choice.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Kareem Hasan:

I had a young guy come in, and the counselor told me, he said, “Hi son, can you talk to him?” He can’t relate to any of us.” I took the kid on a one-on-one, and the kid said, “He’s trying to tell me about my life, but he’s from the county. He never lived like me. My mother and father are on drugs. I’ve got to support my brother and sister. I’m the one that’s got to go out there and bring them something to eat, because my mother and father take all that money and spend it on drugs.”

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Kareem Hasan:

The kid said, “He doesn’t understand my lifestyle, so how is he going to tell me about my lifestyle?” And then he looked at me and said, “Now see, where you come from, I can understand you. We can talk.”

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

“Because I know you understand where I’m coming from.”

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

“Because you’ve been there.”

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

He got to talking about his mother and father, and he started crying. When he started crying, I was telling him about when my father passed, when I was on lockup, and I was in my cell crying.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Kareem Hasan:

And then, later on that night, I was in bed, and it just hit me. I said, “Cry, create a responsible youth.” That’s how I came up with that name, and just like those boys in the penitentiary, they’re crying out, just like in the Maryland state penal system, the ones that’s positive and they change their life, they’re crying out for help, and we’re here to help. We’re here to create responsible youth.

Mansa Musa:

Last, you will hear from Bobby Pittman, who was in the Maryland Prison system and is now out, a community organizer and leading a bully intervention program. This is what he’s doing with his second chance, in the interest of justice.

Robert Pittman:

Bobby Pittman, I’m from Baltimore. I’m a Baltimorian, and I actually went to prison when I was 17 years old. I was sentenced to a life plus 15 year, consecutive 15 year sentence at 17 years old, for felony murder.

Mansa Musa:

How much time you serve?

Robert Pittman:

I served 24 years on that.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, come on.

Robert Pittman:

The crazy thing, it’s been a year and a few days, it’s probably been 370 days I’ve been free.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. Come on. Welcome home.

Robert Pittman:

Thank you. Since I’ve been out here, it’s been amazing. The things that I learned while I was inside of prison, actually, it carried over, with me out here. Within the last year, I helped 50 people get jobs with a connection with the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development. Shout-out to Nigel jobs on deck Jackson.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, Mr. Jackson.

Robert Pittman:

We’ve got individuals, like a couple of mothers, single mothers into schooling.

Mansa Musa:

Okay.

Robert Pittman:

With full scholarships. Got 10 people into schools, people that never believed that they’d have an opportunity to get their education. We got about 10 people in school. And then, I did all that through my peer recovery knowledge, my lived experience, and understanding where these individuals come from, and assessing these individuals, seeing some things that they might need or whatever.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Robert Pittman:

You know that you can get that. You can do that.

Mansa Musa:

What made you stop, once you got to a point where you said you needed to change, what made you get to a point where you started looking and thinking that you can get out? What inspired you about that?

Robert Pittman:

This is crazy. I actually fell off. I was on lockup one time, and I heard all this screaming and yelling. I’m like, “What is this screaming and yelling for?” It was 2012.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Robert Pittman:

They’re like “The law passed.”

I’m like, “What law?”

They said, “The Unger, the Unger’s passed.” People on lockup are screaming and all this stuff. I can hear, on the compound, individuals screaming and celebrating, and things like this. The crazy thing, they were screaming and yelling about a chance.

Mansa Musa:

Come on, yeah.

Robert Pittman:

You know what I mean? It wasn’t even a guarantee.

Mansa Musa:

I got a chance.

Robert Pittman:

All they know is, I’ve got a chance, because I’ve done exhausted all of my daggone remedies.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Robert Pittman:

But I’ve got a chance right now.

Mansa Musa:

Come on.

Robert Pittman:

To have my case looked at again.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Robert Pittman:

That’s when it started.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Robert Pittman:

That’s when it started. The Ungers went out, it wound up being 200 and something.

Mansa Musa:

People started seeing people going home.

Robert Pittman:

People I’ve been looking up to, now they’ve taken my mentor. My mentor is gone. I was happy for them, but now, it made me like I had to step up more, because I had to prepare for my chance. I see it now, Maryland. They said that they had a meaningful opportunity for release through the parole system.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Robert Pittman:

But there wasn’t one person that got paroled since 1995.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Robert Pittman:

It was a fight. It took about six years, but it gave us hope. We’re just waiting.

Mansa Musa:

Oh, yeah.

Robert Pittman:

We’re sitting there like, “Man.” Six years later, 2018, that’s when it was an agreement with the ACLU and Maryland courts that we’re going to restructure the parole system.

Mansa Musa:

Right, for juvenile lifers.

Robert Pittman:

For juvenile lifers, and on that, they created a whole new set of criteria that an individual on parole, or going up for parole had to meet. If they meet these things, the parole commission has the opportunity to release them. I started going through that. I went through it, went through the whole process in 2018, went up for parole and all that, was denied at my first parole hearing, of course. I saw people going home.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, through the system.

Robert Pittman:

I’m sitting there like, “Oh man, I saw somebody go home from parole. This is real.” The first couple I saw, I’m like, “Oh, this is real, now. I see how real this is.”

Mansa Musa:

Right. Talk about what you’re doing now.

Robert Pittman:

Now, I do peer recovery work. I’ve got a nonprofit, Bully Intervention Teams. What we do with Bully Intervention Teams, it’s not your average bully intervention. We look at all forms of injustice as bullying.

Mansa Musa:

Right, you’re talking about bullies.

Robert Pittman:

Yeah, all forms of injustice is bullying. One of the things that I see, I was seeing bullying when I went down to Annapolis this week. They’re bullying individuals through misinformation. This organization will try to make sure these individuals that receive this misinformation will receive proper information, because they’re being bullied through ignorance. It just was horrible. What we do on the weekend, Saturdays, individuals that were incarcerated, a lot of people look at them, “They’re doing good,” but they don’t know the stress of that, because you know what you’re representing. You’ve got to be a certain type of way, because you’re trying to be an example for these individuals. You’re trying to pioneer for these individuals that come out.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, you don’t hae the luxury make a mistake.

Robert Pittman:

We have our session, our peer-run session, where we can just relieve ourselves, because it’s a lot of pressure.

Mansa Musa:

Oh no, that’s there. You’ve got a wellness space.

Robert Pittman:

We need it.

Mansa Musa:

You’ve got to have it, because like you say, our reality is this here. We don’t have the luxury of making a mistake, and everything that we’ve been afforded, and every opportunity that we have, we don’t look at it as an opportunity for us. We look at it as an opportunity to show society that we’re different. Therefore, the person that I’m talking about, who I’m representing on their behalf, I’m saying that I’m different, but this person I’m asking you to give the same consideration that y’all gave me is also different.

We want to be in a position where we can have a voice on altering how people are serving time. One, we want to be able to say, if you give more programs, if you give more hope, you’ll meet your purpose of people changing and coming back out in society. But more importantly, we want to be able to tell the person, like you said, rest assured that you’ve got advocates out there.

The ACLU of Maryland and advocates urged the Senate to pass The Second Look Act, House Bill 853. For those that are interested, the hearing for The Second Look Act, House Bill 853, in front of the Senate Judiciary Proceeding Committee will be held Tuesday, March the 25th, 2025, 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM, in the East Miller Building, room two. For more information, visit Maryrlandsecondlook.com, or ACLUMaryland.org.

There you have it, the real news and Rattling the Bars. We ask that you comment on this episode. Tell us, do you think a person deserves a second chance, and if giving a person a second chance is, in fact, in the interest of justice.

Photo of Linda Foley in committee by Maryland GovPics (CC 2.0). Link to license.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

Marijuana Legalization Advocates are the Majority…It’s Time They Act Like It

Paul Armentano — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 05:54:37 +0000

Photo by Esteban López

Seventy percent of Americans, including majorities of both Democratic and Republican voters, say that marijuana should be legal. Yet far too often, lawmakers choose to either ignore this constituency or treat them with outright hostility.

In Republican-led states like Nebraska, Ohio, and Texas, elected officials are making it clear that election outcomes legalizing marijuana no longer matter to them. And in Democratic-led states like Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey, lawmakers are seeking to undermine existing legalization markets by drastically hiking marijuana-related taxes.

In all cases, elected officials are treating cannabis consumers as targets, not constituents.

Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers in South Dakota sought to repeal the state’s medical cannabis access law, despite 70 percent of voters having approved it. The effort failed, but only by a single vote.

In Nebraska, lawmakers are also considering legislation to roll back the state’s voter-approved medical marijuana law — and Republican Attorney General Mike Hilgers has urged lawmakers to ignore the election results altogether.

In Ohio, GOP lawmakers in the Senate recently approved legislation to rescind many of the legalization provisions approved by 57 percent of voters in 2023. Changes advanced by lawmakers include limiting home-cultivation rights and creating new crimes for adults who share cannabis with one another or purchase legal cannabis products from out of state.

In Texas, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued several cities, including Dallas, for implementing voter-approved ordinances decriminalizing marijuana possession. As a result, local lawmakers in various cities — including Lockhart and Bastrop — are ignoring voters’ decisions to amend their municipal marijuana policies rather than face costly litigation.

In Idaho, Republican Governor Brad Little signed mandatory minimum penalties into law for low-level marijuana possession. And GOP lawmakers have approved a constitutional amendment forbidding voters from weighing in on any future ballot measure to legalize marijuana.

And in Florida, where a 2024 marijuana legalization narrowly failed — it received majority support but less than the 60 percent threshold required under the state law — Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is leading the charge to make it harder for future petitions to qualify for the ballot.

These concerted attacks are an explicit reminder that the war on cannabis and its consumers remains ongoing — and in some cases is even escalating.

Blue states haven’t made moves to roll back legalization or reverse election results. But several Democratic governors are looking to balance their budget deficits on the backs of consumers.

For instance, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has proposed raising the state’s marijuana-related taxes nearly five-fold. A Maryland budget proposal seeks to nearly double the special sales tax consumers pay on retail marijuana purchases. And in Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has proposed an additional 32 percent wholesale tax on cannabis.

If enacted, these proposed increases will not only lighten consumers’ wallets, but they will also hurt state-licensed businesses. As lawmakers push marijuana prices artificially higher, many consumers will exit the legal market and begin patronizing the unregulated marketplace, undermining one of the primary goals of legalization.

Regardless of whether you live in a red or blue state, or in a jurisdiction where cannabis is legal or illicit, it’s time for legalization advocates to stand up and assert themselves. Cannabis consumers are neither criminals nor ATMs. They’re hard-working responsible adults. And they vote.

Now is not the time to become complacent or presume that marijuana will somehow legalize itself. Change only occurs when advocates agitate for it — and when elected officials fear political consequences for failing to abide by voters’ demands.

Those who support legalizing marijuana aren’t part of the ideological fringe. They’re the majority. It’s time for advocates to act like it — and for lawmakers to treat cannabis consumers with the respect they deserve.

The post Marijuana Legalization Advocates are the Majority…It’s Time They Act Like It appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Armentano.

Georgia parliament very close to making harsher ‘foreign agent’ bill a law

CPJ Staff — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:26:19 +0000

New York, March 20, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists expresses deep concern after Georgia’s parliament on March 18 approved a second reading of a foreign agent bill that will most likely become law as early as April, creating an existential threat to Georgia’s independent press.

Media groups fear the bill, which ruling party officials call an “exact copy” of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), will be used more punitively than in the United States, where the law has rarely been applied to media and civil society groups.

“CPJ condemns the Georgian parliament’s approval in a second reading of an ‘exact copy’ of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act. In the hands of an increasingly authoritarian ruling Georgian Dream party, FARA’s overbroad provisions and criminal sanctions could wipe out Georgia’s donor-reliant independent press and media advocacy groups,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Georgian authorities should reject any form of ‘foreign agent’ law.”

Parliament passed a “word-for-word” translation of FARA in an initial reading on March 4, with the ruling party saying it planned to simply adapt U.S.-specific terminology to Georgia’s legal framework. Besides such adaptations, nothing substantial was amended during the second reading, and substantive revisions cannot be made in a final reading, which is expected by April 4, Lia Chakhunashvili, executive director of independent trade group Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics, told CPJ. Georgia President Mikheil Kavelashvili is expected to sign it once it reaches his desk, according to Chakhunashvili.

Officials say a Georgian FARA is necessary because foreign-funded organizations “refuse to register” under the country’s existing foreign agent law, passed in May 2024, and harsher penalties are needed.

The FARA bill includes a maximum penalty of five years in prison for non-compliance and omissions, as well as fines. The existing “foreign agent” law only established fines as punishment, though none appear to have been imposed, Chakhunashvili said.

The switch to FARA would also extend the law’s scope beyond organizations, to individuals, and could be used to require news outlets to label their publications as produced by a foreign agent.

Analysts said the Georgian bill lacks the “legal safeguards and nonpartisan enforcement” that exist in the United States and will enable “swift and severe crackdowns.”

CPJ emailed the Georgian Dream party for comment but did not immediately receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Trump Invokes Wartime Alien Enemies Act, Then Ignores Judicial Order to Turn Around Deportation Flights

Democracy Now! — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:38:04 +0000

President Trump has invoked a controversial 18th-century law last used to justify the arrest and internment of 30,000 Japanese, German and Italian nationals during World War II, as part of his ongoing crusade against immigrants. Citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the Trump administration deported more than 130 immigrants who have been accused, often with little to no evidence, of gang affiliation. The ACLU won a judicial order against the deportations, which the Trump administration ignored, allowing the flights to continue to El Salvador, where authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele received the deportees at a notorious supermax prison. We speak to Lee Gelernt, who argued to stop the flights on behalf of the ACLU, about Trump’s attacks on established U.S. immigration law. We cover the second Trump’s administration’s attempts to incarcerate immigrants at the Guantánamo military prison and end birthright citizenship, as well as the ongoing effects of his previous administration’s policies of family separation and countrywide travel bans.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Formerly incarcerated people urge legislators to bring the Maryland Second Look Act up for a vote

The Real News Network — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 21:52:24 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice

Sobantu Mzwakali — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 07:03:04 +0000

Houses of Parliament (Cape Town, South Africa). Photograph Source: I, PhilippN – CC BY-SA 3.0

There is no discourse in South Africa more ancient, more unresolved, and more weaponised than that of land. The passage of the Expropriation Act in South Africa has set the air thick with tension, a moment that peels open the past to reveal its jagged edges. A history that never ended, only submerged beneath the language of legality and market transactions, is once again clawing at the present.

The land is not just dirt and fences—it is memory, survival, identity and belonging, resistance, dispossession of labour, the looting of minerals, and the establishment of racial capital. It is the primordial question—older than the Republic of itself.

On 23 January 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the controversial Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 into law. Like the screech of rusted gears grinding against time’s stubborn wheel, the Act has sent a raucous clatter through the nation and beyond—its champions hailing it as long-overdue justice for stolen land, its detractors warning of economic ruin, while distant powers, draped in their own self-interest, tighten their grip, their protests echoing not in the name of principle, but of privilege.

The Act, replacing its apartheid 1975 predecessor, is no mere legislative housekeeping. It is the state’s uneasy reckoning with a history of plunder—a tentative attempt to confront the theft that built South Africa’s economy, the dispossession that cemented its class hierarchies. Yet, as the ink dries, old ghosts stir. Who truly benefits? Who is left behind? And what of the landless, for whom restitution has remained a vanishing horizon, a promise deferred by bureaucracy and broken by politics?

At its core, the Act seeks to bring the law in step with the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 108 of 1996, aligning the legal framework with the imperatives of land reform. It corrects the lingering contradictions between the outdated Expropriation Act and Section 25 of the democratic constitution, which speaks of expropriation in the public interest, the just terms of compensation, and the broader commitments of a nation still struggling to unshackle itself from its past. The Act echoes previous iterations—2015, 2018—bearing the scars of legislative battles, the residue of failed consultations. It insists: expropriation must not be arbitrary; compensation must be just.

Yet, as the legal scaffolding is erected, the fundamental question remains—does the law merely refine the mechanics of ownership, or does it reimagine justice itself?

Since the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck and the Dutch East India Company in 1652 on the shores of Southern Africa, the story of South Africa has been one of land, conquest, and capital. The first wars of dispossession began with the violent subjugation of the Khoi-San, their ancestral land carved up for Dutch settlers who spread inland, waging battles of expansion.

As they moved eastward, they met fierce resistance from the Xhosa, who for a hundred years fought a series of wars against colonial encroachment. The Xhosa stood as one of the longest-lasting obstacles to settler domination, pushing back against British and Boer forces in a struggle that shaped the landscape of resistance. Yet, even as these wars raged, the British tightened their grip on the Cape, and tensions between white factions deepened—Boers, losing their cheap slave labour, trekked north to claim new territories, leaving a trail of blood and conflict.

Despite their divisions, settlers were bound by a shared imperative: the extraction of land and labour at the expense of the indigenous majority.

The discovery of minerals in the late 19th century marked a turning point, shifting South Africa from an agrarian society to an industrial economy fuelled by forced native labour. Capital’s hunger for wealth deepened racial segregation, culminating in the Anglo-Boer Wars, where white capital fought itself before ultimately uniting. In 1910, the Union of South Africa was formed, excluding native South Africans from political and economic power. This exclusion was cemented in 1913 with the passing of the Natives Land Act, which stripped natives of land ownership, confining them to impoverished reserves with the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 and into “tribal” boundaries called homelands by the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951. The foundation for apartheid had been laid—not just through law, but through centuries of war, theft, and the relentless logic of capital.

The new Expropriation Act of 2024 attempts to pull South Africa’s legal framework closer to the constitutional imperatives of Section 25—the so-called property clause. The legal fiction of “just and equitable compensation” introduced in the Act is an attempt to balance constitutional propriety with the pressure of historical injustice. But whose justice? And what is equitable in a country where land was not bought but taken?

To date, land reform has largely been cosmetic, measured in hectares redistributed rather than in the dismantling of agricultural monopolies or capital structures. The state has danced cautiously around the issue, unwilling to provoke market unrest or dislodge the deeply entrenched privileges of the white agrarian elite. And so, the Expropriation Act emerges as both a promise and a limitation.

The Act permits expropriation in the “public interest,” a term rooted in the Constitution but destined to be contested in courts for years, entangling the process in legal bureaucracy. While the Act provides a framework for expropriation with and, in limited cases, without compensation, it does not fundamentally alter the state’s cautious approach to reclaiming large tracts of unused, unproductive, or speculatively held land. Instead, it remains tethered to negotiation, reinforcing a slow and measured redistribution. The Act acknowledges the rights of unregistered land occupiers, yet recognition alone does not guarantee security or restitution—leaving many still at the mercy of protracted legal and administrative processes.

As argued before, for the nearly 60% of South Africans living off-register in communal areas, informal settlements, or Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses, the Expropriation Act of 2024 offers little more than a symbolic gesture. Without title deeds, their claims to land are not legally secured, yet their histories and lived realities are deeply embedded in it. If expropriation is not accompanied by a robust land administration strategy that formalises tenure rights for the dispossessed, it risks becoming another performance of reform rather than a transformative intervention.

The Act’s recognition of unregistered land rights is a step forward, but recognition alone does not equate to protection. Unless the expropriation process is integrated with a comprehensive land administration system to document the rights of unregistered occupiers, those most vulnerable to dispossession will remain in legal limbo. The enactment of a Land Records Act, as recommended by the High-Level Panel Report on the Assessment of Key Legislation (2018) and the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform (2019), is essential to ensuring security of tenure.

Additionally, both panels proposed a National Land Reform Framework Act to establish clear legal principles for redistribution, restitution, and tenure reform. Rather than replacing existing laws, this framework would provide coherence by setting legal criteria for beneficiary selection, land acquisition, and equitable access. It would also introduce mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and alternative dispute resolution, including a Land Rights Protector. The Expropriation Act should not stand in isolation—it must align with these broader legislative efforts to ensure that land reform is not only legally sound but also meaningfully transformative.

Land, under capitalist relations, is not merely a resource—it is a commodity. Any attempt at expropriation without rupturing this logic is bound to be a compromised one. The Act, while acknowledging that compensation may, in certain instances, be set at nil, does not articulate a decisive framework for when and how this will occur, leaving these decisions to courts and policymakers. The absence of a robust redistributive mechanism means that expropriation may ultimately reinforce rather than disrupt market logic.

This is not mere conjecture. In countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, land reform initiatives were sabotaged by a combination of domestic elite resistance and international financial retaliation. In South Africa, capital has already signaled its intention to resist large-scale redistribution, with organizations such as AgriSA warning of economic collapse should expropriation be pursued aggressively. This fearmongering is not new. It echoes the same panic-driven narratives that were used to justify land theft in the first place.

Beyond South Africa’s borders, the passage of the Expropriation Act has triggered predictable reactions from Western powers. U.S. President Donald Trump, following a well-worn script of white minority protectionism, issued an executive order cutting aid to South Africa, claiming the law targets white farmers. The European Union has expressed “concern,” a diplomatic prelude to potential economic pressures. Additionally, the U.S. administration has threatened to revoke South Africa’s benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a trade agreement that facilitates tariff-free exports to the U.S. market. Yet, even as these forces decry land reform under the guise of defending property rights, Trump’s administration has quietly extended refugee status to white Afrikaners, framing them as victims of persecution. This move—granting asylum to the descendants of colonial settlers while barring refugees from war-torn Middle Eastern and African nations—reveals the racialised logic underpinning Western foreign policy. These responses are not about human rights or democracy. They are about the continued assertion of Western interests in the Middle East and Africa’s resources, protecting economic and racial hierarchies that long predate the Expropriation Act.

International finance capital is already tightening its grip, with investment ratings agencies hinting at further downgrades should expropriation proceed in ways deemed unfavourable to the market. The South African state, historically timid in the face of international economic leverage, may find itself retreating into a defensive crouch, reducing expropriation to an instrument of negotiation rather than transformation.

The Expropriation Act has reopened historical wounds, but it is not, in itself, a radical break. Its success or failure will depend on political will, legal battles, and grassroots mobilisation. The Landless People’s Movement, shack dwellers’ organisations, and rural activists have long articulated a vision of land reform that centres the dispossessed rather than the property-owning class. Will the state listen? Or will it once again privilege legal technicalities over substantive justice?

For expropriation to mean something beyond legalese, it must be tied to a broader transformation of land relations in South Africa. This means:

+ Implementing a National Land Reform Framework Act, as proposed by the High-Level Panel and Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform, to set clear criteria for redistribution and beneficiary selection.

+ Recognising and securing tenure rights for the millions who live without formal documentation of their land occupancy.

+ Creating mechanisms for community-driven expropriation, where citizens can initiate claims rather than relying solely on the state’s discretion.

+ Dismantling the commercial agrarian monopolies that continue to hoard vast tracts of land.

Expropriation cannot be reduced to a bureaucratic procedure, a sterile legal exercise bound by the logic of the market. It must be a rupture—a deliberate act of redress, dismantling centuries of theft and exclusion. The state stands at a threshold: waver in hesitation, or grasp the weight of history and reimagine South Africa’s land ownership beyond the margins of negotiation. But history is restless. The dispossessed will not wait in endless queues of policy revisions and court battles. The land is calling—not for half-measures, not for another paper revolution, but for a reckoning that answers the injustice written into the soil.

The post South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sobantu Mzwakali.

South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice

Sobantu Mzwakali — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 07:03:04 +0000

Houses of Parliament (Cape Town, South Africa). Photograph Source: I, PhilippN – CC BY-SA 3.0

Yet, as the legal scaffolding is erected, the fundamental question remains—does the law merely refine the mechanics of ownership, or does it reimagine justice itself?

Despite their divisions, settlers were bound by a shared imperative: the extraction of land and labour at the expense of the indigenous majority.

For expropriation to mean something beyond legalese, it must be tied to a broader transformation of land relations in South Africa. This means:

+ Implementing a National Land Reform Framework Act, as proposed by the High-Level Panel and Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform, to set clear criteria for redistribution and beneficiary selection.

+ Recognising and securing tenure rights for the millions who live without formal documentation of their land occupancy.

+ Creating mechanisms for community-driven expropriation, where citizens can initiate claims rather than relying solely on the state’s discretion.

+ Dismantling the commercial agrarian monopolies that continue to hoard vast tracts of land.

The post South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sobantu Mzwakali.

South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice

Sobantu Mzwakali — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 07:03:04 +0000

Houses of Parliament (Cape Town, South Africa). Photograph Source: I, PhilippN – CC BY-SA 3.0

Yet, as the legal scaffolding is erected, the fundamental question remains—does the law merely refine the mechanics of ownership, or does it reimagine justice itself?

Despite their divisions, settlers were bound by a shared imperative: the extraction of land and labour at the expense of the indigenous majority.

For expropriation to mean something beyond legalese, it must be tied to a broader transformation of land relations in South Africa. This means:

+ Implementing a National Land Reform Framework Act, as proposed by the High-Level Panel and Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform, to set clear criteria for redistribution and beneficiary selection.

+ Recognising and securing tenure rights for the millions who live without formal documentation of their land occupancy.

+ Creating mechanisms for community-driven expropriation, where citizens can initiate claims rather than relying solely on the state’s discretion.

+ Dismantling the commercial agrarian monopolies that continue to hoard vast tracts of land.

The post South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sobantu Mzwakali.

Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War

Eric Zuesse — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:43:44 +0000

The war in Ukraine is, but in reverse, the same situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable; Obama, Biden, and Trump, are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of a WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Obama, then Biden, and now Trump), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink — into WW3 — in order to become able to achieve world-conquest. This is as-if Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962 — but, thankfully, he didn’t; so, WW3 was averted, on that occasion.

How often have you heard or seen the situation in the matter of Cuba being near to the White House (near to America’s central command) being analogized to Ukraine’s being near — far nearer, in fact — to The Kremlin (Russia’s central command)? No, you probably haven’t encountered this historical context before, because it’s not being published — at least not in America and its allied countries. It’s being hidden.

The Ukrainian war actually started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said (NOT in 2022 as is alleged in the U.S.-controlled nations). This war was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet.)

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)

Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:

Article 1

The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …

Article 4

The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.

Article 5

The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.

Article 6

All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.

And, in regards to the U.S.:

Article 2

The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.

Article 3

The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.

Article 4

The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.

Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.

On 7 January 2022, the Associated Press (AP) headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands”, and reported:

Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.

According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …

The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …

The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”

NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did agree to, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, America’s recent Presidents are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (America’s recent Presidents), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.

Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022. If Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962, then the U.S. would have invaded and taken over Cuba, because the only other alternative would have been to skip that step and go directly to invade the Soviet Union itself — directly to WW3. Under existing international law, either response — against Cuba, or against the U.S.S.R. — would have been undecidable, because Truman’s U.N. Charter refused to allow “aggression” to be defined (Truman, even at the time of the San Francisco Conference, 25 April to 26 June 1945, that drew up the U.N. Charter, was considering for the U.S. to maybe take over the entire world). Would the aggression in such an instance have been by Khrushchev (and by Eisenhower for having similarly placed U.S. missiles too close to Moscow in 1959), or instead by JFK for responding to that threat? International law needs to be revised so as to prohibit ANY nation that is “too near” to a superpower’s central command, from allying itself with a different superpower so as to enable that other superpower to place its strategic forces so close to that adjoining or nearby superpower as to present a mortal threat against its national security. But, in any case, 317 miles from The Kremlin would easily be far “too close”; and, so, Russia must do everything possible to prevent that from becoming possible. America and its colonies (‘allies’) are CLEARLY in the wrong on this one. (And I think that JFK was likewise correct in the 1962 case — though to a lesser extent because the distance was four times larger in that case — America was the defender and NOT the aggressor in that matter.)

If this finding appears to you to be too contradictory to what you have read and heard in the past for you to be able to believe it, then my article earlier today (March 4), “The Extent of Lying in the U.S. Press” presents also five other widespread-in-The-West lies, so that you will be able to see that there is nothing particularly unusual about this one, other than that this case could very possibly produce a world-ending nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. People in the mainstream news-business are beholden to the billionaires who control the people who control (hire and fire) themselves, and owe their jobs to that — NOT really to the audience. This is the basic reality. To ignore it is to remain deceived. But you can consider yourself fortunate to be reading this, because none of the mainstream news-sites is allowed to publish articles such as this. None of the mainstream will. They instead deceived you. It’s what they are hired (by their owners and advertisers) to do, so as to continue ruling the Government (by getting you to vote for their candidates).

Furthermore, I received today from the great investigative journalist Lucy Komisar, who has done many breakthrough news-reports exposing the con-man whom U.S. billionaires have assisted — back even before Obama started imposing sanctions against Russia in 2012 (Bill Browder) — to provide the ‘evidence’ on the basis of which Obama started imposing anti-Russian sanctions, in 2012 (the Magnitsky Act sanctions), recent articles from her, regarding how intentional the press’s refusals to allow the truth to be reported, actually are: on 28 February 2025, her “20 fake US media articles on the Browder Magnitsky hoax and one honest reporter from Cyprus”, and on 4 December 2024, her “MSNBC killed reporter Ken Dilanian’s exposé of the Wm Browder-Magnitsky hoax. State Department knew about it.”

This isn’t to say, however, that ALL mainstream news-reports in the U.S. empire are false. For example, the Democratic Party site Common Dreams, headlined authentic news against the Republican Party, on March 4, “Trump Threatens Campus Protesters With Imprisonment: ‘Trump here is referring to pro-Palestine protests so you won’t hear a peep from conservatives or even pro-Israel liberals,’ said one journalist”, by Julia Conley; and so did the Republican site N.Y. Post, headlining on 15 October 2020, against the Democratic Party (which Democratic Party media similarly ignored), “Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm.” However, NONE of the empire’s mainstream media publish reports against the U.S. Government or against its empire; so, the lies that have been covered here are virtually universal — go unchallenged — throughout the empire.

The post Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

AFL-CIO President Celebrates Reintroduction of the PRO Act

Newswire Editor — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 22:10:25 +0000

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler issued the following statement on the reintroduction of the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act:

Americans believe in the power of unions, and tens of millions of working people would become union members tomorrow if they could. But American labor law is broken, weighted on the side of the bosses and against the workers. In too many workplaces, in too many industries across the country, big corporations and billionaire CEOs still retaliate against us for organizing. They refuse to negotiate our contracts, force us to sit through hours of anti-union propaganda and engage in illegal union-busting every day. Now they have an unelected, unaccountable union-buster trying to illegally fire tens of thousands of our fellow workers in federal jobs and an administration rolling back the workplace protections.

The PRO Act is long overdue, and the American people agree. We urge the elected leaders of both parties to move this critical legislation forward so that all workers have the chance to stand together and build better lives for themselves and their families.

We know it won’t be easy, but the labor movement never backs down from a righteous fight. And in today’s economy, where our workers’ hard-earned paychecks are covering less of what they need while still facing unsafe conditions and a lack of respect on the job, there’s no fight more righteous than ensuring that every single worker who wants a union has a fair shot to join or form one.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Trump tariffs on 3 largest trading partners trigger retaliation from Canada, Mexico and China; local officials say No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act uses fear to push Trump agenda – March 4, 2025

KPFA — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

Trump levies tariffs on America’s 3 largest trade partners, triggering retaliation in-kind from Canada, Mexico and China
Trump threatens funding for schools that allow “illegal protests”, says agitators will be imprisoned or deported
Federal employee union rallies to protest DOGE for mass firings, dismantling federal programs and agencies
Local officials blast “No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act”, say Administration using fear to push Trump agenda
Mexico lawsuit against US gunmakers reaches Supreme Court, alleges gunmakers cashing in on cartel violence
CDC sends “disease detective” epidemiologists to respond to Texas measles epidemic, HHS Secretary Kennedy sends Vitamin A and recommends cod liver oil

The post Trump tariffs on 3 largest trading partners trigger retaliation from Canada, Mexico and China; local officials say No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act uses fear to push Trump agenda – March 4, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The Pragmatist Party

Philip A. Faruggio — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 15:51:09 +0000

Before I begin on the Democrats, allow me to make this assertion: The Republican Party, for as long as this baby boomer can remember, are but a pack of wolves. They devour anything that is for working stiffs and the poor. Recently, the Republicans are pushing this lie that their reinstatement of Trump’s tax cuts will “Help small business and working people.” Meanwhile, the overwhelming benefit will be for the Super Rich and Corporate America, and not Mom and Pop.

Onto the Democrats. Factor out but a minor percentage of both their legislators and supporters and you have a party of pragmatists. This writer’s definition of a pragmatist is the guy standing in front of the firing squad asking for a blindfold. The leaders of this party believe all that matters is to get out and vote… nothing more… oh sorry, except to send donations. Let’s go back to 2006 when, during the height of the Bush-Cheney ( or is it Cheney-Bush?). The Cabal’s phony war and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Democrats took over the House of Representatives. Rep. John Conyors, he of the Judiciary Committee, had promised a year or so earlier “Once we take over the House and I am chair of the Judiciary Committee, we are going to have major hearings on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.” Then, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the order that “The hearings are OFF the table.” Bye Bye all chances of holding the Cabal responsible for, in my 70+ years of existence, the equally horrific foreign policy act by my nation as the Vietnam War!

So, in my little hamlet of Port Orange, Florida, population at the time of around 60,000, we organized weekly street corner demonstrations against the Iraq invasion and occupation. We stayed at it from before the 2004 presidential election right up until Obama became the candidate in 2008. Once he was the front runner of his party, the 25-30 folks we had on that corner each Tuesday at rush hour now became three or four of us stalwarts. The BS Democratic Party mouthpiece MoveOn.org refused to get behind regular street demonstrations. No, now it was time to spend all energy in getting Barack elected. Meanwhile, many of us on what is called The True Left wanted Medicare for All. Mr. Obama said he liked the idea of a Public Option, which in essence was just that in a more pragmatic (here we go again) manner. Then, when Obama was out receiving campaign donations of $21+ million vs. $7+ million for John McCain from the Health Care and Insurance Industries, he changed course. No public option on the table for his Bully Pulpit. Just the Affordable Care Act, another (here we go again) pragmatic program, which helped stop some of the bleeding but not the cause of the wound.

Bill Clinton gave us the Welfare Reform Act which made those folks in dire need feel like interlopers inside the empire. He and his wife really screwed up any idea for Medicare for All, didn’t they as well? You see, those who walk the line between doing good and doing what the empire wants always fall on their faces… or rather their supporters do. Thus, Obama as President during the middle of the terrible Sub Prime Crisis left it up to his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to run his “best and the brightest” meetings while Barack went home to dinner with his family. Emanuel twisted arms and came up with more TARP money gifts to the Wall Street predators, instead of what Ralph Nader and many conservatives and progressives demanded: Putting the toxic Wall Street companies into Receivership. Uncle Sam could have paid pennies on the dollar for those shitty assets, and then sold them to highest bidders down the road.

When it came to the phony Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Obama and his party leadership did squat about the lies and misinformation the Cabal issued to justify those invasions and occupations. We are still suffering as a nation from that mess. Now we have Trump 2.0 or shall I say Trump-Musk 1 and what will the pragmatists on the other side of the aisle finally do? Will they push out all those empire serving hypocrites from their party and rally Americans for real, viable change? Kamala Harris actually took in more money from the big donors and still lost the election. Her party’s leaders and their lemmings said it was because she was a woman and of mixed race (wasn’t Obama mixed race?). No, she lost because Kamala kept dancing to the same Neocon tune that Sleepy Joe sang to. Working stiffs nationwide could not see any difference between her and Trump 2.0. Harris, Biden, the Clintons, Obama et al. forgot what FDR accomplished to save the Capitalism that they all love, by sticking it to the Super Rich with his New Deal. Because of their failings we can today see how Trump and his party are pushing us back in time to that glorious Gilded Age and 21st Century Feudal America.

The post The Pragmatist Party first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Philip A. Faruggio.

Far from Benign: The US Aid Industrial Complex

Binoy Kampmark — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:16:33 +0000

The US aid program began in earnest in the early stages of the Cold War, with an intention to beat off the contenders from the Soviet bloc in the postcolonial world. President Harry S. Truman proposed, in his 1949 inaugural address, “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, enabling him to issue the executive order that created the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In 1962, the American scholar of international relations, Henry Morgenthau, suggested that foreign aid could fall into six categories: the sort that promoted humanitarian objects, the aid that offers subsistence goals and military aims, the sort that acted as a bribe, the attainment of prestige and economic development.

To provide aid suggests a benevolent undertaking delivered selflessly. It arises from the charitable mission, an attempt to alleviate, or at least soften the blows of hardship arising from various impairments (poverty, famine, disease). But the provision of aid is rarely benign, almost always political, and, in its realisation, often self-defeating. The very transaction acknowledges the inherent victimhood of the sufferer, the intractable nature of the condition, the seemingly insoluble nature of a social problem.

Morgenthau also conceded that humanitarian aid, despite being, on the surface, non-political in nature, could still “perform political function when it operates within political context.” And the very provision of aid suggests an accepted state of inequality between giver and recipient, with the former having the means to influence outcomes.

With such views frothing the mix, it is worth considering why the attack by President Donald J. Trump on USAID as part of his axing crusade against bureaucratic waste is not, for all its structural and constitutional limitations, without harsh merit. Over the years, insistent critics have been lurking in the bushes regarding that particular body, but they have been dismissed as isolationist and unwilling to accept messianic US internationalism. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, has been wondering if the whole idea of US foreign aid should be called off. In January 1995, the body produced a report urging the termination of USAID. “Despite billions of dollars spent on economic assistance, most of the countries receiving US development aid remained mired in poverty, repressions, and dependence.”

Such a viewpoint can hardly be dismissed as a fringe sentiment smacking of parochialism. (In the United States, imperialist sentiment is often synonymous with supposedly principled internationalism.) The less rosy side of the aid industry has been shored up by such trenchant critiques as Dambisa Moyo’s, whose Dead Aid (2009) sees the $1 trillion in development aid given to Africa over five decades as a “malignant” exercise that failed to reduce poverty or deliver sustainable growth. She caustically remarks that, “Between 1970 and 1998, when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, poverty in Africa rose from 11 percent to a staggering 66 percent.” Aid, far from being a potential solution, has become the problem.

The report card of USAID has not improved. One of the notable features of the aid racket is that much of the money never escapes the orbit of the organisational circuit, locked up with intermediaries and contractors. In other words, the money tends to move around and stay in Washington, never departing for more useful climes. A report by USAID from June 2023 noted that nine out of every ten dollars spent by the organisation in the 2022 fiscal year went to international contracting partners, most of whom are situated in Washington, DC. USAID funding is also very particular about its recipient groups, with 60% of all its funding going to a mere 25 groups in 2017 alone.

In January this year, the USAID Office of Inspector General authored a memorandum noting accountability and transparency issues within USAID-funded programs. USAID, Inspector General Paul K. Martin insisted, “must enforce the requirement that UN agencies promptly report allegations of fraud or sexual exploitation and abuse directly to OIG.” While the sentiment of the document echoes a long US tradition of suspicion towards UN agencies, valid points of consideration are made regarding mismanagement of humanitarian assistance. The OIG also took issue with USAID’s lack of any “comprehensive internal database of subawardees.”

Despite these scars and impediments, USAID continues being celebrated by its admirers as a projection of “soft power” par excellence, indispensable in promoting the good name of Washington in the benighted crisis spots of the globe. A cuddly justification is offered by the Council on Foreign Relations, which describes USAID as “a pillar of US soft power and a source of foreign assistance for struggling countries, playing a leading role in coordinating the response to international emergencies such as the global food security crisis.”

Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace discounts the politically slanted nature of US aid policies, not to mention its faulty distribution mechanism, by universalising the achievements of a body he cherishes. USAID “has contributed to humanity’s extraordinary progress in poverty reduction, increased life expectancy, better health, improved literacy, and so much more.”

A less disingenuous example can be found in the Financial Times, which encourages “fighting poverty and disease and enabling economic development” as doing so will improve safety, advance prosperity, curb instability and the appeal of autocracy. But at the end of the day, aid is a good idea because, reasons the editorial, it offers expanded markets for US exports. The sick and the impoverished don’t tend to make good consumers. To cancel, however “life-saving projects” at short notice was “a good way to provoke an anti-American backlash” while giving an encouraging wink to the Chinese. US Aid: far from benign, and distinctly political.

The post Far from Benign: The US Aid Industrial Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Civicus Monitor criticises PNG use of cybercrime law to curb free speech

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 01:31:01 +0000

Pacific Media Watch

Papua New Guinea’s civic space has been rated as “obstructed” by the Civicus Monitor and the country has been criticised for pushing forward with a controversial media law in spite of strong opposition.

Among concerns previously documented by the civil rights watchdog are harassment and threats against human rights defenders, particularly those working on land and environmental rights, use of the cybercrime law to criminalise online expression, intimidation and restrictions against journalists, and excessive force during protests.

In recent months, the authorities have used the cybercrime law to target a human rights defender for raising questions online on forest enforcement, while a journalist and gender-based violence survivor is also facing charges under the law, said the Civicus Monitor in its latest report.

READ MORE: Other PNG media freedom reports

The court halted a logging company’s lawsuit against a civil society group while the government is pushing forward with the controversial National Media Development law.

Human rights defender charged under cybercrime law
On 9 December 2024, human rights defender and ACT NOW! campaign manager Eddie Tanago was arrested and charged by police under section 21(2) of the Cybercrime Act 2016 for allegedly publishing defamatory remarks on social media about the managing director of the PNG Forest Authority.

Tanago was taken to the Boroko Police Station Holding cell and released on bail the same afternoon. If convicted he could face a maximum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment.

ACT NOW is a prominent human rights organisation seeking to halt illegal logging and related human rights violations in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

According to reports, ACT NOW had reshared a Facebook post from a radio station advertising an interview with PNG Forest Authority (PNGFA) staff members, which included a photo of the managing director.

The repost included a comment raising questions about PNGFA forest enforcement.

Following Tanago’s arrest, ACT NOW said: “it believes that the arrest and charging of Tanago is a massive overreach and is a blatant and unwarranted attempt to intimidate and silence public debate on a critical issue of national and international importance.”

It added that “there was nothing defamatory in the social media post it shared and there is nothing remotely criminal in republishing a poster which includes the image of a public figure which can be found all over the internet.”

On 24 January 2025, when Tanago appeared at the Waigani Committal Court, he was instead charged under section 15, subparagraph (b) of the Cybercrime Act for “identity theft”. The next hearing has been scheduled for February 25.

The 2016 Cybercrime Act has been used to silence criticism and creates a chilling effect, said Civicus Monitor.

The law has been criticised by the opposition, journalists and activists for its impact on freedom of expression and political discourse.

JOURNO ARRAIGNED ON CYBER HARASSMENT
Journalist Hennah Joku appeared before Magistrate Paul Nii at the Waigani Committal Court on charges of cyber defamation following a Facebook post made on 4th September 2024.
Read more:https://t.co/LEIDEcTZv6 #EMTVNews #EMTVOnline pic.twitter.com/zHqm353Cst

— EMTV (@EMTVOnline) December 5, 2024

Journalist and gender activist charged with defamation
Journalist and gender activist Hennah Joku was detained and charged under the Cybercrime Act on 23 November 2024, following defamation complaints filed by her former partner Robert Agen.

Joku was charged with two counts of breaching the Cybercrimes Act 2016 and detained in Boroko Prison. She was freed on the same day after bail was posted.

Joku, a survivor of a 2018 assault by Agen, had documented and shared her six-year journey through the PNG justice system, which had resulted in his conviction and jailing in 2023.

On 2 September 2024, the PNG Supreme Court overturned two of three criminal convictions, and Agen was released from prison.

On 4 and 15 September 2024, Joku shared her reactions with more than 9000 followers on her Meta social media account. Those two posts, one of which featured the injuries suffered from her 2018 assault, now form the basis for the current defamation charges against her.

Section 21(2) of the Cybercrimes Act 2016, which has an electronic defamation clause, carries a maximum penalty of up to 25 years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to one million kina (NZ$442,000).

The Pacific Freedom Forum (PFF) expressed “grave concerns” over the charges, saying: “We encourage the government and judiciary to review the use of defamation legislation to silence and gag the universal right to freedom of speech.

“Citizens must be informed. They must be protected.”

Court stays logging company lawsuit against civil society group
In January 2025, an injunction issued against community advocacy group ACT NOW! to prevent publication of reports on illegal logging has been stayed by the National Court.

In July 2024, two Malaysian owned logging companies obtained an order from the District Court in Vanimo preventing ACT NOW! from issuing publications about their activities and from contacting their clients and service providers.

That order has now been effectively lifted after the National Court agreed to stay the whole District court proceedings while it considers an application from ACT NOW! to have the case permanently stayed and transferred to the National Court.

ACT NOW! said the action by Global Elite Limited and Wewak Agriculture Development Limited, which are part of the Giant Kingdom group, is an example of Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP).

“SLAPPs are illegitimate and abusive lawsuits designed to intimidate, harass and silence legitimate criticism and close down public scrutiny of the logging industry,” said Civicus Monitor.

SLAPP lawsuits have been outlawed in many countries and lawyers involved in supporting them can be sanctioned, but those protections do not yet exist in PNG.

The District Court action is not the first time the Malaysian-owned Giant Kingdom group has tried to use the legal system in an attempt to silence ACT NOW!

In March 2024, the court rejected a similar SLAPP style application by the Global Elite for an injunction against ACT NOW! As a result, the company discontinued its legal action and the court ordered it to pay ACT NOW!’s legal costs.

Government pushes forward with controversial media legislation
The government is reportedly ready to pass legislation to regulate its media, which journalism advocates have said could have serious implications for democracy and freedom of speech in the country.

National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) of PNG reported in January 2025 that the policy has received the “green light” from cabinet to be presented in Parliament.

The state broadcaster reported that Communications Minister Timothy Masiu said: “This policy will address the ongoing concerns about sensationalism, ethical standards, and the portrayal of violence in the media.”

In July 2024, it was reported that the proposed media policy was now in its fifth draft but it is unclear if this version has been updated.

As previously documented, journalists have raised concerns that the media development policy could lead to more government control over the country’s relatively free media.

The bill includes sections that give the government the “power to investigate complaints against media outlets, issue guidelines for ethical reporting, and enforce sanctions or penalties for violations of professional standards”.

There are also concerns that the law will punish journalists who create content that is against the country’s development objectives.

Organisations such as Transparency International PNG, Media Council of PNG, Pacific Freedom Forum, and Pacific Media Watch/Asia Pacific Media Network among others, have asked for the policy to be dropped.

The press freedom ranking for PNG dropped from 59th place to 91st in the most recent index published by Reporters without Borders (RSF) in May 2024.

Civicus Monitor.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Veterans Oppose Mass Deportation and Domestic Military Deployments

Veterans for Peace — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 17:06:42 +0000

Veterans For Peace strongly objects to the Trump Administration’s racist campaign of mass deportation of undocumented workers, who are our friends, neighbors and even our fellow veterans. We condemn the violent raids that are sowing fear and terror in communities across the United States. As veterans, we are particularly opposed to the misuse and abuse of U.S. military personnel, including their illegal deployment to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, about 1,000 U.S. Army personnel and 500 Marines have been sent to the border, in addition to 2,500 National Guard members already there. Helicopter units are being sent along with U.S. Air Force C-17 and C- 130 aircraft; and Stars and Stripes reports that 20-ton Stryker armored combat vehicles may also be shipped. The number of U.S. military personnel on the U.S.-Mexico border may rise to as many as 10,000, according to the Defense One newsletter.

The use of active-duty military personnel for domestic policing operations is strictly forbidden by the Posse Comitatus Act, and legal challenges are being mounted. President Trump says he may invoke the Insurrection Act, which effectively overrides Posse Comitatus by allowing the Executive to declare a national emergency requiring the domestic deployment of US troops. But using the Insurrection Act to override the protections of the Posse Comitatus Act and deploy U.S. troops within the United States to investigate, detain, and remove illegal immigrants would be an unprecedented use of presidential power and misuse of the military, according to a recent report by the New York Bar.

What we have here is a U.S. president who is willing to engage thousands of U.S. military personnel in what appears – among other atrocities – to be a profit-making scheme based on a contrived border crisis. According to Customs and Border Protection data, monthly migrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border between December 2023 and December 2024 were reduced dramatically from 249,740 to 47,326 apprehensions. Nevertheless, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials reportedly want to build four new detention centers with 10,000 beds each, along with 14 smaller facilities that each contain around 1,000 beds each. According to the American Immigration Counsel, “That would likely mean tens of billions in taxpayer funds sent to private prison companies,” at least one of whom, CoreCivic, donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee.

Trump is also calling for 30,000 immigrants to be detained at the notorious US gulag at Guantanamo Bay, where U.S. laws and protections do not exist. This would also be another slap in the face of Cuba’s sovereignty over its own territory.

Tragically, this bogus campaign is terrifying, and profoundly disrupting the lives of millions of peaceful, extremely hard-working, tax-paying members of U.S. society. Even as the US government is complicit in the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians from Gaza, it is now “cleansing” the US of immigrants, many of whom are indigenous to North America. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, the “border deterrence” policy – now being carried out with soldiers and Marines – causes the death of more than 2,500 migrants per year, as they are intentionally forced onto the most perilous routes.

These abuses of U.S. law and human rights put US military personnel in a very difficult position. What can active-duty military and National Guard members do when they do not want to be used in an illegal and immoral campaign against their neighbors, or even their own families?

Veterans to GI’s: We Will Support You When You Refuse Illegal or Immoral Orders

Just because the president says so does not make it legal. You swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. You have the legal right and obligation to do so. Veterans For Peace supports U.S. military personnel who choose not to participate in the U.S.-Mexico border deployment, or in sending weapons to Gaza, or in other questionable military activities around the globe. We will put you in touch with trained counselors and lawyers who can advise you of your legal rights.

You can start by calling the GI Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487. You can legally contact your Congressional representatives to tell them your concerns by utilizing the Appeal for Redress. And be sure to check out the recently updated Know Your Rights guide from the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

As veterans of illegal, immoral US wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and too many other places, we understand that you are in a tough place. But you do have options – you are still the boss of your own life. When you follow your conscience and stand up for what is right, you will have the support of Veterans For Peace.

The post Veterans Oppose Mass Deportation and Domestic Military Deployments first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Veterans for Peace.

No, Harvard University did not claim Islamic act of prostration or ‘Sujood’ posture is remedy for back pain

Prantik Ali — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 11:17:01 +0000

Recently, a claim was being widely circulated on social media that Harvard University has named the ‘Sujood’ posture, which is essentially the act of prostration in Islamic prayers, as the best remedy for backaches.

Several Facebook accounts shared this claim.

Click to view slideshow.

Instagram account @taazakhabarofficial0, which describes itself as a ‘news and media website’ also posted this claim on its page. (Archived link)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Taaza Khabar (@taazakhabaroffical0)

While checking for when this information was first shared, we found that the claim was not new and had gone viral in 2023 as well.

On August 16, 2023, X user @AllahGreatQuran had shared something very similar. The post garnered over 600,000 views and was reshared close to 5,000 times. (Archived link)

Harvard University Declares Sujood Posture as the Best Medicine for Back Pain. Subhan’Allah pic.twitter.com/cLAcLI5n5e

— Allah Islam Quran (@AllahGreatQuran) August 16, 2023

Another verified X user @Al__Quraan also posted this around the same time. It has gathering over 850,000 views and reshared 5,700 times. (Archived Link)

Harvard University Declares Sujood Posture as the Best Medicine for Back Pain. pic.twitter.com/y83Wnk9Ek4

— • (@Al__Quraan) August 18, 2023

We were able to find several other X posts from 2023, which propagated the same claim. (Archives 1, 2, 3)

Click to view slideshow.

Fact Check

To find the primary source related to the claim, Alt News ran a keyword search on X. This led us to an X post from Harvard Health’s verified X account (@HarvardHealth) from 2021. (Archive)

You might be considering surgery or other intervention to treat your back pain. But less may actually be more for this common problem, and in many instances the best medicine is good old-fashioned movement and exercise: https://t.co/kS15FLlj5F #HarvardHealth pic.twitter.com/TJv0YNtavv

— Harvard Health (@HarvardHealth) June 30, 2021

The post had a link to a 2020 article published by Harvard Health, which is affiliated to Harvard Medical School. While the article talks about the importance of regular exercise to keep spinal problems at bay, nowhere does it mention the ‘Sujood’ posture. However, we noticed that the image accompanying the article is similar to the Islamic practice of prostration during daily prayers.

Thus it is likely that a section of social media users may have misattributed the representative generic image in Harvard Health’s X post as Harvard Health promoting the ‘Sujood’ posture as a remedy for back pain and later shared the claim with an image of an Muslim person. The fact is that Harvard Health’s article, which talks about strategies to combat back pain, has no reference to the Islamic act of prostration, known as the ‘Sujood’, ‘Sijda’ or ‘Sejdah’.

The post No, Harvard University did not claim Islamic act of prostration or ‘Sujood’ posture is remedy for back pain appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

CPJ, partners call on Council of Europe to act on repression in Azerbaijan

CPJ Staff — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 13:12:07 +0000

On January 21, CPJ joined nine other organizations in calling on the Council of Europe’s parliament, when it meets at the end of the month, to challenge Azerbaijan’s escalating repression, including against the media.

The Azerbaijani delegation is currently suspended from participating in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) because the country has not fulfilled “major commitments” on human rights, the Strasbourg-based human rights body has said, citing a number of examples of its “lack of cooperation.”

The joint letter calls on parliamentarians to maintain the suspension until key demands are met, including the release of imprisoned journalists. It also urges the Secretary General of the Council of Europe Alain Berset to launch an Article 52 inquiry into Azerbaijan over its persistent violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, a provision that it previously used against the country in 2015.

Read the full letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Despite Affordable Care Act Gains, Millions of Workers Still Lack Health Insurance

Newswire Editor — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 15:22:24 +0000

While the Affordable Care Act dramatically expanded the availability of health insurance coverage, a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) reveals that millions of workers between the ages of 18 and 64 – many of whom are employed full time – do not have insurance coverage, falling into gaps in the law’s reach.

The new research paper – “Chronic Condition: Working Without Health Insurance out Health Insurance” – finds that almost 16 million workers lacked health insurance for all twelve months of 2023. About 10.2 million of those uninsured workers held full-time jobs.

The paper – authored by CEPR Domestic Outreach and Research Assistant Emma Curchin and Senior Research Fellow John Schmitt – aims to evaluate the demographic characteristics of the uninsured population during the years 2018 through 2023, with specific focus on workers between the ages of 18 and 64 who were employed full time during the whole year.

Among this group, the study finds a striking disparity among racial or ethnic groups. Full time Hispanic workers were far more likely to be uninsured (21.1 percent) than Black (9.1 percent), Asian (5.1 percent) or White full time workers (5.5 percent). There is also a notable gender gap among full time workers; 6.8 percent of women are uninsured, while the rate for men was 10.4 percent.

Full time workers born outside the United States who are not US citizens are far more likely to be uninsured (28.9 percent) than workers who are citizens born in the United States (6.7 percent) and those born abroad (8.6 percent).

Similar disparities exist for educational attainment. The uninsured rate for full time workers with less than a high school degree (32.3 percent) is much higher than those with a degree (13.9 percent). Workers with some college but no degree are almost twice as likely to be uninsured (7.9 percent) than those who finish college (4.0 percent).

There were notable disparities among wage earners. Over 20 percent of full-time workers in the bottom 20 percent of earners lacked insurance; among the highest 20 percent, the uninsured rate was 1.7 percent.

The paper relies on annual Census Bureau survey data. In their methodology, workers are counted as uninsured only if they are without coverage for the entire year, so this overall represents a conservative estimate of the uninsured population.

“The Affordable Care Act has delivered insurance coverage for millions of Americans, but there are still considerable gaps in coverage – particularly for workers who find themselves too young for Medicare and who earn wages above thresholds for Medicaid coverage,” said Emma Curchin, the Domestic Outreach and Research Assistant at CEPR. “These gaps leave millions of people – many of them working full time all year – unable to secure insurance coverage. With so many unsettling questions about the future of key social safety net programs, policymakers must focus on solutions for delivering consistent insurance coverage to everyone.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Congress Needs to Pass the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act

Helen Stiver — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 22:31:34 +0000

By passing the TSRA, Congress can affirm its commitment to justice and provide tangible support to those seeking to rebuild their lives.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Helen Stiver.

US on target in Guam with first Marine redeployment and missile test

APR editor — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 10:40:21 +0000

By Mar-Vic Cagurangan in Hagatna, Guam

The United States is advancing the fortification of its territory closest to China with the arrival of the first Marines from Okinawa and its first interceptor missile test in Guam last week.

About 100 Marines from Japan landed on Saturday, the vanguard of about 5000 due to be relocated to Guam under a security treaty with the US.

The US successfully downed one of its own unarmed ballistic missiles last Tuesday in what will be a regular occurrence in the territory over the next decade.

READ MORE: Other Guam militarisation reports

The milestones come as the House of Representatives last week also passed the 2025 National Defence Authorisation Act — with more than US$2 billion in spending for Guam — that now goes to the Senate for approval.

Nicknamed the “tip of the spear” due to its proximity to China, Guam is considered a potential target in any conflict between the two nations. The island has no bomb shelters and the unprecedented military build-up continues to divide residents.

“The intensity of the build-up is overwhelming for citizens and public agencies trying to keep track and respond to military plans as they unfold,” said Robert Underwood, chairman of the Guam-based Pacific Centre for Island Security.

“A master plan is needed for understanding by all concerned. One must exist and we are not privy to it,” he told BenarNews.

Lays the groundwork
The arrival of the first troops lays the groundwork for preparing Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz to receive thousands more.

“Relocations will take place in a phased approach, and no unit headquarters will be moving during this iteration,” a US Marine Corps press release said on Saturday.

An aerial photo shows the front gate and ongoing construction progress at Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz in Guam, pictured in March this year. Image: DVIDS/BenarNews

“Forward presence and routine engagement with allies and partners are essential to the United States’ ability to deter attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion and respond to crises in the region, to include providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief when necessary,” the USMC said.

Japan will pay US$2.8 billion to fund some of the infrastructure projects on Naval Base Guam, Andersen Air Force Base and Camp Blaz.

A missile is fired from the Vertical Launching System at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, as part of a ballistic missile exercise last week. Image: DVIDS/BenarNews

The Missile Defence Agency last Tuesday tested its Aegis system, firing off an interceptor from Andersen Air Force to down an unarmed, medium-range ballistic missile more than 200 nautical miles north-east of Guam.

“The event marked a pivotal step taken in the defence of Guam and provides critical support to the overall concept for the future Guam defence system,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a press briefing last Wednesday.

The launch was the first in a series of twice-yearly missile defence tests on Guam over the next 10 years.

16 sites planned
The US Indo-Pacific Command plans to build a missile defence system with 16 sites, touted to provide 360-degree protection for Guam.

The urgency was highlighted after China conducted a rare ballistic missile test with a dummy warhead in September. Its flight path crossed near Guam, Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands before falling into the ocean in the vicinity of Kiribati.

China’s short and mid-range missiles cannot reach Guam, but its intermediate-range missiles, including DF-26, nicknamed the “Guam Express,” can. Image: BenarNews

In July, US military officials had announced that the first missile defence test was set to take place in Guam “by the end of the year,” but did not provide the exact date.

Nanette Reyes-Senior, a resident of Maina village, said she was “extremely surprised” that the MDA launched the flight test “without prior notice to the public — unless there was notice that I missed.”

Underwood has called for greater transparency about the missile defence of Guam.

“The missile testing had already been announced . . . but no specific week, let alone date was announced,” Underwood said.

With more tests to be launched in the coming years, Underwood said: “The general public should be given advanced notice and especially land owners.”

No significant impact
After public consultation earlier this year, the Missile Defence Agency decided the planned tests would not significantly impact humans or the natural environment.

President of the Pacific Association of Radiation Survivors Robert Celestial welcomed the US missile defense test.

“China had 23000 ballistic missiles, numerous ICBM missiles and 320 nuclear warheads. It is evident that we are preparing for war, so we should at least prepare to protect the civilian population from a nuclear attack,” he told BenarNews.

“Growing up in the 1960s we had duck-and-cover drills. I feel better prepared now than [to] suffer later.”

Guam is no stranger to war, being part of the Pacific campaign during World War II.

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s visit to Guam earlier this month to strengthen ties has raised residents’ fears of the territory being further targeted in escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Shelly Vargas-Calvo, a senator-elect who will assume her seat in the Guam legislature next month, said the growing tensions in the region will take Guam into the path of war.

“I applaud the successful test launch,” she said. “It is imperative to show power and capability despite having a small footprint in the region to send a message that we and our allies are not to be messed around with.”

Republished from BenarNews with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Te Tiriti: The history and implications of the Treaty Principles Bill

APR editor — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 05:37:17 +0000

By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News

Activist/educator Tina Ngata (Ngati Porou) has warned proposed changes to Aotearoa New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi principles would undermine indigenous Māori sovereignty, rights, and protections, and risk corporate exploitation and environmental harm.

Ngata is a member of Koekoeā, a tāngata whenua and tāngata tiriti rōpu which brings accessible information and workshops for select committee submissions for the Treaty Principles Bill.

“[ACT leader and Minister for Regulation] David Seymour is saying, ‘it’s just the principles, not the text, so is it really a big deal?’” Ngata said.

Advocate Tina Ngata (Ngati Porou) . . . “The principles are enshrined in the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which came about in 1975 as a result of that generation undertaking hīkoi and protests calling for our land rights and for the Crown to honour Te Tiriti.” Image: Michelle Mihi Keita Tibble

“The Crown commitments are framed within the principles so, when you affect the principles, it has the same legal effect as redefining the Treaty itself.”

Ngata said the principles were the strongest tool to ensure the Crown as a Treaty partner was including and consulting with Māori.

People can submit on the Bill here until 7 2025 and here is a video by Koekoeā showing how easy it is to make a submission.

What are the Treaty principles Seymour hopes to redefine?
“The principles are enshrined in the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which came about in 1975 as a result of that generation undertaking hīkoi and protests calling for our land rights and for the Crown to honour Te Tiriti,” Ngata said.

The Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 introduced the concept of treaty principles, which were commitments for the Crown to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The act established the Waitangi Tribunal.

The principles were often referred to as the “three P’s” — partnership, participation and protection — but there were others such as tino rangatiratanga, ōritetanga as duty to act reasonably.

Over time the principles became more and more defined, particularly in 1987 in a court case where the Māori Council took the Crown to court for trying to sell Aotearoa’s natural assets and privatise them, which was where the principle of consultation came about.

There are no two versions of the Treaty
Ngata said the principles were put into the act to resolve the conflict between what were believed to be two versions that were equally valid but conflicted — often known as the English version, which only 39 Māori signed, and the Māori version, which between 530 and 540 signed.

She said the idea of two versions had a flawed premise.

The Treaty of Waitangi drafted by Captain William Hobson was supposedly translated into Te Tiriti o Waitangi but Ngata said it didn’t qualify as a translation as the two were radically different.

“Even our Māori activists in 1975 were calling the English text the ‘Treaty of fraud’. They were very clear that there was only one valid treaty,” Ngata said.

By valid she means valid by definition where a treaty is an agreement signed between two sovereign nations, and she said the only definition that applied to was Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Incremental journey towards treaty justice
Ngata said the principles themselves did not represent Treaty justice but were reflective of the time.

In 1989 Ngāti Whātua leader and respected scholar Sir Hugh Kawharu translated the te reo Māori document into English. She said even that translation was caught up in the time because it said Te Tiriti gave permission for the Crown to form a government. But more recent research had found Te Tiriti allowed for a limited level of governance and not a government.

Ngata described the principles as the strongest tool to ensure the Crown as Treaty partner was upholding its commitments but, even with those principles, there were consistent breaches.

“Even though [the principles] are not truly justice, Māori have taken them and used them to protect ourselves, protect our families, protect our mokopuna rights,” Ngata said.

“Often many times to protect Aotearoa’s natural resources from corporate exploitation.”

She said that point was important to remember, that the principles had been a road block. Arguably, the drive to replace those principles was to make it easier for corporate exploitation.

Overall, the Treaty Principles Bill was taking New Zealand back before 1975 and in reverse from that journey towards treaty justice, Ngata said

The principles in the new bill
The Treaty Principles Bill dumps the old principles and introduces three new ones. The proposed principles are below, and Ngata explained the problems in each principle.

Civil government — the government of New Zealand has full power to govern, and Parliament has full power to make laws. They do so in the best interests of everyone, and in accordance with the rule of law and the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
Rights of hapū and iwi Māori — the Crown recognises the rights that hapū and iwi had when they signed the Treaty/te Tiriti. The Crown will respect and protect those rights. Those rights differ from the rights everyone has a reasonable expectation to enjoy only when they are specified in Treaty settlements.
Right to equality — everyone is equal before the law and is entitled to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination. Everyone is entitled to the equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights without discrimination.

Māori never ceded sovereignty
In 2014, the Waitangi Tribunal found Māori never ceded sovereignty.

Thus the first principle, “the government has full power to govern and Parliament has full power to make laws” negated Māori sovereignty, Ngata said.

In article one, Te Tiriti o Waitangi gave a limited level of governance for the Queen to make laws through a governor but it was not a cessation of sovereignty.

She argued that article three said Māori had the same rights and privileges as those who were British subjects of the Queen.

“If article 1 was a cessation of sovereignty to the Queen over Māori, then why would we need to explicitly say that we then get the same rights and privileges as those who are subjects of the Queen? That would have been inherent within that article.”

Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination
She said this principle was also not in alignment with how the international community understood human rights.

“The second principle the bill is suggesting is that the Crown will recognise the rights of hapū and iwi but only in so far as they are the same rights as everybody else, unless they are rights that have been enshrined within a settlement act,” Ngata said.

But Ngata said Māori rights did not stem from the Treaty of Waitangi Act, and Māori rights did not stem from Te Tiriti. Instead they were inherent.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognised the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination.

UNDRIP included rights for Indigenous people to freely determine their political status, maintain distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, and participate in decision-making processes that affected them.

“It’s preposterous to say that our rights can only come into effect if they’ve been subject to a Treaty settlement.”

‘Colonial governments will only deliver unequal treatment’
The third article states everyone is equal under law and ACT leader and bill designer David Seymour has proudly advocated “one law for all” but Ngata said this wsn’t equality – it was assimilation.

Earlier in the year, Ngata told Te Ao Māori News the government was implementing assimilation policies, which Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”, included as part of the broader spectrum of genocide.

One of the examples of assimilation policy was the disestablishment of Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori Health Authority, which was created to ensure better health outcomes for Māori and provide te ao Māori approaches, meaning cultural differences rather than simply based on race.

She said the Crown had a long-standing history of treating Māori unequally: “Colonial governments will only deliver unequal treatment.”

“If you were treating the Treaty with Maori equally, you would not be undertaking this process in the first place.”

The impacts the bill would have
Ngata said Māori would be impacted in a “whole ecosystem impact of te ao Māori — across housing, whenua, natural resources, waterways, transport and health”.

She said the bill would impact other marginalised groups and the environment and, therefore, everybody.

She said the bill was being pushed to remove the roadblock to protect the natural environment from corporate exploitation.

It was clear the bill was being driven by multinational corporate interests in accessing natural resources and thus once enacted, there would be environmental degradation.

Ngata said the language and rhetoric David Seymour was using on the topic was reminiscent of and in some cases a direct import of the same rhetoric used to negate treaty rights in Canada and the US.

She cited New Zealand having one of the world’s largest exclusive economic zones (EEZ) (the maritime area a nation has exclusive rights to explore, use and manage natural resources). That zone would be of interest to corporates and, in the past, the Treaty principles had blocked corporations from extracting natural resources.

Ngata said there were international dimensions, and there were parallels with other colonial governments, such as France in Kanaky and Indonesia in West Papua, who “ran roughshod” over Indigenous rights to extract natural resources for profit.

Republished with permission from Te Ao Māori News.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Monarchs Proposed for Endangered Species Act Protection

Newswire Editor — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 19:27:57 +0000

In response to a decade of advocacy by conservation groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed to protect monarch butterflies as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The once-common orange-and-black butterflies have declined by 90% in recent decades, with the latest count showing the second smallest population on record.

If today’s proposal is finalized, monarchs will gain not only protection from harm but also a comprehensive recovery plan and ongoing funding to restore their habitat.

“The fact that a butterfly as widespread and beloved as the monarch is now the face of the extinction crisis is a tri-national distress signal warning us to take better care of the environment that we all share,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “What’s bad for monarchs is bad for humans, so we have to stop pretending that our health is somehow separate from that of the wildlife our activities are decimating.”

Following the lowest count ever in 2014, the Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and renowned Monarch biologist Lincoln Brower petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeking protection for the butterflies and their habitat under the Endangered Species Act. Monarchs were placed on the candidate waiting list for protection in 2020.

Today’s announcement is a result of a lawsuit filed by the Centers to get a date by which the Service would make a decision on whether to provide protections.

“Today’s monarch listing decision is a landmark victory 10 years in the making. It is also a damning precedent, revealing the driving role of pesticides and industrial agriculture in the ongoing extinction crisis,” said George Kimbrell, legal director at the Center for Food Safety. “But the job isn’t done: Monarchs still face an onslaught of pesticides. The Service must do what science and the law require and promptly finalize protection for monarchs.”

In one of the longest migrations of any insect, at the end of summer eastern monarchs fly from the northern United States and southern Canada to overwinter together in high-elevation fir forests in Mexico. The population size is determined by measuring the area of trees turned vivid orange by the clusters of butterflies.

Scientists estimate that 15 acres of occupied forest is the minimum threshold for the migrating pollinators to be above extinction risk in North America. In winter 2023 there were only 2.2 acres of monarchs, and the 2024 count is also predicted to be bleak because of poor summer weather conditions for breeding and abnormally warm September temperatures that delayed the start of migration.

Migratory monarchs face tremendous threats. Their initial decline was driven by widespread loss of milkweed, the caterpillar’s sole food source, due to increased herbicide use on genetically engineered corn and soybean crops — most notably, Monsanto’s Roundup. All stages of monarchs are harmed by neonicotinoid insecticides used in crop seed coatings and on ornamental plants.

Grasslands and other green spaces that provide wildflowers for nectar-seeking adult monarchs continue to be lost to sprawl development. Millions of monarchs are killed by vehicles annually as they migrate across the continent. In their winter habitat in Mexico, forests and streams are being lost at record rates to grow avocados for unsustainable avocado demand in the United States.

The much smaller western migratory population is down more than 95% since the 1980s. Most monarch butterflies west of the Rocky Mountains overwinter on the central coast of California. In spring and summer, successive generations of eastern and western monarchs spread across the continent in search of milkweed. When days grow shorter the last summer generations roost together in trees as they make their way towards their winter forests.

Non-migratory populations of monarchs live year-round in southern U.S. states. These butterflies have smaller wings and are harmed by parasites that build up on non-native tropical milkweed plants that don’t die back in winter.

In Canada monarchs were listed as endangered under the Species At Risk Act in 2023. In Mexico they are considered a species of special concern. The International Union for Conservation of Nature ranks them as vulnerable, a category denoting threatened status.

The Endangered Species Act is a powerful tool to prevent extinction and help vulnerable species recover. It’s 99% effective at preventing species under its protection from going extinct.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

CPJ, partners call on European Commission to act on Turkey’s foreign influence agent bill

CPJ Staff — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:02:17 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists on Tuesday joined 55 partner organizations in a joint letter to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, to ask her to act on Turkey’s temporarily shelved foreign “influence agent bill,” which introduces a vaguely defined new offense called “committing a crime against the security or political interests of the state” under the direction of a foreign group or state.

The signatories voiced their concerns about how the proposed law could be used to silence government critics if passed by the parliament, along with its predictable effects on rights and freedoms in Turkey. They asked the European Commission to “publicly call on Turkey to fully withdraw the bill,” “prioritize freedom of expression in EU-Turkey relations,” and “raise this matter at high-level dialogues with Turkey,” while supporting the civil society.

Read the full letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Why Does Trump Want To Kill the PRESS Act?

The Intercept — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 17:25:31 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.

Wisconsin Republicans are Out of Step With the Times on Act 10

Ruth Conniff — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 22:37:33 +0000

A new court ruling rebukes former Governor Scott Walker’s 2011 union busting law.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Ruth Conniff.

Northern Marianas leaders meet Taiwan President Lai Ching-te in Guam

APR editor — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 02:06:32 +0000

By Mark Rabago, RNZ Pacific Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas correspondent

Northern Marianas Governor Arnold Palacios and Senator Celina Babauta have travelled to Guam to attend a luncheon with Taiwan President Lai Ching-te.

Taiwan is officially known as the Republic of China (Taiwan). China claims Taiwan as its own territory, with no right to state-to-state ties, a position Taiwan strongly disputes.

Palacios welcomed the opportunity to meet Lai and said this could pave the way for improved relations with the East Asian country.

READ MORE: Other Taiwan and the Pacific reports

“This meeting is an opportunity for the CNMI to foster relations with allies in the region.”

When asked if meeting the President would upset the People’s Republic of China, which considers Taiwan a rogue state and part of its territory, Palacios said: “As far as being in the crosshairs of China, we already are in many ways.”

Worldwide, a dozen countries maintain formal diplomatic ties with Taipei.

In January, Nauru cut ties with Taiwan and shifted its diplomatic allegiance to Beijing.

Reconnecting bonds
Babauta, meanwhile, said she was deeply humbled and honoured to be invited to have lunch with Lai and Chia-Ching Hsu, Lai’s Minister of the Overseas Community Affairs Council.

“I am looking forward to connecting and discussing opportunities to strengthen the bond between our two regions and explore how we can create new avenues for our mutual benefit and prosperity, particularly by leveraging our Jones Act waiver,” she said.

“We must turn our economy around. This is an opportunity I could not pass up on.”

Babauta said she asked Lai if she could also make a stopover to the CNMI, but his busy schedule precluded that.

“I am assured that he will plan a visit to the CNMI in the near future.”

The luncheon, which is part of Taiwan’s “Smart and Sustainable Development for a Prosperous Austronesian Region” program, will be held at the Grand Ballroom, Hyatt Regency Guam at noon Thursday and is expected to also have Guam Governor Lou Leon Guerrero and other island leaders.

Lai has previously visited Hawai’i as part of his US tour, one that has elicited the ire of the government of the People’s Republic of China.

Summit ends dramatically
Earlier this year, the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ summit ended dramatically when China demanded the conference communiqué be changed to eliminate a reference to Taiwan.

The document had made a reference to the Forum reaffirming its relations to Taiwan, which has been a development partner since 1992.

But the Chinese Ambassador to the Pacific Qian Bo was furious and the document was rewritten.

Reports say China’s Foreign Ministry has “strongly condemned” US support for Lai’s visit to the US, and had lodged a complaint with the United States.

It earlier also denounced a newly announced US weapons sale to Taiwan.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

#20. Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) Poses Serious First Amendment Concerns

Kate Horgan — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 17:25:44 +0000

Growing concerns about social media use allegedly causing mental health problems in young people have spurred a bipartisan push in Congress for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), an ill-considered piece of internet censorship legislation. First introduced in the US Senate in 2022, KOSA (S. 1409) has gone through multiple…

The post #20. Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) Poses Serious First Amendment Concerns appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Climate protests to continue despite 170 charged in Newcastle ‘protestival’

Wendy Bacon — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 08:49:07 +0000

Despite Australia’s draconian anti-protest laws, the world’s biggest coal port was closed for four hours at the weekend with 170 protesters being charged — but climate demonstrations will continue. Twenty further arrests were made at a protest at the Federal Parliament yesterday.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Wendy Bacon

Newcastle port, the world’s biggest coal port, was closed for four hours on Sunday when hundreds of Rising Tide protesters in kayaks refused to leave its shipping channel.

Over two days of protest at the Australian port, 170 protesters have been charged. Some others who entered the channel were arrested but released without charge. Hundreds more took to the water in support.

Thousands on the beach chanted, danced and created a huge human sign demanding “no new coal and gas” projects.

Rising Tide is campaigning for a 78 percent tax on fossil fuel profits to be used for a “just transition” for workers and communities, including in the Hunter Valley, where the Albanese government has approved three massive new coal mine extensions since 2022.

Protest size triples to 7000
The NSW Labor government made two court attempts to block the protest from going ahead. But the 10-day Rising Tide protest tripled in size from 2023 with 7000 people participating so far and more people arrested in civil disobedience actions than last year.

The “protestival” continued in Newcastle on Monday, and a new wave started in Canberra at the Australian Parliament yesterday with more than 20 arrests. Rising Tide staged an overnight occupation of the lawn outside Parliament House and a demonstration at which they demanded to meet with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

News of the “protestival” has spread around the world, with campaigners in Rotterdam in The Netherlands blocking a coal train in solidarity with this year’s Rising Tide protest.

Of those arrested, 138 have been charged under S214A of the NSW Crimes Act for disrupting a major facility, which carries up to two years in prison and $22,000 maximum fines. This section is part of the NSW government regime of “anti-protest” laws designed to deter movements such as Rising Tide.

The rest of the protesters have been charged under the Marine Safety Act which police used against 109 protesters arrested last year.

Even if found guilty, these people are likely to only receive minor penalties.Those arrested in 2023 mostly received small fines, good behaviour bonds and had no conviction recorded.

On Sunday I was arrested for blockading the world’s largest coal port, and now I am here in Canberra, to voice the anger of my generation.

I wrote to @AlboMP weeks ago inviting him to stand here today, on these lawns, and explain himself to the young people of Australia. pic.twitter.com/QgxjTApS92

— RisingTideAustralia (@RisingTideAus) November 27, 2024

Executive gives the bird to judiciary
The use of the Crimes Act will focus more attention on the anti-protest laws which the NSW government has been extending and strengthening in recent weeks. The NSW Supreme Court has already found the laws to be partly unconstitutional but despite huge opposition from civil society and human rights organisations, the NSW government has not reformed them.

Two protesters were targeted for special treatment: Naomi Hodgson, a key Rising Tide organiser, and Andrew George, who has previous protest convictions.

George was led into court in handcuffs on Monday morning but was released on bail on condition that he not return to the port area. Hodgson also has a record of peaceful protest. She is one of the Rising Tide leaders who have always stressed the importance of safe and peaceful action.

The police prosecutor argued that she should remain in custody. The magistrate released her with the extraordinary requirement that she report to police daily and not go nearer than 2 km from the port.

Planning for this year’s protest has been underway for 12 months, with groups forming in Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra Sydney and the Northern Rivers, as well as Newcastle. There was an intensive programme of meetings and briefings of potential participants on the motivation for protesting, principles of civil disobedience and the experience of being arrested.

Those who attended last year recruited a whole new cohort of protesters.

Last year, the NSW police authorised a protest involved a 48-hour blockade which protesters extended by two hours. Earlier this year, a similar application was made by Rising Tide.

The first indication that the police would refuse to authorise a protest came earlier this month when the NSW police successfully applied to the NSW Supreme Court for the protest to be declared “an unauthorised protest.”

But Justice Desmond Fagan also made it clear that Rising Tide had a “responsible approach to on-water safety” and that he was not giving a direction that the protest should be terminated. Newcastle Council agreed that Rising Tide could camp at Horseshoe Bay.

People got the power! Eye witnesses say 24 protestors were arrested for protesting at parliament today, demanding the Albanese Government stop new coal. pic.twitter.com/ueNjHogzWZ

— RisingTideAustralia (@RisingTideAus) November 27, 2024

Minns’ bid to crush protest
The Minns government showed that its goal was to crush the protest altogether when the Minister for Transport Jo Haylen declared a blanket 97-hour exclusion zone making it unlawful to enter the Hunter River mouth and beaches under the Marine Safety Act last week.

On Friday, Rising Tide organiser and 2020 Newcastle Young Citizen of the year, Alexa Stuart took successful action in the Supreme Court to have the exclusion zone declared an invalid use of power.

An hour before the exclusion zone was due to come into effect at 5 pm, the Rising Tide flotilla had been launched off Horseshoe Bay. At 4 pm, Supreme Court Justice Sarah McNaughton quashed the exclusion zone notice, declaring that it was an invalid use of power under the Marine Safety Act because the object of the Act is to facilitate events, not to stop them from happening altogether.

When news of the judge’s decision reached the beach, a big cheer erupted. The drama-packed weekend was off to a good start.

Friday morning began with a First Nations welcome and speeches and a SchoolStrike4Climate protest. Kayakers held their position on the harbour with an overnight vigil on Friday night.

On Saturday, Midnight Oil front singer Peter Garrett, who served as Environment Minister in a previous Labor government, performed in support of Rising Tide protest. He expressed his concern about government overreach in policing protests, especially in the light of all the evidence of the impacts of climate change.

Ships continued to go through the channel, protected by the NSW police. When kayakers entered the channel while it was empty, nine were arrested.

84-year-old great-gran arrested, not charged
By late Saturday, three had been charged, and the other six were towed back to the beach. This included June Norman, an 84-year-old great-grandmother from Queensland, who entered the shipping channel at least six times over the weekend in peaceful acts of civil disobedience.

The 84-year-old protester Jane Norman . . . entered the shipping channel at least six times over the weekend in peaceful acts of civil disobedience. Image: Wendy Bacon/MWM

She told MWM that she felt a duty to act to protect her own grandchildren and all other children due to a failure by the Albanese and other governments to take action on climate change. The police repeatedly declined to charge her.

On Sunday morning a decision was made for kayakers “to take the channel”. At about 10.15, a coal boat, turned away before entering the port.

Port closed, job done
Although the period of stoppage was shorter than last year, civil disobedience had now achieved what the authorised protest achieved last year. The port was officially closed and remained so for four hours.

By now, 60 people had been charged and far more police resources expended than in 2023, including hours of police helicopters and drones.

On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of kayakers again occupied the channel. A ship was due. Now in a massive display of force involving scores of police in black rubber zodiacs, police on jet skis, and a huge police launch, kayakers were either arrested or herded back from the channel.

When the channel was clear, a huge ship then came through the channel, signalling the reopening of the port.

On Monday night, ABC National News reported that protesters were within metres of the ship. MWM closely observed the events. When the ship began to move towards the harbour, all kayaks were inside the buoys marking the channel. Police occupied the area between the protesters and the ship. No kayaker moved forward.

A powerful visual message had been sent that the forces of the NSW state would be used to defend the interests of the big coal companies such as Whitehaven and Glencore rather than the NSW public.

By now police on horses were on the beach and watched as small squads of police marched through the crowd grabbing paddles. A little later this reporter was carrying a paddle through a car park well off the beach when a constable roughly seized it without warning from my hand.

When asked, Constable Pacey explained that I had breached the peace by being on water. I had not entered the water over the weekend.

Kids arrested too, in mass civil disobedience
Those charged included 14 people under 18. After being released, they marched chanting back into the camp. A 16-year-old Newcastle student, Niamh Cush, told a crowd of fellow protesters before her arrest that as a young person, she would rather not be arrested but that the betrayal of the Albanese government left her with no choice.

“I’m here to voice the anger of my generation. The Albanese government claims they’re taking climate change seriously but they are completely and utterly failing us by approving polluting new coal and gas mines. See you out on the water today to block the coal ships!”

Each of those who chose to get arrested has their own story. They include environmental scientists, engineers, TAFE teachers, students, nurses and doctors, hospitality and retail workers, designers and media workers, activists who have retired, unionists, a mediator and a coal miner.

They came from across Australia — more than 200 came from Adelaide alone — and from many different backgrounds.

Behind those arrested stand volunteer groups of legal observers, arrestee support, lawyers, community care workers and a media team. Beside them stand hundreds of other volunteers who have cleaned portaloos, prepared three meals a day, washed dishes, welcomed and registered participants, organised camping spots and acted as marshals at pedestrian crossings.

Each and every one of them is playing an essential role in this campaign of mass civil disobedience.

Many participants said this huge collaborative effort is what inspired them and gave them hope, as much as did the protest itself.

Threat to democracy
Today, the president of NSW Civil Liberties, Tim Roberts, said, “Paddling a kayak in the Port of Newcastle is not an offence, people do it every day safely without hundreds of police officers.

“A decision was made to protect the safe passage of the vessels over the protection of people exercising their democratic rights to protest.

“We are living in extraordinary times. Our democracy will not irrevocably be damaged in one fell swoop — it will be a slow bleed, a death by a thousand tranches of repressive legislation, and by thousands of arrests of people standing up in defence of their civil liberties.”

Australian Institute research shows that most Australians agree with the Council for Civil Liberties — with 71 percent polled, including a majority of all parties, believing that the right to protest should be enshrined in Federal legislation. It also included a majority across all ages and political parties.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is a fear of accelerating mass civil disobedience in the face of a climate crisis that frightens both the Federal and State governments and the police.

As temperatures rise
Many of those protesting have already been directly affected by climbing temperatures in sweltering suburbs, raging bushfires and intense smoke, roaring floods and a loss of housing that has not been replaced, devastated forests, polluting coal mines and gas fields or rising seas in the Torres Strait in Northern Australia and Pacific Island countries.

Others have become profoundly concerned as they come to grips with climate science predictions and public health warnings.

In these circumstances, and as long as governments continue to enable the fossil fuel industry by approving more coal and gas projects that will add to the climate crisis, the number of people who decide they are morally obliged to take civil disobedience action will grow.

Rather than being impressed by politicians who cast them as disrupters, they will heed the call of Pacific leaders who this week declared the COP29 talks to be a “catastrophic failure” exposing their people to “escalating risks”.

Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was the professor of journalism at University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a Rising Tide supporter, and is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wendy Bacon.

House Passes "Nonprofit Killer" Bill, Most Dangerous Domestic Anti-Terrorism Bill Since PATRIOT Act

Democracy Now! — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:30:46 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

House Approves “Nonprofit Killer” Bill, Most Dangerous Domestic Anti-Terrorism Bill Since PATRIOT Act

Democracy Now! — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 13:42:56 +0000

The House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday that would empower the Treasury Department to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit it deems has provided material support to a terrorist organization. A broad coalition of civil society groups have opposed the bill, warning that it would give the Trump administration sweeping powers to crack down on political opponents. H.R. 9495, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, passed the House 219 to 184 largely along party lines, with 15 Democrats supporting the Republican majority. “This bill is essentially a civil rights disaster,” says Darryl Li, an anthropologist, lawyer and legal scholar teaching at the University of Chicago. Li, who recently wrote a briefing paper on the anti-Palestinian origins of U.S. terrorism law, says “anti-Palestinian racism is one of the great bipartisan unifiers in Congress.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

EU must decisively act to halt Israel’s silencing of journalists

CPJ Staff — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 07:00:00 +0000

New York, November 13, 2024—Ahead of their November 18 meeting, CPJ calls on European Union foreign ministers to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement in light of Israel’s unprecedented attack on press freedom and ongoing abuses of international law.

The EU-Israel Association Agreement sets out the EU’s legal and institutional framework for political dialogue and economic cooperation with Israel, which includes respect for human rights as an essential element. However, EU member states have failed to agree on whether it should be suspended despite clear evidence of significant human rights violations.

The European Union remains divided on openly and categorically condemning Israel for crimes under international law and has not taken effective action that would meaningfully contribute to stopping the press freedom crisis.

CPJ and 59 partners wrote to EU High Representative Josep Borrell and European Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis on August 26, calling for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

In a written response, the European External Action Service told CPJ it “keeps under constant review all agreements with third countries, and the principles and values upon which they are based.” It highlighted the need for “frank and open dialogue…[which] provides important mechanisms to discuss issues and advance our point of view.”

At least 137 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began, at least five of them deliberately targeted. Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained Palestinian journalists in both Gaza and the West Bank, fired on media offices in Gaza, and banned some foreign media outlets, including Al Jazeera, from broadcasting.

There are now almost no professional journalists left in northern Gaza to document what several international institutions have described as an ethnic cleansing campaign. The Israeli army has also prevented foreign media from entering Gaza except on tightly controlled press trips.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

NZ abuse in care apology called PR stunt,’tokenistic’ by some survivors

APR editor — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 06:18:53 +0000

By Lillian Hanly, RNZ News political reporter

Survivors of abuse in care arrived at Parliament today to hear the formal apology from the state which oversaw and inflicted harm on children.

Public sector leaders from Oranga Tamariki, the Ministry of Health, New Zealand Police, and Ministry of Education also apologised, as did the public service commissioner and the solicitor-general, at an event preceding Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s national apology in the House.

By the afternoon, many survivors were still trying to absorb what had been said and what it meant, with some saying it was a “PR stunt,” some calling the speeches “hollow” and others not willing to believe the words until they saw action.

Abuse in state care — survivor reactions. Video: RNZ

During his apology, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said many survivors did not want to engage with the current compensation process — but more than 3500 were — and he signalled there would be an extra $32 million funnelled into that system “while we work on the new redress system”.

Opposition leader Chris Hipkins said he formally joined with the government in its apology, saying the day was a significant step forward.

“Today is a hugely important day for all of you, to finally hear what the Crown has failed to give you for all of these years, an apology.”

Ken Clearwater, a long-time advocate for survivors, was at the event, saying he heard some great words but it was about “what action needs to go with it”.

“Everyone’s saying the right things, but if you look at the policies and stuff we have at the moment, that’s not helping our children.”

He believed National, leader of the coalition government, was going to have to change a lot of their policies.

“So we’re apologising for what happened in the past, but the policies are still in place that are making it no different than when we were in the past.

‘Hollow words .. . dangerous’
“To have hollow words at this stage would be, would be pretty dangerous.”

Signs from protesters sit outside Parliament during the apology for abuse in state care today. Image: VNP/ Louis Collins/RNZ

He said there had to be a belief the government would look into things, “but there’s got to be a survivor voice”.

He mentioned Tu Chapman, a survivor who spoke at the event, who pointed out only having five minutes to speak as a survivor at an apology for survivors.

“So once again, the survivor voice is not forefront, and I think that that’s what they’re going to have to look at, is how they get more more of the survivor voice in whatever policies they look at.”

Another survivor, Reihana Tahau, who had been in state care in the 1980s, agreed, saying he found it ironic there was an apology on one hand while the government goes through the process of appealing Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act.

For him, he said, “that’s the opposite, that’s counterintuitive” because 7AA was helping to stop bringing children into care.

“I can’t understand why they would appeal something that is actually working.

‘Mistrust, systematic trauma’
“And for me, my mistrust and systematic trauma, I can’t help but feeling that they’re not genuine in that, because if they were genuine, they wouldn’t be taking a thing which would potentially set up another generation for trauma.”

He acknowledged the apology was a step in the right direction, but “it still feels like a PR thing”.

“I do find it hard to trust people that read off a paper, because I talk from my heart.”

He said the speech from the prime minister was “part of his job” and he did not know how “authentic that is”.

Reihana Tahau questioned how genuine Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s apology was. Image: RNZ

Another survivor, Nicky, also said it was a “PR stunt”, and would not provide closure.

“This is a PR stunt for the prime minister to look good.”

Ardern thanked
She acknowledged Dame Jacinda Ardern for initiating the apology.

“We’d like to thank her for starting it, but they’ve sat on things, you know, for a quarter of a century we’ve been battling.

“We’re old, we’re broken but we’re still fighting.”

She called specifically for Salvation Army orphanages to be investigated and for their charitable status to be investigated.

“The government paid them to abuse me. We want that money.

“Where did that money go? It didn’t go in our care, it didn’t go in our food, and they worked us like child labour, just like Gloriavale [a small and isolated Christian community located on the West Coast of the South Island].”

Survivors in the room muttered or called out during the speeches, reacting — but saved their strongest reaction for Solicitor-General Una Jagose.

Boos, cries of ‘shame’
As she rose to speak, she was met with boos, and cries of “shame” and “disgrace”. One woman stood and turned her back. Another shouted: “You wanted us dead.”

Another survivor, who listened quietly and intently throughout the proceedings with tears streaming at times, said he wanted to hear what the public sector leaders had to say.

He said what Jagose said needed to be said.

“I’m disappointed, because I’m a lawyer, I’m disappointed that she was howled down and I couldn’t hear all that she said.”

He said he thought Jagose would be used by the government as a scapegoat.

“Us lawyers have to speak for the people we represent, whether they’re good or bad.

“And we shouldn’t be hung drawn and quartered because we’ve been instructed to say something or do something or fight something.”

Clearwater said he could not believe she was there.

‘Nobody wanted her there’
“By the noise there, nobody wanted her there, and so that was a bad choice on the government’s part.”

Tu Chapman spoke on behalf of survivors at the event, and did not think the chief executives should have been at the event apologising.

“It’s like putting the cart before the horse so to speak.”

Chapman was angry the prime minister left before hearing some speeches, saying it was “tokenistic”.

“I think he should have been there to listen to us, so that he could actually, authentically and genuinely apologise to us in the House this afternoon or early this morning.

“And it might have been a little bit more meaningful, because quite right now, it just feels tokenistic.”

Another survivor said the speeches today were “very empty, hollow”.

‘Carbon copy’ speech
He said the prime minister’s speech seemed to be a “carbon copy” of when he had been there for the tabling of the report.

In regards to the solicitor-general, he acknowledged “she was able to take what was getting handed to her and listen to it”.

“She actually took it on and then spoke when she could.”

He said the others seemed to want to get over with the speech fast, “that’s not how you do apologies”.

“You take what’s coming, surely they knew there was going to be some heckling going on.”

His message to the prime minister was not to wait, “take action now”.

Survivors representing mothers and adopted children said they felt they had been missed out of the equation.

More about abuse victims
One acknowledged today was more about abuse victims, but there could be a separate apology for mothers and their children that were “taken from them unlawfully and unwilling”.

“We would like the history of losing our children told in this country.

“I’ve flown from Australia for this and for the few words that were said, I really thought it was pretty poor.”

They want a full inquiry into what happened and an apology.

Another said in regards to the apologies, there were “some people who probably needed a brandy after getting up and speaking and apologising for the departments they worked for”.

“There was one in particular who shouldn’t have been there at all, who shouldn’t represent anybody, let alone the Crown.”

Healing process
Piiata Tiakitai Turi-Heenan said today was needed as part of the healing process for survivors, “this is a start”.

She also did not think the speeches were authentic.

“The words that were authentic came from the survivors themselves.”

She said if the government was looking for answers, they will come from “sitting down with the survivors and sorting everything out with them, rather than around a table with people who have had no experience of surviving”.

On the disruption of the speeches, she said “those were emotions”.

“The focus was on silencing those emotions, but that’s exactly why we are where we are today, because they were silenced in the first place.

“You have permission to not be silent anymore.”

Heart ‘on sleeve’
Another survivor said his heart was “on his sleeve at the moment”.

He had been speaking to various MPs after the event who assured him there was support across the House to make changes.

“I believe they’re sincere, but I’m still, I’m still thinking that I might get let down, but I’m hoping I’m wrong. I’m hoping that it does go ahead.

“Where to for me from here is that I’m gonna keep on doing what I do, until further notice, until I know for a fact, well, this is real.”

Chapman added the journey was only just beginning again for the survivor community.

“Another mechanism for us now is to actually encourage our survivor community to be more intentional about their engagement with the Crown, with ministers, and hold them to account.”

The new redress scheme
The minister in charge of the government response, Erica Stanford, told RNZ Checkpoint the current redress system was not perfect but the announced $32 million of funding to increase capacity and get through claims faster would help.

While some survivors queried why redress could not be addressed sooner, Stanford said nobody expected the government would be able to “turn on a dime” and deliver something straight away.

“We will have something up and running next year,” Stanford said, but she could not commit to an exact date.

Outbursts from survivors during the apology had been expected, Stanford said, due to the amount of “raw emotion” in the room.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Time to act: UNEP paints bleak climate picture without rapid emissions cut

Newswire Editor — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 19:05:02 +0000

The latest UNEP Emissions Gap Report has warned that if countries do not commit to rapid action to cut rising climate pollution emissions, the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C will be gone within a few years.

Tracy Carty, Climate Politics Expert at Greenpeace International, said:

“For 15 years, the UNEP has been sounding the alarm on the great chasm between political will for climate action and the worsening emissions trajectory fuelling rising temperatures. These reports are an historical litany of negligence from the world’s leaders to tackle the climate crisis with the urgency it demands, but it’s not too late to take corrective action.”

“The UNEP has repeatedly warned current policies will lead to global heating far exceeding the goals of the Paris Agreement, to the detriment of nature and communities globally. Are our political leaders reading these reports? On the evidence of their current plans and policies, most seem oblivious to the urgency.

“We challenge leaders to embark on wholesale change in their 2035 climate plans, to come to COP29 prepared to finance climate action and to make up for lost time. The COP28 decision to transition away from fossil fuels must now lead to plans for ending coal, oil and gas and to cut emissions to put the world back on the trajectory we need. Climate crunch has arrived and the 1.5°C goal is currently on life support.”

The Emissions Gap Report 2024 found that it remains technically possible to get on a 1.5°C pathway, with solar, wind and forests “holding real promise for sweeping and fast emissions cuts”, alongside energy demand reductions. However, a failure to increase ambition in countries’ 2035 climate action plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), would put the world at risk for a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1°C by the end of this century.

The UNEP also called on countries to explain how their 2035 NDCs contribute to tripling renewable capacity deployment and doubling annual energy efficiency rates by 2030, agreed at COP28 last year, and to transitioning away from fossil fuels.

An Lambrechts, Biodiversity Politics Expert at Greenpeace International in Cali for COP16, said:

“What is needed is well beyond reduced deforestation, reforestation and so-called sustainable forest management. What science says is that protecting high-integrity carbon-rich ecosystems like primary forests offers the highest mitigation value in the land sector. Maintaining ecosystem integrity is equally important for climate adaptation. Governments should urgently start implementing the goal that was agreed at COP28 last year: halt deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.

“At COP16, governments must push a clear call for protecting ecosystem integrity and agree on a mandate for joint work between the UN conventions on climate and biodiversity. That way, governments at COP29 in Baku can respond and set the scene for real progress in time for the ‘climate and nature COP’ in Brazil at COP30. Coordinated, immediate action on both fronts is required to solve the twin biodiversity-climate crisis.

“Not all forests store carbon the same way. Science indicates primary forests store exponentially more carbon. Protecting these high-integrity ecosystems should be the priority.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

4 Nigerian journalists face fresh charges over report tying bank CEO to fraud claims

CPJ Staff — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 15:11:17 +0000

Abuja, October 16, 2024–The Committee to Protect Journalists strongly condemns the continued detention of journalists Olurotimi Olawale, Precious Eze Chukwunonso, Roland Olonishuwa, and Seun Odunlami, whose criminal charges were amended by prosecutors on October 14.

“Nigerian authorities should release journalists Olurotimi Olawale, Precious Eze Chukwunonso, Roland Olonishuwa, and Seun Odunlami, and end the deepening criminalization of the press,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa Program, from New York. “Nigerian authorities’ additional charges against these four journalists emphasizes their commitment to sending a chilling message to journalists across the country.”

Olawale, an editor of the privately owned National Monitor newspaper; Chukwunonso, publisher of the privately owned News Platform website; Olonishuwa, a reporter with the privately owned Herald newspaper; and Odunlami, publisher of privately owned Newsjaunts website; were newly charged with making “false and misleading allegations” on social media with intent to “extort” and “threaten” the management of Guaranty Trust Bank, as well as causing “harm” to the bank’s reputation, according the October 14 charge sheet. The alleged crimes fall under sections 24(2)(c) and 27(1)(a) and (b) of Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act and sections 408, 422, and 507 of Nigeria’s criminal code.

If found guilty under the criminal code, the journalists could face up to 14 years in prison for violating section 408, seven years for violating section 422, and three months for section 507. Under the Cybercrimes Act, the journalists could face five years in prison with a fine of 15 million naira (US$9,175) for violating section 24 and seven years in prison for violating section 27.

The journalists have been jailed since late September over reporting that implicated Segun Agbaje, chief executive officer of GTBank, in alleged fraud worth 1 trillion naira (US$600 million). The journalists were charged on September 26 with violating the Cybercrimes Act, which was reformed in February but still left journalists vulnerable to prosecution, as CPJ warned.

GTBank’s chief communications officer Oyinade Adegite responded to CPJ’s phone calls for comment with text messages saying she couldn’t talk at that time and did not respond to a follow-up message asking when she would be available to discuss the journalists’ detention. When contacted before the charges were amended, Adegite told CPJ that the journalists’ reporting was “defamatory” and that the bank had sought to have the journalists charged with cybercrime for it.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

"This is an Act of Desperation" | Daze | Big Brother UK | 9 October 2024 | Just Stop Oil #shorts

Just Stop Oil — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 15:47:32 +0000

This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

Economical Explanations: Reflection on the Aims of Past Wars and Wars to Come

T.P. Wilkinson — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 15:15:26 +0000

Down at my grocer’s for half a dozen eggs and some melon, I answered the usual question about my well being openly as accustomed. My neighbour is a friend and his query is sincere. After recounting local concerns he expresses his frustration, one more people certainly share, that they can witness audio-visual depictions of the rampage in the Gaza concentration camp of occupied Palestine on television and hear the words of the ostensible leaders of the great states in the United Nations assembled say little and do less to stop the carnage. Of course neither of us is in a position to raise more than private outrage. I add, however, that this performance of mass murder has been escalating since the end of the Great War when the great states of British Empire, the French Republic and the United States agreed to the European colonization of a strategic prize from the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

Neither of us was alive at the time. Nor were we contemporary with the declaration of statehood by those colonizers on 14 May 1948. The stories we were told to explain and justify European colonization at the same time when those states had proclaimed in San Francisco the universal rights to self-government even for brown people, were that the Europeans concerned had been so punished by the Great Powers through the centuries, especially most recently by the two-time loser among the Great Powers—Germany, that as an act of contrition the population of Palestine had been chosen for collective retribution. That is to say, the brown inhabitants of Palestine in the British Mandate were chosen as a people to be punished, deprived of life, liberty and property, as a penalty for the evils inflicted upon a mass of Europeans whose most important characteristic was that they had been identified as Jews. In the case of Germany under the NSDAP many of the Europeans in question had been deprived of their citizenship as Germans and defined as Jewish by nationality. Thus, under the NSDAP tyranny they were deprived of all their rights as citizens of the state in which they had been born and to whom they had owed allegiance, by operation of law and administrative procedure. One of the principles formalized in the conventions adopted with the United Nations Charter stipulated that no one could be deprived of their nationality against their will. Thus, it would seem the acts of the German regime were declared retroactively violations of human rights. Unfortunately, this principle, like so many others adopted by the Great Powers, was not taken very seriously when skin complexions or geographical locations differed from those of the charter members of the League of Nations successor club. Very little in the stories we were told addressed the obvious inconsistencies between the expressed prohibitions, e.g. collective punishment and deprivation of nationality, when applied to skin colours.

Moreover the stories we were told conflated the victims of the NSDAP regime, a tyranny that enjoyed massive financial and covert political support from the commanding heights of Western industry and finance, with an established settler-colonial movement about which so little was said as possible. While we were entertained by Hollywood productions—beginning with the show trials in Nuremberg and their later film adaptation cast with famous stars of American stage and screen— and continuing with the Leon Uris’s pulp fiction, also adapted for propaganda cinema—the settler-colonial movement was busy practicing what they had no doubt learned from seminars with experts like Adolf Eichmann behind a screen of genuine NSDAP victims and displaced persons manipulated to lend legitimacy to the crimes it continues to perpetrate, live on TV as this is being written. All of this was known to representatives, high and low, of the Great Powers that gave license to this invasion. Where reports of the crimes were not suppressed, the amazing control over mass media and brutal assassinations silenced them quickly.

It has often been said that those methodical Germans were so disciplined that they kept careful records, which could be used to incriminate them later. Thomas Suárez (State of Terror, 2016) found he could reconstruct enough of the criminal history of Zionist occupation of Palestine from the perpetrators records to suggest that not only the NSDAP regime was proud of its attention to detail. As we have seen over the past four years, one of the principal functions of mass media is to inoculate the population at large so as to make them resistant to facts. The details Suárez relates based on research in the National Archives (Kew, UK) cover the period until the declaration of statehood by the settler-colonial regime in Tel Aviv: in other words the behaviour of the founders before we were told that Tel Aviv was the only “democracy” in the Middle East with “the most moral army” on the planet. The book is worth reading if only as a corrective to the amnesiac shock suffered by millions who only discovered that there was “savage and relentless killing in Gaza” a year ago.

Suárez’s story is full of aid workers and UN officials being abused, attacked and murdered. The archives showed that meticulous account was taken of how many Palestinians the invaders were able to rape, torture, kill or otherwise violate and eliminate from the country in which they had been born. Deep intelligence operations throughout the West combined with well-funded and effective mass media campaigns in the US and Britain were as prevalent then as they are today. Innovations in lethality and terror accompanied every effort leading to statehood—and as can be seen beyond. Nobel Peace laureate Menachem Begin, a proud veteran of that era, could justifiably claim—as he indeed once did (in a January 1974 television interview when Russell Warren Howe asked Begin: “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East? “In the Middle East”, Begin bellowed, “in all the world”)—that they (Irgun et al.) had invented terrorism. Striking is the account of youth cadres, some as young as 13, who had been trained as terrorists within the trinity of Zionist paramilitary organisations (Hagana, Irgun and Lehi). Innumerable operations were performed by these highly indoctrinated cadres disguised in the attire typical of the natives (dressed as Arabs). Chronologically it becomes obvious that the methods of terrorism attributed in the West to Muslims were in fact all standard operating procedures for Zionist paramilitary death squads—long before there was any armed resistance to the Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestine.

None of this historical context was part of our history lessons. Nor is it part of the ranting that counts for reporting now. I have heard enough said about my compatriots and their supposed affinity for fascism or natural racism—all based on the interminable repetition of increasingly bizarre films about the NSDAP era in Germany. That all ended in 1945. The insinuations have not stopped, although their application in the past four years defies coherent explanation. However the same regime has been in power in Palestine, de facto since the establishment of the Jewish Agency and de jure since statehood was declared.

It is worth noting that settler-colonialism was still high fashion in 1948 since the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia (also under British rule with a close relationship to Cecil Rhodes’ principal financial advisor) also proclaimed their nationalist version of white supremacy, apartheid. Despite many predictions to the contrary, they have not survived as long as the regime in Tel Aviv. The Afrikaner nationalist attempt to establish a racial-ethnic state with its own language (Afrikaans) and culture also failed. (see also Church Clothes: Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid, 2024) Decades of National Party rule were predicated on the potential onslaught awaiting whites on the continent if a strong white government did not defend them. There was no onslaught. In 1991, the feared horror of Bantu/ Black/ African communism had disappeared. Even the Afrikaner nationalist attempt to support its racial-ethnic state with a “white African” language and culture failed. Although Afrikaans remains one of South Africa’s nine official languages, there is no longer a single Afrikaans-medium university in the country since the apartheid constitution was abolished. The “Cape Dutch” had been established in South Africa since the 1600s and within a mere decade the whole edifice was gone.

That leaves us with the question; especially if one dares to take the absurd woke ideology currently propagated in the West at its word, why settler-colonialism can prevail in Palestine in forms that even heads of state are now likening to those of the NSDAP tyranny? While all manner of institutions, monuments, and artefacts are being renamed, removed or vandalized because of their imputed relationship to racism, colonialism, slavery or some other grave injustice (mainly in Britain and the US), the uninterrupted century of settler-colonial terror in Palestine barely caused a ripple. Is it ignorance, hypocrisy, or plain stupidity? What seems long ago now, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (The Manufacturing of Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, 1988) nearly popularized the distinction between “worthy and unworthy victims”. In their propaganda model the mass media—and those who own it—decide which victims are worthy and hence treated as victims whose suffering is acknowledged and which victims are unworthy and whose suffering can be and is dismissed. This distinction is certainly helpful in calling attention to the silence and invisibility of a century of mass murder and terrorism, after 1948 state terrorism. In order to understand the source of silence, obfuscation, and mendacity, it is necessary to ask the questions how the “worthy victims” are chosen and also by whom?

What we say we know about the past is a construct. Even in the course of a conversation develops as a construct by which the exchange continues on the assumptions of two speakers as to the appropriate way to respond to what was just uttered. Each of us is unwittingly a small scale amateur historian when confronted with utterances, like “what did you mean?” or “what I meant to say was.” There is no way to know definitively what someone was thinking in the past. One can only judge the utterance, either as memory (covertly) or as recording (written or audio), to have some chronological significance and respond to it as one deems appropriate. We have all heard people respond with statements like, “when I said that I did not mean what you think” or “the situation was different then” or “I can change my mind, can’t I? (When someone refuses or denies the interpretation of an utterance assigned to the past). We all know people whom we say are unreliable because in our judgement statements “in the past” do not permit predictions of future behaviour. “Oh he never comes on time” or “he always says one thing and does another”. In all these cases the purpose of our assessment is to control our own behaviour, our reaction to others. We can call it prediction if it means that it controls what we will do (it cannot control what we already have done.) At the same time we have certainly all heard “Oh you are being unfair. He is not always like that” or “He is never like that with me”. In other words the judgement that “he never does what he says he is going to do” is judged by someone else to be an inappropriate explanation and prediction for that person’s behaviour. At the same time it is certainly reasonable to reply, “maybe he does not behave that way with you but he does with me. I cannot rely on him.” At this point, one is acknowledging that although it may be inappropriate to claim that “he is universally unreliable”, it is reasonable to say that “he is unreliable for me”—and it is my interest in reliability that is important here. My interest is another way of saying, reliability is a category of personal conduct which I value and which controls my interaction with others.

Explanations are unavoidable. Whether they are good explanations or bad explanations depends on the judgement of someone and on the interests controlling that judgement. Those interests may also include rendering no judgement that deviates from those others consider appropriate. So in more explicitly historical research, reflection and debate, the interests of the investigator may be controlled by the desire to be treated as a “serious historian” or “serious scholar”, another way of saying that investigation will be governed not only by one’s personal judgement but by what one perceives as the judgement of others as to the appropriateness of one’s work. Academic institutions and other venues where history (often conflated with the past) are the focus of human activity are not only repositories of data but organizations for structuring the use of that data. Structuring the use is another way of saying controlling the way those who are engaged in historical research or study respond to the artefacts and the utterances of other investigators or members of the research institution. There is data, e.g. documents, and utterances and redundancies in response to the data. In that sense historical research is no different from the activity in a chemistry laboratory. It is impossible to separate the utterances and redundancies of response that form an institution from the research product. There is no pure objective fact in the test tube or the archive that is self-evident. Explanations arise from attempts to respond to data in meaningful ways, for instance to control or predict our responses to other data. Even the most abstract forms of research constitute controls on the researcher, what he sees; what he may discover; what he discards or ignores.

A historical explanation, regardless of the volume and nature of the data available (whether known or unknown in scope), will always be a selection of data and its organization. It will always be governed by interests of the researcher or of other researchers or those on whose behalf the research is selected and performed or even of those to whom the researcher addresses his work, e.g. readership, students, public policy, etc.

The armistice of 1918 ended the open hostilities between the regular forces of the alliance (the British Empire, the French Republic and the United States) against those of Austria-Hungary, the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the so-called Central Powers. However, it by no means ended the organized military operations on the Continent or the non-military warfare, as might have been expected by anyone who took the Wilsonian rhetoric at face value. War continued in Eastern Europe. The United States fought with Czech legions, Japanese troops and White Russians against the new Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union until 1922. Economic warfare continued throughout the interwar period despite negotiations and the conclusion of a plethora of treaties known under the rubric of Versailles. The Allies fought overtly or covertly to capture and allocate the extinguished empires among themselves while reinforcing their hold on the empires with which they began the war.

If war aims are not defined by what is announced in declarations but are ascertained by examining forensically the results, then such imputed war aims can be said to constitute a pattern. In other words, a sequence of distinguishable outcomes can form the basis for interpretation of belligerent conduct, specifying general aims or attitudes to explain present and future wars. Such patterns may be classified as instructions by which belligerents chose to wage war or analysis can identify the latent or implicit culture that drives the behaviour. The forensic examination serves to identify redundancies that must be practiced in order to sustain the institutional behaviour underlying the belligerence.

None of the foregoing would have been practically relevant in the 19th century. However, the adoption and ratification of the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy aka Kellogg – Briand Pact (1928) which declared war illegal as a means of resolving international disputes; a violation of international law also known as the law of nations. This pact has yet to be renounced by any of its principal signatories. Thus the prohibition stands. Therefore the determination of war aims and the causes attributed to such wars by those who wage them becomes highly relevant.

If the aims of a given war are not clearly understood, neither the appropriate defence nor a realistic negotiating position to end hostilities can be found, let alone pursued.

In battle, the assailing force seeks to magnify its impact by concealing the actual targets or objectives from the defender. In waging war itself the aggressor is obliged to justify the use of force within the rhetorical framework of the law of nations as commonly understood. Rhetorical legitimacy is no trivial weapon in the aggressor’s arsenal, especially under the League of Nations/ United Nations framework. The more intensely the claims are asserted, the more difficult it becomes to ascertain the effective aims. This is a peculiar aspect of modern ideological warfare. Silencing the defender in public opinion and international fora relies on domination of the totality of communications channels.

The history of modern warfare actually begins with the Crusades. These centuries of assaults against the declared enemies of Christendom always comprised both psychological and physical orders of battle. The papal-rabbinical infrastructure under the command of the Roman pontiff “preached” the Crusades. The military force unleashed through the vassals of the Latin Church wielded the swords and other instruments of death. The pulpit and ecclesiastical apparatus mustered the support needed to drain manpower and other resources for the campaigns of slaughter, demolition and plunder. Prospects of plunder and intangible wealth (salvation) have been essential to convince all those who sacrifice that they will be rewarded on Earth as it is in Heaven, or at least compensated for the material and bodily losses they have to bear.

This is no less true in the 21st century than it was in the 11th.

It is really quite remarkable that while the NSDAP era has been an almost obsessive target of historical research for as long as I can remember, the era in which the settler-colony in Palestine was established receives so little attention although its ostensible legitimation is derived from (retroactively) and enhanced by the very existence of the German fascist regime from 1936 until 1945. Although the ideological roots of Afrikaner nationalism and its close relationship to the doctrinal authors of German National Socialism have been investigated and publicly debated. The relationship between Zionism and Nazism has been given more muted attention. When Zionism and Nazism are discussed generally then there is a tendentious context, which fosters the conflation of Herzl’s ambitions with the campaign to funnel all displaced Jews from Europe into Mandatory Palestine under administration of the Jewish Agency. The implication is that Zionism anticipated the Nuremberg laws, the deprivation of Germans once classified as Jewish of their German nationality and their relocation – disposal, including enslavement and murder. However, any attempt to examine the practices of the Tel Aviv regime over the past century in historical context, including comparison of those practices with practices under other regimes, has been vigorously discouraged.

While it is understandable that the practitioners in the “only democracy” with the “most moral army” may be reluctant to discuss their conduct and utterances in comparative context, it ought to be asked why this reluctance is so widespread beyond the 1967 borders? The most obvious, if somewhat superficial, reason is that the regime in Tel Aviv is the state incarnation of “worthy victims” whose every suffering, real or imagined, must be smothered in sympathy and adoration. Whatever its misdeeds, these are the understandable errors of a distraught, somewhat paranoiac victim for whom at least pity but not punishment is appropriate. The traumatized maiden amidst the bearded, brown-skinned hordes must be forgiven for every act taken in defence of her purity. The mythological, cinematic clichés that can be applied are innumerable. Like cinema, they also distract from serious observation and assessment of the utterances current and past, i.e. the documentary evidence.

(Americans do not realize) the extent to which partition was refused acceptance as a final settlement by the Zionists in Palestine, (nor the conviction among Zionists that) they cannot be satisfied with Palestine alone, that they must have not only all of Palestine but Trans-Jordan, parts of Syria and Lebanon, parts of Iraq and Egypt as well…” Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., CIA officer who led Operation Ajax (TPAJAX) to overthrow Iran’s elected prime minister in 1953. He was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. From a lecture to the US National War College in 1948.

Comparison of practices across countries and periods presents theoretical and methodological problems. These are in part due to the aforementioned institutional constraints. For example, there are material incentives and penalties within academic as well as general research that reward or punish investigation and publication according to the degree of conformity with official, i.e. establishment opinion. A scholar who is successful at promoting established views on any subject would be rewarded with grants, promotions, publication, lecture fees and other favourable attention to his works. The reverse applies. A well-rewarded scholar serves as a model for correct scholarship and indirectly a monitor against deviance. The capacity to reward, also known as patronage, is also the ability to propagate views, defined questions and types of research product desired. It implies the capacity to suppress other views, if only by the stampede for patronage, which a generous investor triggers. This is often called “soft power” in contrast to exile, imprisonment or assassination of dissidents—hard power.

Caroll Quigley argued forcefully (The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981) that one of the principal accomplishments of the Round Table/ Milner Group was to dominate the institutions that wrote and disseminated the history of the British Empire. From fellowships at All Souls and other Oxford colleges in their gift to ownership or control of the newspapers of record and the major publishing houses, members of what would become the Royal Institute for International Affairs (and its imperial franchises in the US — the Council on Foreign Relations — and Commonwealth), “legitimate” history could be propagated and alternative histories excluded. The revolving doors between government and academia also gave the mouthpieces of the Empire the additional credibility lent by access to decision-makers and the official record, both public and confidential. Herbert Hoover, in his capacity as head of the private-public partnership Commission for Relief in Belgium and later the US Food Administration, contributed to this effort after the Great War by confiscating untold volumes of government archives wherever he dispensed “aid” to the distressed countries after the war had ended. The Hoover Institution at Stanford received his loot by bequest thus assuring that this data remained in private hands. After World War II the occupation forces repeated the procedure by capturing the archives of the Axis wherever they went. Access to this treasure has remained subject to the control of friendly agents to this day. Hence the evidence of what conquered nations actually intended or did can be selectively disclosed in ways that are consistent with the established history. Alternative research is largely derived from either accidental discovery or inference. Such alternatives can always be attacked because they necessarily rely on interpretive methodologies at odds with the published record where no “smoking guns” are available. Moreover, the sheer volume of redundant accounts of the official history propagated by those same leading publishing houses and academic institutions effectively buries the alternative publication landscape.

No later than with the inception of the Manhattan Project, the leading sciences were captured by the national security state. The largesse expended to produce atomic weapons and other vile instruments of death created a scholarly and scientific cartel of enviable wealth. Those who did not benefit directly by participation in death and destruction science were induced to shape their work so that it would qualify for funding at the various troughs the national security state had built. The comprehensive focus of all scholarship and scientific research on classified development projects included the imposition of an extensive security system including loyalty tests and secrecy oaths. In short, participation in funded research required membership or at least submission to the rules of the national security cult, not unlike the induction practices for the infamous NSDAP paramilitary organisations.

Britain, as a monarchy, constitutionalism notwithstanding, retained a long tradition of regulated scholarship and research inherited from the Latin Church where the Crown assumed the authority of the Papacy and Episcopate. The extension of this system and practice to North America was a logical consequence of the Round Table project. Cecil Rhodes, and presumably his executor Lord Rothschild, was determined to modernize and thus preserve the British Empire, especially by “recovering” the United States as a member of the English-speaking commonwealth. The intention behind Winston Churchill’s propaganda, A History of English-speaking Peoples (started in 1937 and published in 1956-58 in four volumes), aside from earning money to redeem his chronic indebtedness, was to popularize the idea that America and the Empire (to be renamed more innocuously the Commonwealth) were one race destined to rule the world for the usual benefits its acolytes ascribed to it—democracy, free trade, etc. The meanwhile infamous CIA “Mockingbird” operation emerged from established British intelligence (covert action) practice.

The ability to wage psychological warfare or promote criminal enterprise was centralized in the US very early, despite the republican and federal structure of the State, because its ruling elite had the benefit of treating the country as terra nulla, exterminating the indigenous culture and brainwashing those it selectively admitted to its shores. Despite all claims to diversity today, the “melting pot” myth was a 20th century invention by its propagandists, i.e., the advertising and public relations industry. That machine grew from the massive economic concentration that accelerated after the 1893 depression. Although the Standard Oil trust was dissolved by enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), cartels continued to be formed. Rothschild agent JP Morgan negotiated the merger that resulted in US Steel. General Electric, General Motors and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and other conglomerates gained control over the US economy. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave control over the country’s fiscal and economic policy to an Anglo-American banking cartel functioning through a parastatal “system” which preserved the illusion of a de-centralized economy while consolidating the foundations for the permanent war economy that the US became. The necessity to sell the output of these massive industrial enterprises promoted warmongering and consumerism. The advertising and public relations industry became the American version of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

After the Great War, the Volstead Act (1919) that enforced the 18th Amendment that introduced prohibition also made crime ripe for national organization. Prohibition of alcoholic beverages was depicted as an anti-drug measure when in fact it was part of a variety of anti-immigrant political legislation. Wine and beer consumption was common in the social venues of Germans (socialists) and Italians (anarchists) and other politically threatening working class elements. Their meeting places could be closed and social events circumscribed on the pretext that illegal alcoholic beverages were consumed, thus disrupting unwanted political activism. “Organized crime has traditionally made its profit from providing goods and services people are not supposed to want… Prohibition was responsible for the organization of crime on a national scale and it was the genius of Al Capone to realize that the way to proceed was to organize crime on the model of national business organizations or corporations.” Thus organized crime as “counter-business” is primarily concerned with control over people. (Peckham, 1995). In fact, contrary to the Hollywood history, organized crime owes its effectiveness not to Sicilians but to the crime cartel led discretely by Meyer Lansky. It was far more dramatic and politically advantageous to put Italians in the limelight, initiating a standing tradition by which the term “Mafia” is applied almost exclusively to undesirable immigrants. At no time was there a serious decrease in alcohol consumption. However the federal and state police forces together with their counter-enforcers could protect the development of the legal and illegal drug cartels.

This natural and incestuous relationship was instrumentalized for the establishment of the US national security apparatus. (Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 2004; The Strength of the Pack, 2010) National crime meant national law enforcement and international crime meant international (extra-territorial) policing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were the precursors to what is called euphemistically today the “Intelligence Community”.

National drug cartels needed national control over venues, points of sale as well as marketing vehicles. The wealth generated also had to be laundered. The most natural downstream extension of organized counter-business was the entertainment industry. Not only racetracks, gambling casinos where permitted, bars and houses of prostitution (with the attendant human trafficking) were used. Drug money (alcohol and narcotics profits) created the studio system in the film industry, i.e. Hollywood. The “lifestyle” of the famous and temporarily rich appearing on the silver screen was rightly criticised by the residues of Puritan America—if somewhat hypocritically—as a major source of corruption, both overt and covert. The social managers in Washington and more discrete locations recognized the magnificent power in the Hollywood cartel for instilling whatever tastes or opinions were needed among the entertained public. War Department money enriched Du Pont and other weapons manufacturers. It also filled the coffers of those who produced the thousands of films promoting war against whomever the ruling elite had designated as enemy. As Malcolm X once pointed out the American propaganda machine was able to turn Germans from friends to enemies and back to friends again in a space of time in which no effort was made to alter the perception of Blacks as inferior.

Just as in Britain, the Anglo-American Establishment controlled most of the print media directly. The entertainment industry and the drug system were managed at arm’s length. The cartel was assisted in its international mission by discriminatory legislation that placed Hollywood product in a highly competitive advantage capable of overwhelming the film industries of all other countries. Winning the Second World War meant that with the exception of France, American movie conglomerates were able to flood the world with the “American Way of Life” as defined by the moguls of Southern California and their financial backers, both licit and illicit.

The business corporation had evolved into the single most effective means of power projection. Its single-mindedness, reduced rhetorically to the pursuit of profit, made it efficient in regulating the “market” whether for goods, services or ideas. The legality of the business was irrelevant for the organizational form. Legality is merely a criterion for public appearances, not underlying purposes or methods.

It has been one of the singular deficiencies of common education that attention is devoted to formal rules and government that have little to do with the actual processes of rule. Even those who study the ecclesiastical tradition of business education from the late 19th century are only taught computation. Altogether the strict compartmentalization of what counts as socially relevant knowledge prevents all but a tiny few from ever recognizing how any significant decision is made or executed. Even those who devote their energy to exposing conspiracies, real or imagined, neglect the published and advertised rules and procedures by which Business, that is to say the business corporations, trusts and similar entities are constituted and governed. They do not analyse the principal-agent conflicts that comprise an important part of business litigation. The intricacies and complexities are indeed daunting. Yet even a rudimentary grasp of the allocation of power and authority and its operation would reveal more than a thousand books on political science.

In the US, millions of people occupy single-family dwellings, which they call their homes while they pay over their lifetimes two to three times the ostensible purchase price to a bank to redeem a mortgage bond before they die. This is called in the vernacular “home ownership”. Peter Drucker, a liberal among the Austro-fascists who came to rationalize modern economic exploitation, argued years ago that Americans were all shareholders since their deductions from their pay, essentially deferred compensation, was invested through pension funds in the nation’s economy. Hence, according to Drucker the mere voter had been elevated to the status of mass capitalist. What he did not say was that these pension funds would be held by cartels of asset managers. The most infamous of those hedge funds, better called plantation funds perhaps, are the big three, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. These corporations, owned and managed by a miniscule clique of financial magnates, control virtually all the economic assets of Drucker’s popular capitalists. John D Rockefeller did not control much of the world’s oil industry by prospecting for oil but by rendering it impossible to pump oil from the ground without paying him for the privilege. His Standard Oil controlled everything, directly or indirectly, before the well and after the well, upstream and downstream. This gave Standard Oil what the US Defense Department calls “full spectrum dominance”, which he shared with what were once six other “sisters”. Although as mentioned above, the trust was dissolved by court order, more than a century later the Standard Oil successors, Exxon and Mobil, are still in the top four worldwide. Most of the world’s media is owned by six corporations, National Amusements, Disney, TimeWarner, Comcast, News Corp, and Sony. Whatever one believes the purpose of “media” to be, it is not free and certainly not democratically organized.

Whatever one believes about the nature of the “market”, “democracy” or even something as banal as consumer choice, we live in a world in which three financial entities, six media corporations and four energy companies exercise effective control over fundamental instruments of power: money, information and fuel. Needless to say they control a lot more. So when the 0.1 or more accurately the 0.01% are mentioned there is no need to be abstract. We can talk about an almost microscopic portion of the human population that decides what is good for themselves and how they get it from us. They may be what Larry Fink and his friends like to call “passive investors”. However they own the State and therefore have the capabilities at their disposal to be exceptionally active to increase the value and power of their investments—value and power that can only come at our expense.

What we are told we know about the world (what constitutes accepted “knowledge”) and what is deemed important are matters decided under the foregoing conditions. If we do not understand the extent and depth of control we cannot imagine the full meaning of what Stuart Ewen called Captains of Consciousness (1976). He explored the invention of public relations (propaganda or public diplomacy) in his 1986 book PR! A Social History of Spin, which formed the basis of an Adam Curtis film, Century of the Self (2002). The economic concentration that began in the late 19th century continued unabated by war, war against the body, against populations and against the mind.

Consciousness became an industrial product first by training humans to identify with the consumer goods they did not need but were expected to buy with money they did not have. Thus like the home mortgage, the individual or family invested a lifetime of earnings in constant replacement of things designed to be obsolete or worn out almost as soon as the purchase price had been paid. Thus opportunities for long-term security were compulsively squandered. Excess wages paid to workers in an expanding empire were recovered through artificially high rates of consumption. Once this kind of extraction was exhausted—or in the case of the West rendered ideologically superfluous—the individual himself was converted into a self-consuming product.

The defeats inflicted upon the post-WWII independence movements, by primarily US wars, were also suffered by those in the industrialized West who had struggled to end historical racial oppression at home. This process was highly selective but no less brutal. The most influential leaders among Black Americans fighting to end racial discrimination and oppression were assassinated, imprisoned or driven into exile. This wave of murders occurred within a relatively short space of time at the end of the 1960s in the US and continued beyond its borders far longer, e.g. Guyana scholar and activist, Walter Rodney was murdered in 1980. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968.

Norman Finkelstein (The Holocaust Industry, 2000) who is possibly the first American scholar to openly criticize the American Jewish establishment and what has become the central consciousness myth in America and hence in the world of consciousness the US makes and shapes. In order to explain his position, he addresses the relationship of Jews to other groups in US society. The Holocaust is first and foremost an event portrayed as exemplary of Jewish victimhood. Hence Finkelstein asked how Jewish Americans stand as victims along with other victims in the US, in particular the “founding victims”, the African slaves who as James Baldwin said to the Cambridge Union (1965)—built America. The history books and Hollywood films portray American Jews as the allies of Black Americans in their struggle for human rights. (They do not talk about Jewish slave traders or plantation owners.) He observed (that) “the end of Jewish ‘solidarity’ in the US began in the 1960s when Blacks in the North began to challenge the class position of Jews rather than the racial status as in the South… American Jewish elites turned to the Right to defend their class interests—this coincided with increased support for the occupation and colonization of Israel.” Whitney Webb, in her One Nation under Blackmail (2022) documents the intimate personal and political links of organized crime, Jewish “philanthropy” and the espionage business that operates behind and in addition to the “Holocaust Industry”, with many of the same managers.

Is it a coincidence that between the murder of Malcolm X in 1965 and King’s 1968 assassination lay the Six Day War in 1967? During that war Israel attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 and wounding another 171 of the crew in an attempt to sink the vessel. Malcolm X was vilified but only executed after returning from the Hajj, when he declared that Black Americans must abandon their “victim” status and join with the rest of the world’s oppressed in facing the class war. King was not murdered after his Riverside Church sermon against the war in Vietnam but while in Memphis to support striking workers.

If, as Finkelstein argues, organized Jewry saw reasons to support the civil rights movement in the 1950s because they comprehended them as “race” issues, was this a way of asserting the underlying Zionist argument that Jews constitute a race and also a victim race in a country where race was the most fundamental discriminatory category, e.g., the old “one drop” rule. Calling attention to Jewish race directly would have been counter-productive. However, magnifying the factor race as a trans-historical category for oppression, while ostensibly working to eliminate Blacks from the race of the oppressed could be seen as an intuitive strategy for reserving the race card as a positive political instrument. As explained above, there is no way to know how sincere or pure individual motives for supporting the civil rights movement were among American Jews. However, it is possible to observe the trajectory between 1965 and 1980 when Ronald Reagan was appointed POTUS.

There are those who assert that the key shift in US policy toward the settler-colonial regime was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, replaced by a POTUS notoriously pro-Israel. Laurent Guyénot and others argue that Kennedy’s determination to prevent the Tel Aviv regime from acquiring atomic weapons capability was a strong incentive for Mossad intervention. Johnson turned a blind eye to the Liberty attack and Dimona. Taken as a whole one could argue that the wave of political murders that followed Kennedy’s assassination exemplifies the alignment of the ruling elite, which had been fighting decolonization tooth and nail, with the settler-colonial state in Palestine as a vehicle for de-centring the counter-revolution. The category of race oppression would have been cultivated, only to be hijacked by elites who needed a cast for their legitimation through victimhood.

Finkelstein shows that the great magnification of the Holocaust in American life, and hence in all the means by which it is psychologically and economically managed, coincided with the victory of the IDF in 1967. An event, which had been insignificant in mass American consciousness, along with all but the American participation in the Second World War, was rapidly transformed into something more average Americans could identify than landmarks in its own history. Like “recovered memory” Americans have been taught (as well as all those taught by American mass media) that they were culpable for crimes committed in places even US soldiers had never been during that war. At the same time the crimes actually committed by their own forefathers on American soil were barely mentioned. Thus it seems this magnification not only served the interests of the Jewish elite in concealing class conflict.

While there is no doubt that some twenty million or more people were killed in Eastern Europe and especially the Soviet Union by the Nazi regime’s war against the Soviet Union, it strains logic and plausibility to assert that the only mass murder was committed only against European Jews. Yet the story of the Holocaust that is taught and force fed everywhere in the West with the round number of six million, conspicuously omitting the elderly and disabled, communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, and Slavs of every description. As details recorded not only by Finkelstein but also by many other historians show, the consciousness product Holocaust begins to corrode once one examines the claims for the numbers of survivors of the war and the camps. The 1961 film, Judgement at Nuremberg, dramatizes the discrepancy when the defence argument that no other war crimes were tried except the ones committed by the NSDAP regime is belittled rather than answered. Even Justice Jackson, for the prosecution, insinuated that the trials were problematic by warning that the manner in which they were held could be applied to others. The Soviet Union had insisted that war criminals be tried against the resistance of the British and Americans. As in many cases before and since, the Soviet Union was forced to accept the limitations of the trials in order to have any trials at all. Throughout the occupation, the Western allies conspired to prevent favoured persons from being arrested, let alone charged, hiding them or aiding their escape from jurisdiction. In the Asia-Pacific theatre they effectively prevented Soviet participation in war crimes trials against Japan. In other words, even the official proceedings against those accused of seeking to annihilate all Jews were tainted by serious irregularities. Yet this thoroughly corrupted official record has been used to support the claim that Jews were the paramount victims of World War II.

Though too many people were worked to death, murdered individually and through mass actions by so-called Einsatzkommandos of the regular and Waffen-SS in Eastern Europe. The rescue of whole Waffen-SS divisions from war crimes prosecutions, e.g. the Waffen-SS Division Galizia composed of Ukrainians, further demonstrates the insincerity of the Western Allies in their condemnations. The story, the foundational myth of unique Jewish victimhood, is so riddled with inconsistencies and corruption that its integrity ought to be questioned by any serious historian—not to mention all those in the world who had nothing to do with World War II. Is it possible that the reason is the same as that for the peculiar change in the policy/ attitude of organized Jewish elites with regard to race in the US (and elsewhere)? Could it be that when the US regime defended its leniency and clemency for whole divisions, without even the pretence of criminal investigation in the interest of opposing alleged Soviet communist expansionism, it was expressing the crucial priority of class over any other interest?

Suárez, Finkelstein, and Brenner (Zionism in the Age of Dictators, 1983 and 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, 2002) supply evidence from the Zionist leadership from the very beginning of the movement’s ascendancy to support such a hypothesis. When today’s regime in Kiev, supported by Zionists too, not only disregards the war crimes committed by Ukrainian Waffen-SS units, but has integrated military and paramilitary formations whose insignia are the same as those notorious divisions, e.g. SS-Leibstandart Adolf Hitler and Waffen-SS division Das Reich (the Azov Battalion) in its regular army in the continued war against Russia, it is hard to ignore the true war aims of the West—then and now. It was the foremost objective of Paul Hausser, one of the last commanders of these Waffen-SS forces (Das Reich, II SS Panzer Corps) after 1945 until his death to rehabilitate the Waffen-SS (which had been declared a criminal organization per se) as a brave, multi-national force defending European values, just like any other Western army. From the high official pronouncements throughout the EU, the Ukrainian Armed Forces with its Waffen-SS legacy fights Russia for everything the West holds dear. Just as do the armed forces of the settler-colonial state in occupied Palestine. Ukraine is a victim, as are those who invaded Palestine and declared their conquest to be the Jewish state of Israel in 1948.

The campaigns waged to generate the “victims’ immunity” claimed by these regimes are atrocious. They both rely on a patent of racial superiority but unlike that of classical “white supremacy”, this racial superiority is based on alleged victimhood. They are not superior because of their virtue. Instead their superiority derives from the blanket assertion that all others are perpetrators, latent or active, against whom any measure can be justified as pre-emptive and therefore defensive. Every high official must and does use all the power at his or her disposal to defend the aggression by these self-identified victims.

Self-identification has become a primary instrument of psychological manipulation and warfare. The self-identified not only asserts a whim or personal predilection. He also demands that he is the sole judge of what evidence may be used to support or refute his claims. As a strategy however it must have a mass component. One person alone cannot maintain self-identification against a crowd or against a group with a genuinely recognizable set of features that can be generally classified. Therefore, it is necessary to spread the dogma of self-identification. This is a corollary to the conversion of the individual consumer into a consumed individual, the emergent consciousness strategy of what for want of a better term can be called finance capitalism. That finance capitalism it has been argued above is the contemporary formation of the ruling class, the 0.01%.

If we are experiencing the climax of a massive reaction in the West, one that has intensified since the French Revolution, then the process by which the latest manifestation of feudal empire, presents us with a kind of global feudalism. The doctrines promulgated for this restoration are studied and preached from such altitudes as the Swiss Alps. However, we can understand them better if we examine the history of the West’s paramount merger of power and consciousness, the Latin Church.

Before the Holocaust, the spectre of anti-Semitism (a misnomer if one is talking about European Jews) was first raised by the Latin Church. It is the Latin Church that created the legal and ecclesiastical regime by which Jews in Europe were subjected to special laws of all sorts. Practically speaking however the most intense application of these laws and the persecution they entailed coincided with the wars of Aragon (Spain) to conquer then entire Iberian peninsula and Christianize it. That meant expelling Muslims and Jews who together inhabited the southern half of the peninsula. These wars were called the “Reconquista” so as to imply that Christian Aragon was recovering for the Faith what had been lost to the infidels. Missing from that story is the fact that North Africa — from Egypt to Morocco and Iberia had indeed been “Christian” to the extent that the great landowners who ruled the region self-identified as Christians. It was the systematic oppression of the masses in these “Christian” territories that led them to join the armies of Islam to drive this Christian elite out of the country and restore decent living conditions for them. Islam was an organized force for liberation that would scarcely have taken root had the region’s Christians been civilized people with a sense of justice and equity. When Augustine of Hippo (in North Africa) went to Rome it was as a leader of a putsch driven by this Christian landowning class. Rome was established as the capital of a schismatic church, one that fundamentally contradicted the ecclesiastical plurality that had been characteristic of Christianity with its several centres, e.g. in Antioch and Constantinople. Augustine’s Roman Catholicism claimed to be the sole centre of Christianity. Moreover, it usurped the de-centralized episcopate and installed an absolutist monarchy. The papacy with its cardinalate rejected the Greek elements of Christianity and adopted a form of government that more closely resembled the Talmudic rabbinate. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Pentateuch would be merged with the New Testament and that later the idea of “Judeo-Christian” culture would emerge. If one examines closely the economic policies and political enforcement measures that evolved as pontifical power grew, the papal persecution of Christians who maintained belief in the real poverty preached by Jesus in the New Testament since this was entirely at odds with the class that had established the Latin rite. It was entirely at odds with the beliefs of the great landowners that Islam had driven from North Africa and Iberia. (Islam once extended all the way to the southern provinces of France.) Just as Christianity had grown out of opposition to the Jewish elite’s abuse of the masses, Islam gained its foothold in the most Christian part of the world because the Christian elite so viciously oppressed the common people (Deschner, Die Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums). The Roman support for Aragon was not for the restoration of Christianity of the common man. Those Christians continued to live along with Muslims and ordinary Jews throughout the two caliphates. The House of Aragon was fighting holy class war as the Latin Church has from its inception. The peoples who have traditionally inhabited North Africa were mainly nomadic except in those areas like the Nile Valley where intensive agriculture was established or in the cities from which crafts and trade were practiced. To call a group of people a diaspora—in some elevated, sacrificial form—is another incomplete depiction of population movements in the African continent. Christians and Muslims practicing their religion in other parts of the world are not considered a diaspora, although both religions originate in the same place as the religion of Jews. The myth of the Reconquista and the suppression of Judaism in Spain are facets of political expansion and territorial conquest, not serial universal anti-Semitism. The myth of the unique diaspora is ahistorical since it actually negates any other genuinely diasporic population, e.g., Africans transported throughout the world by slave traders.

Henry Lea, in his multi-volume studies of the Inquisition, made it very clear that the driving force behind the Holy and Universal Inquisition was economic enrichment and not matters of faith or heresy. Alexander Herculano, in his history of the Inquisition in Portugal, supplies ample evidence that the question of whether one was considered a “Jew” in the meaning of the act depended on how much one was able and willing to pay to the Portuguese crown or the Roman pontiff for protection. Certainly poor people were persecuted too. However, exile of Jews or heretics also provided the Portuguese crown with bonded labour for its colonial enterprises while selectively manipulating the domestic labour market, as well as for political ends. The historical monochrome by which the history of Europe is reduced to the persecution of Jews, creating an original sin for all Christians for which they must atone, is a serious distortion of a far more complex fabric of class conflict and struggles for power among the ruling elite.

This supposed blind and irrational persecution of Jews in Europe—there is no evidence to prove it occurred anywhere else—cannot be sustained once the political-economic conditions are seriously examined. What can be said is that ecclesiastical operations and canon law were applied in the same way that anti-communist legislation and repression have been applied—and for the same reasons. At the same time, the realities of political-economic confrontation between merchants, landowners, clergy and military require a sober appraisal of the intra-class conflicts waged just as perniciously and dishonestly then as today. During the US war against Vietnam, the unwritten rule was “if you do not do what you are told (by the Saigon government or any of its officers and beneficiaries), then you are VC (a communist). If you were declared VC, you were an outlaw. (Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 1990) So if someone unaware of this or disregarding this were to examine the National Police records of the era they would no doubt find innumerable “communists”, with no way of knowing if those in the files were communists in fact. Communists have not been able to attain universal victim status, even though the Nazis killed communists before they even thought of killing Jews.

Yet we still have to consider the question: how did this universal Jewish victimhood become established as a dogma in the West? Naturally it is helpful to consider who is served by it. Clearly it is not only Jews who profit from this status. It has been a source of unending contention whether the benefits that accrue to the settler-colonial state are primary or incidental to the institution of Jewish victimhood. I would argue that Jewish victimhood is not even primarily a benefit enjoyed by the regime in Tel Aviv. Finkelstein has shown how it benefits the organized Jewish elite as a running extortion racket. However, as I have tried to show above, that extortion racket is just one operation in a web of activity driven by the 0.01%, those nameable and unnamed who presently own and operate the world’s drug, weapons, money-laundering, and primary resource cartels. However, more than that the concept of Jewish victimhood stands really for class victimhood. The ruling class itself, from the moment it adopted the Latin rite, has endeavoured to present itself as the victims for whom salvation is intended. Jesus did not die to save the poor. He died to save the rich. That is the literal reading of the Passion and it is the only one that makes sense. Given that the Vulgate is largely a forgery over the ages, it is no wonder that the central document upon which Christianity is supposedly based was prohibited to the masses of the faithful upon pain of death until the Reformation. (Another interpretation of the Reformation is beyond the scope of this discussion.) The Roman Church has devoted centuries of effort proving that poverty and damnation are the wages of sin and that the poor deserve their lot. Every attempt, including the last major effort in Latin American liberation theology, to change this dogma and practice has been viciously suppressed by the hierarchy. The first pontiff to retire rather than die in office (Joseph Ratzinger, a child of the Hitler Youth and the close cooperation between the Vatican and the NSDAP) was the leader of that most recent wave of purges.

The portion of the world’s population with the most relative wealth to plunder is still concentrated in North America and Western Europe. They have long ceased to pay their tithes or even go to mass or prayers. The Latin Church and its semi-autonomous Protestant sisters are sustained mainly by the unaccounted wealth accumulated in the past or state subsidies. Although the current pontiff still enjoys the professional media attention and due respect among the faithful in all the poor and populous nations, there is no growth potential where there is still cash to be had. The short-lived Soviet Union and with it the Red threat also lost its salvific attraction. Only the professional killers and sadists were willing to drive through desert sands in search of Muslims for the sake of their souls. A return to the 11th century requires the kind of crusades that enriched the Church then. Quo vadis?

The ruling elite has always been cutthroat and vicious. A major function of their charity is to pay for a better image or assuage opposition when it is impossible or inopportune to exterminate it. So we are constantly served performances that suggest that either there is no ruling elite with shared interests and purposes or that that elite is incapable of overcoming its internal conflicts, thus depriving it of the vast plenitude of power needed to rule us. In fact, the ruling elite constitutes a critical mass of individuals who are born and die but who also reproduce. They reproduce organically like other mammals. However, they also create structures capable of cultivating future members and preserving the class cohesion needed to dominate the rest of us who have no class cohesion, despite regular efforts to instil it. While tyrannicide has its obvious attractions, the hydra-like character of class power means that no sooner is a Rockefeller, Gates or Soros gone, either naturally or assisted, someone else grows into his place. Like the birth and death cycle to which we are all subject, the struggle to deal with the ruling class never ends. There is no salvific moment in which the heavens open to deliver a shower of love, happiness and justice. What class cohesion offers the members of the ruling class are simplifications. With few exceptions if they have to choose between us or one of their own, we will lose. And yet they are also biological individuals whose personal tastes and styles need to be satisfied. The stronger eat the weaker in their homes too.

That means there are different goals for different members of the ruling class. They harmonize to the extent that class interests prevail. However, the impact of their actions is rarely uniform. The problem is generally solved by betting on both sides of any risk. Thus, the hedge fund is the most natural form for the retrograde process of neo-feudalism. When someone like Klaus Schwab repeats the dogma, “you will own nothing and be happy”, he is as ambiguous as a true oracle can be. The hedge fund “owns” nothing and therefore has no risks of loss, but controls all the essential cash flow and therefore can be happy. The rest of us own nothing because all forms of material title are to be converted to various types of lease or rental agreements where possession is merely a transitional status but payment a permanent obligation. Feudalism in the 11th century was not a popularly chosen societal form. It was the sanctification of theft and extortion, which the Roman pontiff tried to monopolize. It was sustained by the active policing of the feudal gangs led by barons and princes. It was justified by the ideological propaganda operations of the clergy in the Latin Church. Sometimes the priest/ missionary came first and then the armed brigands, sometimes the brigands came first. In the end the indigenous culture was absorbed or destroyed and the people subjugated. Taking their land and whatever religions they may have had were both necessary if the theft was to remain permanent.

Since the defeat of the Soviet Union, after the decolonization process had been stopped dead in its tracks, the crusade to steal back everything that had been accumulated by ordinary people over the past two centuries began in earnest. There is no longer a cohesive ecclesiastical instrument and sufficient blind faith in traditional modes of belief. Ironically the traditional modes of belief have become a threat to those charged with organizing the restoration. Whether in the Orthodox Church or the conservative Latin congregations, the ruling class finds resistance built around preservation of family and old-fashioned morality. It is no wonder then that these traditional religious communities are under attack from the armed propaganda gangs of Wokism and transhumanism. These ideologies were developed from what could be called cultural reverse engineering.

When the real social movements were decapitated, they were only partially destroyed. Instead, academically trained cadres were promoted to replace the dead or neutralized activists. They brought with them synthetic ideologies that were made by a kind of recombinant intellectual process, like gene editing. The basic liberation language was dismantled and the dangerous parts replaced with narcissistic code. Self-identification became an individual choice not the recognition of one’s consciousness in a community of real human beings sharing the same material and spiritual conditions. The identity itself becomes the consumable product. In order for this identity to be fully commodified it also had to “perform” like a commodity, i.e. subject to unlimited power of the market. Previously the dissatisfaction or fear induced by the propaganda apparatus was to be satisfied through purchase and consumption of goods and services. Since the body itself—the consumer—is that which is to be consumed a contradiction arises. This contradiction has to be expressed in some material threat or fear. Thus, Wokism achieves its insidious purpose by turning the “woke” person into an individual victim. The model for this chimeric victimhood is the universal Jewish victimhood fuelled by the Holocaust story machine. The total victim is threatened and persecuted by everything and by everyone who does not actively nurture the narcissism upon which this permanent immanent victimhood is based. That is the meaning of all this rhetoric about “safe environments”, “affirming care” and the hysterical chanting of whatever political slogans have been conceived to fuel the internal threat machine. One wears senseless face masks, accepts toxic injections, applauds the injuries to female athletes by male pugilists in skirts, and cheers institutional child abuse and medical mutilation as “affirming care”, while engaged in constant panic reactions to the latest bogus CO₂ or pandemic scare. The woke person has established the right to be protected from unpleasant or dissenting utterances or experiences, especially if they could erode the carefully engineered edifice of narcissism. Liberty has been replaced by libertinism. Unwittingly – for most—they are adopting the archaic entertainments of the ruling class, offered as a sensuous reward for all the material well being they will surrender as a result of toxic substances or poisonous propaganda. The traditionalists are attacked for rejecting those poisons and because they support everything these new narcissists have been taught to despise. The woke are constantly threatened by the traditionalists who deprive them of their “safe environment”. On the other hand this gives them another opportunity to exercise victimhood.

By now the social management strategy ought to be clear. Whereas the medieval crusades offered the poor salvation if they would take the cross and die to conquer the Holy Land, the Woke faith is based on salvation offered to those who take the cross and crucify themselves, surrendering everything to those who not only have taken the Holy Land but are taking everyone else’s land too.

In order to place the present conflict, most visible in the radical expansion of the mass murder perpetrated by the settler-colonial regime in Palestine as I write, in cultural historical context, I have argued that it is entirely legitimate to deduce the aims of an action, like a war, from the consequences of that action. In fact, such a studied conclusion is the only type of assessment we can ever make since the past is irretrievable. The character of any conclusion is inseparable from the kind of questions that are asked and the actions contemplated depending on the response to those questions. There is a significant relationship between the organized, sustained mass murder by the Tel Aviv regime and wider social-political-economic aims. Naturally there are inconsistencies and deficits in the information, which, were, they resolved, might permit more precise prediction of what can be found in the near or long-term future. Yet there is a preponderance of consistency between the war waged in Palestine and the aims of those supporting the war in Ukraine against Russia. This consistency can be found on the one hand by examining the facts. On the other hand it can be found by recognising the “overlapping directorates” at work.

Were the war waged to create Greater Israel the project of a fanatical sect in Tel Aviv, it would be apparent that such mild measures as removing the offending persons to another place, dead or alive, might suffice at least to diffuse the situation. But there is more at stake. Even though Arthur Koestler, who was no enemy of the settler-colonial regime, has been challenged on many points, his The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), draws conclusions from the historical conversion of the Khazars (a people who inhabited the much of the area of today’s Eastern Ukraine) to Judaism. The Soviet era, Russian historian, geographer and ethnologist, Lev Gumilev called it “chimeric”. By that he meant that a parasitical relationship. He argued that a fanatical Jewish sect, the Radhanites, essentially infiltrated the Khazar ruling class and converted them by decree to Rabbinical Judaism. This turned Khazaria into a “merchant octopus” which extended its commercial power both to the East and West. The power they enjoyed straddled the East-West land routes of international trade at the time. This empire collapsed in 965 after wars with Kieven Rus. If there was any diaspora it was not dispersal from the grounds of a mythical Solomon’s temple but the real dispersal of an empire in Central Eurasia (Guyénot, 2022, From Yahweh to Zion, 2018).

When Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that his regime was going to join with its partners to create some channel parallel to China’s new Silk Road and BRI, for which Iran had to be neutralized, could he have meant a restoration of the Khazar Empire and not just the expansion of the settler-colonial regime to the territories Kermit Roosevelt identified as the regime’s ambitions in 1948? In A Jewish State (1904), Theodor Herzl emphasized that Zionism aimed to create what in essence was a commercial empire not unlike Rhodes British South Africa Company (originally seeking to conquer from the Cape to Cairo), religion was the pretext but not the aim. (In fact, contrary to mass media depictions, the pious Jew has traditionally been viewed as a threat to the Zionist colonial project.) Could the man in Kiev who said once that he saw the Tel Aviv regime as a model for Ukraine have been uttering a vision intuitively or instructively underlying the verbosity between bomb explosions in occupied Palestine? Did he mean that Russians in the Donbass were “his Palestinians”? Tel Aviv officials were once routinely cited as telling Americans that the Palestinians are “our Indian problem”.

If we imagine that the war aims are not those declared but quite different ones, then a cultural historical examination might offer another comprehensive interpretation. Namely, the class of people who really own important stuff, like the mass media, the oil channels, the money supply, are closely connected in every way. In a world that has seen the return of manufacturing and much of the world’s productive economy return to Asia, while the West has been de-industrialized and its population reduced to varying degrees of indebtedness and penury, why would not those owners, the great captains of finance capital, see their future power as the foot on the hoses that China and Russia would want between their productive economies and those countries where there is a demand for that output? Wouldn’t it be practical to be the troll at the bridge charging everyone to go across? Isn’t this kind of business something for specialists, like the one banks control? It should not be forgotten that while the outcome of the war with Russia remains uncertain, for many in the West forced to take one of the COVID injections it is their personal future that is uncertain.

Whether this mass murder eliminates enough or all of the Palestinians the Tel Aviv regime has been trying to destroy for the past century, the flow of refugees of all sorts from this region has been uninterrupted since the US launched its first assault on Iraq in 1991. The secret recruitment of mercenary terrorists under cover of religious radicalism has also continued unchecked since Zbigniew Brzezinski conceived the terrorist war in Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s. Thus, the IMO will be assured of a continuous flow of displaced persons. These displaced persons are the true “human shields” behind which organized crime and state terrorism are waged. The war against Russia or China, just as Orwell’s 1984 described is first and foremost a war against the civilian populations of the world. These they will transfer to wherever labour is needed at the expense of the indigenous populations where these refugees are injected. As the indigenous of the Ukraine, Middle East and other attractive zones for exploitation are evacuated or eliminated, the underlying land and resources are confiscated by those who have been funding the wars and the migration in the first place. As I have argued elsewhere, global cash flow is to be matched by globally managed human trafficking. These are realities. This business is being conducted in just this manner. Does it mean that the intent of the actions is to create this system of extraction flows? That is the wrong question. We cannot change intent. What we can change is action and the kinds of consequences agreed by the righteous to be inimical to the welfare of real human beings. It helps if we have a grasp of the enormous cultural historical context in which the assessments must be made and courses of response found.

The same organized criminality that formed the financial and managerial base of the world’s biggest propaganda industry shares power with those who build the weapons of mass depopulation, i.e., the guns and pharmaceuticals sectors. Needless to say interlocking directorates and socialization through exclusive institutions from birth until bodily demise instill the shared values that lead Schwab to preach without the least embarrassment that the World (as property of the elite for whom he speaks) is threatened by the rest of us. When the prelates of the World Economic Forum preach that the “Planet” must be saved, what they really mean is that their world is a victim of popular persecution. By calling this feigned victimhood the threat to the Planet, the mass of ordinary inhabitants is implicated, in fact, vociferously accused, of destroying their world. Their answer to this threat is to destroy us. However, it is more efficient if we can be persuaded to destroy ourselves. So we are commanded to self-identify as threats to “the Planet”. Those who see the Planet as their property also take George Carlin seriously. “The Planet is not going anywhere, we are…” The Zionist war against Palestinians is the ostentatious crucifixion that exemplifies unambiguously the depth of viciousness with which the universal victims represented on Swiss ski slopes and spas wage class war. The evil of communism was used to deny genuine independence and self-government to millions in Africa, East Asia and Latin America. Now the evil of carbon dioxide, a gas essential for human life as well as plant life on Earth as a pretext for continuing to deny and obstruct human development in all those same countries. Their populations are excessive and can only be supplied with energy and food at the expense of “the Planet”—i.e. those victims represented by the annual councils in Davos (and the less publicized or secret meetings). Morse Peckham wrote, “Man does not live by bread alone, but mainly by platitudes.” Victimhood is a part of the rhetoric of power. It has to be repeated in every conceivable form as a means of controlling the range of mass behaviour. The ideology of victimhood does not veil the terrorism and mass murder in Palestine perpetrated by the Tel Aviv regime. Instead it sanctifies it, converts it into a holy sacrifice. It is the logical extension of the pectoral cross worn by the Roman pontiff and other prelates who preached the original crusades against the inhabitants of the critical interface between the centre of the world economy and population and the real victims of Western tyranny in Africa.

The Portuguese and Spanish were the first of the barbarian kingdoms that went to sea to circumvent the bottleneck of the Middle East and the land routes linking a sparsely populated peninsula of the Eurasian continent, impoverished and oppressed by its feudal lords, temporal and spiritual. The recovery of China and the core of human population have meant that the seas are no longer the only channels of communications among the peoples of the world. Captain Mahan’s (The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1890) doctrine is now seriously challenged by the BRI, which could easily link China to Africa as it once was before the Portuguese pirate fleets disrupted the Indian Ocean trade five centuries ago (Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, 1998). This strategic transformation cannot be blocked by direct confrontation; only by annihilation (atomic war) or perpetual war waged by the masters of espionage, covert action, and psychological warfare, in the service of the oligarchic cult of finance capital in the West and their vassals throughout the world. Armed propaganda is the tradition of the Church militant and its descendants in London, Brussels, and New York. The success of the COVID campaign in paralysing the world’s commerce demonstrates the power still held by that 0.01%. This war has only really begun.

The post Economical Explanations: Reflection on the Aims of Past Wars and Wars to Come first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

CPJ, partners urge US Congress to pass PRESS Act

CPJ Staff — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 20:51:12 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists joined more than 100 news outlets and press rights organizations in a letter on Tuesday, October 8, asking U.S. Congressional members to support the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (PRESS Ac t).

The bill would create a federal shield safeguarding reporter-source confidentiality and prevent government access to unreported source material. The legislation previously passed the House twice but has languished in the Senate.

The letters, authored by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, urged members of the Senate to pass the bill during this critical time and requested the House support the measure if it is returned to that chamber.

Read the letters to the House and Senate.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Nigeria police charge 4 journalists with cybercrimes for corruption reporting

CPJ Staff — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 16:01:03 +0000

Abuja, October 3, 2024—Despite recent reforms to Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act, journalists continue to be targeted for publishing news in the public interest, with four reporters being charged under the law last month.

Cybercrime laws and other regulations governing online content have been widely used to jail journalists around the world. In Nigeria, at least 29 journalists have faced prosecution under the cybercrimes law since it was enacted in 2015.

CPJ had warned that February’s amendments to the law, which followed years of advocacy by human rights groups and CPJ, still left journalists at risk of prosecution due to an overly broad definition of what is a criminal offense. Since the law was reformed, it has been used to summon, intimidate, and detain journalists for their work.

On September 20, police in western Lagos State separately arrested Olurotimi Olawale, editor of the privately owned National Monitor newspaper, and Precious Eze Chukwunonso, publisher of the privately owned News Platform website, Nigerian Guild of Investigative Journalists’president, Abdulrahman Aliagan, told CPJ.

On September 25, police arrested Rowland Olonishuwa, a reporter with the privately owned Herald newspaper, in western Kwara state and Seun Odunlami, publisher of privately owned Newsjaunts website, in nearby Ogun state, Aliagan and Kwara-based journalist Dare Akogun told CPJ.

“Nigerian authorities should immediately release journalists, Olurotimi Olawale, Precious Eze Chukwunonso, Rowland Olonishuwa, and Seun Odunlami, and swiftly drop the cybercrime charges against them,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa Program, from New York. “Since Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act became law, it has been used to arrest and prosecute journalists, and these arrests emphasize that the recent reforms to the law have not reversed that trend.”

On September 27, the four journalists were charged in a Lagos federal court with violating sections 24(1)(b) and 27 of the Cybercrimes Act for reporting that implicated Segun Agbaje, chief executive officer of Guaranty Trust Bank, in alleged fraud worth 1 trillion naira (US$600 million) according to Aliagan, Akogun, and a copy of the charge sheet reviewed by CPJ.

Section 24 of Cybercrimes Act relates to pornographic or knowingly false messages “for the purpose of causing a breakdown of law and order, posing a threat to life, or causing such messages to be sent,” according to a copy of the law’s amendments signed by President Bola Tinubu in February. Violation of this section is punishable with up to three years in prison and a fine of 7 million naira (US$4,200).

Section 27 relates to attempts to violate the law and conspiracy, as well as aiding and abetting. Conniving to commit “fraud using computer system(s) or network” carries a variable punishment based on the violation and/or up to seven years in prison and a requirement to refund or forfeit stolen funds, according to the same copy of the amendments.

The journalists pleaded not guilty and were remanded at a Lagos correctional center, pending a bail hearing on October 4, Aliagan and Akogun told CPJ.

Although the police compelled the journalists to take down their articles, Nigeria’s federal House of Representatives subsequently announced an investigation into the bank over fraud allegations.

GTBank’s chief communications officer Oyinade Adegite confirmed to CPJ by phone that the bank had sought to have the journalists charged with cybercrime over their reporting, which she said was “defamatory.”

CPJ’s call and text messages to request comment from Lagos State police spokesperson Hauwa Idris-Adamu on September 27 went unanswered.

Editor’s note: This text has been updated in the ninth paragraph to add detail to the penalty for violating Section 27.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Nigeria police charge 4 journalists with cybercrimes for corruption reporting

CPJ Staff — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 16:01:03 +0000

The journalists pleaded not guilty and were remanded at a Lagos correctional center, pending a bail hearing on October 4, Aliagan and Akogun told CPJ.

Although the police compelled the journalists to take down their articles, Nigeria’s federal House of Representatives subsequently announced an investigation into the bank over fraud allegations.

CPJ’s call and text messages to request comment from Lagos State police spokesperson Hauwa Idris-Adamu on September 27 went unanswered.

Editor’s note: This text has been updated in the ninth paragraph to add detail to the penalty for violating Section 27.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Israel Bombs Lebanon After Blowing Up Pagers in "Act of Mass Mutilation." Is Ground Invasion Next?

Democracy Now! — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 14:33:47 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Israel Bombs Lebanon After Blowing Up Pagers in “Act of Mass Mutilation.” Is Ground Invasion Next?

Democracy Now! — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 12:12:57 +0000

Israel attacked more than 300 sites in Lebanon Monday, killing at least 182 people and injuring more than 700 others as fears grow of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah. The Israeli military also ordered residents of southern Lebanon to leave their homes if they live near any site used by the militant group. “At the heart of this is an attempt to manufacture consent and try to portray most southern Lebanese as Hezbolloh operatives,” says Sintia Issa, editor-at-large at the Beirut-based media organization The Public Source. We also speak with Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon volunteering at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, where he has been treating victims of last week’s device explosions that injured thousands of people. He describes the disfiguring injuries from Israel’s booby-trapping of pagers and walkie-talkies, calling it “an act of mass mutilation.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Vande Bharat window replacement video falsely shared as act of ‘rail jihad’

Ankita Mahalanobish — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 11:53:16 +0000

A video clip of a man hammering a glass window of a train is going viral on social media with users claiming it is a ‘jihadi’ act or a ‘terrorist’ act.

X (formerly Twitter) account BhikuMhatre (@MumbaichaDon) amplified the video with the claim that the person seen in it was a “Rail Jihadi”.

Railway Minister .@AshwiniVaishnaw Ji, can this “Rail Jih@di” be booked under UAPA? Doesn’t causing intentional damage to Nation’s Property fall under “राष्ट्रद्रोह”?pic.twitter.com/vJ6GRipHxW

— BhikuMhatre (@MumbaichaDon) September 10, 2024

Right-wing propaganda handle The Jaipur Dialogues (@JaipurDialogues) reshared a tweet by a user named Dr Mouth Matters (@GanKanchi) and wrote, “Jihadis are systematically destroying our railways, what are we doing about it?”

Jihadis are systematically destroying our railways, what are we doing about it?
pic.twitter.com/sbCdVe7y6F

— The Jaipur Dialogues (@JaipurDialogues) September 10, 2024

Similarly, X handle “Rubika J. Liaquat Satire” (@RubikaLiaqat) also shared the video. The tweet reached over 2.7 lakh viewers and was reshared around 1000 times.

भारतीय न्याय संहिता के अनुसार इसको कौन सजा मिलनी चाहिए?

या UAPA के तहत मामला दर्ज किया जाना चाहिए?

यह किसी आतंकवादी कृत्य से कम नहीं है ??

सारे जहरीले साँप तो हमने अपने घर में ही पाल रखे है,

मौका पाते ही डस लेते हैं- ख़ुद देखिए pic.twitter.com/6rMku5chPK

— Rubika J. Liaquat Satire (@RubikaLiaqat) September 10, 2024

Several Right-wing X accounts, including Squint Neon (@TheSquind), Raushan Sinha (@MrSinha_), journalist of propaganda outlet Sudarshan News Sagar Kumar (@KumaarSaagar), Kreately.in (@KreatelyMedia), have amplified the claim.

Fact Check

We noticed that a user named Manthira Moorthy M (@RoboMoorthy) had responded to the tweet by @GanKanchi and explained that a routine procedure of changing a damaged window was being carried out in the video. Moorthy’s X bio says he is a senior section engineer, deputy incharge- Tirunelveli coaching depot, and incharge of Vande Bharat Express, Tiruneveli junction railway station.

Tirunelveli in Madurai division of Southern Railways has a rail coach depot.

Moorthy subsequently deleted the tweets, but readers can find screenshots of his tweets below:

In the first tweet, he said, “…It is one of the process of changing the Cracked Window Glass. He is trying to break the cracked glass for removal.” (sic) With this, he also shared a screenshot of the procedure manual where “Step 2” mentioned that one had to “break the outer glass with a hammer” and “gently develop the cracks”.

In the second tweet, Moorthy pointed out that there was no indication in the video that the man seen in it was an unauthorised person.

We also found a tweet by verified X handle Trains of India (@trainwalebhaiya), where the user made the same point. He also mentioned that this procedure took place in the maintenance depot and the person was not damaging the train but breaking an already damaged glass to replace it.. (archive)

No, He isn’t damaging the train but breaking an already damaged glass to replace it with a new one at maintenance depot, as the glass is glued tightly with the body it needs to be broken first.pic.twitter.com/RLfn2Byf1i

— Trains of India (@trainwalebhaiya) September 10, 2024

In a subsequent tweet, the user shared a similar video of a man hammering a train window glass to create a web of cracks and then removing the entire glass pane. The user added that it was standard procedure and protocol. (archive)

This is how #VandeBharatTrain glass is replaced, this protocol is followed at maintenance pits as:
• Quick & easy
• Glass glued tightly
• Less TAT for train at pit lines
Meanwhile proper procedure is followed at workshop where train goes for schedule maintenance every 2yrs. https://t.co/UHx2OWcT9C pic.twitter.com/POkBVeevow

— Trains of India (@trainwalebhaiya) September 10, 2024

To further confirm this, Alt News also spoke to a former Indian Railways employee, Nilanshu Singh, who worked at a coaching complex in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh. He told us, “It is clearly visible in the video that the train is on the pit line (photo below supplied by Singh). Pit lines are present in a coaching complex where trains are maintained or repaired. And the action that we can see in the video is of hammering/breaking the glass. It is done as a procedure to change the glass. I was in railways for four years and I was posted at the coaching complex itself. We used to do the same thing for the AC coaches back then if a window developed a crack or leakage. This is how we replace it with a new one… pit lines are generally elevated and in between we have the tracks. On those elevated platforms, people work. This is visible in the video.”

A pit line where rail coaches are repaired

A relevant keyword search led us to a YouTube video that shows how to change window glass in Vande Bharat trains. This video was uploaded on March 19, 2024. In this video, one can see that to change Vande Bharat’s window glass, the first step is to hammer it down.

India Today Group Identified the Man in the Video

Various outlets of the India Today Group published reports on the viral video. Their journalists identified the man in the video as Manish Kumar from Ara, Bihar. Kumar admitted to Lallantop that the person seen in the video was him. Western Railway’s senior public relations officer Pradeep Sharma further informed the outlet that the video had been made during the maintenance of Ahmedabad-Mumbai Vande Bharat at Integrated Coaching Depot Kankaria.

“The window glass of Vande Bharat is made of toughened glass keeping in mind the safety of the passengers so that the passengers do not suffer any kind of harm if any external object hits them. During maintenance, if there is a crack in the window glass, it is broken and removed with the help of a pointed hammer. This work was being done by a contract worker. During the same time, this video was made by another contract worker,” he told Lallantop.

Hence, from the above findings, it is clear that the viral video of a man breaking the glass window of Vande Bharat Express is not an act of ‘terrorism’ or ‘Jihad’. It is a part of a basic protocol and procedure to replace damaged glass window of a train.

Ankita Mahalanobish is an intern at Alt News.

The post Vande Bharat window replacement video falsely shared as act of ‘rail jihad’ appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.

Overthrowing the Constitution: All Sides Are Waging War on Our Freedoms

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 04:10:56 +0000

It is both apt and ironic that the anniversary of 9/11, which paved the way for the government to overthrow the Constitution, occurs the week before the anniversary of the day the U.S. Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787.

All sides are still waging war on our constitutional freedoms, and “we the people” remain the biggest losers.

This year’s presidential election is no exception.

As Bruce Fein, the former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, warns in a recent article in the Baltimore Sun, “In November, the American people will have a choice between Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance. But they will not have a choice between an Empire and a Republic.”

In other words, the candidates on this year’s ballot do not represent a substantive choice between freedom and tyranny so much as they constitute a cosmetic choice: the packaging may vary widely, but the contents remain the same.

No matter who wins, the bureaucratic minions of the Security/Military Industrial Complex and its Police State/Deep State partners will retain their stranglehold on power.

Neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris have the greatest of track records when it comes to actually respecting the rights enshrined in the Constitution, despite the rhetoric being trotted out by both sides lately regarding their so-called devotion to the rule of law.

Indeed, Trump has repeatedly called for parts of the Constitution to be terminated, while both Harris and Trump seem to view the First Amendment’s assurance of the right to free speech, political expression and protest as dangerous when used to challenge the government’s power.

This flies in the face of everything America’s founders fought to safeguard.

Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

In the 23 years since the USA Patriot Act—a massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA—was rammed through Congress in the wake of the so-called 9/11 terror attacks, it has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the ten original amendments—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments—and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well.

The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience are now considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.

In fact, since 9/11, we’ve been spied on by surveillance cameras, eavesdropped on by government agents, had our belongings searched, our phones tapped, our mail opened, our email monitored, our opinions questioned, our purchases scrutinized (under the USA Patriot Act, banks are required to analyze your transactions for any patterns that raise suspicion and to see if you are connected to any objectionable people), and our activities watched.

We’re also being subjected to invasive patdowns and whole-body scans of our persons and seizures of our electronic devices in the nation’s airports. We can’t even purchase certain cold medicines at the pharmacy anymore without it being reported to the government and our names being placed on a watch list.

In this way, “we the people” continue to be terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

If there is any sense to be made from a recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.

So what’s the solution?

It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.”

In other words, it’s our job to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.

Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.

Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.

A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to do more than grouse and complain.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have the power to make and break the government.

The post Overthrowing the Constitution: All Sides Are Waging War on Our Freedoms first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

CPJ joins call urging U.S. government to make effective use of Global Magnitsky sanctions

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 18:40:12 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists joined the nonpartisan human rights organization, Human Rights First, with over 90 press freedom and advocacy groups in expressing deep concern over the U.S. government’s declining response to international human rights and corruption violations in a September 5, 2024 letter.

The signatories urged the Departments of State and Treasury to prioritize the effective use of Global Magnitsky sanctions, a human rights and anticorruption accountability tool that authorizes sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Read the full letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Dark money donors could be named if Congress would just pass the DISCLOSE Act. 🔗 ⬇️ for the full pod

The Intercept — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 17:27:24 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.

Israel supporters flout Canadian law with impunity

Yves Engler — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 04:08:30 +0000

As an observer of foreign affairs, I’ve often written about the hypocrisy of Liberal and Conservative governments’ failure to uphold “an international rules-based order” despite claims of its importance. In the case of Israel, the duplicity is even more glaring. Our governments, past and present, repeatedly fail to uphold Canadian law.

Activists have long shown how arms sales and military recruitment to Israel violates the law. But Global Affairs, Minister of Justice, RCMP and other government agencies have generally ignored their legal responsibilities when it comes to the genocidal apartheid state.

Issuing arms permits to Israel contravenes Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act. According to the law, Canada shouldn’t export arms to a country if there is “a substantial risk” they would undermine peace and security or be used to violate international law. As a signatory to the UN Arms Trade Treaty Canada is also obliged to not transfer arms to a country responsible for grave human rights violations. Two recent International Court of Justice rulings strengthen the legal case against Canadian arms sales to Israel. Still, Global Affairs allows arms transfers.

The Minister of Justice and RCMP have also failed to apply the law regarding Israel, refusing to enforce the Foreign Enlistment Act and Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. In 2020 a formal legal complaint and public letter signed by numerous prominent individuals were released calling on the federal government to investigate individuals for violating the Foreign Enlistment Act by inducing Canadians to join the Israeli military. The Trudeau government effectively ignored the public letter and legal complaint even though it was published on the front page of Le Devoir. Then Justice Minister David Lametti responded by simply saying it was up to the police to investigate. For their part, the police refused to seriously investigate. Partly in response to the police’s unwillingness to take the matter seriously, a case was launched through a private prosecution against Sar-El Canada, which brings Canadians to volunteer on Israeli military bases. A Justice of the Peace agreed the evidence warranted a hearing, but the Crown interceded to dismiss the case against Sar-El. They clearly didn’t want a court to adjudicate the matter.

More recently, Canadians fighting in a force that’s slaughtered tens of thousands should be investigated under Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. Highlighting reports of Canadians in the Israeli military, a Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East letter to Justice Minister Arif Virani called on him to “Issue a warning to Canadian nationals that serving or volunteering with the Israeli military may make them criminally liable under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act”. CJPME’s January letter also requested the minister “launch an investigation under its War Crimes Program into the participation of Canadian nationals involved in Israel’s military offensive.”

Thousands messaged the minister calling on him to investigate Canadians committing war crimes in Gaza. Following up on this push, I asked Virani directly if he’d investigate those killing Palestinians under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. He refused to answer, walking down the wrong hallway to escape my questioning.

While staying mum on Canadians killing Palestinians, the Trudeau government actually interceded to block a bureaucratic move to properly label wines from illegal colonies. After David Kattenburg repeatedly complained about inaccurate labels on two wines sold in Ontario, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) notified the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) in 2017 that it “would not be acceptable and would be considered misleading” to declare wines produced in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as “products of Israel”. But, immediately after the decision became public the government reversed the advisory and then appealed a judge’s ruling to block accurate labelling of wines produced in the occupied West Bank.

In a major form of Israel-focused criminality, dozens of registered charities violate the Income Tax Act by supporting the Israeli military, racist organizations and West Bank colonies. In a bid to press the CRA to uphold the law, formal complaints have been submitted to the revenue agency detailing a dozen charities’ – with over $100 million in annual revenue – violating the rules. That campaign contributed to the recent revocation of the charitable status of Canada’s second most powerful Zionist charity, the Jewish National Fund of Canada (as well as the Ne’eman Foundation). While its recent revocations restore some confidence in the CRA’s ability to act independently, a law-abiding revenue agency would do far more to curtail illegal subsidies to Israel.

To press the CRA to revoke the charitable status of other Israel-focused organizations violating the law, actions will be held at CRA offices across the country on International Day of Charity. On September 5 join one of the many protests calling on the CRA to stop subsidizing war crimes and apartheid.

One has to wonder why we must take to the streets to convince our government to uphold Canadian law.

The post Israel supporters flout Canadian law with impunity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

CPJ, others urge EU to act against Israel’s unprecedented journalist killings, press freedom violations

Committee to Protect Journalists — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 04:01:00 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists and 59 partners on Thursday, August 22, wrote to EU High Representative Josep Borrell, European Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis, and EU member state foreign ministries asking that the EU “take action against the Israeli authorities’ unprecedented killing of journalists and other violations of media freedom.”

The letter condemns widespread and systematic abuses committed by Israeli authorities and calls for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement as well as further EU targeted sanctions against those responsible.

The Association Agreement intends to provide an “appropriate legal and institutional framework for political dialogue and economic cooperation between the EU and Israel” and includes human rights as a core component.

An informal meeting of foreign affairs ministers is expected to take place on August 29.

Read the full letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

‘Integrity at the Present time is Resistance’ | Climate Genocide Act Now | 3 August 2024

Just Stop Oil — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 20:14:30 +0000

This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

Violating the Sherman Act: Google’s Illegal Monopoly

Binoy Kampmark — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 04:38:14 +0000

The occasion sparked much in the way of visionary language and speculative musings. This month, one of the world’s most conspicuous and dominant behemoths of Silicon Valley was found to be operating an illegal monopoly in internet search and advertising markets, thereby breaching the Sherman Act which renders monopolisation, attempted monopolisation and conspiracy to monopolise unlawful.

In a Memorandum Opinion ruling running into 286 pages, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia found that Google acted as a monopoly in its “general search” and “general search text advertising” markets and had breached Section 2 of the Sherman Act by making exclusive dealing agreements with various vendors (Apple, Samsung, Verizon and so forth).

In doing so, Google’s search engine was given exclusive default status on various platforms and devices, notably web browsers, wireless carriers and smartphone manufacturers. “These partners agree to install Google as the search engine that is delivered to the user right out of the box at key search access points.” Through its “revenue share” operation, involving the payment of billions of dollars to its partners, “Google not only receives default placement at the key search access points, but its partners also agree not to preload any other general search engine on the device.” Such a distribution system had forced Google’s competitors to seek other means of reaching users.

The decision offers a chronology of how such monopoly developed. Initially, Google most likely reached the high summit of market supremacy through legal means, making its search product enviably singular. The problem here was Google’s conduct in seeking to maintain that supremacy in the market, thereby foreclosing it to competitors.

The memorandum ruling is also valuable for revealing the tactical and strategic approach of the company in preserving its dominance, not to mention showing full self-awareness of that fact. Were such partners as Apple to develop their own search engine as the default in Safari, for instance, a fortune would be at stake.

The company also showed a sketchy practice to preserving evidence, indulgently destructive in the practice of deleting chat messages after 24 hours, unless the default setting was turned to “history on”. According to arguments of the DOJ and the regulators, doing so revealed knowledge that Google’s practices “were likely in violation of the antitrust laws and wanted to make proving that impossible.” In Judge Mehta’s words, “Any company that puts the onus on its employees to identify and preserve relevant evidence does so at its own peril. Google avoided sanctions in this case. It may not be so lucky with the next one.”

Other practices included an extensive, overly indulgent misuse of attorney-client privilege by filling email communications with gratuitous references to the company’s in-house legal team. Directions were also issued to employees to avoid using “certain antitrust buzzwords in their communications.” A March 2011 presentation, “Antitrust Basics for Search Team,” was blatant in instructing employees to avoid any reference to “markets”, “market share” or “dominance,” not to mention “scale” and “network effects”. Best also avoid, according to the presentation, any “metaphors to wars or sports, winning or losing.”

The exclusionary conduct engineered through Google’s agreements was found by the Court to have had “three primary anticompetitive effects”: market foreclosure, preventing rivals from achieving scale and diminishing the incentives of any rivals, including nascent challengers, to invest and innovate in general search.

Causation of such harm could be “inferred” in this case if the anticompetitive conduct in question reasonably appeared “capable of making a significant contribution to … maintaining monopoly power”. There was no need for “but-for proof,” something that made the task of the US Department of Justice that much easier. It followed that the company’s “distribution agreements are exclusionary contracts that violate Section 2 because they ensure that half of all GSE [general search engine] users in the United States will receive Google as the preload default on all Apple and Android devices, as well as cause anticompetitive harm.”

The saga is set to become even lengthier, given that no remedies have yet been identified. These, as Robert Milne and Edward Thrasher of White & Case explain, can vary in terms of severity and effect, ranging from prohibiting Google from entering into the exclusive agreements to privilege the default status of its search engine, to requiring the company to share data and relevant code with other competitors in the search market, to the more drastic breaking up of the company.

Google has announced that it will appeal the decision, and the commentary about how it could do so is already mushrooming. Geoffrey A. Manne, president of the International Center for Law and Economics, is one, offering a detailed overview about where Judge Mehta is said to have misread or misunderstood such concepts as proof of anticompetitive conduct.

Invariably, scribblers in the tech industry have seized the opportunity to wonder what the alternatives to a post-Google world – or one where the company is stripped of its monopolistic ascendancy – might look like. Natasha Lomas in Techcrunch writes dreamily that a web lacking Google’s acquisitive, data-pinching domination, let alone existence, “is absolutely bigger than mere utility.” This presented a chance “for different models of service delivery – ones that prioritize the interests of web users and the public infosphere – to achieve scale and thrive.”

Broadly speaking, the Google decision can be said to nest in a range of recent efforts and undertakings by government regulators to conserve competition in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital markets, a point made by the July 23, 2024 “Joint Statement on Competition in Generative AI Foundation Models and AI Products” from the US Department of Justice, the US Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, and the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority.

The regulators are mindful of potential attempts by firms “to restrict key inputs for the development of AI technologies,” entrench or extend existing market power in digital markets “in adjacent AI markets or across ecosystems, taking advantage of feedback and network effects to increase barriers to entry and harm competition,” create instances of monopsony power and develop and wield AI “in ways that harm consumers, entrepreneurs, or other market participants.”

Such talk is hardly novel. It peppers and haunts the incipient stages of the web’s existence: misty visions of the informed cybersphere; communities of engaged digital citizens rowdily if respectfully engaged in civil discourse. All of this done in defiance of policing measures and the suspicious eye of the authoritarian State. Eventually, techno utopianism is as faulty as any other variant of the unrealised idyll. The honey, milk and fruit always seem better on that side of the river, till the journey is made.

The post Violating the Sherman Act: Google’s Illegal Monopoly first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Decrepit Pipes Put Jackson, Mississippi, on the Edge of Catastrophe. State Regulators Didn’t Act.

by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Mississippi Free Press. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Beneath the city of Jackson, Mississippi, is a Rube Goldberg-esque network of pipes that brings water to residents. The system, by one estimate, is twice as long as it should be for a city of this size. Much of it has been in disrepair for years; some parts are more than 100 years old.

Underground, broken pipes have spewed water into the surrounding earth or sent it bubbling up from cracked streets. For every gallon of water that reaches a customer’s tap, at least another gallon doesn’t, according to a June estimate from the manager of the water system.

Aboveground, the symptoms of those problems have been faucets that sputtered and toilet bowls that didn’t refill. Teenagers in the county’s juvenile-detention center were sent to other facilities to shower, one official said. Hospitals that regularly lost water built their own wells. Roughly every few days, people in one part of town or another have received notices telling them their water was unsafe to drink unless they boiled it first. At times, like for two weeks in the winter of 2021, many residents had no running water at all.

But for years, state employees inspecting Jackson’s primary water system noted few problems with the distribution system — the pipes that delivered water to its customers. In the 16 years before the system collapsed in 2022, leaving roughly 160,000 residents in and around Jackson dependent on bottled water for weeks, inspectors admonished the city just a couple times about the pipes underground. They identified issues with low water pressure just once and noted high water loss a few times. But they issued no formal reprimands or fines.

From 2006 through 2021, Jackson’s inspection score from the Mississippi State Department of Health, which oversees water systems in the state, averaged nearly 4 out of 5. The few times MSDH identified major problems in Jackson, all but one were tied to its water plants, not the distribution system.

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General said the state’s failure to flag ongoing problems in Jackson’s water system, including those in the pipes, contributed to the Jackson water crisis in August 2022. Over several years, the state’s inspections “did not reflect the conditions of Jackson’s system,” the inspector general’s staff wrote. As a result, they wrote, problems “were left unresolved until the eventual catastrophic failure of the system,” when the city’s main water plant finally buckled. It took weeks until the city could reliably pump clean water to residents.

A Jackson, Mississippi, firefighter loads cases of bottled water into a resident’s car in August 2022. The collapse of the city’s water system that summer left roughly 160,000 people dependent on bottled water for weeks. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP) Portable toilets were parked on the grounds of the Mississippi Capitol during the 2022 failure of Jackson’s water system. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)

The Office of Inspector General said the EPA, as the agency ultimately responsible for compliance with federal drinking water standards, shares some responsibility for the state’s failures because it didn’t make sure the state was properly enforcing its regulations. The agency said in a response included in the report that it agrees with the inspector general’s findings.

MSDH hasn’t responded to requests for comment on the report; its response to the Office of Inspector General wasn’t immediately available. But the findings aren’t exactly new to state regulators. The report, which covers inspections from 2015 through 2021, corroborates reporting by the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that looked at state inspections dating back to 2006.

The news outlets told MSDH this year that their reporting showed that the states’ inspections had failed to identify problems in the distribution system and to require the city to act. MSDH officials disputed the claim as “patently false,” saying its inspections were based on information provided by the city. The agency said the city of Jackson failed to take on the responsibility “to respond to any potential pressure or water loss issues.”

In an interview late last year, State Health Officer Dan Edney defended MSDH’s oversight. Still, he said he expected the EPA to tighten its rules on how states oversee water systems. “The EPA probably, after studying this event, is going to change some things in terms of how they want inspections to be, and I welcome that,” he told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica. Such changes, he said, would allow Mississippi “to intervene in a little bit more meaningful way, sooner.”

Such changes are indeed underway. In response to the inspector general’s report, the EPA plans to review how MSDH conducts federally required inspections. Beyond Mississippi, the EPA is checking other states’ oversight in the Southeast. And federal officials will update EPA guidance on how to perform federally required inspections to include a process for handling ongoing problems such as those that plagued Jackson’s distribution system.

Water Pressure Was Bad, but Still Passed the Test

MSDH’s inspections do include questions about the pipes underground. But time and again, the agency’s inspection records did not reflect what was going on beneath the surface in Jackson.

Every year when inspectors came, they checked water quality, reviewed records and policies and looked over equipment. They filled out a two-page questionnaire, awarded points based on the answers and wrote up pages of recommendations. On every inspection report from 2006 to 2020, inspectors answered no to a question about whether there was “any indication” of pressure problems. Only in 2021 did they answer yes, noting that a fire at a water plant had caused pressure to drop.

A completed questionnaire after a state inspection of the Jackson water system in 2018. As on every other inspection report from 2006 to 2020, state employees answered no to a question asking if there was “any indication” of pressure problems. (Obtained by Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Edney, who became the state’s chief health officer in 2022, admitted to the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that this was “surprising.” As a practicing physician, he had experienced water pressure problems at Merit Health Central, a hospital located in a part of town that was often the first to lose water during an outage.

There was other evidence as well: the city’s own boil-water notices, which alerted people to problems in the system. Low pressure resulting from a line break can allow bacteria to seep into the pipes, which is why Jackson residents regularly received such notices. From August 2014 through July 2022, Jackson issued more than 1,500 boil-water notices, according to city records in the possession of MSDH, including at least nine notices that affected everyone in the city. Such notices aren’t normally reported to the EPA. But, inspector general staff wrote, “if state surveyors find an exorbitant number of boil water notices” during a federally required inspection, “the state could report the issue to the EPA.”

The Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica asked Edney how inspectors could have noted pressure problems just once even as Jackson regularly shared boil-water notices with MSDH. Edney said the state doesn’t consider water pressure to be a problem unless it’s “consistently” below 20 pounds per square inch, and Jackson often posted pressures of 21 to 30 psi. “If they’re consistently running 22 psi, then they pass,” Edney said. “That’s an acceptable low pressure.”

Though that figure might be acceptable to Mississippi, it is much lower than the standard pressure specified in a set of guidelines that the EPA recommends water systems follow. Those guidelines, produced by a consortium of state water regulators, say that a water system’s “normal working pressure” must be at least 35 psi and generally should be between 60 and 80 psi.

Both MSDH and the EPA pointed out that these are just guidelines. There are no federal requirements for how high water pressure must be; the EPA says most states set the minimum at 20 psi to ensure that firefighters have the water they need.

Ken Kopocis, who led the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama administration, said a water system operating on a thin margin like Jackson’s did is just “one small hiccup” away from an interruption in water service or a widespread outage. “This is going to happen,” he said. “It’s only a matter of happenstance that it got delayed as long as it did.”

Massive Water Loss Wasn’t a Problem for Inspectors

When pressure in a water system drops unexpectedly, there are two likely causes: a decline in water production at plants or water loss due to broken pipes.

Estimates suggest that for years, Jackson has lost half or even more of its treated water. It was a well-known problem among the people who ran the utility. In 2012, an engineering firm warned that the rate of water loss was increasing. In 2016, a public works official estimated that Jackson was losing 40% of its water, according to a news story at the time.

Data from the city’s water plants indicates the situation may have been even worse. Between 2013 and 2022, Jackson’s water plants produced an average of about 45 million gallons of treated water a day. On a normal day, the city should require 18 to 20 million gallons, according to Ted Henifin, the head of JXN Water, the federally appointed management firm now running the city’s water system.

Because of widespread leaks underground, Jackson’s two water plants, including the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, had to produce much more water than the city should have needed. (Steve Helber/AP)

It wasn’t until after Henifin’s team took over the water system in 2022 that Terence Byrd, who managed one of the utility’s two water treatment plants for about five years, realized how those leaks contributed to the constant cycle of breakdowns and repairs at the plants. “Our plants were running into the ground,” said Byrd, who is now working for JXN Water, “because they were trying to pump against so many leaks in the system.”

Bill Miley, who was responsible for fixing those leaks when he served as utilities manager for the city of Jackson, said that work kept his ever-shrinking crews and hired contractors running nonstop. “I had enough to keep three crews busy near seven days a week,” he said.

The city experienced more than 7,300 breaks over a five-year period, according to the EPA inspector general, far above the industry benchmark. A former city official told federal employees that a single line break leaked 4 million to 5 million gallons a day — a total of 10 billion to 13 billion gallons from 2016 to 2022, according to the inspector general’s report. State inspectors, however, never flagged the frequent line breaks as a serious problem that warranted official corrective action.

Nor did they evaluate Jackson based on how much water it was losing. Their questionnaire asked only whether the city was tracking water loss at all and whether “acceptable” records were available for review. For all but two of 16 years, inspectors said Jackson’s records were fine.

The exception was in 2008 and 2009. The first year, inspectors noted that Jackson hadn’t provided acceptable records, which was considered a “significant deficiency,” and they told the city to respond with a plan to fix it. In 2009, state inspectors again noted the lack of records on their report. From 2010 on, MSDH’s inspection records show, the agency considered Jackson’s records acceptable.

Three current and former officials with Jackson’s water system told the news organizations that the inspection reports were wrong in calling the city’s water records acceptable. They explained that tracking water loss requires functional meters to measure how much water customers use. But in Jackson, the city’s water meters have been in a state of constant failure for at least the last decade. The city had no way to accurately calculate how much water it was losing, and officials knew it at the time.

In a written statement sent before the inspector general report was published, MSDH said that, under state law, there was nothing further the agency could have done to mandate that the records reflected reality. “There is no established and enforceable consequence of providing inaccurate water loss information,” the agency said. And there’s little chance that state lawmakers would grant the agency the authority to set a limit. The Legislature “is unlikely to support changing the regulatory environment for every public water system in the state as a result of Jackson and its specific lack of system maintenance,” MSDH officials said.

Inspectors eventually made note of Jackson’s water loss in their 2019 report, saying that city records showed that water loss was “around 50%.” The following two years, inspectors put it at more than 40%. Even then, Edney said MSDH had no authority to intervene because the state doesn’t have a limit on how much water a local utility can lose. “Maybe there needs to be,” he said.

The state’s limited approach to enforcement comes up repeatedly in the inspector general’s report. State employees overlooked some problems, and they didn’t consistently document others or escalate those that continued from year to year, inspector general staff wrote. When state employees did identify serious problems, they didn’t always notify the city and sometimes didn’t record them in an EPA database. As a result, the EPA didn’t know just how bad things were in Jackson.

A City That Couldn’t Count on the Water

The water system portrayed in the state’s inspection reports contrasted sharply with the experience of residents of Windsor Forest, a majority-Black neighborhood located far from the water plants and pumping stations.

For most of the six years that Paidra Evans has lived in the South Jackson neighborhood, she’s had trouble getting enough water to wash dishes or hose down her car. When the 2022 crisis hit, she was caring for her husband, a truck driver, as his health slowly declined. “A lot of times, when I had to bathe him on the bed, the water would be brown,” she said. “He couldn’t brush his teeth or anything. He said: ‘Baby, what is going on? Just let the water run, run, run, and then maybe it’ll get clear.’”

Paidra Evans lives in Windsor Forest, a neighborhood across the city from the water plants. That part of town experienced persistently low water pressure up until last year. (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press)

Her neighborhood “had been a focal point even before the crisis started,” JXN Water’s Byrd said. (As of October, JXN Water said it had transitioned the neighborhood to the city’s well system, alleviating these long-standing issues; Evans said her water pressure has improved.)

Miley, the city’s former utilities manager, was well aware of those problems. He said he knew something was wrong whenever he got a call from Merit Health Central. When the pressure dipped in the system, Merit would lose water above the fifth floor — a warning that others in the city weren’t getting water either.

Merit, which by 2015 was the only hospital in the city without its own water supply, eventually decided to pay $11,000 a month to park water trucks outside in case of an outage. The bill goes up to $10,000 per day when the hospital needs the water.

At the Henley-Young-Patton Juvenile Justice Center in South Jackson, every two months or so the water pressure would decline so severely that staff needed bottled water to cook and flush toilets, said Eddie Burnside, the facility’s operations manager. That started in 2018 and continued until at least 2023, he said.

In 2020, Hinds County installed a pump at the facility to draw water from the city’s pipes, Burnside said. But problems continued; Burnside said detainees drank bottled water when pressure dropped too low to trust what came out of the pipes.

Jordan Rae Hillman, JXN Water’s chief operating officer, confirmed in a written statement that pressure at Henley-Young dropped whenever there were significant line breaks anywhere in the city. She said it was a consequence of the facility’s relatively high elevation and the water system’s challenges in keeping the system pressurized.

Now, with the intervention of the federal government, pressure across the city has begun to increase. Melanie McMillan, Merit Health’s spokesperson, said the hospital has seen “tremendous improvement.”

That’s due to a drastic reduction in water loss, said Henifin, head of JXN Water. The city’s two plants now produce just 38 million gallons a day to meet demand, down from 55 million gallons a day last summer. “Great progress,” Henifin said; still, half of that water doesn’t make it to customers.

JXN Water has periodically monitored pressure outside Henley-Young, part of a new network of sensors across the city. The most recent measurement in February showed street-level pressure of 38 psi, just above what the guidelines recommended by the EPA say is the lower limit for normal pressure. Soon, a new jail nearby will provide well water, permanently freeing the juvenile facility from the city’s water service.

Though Mississippi regulators defended their oversight of the city’s water system, Edney acknowledged in two interviews that MSDH could do more to make sure communities have reliable, safe drinking water. When systems are out of compliance, the state will use the threat of fines to force water systems to make repairs, he said.

Kopocis, who headed the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama years, echoed water regulators in a few other states in saying that the gaps exposed by the Jackson water crisis extend beyond Mississippi. Most states do not have water quality laws that are stricter than the federal government’s. And regulators in several states said inspectors there focus on water plants, not pipes.

That means problems like Jackson’s may go undetected before a major failure. Robert Brownwood, who works for California’s water regulator, said Jackson is like Flint, Michigan — another struggling, majority-Black city that made headlines for a water crisis beginning in 2014. “As Flint was for lead,” he said, “Jackson is the poster child for distribution infrastructure and repair.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press.

Online abusers ‘shaming, silencing’ Fiji women journalists, say researchers

Pacific Media Watch — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 23:37:47 +0000

By Brooklyn Self, Queensland University of Technology

Gendered online violence is silencing women journalists in Fiji, says Pacific media scholar Dr Shailendra Singh.

The harmful trend involves unwanted private messages, hateful language and threats to reputation, often from anonymous sources.

The visibility of women journalists has made them frequent targets, while perpetrators can harness popular online platforms to shame or embarrass them in the public eye.

READ MORE: Other QUT Project reports

Dr Singh has dedicated extensive research to this dangerous phenomenon, including a 2022 study with Geraldine Panapasa and other colleagues from The University of South Pacific and Fiji Women’s Rights Movement.

The research found 83 percent of female Fijian journalists who completed their survey had experienced online harassment.

Significantly, the women journalists reported changes to their journalistic practice because of abuse, such as self-censoring their content or avoiding certain sources or stories.

The report on Prevalence and Impact of Sexual Harassment on Female Journalists found most of Fiji’s women journalists changed their reporting or social media habits because of online violence. Image: Shailendra Singh and Geraldine Panapasa/USP

“The aim is to embarrass female journalists into silence, or punish them for writing a report that someone did not like,” Dr Singh says.

The researchers said the valuable role of the Fourth Estate in protecting the public interest makes harassment of journalists a critical concern.

Eliminating the problem will need further action, as 40 per cent of the women journalists who responded said their employers had no systems in place for dealing with online violence.

Islands Business magazine manager Samantha Magick says her staff can come to her for support, but even so, harassment adds another barrier to attracting and keeping journalists in the industry.

“We’re competing with marketing, or competing with UN agencies that will snap up a great young communications officer after they’ve done a year in a newsroom, and pay them a lot more,” she says.

“The people who stick with the profession are either super passionate about it and willing to sacrifice certain things or are in a position where it can be viable for them.”

Fiji adopted its Online Safety Act in 2018, which bans harmful online communications and appoints the Online Safety Commission to investigate offences.

Fiji TV news editor Felix Chaudhary says journalists often do not report online abuse because of a lack of faith or awareness around reporting procedures.

“You can have the best laws, but if you aren’t able to enforce the law or have reporting mechanisms in place, then the laws are useless because they’re not going to serve their purpose,” he says.

A Pacific Media Conference 2024 lineup last month when online abuse and harassment was widely discussed by journalists and academics . . . Professor David Robie (clockwise from top left), Nalini Singh, Professor Emily Drew, Professor Cherian George, Irene Liu, conference chair Associate Professor Shailendra Singh and Indira Stewart. Image: USP Wansolwara

Until these mechanisms are developed, media employers should build a zero-tolerance workplace culture and establish their own protocols to deal with online violence, Chaudhary says.

“You get very clear from the beginning that you will not tolerate any form of harassment – abuse, verbal, written online,” he says. “So it’s very clear from the get-go that kind of behaviour is not accepted.”

There is a growing body of data to suggest women’s online safety is a critical concern across Fiji, with research from the Online Safety Commission revealing that 61.44 per cent of women in Fiji experienced cyberbullying in 2023.

Chaudhary says the online harassment of women journalists reflects ongoing issues for women that stem from the explosion of internet use in Fiji.

“Facebook, Twitter and Instagram gave people open territory to abuse anyone and everyone at will, whenever they wanted to.

“I think there should have been a lot of education on social media etiquette, what’s acceptable and what’s not,” he says.

Fijians can directly report online violence on social media platforms or lodge a complaint with the Fiji Online Safety Commission: https://osc.com.fj/

Brooklyn Self is a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This article is republished by Asia Pacific Report in collaboration with the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), QUT and The University of the South Pacific.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Islands Business: ‘Big picture’ style journalism is the future for media

Pacific Media Watch — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 07:23:50 +0000

By Dominique Meehan, Queensland University of Technology

In the expansive landscape of Pacific journalism, one magazine stands for unwavering command and unfiltered truth. Islands Business, with its roots deep beneath Fijian soil, is unafraid to be a voice for the Pacific in delivering forward-thinking analysis of current issues.

Established in Fiji’s capital, Suva, Islands Business has carved out a niche position since the 1970s and is now the longest surviving monthly magazine for the region.

With Fiji’s restrictive Media Industry Development Act (MIDA) only repealed in April 2023 following a change in government, the magazine can now publish analytical reporting without the risks it previously faced.

With a greater chance for these stories to shine, communities have a greater chance that their voices will be heard and shared.

Islands Business general manager Samantha Magick notes the importance of digging below the surface of issues and uncovering injustices with her work.

“I feel like that time where you have to be objective and somehow live above the reality of the world is gone,” Samantha says.

“Quite often I can go into a story thinking one thing and come out saying, ‘I was completely wrong about that.’

‘Objective openness’
“Maybe it’s about going in with an objective openness to hear things, but then saying at some point ‘we as a publication, platform or nation should take a position on this.’”

Magick provides the example of the climate change issue.

“Our position from the start was that climate change is real. We need to be talking about this, we need to be holding these discussions in our space,” she says.

“As long as you declare that this is our position and where we stand on it, why would I give a climate denier space? Because it’s going to sell more magazines or create more of a stir online? That’s not something that we believe in.”

Islands Business magazine frequently highlights social justice issues, including coverage of meetings between Solove’s cane farmers and the Ministry of Sugar Industry to address land lease expirations, the effects of drought on crop production and other concerns. Image: Islands Business/Facebook

Despite the magazine’s dedication to probing coverage of business and social issues, new waves of digital journalism continue to affect its reach.

With an abundance of free news readily available online, media outlets around the world have seen a significant reduction in demand for paid content, recent research shows.

Despite this being a global phenomenon, the impact appears to be harsher on smaller outlets such as Islands Business compared to large media corporations.

‘Younger people expect to not pay’
“Younger people expect to not pay for their media content, due to having so much access to online content,” Magick says.

“We need to be able to demonstrate the value of investigative reporting, big picture sort of reporting, not the day-to-day stuff, and to be able to do that, we need to be able to pay high quality reporters and train them up in future writing.”

Islands Business’s newest recruit, Prerna Priyanka, agrees that this very style of reporting attracted her to work for the publication.

“Their in-depth writing style was something new for me compared to other media outlets, so learning and adapting as a rookie journalist was something that drew me to work with them,” Prerna says.

Prerna notes she has some say over the topics she can cover and strives to incorporate important issues in her work.

“I believe it’s essential to shed light on pressing issues like gender equality and environmental sustainability, and I actively seek out opportunities to do so in my work,” she says.

As Islands Business looks forward, Samantha Magick aims to ensure the diverse Pacific voices remain centred in every discourse and are an active part of the magazine’s raw, unfiltered storytelling.

Dominique Meehan is a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This article is republished by Asia Pacific Report in collaboration with the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), QUT and The University of the South Pacific.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Should We Obey Bad Laws?

Kim Petersen — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 15:59:18 +0000

A guest on Judging Freedom, Dr Gilbert Doctorow, took a contrarian stance to Scott Ritter’s journalism work on Russia, which seemingly aligns Doctorow’s stance with the official government stance.

Doctorow accused Ritter (starting about 21:30) of stomping across redlines that any person familiar with Russia should have been aware of. Doctorow didn’t specifically state what any of these redlines might be.

He also accused Ritter of violating FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), albeit he conceded that was not for him to judge.

Says Doctorow,

My concern is [that] two generations of Americans have not understood the Cold War and how you behave in circumstances when you are backing the cause or at least sympathetic to the cause or even understanding the cause of an [US] adversary. How do you avoid becoming Tokyo Rose [as English-speaking female radio propagandists for Japan were called]?

In other words, Doctorow is accusing Ritter of being a (perhaps unwitting) propagandist for Russia as well as not knowing how to behave in certain circumstances. In other words, Doctorow (who has his academic credentials highlighted as “Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.”) comes across as questioning the intellectual rigor of Ritter.

An additional redline, according to Doctorow,

And, you do not accept payments of any kind, or of favors, like travel. That is air travel, hotels, and the rest of it. You do not touch that. If it is being offered to you by a country, by a foreign country, particularly a foreign country that is in such hostile relations with the United States. (23:50)

… Ritter has “exposed himself to [violating FARA] charges by admitting he received money from RT and so forth.” (29:45)

Such an argument is problematic for many reasons. According to Doctorow, any journalistic work with a hostile country must be unpaid. Journalism, for many, is a paying job. It is a means to be reimbursed for one’s time, effort, training, and skill. Yet Doctorow proffers that in certain circumstances a journalist should forgo payment.

If US authorities do not explicitly decree that journalism relaying the situation or views of a certain foreign country is prohibited, then how is one to know?

Besides, do Americans not have an inalienable right to know? Or is knowledge/information/data to be solely the prerogative of the US government to determine what citizens can be exposed to? Is gaining insight to what the other side is saying to be prohibited? Americans will just have to trust that their government knows best; for instance, that Viet Nam had fired missiles at US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, that Iraq had weapons-of-mass-destruction, that Syrian government forces had carried out chemical weapon attacks, that there is no genocide in Palestine.

Does the First Amendment in the US not protect freedom of speech and the press? Because if one has to pay to fly to Russia, pay for hotels, transportation, and meals in Russia, then only those with the means to self-finance such an endeavor are likely to provide information — with potential for bias from the well-to-do perspective. If reporting on Russia has to be done out of the pocket of a journalist, this sounds like a good way to censor journalism. It is censorship that limits the rights of those who want to work as a journalist and also denies the rights of readers/viewers of such journalism.

If it wasn’t largely for Ritter then how many people would have known about Iraq having been “fundamentally disarmed”? More recently, if not for Ritter, how many people would have heard that the Bucha massacre of scores of civilians blamed on Russia and reported as such by the stenographers in western monopoly media was a fabrication for killings carried out by Ukrainians?

People and the interests behind them seek to control information. They want to prevent certain information from reaching an audience and they’d like a certain narrative, even disinformation, to reach that audience.

If knowledge is power (not a corrupting power, it is hoped), then it should not be controlled by the already powerful, it should be a liberatory force to empower the masses.

Don’t Be a Yes Man

There are different types of contrarians depending on whether those who we are talking to are in agreement or disagreement.

We are encouraged to be critical thinkers. We are taught to value leadership. However, there is a type of person called a Yes Man (or Yes Woman). This is a weak person who always supports whoever is in a position of power, rightly or wrongly. Yes Men are dangerous.

There are plenty of bad laws on the books. One aphorism holds that laws are meant to be broken. This is too simplistic. But some bad laws should be broken and taken off the books.

Don’t follow bad leaders or bad laws. Ritter is a contrarian to the fetid state. He has the courage to oppose censorship, bad thinking, and following bad laws.

Image from fractal enlightenment.

The post Should We Obey Bad Laws? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Unions and Communities Should Have a Say in CHIPS Act Funding

Anibel Ferus-Comelo — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 20:06:54 +0000

Decisions about allocating the Act's billions in public subsidies are being made behind closed doors.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Anibel Ferus-Comelo.

Famine in Sudan: Activist Marine Alneel Says International Community Must Act

Democracy Now! — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 15:56:35 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Famine in Sudan: Activist Marine Alneel Says International Community Must Act

Democracy Now! — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 12:51:20 +0000

Senior United Nations officials are calling on the international community for help in getting humanitarian aid into Sudan after a famine was declared in at least one part of the Darfur region following 15 months of war between the Sudanese military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Officials say perhaps 26 million people are at risk from acute hunger, but Sudanese activist Marine Alneel warns that the true scope of the crisis could be much larger. “This is a continuous pattern in Sudan that catastrophes are always underreported, they’re underdocumented,” says Alneel, who adds that the world can’t wait for a settlement between the warring parties before acting. “What matters now is for people to eat, for people to live safely, and that is not going to happen through … the same ones who are killing us and causing us to starve.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Viral video of sexual act demonstrates failure of Instagram’s content moderation mechanism

Kalim Ahmed — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 08:29:08 +0000

Trigger Warning: Descriptions of Sexual Activity

An explicit video of two individuals indulging in penetrative sex has gone viral on Instagram and X.

The authors of this story came across the reel while scrolling through Instagram last week. It shows two young Indian men having a drink. Initially, the video appears typical, casually shot, and not intended to promote any product or service. However, as the video progresses, it shows one of them, whose face is blurred throughout the clip, losing or partially losing consciousness and the other, whose face is visible, taking the incapacitated man to another room and engaging in penetrative sex. The video graphically displays their naked bodies and genitalia during the act, throughout which the ‘victim’ is unconscious or barely conscious. The clip includes multiple cuts, which suggests that it has been edited to resemble a typical pornographic video.

Here are a few screenshots from the initial part of the video:

According to Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, even consensual sexual intercourse is considered rape if the consent is taken when one is intoxicated or incapacitated. It is also to be noted at the outset that one can not confirm whether the clip in question is a staged video or whether it shows an actual commission of a rape. Upon inspection, however, we found that the man whose face was visible in the clip was a creator/adult entertainer holding an account on the subscription-based content-sharing platform ‘OnlyFans’.

What is of deep concern from the point of view of platform accountability is that the video, which flouts Instagram’s community guidelines on several counts, was live for at least six days amassing nearly 7 million views and 2.4 million shares. Even more worrying is that it was uploaded three times by the same user without being flagged by the automatic moderation algorithm. While these have been removed, the video continues to be live on Instagram, uploaded by other users.

The community guidelines of Instagram state, “We know that there are times when people might want to share nude images that are artistic or creative in nature, but for a variety of reasons, we don’t allow nudity on Instagram. This includes photos, videos and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals and close-ups of fully nude buttocks.”

We reported the video using Instagram’s in-app reporting mechanism and it took the platform six days to remove all three videos.

Click to view slideshow.

At the time of this article being written, the video has been uploaded for the fourth time by the same account and continues to be live. It has also been uploaded by several other users on Instagram, one of which has 6.7 million views. A new Instagram account which had only this video on its timeline amassed close to 6,800 followers. We reported this particular video on July 25. It was no longer available at the time of this article being published, though we did not receive any notification from Instagram on the platform removing it. The same account subsequently shared another post which directed users to another account where the video was still live. Even spoof videos and skits made on the basis of the problematic clip are now doing the rounds on social media platforms. Besides, screenshots from the video have made their way into memes and have gone viral.

Click to view slideshow.

Besides, several accounts have been created using the suffix ‘Zucc’ in the user name just to amplify the video. These accounts are being tagged in comments on other posts so that more viewers can access the video. The username is a clever wordplay. In meme culture, when a page is disabled or deleted, it’s referred to as being ‘zucced’, where ‘zucced’ is an allusion to Zuckerberg. This essentially implies that the page was taken down owing to Meta’s moderation mechanism. Accounts with such usernames are often backup pages for content that is likely to be removed by Meta.

In March 2019, Meta introduced a technology to detect nude images and videos automatically. It said in an announcement, “When someone’s intimate images are shared without their permission it can be devastating. To protect victims, it’s long been our policy to remove non-consensual intimate images (sometimes referred to as revenge porn) when they’re reported to us — and in recent years we’ve used photo-matching technology to keep them from being re-shared… By using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can now proactively detect near nude images or videos that are shared without permission on Facebook and Instagram. This means we can find this content before anyone reports it…”

It is worrying to note that this particular video was not flagged for nudity at the server end when it was being uploaded multiple times.

According to Meta’s blog, it also uses a technology called SimSearchNet++, an image-matching model trained through self-supervised learning to match variations of an image with high precision and improved recall. This technology essentially helps in applying warning labels to duplicates of false claims and reduces their distribution. If Meta is using a similar technology for content moderation, the repeated upload of the video shows the ineffectiveness of that feature.

Also, Meta has introduced nudity protection in Instagram DMs, which blurs images identified as containing nudity and encourages people to think twice before sending nude pictures. The feature is designed to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs and from scammers. The number of shares of the video in question suggests that nudity protection either doesn’t work on this video or it isn’t designed to work on videos in general. We tested the feature on Instagram by sending this reel to a demo account and it didn’t get blurred. Nor were we shown any prompt about potential nudity. This shows that the nudity protection mechanism applicable to images doesn’t work on videos.

Alt News has written to Meta about this. The story will be updated once we receive a response. We also reached out to the OnlyFans creator several times but they refused to speak to us.

Possibility of Exposure to Minors

We came across this video on Instagram’s Reels section, where the social media platform has implemented an algorithm that presents users with videos posted from accounts they do not follow. More importantly, these algorithms are black boxes and can display content to users based on various factors, which are hard to determine. Instagram allows 13-year-olds to register for accounts on the platform and has introduced various parental control features in recent years. It is possible that the video came up/comes up in the timeline of a minor.

It is to be noted that a 2021 study commissioned by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights found that among 3,491 participating school-going children, many have accounts on major social networking apps/sites, among which Instagram (used by 45.50 per cent) and Facebook (used by 36.8 per cent) were the most popular.

Alt News spoke to a psychologist to understand the effects of exposure to such videos on a minor. Ananya Sinha, director and chief clinical psychologist at TherapHeal, said, “Exposure to such videos, portraying hardcore pornography containing abuse, rape or sexual manipulation or aggression, has a strong influence on adolescents’ sexually permissive attitudes. They tend to normalize sexual harm and aggression. We must remember, pornography is not only watched out of curiosity or pleasure, but sometimes acts as a source of information. If a video like this pops up on an adolescent’s timeline, they will start thinking that this is how sexual interaction is supposed to be”.

“On the other hand, when one unexpectedly gets exposed to such videos, they may leave a significant psychologically distressing impact on the viewer’s mind. Viewing such sexual violence could be traumatising and the associated fear and anxiety may stay with one for years. This is one reason why social media platforms have community guidelines. The existence of the video on the platform shows the abject failure of these,” she added.

We also spoke to an advocate practising in Delhi. She said, “Instagram not taking the video down for days is illegal and they should have faster turn-around time. They have stricter community guidelines than most other platforms. The reel depicts a non-consensual scene and should have been taken down immediately. Publishing or transmitting obscene material/ sexually explicit act in electronic form is punishable under section 67 of Information Technology Act, 2000.”

Meta Has Deprioritized Content Moderation

In the past, Meta has come under criticism for arbitrarily deleting/disabling entire accounts of erotic art creators and pole dancers It also disabled the account of a creator for featuring photos of them breastfeeding their child. It is also pertinent to note that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has deprioritized content moderation over the past year. It laid off nearly 200 content moderators in 2023. Additionally, more than 100 positions related to trust, integrity, and responsibility were reportedly abolished the same year. The moves came at a time when nearly 50 elections, affecting half the planet’s population, were scheduled for 2024.

Several media outlets have highlighted these while reporting on issues such as shrimp Jesus AI art, stolen AI-based images on Facebook, ads on Instagram selling drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, counterfeit money, weapons, and videos of minors doing sexual activity. Alt News, too, has written extensively on the failure of Meta’s content moderation, particularly in cases involving hate speech and depiction of violence.

Earlier this year, a police complaint filed in West Bengal had named Instagram as a co-accused in an offence under Section 12 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and Section 67 (B) of the Information Technology (IT) Act of 2000. Responding to media queries, a spokesperson from Meta had then said that they took action on “content that violates our Community Guidelines or when it violates local law.”

The story does not include usernames and links to prevent promotion of the video in any way.

Kalim Ahmed is an independent researcher and former fact-checking journalist at Alt News.

The post Viral video of sexual act demonstrates failure of Instagram’s content moderation mechanism appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

Americans With Disabilities Act and Unions Help Protect People with Long Covid

Newswire Editor — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 20:04:49 +0000

Today marks the 34th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which prohibits discrimination against disabled people in employment and public services. In a new analysis, CEPR Research Associate Hayley Brown explains that the pandemic leaves in its wake between 10 and 30 percent of those infected with Long COVID, many of them meeting the definition of disability covered by the ADA.

As we celebrate the ADA as a vital resource, it is limited in its ability to direct and foster the kinds of supportive work environments that would help those with Long COVID and other chronic illnesses thrive in their jobs. Although the ADA requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified workers with disabilities, employers and employees may not see eye-to-eye on what is reasonable.

Unions offer one possible remedy. Union representation carries a 17.7 percent wage premium for workers with disabilities and is associated with increased access to employer-sponsored health insurance, paid sick leave, and retirement coverage for disabled workers. In other words, unions can empower disabled workers on the job and hold employers accountable for workplace discrimination.

“Securing economic justice for workers with disabilities will require more than just the ADA,” says Brown. “Unions have an important role to play in advocating for the growing ranks of workers with disabilities.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Retired PNG military chief furious over ‘witchhunt’ charge for Capital Markets Act breach

APR editor — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:21:18 +0000

By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

A former Papua New Guinea army leader, Major-General Jerry Singirok, is furious after being arrested and charged under the Capital Markets Act.

He was a trustee of Melanesian Trustee Services Ltd, part of a superannuation agency with 20,000 unit holders, but its trustee licence was revoked last year.

General Singirok said the agency was already embroiled in legal action over that revocation and he said his arrest on Wednesday was aimed at undermining that action.

READ MORE: Other Jerry Singirok reports

He said Task Force Shield, which he said had been set up by Trades Minister Richard Maru, had made a series of allegations about the degree of oversight at Melanesian Trustee Services Ltd.

The Post-Courier reported that Singirok was released on 6000 kina (NZ$2700) bail.

“They said that we did not audit, [but] we got audited, annual audits for the past 10 years,” he said.

“They said we didn’t do that. [They claimed] we continued to function without consulting our unit holders, which is wrong.

“There is a list of complaints, and as I said, it is now going to be subjected to a court. What’s important is that they are using the Capital Markets Act to charge us.”

General Singirok said in a Facebook post that he had spent his entire life fighting for the rights of the ordinary people and he would clear his name after what he is calling a “witchhunt”.

He said he had been a member of the superannuation operator since 1989.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“This Is an Emergency, Laws Don’t Apply”

Joseph Essertier — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 21:26:53 +0000

The first chapter of Agamben’s The State of Exception (U. of Chicago, 2005) presents a brief outline of the history of the state of exception, including concrete examples from Nazi Germany, the U.S. (the Civil War and after 9/11), France, Switzerland, Italy, and England, roughly in that order. He explains that World War I was a “laboratory for testing and honing” systems for establishing states of exception, and that there was a “gradual expansion of the executive’s powers during the two world wars.” He quotes Walter Benjamin writing in 1942, that “the state of exception… has become the rule.”

Similarly, Matthew Marino, the Executive Editor of the University of Cincinnati Law Review, summed up the problem in the U.S. in March 2021:

Emergency powers have desirable features. As mentioned, Congress cannot act quickly in response to a crisis. Presidential authority has increased in most liberal democracies so presidents can effectively confront “a world besieged by complexity and crisis” that legislatures are ill-equipped to address. However, with more power vested exclusively in the President comes more potential for abuse of the emergency powers.

According to Marino, the National Emergencies Act (NEA) of 1976 was originally intended to hold back the executive branch, but “accountability and reporting provisions have not been vigorously enforced and therefore do not adequately restrain the President’s broad discretion under emergency statutes.” Congress members had “recognized that by refusing to terminate states of emergency, the President was retaining extraordinary power intended only for use during a genuine crisis.”

Marino adds that at that time, in 2021, the U.S. was under 40 ongoing states of emergency.

The NEA allowed President George W. Bush to declare a national emergency for the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and it allowed former President Trump to issue a “Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak” on 13 March 2020. These are two of the “national emergencies” that stand out, but we are now accustomed, in fact, to constantly living under national emergencies, which can also be categorized in Agamben’s terms as “states of exception.” And most U.S. citizens are not aware of this, how different life is for us, compared to generations long ago, such as those who lived during the 19th century.

Agamben explains that the Patriot Act that was issued by the U.S. Senate on 26 October 2001 had already allowed the Attorney General to take into custody any alien suspected of endangering our national security, but under that law, within one week, the alien had to be charged with a crime or let go. (State of Exception 1.3). On 13 November of that year, then President Bush issued a “military order” entitled “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism.”

But “in a 5-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled on June 29, 2006, that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees. The court ruled that the tribunals violate U.S. laws and the international Geneva Conventions.”

In Agamben’s estimation, what was new about Bush’s order was that it radically erased “any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.” (State of Exception 1.3). For Agamben the legal situation of Taliban members captured in Afghanistan was similar to that of Jews in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. With insights from the philosopher Judith Butler in mind, he writes that “bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy” in the situation of the detainee at Guantánamo. (State of Exception 1.3)

I have argued in previous essays (starting in March 2021) that the U.S. government has engaged in fearmongering in order to establish “states of exception,” increasingly since the 9/11 attack, including establishing such a state in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. In February of this year, I gave examples of how COVID-19 was being manipulated through a filter of censorship by the U.S. “national security state,” allowing them to exaggerate the danger posed by the virus, create a state of exception through our fear of it, and generate suspicion against anyone who would dare downplay the threat of the contagion or criticize the biosecurity industry.

The several years after 9/11 saw a huge expansion of the U.S. budget for biodefense. And to raise awareness about the trajectory that we are currently on, with respect to the ideologies surrounding biodefense, here I outline some of the legal changes that have facilitated biomedical “states of exception” and the growth and empowerment of the biodefense industry.

Emergency Use Authorization (EUAs)

Under these EUAs, it became OK during an emergency to resort to relatively risky medical interventions. In 2004, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act. This called for $5 billion for purchasing vaccines that would be used in the event of a bio terrorist attack. This opened the door to “EUAs,” and on 4 February 2020 the “HHS Secretary determined that there is a public health emergency that has a significant potential to affect national security or the health and security of United States citizens living abroad, and that involves the virus that causes COVID-19.” This legal emergency made it possible for many people to receive the new vaccines, even at the stage when there were doubts about safety and effectiveness. While these vaccines may have saved the lives of millions, some previously healthy people have actually suffered various injuries and harms, such as myocarditis. Surely very few knew, if any, about such risks when they consented to receive the vaccine. Such is the disadvantage of authorizing the use of vaccines that have not been thoroughly tested in clinical trials.

The 2005 PREP Act

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act was passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush in December 2005. This law was essential to establishing a new system of irresponsibility for vaccine manufacturers. “During a public health emergency, the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (“PREP Act”) gives immunity from lawsuits, for manufacturers, administrators and distributors of vaccines, as well as other qualified persons (i.e., healthcare and other providers) who prescribe, administer, or dispense countermeasures, unless they were acting with willful misconduct.” (Author’s italics. Of course, it would be difficult to prove willful misconduct in a court of law).

This PREP Act was a liability shield that protected manufacturers of “countermeasures.” It limited liability so that potentially life-saving countermeasures would be “efficiently developed, deployed, and administered.” (Author’s italics).

Kadlec and BARDA:

Following the introduction of those major laws in 2004 and 2005, the biodefense industry got a new law that facilitated the stockpiling of countermeasures in 2006. The Pandemics and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA, pronounced “Papa”) created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and established the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR) position. Former President Donald Trump nominated Robert Kadlec for this position and he held it from August 2017 to January 2021.

In the words of Paula Jardine, who has written about various aspects of the military approach to COVID-19, the “ASPR controls the national stockpile of smallpox and anthrax vaccines and other public health emergency medical equipment such as ventilators. During emergencies this Assistant Secretary [the ASPR] has expansive powers enabling him or her to act as the single point of control co-ordinating national response.”

Other Transaction Authority (OTAs)

In 2016, the definition of OTAs was changed such that prototypes of countermeasures could be deployed. Originally, OTAs were up in the 1990s to help DARPA promote basic research and acquire weapons. “DARPA” stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense. Tom Burghardt wrote in 2010 that they have “geek squads” working on “bizarre projects hatched in darkness.”

Apparently, the Pentagon “loosened regulations guiding the use” of OTAs for the COVID-19 health policies. And through an OTA the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer gained financial support from the U.S. government. The mass media has not really questioned, problematized, or debated whether we want the mechanism of OTAs to authorize risky products, even when anyone can see that Pfizer used that mechanism. Pfizer is clearly referenced in a judge’s written decision for a case in which an employee named Brook Jackson sued Pfizer. Jackson’s case was dismissed, but the judge wrote:

Defendants claim that “due to pandemic-related exigencies, the Project Agreement was not a standard federal procurement contract, but rather a “prototype” agreement… Such prototype agreements are executed under the DoD’s “Other Transaction Authority.”

Trial Site News explains the case in a clear and succinct way. Jackson claimed that “in the race to secure billions in federal funding and become the first to market, Defendants deliberately withheld crucial information from the United States that calls the safety and efficacy of their vaccine into question.” The Defendants included three companies, Pfizer, ICON, and Ventavia. Jackson had worked for Ventavia until she started to raise questions and blow the “whistle.” That’s when she was fired.

Turning the Switch

By 2020, all the legal machinery for the mRNA vaccine profit-taking was in place. On 31 January 2020, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared the novel coronavirus a public health emergency. Six weeks later, on 13 March 2020, Trump issued a “Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak.” He authorized assistance administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Five days later, he notified the FEMA Administrator that his agency would be in charge of the federal pandemic response effort.

That was a first. FEMA had never been in charge of a public health crisis before.

In fact, according to Debbie Lerman, the National Security Council (NSC), a “group of military and intelligence people who advise about war and terrorism,” rather than civilian medical doctors who advise about disease, were the ones in charge of COVID-19 policy. (See Figure 2, “US Government COVID-19 Coordination and Response,” on page 9 of “PanCAP Adapted U.S. Government COVID-19 Response Plan,” 13 March 2020). The NSC decided the policy, and FEMA implemented it. Although Dr. Fauci has recently been publicly grilled about COVID policy failures, in fact, it appears that the NSC should be investigated since they made the big decisions.

Conclusion

In early 2019, Elizabeth Goitein, author of a report entitled “The New Era of Secret Law,” warned about what then President Trump could do to our country, given the unfortunate state of our laws.

Like all emergency powers, the laws governing the conduct of war allow the president to engage in conduct that would be illegal during ordinary times. This conduct includes familiar incidents of war, such as the killing or indefinite detention of enemy soldiers. But the president can also take a host of other actions, both abroad and inside the United States. These laws vary dramatically in content and scope. Several of them authorize the president to make decisions about the size and composition of the armed forces that are usually left to Congress. Although such measures can offer needed flexibility at crucial moments, they are subject to misuse. For instance, George W. Bush leveraged the state of emergency after 9/11 to call hundreds of thousands of reservists and members of the National Guard into active duty in Iraq, for a war that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Other powers are chilling under any circumstances: Take a moment to consider that during a declared war or national emergency, the president can unilaterally suspend the law that bars government testing of biological and chemical agents on unwitting human subjects. (“In a Crisis, the President Can Invoke Extraordinary Authority. What Might Donald Trump Do With This Power?” The Atlantic Monthly 323:1, p. 42).

Well, thanks to the DNC’s short-sightedness, Trump will probably get four more years to test out those emergency powers, once again, as he did with his “business-government-military partnership” Operation Warp Speed. Many decades ago a liberal president, too, violated our constitution by invoking emergency powers, in his role as the Commander-in-Chief, when he issued Executive Order 9066 directing that all Japanese-Americans residing on the West Coast be placed into internment camps.

In Where Are We Now?, Agamben cites the philosopher before him Michel Foucault, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, to question and analyze contemporary biosecurity ideologies, with his idea that “biopolitics tends to morph into thanatopolitics” (a politics of death). (Section 17, “Law and life,” Where Are We Now?). Arguably, that is especially true under a state of exception that is manipulated by a military institution, such as the Pentagon. He underlines the fact that the “first case of legislation by means of which a state programmatically assumed for itself the care of its citizens was Nazi eugenics” (Section 17).

The post “This Is an Emergency, Laws Don’t Apply” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.

The Supreme Court Takes on the Administrative State

Ellen Brown — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 02:42:04 +0000

In a highly controversial decision, the Supreme Court on June 28 reversed a 40-year old ruling, reclaiming the Court’s role as interpreter of statutory law as it applies to a massive body of regulations imposed by federal agencies in such areas as the environment, workplace safety, public health and more.

The Court’s 6-3 conservative majority overturned a 1984 ruling, also issued by that Court’s conservative majority, that granted authority to a federal agency if a Congressional statute involving that agency was ambiguous or incomplete. It left the interpretation of the law to the agency rather than the courts.

This principle blocked individuals and businesses from suing agencies in court for damages incurred when the agencies exceeded their Congressional mandates.

“Chevron deference,” the name given the 1984 decision due to the litigation involving that company, has been grounds for upholding thousands of regulations by a host of federal agencies over the last four decades. Opinions by commentators on its reversal range from “an epic disaster, … one of the worst Supreme Court rulings … another huge gift to special interests and corporations,” to “a victory for the common man” and “an important win for accountability and predictability at a time when agencies are unleashing a tsunami of regulation — in many cases clearly exceeding their statutory authority ….”

On July 10, Reuters reported that House Republicans had asked all federal agencies to begin reviews of regulations that could be affected by the recent ruling, noting:

Three House committees — Agriculture, Oversight, and Education and Workforce — targeted agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Labor in what the chamber’s No. 2 Republican, Steve Scalise, called a “fight to free the American people from the power-hungry administrative state.”

The “administrative state” had modest beginnings during George Washington’s presidency, with the formation of the Defense, State, Treasury and Justice Departments. Today it has mushroomed into more than 400 agencies. For the 178 laws passed by Congress in 2020 alone, federal agencies issued an average of 19 rules and regulations for each law passed, for a total of 3,382 such rules. The Federal Register, a common measure of regulatory action, hit an all-time high 95,894 pages in 2016. That’s 75 times The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which contains 1280 pages.

The issues raised by the Chevron doctrine go back to the founding of the country and make for an interesting lesson in civics. But first a look at the fishing case that reversed it.

The Fishermen Who Challenged a Bureaucracy

On Jan.17, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two combined cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless, Inc v Department of Commerce, which would determine the fate of Chevron. On June 28, the Court ruled in favor of the fishermen plaintiffs in the Loper Bright case, rejecting the deference that courts have given federal agencies in cases where the law is unclear. The Court did not rule on the merits — the question whether the agency had exceeded its statutory authority. It just ruled on the judicial question whether Chevron blocked the case from proceeding. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Opinion of the Court, stated:

Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. …

Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA [Administrative Procedures Act] requires.

The case was therefore allowed to go forward in the lower D.C. District Court where it originated. Those proceedings are expected to begin this fall.

The plaintiffs are three New Jersey herring fishermen who challenge what they say is an unlawful requirement that forces them to surrender 20% of their earnings to pay at-sea monitors – individuals who gather information used to regulate their industry. The cost works out to as much as $700 a day, which can be more pay than the crews themselves take home.

The requirement was imposed on them by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which regulates the nation’s fisheries. The fishermen don’t contest that federal law allows the government to require at-sea monitors on their boats, but they argue that Congress never gave the executive branch authority to pass monitoring costs onto the fishermen. They contend that the NOAA abused its power, but they were handicapped by Chevron in fighting the rule.

“We are grateful the Court has overruled Chevron,” said Bill Bright, one of the fishermen plaintiffs. “Restoration of the separation of powers is a victory for small, family-run businesses like ours, whether they’re involved in fishing, farming or retail.”

Paul Clement, former U.S. Solicitor General and attorney for the fishermen, echoed that sentiment, stating, “We are gratified that the Court restored the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.” And that Constitutional mandate is what makes for an interesting civics lesson on the issues.

Designing a Republic with a Balanced Separation of Powers

The Founding Fathers were famously afraid of centralized power, and they designed the Constitution and Bill of Rights to avoid it. Power was balanced among separate branches of the government — watchers watching the watchdogs, with no one imperial controller.

In colonial America, judges were appointed and paid by the monarchy, receiving salaries that were raised from duties paid by the colonists. King George exercised sole authority to appoint colonial governors to represent the Crown’s interests. For legislative control, the monarchy possessed the powers of the purse and the sword, stationing soldiers in the colonies while requiring that colonists house, feed, and pay taxes for the soldiers’ imported supplies.

Today, many regulatory agencies have their own in-house court systems, which similarly serve as judge and jury. As Stone Washington with the Competitive Economic Institute, a nonprofit libertarian think tank, wrote:

The judicial branch is presumably an independent branch of government, alongside the legislative and executive branches. But many regulatory agencies have their own in-house court systems, called administrative law courts (ALCs). In ALCs, agencies choose their own judges, pay their salaries, and set the rules of procedure. Agencies rarely lose in their own courts. And their abuses to established constitutional norms have garnered the attention of federal courts in recent years especially in antitrust and securities law matters.

In administrative law courts, private litigants are deprived of basic constitutional privileges, including the right to trial by jury, freedom to petition a case before a Constitutional (Art. III) court, and equal application of justice under the law. Litigants who lose may or may not be granted the right to appeal to a federal court; but even if they succeed in getting on the appellate court docket, the process is lengthy and expensive, undemocratically excluding those who cannot afford the cost or the time to wait for a decision.

The New Jersey fishermen in the two herring boat cases were not required to go through the administrative law court system, but the result was the same: the agency made the rules and enforced them; and under “Chevron deference,” the plaintiffs were powerless to contest the outcome.

Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist that any irreconcilable differences between the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress were to be decided in favor of protecting the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. The power of judicial review was first asserted in the Supreme Court’s 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, recognizing the Constitution as the highest law in the land. Through judicial review, the Court reinforced that constitutional system by checking the power of other branches. Not just the administrative arm of the executive branch but the legislature itself could be restrained from passing legislation that violated the Constitution.

In 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to codify the procedure for executing administrative law. The APA provides that the “reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, [and] interpret… statutory provisions.”

It is that deviation from the constitutional system as codified in the APA that the Supreme Court intended to rectify. Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the dissenting opinion, stated that “the majority’s decision today will cause a massive shock to the legal system, ‘cast[ing] doubt on many settled constructions’ of statutes and threatening the interests of many parties who have relied on them for years.” But Justice Roberts made clear that prior decisions relying on Chevron were not automatically nullified but stood under stare decisis (to “stand by things decided”). The issues could be challenged in new cases, but the challenged rules had to be shown to exceed the mandate of Congress.

The Question of Corporate Capture

No doubt the floodgates to new cases will be opened, as other critics have stated; and it will be a major burden for the court system, which is already backlogged. But it is actually a democratic development. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explains on X:

The Chevron decision cuts both ways. The original ruling allowed agencies to function effectively, which they cannot if every interpretative gray area in the law requires a court decision. If the agency is working in the public interest, we definitely want it to exercise broad interpretive leeway. For instance, almost every important environmental decision in federal court over the past 40 years is based upon Chevron. Without it, the EPA (not an entirely captured agency) is virtually powerless. But when corporate interests have captured a federal agency, then the same interpretive leeway gives the agency even more power to serve their corporate masters at the expense of the public interest. Thus we have the FDA sending armed police to shut down Amish farmers and grocery stores for selling raw milk, while they allow into our food supply hundreds of harmful but profitable chemical additives that are banned in other countries. The Chevron controversy is therefore a false dilemma with no solution. The real issue is corporate capture. If federal agencies served the public interest, then no one would want to hamstring them.

Although critics say the ruling is a boon to corporations, it is the agencies themselves that are notoriously susceptible to “corporate capture.” As explained in Investopedia:

Regulatory capture is a process by which regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be scrutinizing.

It is that sort of corporate capture that Chevron deference protected from the reach of the courts, and that the Supreme Court’s latest ruling has opened to private challenge. The APA tells agencies they cannot act illegally, arbitrarily, or without letting the public meaningfully participate in the creation of new rules. Many agency rules are now vulnerable to judicial review for violating those standards.

Agency Overreach: Some Areas of Vulnerability

Technically, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the Treasury, the State Department, the IRS and even the Defense Department are agencies falling under the Administrative Procedure Act and its rules. Even those secretive, non-transparent, unaccountable intelligence agencies sometimes called the “deep state” could be subject to APA review. But as detailed in a Vanderbilt Law School article titled “The Politics of Deference,” “national security” has its own special deference under separate case law, so it probably cannot be reached.

The more likely initial targets will be agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

MSNBC experts expect electric vehicles to be most at risk. A Reuters article titled “Biden Tailpipe Emission Rules on Shakier Ground after Supreme Court Ruling” explains, “That’s because the rules target mobile sources of greenhouse gas rather than stationary ones like power plants, even though environmental laws are ambiguous on whether regulators have the mandate to do that.” Another expert says the controversial tailpipe regulations “will eliminate most new gas cars and traditional hybrids from the U.S. market in less than a decade.”

Steve Forbes argues that Congress would not have passed such a prohibition because of intense public opposition, so it got kicked over to the EPA, which was thought to be untouchable under Chevron. But Chevron deference is no more. On July 3, 26 states filed suit against the Administration over EV mandates. The Petition for Review states, “the final rule exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and otherwise is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law.”

Other agency regulations expected to be the subject of lawsuits include the SEC’s imposition of civil penalties without the benefit of a jury trial, and FDA and CDC regulations involving vaccines, pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements.

The administrative law system does not follow constitutional principles, which it must if it is ruling on regulations having the force of law. Removing some of the arbitrary red tape hampering small business, local politicians, schools and families by holding administrative regulations up to Constitutional standards can not only stimulate economic productivity and lower inflation and taxes but can help restore the system of checks and balances so important to our country’s founders.

• This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com.

The post The Supreme Court Takes on the Administrative State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ellen Brown.

Dear Democratic Party: Clean Up Your Act for the Planet

Ilana Cohen — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 20:03:49 +0000

Democrats need to put forward a candidate who will champion bold climate action.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Ilana Cohen.

The American Enabling Act

Stephen F. Eisenman – Sue Coe — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 05:57:29 +0000

Illustration by Sue Coe.

Art by Sue Coe.

A fascist revival

The following lines, from a sermon delivered at Riverside Church in 1938, were resurrected after the election of Trump in 2016: “When and if fascism comes to America, it will not be labelled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’.” Trump and his minions proclaimed, “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Charles Lindbergh not Hitler was their avatar, though the former of course admired the latter. Tucker Carlson on Fox News was Trump’s unofficial media spokesman; he didn’t need to employ his own Goebbels.

But recent developments suggests that pre-war Germany may after all turn out to be the ursprung of the emergent American fascism. Instead of Jews and Roma, immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, Haiti and the Middle East are the “vermin,” according to candidate Trump, “poisoning the blood” of the American body politic. And in place of the enfeebled, 86-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg clearing the path for Hitler’s elevation, it’s the frail, 82-year old President Joe Biden allowing Trump’s-re-ascension. History doesn’t repeat itself, the saying goes, but sometimes it rhymes.

How Hitler came to power

Hitler’s ultimate rise to power was the result neither of a popular vote nor a coup, but an “Enabling Act,” or more precisely, “The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich.” The legislation submitted to the German Reichstag (parliament) on March 23, 1933, enabled Hitler and his cabinet to 1) make laws without participation of the Reichstag; 2) enact measures that violated the German constitution; 3) implement new laws immediately; 4) allow the government to make foreign treaties without input from the Reichstag; and 5) sunset the act after four years.

Hitler and his cabinet took no chances on its passage. They surrounded the Reichstag and filled its galleries with angry and armed stormtroopers (“brownshirts”); arrested or barred members of the opposition German Communist Party; and threatened vacillating legislators from the Center Party. The only remaining voice of opposition belonged to Otto Wels, head of the Social Democrats (SPD), the former governing party of the Weimar Republic. His speech was greeted with jeers and epithets:

“After the persecutions that the Social Democratic Party has suffered recently, no one will reasonably demand or expect that it vote for the Enabling Act proposed here. …Never before, since there has been a German Reichstag, has the control of public affairs by the elected representatives of the people been eliminated to such an extent as is happening now, and is supposed to happen even more through the new Enabling Act….But we stand by the principles enshrined in [our Constitution], the principles of a state based on the rule of law, of equal rights, of social justice…. We greet the persecuted and the oppressed.”

The Enabling Act easily gathered the required 2/3 vote, and Wels quickly fled the country. On July 12, Goebbels gloated: “SPD dissolved. We won’t have long to wait for the total state.” A day later, all non-Nazi political parties were banned, and the stiff armed Hitlergruß and “Heil Hitler” greeting were made mandatory for state employees.

The Enabling Act gave Hitler carte blanche to assume dictatorial powers. He banned opposition parties; forced trade unions to bend to his will; intimidated, jailed or murdered dissidents; established concentration camps; implemented harsh sanction on the nation’s Jews; forged alliances with the other European fascist powers, notably Italy and Spain; and undertook a massive program of rearmament. Six years later, Hitler would use his absolute authority to invade Poland, start the war in Europe, and perpetrate the genocide of Jews, Roma, queers, and others. The Enabling Act was renewed every four years and only expired with the demise of the Reich in 1945.

A majority of the U.S. Supreme Court gives Trump the Hitler salute

The Supreme Court of the United States two weeks ago passed its own enabling act, a virtual “Sieg Heil” to Donald Trump. In a case called United States v. Donald Trump, they agreed with the accused that the U.S. Constitution confers upon presidents near complete immunity from prosecution. Like a Roman emperor, he is legibus solutus, above the law.

The case arose from charges that Trump, following the November 2020 election, engaged in election interference by coercing the U.S. justice Department, supporting the establishment of fake, state electors, and encouraging a mob to storm the U.S. Congress to stop the electoral count. After a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ex-president lacked immunity from criminal prosecution, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices heard oral arguments on April 24, 2024, and issued their ruling on July 1, 2024, the final day of the term. Their dilatoriness all but ensured the case would not go to trial before the November election.

The six, conservative justices – Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Gorsuch — concluded that presidents enjoyed absolute immunity from prosecution for official , executive branch acts such as pardons, military command, immigration, and implementation of the laws. They also had “presumptive immunity” for all other, unspecified acts within the “outer perimeter” of presidential responsibilities. Only unofficial actions, also unspecified, were subject to criminal prosecution. Thus, in the case at hand, Trump was immune from prosecution for attempting to force the U.S. Department of Justice to interfere in the election because those communications were official acts. His calls to Mike Pence to fraudulently reject the election results were immune from prosecution since presidents are conducting official work when they discuss with vice presidents their respective responsibilities. Consideration of the president’s motives for an official act were also barred. Thus, it made no difference at all to the conservative justices that the capital rioters, with Trump’s blessing, proposed to lynch Mike Pence.

The king’s two bodies

The Court’s specific arguments, no less than their constitutional bases, are risible. When candidate Trump plots to overturn election results, he can be prosecuted. But when President Trump outlines the plot in an email to his Attorney General, the evidence is inadmissible. When the candidate urges the January 6 mob to storm the capital and halt the electoral count, he can be indicted. But when the president conveys that message in a speech or text message, the evidence is excluded because “most of a president’s public communications are likely to fall within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities.”

According to medieval, political theology, the king has two bodies, one mortal, the other immortal, thus “The kings is dead. Long live the king!” The Supreme Court has endowed the U.S. presidency with two bodies, one subject to law the other not. The candidate is mortal, the president divine, but the latter they conclude, always supersedes the former.

The U.S. Constitution, the putative basis of Supreme Court rulings, says otherwise. Its authors were a disputatious lot, but they uniformly agreed that the president was not a king and must be subject to the law. Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers that “the president would be amenable to personal punishment and disgrace.” Article 1, sec. 6, clause 10 of the Constitution grants U.S. Senators and Representatives immunity from prosecution only during their congressional attendance and transportation to and from Congress (a lengthy process in the late 18^th Century). But even that immunity is partial. They can still be prosecuted for “treason, felony, or breach of the peace” – a capacious exception! Nowhere in the Constitution is the president granted even limited immunity.

At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison briefly raised the question of presidential immunity, but his colleagues balked. State ratifying conventions instead endorsed the idea that the U.S. president could, as one delegate wrote: “be proceeded against like any other man in the ordinary course of law.” Indeed, the whole point of the American Revolution was to dispense with the rule of a king. The colonists’ chief grievance against “the present king of Great Britain” was that he demonstrated a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” the result of which was “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States….He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

Article 1 (section 3, clause 7 ) of the Constitution specifically mentions the president’s potential, criminal culpability: “Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law . The six justices agreed that the clause does not mean a president must be impeached and convicted before being charged with a crime. But even if he is convicted, he still may not be charged with a crime for any official act!

Three Supreme Court justices — Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson — wrote in dissent of the majority opinion. They pulled no punches:

“Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Order the Navy’s Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold power? Immune. Take a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune….In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

The question now is whether Sotomayor’s dissent will be a rallying cry that helps stop Donald Trump from once more assuming the presidency, or an epitaph for democracy, like the one issued by Otto Wels in 1933. The Supreme Court has issued its Enabling Act, and an avowed dictator is waiting to use it.

The post The American Enabling Act appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen F. Eisenman – Sue Coe.

Progressive Caucus Chair Condemns Supreme Court Ruling Gutting 40-Year Legal Precedent for Federal Protections to Benefit Large Corporations; Urges Congress to Pass Stop Corporate Capture Act to Codify Chevron Deference

Newswire Editor — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 17:06:59 +0000

Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, issued the following statement in response to the Supreme Court’s rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce:

“Today’s decision by an extremist Supreme Court eviscerates four decades of legal precedent that protects Americans’ rights to clean air and water, safe workplaces, and healthcare by preventing the dedicated civil-servant experts who staff our federal agencies from implementing the laws enacted by Congress. This dangerous ruling overturns a unanimous Supreme Court determination, known as Chevron deference, that recognizes that judges are not policy experts and that it is entirely appropriate for knowledgeable regulatory agencies to respond effectively to protect Americans.

“That is why Congress must immediately pass my Stop Corporate Capture Act, the only bill that codifies Chevron deference, strengthens the federal-agency rulemaking process, and ensures that rulemaking is guided by the public interest–not what’s good for wealthy corporations.

“Today’s ruling creates massive uncertainty around the ability of the Executive Branch to fulfill its constitutional obligation to enforce our laws and casts doubt on the protections Americans depend on for a safe environment, financial markets, food products, prescription drugs, enforcement of our civil rights, and much more. It empowers the very same Supreme Court that struck down abortion rights to make far-reaching policy decisions.

“Make no mistake: this is the outcome of a multi-decade crusade by big business and rightwing extremists to gut federal agencies tasked with protecting Americans’ health and safety to instead benefit corporations aiming to dismantle regulations and boost their profits.

“In addition to passing my bill to codify Chevron deference, we must also enact sweeping oversight measures to rein in corruption and billionaire influence at the Supreme Court, whose far-right extremist majority routinely flouts basic ethics, throws out precedent, and legislates from the bench to benefit the wealthiest and most powerful.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Some Surprises in the No Surprises Act

by T. Christian Miller — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

by T. Christian Miller

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In 2020, Congress passed the No Surprises Act to protect patients from exorbitant medical bills that had burdened Americans with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The law was designed to decrease the charges for patients treated by an out-of-network doctor during medical emergencies. Such ER visits often left people vulnerable to so-called surprise bills, in which their insurer would only pay a portion of the expensive treatment.

One of the biggest health care reforms since Obamacare, the No Surprises Act appears to have worked in one important sense. Patients have reported fewer crippling bills. Although little hard data exists, an insurance industry survey found that consumers avoided some 10 million surprise bills in the first nine months of 2023. A think tank report also suggests that people are paying less for the care they receive in the ER and other medical situations covered by the law, such as air ambulance trips.

But a cumbersome government system to resolve payment disputes between doctors and insurers now threatens to undermine the law’s promise, according to interviews with industry players, recent data analyses and government documents.

One potential outcome: higher insurance premiums for everyone.

Another: fewer physicians available to treat rural populations.

Doctors said that insurance companies have been abusing the system to lower payments, stiff medical practices and kick physicians out of their networks.

“I’m trying to think of a polite word to describe the experience, but it has been just chaotic and inefficient,” said Dr. Andrea Brault, the head of the Emergency Department Practice Management Association, a physicians’ trade group. “It’s a costly, lengthy process.”

Insurers, however, charged that big physician groups — some of them owned by private equity investors — are trying to manipulate the process to squeeze out higher payments. “A small but significant number of bad actors” have flooded the system with cases “as a way to maximize revenue,” said Kelly Parsons, a spokesperson for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. “Should this trend continue, health care costs are likely to rise unnecessarily.”

An official at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said the rising number of disputes was a byproduct of the law’s success.

“The No Surprises Act is protecting millions of patients from surprise medical bills when they experience an emergency or get care from an out-of-network provider at an in-network facility,” said Jeff Wu, the deputy director of policy of CMS’ Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. “The incredibly large volume of disputes submitted since the law’s surprise billing protections became effective demonstrates the need for this law.”

For decades, private insurance customers had to worry about receiving giant bills from using out-of-network doctors, who typically charge more for services. This was especially true when they had to go to an emergency room, where people have little ability to choose which doctor or hospital to treat them. The No Surprises Act aimed to fix the problem by protecting ER patients so that they would get billed essentially the same as if they received care from in-network physicians and hospitals.

The law radically changed the dynamics of billing disputes. “Before the No Surprises Act, you had doctors and physicians fighting, with patients stuck in the middle. Now you just have doctors and insurers fighting,” said Zack Cooper, a professor of public health and economics at Yale whose research helped shape the law.

Under the law, out-of-network doctors or hospitals invoice insurers, which counter with their own offer. Some 80% of claims are resolved this way, according to the survey conducted by the insurance trade groups.

But when the two sides can’t agree, they go to battle in a system created by the CMS and other government agencies. There, an independent arbiter weighs various factors and determines the final payment amount. This arbitration is at the heart of many of the law’s unintended consequences.

Originally, the government estimated there would be about 17,000 cases a year. But in 2023, almost 680,000 were filed, according to data released in June. The result is an enormous backlog that has slowed payments to doctors, hospitals and medical groups. Decisions are supposed to take 30 days. Since 2022, however, more than half of the cases remain unresolved. Some have lasted more than nine months. Wu said that arbiters have “scaled up their operations” to reduce the delays.

In addition, the law has been challenged repeatedly in court — health care provider associations and air ambulance groups have filed nearly 20 lawsuits involving the No Surprises Act, according to legal experts at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Two cases have overturned the initial CMS guidelines governing the arbitration. The agency has been forced to make numerous adjustments to the process that have contributed to the long delays.

The most heated debate over the dispute system surrounds the payment and enforcement of arbiters’ decisions.

Federal health officials at first thought that the law would help lower the cost of medical care. Instead, arbiters have awarded higher amounts to doctors and other providers than expected — potentially driving up insurance premiums.

“The most likely outcome is that this law doesn’t save consumers on net and potentially pushes in the opposite direction,” said Loren Adler, a researcher at the Center on Health Policy at Brookings, which issued a recent study on the possibility.

While the amounts are higher than expected, they remain lower than what doctors’ groups have billed. Doctors charge that insurance companies are submitting artificially low payment amounts. As proof, they point to data from June that shows arbiters rule in favor of doctors the vast majority of the time.

Still, overall, providers have seen nearly a 40% decrease in reimbursements since the law took effect in 2022, according to a recent survey by the emergency physicians trade group. At least one doctors’ group, Envision Healthcare, mentioned the No Surprises Act as one of the reasons it filed for bankruptcy. (The company has since emerged from court oversight.)

If revenue decreases continue, some doctors’ groups may have to cut back on services. This would most likely be felt in rural hospitals, which often operate with thin profit margins and already have difficulty recruiting ER doctors. “This is threatening to the sustainability of many, many practices,” said Randy Pilgrim, the enterprise chief medical officer for SCP Health, which provides doctors to emergency rooms across the country. “There have been few practices in the over 30 states where we operate that haven’t been affected by this.”

Doctors have also said that insurance companies are making late or incomplete payments after decisions by the arbiter. Complaints to CMS have been ignored, doctors said. Wu, the CMS official, said the agency actively investigates complaints under its jurisdiction.

It is also not clear whether courts can force an insurance company to pay. Pilgrim said his company had submitted almost 75,000 letters to insurance companies pleading for reimbursements after winning an arbitration decision.

“There’s very little teeth” in the process, he said. “You just continue to plead your case and hope you get somewhere.”

Do You Have Insights Into Dental and Health Insurance Denials? Help Us Report on the System.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by T. Christian Miller.

Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable

Binoy Kampmark — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 06:43:07 +0000

The WikiLeaks project was always going to put various noses out of joint in the journalistic profession. Soaked and blighted by sloth, easily bought, perennially envious, a good number of the Fourth Estate have always preferred to remain uncritical of power and sympathetic to its brutal exercise. For those reasons, the views of Thomas Carlyle, quoting the opinion of Edward Burke in his May 1840 lecture that “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” seem quaintly misplaced, certainly in a modern context.

The media response to the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from his scandalous captivity after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the US Espionage Act of 1917 provides a fascinating insight into a ghastly, craven and sycophantic tendency all too common among the plodding hacks.

Take, for instance, any number of journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, official national broadcaster and devotee of the safe middle line. One, a breakfast news anchor for the network’s meandering twenty-four-hour service, has a rather blotted record of glee regarding the mistreatment of Assange over the years.

Michael Rowland, torturously insipid and ponderously humourless, had expressed his inexpressible joy when the Ecuadorian government cut off Assange’s access to the Internet while confined to the country’s London embassy. “A big gold star to Ecuador,” he chirped on March 28, 2018. Andrew Fowler, another journalist and far more seasoned on the rise of WikiLeaks, reproached Rowland on Twitter, as the X platform was then called. “Why would silencing a fellow journalist be supported?” For Rowland, the matter was as clear as day. “That remains a disputed opinion, Andrew. Publisher and activist yes. But you put yourself in a small camp calling him a journalist.”

These points matter, because they go to the central libelling strategy of the US government’s prosecution so casually embraced by mainstream outlets. In such a generated smokescreen, crimes can be concealed, and the revealers shown to be those of bad faith. Labels can be used to partition truth, if not obscure it altogether: a publisher-activist is to be regarded more dimly than the establishment approved journalist.

The point was rather well made by Antony Loewenstein, himself an independent journalist keen to ferret out the grainier details of abusive power. When interviewed by none other than Rowland himself, he explained, with unflagging patience, the reasons why Assange and Wikileaks are so reviled by the orthodox scribblers of the Fourth Estate. WikiLeaks, he stated with salience, had confronted power, not succumbed to it.

Rowland could only reiterate the standard line that Assange had admitted guilt for a “very serious offence”, refusing to examine the reasons for doing so, or the implications of it. Again, the vulgar line that Assange had “put US lives at risk” with the WikiLeaks disclosures was trotted out like an ill-fed nag. Again, Loewenstein had to remind Rowland that there was no evidence that any lives had been exposed to harm, a point made in several studies on the subject from the Pentagon to the Australian Defence Department.

The tendency is pestilential. While more guarded in his current iteration as a professor of journalism, Peter Greste, formerly a journalist for Al Jazeera, was previously dismissive in the Sydney Morning Herald of Assange’s contributions as he was brutally evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. “To be clear, Julian Assange is no journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.” An organisation boasting “the libertarian idea of radical transparency” was “a separate issue altogether from press freedom.”

While approving the publishing activities centred on the release of the Collateral Murder video showing the killing of civilians including two Reuters journalists by Apache helicopters, and the release of the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs and “Cablegate”, Greste fell for the canard that the publisher did not redact names in documents to “protect the innocent” by dumping “them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or their impact they might have had.”

There is no mention of the decrypting key carelessly included in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by its bumbling authors David Leigh and Luke Harding, or the fact that the website Cryptome was the first to publish the unredacted files ahead of WikiLeaks. There is certainly no discussion of the extensive redacting efforts Assange had made, as many of his collaborators testify to, prior to the release in November 2010.

Writing on June 25 in The Conversation, Greste displays the emetic plumage of someone who has done an about face. “It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release,” he writes distastefully, also reflecting on his own carceral experiences in an Egyptian prison cell. He also claims that the role of WikiLeaks, in checking “the awesome power that governments wield”, should be celebrated, while stating, weakly, that he never believed that Assange should “have been charged with espionage.”

In such shifting views, we see wounded egos, cravenness, and the concerns about an estate whose walls had been breached by a usurping, industrious publisher. By all means use the spoils from Assange and his leakers, even while snorting about how they were obtained. Publish and write about them in the hope of getting a press award. Never, however, admit that Assange is himself a journalist with more journalism awards than many have had hot dinners. In this grotesque reality, we are now saddled with a terrifying precedent: the global application of a US espionage statute endangering journalists and publishers who would dare discuss and run material on Washington’s national security.

The post Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Does the video show a US lawmaker outraged over the Antisemitism Awareness Act?

By Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 04:41:33 +0000

A video of an American legislator yelling in outrage emerged in social media posts that claim it shows the lawmaker was angry about the recent passage of the Antisemitism Awareness Act by the U.S. House of Representatives.

But the claim is false. The video, taken from 2012 footage, shows the-Illinois House of Representatives member and current Illinois Republican congressman Mike Bost criticizing a reform plan for social security.

The video was shared on X by Chinese diplomat Zhang Heqing on June 8, 2024.

“It looks like he is angry,” Zhang said in the post.

The 44-second video shows a man dressed in a suit shouting in outrage at what appears to be a meeting of the U.S. House.

“The U.S. putting out this act about the Jews is a shameful disgrace,” a superimposed caption in Chinese reads.

Chinese diplomat Zhang Heqing circulated a video claiming that a U.S. legislator lost his temper and publicly went off on the recent Antisemitism Awareness Act passed by the House of Representatives. (Screenshot/X)

The House passed a bipartisan bill, Antisemitism Awareness Act, on May 1 to combat antisemitism as pro-Palestinian protests roil colleges across the U.S.

The bill would mandate that the Education Department adopt the broad definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental group, to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The group defines antisemitism as a “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”

It adds that “rhetorical and physical manifestations” of antisemitism include such things as calling for the killing or harming of Jews or holding Jews collectively responsible for actions taken by Israel.

The video had previously been shared by other Chinese influencers on social media platforms such as Douyin, Weibo and X.

Some online users commented that even “U.S. lawmakers have grown fed up with U.S. support of Israel and the Jewish community” citing the video.

But the claim is false.

Old video

A reverse image search found the video published in a report by the American broadcaster CBS on May 30, 2012.

“IL Rep. Mike Bost Is Furious Over Pension Reforms by Steve Lehocky on YouTube,” the caption of the video reads.

The report details the Democrat-led plan to overhaul the state pension system.

Both the figures and scene from the footage of Bost in 2012 (top) matches the recent footage Chinese netizens purportedly claim shows a legislator’s outburst over the Antisemitism Awareness Act. (Screenshots /CNN and X)

“A downstate lawmaker screamed, yelled and threw papers Tuesday, as he expressed frustration about the Democrat-led plan to overhaul the state pension system,” the report reads in part.

“One of those lawmakers is Rep. Mike Bost (R-Murphysboro), who launched into a tirade Tuesday as he complained about the amount of power Madigan wields.”

Bost on the Antisemitism Awareness Act

Bost did not speak at all during the near hour long House deliberation on the Antisemitism Awareness Act broadcast by CSPAN on May 1.

The act eventually passed the House by a vote of 320 in favor, 91 against and 18 abstentions, with Bost officially recorded as voting for the act.

While legislators from both parties openly opposed the bill, none of them expressed their disagreement in emotional language or exaggerated movements during the proceedings.

The act awaits approval by the Senate before it can be sent to the president to be signed into law.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

CPJ welcomes reports that Assange will be released in plea deal

Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 01:33:04 +0000

New York, June 24, 2024— The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes reports that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be freed from prison in a plea deal with the United States Justice Department.

“Julian Assange faced a prosecution that had grave implications for journalists and press freedom worldwide,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “While we welcome the end of his detention, the U.S.’s pursuit of Assange has set a harmful legal precedent by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers. This should never have been the case.”

According to news reports, Assange is expected to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information.

Assange is expected to return to his native Australia once the plea deal is finalized in federal court in the Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific.

Assange was indicted on 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in relation to WikiLeaks publication of classified material, including the Iraq War logs. If convicted under these charges, he would have faced up to 175 years in prison.

CPJ has long opposed U.S. attempts to prosecute Assange and campaigned for his release jointly with other organizations.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

Former MP slams National’s stance on Samoa citizenship bill

APR editor — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:28:09 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

A former National Party Member of Parliament says his late party looked “like dickheads” not supporting the first reading of a bill that would restore New Zealand citizenship to a group of Samoans and is hoping they will change tune.

Anae Arthur Anae told RNZ Pacific it “was outright racism” that National did not back Green Party Member of Parliament Teanau Tuiono’s Restoring Citizenship Removed by Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill.

National was the only party to not support it, citing “legal complexity” as the issue.

Minister for Pacific Peoples Dr Shane Reti declined an interview with RNZ Pacific.

In 1982, the Privy Council ruled that because those born in Western Samoa were treated by New Zealand law as “natural-born British subjects”, they were entitled to New Zealand citizenship when it was first created in 1948.

Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono speaks during the First Reading of his Member’s Bill, the Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill. Image: Johnny Blades/RNZ

However, the National Party-led government under Robert Muldoon took that away with the Western Samoa Citizenship Act 1982, effectively overturning the Privy Council ruling.

Tuiono’s bill aims to restore the right of citizenship to those who had it removed.

25,000 submissions
Public submissions have closed and the Governance and Administration Committee received almost 25,000 submissions.

NZ First leader Winston Peters has told Pacific Media Network he intended to continue to back it, if he does, it will likely become law.

Anae said if National continued to “slag it” during the process they would keep making themselves look stupid.

“Not only in New Zealand but internationally and on the human rights issues. They have put themselves in a serious situation here and they really have to get this right.

“I’m hoping and praying that they will see the light and say, ‘look, enough is enough, we’ve got to sort this thing out now’.”

Anae said the world had grown out of the racism he knew as a child and it was time for New Zealand to follow suit.

“Who would have ever imagined the day when the key positions in the UK of Prime Minister, Mayor of London, all senior positions across the Great Britain, would be held by the children of migrants.

“Time has changed, we’ve got to wake up to it.”

Hearings to begin
Hearings will be held in-person and on Zoom in Wellington on Monday, Wednesday and July 9.

There will also be hearings held in South Auckland on July 1.

Anae said about 10,000 of the submissions came from Samoa and there was a request for a hearing to be held there also.

“Everybody in Parliament right now is under huge pressure with the budget discussions that have been going on, so I do have my sympathies understanding the situation.

“But at the same time this thing is one of the most important thing in the lives of Samoan people and we want it to be treated that way.”

He said almost all the public submissions would be in support of the bill. He said in Samoa, where he was three weeks ago, the support was unanimous.

But he said Samoa’s government was being diplomatic.

‘Sitting on fence’
“They do not want to upset New Zealand in any way by seeing to be siding with this and they’re sitting on the fence.”

Tuiono said it was great to see the commitment from NZ First but because it was politics, he was reluctant to feel too confident his bill would be eventually turned into law.

“There’s always things that will need to be ironed out so the role for us as members participating in the select committee is to find all of those bits and pieces and work across the Parliament with different political parties.”

Tuiono said most of the discussion on the bill was around whether citizenship was extended to the descendants of the group and how many people would be entitled to it.

“That seems to be where most of the questions seem to be coming from but this is what we should be doing as part of the select committee process, get some certainty on that from the officials.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

NZ Samoa citizenship bill: Committee receives 24,000 plus public submissions

APR editor — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 01:46:34 +0000

Public submissions have closed on a bill which would offer a pathway to New Zealand citizenship to a group of Samoans born between 1924 and 1949.

Public hearings on the Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship Act Bill start on Monday.

READ MORE: Other Samoa citizenship reports

Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono’s bill aims to restore the right of citzenship to those impacted.

Last month, Tuiono said the “community want to have the issue resolved”.

Samoan Christian Fellowship secretary Reverend Aneterea Sa’u said the bill is about “trust and fairness” and encouraged the Samoan community to reach out to their local MPs to back the bill as it moves through the process.

NZ First leader Winston Peters has said his party would support the bill all the way.

The Governance and Administration Committee received about 24,500 submissions on the bill.

Hearings will be held in-person and on Zoom in Wellington on June 24 and 26, and on July 9, and there will also be hearings held in South Auckland on July 1.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

NZ Samoa citizenship bill: Committee receives 24,000 plus public submissions

APR editor — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 01:46:34 +0000

Public submissions have closed on a bill which would offer a pathway to New Zealand citizenship to a group of Samoans born between 1924 and 1949.

Public hearings on the Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship Act Bill start on Monday.

READ MORE: Other Samoa citizenship reports

Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono’s bill aims to restore the right of citzenship to those impacted.

Last month, Tuiono said the “community want to have the issue resolved”.

NZ First leader Winston Peters has said his party would support the bill all the way.

The Governance and Administration Committee received about 24,500 submissions on the bill.

Hearings will be held in-person and on Zoom in Wellington on June 24 and 26, and on July 9, and there will also be hearings held in South Auckland on July 1.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

How Donald Trump Worked to Destroy America’s Labor Unions

Lawrence Wittner — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 17:04:42 +0000

Although Donald Trump has been eager to garner support from American labor unions for his re- election campaign, there are lots of reasons he’s not going to get it. Chief among them is his record in sabotaging the nation’s labor movement.

During his decades as a wealthy businessman, Trump clashed with unions repeatedly. And, upon becoming President, he appointed people much like himself―from corporate backgrounds and hostile toward workers―to head key government agencies and departments. Naturally, an avalanche of anti-union policies followed.

Under Trump, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)―the federal agency enforcing the nation’s fundamental labor law, the National Labor Relations Act―led the charge. Instead of following the intent of the 1935 legislation, which was to guarantee the right of workers to union representation, the Trump NLRB widened the basis for denying that right. According to the NLRB, the nearly two million Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as other workers in the gig economy, were not really workers, but independent contractors and, as such, not entitled to a union. The NLRB also proposed depriving graduate teaching assistants and other student employees at private universities of the right to organize unions and collectively bargain.

When it came to the reduced number of workers still eligible to form a union, the Trump NLRB adopted new rules making it more difficult for them to win the employee elections necessary for union representation. The NLRB hindered union activists’ ability to organize workers during non-working hours and, also, allowed employers to gerrymander bargaining units. In March 2020, the Trump NLRB used the excuse of the Covid-19 pandemic to suspend all union representation elections and, thereafter, allowed mail ballot elections only if the employer agreed to them.

Unlike their Trump-appointed managers, many NLRB employees, as career civil servants, resented the agency’s shift toward anti-union policies and sought to enforce what labor rights remained under the National Labor Relations Act. But the new management undermined their ability to protect workers’ rights by refusing to fill vacancies, thereby hollowing out the agency. As a result, the number of NLRB staff members dropped by nearly 20 percent.

Major federal departments moved in the same anti-union direction. Trump’s Department of Education scrapped collective bargaining with the American Federation of Government Employees and unilaterally imposed a contract curtailing the union rights of the department’s 3,900 workers. Trump’s Department of Labor removed requirements that employers disclose their use of “union-busting” law firms (a practice in 75 percent of union representation elections at an estimated annual cost of $340 million). And the Department of Justice, in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the Janus case, delivered what was expected to be a devastating blow to public sector unions.

Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 was the culmination of lengthy efforts by big business and reactionary forces to cripple unions representing teachers, firefighters, and other public servants by slashing their source of income: union dues. In the past, the courts had ruled that, even if a public worker chose not to join the union, the worker, in lieu of union dues, would still have to pay “fair share fees” to cover the costs of collective bargaining and administration of the union contract. In the Janus case, though, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, prohibited public sector unions from charging fees to nonmembers for representation. In this fashion, the narrow Court majority (including all three of Donald Trump’s appointees) established a significant financial incentive for millions of workers to stop paying union dues and become “free riders,” securing union benefits without paying for them. To widespread surprise, though, union-represented workers simply stuck with their unions and went on paying union dues, thereby foiling this Trump administration gambit.

In addition to relying on his appointees, Trump took direct action as president to undermine American unions. Kicking off Labor Day in 2018, he denounced the nation’s top labor leader, Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, stating that Trumka’s policies explained “why unions are doing so poorly.” In 2020, after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act―billed by the AFL-CIO as “the most significant worker empowerment legislation since the Great Depression”―Trump blocked the legislation from moving any further by threatening to veto it.

Trump’s disdain for the American labor movement continued in the years after he left office. In August 2023, attacking the newly-elected, dynamic leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW), he told UAW members that “you shouldn’t pay those [union] dues because they’re selling you to hell. Don’t listen to these union people who get paid a lot of money.” That October, he insisted: “The auto workers are being sold down the river by their leadership.” In fact, though, that November, UAW president Shawn Fain and his team led one of the most impressive nationwide strikes of modern times, securing wage raises for auto workers of at least 25 percent, as well as boosting retirement contributions and other benefits.

Not surprisingly, the UAW doesn’t have much respect for Donald Trump. In January 2024, the 400,000-member union endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, with Fain remarking that Biden “stood with the American worker,” while “Trump has a history of serving himself and standing for the billionaire class.” These remarks echoed Fain’s comments of a few days before, when he called Trump “a scab” who “stands against everything we stand for as a union.”

The AFL-CIO, which unites most of America’s unions, delivered a similar appraisal in a press release (“Donald Trump’s Catastrophic and Devastating Anti-Labor Track Record”) the preceding September. “Trump spent four years in office weakening unions and working people,” it maintained. “We can’t afford another four years of Trump’s corporate agenda to … destroy our unions.”

If Trump expects significant union support this November, it’s merely another of his many illusions.

The post How Donald Trump Worked to Destroy America’s Labor Unions first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Lawrence Wittner.

“ADVANCE Act” Actually a Retreat on Nuclear Power Safety

Newswire Editor — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 14:46:32 +0000

The U.S. Senate is expected to pass the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act (ADVANCE Act) as part of legislation to reauthorize federal firefighter programs this week. The bill, already approved by the House, would then go to the president for his signature.

Below is a statement by Dr. Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

“It’s extremely disappointing that, without any meaningful debate, Congress is about to erase 50 years of independent nuclear safety oversight by changing the NRC’s mission to not only protect public health and safety but also to protect the financial health of the industry and its investors. Just as lax regulation by the FAA—an agency already burdened by conflicts of interests—can lead to a catastrophic failure of an aircraft, a compromised NRC could lead to a catastrophic reactor meltdown impacting an entire region for a generation.

“Make no mistake: This is not about making the reactor licensing process more efficient, but about weakening safety and security oversight across the board, a longstanding industry goal. The change to the NRC’s mission effectively directs the agency to enforce only the bare minimum level of regulation at every facility it oversees across the United States.

“Passage of this legislation will only increase the danger to people already living downwind of nuclear facilities from a severe accident or terrorist attack, and it will make it even more difficult for communities to prevent risky, experimental reactors from being sited in their midst.”

Additional UCS resources:

A UCS letter to congressional leadership outlining concerns with the companion House bill, the Atomic Energy Advancement Act.

Lyman’s column “Conflicts of interest surrounding nuclear laws could undermine US safety” published in The Hill.

An analysis published in Science that found the high assay low-enriched uranium fuel used in small nuclear power reactors can be used directly to make nuclear weapons, posing terrorism and nuclear proliferation threats.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

We Do Need those Stinking Badges

Paul Haeder — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 14:00:07 +0000

…all those McCarthy-Loving Feds and Politicians have tapped the nerds and software billionaires to watch our every fucking move!!!!!!!

Proof of life. Don’t mess with the SS Administration ** [**see below, way below]

Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!

The real quote from B. Traven’s book, Treasure of Sierra Madre.

“Badges, to god-damned hell with badges! We have no badges. In fact, we don’t need badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges, you god-damned cabron and ching’ tu madre! Come out there from that shit-hole of yours. I have to speak to you.”

(For the Spanish-deprived among you, “cabron” is cuckold, “chingar” is “fuck,” and “tu madre” is “your mother.” Clearly the dialogue was cleaned up for the film.)

Oregon offers both a standard card and a Real ID Act-compliant card. Both types of cards allow you to legally drive and prove identity and age for things such as cashing a check. *Beginning May 7, 2025, a standard card cannot be used to board a domestic flight. See the TSA website for federally acceptable documents. [Does the passport work for domestic travel starting May 7, 2025?]

Federal banking laws and regulations do not prohibit banks from requesting that you provide a fingerprint or thumbprint to cash a check. Banks may use fingerprinting as a security measure and a way to combat fraud.

Employers sometimes check credit to get insight into a potential hire, including signs of financial distress that might indicate risk of theft or fraud. They don’t get your credit score, but instead see a modified version of your credit report.

Employer credit checks are more likely for jobs that involve a security clearance or access to money, sensitive consumer data or confidential company information. Such checks may also be done by your current employer before a promotion.

Pre-employment drug tests are required by some employers as a condition of job offers.

• These tests typically screen for the presence amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, opiates, and phencyclidine, but employers can also request testing for additional substances.
• Pre-employment drug tests help protect workplace safety and boost productivity while reducing accidents and turnover.
• Testing methods can include urine, saliva, hair, and blood, but urine is the most common.
• Most employers in regulated industries are required to perform pre-employment drug tests. Private-sector, non-regulated employers are not required to conduct pre-employment drug tests but can do so as long as they comply with state and local laws.

Criminal Records Check and Fitness Determination/ OAR 125-007-0200 to 125-007-0330/ Status: Permanent rules effective 1/14/2016

Overview:

The Oregon Department of Administrative Services (DAS) implemented statewide administrative rules related to certain aspects of criminal records checks on January 4, 2016 (ORS 181A.215).

These rules streamline the criminal records check process for all of Oregon. They provide guidelines for decreasing risk to vulnerable populations from people who have access or provide care.

ODHS and OHA background check rules have been updated to follow DAS rules, while maintaining specific requirements needed for ODHS and OHA employees, contractors, volunteers, providers and qualified entities.

Keystroke technology is a software that tracks and collects data on employees’ computer use. It tracks each and every keystroke an employee types on their computer and is one of a few tools companies have to more closely monitor exactly how staff spend the hours they are expected to work.

Newer features allow administrators to also take occasional screenshots of employees’ screens.

One firm providing the tools is Interguard, which uses software allows administrators to view logs of employee computer use data, including desktop screenshots of employee activity. It also alerts administrators when certain employees’ computer activity diverts from their normal patterns.

Workplace surveillance is becoming the new normal for U.S. workers

What is forced arbitration?

In forced arbitration, a company requires a consumer or employee to submit any dispute that may arise to binding arbitration as a condition of employment or buying a product or service. The employee or consumer is required to waive their right to sue, to participate in a class action lawsuit, or to appeal. Forced arbitration is mandatory, the arbitrator’s decision is binding, and the results are not public.

As more and more workplaces return to work in the next few months, these social distancing monitors are likely to become a minor boom industry of their own: Bloomberg News has reported that Ford planned to enforce social distancing by having its workers wear RFID wristbands, developed by Radiant RFID, that would buzz when a worker got too close to a colleague and would also provide supervisors with alerts about employees who were congregating together in larger groups.

Another company, Guard RFID, published a blog post detailing how its technology could be used for “infection control in the workplace,” including through the use of wearable RFID tags that would “alarm when tagged individuals come within close proximity to each other.” (Guard RFID and Radiant both declined to comment on their ventures into social distancing solutions.)

“A lot of tracking of workers happens under the rubric of worker safety or ensuring that workers are not injuring or hurting themselves,” she said. “But the boundaries between that and using the data in ways that are punitive or negative are hard to establish.”

A Wisconsin company is offering to implant tiny radio-frequency chips in its employees – and it says they are lining up for the technology.

The idea is a controversial one, confronting issues at the intersection of ethics and technology by essentially turning bodies into bar codes. Three Square Market, also called 32M, says it is the first U.S. company to provide the technology to its employees.

The company manufactures self-service “micro markets” for office break rooms. It said in a press release that obtaining a chip is optional, but expects that about 50 employees will take part.

CEO Todd Westby said that the company believes the technology will soon be ubiquitous:

“We foresee the use of RFID technology to drive everything from making purchases in our office break room market, opening doors, use of copy machines, logging into our office computers, unlocking phones, sharing business cards, storing medical/health information, and used as payment at other RFID terminals. Eventually, this technology will become standardized allowing you to use this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc.”

The state laws on social media passwords are intended to protect social media pages that applicants have chosen to keep private. If you have publicly posted information about yourself without bothering to restrict who can view it, an employer is generally free to view this information. However, employers still need to follow other employment rules.

Antidiscrimination laws. An employer who looks at an applicant’s Facebook page or other social media posts could well learn information that it isn’t entitled to have or consider during the hiring process. This can lead to illegal discrimination claims. For example, your posts or page might reveal your sexual orientation, disclose that you are pregnant, or espouse your religious views. Because this type of information is off limits in the hiring process, an employer that discovers it online and uses it as a basis for hiring decisions could face a discrimination lawsuit.

Your Free Speech Rights (Mostly) Don’t Apply At Work

A noncompete agreement is a contract that an employer can use to prevent employees from taking certain jobs with competitors after they leave the company. Sometimes, an employer can make signing a non-compete agreement a condition of employment. These contracts benefit a company by preventing former employees from using trade secrets to give another company a competitive advantage or starting a company that competes with a former employer.

A noncompete agreement can also be referred to as a covenant not to compete, a noncompete covenant, a noncompete clause, or simply a noncompete.

+—+

The Man With the Stolen Name: They know what he did. They just don’t know who he is.

“John Doe,” of Owego, New York, was sentenced today to 57 months in prison for aggravated identity theft and misuse of a social security number. Doe used the name, social security number and date of birth of a homeless U.S. Army veteran to fraudulently obtain $249,811.93 in Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits and an additional $588,645.85 in state benefits. Doe’s true identity has yet to be confirmed.

The announcement was made by United States Attorney Carla B. Freedman and Gail. S. Ennis, Inspector General for the Social Security Administration (SSA).

United States Attorney Carla B. Freedman stated: “We don’t yet know the defendant’s name, but we know what he did. Today’s sentence justly punishes him for stealing the identity of a homeless veteran to fraudulently obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars in government benefits. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of local, state and federal investigators, we were able to bring John Doe to justice in spite of not knowing his true identity.”

SSA Inspector General Gail S. Ennis stated: “This individual stole the identity of a U.S. Army veteran to fraudulently obtain Supplemental Security Income benefits, a critical safety net for those in need. This sentence holds him accountable for his unlawful actions. My office will continue to pursue those who steal another person’s identity and misuse a social security number for personal gain. I appreciate the work of our law enforcement partners in this complex investigation and I thank Assistant U.S. Attorneys Adrian S. LaRochelle and Michael Gadarian for prosecuting this case.”

Doe was found guilty following a 4-day trial in May 2022. The evidence established that from approximately 1999 until June 2021, Doe received SSI benefits under the name, date of birth, and Social Security number of a homeless U.S. Army veteran living in North Carolina. When Doe’s use of the veteran’s identity was ultimately discovered and Doe was questioned by federal agents, Doe continued to falsely claim the identity as his own and provided agents with a photocopy of the victim’s birth certificate and Social Security card, claiming these documents were his own. Agents located the veteran and established through fingerprint and DNA analysis that Doe is not the person he claims to be.

United States District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino also ordered Doe to serve a 3-year term of supervised release following his release from prison and ordered Doe to pay a total $838,457.78 in restitution in connection with the benefits he unlawfully received under the victim’s name.

This case was investigated by the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General, the Tioga County Sheriff’s Office, the Tioga County Department of Social Services, and the New York State Police, with assistance provided by the U.S. Marshals Service. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Adrian S. LaRochelle and Michael D. Gadarian.

Are We All Witnesses?

WE ARE WITNESSES — The American criminal justice system consists of 2.2 million people behind bars, plus tens of millions of family members, corrections and police officers, parolees, victims of crime, judges, prosecutors and defenders. In We Are Witnesses, we hear their stories.

Early one summer morning, Son Yo Auer, a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found a naked man lying unconscious in front of the restaurant’s dumpsters. It was before dawn, but the man was sweating and sunburned. Fire ants crawled across his body, and a hot red rash flecked his skin. Auer screamed and ran inside. By the time police arrived, the man was awake, but confused. An officer filed an incident report indicating that a “vagrant” had been found “sleeping,” and an ambulance took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Savannah, where he was admitted on August 31, 2004, under the name “Burger King Doe.”

Other than the rash, and cataracts that had left him nearly blind, Burger King Doe showed no sign of physical injury. He appeared to be a healthy white man in his middle fifties. His vitals were good. His blood tested negative for drugs and alcohol. His lab results were, a doctor wrote on his chart, “surprisingly within normal limits.” A long, unwashed beard and dirty fingernails suggested he had been living rough. But the only physical signs of previous trauma were three small depressions on his skull and some scars on his neck and his left arm.

We live in an age of extraordinary surveillance and documentation. The government’s capacity to keep tabs on us—and our capacity to keep tabs on each other—is unmatched in human history. Big Data, NSA wiretapping, social media, camera phones, credit scores, criminal records, drones—we watch and watch, and record our every move. And yet here was a man who appeared to exist outside all that, someone who had escaped the modern age’s matrix of observation.

His condition—blind, nameless, amnesiac—seemed fictitious, the kind of allegorical affliction that might befall a character in Saramago or Borges.

Even if he was lying about his memory loss, there was no official record of his existence. He lived on the margins, beyond the boundaries mapped by the surveillance state. And because we choose not to look at individuals on the margins, it is still possible for them to disappear.

The post We Do Need those Stinking Badges first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

CPJ joins letter calling for US Senate to push forward on PRESS Act

Committee to Protect Journalists — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 20:01:51 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists joined over 50 news and press freedom organizations in urging United States senators to support the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (PRESS Act). The bill would create a federal shield safeguarding reporter-source confidentiality and prevent government access to unreported source material.

The letter, authored by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, urges Senate leadership to advance the bill during this critical period.

The legislation previously passed the House twice but has languished in the Senate.

Read the full letter:

Ltr. Senate PRESS Act 6.7.24 Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ, others call on Slovakia’s Parliament to reject public broadcasting bill

Committee to Protect Journalists — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 14:11:06 +0000

Berlin, June 10, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists joined seven international press freedom organizations in urging Slovak members of parliament on Monday to reject the proposed public service broadcasting bill scheduled for parliamentary review next week.

The statement says that despite modifications, the bill still allows the government to politicize the public broadcaster, which would fatally compromise its independence. Therefore, it is contrary to the European Media Freedom Act’s provisions on the independence of public media.

Referring to the recent shooting of Prime Minister Robert Fico in the background of a polarized society, the statement says that the “need for pluralistic and independent public media, that can facilitate debate across the political spectrum in a time of crisis, has never been greater.”

Read the full statement:

Slovakia PSM bill june 24.docx Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

FijiFirst party founders Voreqe Bainimarama, Sayed-Khaiyum and others resign in shock move

APR editor — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 06:47:38 +0000

RNZ Pacific

The founding members of the FijiFirst party, including former prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama and ex-attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, have resigned.

Sayed-Khaiyum confimed that party president Ratu Joji Satalaka, vice-president Selai Adimaitoga, acting general-secretary Faiyaz Koya and treasurer Hem Chand have also resigned from the party, according to local media reports.

Sayed-Khaiyum said the other vice-president Ravindran Nair and founding member Salesh Kumar have also resigned.

READ MORE: Other Fiji politics reports

He said the resignation letters were given to the Registrar of Political Parties last Friday, June 7.

One FijiFirst MP, Ketal Lal, posted on Facebook: “Sad day for Fiji” after the news was made public.

Dialogue Fiji executive director Nilesh Lal said the “mass resignation of founding members and senior officials is probably one of the most ill-conceived moves on the part of the founding members of the FijiFirst party”.

Lal said the move will “severely weaken” the position of the two minor parties — Sodelpa and NFP — in the coalition government.

Minor parties losing ‘bargaining chip’
“It was always in the interests of NFP and Sodelpa that FijiFirst remained a strong, united and viable party, and with this latest development, this is clearly not the case any longer. Both Sodelpa and NFP lose their bargaining chip, with the demise of FijiFirst.”

RNZ Pacific has contacted the Registrar of Political Parties, Ana Mataiciwa, for comment.

Last week, FijiFirst confirmed that it had sacked 17 MPs after they voted for a pay rise — going against a party directive.

However, the expelled Fijifirst MPs said they were going to contest the decision and would remain parliamentary opposition, highlighting divisions within the largest single party in the Fijian Parliament.

Mataiciwa, who was also the Supervisor of Elections, said FijiFirst needed to amend its consitution by June 28 or risk deregistration.

She told local media the party’s constitution did not have guidelines on how internal party disputes were resolved, which was in breach of the Political Parties (Registration, Conduct, Funding and Disclosures) Act 2013.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Their Rules-Based International Order Is the Rule of the Mafia

Vijay Prashad — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 14:53:39 +0000

Ana Segovia (Mexico), Huapango Torero (‘Huapango Bullfighter’), 2019.

The skin is the largest organ of the human body. It covers our entire surface, at some points only as thin as a piece of paper and at other points about half as thick as a credit card. The skin, which protects us from all manner of germs and other harmful elements, is fragile and unable to defend humans from the dangerous weapons we have made over time. The ancient blunt axe will break the skin with a heavy blow, while a 2000-pound MK-84 ‘dumb bomb’ made by General Dynamics will not only obliterate the skin, but the entire human body.

Despite a 24 May order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Israeli military continues to bomb the southern part of Gaza, particularly the city of Rafah. In blatant disregard of the ICJ’s order, on 27 May Israel struck a tent city in Rafah and murdered forty-five civilians. US President Joe Biden said on 9 March that an Israeli attack on Rafah would be his ‘red line’, but – even after this tent massacre – the Biden administration has insisted that no such line has been violated.

At a press conference on 28 May, communications advisor to the US National Security Agency John Kirby was asked how the US would respond if a strike by the US armed forces killed forty-five civilians and injured two hundred others. Kirby responded: ‘We have conducted airstrikes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where tragically we caused civilian casualties. We did the same thing’. To defend Israel’s latest massacre, Washington has chosen to make a startling admission. Given that the ICJ has ruled that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, could it be said that the US is guilty of the same in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Ficre Ghebreyesus (Eritrea), Map/Quilt, 1999.

In 2006, the International Criminal Court (ICC) began to assess the possibility of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, in 2014 and 2017, respectively, opened formal investigations into crimes committed in both countries. However, neither Israel nor the United States are signatories to the 2002 Rome Statute, which established the ICC. Rather than sign the statute, the US Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act – known informally as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ – which legally authorises the US government to ‘use all means necessary’ to protect its troops from ICC prosecutors. Since Article 98 of the Rome Statute does not require states to turn over wanted personnel to a third party if they have signed an immunity agreement with that party, the US government has encouraged states to sign ‘Article 98 agreements’ to give its troops immunity from prosecution. Still, this did not deter ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (who held the post from 2012–2021) from studying evidence and issuing a preliminary report in 2016 on war crimes in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan joined the ICC in 2003, giving the ICC and Bensouda jurisdiction to conduct their investigation. Even though it signed an Article 98 agreement with Afghanistan in 2002, the US government fervently attacked the ICC’s investigation and warned Bensouda and her family that they would face personal repercussions if she continued with the investigation. In April 2019, the US revoked Bensouda’s entry visa. Days later, a panel of ICC judges ruled against Bensouda’s request to proceed with a war crimes investigation in Afghanistan, stating that such an investigation would ‘not serve the interests of justice’.

Staff at the ICC were dismayed by the court’s decision and eager to challenge it but could not get support from the justices. In June 2019, Bensouda filed a request to appeal the ICC’s decision not to pursue the investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan. Bensouda’s appeal was joined by various groups from Afghanistan, including the Afghan Victims’ Families Association and the Afghanistan Forensic Science Organisation. In September 2019, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC ruled that the appeal could go forward.

Dawn Okoro (Nigeria), Doing It, 2017.

The US government was enraged. On 11 June 2020, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13928, which authorised his government to freeze ICC officials’ assets and ban them and their families from entering the United States. In September 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Bensouda, a national of Gambia, and senior ICC diplomat Phakiso Mochochoko, a national of Lesotho. The American Bar Association condemned these sanctions, but they were not revoked.

The US government eventually repealed the sanctions in April 2021, after Bensouda left her post and was replaced by the British lawyer Karim Khan in February 2021. In September 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said that while his office would continue to investigate war crimes by the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan, it would ‘deprioritise other aspects of this investigation’. This awkward phrasing simply meant that the ICC would no longer investigate war crimes committed by the United States and its allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The ICC had been sufficiently brought to heel.

Alexander Nikolaev, also known as Usto Mumin (Soviet Union), Friendship, Love, Eternity, 1928.

Prosecutor Khan again demonstrated his partial application of justice and fealty to the Global North ruling elites when he rushed into the conflict in Ukraine and began an investigation into war crimes by Russia just four days after its invasion in February 2022. Within a year, Khan would apply for warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, which were issued in March 2023. Specifically, they were charged with colluding to abduct children from Ukrainian orphanages and children’s care homes and take them to Russia, where – it was alleged – these children were ‘given for adoption’. Ukraine, Khan said, ‘is a crime scene’.

Khan would use no such words when it came to Israel’s murderous assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Even after more than 15,000 Palestinian children had been killed (rather than ‘adopted’ from a war zone), Khan failed to pursue warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his military subordinates. When Khan visited Israel in November–December 2023, he warned about ‘excesses’ but suggested that since ‘Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders’, they could prevent any horrendous violations of international humanitarian law.

Ayoub Emdadian (Iran), The Sapling of Liberty, 1973.

By May 2024, the sheer scale of Israel’s brutality in Gaza finally forced the ICC to take up the issue. The orders from the ICJ, the outrage expressed by numerous governments of the Global South, and the cascading protests in country after country together motivated the ICC to act. On 20 May, Khan held a press conference where he said that he filed applications for the arrest of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, and Ismail Haniyeh and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his head of military, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said that the ICC accusations against Netanyahu and Gallant are ‘baseless’ and that Israel will not comply with any ICC warrant. For decades now, Israel – like the United States – has rejected any attempt to apply international humanitarian law to its actions. The ‘rules-based international order’ has always provided immunity for the United States and its close allies, an immunity whose hypocrisy has increasingly been revealed. It is this double-standard that has provoked the collapse of the US-driven world order.

Buried within Khan’s press statement is an interesting fragment: ‘I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence the officials of this Court must cease immediately’. Eight days later, on 20 May, The Guardian – in collaboration with other periodicals – published an investigation that revealed Israel’s use of ‘intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear, and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries’. Yossi Cohen, the former head of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, personally harassed and threatened Bensouda (Khan’s predecessor), warning her, ‘You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family’. Furthermore, The Guardian noted that ‘Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members’. ‘Took an interest’ is a euphemistic way of saying gathered information on her family – including through a sting operation against her husband Philip Bensouda – to blackmail and frighten her. These are clichéd mafia tactics.

Hamed Abdalla (Egypt), Conscience du sol (‘The Consciousness of the Earth’), 1956.

As I followed these stories of the blood and law, I read the poems of Chechnya-born Jazra Khaleed, writing in Greek in Athens. His poem ‘Black Lips’ stopped me in my tracks, the last stanzas powerful and bleak:

Come let me make you human,
you, Your Honor, who wipe guilt from your beard
you, esteemed journalist, who tout death
you, philanthropic lady, who pat children’s heads without bending down
and you who read this poem, licking your finger—
To all of you I offer my body for genuflection
Believe me
one day you will adore me like Christ

But I’m sorry for you sir—
I do not negotiate with chartered accountants of words
with art critics who eat from my hand
You may, if you desire, wash my feet
Don’t take it personally

Why do I need bullets if there are so many words
prepared to die for me?

Which words are slowly dying? Justice, perhaps, or even humanitarianism? So many words are thrown about to assuage the guilty and to confuse the innocent. But these words cannot muffle other words, words that describe horrors and that demand redress.

Words are important. So are people, such as Gustavo Cortiñas, who was arrested by the Argentinian military dictatorship on 15 April 1977, never to be seen again. He became one of the 30,000 people whom the military killed between 1976 and 1983. On April 30, two weeks after Gustavo was arrested, his mother, Nora Cortiñas (or Norita, as she was lovingly known), joined other mothers of the disappeared to protest in front of the government house Casa Rosada, at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the first in what became a regular feature.

Norita was a co-founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which courageously shattered the wall of misleading words that tumbled out of the mouths of the military Junta. Though her son was never found, Norita found her voice looking for him – a voice that was heard at every protest for justice and spoke with great feeling about the pain in the world until the weeks leading up to her death on 31 May. ‘We say no to the annexation of Palestine’, she said in a video message in 2020. ‘We oppose any measure that tends to erase the identity and existence of the Palestinian people’.

Norita leaves us with her precious words:

Many years from now, I would like to be remembered as a woman who gave her all so that we could have a more dignified life… I would like to be remembered with that cry that I always say and that means everything I feel inside me, that means the hope that someday that other possible world will exist. A world for everyone. So, I would like to be remembered with a smile and for shouting loudly: venceremos, venceremos, venceremos! We will win, we will win, we will win!

See also “What is the Rules-Based Order?“

The post Their Rules-Based International Order Is the Rule of the Mafia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

In Nigeria, 2 ICIR journalists summoned, questioned over corruption report

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:21:11 +0000

Abuja, May 31, 2024—Nigerian police authorities should immediately drop their criminal investigation into journalist Nurudeen Akewushola and the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), and allow them to work free of harassment and fear of arrest, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

On May 20, officers with the Nigeria Police Force-National Cybercrime Center (NPF-NCCC) summoned Akewushola, a reporter with the nonprofit ICIR news agency, and an ICIR’s managing director, who was not named, for questioning in connection with a police investigation “into a case of cyberstalking and defamation of character,” according to Akewushola, ICIR editor Victoria Bamas, and an ICR report.

On May 28, Akewushola and ICIR Executive Director Dayo Aiyetan went to the Nigeria police station in the Nigerian capital Abuja where officers held and questioned them for over nine hours and then released them on condition that they both must return for further questioning on June 11, according to the journalists and their lawyer, Saidu Muhammad Lawal, who spoke by phone with CPJ. Akewushola added that he needed to provide surety before he was released. Aiyetan and Lawal also said the officers threatened to charge Akewushola.

Akewushola and Aiyetan told CPJ that police questioned them about a February 2024 report authored by Akewushola and published by ICIR that alleged two former Nigeria inspector generals of police, Solomon Ehigiator Arase and Ibrahim Kpotum Idris, were involved in illegal land sales. During police questioning, Aiyetan, Akewushola, and Lawal said that officers showed them a criminal complaint filed by Corpran International Limited, one of the land developers mentioned in the ICIR report. Akewushola also said the complainant accused him of seeking a bribe when he called for comments before publishing the report, an allegation the journalist described as a blatant falsehood.

Additionally, days after the publication, Arase wrote a letter to ICIR, which CPJ reviewed, describing the report as false and demanding a retraction of the story and compensation of one billion naira ($714,647 USD). He also filed a civil suit against ICIR alleging defamation of character.

“Nigerian police should immediately end the criminal investigation of journalist Nurudeen Akewushola over his reporting, drop any plans to charge him or his colleagues, and cease harassing the International Centre for Investigative Reporting,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ Africa program, from Durban, South Africa. “It seems that despite reforms to Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act, police continue to use it as a tool to summon and harass the press, even without bringing charges.”

On May 15, ICIR received a similar police summons, a copy of which CPJ reviewed, for Akewushola and the outlet’s “managing directors.” That summons was dated April 16, 2024, and cited a case of “cyberstalking and defamation of character,” without further details.

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Corpran International Limited owner Andy Chime confirmed that he had filed a complaint with police alleging “cyberstalking and defamation of character” about ICIR’s February report. Chime also called this reporter “stupid” for requesting clarity on the allegation of cyberstalking mentioned in his complaint, before ending the call.

When CPJ contacted Arase on May 17, after the first invitation, he said he had filed a civil case against the ICIR and declined to comment about a possible police complaint filing.

On the same day, when CPJ contacted the director of the NPF-NCCC, Henry Ifeanyi, he declined to discuss details of the case that caused the summons and said he was not aware of any laws preventing the police from inviting Nigerians for questioning. Reached by phone on May 28 while Akewushola and Aiyetan were at the station, Ifeanyi said “I don’t have any journalists detained” and declined to comment further, referring CPJ to the police’s public relations office.

When contacted on May 28, police force public relations officer Muyiwa Adejebi said he will contact the Cybercrime Center for details of the police invitation and investigation. On Wednesday, Adejobi told CPJ that he could not give the details of any possible charge against Akewushola but added that if the investigators decided to charge him, it would relate to Akewushola’s work as a journalist.

In February, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu signed into law amendments to the country’s Cybercrimes Act, increasing the burden of proof to bring charges under section 24, which relates to cyberstalking, according to a CPJ research.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ, partners join call for U.S. Senate to advance PRESS Act

Committee to Protect Journalists — Thu, 30 May 2024 18:08:12 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists joined more than 85 journalism and civil society organizations and 35 attorneys and law professors in urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to schedule a markup of the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (PRESS Act) as soon as possible so that it can be considered by the full Senate and become law.

The PRESS Act would create a federal shield law, protecting journalist-source confidentiality and preventing government surveillance of journalistic activity through phone and email providers.

The legislation, which CPJ helped author, passed the House twice but has previously languished in the Senate.

Read the full letter:

Coalition Letter in support of PRESS Act – May 2024 Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

NH Deepfake Indictment Is Yet Another Wake-Up Call: Congress Must Act To Prevent Chaos

Newswire Editor — Thu, 23 May 2024 20:14:52 +0000

Today, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella announced that political consultant Steven Kramer has been indicted for orchestrating robocalls to New Hampshire voters with a fake, AI-generated version of Joe Biden’s voice.

Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:

“New Hampshire was able to indict Kramer because the robocalls aimed to deter people from voting. Almost every state makes it illegal to undertake fraudulent efforts to deceive people into not voting. New Hampshire also makes it illegal to impersonate a candidate on a telephone call.

“However, most political deepfakes misrepresenting candidates and aiming to defraud voters will not run afoul of existing law – unless lawmakers and regulators act. Eighteen states and counting have passed laws to prevent political deepfakes. Congress is moving slowly on the issue, with no guarantee of action. And the Federal Election Commission is, at best, slow walking the issue.

“The New Hampshire deepfake robocall should have been a wakeup call to policymakers across the country. Most hit the snooze button, but today’s indictment is the alarm sounding again: The American people need you to act now to prevent deepfake chaos in November. No one benefits from deepfake chaos and the problem is preventable. If policymakers fail to act, we should expect chaos to ensue.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Hell in a Very Small Place

T.P. Wilkinson — Sat, 18 May 2024 18:15:42 +0000

Hell: the creditor of last resort

Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with the imperial powers that exploited Indochina, both French and American. His account of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu was a combination of despair and appeal for a more sensible counter-insurgency strategy that would waste fewer (French) lives. While Gaza and Dien Bien Phu are by no means politically or historically comparable. The ambiguities in the assessment of this military operation do bear some similarity to the contradictions among opponents of the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza. Thus the reference to Fall’s title is not intended as analogy or allegory but as cognitive provocation.

Between BlackRock and a hard place

According to published sources, whatever one may think of Wikipedia’s notoriously selective entries, the university named after the Puritan merchant-adventurer of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Harvard, constitutes a corporation with the largest academic endowment in the world, valued at some USD 50 billion as of 2022. This had led to at least one wag designating “Harvard” as a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio. Hedge funds are unregulated entities that permit people with real money to move it from one source of extraction to another with various benefits such as offshore opacity, tax avoidance, and sundry immunities obtained through the efforts of correspondingly empowered managers to influence investment conditions and outcomes. The hedge fund is a modern version of the Latin Church’s vast traffic in salvation, otherwise known as the indulgence business and Crusades.

Salvation is the intangible product promised by the Latin Church in the context of its risk management business. Financial risk management is the modern product for which the hedge fund was developed. The rabbinical-papal financial services industry — concentrated in the Vatican by Innocent III — is composed of the congregations that preach damnation, those that preach salvation, and the orders and offices that deliver the risk management products, i.e. various types of sacraments, indulgences, dispensations and preferment. Parallel to but in fact a logical extension of the Latin Church’s financial system, the hedge fund has superseded the bank as the core instrument for trading life in return for death.

The university corporations upon which the US Ivy League were based are found in the renowned collegiate universities located in Cambridge and Oxford. Unlike most universities today, the collegiate university was created on the basis of ecclesiastical endowments — hedge funds by which the founders secured dispensation and protected their wealth from those they had robbed in their lifetime. When the Latin Church was nationalized under the Tudors, the English Church succeeded in title but the business continued otherwise unabated. The history of exclusion from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges has been presented as a history of arbitrary prejudice and discrimination, all of which was successively remedied by the post-1945 order. This is a crass avoidance of the real issue. The Oxford or Cambridge college was foremost a financial institution. One must recall that both universities were entitled to send members to the House of Commons. That was not because of their learned activity but because they were property and asset holders and as such satisfied the requirements for the franchise whereas municipalities with ordinary tenants did not.

In other words to become a member of a college in either university made one a shareholder in the corporation and at least a limited beneficiary of the wealth extraction instruments inherent in these entities. From the standpoint of the university corporations, it was clearly inconceivable that persons otherwise not entitled to property or the franchise be admitted to these universities. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates enjoyed privileged access to government, after the precedence of aristocracy and the great public schools, was not based on academic merit but on class membership and in some cases meritorious service to the ruling class. The US elite universities were founded with the same principles and the same structures, albeit without the loyal toast at high table. Later foundations, the post-colonial colleges and universities were controlled by a similar business model. Then the 1862 (and 1890) Morrill Acts, created the basis for the so-called Land Grant universities. Federal land, generously transferred from the indigenous population to the US government, was allocated to the states for the purpose of establishing universities, mainly of the agricultural and technical type. These were a departure from the collegiate structure and more closely resembled the German technical college. Toward the end of the 19^th century the US would largely abandon the English model in favour of the German Hochschule. On one hand this was because the Anglo-American elite needed engineers and technicians to develop the country and lacked (rejected) the occupational dual-education system common on the Continent. On the other hand it was implicitly desired to replace hereditary aristocracy with quasi-hereditary “meritocracy”. The Ivy League was to continue to indoctrinate the senior civil service and managerial class as well as issue credentials to the runs of the plutocratic litter so as to preserve the latent class structure in America’s “classless society.” The Anglo-American elite, in contrast to the latifundista of the “Blessed Isle”, recognized the need for merchants and engineers or mechanics to convert a stolen and progressively vacated continent into fungible assets. The settler-colonial elite in North America did not have the benefit or obstacle of the millions with which first the East India Company and then HM Viceroy was confronted.

As a result of this distinct historical development most of the US higher (tertiary) education system is in fact state established and funded by the public purse. After the Second World War, the US elite — in panic after failure to destroy the Soviet Union or even inhibit its technological and social development — adopted legislation to inject massive amounts of public funds into education, a policy deeply antithetical to Anglo-American elite culture, Thomas Arnold and John Dewey notwithstanding. Harvard and Yale graduates were forced to recognize that even their theological seminaries (the new business schools) were not enough to train the masses of indoctrinated technicians needed to confront the Ivan who had not only taken Berlin but launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. Places like Michigan State specialized in counter-insurgency to help the regime terrorize Vietnamese. However even here the bulk of the money went to private universities. This was not only because of the personal union of grantors and grantees but because funnelling public funds for research at MIT or Columbia promoted the money-laundering schemes by which these foundations retained their exclusivity.

Behind the mask of merit, the endowment (and the gravy train to public research funding) permit the university to operate profitably without regard for tuition fees. Essentially the “research grants” subsidize these tax dodges (universities are generally tax-exempt and can accept donations for tax exemption) and constitute a covert subsidy to those corporations or wealthy individuals who endow them. What is in a name? A library by any other name would smell as mouldy.

There is another less obvious but intellectually insidious aspect of this business model. Elite universities become repositories of rare and valuable cultural, intellectual and scientific resources. They are able to hoard them and restrict access accordingly. Thus a poor or mediocre scholar can establish himself as an authority by virtue of using the sources held by such endowments to which others have only restricted access, if any. In a system where canonical texts are used to exemplify dominant ideology, limiting access to such materials gives authority to the loyal servants while diminishing that of scholars forced to rely on secondary or even tertiary sources. It should be recalled that until the Reformation even possession of a Bible by anyone without ecclesiastical license could be punished by death. When our loquacious regurgitators of doctrine and dogma preach against conspiracy they are protected by the locks and keys of the Hoover Institution and the US Holocaust Museum as well as the soft files that saturate the corporate, espionage and secret police bureaucracies.

Which leads us to the business at hand: what is actually happening at the renowned universities of the Great North American republic? The charming claims that academic freedom is being violated are really nothing more than charming. As George Carlin said about “rights”, they are a cute idea. There has never been anything called “academic freedom”, unless one means by that “free enterprise” applied to universities as businesses. As I have already argued elsewhere, science was wholly replaced by Science after the Manhattan Project and the less known biological warfare unit run by Merck during the great war against communism (aka WW2). Where scholarship has been genuinely free it has been despite the university not because of it. The same applies even more rigorously to teaching. There is a reason why teacher colleges (once the only venues to accept women) were called “normal schools”. John Dewey, celebrated for his assertions that education was essential for democracy, never vocally challenged the plutocracy that obstructed it. His education for democracy was ultimately distilled into indoctrination of an emergent multi-ethnic society such that they possessed no identity capable of coherent interest articulation. Unlike the Soviet Union, defunct successor to a historically multi-ethnic state, the US was not only founded on the extermination of the indigenous but on the acidic brain dissolution of the immigrant. Genetic engineering is in fact a deep technological application of the ideology by which humans can be infinitely reconfigured beyond Donald Cameron’s reprogramming at the Allan Memorial between 1957 and 1964.

Barely buried, the FBI asset and GE lackey appointed governor of California and later POTUS, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was canonized for his propaganda (to use the term Edward Bernays did his best to replace) contributions to the complete privatization of what little public and potentially democratic space had emerged in the US despite the victory of finance capital in 1913. Under so-called New Deal policies, the historic mercenary forces of corporate industrial and financial capital managed by so-called White Shoe law firms in cooperation with the US Marine Corps (don’t take my word for it, USMC General Smedley Butler knew what he was he was being ordered to do), was temporarily nationalized. As the war drew to an end there were some who wanted to dissolve these state agencies like the OSS and return liability for piracy to the private sector. However the prescient, mainly Ivy League, elite recognized that the propaganda they had embedded in the UN Charter made a return to open corporate criminality bad for the US image in the competition with the unfortunately surviving system competitor. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 preserved the state protection of the US plutocracy that prevails to this day. Saint Ronald is worshipped like Our Lady of Fatima, by the witting for his PR success and the unwitting because of their blind faith.

Meanwhile there have been numerous challenges to the brutality perpetrated by the militarized police forces of cities where even elite universities reside. They have not prevented the police repression. However some have at least insinuated—as in the case of Columbia — that the actions are not entirely based on local law enforcement perceptions. The relationship between a certain Ms Weiner, as head of NYPD intelligence and counter-terrorism (let’s call it NYC’s Phoenix Program) embedded in the university faculty like what the NSDAP called a “Führungsoffizier” (a party leadership officer responsible for assuring ideological compliance under the Hitler regime) and NYPD liaison to the state terrorist apparatus in Tel Aviv has been illuminated without innuendo. The investigators recognize that the conclusions one can draw are hopelessly obvious. This archetypical infiltration of a primary academic and research institution has been rightfully criticized. However it is not a new phenomenon. The FBI and through cut-outs the CIA have always had agents in the educational institutions deemed critical for the system. These agents served as “talent scouts” and police informers. What appears quite unique to this period of campus protest is on one hand the willingness of students to make demands on the “official permanent and privileged victim state” aka as the State of Israel in Palestine and the violence with which the agents and assets of that State without constitutional or moral boundaries are prepared to perpetrate in their largest host country. As Ron Unz et al. have said with justifiable vehemence, the masks have fallen. The State of Israel is demonstrably capable not only of buying the entire federal legislature and considerable assets at state level, it is able and willing to dictate individual police actions at municipal and university level.

The debate has begun — albeit only among already sensitized critics — about how the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson in suppressing the investigation and condemnation of the State of Israel for its murderous attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 created the immunity of that settler-colonial regime’s officials from any liability under any recognized law. The blatant interventions have followed pronouncements by the reigning head of government with such rapidity that only an idiot could imagine that diplomatic channels were even necessary. This atrocious and obvious capacity to intervene in the minutia of US domestic politics (whereby these are surely not purely domestic matters) may, even if only at the pace of snails or winter maple syrup, produce a partial revulsion against the gut feeling of many sharing that primitive spirit of national sovereignty residual from the 19th century.

Yet beyond the mathematical equation by which the thermodynamics of dog and tail are integrated, there is a more elemental quality that bears consideration. Morse Peckham once wrote and frequently said that “man does not live by bread alone, but mostly by platitudes”. Thomas Friedman wrote that McDonald’s was inseparable from McDonnell Douglas (all now Boeing, I believe). And Harvard is a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio.

Take these platitudes seriously for a moment, in their combination. It helps to be specific. A McDonald’s in Saigon needed an F-4 Phantom. And hedge funds need collection agents, too. Before 1947 these were usually the USMC. Ajax and PBSuccess were the style of the 1950s. FUBELT was the name given to the CIA’s operation on behalf of ITT et al. University students were a disproportionate target of the first wave since they formed the potential cadre in support of the Allende government. In fact, at least two academic economists from North America were successfully marginalized for the rest of their careers just because they supported the new government and not the Rockefeller economics of the University of Chicago. Not only is there no academic freedom under capitalism there is unlimited vindictiveness toward those who violate the free market. We do not know what the cryptonyms for the current counter-insurgency operations are. However, it is important to see their true origins.

While there is no doubt as to the smell of cordite and the hands upon which the powder stains can be found, a more fundamental force is at work, that of the hedge fund. The world’s leading hedge fund and the paramount of this criminal tribe is BlackRock, known also through the peculiar person of one Mr Laurence Douglas Fink, where students of his alma mater have recently been attacked by SA-like gangs for protesting against the mass murder perpetrated by the armed forces of the state occupying Palestine, is reported to have more than USD 10 trillion (billion in continental terms) of “assets under management”. There are diagrams that illustrate the degree to which just this hedge fund has penetrated the world economy, both private and private-public. There is no reason to doubt that the hubris of this graduate of the First Boston school of financial engineering (aka as legalized securities fraud) reflects the asset class to which he belongs.

It may help to diverge for a moment to explain a few basics of the formal corporate and municipal debt business. Gustavus Meyer’ History of the Great American Fortunes (written before he, like Ida Turbell in the matter of Standard Oil, was persuaded to write with more sympathy) explains in lay vocabulary how the bond and stock market actually function. Corporate finance is taught at business schools like typing is taught at vocational schools. However once one has obtained a proper degree in finance or business from one of the gateway institutions—or through viciousness has worked his or her way up after graduation from a less prestigious school — the process begins by which one learns the work of hard selling, usury, stock watering, legislative influence, tax and accounting fraud and deployment of ratings agencies. In short, an investment banking apprenticeship is a course in how — in Adam Smith’s terms — one meets to collude, fix prices and manipulate markets. Cigars only available to those who can evade the general embargo beyond the Strait of Florida or the narcotics beyond the substance control by the CIA/DEA lubricate the Rolex and Patek Philippe adorned wrists.

These cardinals and bishops, prelates of finance capital, sell financial salvation to unwitting penitents and their pastors. They must protect the faith in their product, the belief in the sin for which these sacraments, indulgences and penance are sold. They must retain the value of the derivative instruments for which universities (and other tax dodges) have been established. At the height of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition together with whatever massed mercenary forces and police power the rabbinical papacy could command, from Brazil to Wittenberg, from Rome to Lima, from Milan to Manila, perpetrated every conceivable and heinous violence against ordinary humans to preserve the credit rating, to secure the value of discounted cash flows.

And so it is today. What we witness at US universities, especially those financed for the benefit of tax dodging hedge fund operators, is command performance. These are not merely the punishment ordered by some barbarian of Polish descent leading a settler-colonial regime in Palestine. These are the acts of the apostles. Acts of the apostles of the holy hedge funds who have succeeded the Latin Church — although consensually — to deliver truly catholic salvation. Salvation that is wealth for the quick and the grave for the dead.

The post Hell in a Very Small Place first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Are We Having an Election in November?

Greg Godels — Fri, 10 May 2024 22:04:47 +0000

With an important US presidential election — we are told — only months away, but one posing two repugnant, disheartening choices, it may be a good time to explore where we are and how we got here.

What we can agree is that most of us, when asked, believe that things are going badly: an October, 2023 AP-NORC poll finds that 78% of those polled responded that “the country is going in the wrong direction;” a January Morning Consult poll concludes that less than a third of those responding “say the country is headed in the right direction; a recent Harvard Kennedy school poll says that less than 10 % of youth 18 to 29 believe that the US is “generally headed in the right direction” and so on with NBC, ABC, Pew, etc. polls. We could quarrel over the exact numbers expressing dissatisfaction, but all polls point to a nation decidedly unhappy with our direction.

Of course, there is room to debate exactly what people mean by the “wrong direction.” They may mean in regard to their own current situation or that of their family or friends; they may mean their sense of security; they may mean their own or others’ prospects. Or they may mean that “society” is heading the wrong way culturally, politically, or economically. No doubt respondents to the various polls have complex, even contradictory reasons for losing confidence in the US trajectory. Moreover, one cannot discount the influence of monopoly media reportage and commentary in constructing the sense of dissatisfaction.

It is fair to say, however, that most people believe that our future will be determined by political outcomes. Whether or not they have confidence in the political system — polls say they don’t — they do, in fact, rely on campaigning and elections to determine the future course of the country. Most US citizens have not yet chosen or do not know of other political courses of action beyond voting or indifference.

A fixture of our political system is the two-party monopoly. While it is not unlawful or completely uncommon that there be other parties, tradition, entry-demands, financing, chicanery, and even violence have worked to deny third-party movements access or ensure their lack of success. Popular sentiment is denied by Republican and Democratic leaders and functionaries and those others invested in the two-party system who control the rules of the game. A fall, 2023 Gallup poll finds that “Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do ‘such a poor job’ of representing the American people that ‘a third major party is needed.’” For a poll-based summary of US voters’ overall negativity, see this Pew article.

So ahead of a November election, we face two poles: one represented by a self-styled nationalist-populist promising to “Make America Great Again,” while weighted down with a sordid, vulgar, and elitist history; and the other represented by a corporate Democrat once known as the “senator from MBNA” (the infamous credit card company) for his cozy relationship with the credit card industry, a reliable friend of wealth and power, and a history of supporting legislation hostile to the interests of Black people.

This is where we have arrived.

Do the two-parties offer answers to the negativism expressed in polls?

I don’t see it.

The Republican Party remains a corporate party wedded first and foremost to the interests of capital. It has a relatively independent wing that is able and willing to force its own cultural and social agenda on the entire party. Parts of that wing recognize that the self-proclaimed “party of labor” — the Democratic Party — has long failed to deliver anything of deep or lasting value to working people. Elements of this wing have — in the twenty-first century — constructed a faux-populist image to attract working people, with some success. Variations of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had been used earlier by Reagan and the Clintons to entice workers’ votes.

Trump and others have attracted angry voters with their vocal disdain for the “establishment,” elite arrogance, East Coast condescension, and US leaders’ general superciliousness. While “draining the swamp” is a worthy goal, four years of the Trump administration provided no relief from elitism.

The Republicans historically vacillate between isolationism and belligerence. But at least they vacillate.

While the Republicans do not want to identify with racism, misogyny and the many other know-nothing-isms, they are not above courting the scum that do.

The Democratic Party — the other option that we are allowed by our ruling class — wears the mythical mantle of “the party of the people.” The sole basis for this claim is dim recollections of the New Deal, a little understood period of US history that brought some benefits to working people as a result of a desperate attempt to save capitalism from itself.

With capitalism on a firmer footing after World War II, US rulers, with the full cooperation of Democratic Party Cold Warriors, dealt a fatal blow to the so-called popular front, purging left-wing militancy from unions, universities, schools, media, and any other area of influence.

The coup de grâce to New Deal thinking came after the collapse of the Keynesian paradigm/New Deal political coalition in the 1970s. When Reagan ushered in market fundamentalism and ushered out government intervention, the Democrats were not long in jumping on board. Soon, every Democrat saw the wisdom of efficiency, balanced budgets, private initiatives, and entrepreneurial sovereignty. As the Republican Party embraced religious zealotry and medieval justice, many saw the Democrats as the new Republicans, with their stealth attacks on welfare, Social Security, and Medicare.

Today’s Democratic Party is neither democratic nor a party, but a brand. It lives and breathes on money from corporate sponsors. Its contact with its supporters is through advertising, television talking heads, the punditry, and indirectly through various media; the idea of human contact with potential voters is only useful if it can be filmed and included in a television commercial.

Like the Republicans, the Democrats have an activist wing that provides a social democratic veneer to the party’s image. Unlike the Republican counterpart wing, the “progressive” Democratic wing never dares to attempt to impose its views on the party. Without exercising “leverage,” the Democratic Party left wing simply serves as a cover, a safe space for “progressives” to welcome other progressives into the party’s arms.

The truth is the Democratic Party is a corporate party, but a party that has occasionally been forced by social pressure, circumstances, or crises to play a people-friendly role. The pressure is not there now.

Moreover, the Democratic leadership has nothing to offer working people. The class base of the party has shifted. With the loss of the South to the Republicans and the ugly Nixon fiasco in the 1970s, the Democrats captured the suburban petty-bourgeoisie and its aspirants who were comfortable with the shrinkage of the welfare state, lower taxes, and deregulation, yet socially liberal on personal questions. Stable super-voters, active in social movements, and financially generous to the Democrats, they (and their contemporary urban gentry counterparts who share a similar profile) are the new keystone of the Democratic Party. The traditional backbone of the Democratic Party– minorities, unions, youth, the poor– are taken for granted. After all, according to the reasoning of Democratic leaders, those groups have nowhere else to go.

This realignment has refashioned its core issues around lifestyle, personal rights, and a hyper-regard for the diversity of individual values. The traditional left’s concerns for common social values of equality, community, and material security have been forced into the background. Good jobs, health care, education, and secure retirement are not there for all to have, but for those who earn them.

Democratic leaders celebrate achievers — those who have broken through glass ceilings — but have contempt for those fallen or stuck in the basement. Both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama have arrogantly, and with little forethought for appearances, relegated the heartland of the US to a land of gun-loving, Bible-thumpers — in Clinton’s unforgettable words, “the deplorables.” Never mind that the Midwest has been ravaged by corporate deindustrialization, leaving cities and small towns depopulated, poor, with shrinking social services, and marginal employment. The “deplorables” have failed to push on, get a late-life STEM education, and rise by their own bootstraps. In the meantime, let’s extend a welcoming, helping hand to those few who merit admission to the highest rungs of elite society.

This contempt for the non-coastal residents came forth most recently in a New York Times bestseller, White Rural Rage, by Schaller and Waldman, who depict small town USA as backward and infected with racism. Like so many in the Democratic Party intelligentsia, they see this as a threat to “our” democracy. That is to say, the authors worry about contempt for the democracy of the “successful,” but care little for the democracy of the “losers.” For a tightly argued, thoughtful rejoinder to this dose of elitism, read Les Leopold’s Wall Street War on Workers, though I wish Leopold would have as a sub-title “and the Two Parties’ War on Workers.”

For the forthcoming election, the Democrats will once again hope to corral those left-of-center with Trump’s alleged threat to “our” democracy. They will go so far as to raise the specter of fascism. Ironically, the closest move against democracy that resembles the realities of life under fascism is the recent bipartisan passage of an expanded section 702 of the infamous FISA, an act that permits warrantless spying on US citizens. The ACLU comments that it is a “bill that gives the government more ways to secretly surveil us.” Even more ironically, Trump — the alleged enemy of democracy — denounced the entire FISA act.

Leftish Democrats will again raise the old canard about divisions on the left in Germany opening the door to fascism in the 1930s. According to this historical reconstruction, the failure of the Communists and Social Democrats to unite against Hitler allowed him to take power. It is an ill-informed, simplistic take on a complex situation. But suffice it to say, it excuses the real causes of Hitler’s rise: the draconian Treaty of Versailles, discredited centrist politics, compromised industrialists and business people, a profound economic crisis, displaced workers whose voices were not heard, their desperation, and– yes– a rotten, broken capitalist system.

The Democrats face an enormous problem with poor management of the economy and support for unpopular wars. Some say the Democrats are the war party. But that is not fair. Both parties are war parties, each with its own badges of shame.

But Biden and the Democrats will pay a price for enabling the bloodletting in Ukraine and, especially, for complicity in the massacres in Gaza. The intensity of the outrage against the genocidal slaughter in Gaza will only increase.

Regardless of which of the two parties wins in November, we are in for a rough patch. While the candidates are different, they are different in equally despicable ways.

I will follow the wise council of most of my fellow citizens who say that “a third majority party is needed” and cast my one vote towards that goal.

The post Are We Having an Election in November? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Are We Having an Election in November?

Greg Godels — Fri, 10 May 2024 22:04:47 +0000

This is where we have arrived.

Do the two-parties offer answers to the negativism expressed in polls?

I don’t see it.

The Republicans historically vacillate between isolationism and belligerence. But at least they vacillate.

While the Republicans do not want to identify with racism, misogyny and the many other know-nothing-isms, they are not above courting the scum that do.

Regardless of which of the two parties wins in November, we are in for a rough patch. While the candidates are different, they are different in equally despicable ways.

I will follow the wise council of most of my fellow citizens who say that “a third majority party is needed” and cast my one vote towards that goal.

The post Are We Having an Election in November? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

"Criminal Act": Israel Bans Al Jazeera, Largest Int’l News Org. in Gaza, Ahead of Rafah Invasion

Democracy Now! — Mon, 06 May 2024 14:54:58 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“Criminal Act”: Israel Bans Al Jazeera, Largest Int’l News Org. in Gaza, Ahead of Rafah Invasion

Democracy Now! — Mon, 06 May 2024 12:11:19 +0000

As the death toll in Gaza soars to more than 34,700, Israeli authorities have taken Al Jazeera off the air in Israel and ordered Palestinians in eastern Rafah to evacuate ahead of an Israeli offensive. “The Israeli government is trying to conceal what’s happening in Gaza and trying to intimidate Al Jazeera … and delegitimize the whole coverage,” says Al Jazeera’s managing editor Mohamed Moawad, explaining this is “a strategy” to “try to make sure that the story doesn’t reach the world.” Over the past eight months, Al Jazeera has been one of the only international outlets with reporters on the ground inside Gaza, where at least three of its employees have been killed by Israel’s monthslong assault. Israel has been threatening to ban Al Jazeera for “incitement” via “a series of intimidations” for months, culminating in “a criminal act,” says Moawad. He calls on the international community, including the U.S. government, to condemn Israel’s suppression of a free press.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

‘Ram Mandir’ all over BJP’s election campaign in brazen disregard to poll code, Representation of People Act

Oishani Bhattacharya — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 09:40:58 +0000

The official X handle of Karnataka chief electoral officer on April 26 announced that action had been initiated against sitting Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya for posting a video on his X handle and soliciting votes on the grounds of religion. A case was lodged at Jayanagar police station in Bengaluru on April 25 against Surya under Section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Police sources told The Hindu that they had taken cognizance of a tweet by Surya where he allegedly sought votes citing the Ram Mandir and asked people to vote for Modi for “a better and secure future.”

The said tweet was shared by the BJP Yuva Morcha national president on April 25.

Our generation was blessed to witness the majestic Surya Tilak on Bhagwan Shri Ram at Ayodhya on Ram Navami.

A wait for almost 500 years & a wish of crores of Bharatiyas was fulfilled by PM Shri @narendramodi Ji.

For Bharatiyata to survive, vote for BJP!#DakshinakkeSurya pic.twitter.com/4B0ti6pT1B

— Tejasvi Surya (ಮೋದಿಯ ಪರಿವಾರ) (@Tejasvi_Surya) April 25, 2024

Section 123(3) of The Representation of the People Act, 1951, under which elections are held in India, prohibits a candidate from seeking votes “on the ground of his religion, race, caste, community or language or the use of, or appeal to religious symbols…” and designates these as ‘corrupt practices’.

The tweet by the BJP’s Bengaluru South also violated provisions of the election model code of conduct (MCC), which had come into effect on March 19 with the announcement of the 2024 general elections. Serial No. 3 of ‘General Conduct’ under the MCC states, “There shall be no appeal to caste or communal feelings for securing votes. Mosques, Churches, Temples or other places of worship shall not be used as forum for election propaganda.” Serial No. 4 requires parties and candidates to “avoid scrupulously all activities which are “corrupt practices” and offences under the election law.”

When Alt News went through the official X handles of BJP and its various state units, we found that the Ram Mandir issue, photos of the newly-built temple in Ayodhya and the idol of Ram and religious tropes were used rampantly in visuals while seeking votes, in blatant defiance of the above provisions of the MCC and the Act.

Official X Handle of BJP Official (@BJP4India)

In the past few weeks, both Prime Minister Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah have asserted that the Ram Mandir is not a poll plank for the BJP. However, the fact is that the Ram Mandir construction in Ayodhya has been a major election promise for the BJP for decades. It featured prominently in BJP’s 2019 election manifesto alongside matters like abrogation of Article 370. This election season, top BJP leaders, including PM Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah have used the Ram Mandir issue to seek votes and even described Congress leaders as anti-Hindu for not accepting invitation to the Ram Mandir consecration ceremony in January this year in speech after speech.

Below, readers can find a handful of the many tweets by the official X handle of the BJP (@BJP4India) where the party used visuals of the Ram Mandir or related ones to woo voters. Several of these posts draw a direct correlation between the temple and votes for the BJP. We have highlighted some part of some of these tweets which clearly seek to divide the electorate stoking religious sentiments vis-a-vis the Ram Mandir issue.

Click to view slideshow.

BJP Uttar Pradesh (@BJP4UP)

In a video shared by BJP Uttar Pradesh’s official X handle on April 21, Union home minister Amit Shah can be heard saying how Ram Mandir is not a tool for their election campaigning. The caption of the tweet also quotes what Shah has said in the video. However, the tweet uses the hashtags: “#Vote4ModiJi #PhirEkBaarModiSarkar #AbkiBar400Paar”. These hashtags have been used by the BJP in their election campaigning materials.

“हमारे लिए राम मंदिर राजनीतिक फायदे का नहीं, आस्था का मुद्दा है…”#Vote4ModiJi #PhirEkBaarModiSarkar #AbkiBar400Paar pic.twitter.com/83ECYWSoJ4

— BJP Uttar Pradesh (@BJP4UP) April 21, 2024

Below are a few instances where campaigning posts were shared with visuals of the Ram Mandir.

Click to view slideshow.

We also found several instances where the BJP UP’s X page made direct communal references calling the Opposition and their candidates anti-Sanatan (or anti-Hindu). One of the tweets uses the trope of ‘Hijab’ and ‘Mangalsutra’ in a clear attempt at exploiting communal feelings.

Click to view slideshow.

BJP Bihar (@BJP4Bihar)

Voting was held in four constituencies of Bihar in Phase 1 and four other constituencies in the state on April 26.

On the morning of the second phase polling, the official X handle of BJP Bihar shared a tweet which said in Hindi: “If you do not want infiltrators to take over your rights, come out and vote for the NDA”. The image in the tweet also contained the same text alongside photos of PM Modi, Amit Shah and several other BJP leaders.

This came days after PM Modi referring to Muslims as infiltrators at a rally in Banswara, Rajasthan.

अगर आप चाहते हैं कि कोई घुसपैठिए आपका हक ना मारे,

तो बाहर निकलिए और NDA को वोट करिए!#PhirEkBaarModiSarkar pic.twitter.com/6PwgZ3G2xd

— BJP Bihar (@BJP4Bihar) April 26, 2024

Earlier, on the morning of the phase 1 polling, BJP Bihar’s official X page had shared a tweet directly seeking votes in the name of the Ram Mandir. “Are you going to vote? While voting remember who constructed Ram Lalla’s temple,” it said.

वोट देने जा रहे हैं, तो ये जरूर याद रखियेगा,

रामलला का मंदिर किसने बनवाया!#PhirEkBaarModiSarkar pic.twitter.com/L94GZcwabr

— BJP Bihar (@BJP4Bihar) April 19, 2024

Before Phase 1 elections, BJP Bihar shared visuals of the temple in Ayodhya and other temples at least seven times. It urged people to vote for the BJP saying that their votes had made the construction of the Ram Mandir possible.

Click to view slideshow.

BJP West Bengal (@BJP4Bengal)

As early as in January 2024, the West Bengal state unit of the BJP had decided to use the Ram Mandir issue prominently in its general elections campaign. Accordingly, Bengal BJP carried out a door-to-door programme with the message: ‘Sabke Ram’ (Ram for everyone).

On April 21, two days after the MCC had come into effect, the official X page of BJP West Bengal shared a quote from Union defence minister Rajnath Singh’s public address in the state where he had said: “It is time for Ram Rajya to arrive in India”.

ভারতে রামরাজ্য আসার সময় হয়ে এসেছে।

– প্রতিরক্ষা মন্ত্রী শ্রী @rajnathsingh #PoddoFutbeBJPJitbe pic.twitter.com/Nm6VPUZf0R

— BJP West Bengal (@BJP4Bengal) April 21, 2024

Following are a few times when BJP West Bengal sought votes for the party sharing the Ram Mandir visuals:

Click to view slideshow.

BJP Rajasthan (@BJP4Rajasthan):

Rajasthan has been at the epicentre of poll code-violation controversies. Prime Minister Modi deliverd a speech at Banswara is southern Rajasthan on April 21 where he referred to Muslims living in India as ‘infiltrators’ and mocked them as “those who produce more kids.” He also indulged in scaremongering at the expense of Muslims by painting them as the devil out to devour the wealth of the country’s majority Hindus. Not just any wealth, but ‘mangalsutra’, a necklace worn by Indian brides, which carries religious connotations. The statements made by the Prime Minister in this speech appear to be in clear violation of points numbers 1 and 3 under the general conduct of MCC and the Section 123 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951.

Union home minister Amit Shah, too, used the Ram Mandir as a poll plank in his speech at Pali, Rajasthan, on April 19. He took a dig at Congress by saying that they had kept Ram Lalla in a tent for years and kept the matter of the temple hanging in uncertainty. Shah openly correlated electing Modi for the second time with the construction of the temple in Ayodhya. Congress did not accept the invitation for consecration because they were scared to lose minority votes, he added. He also listed out several temples in the country which Narendra Modi had prioritized and begun work on.

कांग्रेस ने वर्षों तक रामलला को टेंट में बैठाकर रखा। राम मंदिर के फैसले को लटका कर रखा।

– केंद्रीय गृह एवं सहकारिता मंत्री श्री @AmitShah pic.twitter.com/pxf29N4d8s

— BJP Rajasthan (@BJP4Rajasthan) April 19, 2024

Below are a few more instances where the state unit of the BJP shared election campaign tweets using religious tropes and the Ram Mandir in general. It also shared parts of speeches by PM Modi, Amit Shah and Rajasthan CM Bhajan Lal Sharma where they had sought votes in the name of the Ram Mandir.

Click to view slideshow.

BJP Uttarakhand (@BJP4UK)

BJP Uttarakhand’s official X page tweeted a clip from a public meeting of BJP National President JP Nadda and quoted his as saying, “Congress party has always been anti-Ram and anti-Sanatan.” Additionally, in the video, BJP leader Nadda further emphasizes that Congress has repeatedly tried to keep the Ram Mandir case hanging in uncertainty.

कांग्रेस पार्टी सदैव राम विरोधी और सनातन विरोधी रही है।

-भाजपा राष्ट्रीय अध्यक्ष श्री @JPNadda #PhirEkBaarModiSarkar pic.twitter.com/Z6IG7izcew

— BJP Uttarakhand (@BJP4UK) April 23, 2024

Below are a few more instances where BJP Uttarakhand directly used Ram Mandir for their campaigning.

Click to view slideshow.

BJP Chhattisgarh (@BJP4CGState)

In his public address in Chhattisgarh, PM Modi tried to garner support for his party using religious sentiments around the construction of the Ram Mandir. He mentioned that Congress leader had not accepted the invitation to attend the consecration because Congress considered itself bigger than Ram. He asked the audience, “Isn’t it an insult towards our saints? And Chhattisgarh is Shree Ram’s maternal home. Isn’t this an insult directed at Chhattisgarh? (crowds shout yes in agreement)”. The Prime Minister openly used religion and references to a place of worship in his campaign speech.

राममंदिर का निमंत्रण ठुकरा कांग्रेस ने किया छत्तीसगढ़ को अपमानित#मोदीमय_छत्तीसगढ़ pic.twitter.com/ZLzcyVSPMX

— BJP Chhattisgarh (@BJP4CGState) April 23, 2024

Below, one can find several instances of BJP Chhattisgarh violating the MCC by using the Ram Mandir in campaign material.

Click to view slideshow.

ECI Notice to BJP, Congress; Disqualification Plea for Modi in Delhi HC

On April 25, the Election Commission (ECI) of India sent a notice to the BJP regarding Prime Minister Modi’s speech at Banswara, Rajasthan, on April 21, where he had referred to Muslims as ‘infiltrators’ and claimed that the Congress had the intention of taking the wealth of the Hindus and distributing it among Muslims. This is the first time the ECI has taken cognisance of an MCC violation complaint against PM Modi and has asked the party for a response by 11 am on April 29. The ECI has also served a notice to Congress seeking responses to a complaint against Rahul Gandhi. These notices have been sent to respective party presidents and neither of the persons against whom the complaints had been filed were named in these notices.

Besides, the Delhi high court will on Monday, April 29, hear a petition seeking to disqualify Prime Minister Narendra Modi for six years under The Representation of Peoples Act for allegedly seeking votes for the BJP in the name of Hindu and Sikh deities and place of worships in a speech in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit on April 9. The petitioner submitted that Modi had not only sought votes in the name of religious deities and places of worship, but also made comments against “opposite political parties as favoring Muslims.”

In the said speech, PM stated that it’s the people of the country who had made it possible to construct the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. The Opposition, he added, had always been against the temple and even used legal recourse to stop its construction. The Prime Minister then stated: “But even after that, the citizens of the country contributed to the construction of the temple and you (Opposition) were invited to attend the temple’s consecration. You declined the invitation and insulted Prabhu Ram. Their hearts are filled with such poison, the ones from their parties who came to the Pran Pratishtha (consecration) have been thrown out of the party for six years. How can this happen in Hindustan? How can someone be thrown out of a party for worshiping Ram? Never forget these sinners.” He then alleged that Congress had gone down the path of appeasement so far that it could never get out of it and the Congress manifesto, hence, looked like that of the Muslim League.

The post ‘Ram Mandir’ all over BJP’s election campaign in brazen disregard to poll code, Representation of People Act appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

Does US’s Taiwan Relations Act not cover Kinmen islands?

By Zhuang Jing for Asia Fact Check Lab — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 20:12:58 +0000

A misleading claim emerged in Chinese-language social media posts about the U.S. policy to act in support of Taiwan, citing a Newsweek article, saying that the policy does not cover Taiwan’s Kinmen islands.

The United States’ Taiwan Relations Act, designed to regulate unofficial relations between Washington and Taipei, contains no clause commenting on what Taiwanese territories the U.S. will or will not defend.

The claim was shared on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo on Ｍarch 4, 2024.

“A Newsweek correspondent in Taiwan reported, citing the views of U.S. experts, that the so-called ‘Taiwan Relations Act’ only covers Taiwan’s main island and Penghu. It doesn’t cover other outer islands,” the claim reads in part.

Recent disputes around Kinmen between China and Taiwan have increased tensions in the region, with several Chinese influencers claiming that the U.S. has officially stated it will not help defend Taiwan from China. (Screenshot/ Weibo, X)

The Taiwan Relations Act, or TRA, is a congressional act passed in 1979 that broadly defines U.S. policy towards Taiwan.

Similar claims were also shared on Reddit and X, with some users claiming that the TRA precludes the United States from intervening to defend Kinmen or Matsu from attack.

But the claim is misleading.

Newsweek article

A keyword search found the Newsweek article cited by Chinese-language social media users published on Feb. 29.

Newsweek quoted the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Bonny Lin who did say the TRA “does not cover Kinmen.”

“The 1979 law makes it U.S. policy to consider a quarantine of Taiwan ‘a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States,’ but it does not cover Kinmen, said Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington,” reads the article in part.

But AFCL found Chinese users partly cited Lin’s comments in their claim.

Lin also told Newsweek: “The TRA does not state specifically what the United States would do in this context, but provides a basis for U.S. leaders to act in support of Taiwan in such scenarios.”

TRA on Taiwan

The TRA defines Taiwan as “the islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores,” and it does not explicitly exclude either Kinmen or Matsu.

Hsiao-ting Lin, curator of the Modern China and Taiwan collection at Stanford University, said the legislation was meant to regulate unofficial relations between Washington and Taipei and does not explicitly require the United States to defend any part of Taiwan and the neighboring Pescadores islands.

Instead it only commits to supply Taiwan with “arms of a defensive character,” Lin added.

Strategic ambiguity

Lin, who is also author of the book on the formation of modern Taiwanese state Accidental State, also said that the U.S. had adopted its policy of strategic ambiguity towards Kinmen and Matsu even when it still maintained official relations with Taiwan prior to 1979.

The legislation that outlined U.S. policy towards Taiwan at that time was a mutual defense treaty signed in December 1954 following a Chinese bombardment of Kinmen in September 1954, Lin wrote in the book.

While this event convinced many in Washington that the Taiwan Straits was likely to become the next major Cold War battleground and increased their resolve to speedily sign a defense treaty with the country for deterrence, it also made the U.S. wary of unwittingly getting embroiled in a larger war due to small conflicts breaking out in the area, according to Lin’s book.

This led to the treaty adopting a deliberately ambiguous policy towards the defense of these islands, postponing any decision on the U.S. part until a potential conflict actually loomed near.

“As both sides had previously agreed, the treaty deliberately avoided the question of whether the U.S. would defend the outer islands [Kinmen and Matsu] in the hope that such strategic ambiguity would have the simultaneous effect of deterring the CCP and preventing [then executive head of Taiwan] Chiang Kai-shek from using the islands as a springboard to attack the mainland,” Lin wrote.

Current U.S. policy towards Taiwan

The American Institute in Taiwan, or the AIT – the de facto U.S. embassy in Taiwan – was established under the TRA and continues to operate.

It provides services to Kinmen, which a spokesperson for the organization previously described as being “the backdrop of many years of fascinating U.S.-Taiwan cooperation” in 2020.

Brent Christensen, former director of the AIT Taipei Office, also emphasized the importance of U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation while attending a commemorative event held in Kinmen in August 2020.

In response to AFCL’s inquiries about the TRA-related claims, a spokesperson for the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs said: “We continue to urge restraint and no unilateral change to the status quo, which has preserved peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and throughout the region for decades.”

“The United States shares with other countries an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and in the broader Indo-Pacific region, which impacts global security and prosperity. We urge the PRC to engage in meaningful dialogue with Taiwan to reduce the risk of miscalculation.”

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke, Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Zhuang Jing for Asia Fact Check Lab.

CPJ, others oppose the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act

Committee to Protect Journalists — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 16:36:31 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists, along with over 70 civil society organizations, signed a letter urging Senate leaders to oppose the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), H.R.7888, which would dramatically expand the government’s warrantless surveillance powers without providing adequate protections for journalists.

Under an amendment adopted as part of RISAA, the government could, in effect, require American businesses, including individuals such as journalists, with no role in providing communications services, to assist with National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has itself noted the “persistent and widespread” abuses of Section 702, including backdoor searches of journalists.

Read the full letter here:

Senate RISAA Letter Sign-on – Letter-to-Senate-Opposing-RISAA_4.16.2024 Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

First They Came For My Appliances: We Are Here For the Refrigerator Freedom Act

Abby Zimet — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 19:17:20 +0000

Okay all you naysayers whining shambolic House GOPers aren't doing their job just 'cause they're blocking border solutions, ignoring infrastructure, enabling Ukrainian deaths and barely keeping the government afloat: Listen up. Boldly showcasing their astute priorities, they will fight Monday to liberate your dishwashers, dryers, fridges and other home gizmos from a Marxist "avalanche" of new "Libby Boogyman" rules aimed at keeping the planet from vaporizing into air, and c'mon who cares about that?!

Ever-steadfast in upholding their tradition of chasing fictional ills - Mike 'Election Chicanery' Johnson is now vowing to require proof of citizenship to prevent (brown-skinned) non-citizens from voting even though it's already illegal, also "not a thing" - the GOP-led House Rules Committee meets Monday to discuss six bills to prep them for final votes on the House floor. The six bills are the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act, the Liberty in Laundry Act, the Affordable Air Conditioning Act, the Clothes Dryer Reliability Act, the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act and the Refrigerator Freedom Act. Yes. They are real. They're in response to a number of Biden regulations or proposals aimed at addressing climate change, part of a $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act that seeks to lower costs, reduce energy use, cut pollutants and move to more green-energy practices.

To Republicans, however, they're aimed at letting tyrants "control everything Americans are able to do on a day-to-day basis," part of an insidious plot to allow "others" to come for their stuff, their choices and their God-given rights, evidently including the right to get a back-alley abortion with a coat hanger. (One sage: "REPUBLICANS: 'Keep gubmint OUT of our toasters and dish washers!' ALSO REPUBLICANS: 'We need surveillance cameras inside every cha-cha so we can keep an eye on what women are doing!'") Thus did Arizona's Rep. Debbie Lesko, declaring she is "proud (to) stand on the side of choice for American consumers," devise the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act to prohibit "federal bureaucrats" from issuing an aforementioned "avalanche" of new energy standards "not technologically feasible and economically justified."

In March, Iowa's Rep.Mariannette Miller-Meeks echoed her, introducing and eventually passing the Refrigerator Freedom Act to prohibit the same offenses - now "not cost-effective or technologically feasible" - because Biden has "done nothing but implement outrageous regulations" that only limit choice, increase prices, disenfranchise toilets and blenders, and move us toward dictatorship. MAGA-ites, of course, applaud these red-meat efforts to rescue heat pumps, gas stoves, washing machines, showers and air fryers from domination. "Finally, following American and not Globalist priorities," said one. "I am sick and tired of the government telling us what we can and cannot buy and use." And after 11 GOP-run states sued over some of the changes, a judge dismissed the rules as "arbitrary and capricious."

That could also apply to a House focused on fighting to be able to buy a $7 toaster even if, okay, so it may burn your house down but FREEDUMB! Of course, confronting issues like national security or infrastructure require actual, unflashy, conciliatory, negotiating, attention-to-detail legislative work, and they're barely able to co-exist with their colleagues, never mind opponents, and anyway it's probably about time for another two-week recess, so let's go with hair dryers and ceiling fans. Along with the petty stupidity is the economic irony: Most appliances are made in China, so they're protecting Chinese companies from U.S. regulations, and for things made here, they're ensuring big business can be left alone to make over-priced, planet-killing, deliberately-soon-obsolete crap. Your tax dollars at work!

Predictably, the cognitive dissonance drew its share of mockery, with Digby noting, "We all know the GOP likes to focus on kitchen table issues, but this is ridiculous." Others argued that, "Insurrectionists are now GOP Congresspersons" and that, thanks in part to such diversionary tomfoolery, "The GOP has Ukrainian blood on their hands." "First they came for my appliances," one intoned. "I was not an appliance, so I said nothing." Another suggested a key addition to the GOP agenda: a "Stop Wasting Our Time on Meaningless Legislation Act." There were also triumphant stories of deliverance born of the GOP's hard and noble work. "In honor of the Refrigerator Freedom Act, I just opened my front door and set my newly liberated Frigidaire free," one reported. "Needless to say, it's running."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

CPJ welcomes South Africa’s abolition of criminal defamation, calls for further legal reforms

Committee to Protect Journalists — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 21:24:23 +0000

Lusaka, April 10, 2024 – The Committee to Protect Journalists on Wednesday welcomed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s signing into law a bill that abolishes criminal defamation, and urged authorities to reform other problematic laws that threaten press freedom in the country.

On April 3, Ramaphosa signed the Judicial Matters Amendment Act (2023), which includes a provision repealing “the common law relating to the crime of defamation,” according to news reports and a statement by the president’s office. The South African parliament forwarded the bill to Ramaphosa for signature after approving it in December last year.

South Africa becomes the latest country in southern Africa to decriminalize defamation, following its neighbors Zimbabwe (2016) and Lesotho (2018). Other countries in the Southern Africa Development Community regional bloc which continue to use criminal defamation against journalists include Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to CPJ research.

“The long-awaited repeal of the crime of defamation in South Africa is an important victory for press freedom and hopefully will reverberate positively across other parts of the region, such as Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where defamation continues to be used to criminalize journalism,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa program, in New York. “South African authorities should also move swiftly to reform other laws, as well as draft legislation that threaten, or have the potential to undermine media freedom and the public’s right to information.”

South Africa’s parliament voted to abolish the common law crime of defamation, which is based on Roman Dutch Law and court precedents, on December 6, 2023 after decades of advocacy by the press, media lawyers, and civil society activists who argued that there were other remedies that did not involve prosecution or jail, such as civil defamation lawsuits for aggrieved parties who believed their reputations were impugned.

The 2013 conviction of newspaper journalist Cecil Motsepe was the most recent case in which a South African journalist was found guilty of criminal defamation, according to a guide on South African media law by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a philanthropic body that works to advance press freedom. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 2014, although the court ruled that criminal defamation remained constitutional. CPJ was among a group of organizations that filed an amicus brief in support of Motsepe, arguing for the decriminalization of defamation in South Africa.

Despite the repeal of criminal defamation, several problematic laws remain, including the Cybercrimes Act, according to press freedom advocates. In a 2022 Universal Periodic Review submission, CPJ and four other partner organizations urged South African authorities to amend the Cybercrimes Act, which lacks public interest overrides for journalists and could affect the ability to publish leaked information. The organizations also called for reform of the Protected Disclosures Act in order to strengthen protection for whistleblowers and the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill, which criminalizes speech on broad terms and which commentators fear could undermine public debate. That bill is pending presidential approval.

Justice Deputy Minister John Jeffery told CPJ by phone that the lack of a public interest override was not raised during public submissions about the proposed Cybercrimes Act. The justice department was not averse to making changes to draft laws if threats to press freedom arose, and it had done so previously, even when journalists had raised concerns at the eleventh hour.

Civil society groups also raised concerns about the General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill currently before Parliament arguing in December last year that it posed a threat to democracy. When the bill was first tabled in December last year, critics feared that the power given to state security to vet individuals who accessed national key points, including the public broadcaster, SABC, was a threat to journalists’ independence. Although several amendments were subsequently made, free expression groups remain concerned that SABC journalists could still be targeted on the pretext that the intelligence services were establishing their trustworthiness. The National Assembly approved the revised bill last week, and it is now before the National Council of Provinces for processing.

State Security Agency spokesperson Sipho Mbhele did not respond to CPJ’s requests by messaging PP and telephone calls for comment.

Caroline James, the AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism’s advocacy coordinator, told CPJ by phone there were also other laws and draft legislation that indirectly affect media freedom, contributing to a lack of transparency and restricting access to information for journalists and the public. These include the Protection of Personal Information Act and Public Procurement Bill.

Quintal is a non-executive board member of amaBhungane.

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, South African courts have generally acted as a bulwark against threats to press freedom, including striking down efforts to legally gag the media or to judicially harass journalists.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Allies File Lawsuit to Restore Endangered Species Act Protections for Wolves

Mike Garrity — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 05:56:05 +0000

Image by USDA.

Let’s get right to the point, the end goal of the wolf ‘management plans’ in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming is to once again exterminate them from the Northern Rockies. They think the only good wolf is a dead wolf.

The wolf slaughter is out of control with bounties, shoot-on-sight, traps, snares, night scopes, and aerial gunning. It’s so horrific they’re even running them down with snowmobiles in Wyoming, which has brought the issue to international attention.

We petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reinstate Endangered Species Act protections and send them a 60-day notice of Intent to Sue, but the Fish and Wildlife Service determined that action was ‘not warranted. In fact the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that all wolves throughout the western United States should not be protected under the Endangered Species Act. The Fish and Wildlife Service has not yet delisted wolves in the rest of the western United States but signaled that they will do so.

Because the Service’s finding ignores obvious threats to the species, runs contrary to the best available science, and relies on flawed population models for its determination, our only recourse now is to take the federal government to court so wolves can fulfill their role in the Northern Rockies ecosystem as a critical apex predator. Therefore the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Western Watersheds Project, Trap Free Montana, Friends of the Clearwater, Wilderness Watch and 5 other plaintiffs, all of whom are represented by Western Environmental Law Center, filed a lawsuit

The Alliance successfully sued to overturn the delisting of wolves in 2012. Still, Montana’s Democratic Senator Jon Tester broke his campaign promise to not use riders to overturn court decisions and attached a rider to a must-pass Defense appropriation bill to remove wolves from Endangered Species list. It is time to once again manage wolves in the Northern Rockies and throughout the west based on science, not politics, since Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have proven that they are not capable of doing so.

Despite the “not warranted” finding by the Fish and Wildlife Service, a 2023 study by Dr. Robert Crabtree and others found the state of Montana’s population model was badly biased, overestimating total wolf populations by as much as 50%. The report noted this serious flaw creates a “precariously misleading situation for decision-makers that threatens wolf populations.” That reinforces Dr. Creel’s earlier study that found Idaho and Montana’s population estimates generated by their faulty models are unreliable. Yet the Fish and Wildlife Service relied on these flawed population estimates to conclude wolves in the West are not at risk of extinction.

A second 2023 study by wolf geneticist Dr. Bridgett vonHoldt and others found wolf populations in the northern Rockies are losing genetic variability and are presently below genetic minimum viable population levels. Once inbreeding occurs, the genetic damage is irreversible.

Simply put, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t follow the law and stand up to these states to protect wolves. That’s particularly troubling since Martha Williams, the Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is the former Director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks and is defending Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana’s policies of wolf extermination so we were forced to go to court to protect wolves.

The post Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Allies File Lawsuit to Restore Endangered Species Act Protections for Wolves appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Garrity.

Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Allies File Lawsuit to Restore Endangered Species Act Protections for Wolves

Mike Garrity — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 05:56:05 +0000

Image by USDA.

The post Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Allies File Lawsuit to Restore Endangered Species Act Protections for Wolves appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Garrity.

Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) Poses Serious First Amendment Concerns

Shealeigh — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:09:58 +0000

In an article for Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), authors Jason Kelly, Aaron Mackey, and Joe Mullin argue that updates to the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) aren’t enough to fix its core First Amendment issues, which will endanger LGTBQ youth, young people seeking mental health information, and many other at-risk…

The post Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) Poses Serious First Amendment Concerns appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

From Gaza to West Papua, the long struggle for justice and freedom

Pacific Media Watch — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:02:48 +0000

ANALYSIS: By David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report

On my office wall hangs a framed portrait of Shireen Abu Akleh, the inspiring and celebrated American-Palestinian journalist known across the Middle East to watchers of Al Jazeera Arabic, who was assassinated by an Israeli military sniper with impunity.

State murder.

She was gunned down in full blue “press” kit almost two years ago while reporting on a raid in the occupied West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp, clearly targeted for her influence as a media witness to Israeli atrocities.

READ MORE: The plan is to turn Palestine into a historical footnote so it’s too late to save it

As in the case of all 22 journalists who had been killed by Israeli military until that day, 11 May 2022, nobody was charged.

Now, six months into the catastrophic and genocidal Israeli War on Gaza, some 137 Palestinian journalists have been killed — murdered – by Israeli snipers, or targeted bombs demolishing their homes, and even their families.

Also in my office is pasted a red poster with a bird-of-paradise shaped pen in chains and the legend “Open access for journalists – Free press in West Papua.”

The poster was from a 2017 World Media Freedom Day conference in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, which I attended as a speaker and wrote about. Until this day, there is still no open door for international journalists

Harassed, beaten
Although only one killing of a Papuan journalist is recorded, there have been many instances when local news reporters have been harassed, beaten and threatened – beyond the reach of international media.

Ardiansyah Matra was savagely beaten and his body dumped in the Maro River, Merauke. A spokesperson for the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), Victor Mambor, said at the time: “‘It’s highly likely that his murder is connected with the terror situation for journalists which was occurring at the time of Ardiansyah’s death.”

Dr David Robie . . . author and advocate. Image: Café Pacific

Frequently harassed himself, Mambor, founder and publisher of Jubi Media, was apparently the target of a suspected bomb attack, or warning, on 23 January 2023, when Jayapura police investigated a blast outside his home in Angkasapura Village.

At first glance, it may seem strange that comparisons are being made between the War on Gaza in the Middle East and the long-smouldering West Papuan human rights crisis in the Asia-Pacific region almost 11,000 km away. But there are several factors at play.

Melanesian and Pacific activists frequently mention both the Palestinian and West Papuan struggles in the same breath. A figure of up to 500,000 deaths among Papuans is often cited as the toll from 1969 when Indonesia annexed the formerly Dutch colony in controversial circumstances under the flawed Act of Free Choice, characterised by critics as the Act of “No” Choice.

The death toll in Gaza after the six-month war on the besieged enclave by Israel is already almost 33,000 (in reality far higher if the unknown number of casualties buried under the rubble is added). Most of the deaths are women and children.

At least 27 children have died of malnutrition so far with numbers expected to rise sharply.

The Palestinian and West Papuan flags flying high at a New Zealand protest against the Gaza genocide in central Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR

Ethnic cleansing
But there are mounting fears that Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Gazans has no end in sight and the lives of 2.3 million people are at stake.

Both Palestinians and West Papuans see themselves as the victims of violent settler colonial projects that have been stealing their land and destroying their culture under the world’s noses — in the case of Palestine since the Nakba of 1948, and in West Papua since Indonesian paratroopers landed in a botched invasion in 1963.

They see themselves as both confronting genocidal leaders; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose popularity at home sinks by the day with growing protests, and Indonesia’s new President-elect Prabowo Subianto who has an atrocious human rights reputation in both Timor-Leste and West Papua.

And both peoples feel betrayed by a world that has stood by as genocides have been taking place — in the case of Palestine in real time on social media and television screens, and in the case of West Papua slowly over six decades.

Last November, outgoing Indonesian President Joko Widodo confronted US President Joe Biden on his policies over Gaza, and appealed for Washington to do more to prevent atrocities in Palestine.

Indonesian politicians such as Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi have been quick to condemn Israel, including at the International Court of Justice, but Papuan independence leaders find this hypocritical.

“We have full sympathy for the struggle for justice in Palestine and call for the restoration of peace,” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda.

Pacific protesters for a Free Palestine in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR

‘Where’s Indonesian outrage?’
“But what about West Papua? Where was Indonesia’s outrage after Bloody Paniai [2014], or the Wamena massacre in February?

“Indonesia is claiming to oppose genocide in Gaza while committing their own genocide in West Papua.”

“Over 60 years of genocidal colonial rule, over 500,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian forces.”

Wenda said genocide in West Papua was implemented slowly and steadily through a series of massacres, assassinations and policies, such as the killings of the chair of the Papuan Council Theys Eluay in 2001; Mako Tabuni (2012); and cultural curator and artist Arnold Ap (1984).

He cited many independent international and legal expert reports for his “considered position”, such as Yale University Law School, University of Wollongong, and the Asian Human Rights Commission – The Neglected Genocide.

In the South Pacific, Indonesia is widely seen among civil society, university and community groups as a ruthless aggressor with little or no respect for the Papuan culture.

Jakarta is engaged in an intensive diplomacy campaign in an attempt to counter this perception.

Unarmed Palestinians killed in Gaza – revealing Israel’s “kill zones”. Video: Al Jazeera

Israel’s ‘rogue’ status
But if Indonesia is unpopular in the Pacific over its brutal colonial policies, it is nothing compared to the global “rogue” status of Israel.

In the past few weeks, as atrocity after atrocity pile up and the country’s disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions increasingly shock, supporters appear to be shrinking to its long-term ally the United States and its Five Eyes partners with New Zealand’s coalition government failing to condemn Israel’s war crimes.

On Good Friday — Day 174 of the war – Israel bombed Gaza, Syria and Lebanon on the same day, killing civilians in all three countries.

In the past week, the Israeli military racheted up its attacks on the Gaza Strip in defiance of the UN Security Council’s order for an immediate ceasefire, expanded its savage attacks on neighbouring states, and finally withdrew from Al-Shifa Hospital after a bloody two-week siege, leaving it totally destroyed with at least 350 patients, staff and displaced people dead.

Fourteen votes against the lone US abstention after Washington had earlier vetoed three previous resolutions produced the decisive ceasefire vote, but the Israeli objective is clearly to raze Gaza and make it uninhabitable.

As The Guardian described the vote, “When Gilad Erdan, the Israeli envoy to the UN, sat before the Security Council to rail against the ceasefire resolution it had just passed, he cut a lonelier figure than ever in the cavernous chamber.”

The newspaper added that the message was clear.

‘Time was up’
“Time was up on the Israeli offensive, and the Biden administration was no longer prepared to let the US’s credibility on the world stage bleed away by defending an Israeli government which paid little, if any, heed to its appeals to stop the bombing of civilian areas and open the gates to substantial food deliveries.”

Al Jazeera interviewed Norwegian physician Dr Mads Gilbert, who has spent long periods working in Gaza, including at al-Shifa Hospital. He was visibly distressed in his reaction, lamenting that the Israeli attack had “destroyed” the 78-year legacy of the Strip’s largest and flagship hospital.

Speaking from Tromso, Norway, he said: “This is such a sad day, I’ve been weeping all morning.”

Dr Gilbert said he did not know the fate of the 107 critical patients who had been moved two days earlier to an older building in the complex.

“The maggots that are creeping out of the corpses in al-Shifa Hospital now,” he said, “are really maggots coming out of the eyes of President Biden and the European Union leaders doing nothing to stop this horrible, horrible genocide.”

Australia-based Antony Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, who has been reporting on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for two decades, described Israel’s attack on the hospital as the “actions of a rogue state”.

Gaza health officials said Israel was targeting all the hospitals and systematically destroying the medical infrastructure. Only five out of a total of 37 hospitals still had some limited services operating.

Indonesian soldiers gag journalists in West Papua – the cartoon could easily be referring to Gaza where attacks on Palestinian journalists have been systemic with 137 killed so far, by far the biggest journalist death toll in any conflict. Image: David Robie/APR

Strike on journalists’ tent
Yesterday, four people were killed and journalists were wounded in an Israeli air strike on a tent in the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

The Israeli military claimed the strike was aimed at a “command centre” operated by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad armed group, but footage screened by Al Jazeera reporter Hind Khoudary clearly showed it was a tent where displaced people were sheltering and journalists and photographers were working.

The Israeli military have killed another photojournalist and editor, Abdel Wahab Awni, when they bombed his home in the Maghazi refugee camp. This took the number of journalists killed since the start of the war to 137, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.

Al Jazeera has revealed that Israel was using “kill zones” for certain combat areas in Gaza. Anybody crossing the “invisible” lines into these zones was shot on sight as a “terrorist”, even if they were unarmed civilians.

The chilling practice was exposed when footage was screened of two unarmed civilians carrying white flags being apparently gunned down and then buried by bulldozer under rubble. A US-based civil rights group described the killings as a “heinous crime”.

The kill zones were confirmed at the weekend by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which said the military had claimed to have killed 9000 “terrorists”, but officials admitted that many of the dead were often civilians who had “crossed the line” of fire.

Call for sanctions
The Israeli peace advocacy group Gush Shalom sent an open letter to all the embassies credited to Israel calling for immediate sanctions against the Israeli government, saying Netanyahu was “flagrantly refusing” to comply with the ceasefire resolution.

“We, citizens of Israel,” said the letter, “are calling on your government to initiate a further meeting of the Security Council, aiming to pass a resolution which would set effective sanctions on Israel — in order to bring about an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip until the end of Ramadan and beyond it.”

A Palestinian-American professor of law Dr Noura Erakat, of Rutgers University, recently told a BBC interviewer that Israel had made its end game very clear from the beginning of the war.

“Israel has made its intent clear. Its war cabinet had made its intent clear. From the very beginning, in the first week of October 7, it told us its goal was to depopulate Gaza.

“They have equated the decimation of Hamas, which they cannot achieve militarily, with the depopulation of the entire Gaza strip.”

A parallel with Indonesia’s fundamentally flawed policies in West Papua. Failing violent settler colonialism.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Defenders Statement on Biden Administration’s Final Endangered Species Act Regulations

Newswire Editor — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:19:13 +0000

The Biden administration today released final Endangered Species Act regulations that restore several core components of the bedrock conservation law that the previous administration sought to undercut. Defenders of Wildlife, which pursued legal challenges to the 2019 regulations, expressed both appreciation and concern with the newly released regulations.

“While the regulations restore some essential wildlife protections, we were hopeful for far more than the marginal win the Biden administration delivered today. Our nation’s threatened and endangered species are under constant attack and the Endangered Species Act is the only thing standing between them and extinction,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. “We appreciate the administration’s work on this matter, but at the end of the day much work remains to be done to ensure the Endangered Species Act can fulfill its critical lifesaving mission.”

Among the positive changes in the final regulations are the reinstatement of automatic ESA protections for threatened species managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service known as the “blanket 4(d) rule” and the removal of regulations that injected economic considerations when determining whether a species should be listed under the ESA. The ESA requires listing decisions be made using the best available science and specifically prohibits consideration of related economic costs.

Of concern in the regulations, among other things, is retained 2019 language that allows the piecemeal destruction of critical habitat for threatened and endangered species; invites federal agencies to rely on speculative and unverified mitigation measures when analyzing agency actions that could jeopardize listed species or destroy or adversely modify critical habitat; and, invites federal agencies to ignore existing degraded conditions that have caused serious harm to listed species or critical habitat when considering the modification or relicensing of activities and existing facilities.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Our Survival Depends on the Endangered Species Act

Abigail Dillen — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 15:11:26 +0000

Biodiversity is our strongest natural defense against climate change. The ESA is our best tool to protect it, writes Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Abigail Dillen.

Our Survival Depends on the Endangered Species Act

Abigail Dillen — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 15:11:26 +0000

Biodiversity is our strongest natural defense against climate change. The ESA is our best tool to protect it, writes Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Abigail Dillen.

‘Your credibility is on the line’: CPJ, 41 others urge MFC member states to act on Gaza

Committee to Protect Journalists — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 14:58:42 +0000

Editor’s note: This letter has been updated to reflect an increased number of signatories.

The Committee to Protect Journalists joined 41 other media freedom organizations in calling out the “collective official silence” of the Media Freedom Coalition member states regarding the killings of journalists in Gaza and further warned that this silence seriously diminishes their ability to stand up for media freedom globally.

The Media Freedom Coalition is a group of 52 countries that have pledged to protect media freedom at home and abroad.

Read the full statement here:

Joint CSO call on MFC States to act on Gaza March 2024 V2 Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

New EU media law must bolster press freedom, CPJ and partners say

Committee to Protect Journalists — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 15:36:51 +0000

Brussels, March 13, 2024— As the European Parliament on Wednesday voted in favor of the European Media Freedom Act, CPJ and 20 other groups representing journalists, as well as press freedom and civil society organizations, called for effective implementation of the new law to ensure greater media independence and pluralism within the European Union (EU).

The legislation will require EU member states to make changes at the national level to better protect the media and journalists against political interference and spyware and to increase transparency over funding and ownership, amongst other things.

CPJ and partners called on the EU to pressure its member states to be as ambitious as possible to prevent further backsliding on the rule of law and attacks on the media within the bloc.

For more about the EU and press freedom, read our 2023 report, Fragile Progress: The struggle for press freedom in the European Union.

Read the joint statement here:

EMFA joint statement Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Gen. Mark Milley’s Second Act: Multimillionaire

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 21:13:11 +0000

Since retiring from the military last year, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley has become a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase bank, joined the faculties of Princeton and Georgetown, and embraced the lucrative paid speaking circuit. From military pay of $204,000 a year, Milley is sure to skyrocket to compensation in the millions, especially because he is represented by the same high-powered speakers’ agency as Hillary Clinton, who faced criticism in 2016 for her paid speeches to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Called “cashing in” by military officers, transitioning from capped government salaries to defense industry, private consulting for global risk management, or work with venture capital brings in lavish paydays. For retired generals, the invasion is swift. The recently retired chief of space operations for the Space Force, Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, for example, has joined the board of directors for aerospace companies Impulse Space and Axiom Space, as well as becoming senior managing director for investment firm Cerberus Capital Management. Gen. James C. McConville, who served as chief of staff of the Army before retiring last year, has joined the board of directors of drone manufacturer Edge Autonomy and aerospace investment firm AE Industrial Partners, as an operating partner.

Milley’s speaker’s agency, Harry Walker Agency is touting the retired general, who crossed swords with former President Donald Trump and continues to be a polarizing figure, for his insights on leadership and international conflicts. “His perspective is invaluable for audiences looking to understand the impact of current conflicts and managing risks on boards of directors and leadership teams who are responsible for making strategic decisions and identifying vulnerabilities,” the website says.

According to the speaker’s agency, Milley recently participated in a Q&A at a gathering of 160 CEOs organized by investment bank Moelis & Company, where he provided his “insider’s perspective on world affairs.”

The engagement has not been previously reported.

“He was terrific — we loved him!” said Moelis & Company, a global investment bank, in a review featured on the agency website. “It was fantastic!”

According to the agency website, Milley “provided crucial perspective to business leaders,” but provided little more detail.

On March 4, Milley also spoke at the American Council on Education’s 2024 Presidents and Chancellors Summit at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., according to an event page. A portrait of Milley appears on the list of major speakers and links to his Harry Walker Agency page.

His speech at the summit was sponsored by Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consulting and accounting firms, an event page notes. The page describes his speech as exploring “the convergence of democracy, higher education, and moral leadership during times of crisis”; as well as “emphasizing the responsibilities of leaders to uphold democratic principles and inspire resilience in challenging times.”

“The Summit was exclusively for presidents and chancellors, and there is no transcript,” Jonathan Riskind, vice president of public affairs and strategic communications for the American Council on Education, told The Intercept in response to a query.

Asked for transcripts of this and other speaking engagements, and for Milley’s compensation, Moelis & Company, the Harry Walker Agency, and Milley himself did not respond to requests for comment.

Speaker’s fees for former top officials like Milley are often substantial. During the 2016 presidential election, Democratic nominee Clinton came under fire for receiving over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs alone in one year. Along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, the couple raked in over $153 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House.

Milley has emerged as an ardent critic of Trump — unusual for high-ranking military officers who typically eschew politics. In his final speech as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year, in a swipe at Trump, Milley said that “we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”

Trump replied with a statement on his social media platform Truth Social: “Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week.”

Clinton’s speeches reportedly earned her around $200,000 a pop — about the same as Milley’s annual salary when he was in uniform.

Join The Conversation

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Malawi police seize equipment from journalists amid ‘fake’ Facebook page investigation

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 21:54:03 +0000

On February 13, officers from Malawi’s Digital Forensics and Cybercrime Investigations department seized cell phones and laptops from 14 Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) journalists, according to news reports, the Malawi chapter of regional press freedom group Media Institute of Southern Africa, South Africa-based rights group Campaign for Free Expression, and four of the affected journalists, who spoke to CPJ. The police officers seized cell phones from each of the 14 journalists and laptops from five of this group.

The seizures took place largely at MBC offices in Blantyre, Lilongwe, and Mzuzu following a complaint by MBC’s management about the creation of a “fake” Facebook page bearing the corporation’s name and logo, which the outlet had not approved, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), the journalists, and police search warrants reviewed by CPJ. The complaint accused the 14 journalists of “spamming,” which carries a maximum penalty of two million Malawian kwacha (about US$1,190) and imprisonment for five years under section 91 of Malawi’s Electronic Transactions and Cybersecurity Act.

As of March 8, police returned three laptops and nine phones to the journalists, according to a journalist who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. The journalist, whose phone has been returned, is concerned that the device has been compromised while in police custody and will no longer use it.

Another journalist, who also spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said some MBC colleagues received email notifications about attempts to log into their Instagram and X accounts while their devices were in police custody.

Malawi police spokesperson Peter Kalaya told CPJ in a late February 2024 phone interview that the police investigation was being conducted in response to a legitimate complaint, and police had obtained a warrant before seizing and searching the devices.

“The investigation is not targeting journalists, it is targeting people who we suspect to be responsible” for the Facebook page, Kalaya said, but he declined to explain how the police had determined which individuals were suspects.

“We have a forensics laboratory and sometimes we use other institutions’ forensic laboratories,” Kalaya told CPJ, but declined to give specifics about the technologies used to search the journalists’ devices. “Our search in the gadgets is going to be restricted to those apps that we believe or that we suspect were used in the commission of the crime,” Kalaya told CPJ, adding that the journalists whose devices had been seized should trust the professionalism of the investigating officers. “Why should a police officer go to contacts, to [the] photo gallery when what he is looking for is not there, or if he does not suspect it will be there?” he said.

In January 2024, the local Platform for Investigative Journalism (PIJ-Malawi) reported that Malawian authorities had obtained the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), a powerful technology designed to access and extract information from electronic devices and sold by the Israel-based company Cellebrite. The Malawi police sought to further expand its investigative capacity with similar tools, according to the report. In response to CPJ’s questions about which tools, including those sold by Cellebrite, police used to search the devices of MBC journalists, Kalaya declined to give specifics.

CPJ has previously documented the use of Cellebrite’s UFED by police in Botswana to search journalists’ phones and has raised the issue of privacy concerns when law enforcement seizes devices and has access to such technology.

MBC director general George Kasakula declined to comment until the police investigation into the alleged spamming concludes at an unknown date.

On February 15, five police officers looking for Greyson Chapita, MBC’s suspended controller of news and programs, arrived at his daughter’s home. The officers told family members there to call Chapita and tell him that his daughter was sick to lure him there, the journalist told CPJ, adding that his family obliged, and he arrived shortly after. Once Chapita arrived, police officers told him that he was a suspect in a murder and requested to search his phone and laptop, but he initially refused.

Chapita told the officers that he would not comply until he verified that they were police officers, and he went with them to the local police station to confirm their identities. Once confirmed by a senior officer, Chapita returned with them to his home, where the officers showed him the same warrant citing MBC management’s complaint, and he opened his laptop and entered his password, he told CPJ. The officers then looked through his Facebook account for 30 minutes without further explanation as Chapita watched.

“[T]hey checked my Facebook account and took screenshots. They made me sign a document showing that they searched my laptop and did not find anything, so they didn’t take it. They couldn’t see my phone because it is not a smartphone,” the journalist added.

When asked about the police officers’ tactics used to summon Chapita and search his computer, Kalaya told CPJ that he could not comment on the specifics of the incident, but he said the journalist could file a complaint.

“What I can assure you is that our investigators are very professional and whatever they are doing is very professional,” Kalaya said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ, media leaders demand UK police act on online abuse of women journalists

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:22:32 +0000

Berlin, March 8, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists and more than 100 journalists and media leaders sent an open letter to senior British police officers and lawmakers on Friday, International Women’s Day, calling on them to break the cycle of online violence and abuse against women working in journalism, which risks sidelining them from the profession, and to secure a safer future for women in the media.

In the letter, the signatories made four recommendations to the police:

to improve the recording of crimes against journalists
to provide national-level guidance for police on online violence against journalists and training on the gendered nature of online violence
to regularly report back to the National Committee for the Safety of Journalists
to improve dialogue between police and the journalism industry

Read the letter below:

Stop the Cycle_ Open letter to police Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

NZ’s shameful act over Hamas in defiance of Gaza atrocities reality

David Robie — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 06:54:56 +0000

COMMENTARY: By David Robie

New Zealand has taken another shameful act in its tone deaf approach to Israel’s War on Gaza this week by declaring Hamas a “terrorist entity” at a time when millions are marching worldwide for an immediate ceasefire and a lasting peace founded on an independent state of Palestine.

It would have been more realistic and just to condemn Israel for its genocidal war and five months of atrocities.

Instead, it has been corralled into the Five Eyes clique with an increasingly isolated United States as it continues to support the war with taxpayer funded armaments and providing the cloak of diplomacy.

READ MORE: More children die of malnutrition — Israel hits Gaza amid truce push

It was really unwise of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s coalition government to declare the Hamas political wing as terrorist, after already having declared the military wing terrorist in 2010.

Many argue around the world with increasing insistence that actually Israel is a rogue terrorist state.

Also, it is very unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu will succeed in his aims of “destroying” the Hamas movement, whatever the final outcome of the war.

As John Minto points out, Palestinian resistance movements have the right under international law to take up arms to fight against their colonial occupiers just as the African National Congress (ANC) had the right to take up arms to fight for freedom in apartheid South Africa.

Hamas represents an ideal, an independent Palestinian state and that can never be defeated.

Factions meet for unity
The various factions of the Palestinian resistance and political movements, including Fatah and Hamas, have been meeting in Moscow this week to settle their differences and stitch together a framework for a “Palestinian government of unity” as a basis for the future political architecture of independence.

Meet Gaza’s 11-year-old war reporter Sumayya Wushah, who says she was inspired by Shireen Abu Akleh to tell Palestine’s stories. pic.twitter.com/a7vB99nkqa

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) February 27, 2024

The United Nations General Assembly in 1969 — two years after the 1967 Six Day War when Israel seized Gaza from Egypt and Occupied West Bank from Jordan — recognised and reaffirmed “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.

This includes the right to choose their own representatives, including Hamas, a nationalist independence movement defending their illegally occupied territory, not a “terrorist” movement that the US and Israel try to have the world believe.

They are still very likely to be in the post-war line-up ending the status quo after five decades of illegal military occupation of Palestinian lands and the rash of illegal Israeli settlements.

American economist and public policy analyst Professor Jeffrey Sachs . . . “Israel is a criminal. Israel is in non-stop war crime status. Image: Judging Freedom

American economist and public policy analyst Professor Jeffrey Sachs summed up the reality over Israel’s colonial settler project in an interview this week by describing the Netanyahu government as a “murderous gang” and “zealots”, warning that “they are not going to stop”.

“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved. I am not using an exaggeration.

“I’m talking literally starving a population,” said the director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at New York’s Columbia University.

‘Israel is criminal’
“Israel is a criminal. Israel is in non-stop war crime status. Now, I believe, it is in genocidal status, and it is without shame, without remorse, without truth, without insight into what it is doing.

“But what it is doing is endangering Israel’s fundamental security because it is driving the world to believe that the Israeli state is not legitimate.

“This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not be by any self-control in Israel. There is none in this government.

“This is a murderous gang in government right now. These are zealots. They have some messianic vision of controlling all of today’s Palestinian lands. They are not going to stop.

“They believe in ethnic cleansing, or worse, depending on whatever is needed. And it is, again, the United States, which is the sole support. And it our mumbling, bumbling president and the others that are not stopping this slaughter.”

In addition, to the growing massive protests around the world against the Israeli extremism, a growing number of countries and organisations, inspired by two International Court of Justice cases against Israel — one by South Africa alleging genocide by Israel and the other by the UNGA seeking a ruling on the legality of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine — have introduced lawsuits.

A Dutch court last month ordered the government to block all exports of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel following concern that the country may be violating international laws such as the Genocide Convention.

Follow-up lawsuit
South Africa is preparing a follow-up lawsuit against the US and the UK for “complicity” in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. South African lawyer lawyer Wikus Van Rensburg said: “The United States must now be held accountable for the crimes it committed.”

Nicaragua is suing Germany at the ICJ for funding Israel – its export of weapons and munitions to the country has risen ten-fold since the Hamas deadly attack on Israel last October 7 — and cutting aid to the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), the major humanitarian agency in Gaza.

It has called for emergency measures that would force Germany to cease military aid to Israel, and restart funding to the UNRWA.

Nicaragua lawyers said in their lawsuit that the action was necessary because of Germany’s “participation in the ongoing plausible genocide and serious breaches of international humanitarian law” in Gaza.

“Would it be OK for you if they killed me?” . . . placard with child in pram at the Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland on Saturday. Image: David Robie/APR

Instead of joining the US-led coalition in the Red Sea operation against the Houthis, who are targeting US, UK and Israeli-linked ships to disrupt maritime trade in support of the Palestinians, New Zealand would have been more constructive by joining the South African case against Israel in The Hague.

Principle before profit if New Zealand is really committed to international rules based diplomacy.

No time to be ‘neutral’
This is no time to be “neutral” over the War on Gaza, there are fundamental issues of global justice and human rights at stake. As various global aid officials have been saying, every day that passes without a ceasefire and a step towards an independent Palestine as a long-term solution means more children dying of starvation or from the bombing.

The death toll is already a staggering more than 30,000 — mostly women and children. The war is clearly directed at the people of Gaza, collective punishment.

Australian columnist Caitlin Johnstone warns against neutrality, advice that might have been heeded by New Zealand’s foreign affairs advisers.

“At least be real with yourself that by refusing to pick a position you are licking the boot of a nuclear-armed ethnostate that is backed by the most powerful empire the world has ever seen.”

And that impunity needs to end.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by David Robie.

RNZ Mediawatch: NZ media facing an apocalypse now?

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:47:17 +0000

For years news media bosses warned the creaking business model backing journalism would fail at a major local outlet. It finally happened this week when Newshub’s owners proposed scrapping it. Then TVNZ posted losses prompting warnings of more cuts to come there. Can TV broadcasters pull a crowd without news? And what might the so-far ambivalent government do?

After Warner Bros Discovery top brass broke the bad news to staff on Wednesday, Newshub at 6 that night became a news event in itself.

RNZ MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

After Warner Bros Discovery top brass broke the bad news to staff on Wednesday, Newshub at 6 that night became a news event in itself.

In her report, political reporter Amelia Wade reminded viewers more than 30 years of TV news and current affairs — spanning the entire period of commercial TV here — could come to an end in June.

Before TV3 launched in 1989, state-owned TVNZ had been the only game in town.

But for most of its recent history, TV3’s parent company MediaWorks was owned by private equity funds and it was hamstrung with debts.

There were periodic financial emergencies too which seemed to signal the end.

In 2015, the boss Mark Weldon axed the current affairs shows Campbell Live and 3D and replaced them with ones that didn’t pull in more viewers or pull up many trees with their reporting.

“Reports of our death at 6pm have been greatly exaggerated”, host Hilary Barry responded to reports 3 News might be for the chop the following year.

But Weldon persuaded the owners to stump up a significant sum to launch Newshub instead.

When the huge global company Discovery bought MediaWorks loss-making TV channels in December 2020, many in the media were pleased a major media outfit was now in charge.

Using the Official Information Act, Newsroom later reported the Overseas Investment Office fast tracked Discovery’s application and sought no guarantees of a commitment to local news.

The 2021 mega-merger in the US that turned it into “Warner Bros Discovery” excited The Spinoff founder Duncan Grieve.

“Tova O’Brien breaking stories on CNN NZ at 6pm, before an evening of local reality TV souped up by global budgets and distribution — with major sports and drama rights for good measure,” was one scenario.

“It could also swing the other way, with the New Zealand linear asset seen as too small and obscure,” he warned.

After losses including a $35 million one last year, the owners now “propose” to slice out the entire on-screen and online news operation. New Zealand could lose more than 15 percent of its full-time journalists in one go.

Beginning of the end?

Current affairs journalist Eugene Bingham . . . “this was a moment we’ll look back on as a watershed moment in democracy and journalism.” Image: RNZ

“Oh, the irony, right? When those so-called ‘vulture funds’ had it, the operation still continued, albeit always run on the smell of an oily rag. Then a big media organisation was the one which axed it,” long-serving TV3 current affairs journalist Eugene Bingham told Mediawatch.

“I’ve been around long enough to see death by a thousand cuts over the years. But this was a moment we’ll look back on as a watershed moment in democracy and journalism,” Bingham said.

Former MediaWorks executive Andrew Szusterman told RNZ’s Morning Report the next day this decision would also ripple out to local drama and entertainment.

“We’re going to start to see how this is going to impact the production sector. Irrevocably, possibly,” said Szusterman, now the chief executive at production company South Pacific Pictures.

Does Newshub’s demise also kill off Three?

Mediaworks chief news officer Hal Crawford . . . “The loss of the newsroom represents the loss of the ability to respond to any event in real time.” RNZ

There’s been no shortage of people this week pointing out the appetite for TV news — and linear TV in general — is not what it was. That’s the main reason for the ad revenue slump cited by WBD.

Some who do tune in to Three (and WBD’s other channels) for The Block, Married at First Sight and free movies may not miss the news shows from June 30. So maybe Three will be fine?

“The loss of the newsroom represents the loss of the ability to respond to any event in real time. That is the heart and soul of a traditional TV broadcaster,” Hal Crawford — chief news officer at MediaWorks (and effectively Newshub’s boss) until early 2020 — told Mediawatch.

“When the Queen dies you can send a team to London, you can have someone in the studio talking about it, you can interact in a way that makes people feel like it is alive and a real human entity.”

Warner Bros Discovery executives Glen Kyne (left) and Jamie Gibbons fronting up on Newshub at 6pm last Wednesday. Image: Newshub at 6 screenshot/RNZ

Channels without the live element news brings are effectively just “content databases”, Crawford told Mediawatch.

“News is the one programme that runs 365 days a year . . . which the schedule is going to rely on to lead into prime time. So the rest of your schedule is going to dwindle. Ratings are gonna fall off and everything is going to go to pieces.

“It really is going to dwindle as a cultural entity in New Zealand because you’re not going to be able to justify the funding from NZ on Air if you aren’t getting audiences. It’s hard for me to see a way out of Three basically going away as a cultural force in New Zealand.”

But TV-style news and current affairs is also now being done online.

After Eugene Bingham’s TV3 show 3D was axed in 2016, four members formed the Stuff Circuit investigative team. Its video documentary productions won awards until it was axed by Stuff late last year.

“Of course, there have been changes in viewing habits . . . but there’s still a reason that the ‘1’ and the ‘3’ on remotes around the country are worn down. Hundreds of thousands of people at six o’clock flip the channel. Without a TV bulletin there, doesn’t (Three) just become like Bravo, where there’s just programmes running and you either switch on or you don’t?”

In the end, journalists have to confront the fact that not quite enough people these days care about what they do — including executives at media companies, politicians not inclined to intervene and members of the public.

Most New Zealanders are happy to use services like Netflix or Google search or Facebook that carry news and local content but contribute almost nothing to it.

“But I don’t think people quite understand the depth of the problem facing media and the implications. That certainly came through to me watching the broadcasting minister saying, well, people can still watch programmes like Sky for news,” Bingham said.

The National Party went into the last election without a media or broadcasting policy or any specific manifesto commitments.

What should/could the government do?

Media minister Melissa Lee . . . a case of a private company taking action because “their business model actually wasn’t working”. Image: RNZ/Angus Dreaver

While Wednesday’s announcement shocked the 300-odd staff, the local chief executive Glen Kyne — close to tears on Newshub at 6 — told Newshub’s Michael Morrah he had known about the possibility since January.

The government also got a heads-up earlier this week.

Media minister Melissa Lee told reporters WBD made no requests for help, prompting Glen Kyne to tell Newshub WBD did ask both the current and previous government for assistance, such as a reduction in the multi-million dollar fee paid to state-owned transmission company Kordia.

Lee later clarified her comment but was firm that the government had no role to play because this was a case of a private company taking action because “their business model actually wasn’t working.”

On Morning Report, Andrew Szusterman disagreed.

“Channels 7,9 and 10, SBS, ABC, and Fox in Australia all run news services. I don’t think their government would let the last commercial free-to-air news broadcaster just walk away. The fact the broadcasting minister hasn’t fronted . . . it’s quite shameless,” he told RNZ’s Morning Report.

Stuff’s Tova O’Brien — who famously turned on her former employer MediaWorks on air in real time last year when it closed Today FM — called the minister’s response “cold and tone-deaf” and accused the government of a “glib shrug”.

That was partly because Lee’s first response to the Newshub announcement was to tell reporters: “There’s Sky as well, there’s a whole lot of other media about.”

Sky contracts Newshub to produce its 5.30pm free-to-air news bulletin — and Sky subscribers won’t find any locally-made news on Sky TV’s pay channels.

Lee should have known that. She was a programme-maker before she was an MP and was National’s spokesperson on broadcasting for years in opposition.

Lee declined all interview requests this week — including from Mediawatch — but did tell reporters at Parliament: “I wasn’t as articulate as I could have been. But I am taking this seriously.”

The PM told Stuff he is expecting an update at Cabinet on Monday. The media will be watching that space with pens and cameras poised.

There is legislation currently before a select committee which could compel the big online tech platforms to pay local producers of news for it.

In opposition, Lee opposed it and called it “literally a shakedown” in Parliament. (This weekend Facebook’s owner Meta announced it would not do any more deals with media under Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, prompting a likely confrontation with the government there.)

“The government’s position on this will obviously take into account these latest developments in terms of the wider media landscape. This government is committed to working with the sector on ways to ensure sector sustainability, while still preserving the independence of a fourth estate and avoiding market interference,” Lee said in Parliament on Thursday when questioned.

The government already heavily intervenes in the market by overseeing the state-owned broadcasters and agencies — including TVNZ — and putting over a quarter of a billion dollars every year onto broadcasting, programmes and other content.

The former government also put $80 million over two years into Māori media content, partly in the expectation there might also be a new public media entity to broadcast it.

In 2019, Hal Crawford — boss of Newshub at the time — declared the New Zealand news media is broken.

His chief executive also urged the government to intervene. AM show host Duncan Garner switched the studio lights off as an on-air stunt.

Crawford is now a digital media consultant based in his native Australia. The broadcasting funding agency in NZ On Air hired him in 2021 to review its own spending of public money on the media.

“It’s not a good idea for governments to knee jerk and sponsor particular commercial companies in some sort of bailout,” he said.

“To give money to the people who are in financially the worst position is the most ineffective and unfair use of public money that I can think of. If the market is telling you that something isn’t wanted and needed, you have to listen to that.

“But it doesn’t mean that you have to always listen to the market and do things that have never been done before.”

He cites the Public Interest Journalism Fund which put $55 million into new content and created new jobs for cash-strapped news media companies.

Crawford’s fact-finding report on the planned PIJF in 2021 records media managers feared cuts and possible closures to come.

“Many of our interviewees believed that if an organisation could show that cuts were imminent, they should be able to apply for funded roles under the PIJF. Many saw the dangers in this non-incremental funding, but argued for exceptions in extreme circumstances. Although these arguments are compelling, Funding could evaporate quickly trying to keep the newsrooms of big commercial companies afloat if this became the primary aim of the fund.”

“Around the world and in New Zealand, there’s ample evidence that public funding of journalism is becoming more essential. There has to be a way there, because what we’re seeing with the the planned closure of Newshub is the end result of the factors that we’ve known about for at least a decade,” Crawford told Mediawatch.

“Direct subsidy from the government to a commercial newsroom isn’t going to work. The government has to find a way to sensibly finance news and structure it so that it doesn’t become a political football.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Republicans Hatched a Secret Assault on the Voting Rights Act in Washington State

by Marilyn W. Thompson — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:00:00 +0000

by Marilyn W. Thompson

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Republican Paul Graves’ work was about to come undone. In the wee hours of Nov. 15, 2021, he and his fellow Republican on Washington state’s independent redistricting commission had finally prevailed on their Democratic counterparts to agree to the maps voters would use in the upcoming election.

But then Latino voters sued the state, claiming the new legislative maps didn’t give them voting power commensurate with their population. Now, Graves worried, a federal judge was about to force the state to give Democratic-leaning Latinos more voting power.

With the balance of power in Washington up for grabs, he launched a covert attack. He consulted powerful state Republicans. He reached out to national Republicans, including the most influential conservative redistricting lawyer in the country, to discuss funding a lawsuit and get strategic advice. He conferred with a Seattle law firm. And he found a Latino congressional hopeful to act as the face of the lawsuit.

A countersuit was filed — against Graves’ own work. This suit made the opposite argument from the Latino group’s. Yes, the map that Graves and his fellow commissioners had created discriminated. But it had disadvantaged white people and other voters.

Sure enough, as Graves had foreseen, in August of last year the judge sided with the Latino plaintiffs. He determined the Yakima Valley map violated the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law that has been the bedrock of voting discrimination cases for over half a century. Section 2 of the VRA prohibits the creation of election districts that deprive voters of color of their full rights. The judge said the maps needed to be redrawn.

Having handed Latinos a win, the judge tossed the lawsuit that Graves had helped generate as moot. Undeterred, the legal team of Benancio Garcia, the Latino congressional hopeful, appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to block the new maps until it had weighed the merits of his claim. The court declined to take the case earlier this month, and it is unclear whether lawyers will now appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Graves told ProPublica he wanted legal action that would slow down the court because he believed the plaintiffs were about to push through “a naked partisan gerrymander.”

“My singular goal, once a lawsuit was filed, was to defend the maps,” he said in a statement. His work is described in sworn depositions and court documents, including emails and other communications introduced as exhibits.

The Washington state salvo is merely one part of a yearslong national legal assault on laws and policies intended to prevent discrimination. In 2013, in a victory for right-wing activists, the conservative-majority Supreme Court overturned a key aspect of the VRA, lifting federal oversight over maps in areas that had historically discriminated against people of color. Last year, plaintiffs succeeded in getting the high court to make affirmative action illegal at private universities. Conservatives have also targeted school desegregation efforts and diversity initiatives at myriad organizations, including corporations and universities.

The activists are not done. By taking aim at the remaining pillar of the VRA, Section 2, they could substantially reshape U.S. elections. Despite a recent setback at the Supreme Court in an Alabama case, a sprawling, multipronged effort to get the high court to change course continues, supported by key national Republican figures. The Washington state case is one of 38 in 12 states that seek to roll back protections against discrimination by either attacking Section 2 directly or arguing that the constitutional protections of the 14th Amendment, which was passed after the Civil War and extended full citizenship rights to all Americans, trump Section 2.

The underlying premise animating these legal efforts is, in the famous words of Chief Justice John Roberts in another major ruling, that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The argument, which conservatives have been developing for years, flips what has been traditionally seen as the original intent of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Instead, they argue, the amendment can be read as prohibiting taking racial and ethnic composition into account — period. Section 2, however, requires states to ensure that voters of color are fairly represented.

Republicans say that these competing mandates confuse state legislators as they try to draw fair maps. Democrats are taking advantage of Section 2 to draw as many districts as possible that will elect Democrats, according to Adam Kincaid, who directs the National Republican Redistricting Trust and its nonprofit affiliate the Fair Lines America Foundation. “That was not what Congress intended and is not what the Constitution permits,” he said.

Victory over Section 2 could stifle the voting power of nonwhite groups nationwide, striking fear in legal experts and activists who say that the country remains scarred by centuries of discrimination and racism.

“Even after serious damage by the Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act remains one of the country’s most effective civil rights statutes. Every attempt to limit its impact is really an attempt to limit our ability to protect against racial discrimination,” said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department civil rights official who is now a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School.

An Urgent Mission

Tracking the course of mapmaking fights is vital to understanding the likely results of the 2024 elections. In Washington state, where partisan gerrymandering is forbidden, Graves and his fellow Republican commissioner came to believe the Democratic members were pushing a map that was overly favorable for their party.

Paul Graves, a Republican member of Washington’s state redistricting committee (Washington state House Republicans website)

At issue was how to divide Yakima Valley, a rural area that’s home to many of the state’s vineyards and historically has voted Republican. In recent years, the Latino population in the valley has boomed.

By the Democrats’ read of Section 2, the commission was required to create a district that gave Latinos in Yakima a fair chance to elect the candidate of their choice. The commission couldn’t reach a consensus on whether it should hire a consultant to do a racial voting analysis, so Democrats hired their own. He concluded the district needed a 60% Latino voting population to comply with the VRA.

Most Latino voters lean Democratic, so drawing such a map could diminish Republican political power.

Concerned, Graves and another Republican member convinced Republicans in the state Senate to pay for an opinion from a Seattle law firm it used for legal work. It concluded that drawing lines to comply with Section 2 racial mandates could give grounds for a 14th Amendment lawsuit.

“I don’t read Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to say one party gets to win over another,” Graves later testified.

Partisan arguments dragged on during an all-night meeting the commission held on Nov. 15. Graves at one point asked Democrats what would be a “fair trade” if they got a majority Hispanic district in the Yakima Valley. If Republicans gave up voting strength there, he argued, the GOP should get an adjustment elsewhere.

With all of the haggling, the commission blew its midnight deadline but continued working through the night to reach an agreement that it could forward to the state Supreme Court. Worn down, Democrats finally agreed to the Republican proposals for the new 15th Legislative District.

Graves was in charge of plugging final numbers into computer mapping software. Democrats later complained that his final map put the Latino voter percentage a tad lower than they had expected, at just over 50%. Graves said Democrats were consulted on every mapping adjustment.

The Washington Supreme Court allowed the commission’s work to stand despite its tardiness, and the maps were used in the 2022 elections.

Latino plaintiffs filed the Section 2 lawsuit in January 2022. The commission was not a named defendant, but the panel’s work was at the heart of the case. All the commissioners were expected to be state witnesses.

Graves and some other commissioners were upset when the office of the Democratic attorney general declined to defend the map and told the commission to hire its own attorney. Commission Chair Sarah Augustine resigned in March 2022, criticizing the state’s lack of legal support.

Graves believed that the state’s refusal to defend the map could lead the judge to render a judgment that would invalidate the map, which would have been “a disaster,” he testified.

“I was faced with the prospect of having to raise private funds to defend a public map,” he testified. Graves, a former lawmaker who ran the legal department of a trucking firm, urgently worked the phone. He got in touch with his state and national Republican contacts, including Kincaid, the director of the NRRT and its foundation, who Graves had reached out to soon after his appointment. Graves said he wasn’t sure at first what the appropriate legal strategy should be, but he knew he had to move expeditiously.

Through a GOP contact, Graves connected with Garcia, an Iraq combat veteran and prominent Latino Republican who wanted to run for Congress. Garcia testified that they talked by phone about the map and whether it could be a “racial gerrymander” drawn to favor Latino Democrats. They discussed whether Garcia would quickly file a lawsuit challenging the map, and Graves connected him with two Seattle lawyers and Kincaid. Graves also urged him to bring on a national Latino GOP group as a co-plaintiff. (The group never signed on.)

Graves emailed Garcia that Kincaid’s foundation “can serve as a funding vehicle for this work.” Kincaid declined to comment on foundation spending.

As a commissioner, state ethics rules restricted what Graves could share with outside parties about private commission deliberations. Plaintiffs’ lawyers introduced texts and emails that showed Graves guiding Garcia and questioned how Graves “found it appropriate — as a lawyer — to coordinate the filing of a lawsuit he believed to be meritless in order to interfere with a separate ongoing federal proceeding.”

Texts between Graves and Benancio Garcia, introduced into evidence by plaintiffs for a group of Latino voters suing over Washington’s electoral maps, appear to show Graves coaching Garcia through the process of filing a lawsuit. (U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington)

Graves called the accusations made by plaintiffs’ lawyers false and “scurrilous.”

In a statement, he told ProPublica his “singular goal, once a lawsuit was filed, was to defend the maps.”

For his part, Graves said he never believed his map was an illegal racial gerrymander, as Garcia’s lawsuit asserts. But Graves testified that he thought a 14th Amendment challenge “would at least meet the immediate goal” of delaying a default judgment.

Garcia’s testimony was also damaging. He said in his deposition that he knew little about the case brought by Latino voters until he talked with Graves and that he rarely spoke with his own lawyers. Asked who was paying his legal fees, he could only say, “I don’t know.” The legal team Graves helped arrange included state Rep. Andrew Stokesbary, the new House minority leader and a friend of Graves, and the national law firm of Jason Torchinsky, the NRRT’s chief counsel and a leading GOP redistricting litigator.

Garcia’s deposition harmed the suit so much that his lawyers later tried to have much of it corrected to reverse many of his assertions, including his testimony that his lawyers rarely talked with him. The judge would not allow the corrections.

Stokesbary, Torchinsky and Garcia did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

While the Garcia case was in motion, Stokesbary and Torchinsky agreed to represent three GOP intervenors in a parallel effort to derail the plaintiffs in the original case. This new effort sought to preserve the commission’s map. The intervenors, including a GOP lawmaker and the brother of an aide to a GOP redistricting commissioner, argued that Graves’ map did not violate Section 2 and no remedial map was needed.

The attorney general’s office asked the judge to investigate possible conflicts by Stokesbary and Torchinsky, who were representing clients arguing two opposite legal positions. As a leading Republican in the House, Stokesbary had voted to approve the plan Garcia was challenging. Plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the conflicts traced back to Graves and his effort to “conjure up nonmeritorious and competing legal claims.” The judge allowed the attorneys to continue after their clients signed waivers.

After a four-day trial, the judge ruled in August 2023 that the Yakima Valley map must be redrawn before the 2024 election. Then a three-judge panel said the decision in the case brought by Latino voters rendered the Garcia case moot.

Graves took the stand during the trial and offered a convoluted defense. He described his fear that the commission’s map would be thrown out and his frantic effort to stop it. “I was trying to make sure the maps have a full-throated legal defense,” he testified.

He argued that the commission did not intentionally violate Section 2. The federal law, he said in a deposition, is “not crystal clear.”

Go Fishing

As the battle against Section 2 has continued, Torchinsky has emerged as one of the most significant GOP lawyers in fights over election mapmaking.

A fierce litigator, Torchinsky and his firm, Holtzman Vogel, have represented Republican congressional and Senate fundraising committees, the Republican National Committee and a long list of leading GOP candidates and PACs. In Texas, his efforts to shield Kincaid from demands that he give a deposition and produce documents in a Section 2 lawsuit brought by Latino plaintiffs dragged on for more than a year. An appeals court is still weighing GOP claims of legislative privilege in the case.

In Florida, Torchinsky worked for more than 100 hours with the staff of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 to create an alternate congressional redistricting map that would be more favorable to Republicans. A circuit court judge ordered the map redrawn, saying it diminished Black voting strength, but an appeals court overturned the decision. The Florida Supreme Court has said it will hear the case.

That same year, Torchinsky weighed in on a Section 2 case before the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that many legal experts expect to become the next Supreme Court showdown. The case involves a challenge from the Arkansas NAACP to the state’s 2021 redistricting plan. In a major ruling questioning decades of precedent, a three-judge panel said private parties lack standing to bring Section 2 lawsuits because the law gives enforcement power only to the U.S. attorney general.

Torchinsky had filed a brief on behalf of GOP Sen. Tom Cotton arguing that the courts should not allow private parties to bring lawsuits. The law is specific, he said, and to “infer otherwise would be an act of judicial lawmaking incompatible with the power of the federal judiciary.”

The appeals court recently declined to rehear the case, and the Arkansas NAACP and other plaintiffs are weighing an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Torchinsky’s clients had a setback in June 2023 when the Supreme Court issued an unexpected 5-4 decision upholding Section 2. The case involved a challenge to congressional maps brought by Black voters in Alabama. Representing the GOP congressional delegation in a solidly Republican state, Torchinsky urged justices to reverse the lower court’s order that the map be redrawn. “The Voting Rights Act was never intended to guarantee the success of one political party given the coincidence that the minority group prefers that political party,” he wrote.

Torchinsky explained his reasoning a few weeks later in a podcast interview. He reflected a view shared by the NRRT’s Kincaid, who told ProPublica in a statement that lawyers for the left, funded by vast sums of “dark money,” are turning the VRA “into a vehicle to elect more Democrats rather than to elect minority candidates.”

Torchinsky described the difficulties in many states of separating race and politics. As he put it, “When an African-American can’t win a statewide election in Alabama, is it because they are Black? Or because they are running as a Democrat? And I think that is some of what the courts should be trying to untangle in these cases.”

Torchinsky predicted “substantially more litigation” as state legislatures wrestle with tensions between Section 2 and the 14th Amendment.

Levitt, the former Justice Department official, said several justices have clearly expressed opposition to Section 2, so Republican lawyers in recent years appeal any case that might raise a new issue and have a chance to win over the court’s conservative supermajority.

“You put enough bait in the ocean, and sometimes you catch a fish,” he said.

Looking to 2024

The remedial map-drawing process is close to completion in Washington, with a judge’s decision expected this month. A court-appointed special master is considering five possible fixes. Republican leaders have condemned all the plans as Democratic gerrymanders that could disrupt four to eight GOP districts and change the election districts of hundreds of thousands of residents.

In recent months, GOP state Sen. Nikki Torres has joined the lawsuit brought by Latino voters as a third party with a personal stake in the outcome, arguing that the maps do not need to be redrawn to give Latinos a greater voice. She won election as the first Latina senator from Central Washington in 2022 with about 68% of the vote under the 15th District map drawn by the commission.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers consider her entry into the case just another delaying tactic that, if successful, will leave challenged maps in place for the 2024 election cycle.

Ernest Herrera, of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said: Lawyers for the intervenors are “trying every way they can to delay the Latino plaintiffs from having a map in which they can elect or have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Marilyn W. Thompson.

‘National crisis’: PNG women demand MPs act against all forms of violence

APR editor — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 03:34:32 +0000

By Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent, and Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist

Women’s rights advocates in Papua New Guinea are calling for peace and for the men in Parliament to act against the violence in the country.

The call comes following tribal fighting in Enga Province ended in a mass massacre at the weekend, which has so far claimed more than 60 lives.

Dorothy Tekwie, founder of Papua New Guinea Women in Politics, said she was heartbroken for the women who’ve have lost their children in the brutal killings.

READ MORE: Other Wapenamanda massacre reports

“Any woman would be emotional…and I am also calling on women throughout Papua New Guinea to stand up. Enough is enough of violence of all forms.

“We are asking for accountability from our members of Parliament. It doesn’t matter whether they are in government or in opposition. This is a national crisis.”

Tekwie said the government needed to return the peace in the Highlands so infrastructure, housing, health and education development could begin.

On Wednesday, the government addressed a motion to take action on tribal conflicts and violence, specifically in Enga province.

Mothers mourning
Another advocate Esmie Sinapa said as gunmen planned their next attack in the Highlands, mothers were mourning the deaths of their children.

Sinapa said violence had been escalating across the nation for some years.

“Imagine 60 mothers, wailing, weeping for their sons. As mothers of this country, women of this country, we are very concerned,” she said.

Papua New Guinea Women in Politics founder Dorothy Tekwie . . . the government needs to return the peace in the Highlands. Image: RNZ Pacific/Scott Waide

Cathy Alex, who was kidnapped last year in the Bosavi region and held for ransom, said PNG was on the verge of being a “failed state”.

As a woman who herself had experienced similar violence, Alex said the government must act.

“I don’t know what kind of country we call ourselves,” she said.

“This is a country . . . that if we look at indicators that shows a failed state. We are already it.

‘Individuals stand up’
“What’s holding this country together is individuals like these individuals who stand up for their communities and hold peace.

“What happened [in Enga] is completely unprecendented,” she added.

Tekwie said PNG women want affirmative action taken by government to deal with some of these issues.

“Starting with early education for one. We are mothers and are finding it so hard to get our kids into school,” she said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Women’s advocate Esmie Sinapa . . . “Imagine 60 mothers, wailing, weeping for their sons.” Image: RNZ Pacific/Scott Waide

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Despite Its Popularity, The Kids Online Safety Act Won’t Help Young People, It Will Hurt Them

Kate Horgan — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 20:03:37 +0000

By: Steve Macek In January 2024, top executives at X (formerly Twitter), Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram), Snap, Discord, and TikTok appeared at a Senate hearing to answer…

The post Despite Its Popularity, The Kids Online Safety Act Won’t Help Young People, It Will Hurt Them appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Nepali journalists Aishwarya Kunwar, Puskar Bhatt arrested under cybercrime law

Committee to Protect Journalists — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:29:36 +0000

On February 10, police in Kanchanpur district of western Sudurpaschim province arrested Aishwarya Kunwar, a reporter for the privately owned news website Nigarani Khabar, and Puskar Bhatt, a correspondent for the privately owned broadcaster Mountain Television, following their reporting and social media commentary on allegations of police misconduct, according to the local advocacy organizations Media Action Nepal and Freedom Forum.

Police opened an investigation into the journalists, who have since been released, under Section 47 of the Electronic Transactions Act, 2008, those sources said. The law criminalizes the electronic publication of content deemed illegal under existing laws or “contrary to public morality or decent behavior” with a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of 100,000 rupees (US $754). CPJ has repeatedly documented the use of the Electronic Transactions Act to detain and investigate journalists for their work.

Kamal Thapa, superintendent of the Kanchanpur police, told CPJ that the case registered against the journalists was in relation to their social media posts, not their news coverage. On February 5, the Kanchanpur police said in a statement that those who “write such misleading news/status” would be punished under the law.

Binod Bhatta, the journalists’ lawyer, told CPJ that his clients’ social media posts and news coverage should be considered as interrelated because they reported on the same topic in the public interest.

On February 5, Bhatt published an interview on his Facebook page with a police officer who said that he resigned from his job after he was beaten by a female inspector, whom he named. Bhatt also commented on the allegations on his Facebook page.

On February 5, Kunwar’s news website Nigarani Khabar reported the same allegations against the female officer, while a second article made four allegations of misconduct by the same policewoman, including her involvement in detaining Kunwar in 2023 while the journalist was reporting on a clash between police and locals. Kunwar also commented on the allegations on her Facebook page.

Bhatt and Kunwar were released at around 10 p.m. on February 14 and 1 a.m. on February 15 respectively, on personal guarantee, which requires them to remain present in the area while the investigation is carried out, according to Media Action Nepal, Bhatta, and a person familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

While in police custody, the officer asked the journalists to apologize by touching her feet, a sign of respect in South Asian culture, but Kunwar refused, which delayed her release, those sources said.

As of February 20, the journalists’ phones, which were seized during their arrest, remained in police custody, according to Bhatta and the person familiar with the case.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ, partners call on European Commission to act on press freedom in Greece

Committee to Protect Journalists — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 15:32:43 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists on Tuesday joined 16 partner organizations in a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, to ask her to hold the Greek authorities to account for press freedom concerns.

CPJ and other organizations recently reported that Greece is the only EU country to currently have two open cases of impunity for the murder of journalists and that almost no other country in the EU has experienced such a high number of physical attacks which endanger the safety of journalists in the last few years.

Read the full text of the letter below:

Joint NGO letter to EC on Greece Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Northern Rockies Gray Wolves Denied Endangered Species Act Protection

Newswire Editor — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 19:07:58 +0000

Deluzio, who introduced the House version of the bill with Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), noted that the Norfolk Southern train derailed and released hazardous materials "less than a mile from the Pennsylvania state line and the homes and farms of my constituents."

"Without dwelling on the resulting health problems, environmental scare, and general lack of trust that I still regularly hear from my constituents, I instead want to empathize that we cannot accept congressional inaction, and how the February 3, 2023 derailment could have been much worse," the congressman wrote. "Folks like us, who live along or near the tracks, refuse to be treated as collateral damage in the way of big railroads' profits."

"Over the last two centuries, railroad companies have wielded their power and influence to protect their profits and avoid commonsense safety measures, allowing them to cut corners and pad the pockets of their corporate shareholders at the expense of the American people," he explained. "After the East Palestine derailment, the big railroad lobby sprang into action once again and lobbied members of Congress—directing them to do nothing to make rail safer and risk cutting into their profits."

The Railway Saftey Act—led in the Senate by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and JD Vance (R-Ohio)—contains provisions to enhance safety procedures for trains carrying hazardous materials, reduce the risk of wheel bearing failures, require well-trained two-person crews, force carriers to face higher fines for wrongdoing, support communities impacted by disasters, and invest in safety improvements.

The rail lobby wants to shut down this bill, but I take a back seat to no one when it comes to standing up to special interests. https://t.co/0N1QGfVCIJ
— (@)

Brown and Vance have also issued fresh calls for action this week.

"Over the last year, I've visited East Palestine repeatedly, and our staff is there even more often," Brown said Tuesday. "Each time, we ask residents what we can do. They want the support and the compensation they are owed, but they do not want this derailment to define them. I don't want that either, and I don't want any other community in Ohio or around the country to have to deal with a disaster like this ever again."

"As I've told the people of East Palestine—and as I keeptelling them: I'm here for the long haul," he added. "I will always fight for the people of East Palestine. I will always fight to hold Norfolk Southern accountable. And I will always fight to make our railways safer."

As Nexstar's Reshad Hudson reported Tuesday:

Vance says he's working with Brown to get the needed support for the bill.
"It's not going to eliminate every train crash, but it hopefully can make these things much less common because they happen way too often,” Vance said.

According toRoll Call, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told reporters this week that his department has "done our part" and "we are pressing industry to do their part, Congress needs to act as well."

"Any congressional leader of any party who is serious about railroad safety should support funding for railroad safety inspections... and should support the Railway Safety Act," he said.

While the outlet noted that delays in the House are partly tied to a forthcoming national Transportation Safety Board investigation report, the bill's sponsors and Buttigieg are largely blaming industry opposition, with the secretary saying that "in the past, there have been times when Congress stood up against the railroad lobby... they should do that now."

A year after the train derailment, residents of #EastPalestine Ohio are still paying the price for fossil fuel corporations' irresponsibility.
— (@)

The White House announced this week that Biden plans to visit East Palestine sometime in February "to meet with residents impacted by the Norfolk Southern train derailment and assess the progress that his administration has helped deliver in coordination with state and local leaders to protect the community and hold Norfolk Southern accountable."

The White House also reiterated the administration's support for the Railway Safety Act—a bill that is backed by workers but also contains loopholes that "you can run a freight train through," as Eddie Hall, national president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, warned last year.

Other measures before Congress include the Railway Accountability Act—led by Brown along with Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who are also fighting to pass the Railway Safety Act.

We need rail companies to implement these safety measures\u00a0nationwide \u2014 and\u00a0before a derailment, not after.\n\nNow, let\u2019s pass the Railway Safety Act and make sure we hold these companies accountable.
— (@)

Demands for congressional action on rail safety and more have also continued to pour out of East Palestine and surrounding communities—particularly from people who remain displaced and are suffering a wide range of symptoms.

"What I've been experiencing is some of the fear that I've never known in almost all of my 70 years," Stella Gamble, a grandmother of nine who lives less than a mile from the derailment, said in a testimony shared by The Real News Network. "I am so afraid for my grandchildren and for the other children in this town. My granddaughters have rashes on their skin. They've been having female issues. They get massive headaches."

"I think that the whole thing behind everything that's happened here is the same as it is everywhere else in this country. It's all about the money," Gamble added. "Everything about it is the money, and they will gladly sacrifice a few thousand Appalachians to keep their trains going through here... We're just a sacrifice. That's how I feel. And I feel like my grandkids are being sacrificed, too."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Ukraine’s First Lady Urges Allies To Act ‘Faster’ In Effort To Force Russia To Return Children

News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 17:18:04 +0000

Leaders from the European Union unanimously agreed to a four-year 50 billion-euro aid package for Ukraine as Hungary, which vetoed the deal in December, fell into line with the other 26 member states, ending weeks of wrangling over the move.

"We have a deal.... This locks in steadfast, long-term, predictable funding for Ukraine. The EU is taking leadership & responsibility in support for Ukraine; we know what is at stake," European Council President Charles Michel wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, after the deal was reached rapidly after the start of a special summit in Brussels on February 1.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia's unprovoked full-scale invasion nears the two-year mark.

In a video address to EU leaders after the deal was agreed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hailed the move as "a clear signal that Ukraine will withstand and that Europe will withstand."

"It is also really important that the decision was made by all of you, all 27 member states, which is another clear sign of your strong unity," Zelenskiy told the EU leaders.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the only EU leader who maintains warm relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, had been repeatedly at odds with the other leaders of the bloc over measures to help Ukraine since Russia's invasion.

Orban, a right-wing populist who has been in power since 2010, has faced criticism that his opposition to EU aid for Ukraine amounts to an attempt to blackmail the bloc into disbursing billions of euros in EU funds for Hungary frozen by Brussels over rule-of-law and democracy concerns.

In December he vetoed the package, and ahead of the February 1 summit in the Belgian capital he appeared on track to try and do the same again.

But a deal was swiftly announced on February 1 after Orban held talks with the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

"He gave some ground," one European diplomat told AFP. "He saw that people were growing irritated, that there was a line not to cross," said the diplomat, who spoke under the condition of anonymity.

All of the bloc's 27 members must unanimously vote in favor of the aid package from Ukraine that would come from the EU's common budget.

"A good day for Europe," von der Leyen wrote on X, formerly Twitter after the deal.

"Once again, Europe has delivered," European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said on X.

In a video on Facebook, Orban put on a brave face, presenting the move as a victory for Hungary, saying that a review mechanism accompanying the aid package would “guarantee the rational use of the funds.”

"Hungarians’ money cannot be given to Ukrainians," Orban said. "We will not take part in the war, we will not send weapons, we continue to stand on the party of peace!"

An unnamed EU source said the leaders agreed that the European Commission would propose a review of the Ukraine aid package in two years, if needed, but such a move wouldn't include a veto right for Budapest.

Following the agreement, Ukraine said it expected to receive the first tranche of 4.5 billion euros ($4.9 billion) from Brussels next month.

Ukrainian leaders have been warning for months that they are desperately in need of fresh supplies of weapons and ammunition as Kyiv's counteroffensive stalls.

In his video address to the summit, Zelenskiy also warned that Ukrainian forces were in a race against the clock with the Russian invaders as intelligence reports confirmed that Russia was receiving 1 million artillery shells and missiles from North Korea.

"Meanwhile, the implementation of the European plan to supply 1 million artillery shells to Ukraine is being delayed," Zelenskiy said, adding that this was "a competition Europe cannot afford to lose."

Adding to the urgency, a supplementary spending bill that includes $61 billion in aid to Ukraine has been stalled in the U.S. Congress amid opposition from Republican lawmakers who want any spending package to also include sweeping changes to border protection policy in the United States.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

“An Act of Assassination”: Mustafa Barghouti Slams Undercover Israeli Raid on Jenin Hospital

Democracy Now! — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 13:27:35 +0000

In a shocking raid on a hospital in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, three Palestinians were killed by undercover Israeli assassins disguised as Muslim women and doctors. Citing no evidence, the Israeli military claimed the three men it targeted were involved in planning an imminent attack and were using the hospital as a hideout. Hospital officials said there was no exchange of fire and that the three men were asleep. One of the men had been receiving treatment at the hospital since being injured in an Israeli drone attack on October 25 and was partially paralyzed. Our guest, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative, decries the silence of Western governments in the face of the incident’s brazen and multipronged “violation of international humanitarian law.” It’s part of an extensive pattern of Israeli impunity on the world stage, says Barghouti, while “all the condemnation, all the collective punishment, is directed only at one people: the Palestinians.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Waitangi 2024: how NZ’s Tiriti strengthens democracy and checks unbridled power

APR editor — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:33:49 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Dominic O’Sullivan, Charles Sturt University

The ACT Party’s election promise of a referendum for Aotearoa New Zealand to redefine and enshrine the “principles” of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) is likely to dominate debate at this year’s Rātana and Waitangi Day events.

ACT’s coalition agreement with the National Party commits the government to supporting a Treaty Principles Bill for select committee consideration. The bill may not make it into law, but the idea is raising considerable alarm.

Leaked draft advice to Cabinet from the Ministry of Justice says the principles should be defined in legislation because “their importance requires there be certainty and clarity about their meaning”. The advice also says ACT’s proposal will:

change the nature of the principles from reflecting a relationship akin to a partnership between the Crown and Māori to reflecting the relationship the Crown has with all citizens of New Zealand. This is not supported by either the spirit of the Treaty or the text of the Treaty.

Setting aside arguments that the notion of “partnership” diminishes self-determination, the 10,000 people attending a hui at Tūrangawaewae marae near Hamilton last weekend called by King Tūheitia were motivated by the prospect of the Treaty being diminished.

Do we need Treaty principles?
The Treaty principles were developed and elaborated by parliaments, courts and the Waitangi Tribunal over more than 50 years to guide policy implementation and mediate tensions between the Māori and English texts of the document.

The Māori text, which more than 500 rangatira (chiefs) signed, conferred the right to establish government on the British Crown. The English text conferred absolute sovereignty; 39 rangatira signed this text after having it explained in Māori, a language that has no concept of sovereignty as a political and legal authority to be given away.

Because the English text wasn’t widely signed, there is a view that it holds no influential standing, and that perhaps there isn’t a tension to mediate. Former chief justice Sian Elias has said: “It can’t be disputed that the Treaty is actually the Māori text”.

On Saturday, Tūheitia said: “There’s no principles, the Treaty is written, that’s it.”

This view is supported by arguments that the principles are reductionist and take attention away from the substance of Te Tiriti’s articles: the Crown may establish government; Māori may retain authority over their own affairs and enjoy citizenship of the state in ways that reflect equal tikanga (cultural values).

Author and Professor of Māori Studies at the University of Auckland, Margaret Mutu, who was in attendance at the recent hui-ā-iwi at Tūrangawaewae marae, says the government is required to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.https://t.co/zSusoi5RER pic.twitter.com/dMrxjtMRan

— 95bFM News (@95bFMNews) January 26, 2024

Democratic or undemocratic?
The ACT Party says this is undemocratic because it gives Māori a privileged voice in public decision making. Of the previous government, ACT has said:

Labour is trying to make New Zealand an unequal society on purpose. It believes there are two types of New Zealanders. Tangata Whenua, who are here by right, and Tangata Tiriti who are lucky to be here.

Liberal democracy was not the form of government Britain established in 1840. There’s even an argument that state government doesn’t concern Māori. The Crown exercises government only over “its people” – settlers and their descendants. Māori political authority is found in tino rangatiratanga and through shared decision making on matters of common interest.

Tino rangatiratanga has been defined as “the exercise of ultimate and paramount power and authority”. In practice, like all power, this is relative and relational to the power of others, and constrained by circumstances beyond human control.

But the power of others has to be fair and reasonable, and rangatiratanga requires freedom from arbitrary interference by the state. That way, authority and responsibility may be exercised, and independence upheld, in relation to Māori people’s own affairs and resources.

Assertions of rangatiratanga
Social integration — especially through intermarriage, economic interdependence and economies of scale — makes a rigid “them and us” binary an unlikely path to a better life for anybody.

However, rangatiratanga might be found in Tūheitia’s advice about the best form of protest against rewriting the Treaty principles to diminish the Treaty itself:

Be who we are, live our values, speak our reo (language), care for our mokopuna (children), our awa (rivers), our maunga (mountains), just be Māori. Māori all day, every day.

As the government introduces measures to reduce the use of te reo Māori in public life, repeal child care and protection legislation that promotes Māori leadership and responsibility, and repeal water management legislation that ensures Māori participation, Tūheitia’s words are all assertions of rangatiratanga.

Those government policies sit alongside the proposed Treaty Principles Bill to diminish Māori opportunities to be Māori in public life. For the ACT Party, this is necessary to protect democratic equality.

In effect, the proposed bill says that to be equal, Māori people can’t contribute to public decisions with reference to their own culture. As anthropologist Dr Anne Salmond has written, this means the state cannot admit there are “reasonable people who reason differently”.

Today thousands answered the Māori Kings call for unity by descending on Tūrangawaewae marae for a national hui to discuss Act’s proposal to redefine the principles of the treaty. Here’s David Seymour being grilled by @moanatribe on his questionable use of the word apartheid. pic.twitter.com/1E9pItTqLm

— Kelvin Morgan (@kelvin_morganNZ) January 20, 2024

Liberal democracy and freedom
Equality through sameness is a false equality that liberal democracy is well-equipped to contest. Liberal democracy did not emerge to suppress difference.

It is concerned with much more than counting votes to see who wins on election day.

Liberal democracy is a political system intended to manage fair and reasonable differences in an orderly way. This means it doesn’t concentrate power in one place. It’s not a select few exercising sovereignty as the absolute and indivisible power to tell everybody else what to do.

This is because one of its ultimate purposes is to protect people’s freedom — the freedom to be Māori as much as the freedom to be Pakeha. If we want it to, democracy may help all and not just some of us to protect our freedom through our different ways of reasoning.

Freedom is protected by checks and balances on power. Parliament checks the powers of government. Citizens, including Māori citizens with equality of tikanga, check the powers of Parliament.

One of the ways this happens is through the distribution of power from the centre — to local governments, school boards and non-governmental providers of public services. This includes Māori health providers whose work was intended to be supported by the Māori Health Authority, which the government also intends to disestablish.

The rights of hapū (kinship groups), as the political communities whose representatives signed Te Tiriti, mean that rangatiratanga, too, checks and balances the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

Checking and balancing the powers of government requires the contribution of all and not just some citizens. When they do so in their own ways, and according to their own modes of reasoning, citizens contribute to democratic contest — not as a divisive activity, but to protect the common good from the accumulation of power for some people’s use in the domination of others.

Te Tiriti supports this democratic process.

Dr Dominic O’Sullivan is adjunct professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, and professor of political science, Charles Sturt University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Biden’s CHIPs Act Is Being Used to Arm Israel

Arvind Dilawar — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 19:46:40 +0000

$35 million in federal subsidies went to a multinational arms manufacturer with business ties to the country.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Arvind Dilawar.

Luxon warned over ‘meddling’ on Te Tiriti – ‘Māori will not sit idly by’

APR editor — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 09:19:15 +0000

RNZ News

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has been warned that Māori will not sit by without a fight if the government attempts to meddle with te Tiriti o Waitangi.

As politicians of all stripes have flocked to Rātana near Whanganui, it was a rare chance for Māori to address politicians directly on the pae — something that holds extra weight this year, because the annual celebrations come so soon after last weekend’s national hui.

Among those in attendance were Labour and Green MPs, Prime Minister Luxon, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones, while Te Pāti Māori were welcomed on Tuesday. ACT did not have a representative there.

Rāhui Papa, a representative of the Kiingitanga and Waikato-Tainui, said they were watching the rhetoric coming out of the Beehive very closely.

“Quite frankly, te iwi Māori — and the hui at Turangawaewae confirmed, the hui here at Rātana has confirmed — that if there is any measure of meddling with Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Māori will not sit idly by.

“The message is: The Tiriti o Waitangi is sacrosanct in the view of te ao Māori. We truly believe that the only treaty in town is the one that was written in the indigenous language.”

Rāhui Papa at Rātana Pā . . . “The Tiriti o Waitangi is sacrosanct in the view of te ao Māori.” Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ

Amid a climate of concern over the Treaty Principles legislation, Luxon is calling for calm over a bill he himself has said feels divisive.

Government ‘will honour the Treaty’
“The government has no plans and never has had plans to amend or revise the Treaty, or the Treaty settlements that we have all worked so hard together to achieve.

“The government will honour the Treaty.”

His speech to the Rātana faithful largely a speech to all Māori — and focusing on his favourite word: outcomes.

“Ours will be a government with goals for better healthcare, better school achievement, and less welfare dependency.

“When I talk about wanting better outcomes, I’m not talking about giving out hand-outs to close the gaps. I want to improve the opportunities so that people who are prepared to get to work and work hard, can make the most of their opportunities and get ahead.”

Kamaka Manuel at Rātana Pā . . . “What we do see is the first part of the word ‘outcomes’ – or like ‘Māori out’.” Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ

Ratana representative Kamaka Manuel told the government that promise of better outcomes was hard to believe.

“What we do see is the first part of the word ‘outcomes’ — or like ‘Māori out’ — and we’re left with the last part: ‘how come’.”

Māori outcomes ‘gone backwards’
He once again reiterated his claim that outcomes for Māori had gone backwards under Labour, and that National had “no intention and no commitment” to take ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill beyond a first reading.

There may be no commitment or intention at this point to do so, but Luxon has repeatedly refused to categorically rule out further support for it.

“It’s consistent with our coalition agreements, we have said and I don’t know how to be any clearer about it, there is no commitment to support it beyond the first reading.”

He was asked by reporters if he would say National would clearly say they would not support it further, but Luxon again said there was “no intention, no commitment”.

Deputy PM Winston Peters at Rātana Pā . . . lashing out at Labour to pockets of heckling. Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ

For a day full of politicians, Rātana is not supposed to be overtly political.

Deputy Prime Minister Peters acknowledged that — but still gave a political speech anyway — lashing out at Labour to pockets of heckling.

“These people will promise you a bridge where there is no river . . . I want to ask you this question: what’s their record?.”

impromptu standup
In an impromptu standup with reporters, NZ First’s Shane Jones said a review of the Waitangi Tribunal would need to address whether its powers should remain intact.

“An institution that’s been around for 50 years should not expect to continue on uncritically for another set of decades without being reviewed.”

Labour’s Reuben Davidson (left) and Willie Jackson (centre) at Rātana Pā . . . . Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver

Spurred on by speeches from the morehu, Labour’s Willie Jackson said it had made the opposition parties more united than ever.

“What they were saying the whaikōrero was that there was one enemy . . . and the enemy was the government, and so they wanted us to all . . . to come together as a group — Greens, Pāti Māori, Labour.”

Labour leader Chris Hipkins, in his first public appearance of the year, spent all of a minute talking about Labour’s deep connection to Rātana — and then went on the attack.

“The role of us as political leaders is to light that path forward, it’s not to exploit the fear that comes from uncertainty.”

Rātana celebrations. Video: RNZ

Hipkins said the current government’s approach was emboldening racism, which he later clarified related to things like the Treaty Principles Bill.

Policies ‘enable racism’
“I don’t think those are things that a responsible government should do.

“The policies of this current government encourage, foster, and enable racism in New Zealand and we should call that out for what it is.”

This time last year, Hipkins was speaking as prime minister. He now admitted — from the benefit of hindsight — the last government didn’t get it all right.

“One of the things that we didn’t get right was that making sure we were bringing non-Māori New Zealanders along with us on that journey.”

There was a notable absentee — the ACT Party, whose Treaty Principles Bill National has agreed to support to Select Committee, but no further.

“We know there could have been some trepidation like last week at Turangawaewae where we only had a couple from the three-headed taniwha government that we have in New Zealand today,” Rāhui Papa said.

Carmel Sepuloni (Labour), Marama Davidson (Greens) and Labour opposition leader Chris Hipkins at the Rātana celebrations: “The role of us as political leaders is to light that path forward, it’s not to exploit the fear.” Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ

‘Dishonour’ to Māori world
Greens’ co-leader Marama Davidson told reporters that ACT’s no-show at Rātana was a display of “absolute ignorance” and a dishonour to the Māori world.

“It dismisses the mana and the importance of Ratana, of Wiremu Pōtiki Ratana, and te ao Māori and their political voice.”

But David Seymour was brushing off the criticism.

“There was a time when they didn’t manage to invite me and now they seem to be complaining that they’ve invited me but I haven’t come. I guess one day the stars will align.”

Seymour has never attended Rātana festivities, describing it as a “religious event”, but he will be attending Waitangi next month.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

NZ opposition parties urge PM Luxon to shut down ‘erase treaty’ bill

APR editor — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 10:06:08 +0000

RNZ News

New Zealand’s opposition parties have seized on a leaked ministerial memo about the coalition government’s proposed Treaty Principles bill, saying the prime minister should put a stop to it.

ACT is defending the bill, while National has repeated its position of supporting it no further than select committee.

Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi posted a screenshot of part of a page of the leaked document on social media on Friday, saying it showed the government’s “intentions to erase Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.

How 1News TV reported the Treaty “leak” on its website. Image: 1News screenshot APR

1News also reported that it had a full copy of the leaked report, which it said warned the proposal’s key points were “at odds with what the Treaty of Waitangi actually says”.

Ministry of Justice chief executive Andrew Kibblewhite confirmed the leak “of a draft paper seeking to include the Treaty of Waitangi Bill in the Legislation Programme for 2024” would be investigated.

“We are incredibly disappointed that this has happened. Ministers need to be able to trust that briefing papers are treated with utmost confidentiality, and we will be investigating the leak as a priority.

“All proposed Government Bills are assigned a priority in the Legislation Programme. The draft paper was prepared as part of that standard process, and had a limited distribution within the Ministry of Justice and a small number of other government agencies.

“We will be keeping Minister [of Justice Paul] Goldsmith informed on our investigation and will not be making any further comment at this stage.”

ACT: ‘That is what I believe our country needs’
The bill was an ACT Party policy during the election, which National in coalition negotiations agreed to progress only as far as the select committee stage. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in Parliament last year said “that’s as far as it will go”.

Party leader David Seymour defended the bill.

“Over the last 40 years, the principles of the Treaty have evolved behind closed doors with no consultation of the average New Zealander, no role for them to play in it whatsoever,” he said.

ACT leader David Seymour . . . people in the bureaucracy had become set in that way of thinking about the Treaty. Image: RNZ/Angus Dreaver

That referred to the courts’ attempts over the last few decades to reconcile the differences between the English and reo Māori texts of the Treaty, based in part on the findings of the Waitangi Tribunal — an independent body set up by a previous National government to examine the Treaty’s role in New Zealand.

Seymour said people in the bureaucracy had become set in that way of thinking about the Treaty, but that it had made the country feel more divided by race.

“And when ACT comes along and says, ‘hey, we need to have an open discussion about this and work towards a unified New Zealand’, you expect that they’re going to be resistant. Nonetheless, there’s the band aid this government has, and that is what I believe our country needs.

“I believe that once people see an open and respectful debate about our founding document and the future of our constitutional settings, that’s actually something that New Zealanders have been wanting for a long time that we’re delivering, and I suspect it might be a bit more popular than the doomsayers anticipate.”

In a statement, he said the party was speaking for Māori and non-Māori alike who believed division was one of the greatest threats to New Zealand.

“We’re proposing a proper public debate on what the principles of the Treaty actually mean in the context of a modern multi-ethnic society with a place in it for all.

“ACT’s goal is to restore the mana of the Treaty by clarifying its principles. That means the New Zealand government has the right to govern New Zealand, the New Zealand government will protect all New Zealanders’ authority over their land and other property, and all New Zealanders are equal under the law, with the same rights and duties.”

He said they would be consulting all New Zealanders on it, and once it got to select committee they would have a chance to recommend changes to the bill, which would then be put to the public as a referendum.

Te Pāti Māori: ‘The worst way of rewriting the Tiriti’
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer told RNZ News she was not surprised to see ministry officials warning against the bill.

“The extent and the depth of the erasing of Tangata Whenua, the arrogance to assume to rewrite a Treaty based on one partner’s view — and that was a partner who only had 50 rangatira sign — is really alarming.”

She said she did not trust Prime Minister Christopher Luxon would not support the bill any further than the select committee stage.

“It’s the worst way of rewriting the Tiriti we could ever have expected, it’s made assumptions that don’t exist and again has highlighted that they rate the English version of te Tiriti.

“I’m not quite sure when the last time you could believe everything a prime minister said was factual,” she said.

“The prime minister has been caught out in his own lies . . . the reality is that a clever politician and intentional coalition partner will roll anyone out of the way to make sure that something as negatively ambitious as what this rewrite is looking like can happen.”

She said one of Māoridom’s biggest aspirations was to be a thriving people “and ensure that through our whakapapa te Tiriti is respected”, she said, criticising Luxon’s refusal to attend this weekend’s national hui.

“He didn’t have to be the centre of all the discussions, a good leader listens,” she said.

Labour: ‘A total disgrace and a slap in the face for the judiciary’
Labour’s Māori Development spokesperson Willie Jackson however said the bill was a “total breach” of the Treaty, its obligations, and the partnership between Māori and the Crown.

“It’s a total attack on the Treaty and the partnership that we have, that Māori have with the Crown, and it continues the negative themes from this government from day one.

“The reality is that the Treaty principles — in terms of what’s been drawn up in terms of the ‘partnership’ — was already a compromise from Māori. That’s why the judiciary wrote up the partnership model — so if they want to go down this track they’ll open up a can of worms that they’ll live to regret.”

He said the government should not be pushing ahead with the bill.

“Absolutely, absolutely not, and Luxon should show some leadership and rule it out now. This is a disgrace, what ACT are doing, a total disgrace and a slap in the face for the judiciary and all the leaders who in past years have entrenched the partnership.

“You’re talking about National Party leaders like Jenny Shipley, Jim Bolger, Doug Graham, John Key. This is just laughable and idiotic stuff that is coming from Seymour, and Luxon should shut this down now because it goes in the face of legal opinion, legal history, judiciary decisions since 1987, prime ministerial decisions from National and Labour.

“All of a sudden we’ve got this so-called expert Seymour who thinks he knows more than every prime minister of the last 40 years and every High Court judge, Supreme Court judge — you name it … absolute rubbish and it should be thrown out.”

He said Seymour was “trying to placate his money men . . . trying to placate some of his extreme rightwing mates”.

He did not trust the government to do as Luxon had said it would, and end support for the bill once it reached select committee.

“I mean surely this government would be the last group of people you’d trust right now wouldn’t you think? These are people that are going to disband our magnificent smokefree laws to look after their tax cuts.

“They also must be told in no uncertain terms that there can be no compromise on the Treaty relationship.”

Greens: ‘All of the kupu are a breach’
Green Party Māori Development spokesperson Hūhana Lyndon also said the government should not proceed with the bill, arguing all the words proposed by ACT for replacing the principles were a breach of the Treaty itself.

“All of the kupu are a breach to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and this is the choice of the National government to allow this to go ahead into select committee. There’s been no consultation with te iwi Māori or the general public.

“The government shouldn’t proceed with it. Te Tiriti o Waitangi is Te Tiriti o Waitangi — and those words need to be given effect to by the government, any changes to Te Tiriti o Waitangi is between hapū, iwi and the Crown.”

She said the new words proposed to assert a specific interpretation of te Tiriti and its historical context “does not give effect to te Tiriti and does not honour the sacred covenant that our tūpuna signed up for”.

“Ultimately, as we can see, even the government advice is cautioning strongly that the proposed words in the Treaty principles bill will be contentious, and could splinter — and, in fact, undermine — the strong relationship of te iwi Maori with the Crown to date as we have our ongoing conversation around how we honour te Tiriti o Waitangi.

“As we’ve seen with this government thus far, they are rushing through bad legislation under urgency, and this is no different to what we saw before Christmas.”

The Hui-ā-Iwi at Tūrangawaewae marae near Hamilton today . . . a touch point for Aotearoa New Zealand’s future. Image: RNZ

National: ‘It’s just a simple coalition agreement’
National’s Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith repeated to RNZ the party’s stance was to only progress it as far as the select committee, and no further.

“That’s what the prime minister has indicated,” he said. Asked why the government was even supporting it that far, he said it was part of the coalition agreement.

“Look, it’s just a simple coalition agreement that we have with the ACT Party, we agreed to support it to the select committee so that these matters can be given a public hearing, people can debate it. And so that was the agreement that we had.

“The process that we’ve got will introduce a bill that will have the select committee hearing, lots of different views on it and its merits.”

Asked about National’s position on whether the Treaty principles needed to be defined in law, he said their position was very clear, “that we support this piece of legislation going to the Select Committee and that’s as far as our support goes”.

He rejected Waititi’s suggestion it was an attempt to erase the Treaty.

“Look, I think there’ll be a lot of inflamed rhetoric over the coming weeks, and I’m not going to contribute to that . . . there’s no intention whatsoever to erase the Treaty and that’s not what this bill would do.”

When asked about the memo’s author saying the bill would be in opposition to the Treaty itself, he said the memo was a draft and the matter would be debated at select committee.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ACLU Cheers House Passage of the PRESS ACT

Newswire Editor — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 21:24:46 +0000

esterday, the House of Representatives voted to pass HR 4250, the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (PRESS Act), which prevents the government from compelling journalists to reveal their sources and work product. The act also bars the government from spying on journalists’ phone records and search histories through third parties, like internet service providers, as a work-around.

The American Civil Liberties Union has championed this bill for years, and recently sent a letter to the House of Representatives urging it to vote yes on HR 4250. The ACLU cheers this initial victory for press freedoms, and urges the Senate to take up the bill promptly.

“The PRESS Act creates critical protections for the journalists who keep all of us informed,” said Jenna Leventoff, ACLU senior policy counsel. “The press is so vital to our democracy that protections for a free press were written into the First Amendment of the Constitution. By preventing the government from compelling the disclosure of sources, or spying on journalists as a work-around, this legislation will ensure that journalists across the country have the confidentiality they need to do their jobs.”

While the majority of states already have shield laws in place that protect journalists from compelled disclosure of their sources, the PRESS Act provides uniform protections to journalists across the country. The ACLU urges the Senate to protect our right to a free press and pass the PRESS Act.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The SAT and the ACT Are Back with a Vengeance

Howard Lisnoff — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 06:55:13 +0000

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu

Horace Mann, who visited schools in Europe as the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, came back with an idea that has left its imprint on public and private schools in the US ever since. Mann was taken with standardized tests then administered in European schools and soon began the use of standardized testing in Massachusetts. Here is the reasoning that he used:

“When the oral method [of testing] is adopted, none but those personally present at the examination can have any accurate or valuable idea of the appearance of the school… Not so, however, when the examination is printed and written answers. A transcript, a sort of Daguerreotype likeness, as it were of the state and condition of the pupils’ mind, is taken and carried away, for general inspection,” (“History of Standardized Testing,” Lehigh University, October 18, 2013).

“Instead of being confined to committees and visitors, it [standardized testing] is open to all; instead of perishing with the fleeting breath that gave it life, it remains a permanent record. All who are, or who may afterwards become interested in it may see it.”

As historian William J. Reese, author of Testing Wars in Public Schools: A Forgotten History, wrote in a New York Times essay: “What transpired then still sounds eerily familiar: cheating scandals, poor performance by minority groups, the narrowing of the curriculum, the public shaming of teachers, the appeal of more sophisticated measures of assessment, the superior scores of other nations, all amounting to a constant drumbeat about school failure,” (“History of Standardized Testing,” Lehigh University, October 18, 2013).

Over 170 years later, the debate over what standardized testing means for college and university admissions and economically challenged, but high-achieving students is highlighted in “The Misguided War on SAT,” (New York Times, January 7, 2024). The article cites a recent study that shows a subset of “lower-income students and underrepresented minorities” can benefit from the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test-literacy, numeracy, and writing sections). The test purports to measure verbal and mathematics aptitude. The test can be a conduit for high achievers among these groups, offering entrance into the so-called most selective colleges and universities in the US, and hence, entrance into careers at high echelons of US society. Without the purported benefit of this test, the proponents cited in this Times article argue, these students would likely be left behind and not enter the elite stratosphere of higher education and work. The authors of this study argue that reliance on high school grades, sometimes inflated, are not predictive of college and university achievement.

“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, recently wrote. Stuart Schmill[,] the dean of admissions at M.I.T., one of the few schools to have reinstated its test requirement told me, “Just getting straight A’s is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not,”(“The Misguided War on SAT,” New York Times, January 7, 2024).

The group Opportunity Insights, speaking about the “Ivy Plus colleges,” eight Ivy League schools and Duke, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, released a study showing “a strong relationship between test scores and later success” (“The Misguided War on SAT,” New York Times, January 7, 2024).

Standardized testing feeds into political, economic, and social issues that change with the way the wind blows. In the era of great changes of the 1960s and early 1970s, testing was seen in perspective and not the sole determining factor for individual achievement. With the far right Ronald Reagan, the winds shifted and public schools, teachers, teacher unions, and student achievement were all in the crosshairs of the attacks against government in general and public schools in particular. The juggernaut to begin the long march to privatize public schooling in the US began with the product of his administration “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative of Educational Reform” (1983). Could the sea of the sameness of uniforms typifying charter schools that feed at the public tax trough, while having little or no oversight by states and localities, be far behind? Could the god of standardized testing also be lurking close by?

None of the Above: The Truth Behind SATs (Revised, 1999), is a critique, in part, about how that test reinforces the socioeconomic status quo. Schools generally reflect the communities in which they are located and the economic status of students’ families. The connections between income, community, and achievement are undeniable. Rather than improve public schools across this nation, cherry-picking talented students from schools that are not high performing goes to the heart of the argument about those students who are left behind because of schools not recognized for high college admissions test results. It’s a long process to improve schools and this is a nation that loves myths and demands immediate results.

“The intended purpose of the SAT I, SAT II, and ACT is to help predict first-year college grades. Yet high school grades, class rank, and rigor of courses do a better job of forecasting college performance than any of the tests.”

“These findings lead to one central conclusion: substituting one university admission exam for another benefits neither students nor schools. Colleges that are genuinely committed to increasing the representation of African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans must look into other alternatives,” (“Different Tests, Same Flaws: Examining the SAT I, SAT II, and ACT,” Journal of College Admissions, Fall 2002).

Prior to the current juggernaut supporting the administration of the SAT and the ACT (American College Testing: English, mathematics, reading, and scientific reasoning sections) and their purported advantages for underrepresented minorities and students from so-called underperforming schools, SAT critics noted gender bias and other stereotypes in the SAT (“Tutors See Gender Bias in SAT. Testers See None of the Above,” (New York Times, June 26, 2016). Some of the reading selections of the newest iteration of the SAT at that time were so highly edited that the final selections, in some cases, were beyond the pale. Many reading selections were edited to remove references that may have been unfamiliar to some test takers.

There are tests such as those reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress that offer a snapshot of how students perform at different levels of educational development and there is a valid claim as to their necessity. But, college admissions tests exemplified in the SAT and the ACT miss much of the abilities and multiple intelligences of many students and often provide only a one-dimensional view of those students. But now, among many college and university administrators, testing with all of the anxiety it creates among high school students is all the rage.

The post The SAT and the ACT Are Back with a Vengeance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Howard Lisnoff.

Jane Fonda’s Victim Act

Fred Gardner — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 06:39:52 +0000

Seen you in the supermarket
you and Lily Tomlin got a big hit
and leaning in for Hillary
I ain’t surprised not one little bit
Jane like stalkin’ my mind
from time to time
Can’t escape nohow
Great fame can mean this is then
and that was now

In late November I was notified about a webinar at which the makers of three anti-war films would discuss their works:

“Films of the GI Antiwar Resistance • Jane Fonda, producer/performer of FTA (1972) • Holly Near, musical artist and performer for FTA • David Zeiger, director of Sir! No Sir! (2005) • Connie Field, director of The Whistleblower of My Lai (2018).”

I didn’t zoom in but afterwards got an email from Donna Mickleson, who had been my partner in opening the UFO Coffeehouse near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in late ’67. “I was impressed by all three main speakers,” wrote Donna. “I believe you’ve been skeptical of Fonda’s role in the past, but to me she came across as very real, and listening to her story—and the way she and Holly filled in each other’s memories— was quite moving. I also noted how Zeiger credited Fonda with helping to fund his film. His focus on the role of the ‘spitting myth’ in depressing antiwar movements since Viet Nam wasn’t one I’d thought about much and seems ‘on target.’

“I plan to watch ‘FTA!’, which I’ve never seen, and re-watch ‘Sir, No Sir!’ on Netflix. I had either not known or—more likely—forgotten that FTA! was abruptly pulled from theaters, probably because Nixon didn’t want it out there and pulled strings.”

I wanted to reassure my old friend that of course, I know Jane Fonda is on the side of the angels, and has a good heart. But that last bit about Nixon causing the FTA film to fail made me skeptical all over.

Wikipedia describes the FTA film as “A documentary… which follows a 1971 anti-Vietnam War road show for G.I.s, the FTA Show, as it stops in Hawaii, The Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan. It includes highlights from the show, behind the scenes footage, local performers from the countries visited, and interviews and conversations with GIs.”

It was Dr. Howard Levy who, in the winter of 1970-71, had suggested that the peace movement produce an alternative to Bob Hope’s USO show. Jane Fonda loved the idea and began putting it together. Dr. Levy was then working for the Health Policy Advisory Council in New York, having served his time at Leavenworth for refusing, when he was a captain in the Army, to train Green Berets in the healing arts. I was in NYC, too, having handed over leadership of the GI Coffeehouse network to Tom Hayden in the spring of ’68. Tom said “the mobilization” could provide staff and funding to open coffeehouses near nine more bases! I said “Great, Tom.” He had just come back from North Vietnam, escorting US pilots who had been shot down and were released after denouncing their missions. I said no, thanks. was politically confused –if I wasn’t part of the peace movement, what was I part of? My wife was in San Francisco, in love with a woman. I missed my kids but told myself I wasn’t really needed. I found a cozy apartment in the Village and was planning to go to medical school.

To create the FTA show, Jane’s agent Mike Medavoy hooked her up with another of his clients, Alan Myerson, director of San Francisco’s brilliant comedy cabaret. Jane recruited Donald Sutherland, Peter Boyle and Dick Gregory for star power. Many writers, Barbara Garson and Jules Feiffer among them, contributed skits. Carl Gottleib and Garry Woodrow transposed Committee sketches into a military context. They must have been rehearsing in New York because one night Myerson came to my apartment and urged me to be the show’s stage manager and liaison to the GI coffeehouses that would be hosting productions, starting with Fort Bragg next month. I confided in him that I felt estranged from the movement, that “lifers” made up the working class of the Army and deserved support, not contempt. Myerson said that Jane had become extremely influential and with her support I could get my line across. And so I assented. He also asked me to write a song for Jane to sing verses of during the blackouts between skits. I think it was a 10-minute song:

… Future Teachers of America, Free the Albanians
why write that on latrines?
Foxtrot, Tango, Alpha…
Help me, tell me what it means.”

I resigned as stage manager after the FTA show played San Diego. I didn’t like the anti-“lifer” jokes and didn’t have enough influence to get them to change their line(s). I advised Jane not to take the show to Asia. We were sitting on a stoop on Liberty Street in SF. I said I was giving her a direct order on behalf of the American people. She said that was the most presumptuous thing anybody had ever said to her.

To re-direct the show and produce the film Jane replaced Myerson with a woman named Francine Parker. FTA!, the documentary, opened in the summer of ’72, just as Jane arrived in Hanoi and smiled at that anti-aircraft gun.

Did anybody in the peace movement notice, that summer, that the Army had begun a “Reduction in Force.” A million and a half soldiers would be reduced to 840,000 over the next few years. A carrot-and-stick system of motivation called the “Qualitative Management Program” was introduced. The carrot was higher pay and better living conditions for enlisted personnel (The Army was then more than 90% male and non-commissioned officers and specialists were “EMs.”) The stick was “involuntary retirement.” There would be no more assurance that if you did your job satisfactorily you could retire with a decent pension after 20 or 30 years.

“A new policy regarding enlisted career management has been implemented,” General Westmoreland announced. “It is intended to enhance the quality of the career enlisted force. It provides for the selective retention of the best soldiers, improved career progression and denial of reenlistment to the non-progressive and nonproductive. Those who do not meet the criteria established will be separated on a mandatory basis.” In other words, up or out.

Sgt Major Copeland, who was supposed to speak for enlisted personnel but actually spoke to them on behalf of the brass, said “In today’s Army, as in the world of sports, you are only as good as your latest performance.”

The RIF was enforced by a review board that met regularly at the Pentagon to review the records of NCOs and specialists from every pay grade and weed out 3% –just enough to make everybody insecure. Promotion above the rank of E-5 would now require a high school diploma. NCOs were tested and had to do well on their secondary MOS (Military Occupational Specialty). Even IQ scores were taken into account by the review board. How well you did your job became less important.

As I look through the “GI papers” I carried through the years, I see increasing contempt for “lifers” as the civilian peace movement became more influential in producing them.

Here’s what I couldn’t get across to my so-called friends back then: it is the cadres –NCOs and specialists– plus a small number of officers, who do almost all the real work of the army, outside of combat. Supply, maintenance, clerical work, cooking, recruiting… all are the direct responsibility of career enlisted men under the not-always-helpful supervision of officers. And if an NCO has low-ranking EMS or junior officers moving in and out of his unit, add training to his job description. But since the officer in the supervisory position is the one who will get the credit if the unit performs well, the NCO hast to maintain a pretense that the officer is doing the more significant work (even if the officer is doing no real work at all).

The NCO must always pretend that the “old man” (who is often a younger man) had a certain idea, got a certain job done. If an NCO isn’t self-effacing enough, he can expect a less-than-outstanding efficiency report. The buffoon, the mother hen, the alcoholic – these are familiar stereotypes that NCOs hide behind to conceal the fact that they are serious and efficient. Officers like to be flattered, not embarrassed; the NCO who gets an outstanding rating is the one who does not make his superiors conscious of the fact that he, the NCO, has done the real work of the unit. In other words, NCOs cannot demand credit – the credit is rarely given where do – and usually have to shuffle to build up the authority of the officers above them. They have to appear less serious than they are, less intelligent. If one day Sergeant Smith started acting with the decisiveness he is fully capable of, Major Jones would feel threatened and angry, because the question would implicitly arise why is 35-year-old Sergeant Smith worth $7000 a year or less than 30-year-old Major Jones? Why should Sergeant Smith family live in summer inferior housing? Why should Major Jones get to evaluate Sergeant Smith but not vice versa? After all, subordinates know a great deal about the actual abilities of their “superiors.”

It used to be that the rating an officer gave an NCO determined whether or not that man got promoted. This personality contest was bad enough; but now, with the upper out policy, the officer’s evaluation can determine whether the NCO is to be thrown onto a job market where there are almost no jobs, and certainly no good ones for a man who leaves the army after say 12 years. To make matters worse, officers are under pressure from above to get rid of a certain number of men – all in the name of efficiency…

As the FTA film was being edited, Jane had sent emissaries asking me to sign a release so they could use the silly little FTA song. My allies figured there was real money to be had and urged me not to sign. Donald Sutherland came to see us, pretending to be interested in where we were at politically. In those days I used to write songs like diary notes.

You say it’s for the cause, just sign this clause
it’s a statement more than a contract…

There was a beautiful woman in the group, Pam E., she looked like a French actress from long ago, Michele Morgan. Donald couldn’t take his eyes off her. It was almost embarrassing. Plus he kept apologizing because he was making a movie funded by General Electric. We were confused. Finally he explained that GE was involved in the manufacture of “smart bombs.” The LA lefties must have been giving him a very hard time. We advised him to lighten up. Driving to the airport he asked me to sign the release for the FTA song. I told him how much it would take for Pam and two other women to leave their jobs and do political work for a year.

So go back down to Hollywood town
and tell the real boss he wouldn’t confess…

A lawyer had advised “Wait until the film opens, then enjoin them from showing it. They’ll pay because you’ll be blocking ticket sales.” But after opening night in LA and New York the film just didn’t draw. The word-of-mouth was negative. My allies were disappointed –no leverage to get an injunction. I was relieved. I wrote “The GI Movement: a Case Study in Opportunism,” a leaflet harshly critical of Tom and Jane. The facts were true but the tone was wrong.

Two years later I pitched a story idea to Warren Hinckle, who was then editing Francis Ford Coppola’s City Magazine. The piece I proposed was a detailed analysis of the work force called “Who Works in San Francisco?” The piece Hinckle wanted to publish was my old leaflet about Jane and Tom (who was running against the incumbent, John Tunney, for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate). One day I got a telegram from KPFA offering me time to respond to Jane calling me crazy on air. Again my allies urged me to sue but it just seemed undignified. Maybe they were right. Down the line Tom would get $6 million in alimony. Maybe I was crazy!

Once you slandered me
Well I can understand it was for the candidate
And playing Miss Hellman as JULIA Gardiner
I tried to relate
Jane hear you talkin in my mind
from time to time
On THE MORNING AFTER had to swear off wine
But never for a minute following my line

Down Jane Street
Old Jane Street
Walkin down Jane Street
Live on a screen.

DISSOLVE to a video business in Kenwood, California, Spring 1984. “Workout Starring Jane Fonda” is a best-seller. The owner doesn’t tell the customers that he once knew her.

Married to a billionaire
And shilling for videos on fitness
A-hooing with “Chief Nakahoma”
How embarrassing to witness
Jane tomahawkin’ my mind
From time to time
Out west down south back east
Of all of your directors I directed you the least

CUT to last week. I’m on the phone with Howard Levy sharing memories and complaints. (Not many lefties stood by me when I split with “the movement” in ’71, and I treasure the few who did.) Howard had never heard that Tricky Dick pulled the plug on the FTA show, but he said he hoped it was true “Because that would show how seriously they took the GI movement.” He suggested that I get the facts from David Zeiger, the LA filmmaker who is now distributing FTA! .

So I called Zeiger (who worked at a GI coffeehouse, as did his sister Leni). “What’s the evidence linking Nixon to the failure of the FTA film?” I asked. He said there was no evidence, “just an assumption.”

And what was the assumption based on, I asked? “The film had been released by Roger Corman,” Zeiger said, “who was a friend of Nixon’s.”

Quite a leap, it seemed to me. But I’m trying to be on good behavior these days, so all I said was “You’d think if Nixon could tell Roger Corman what films to suppress he would have nixed ‘The Harder They Come.’ That was a radical movie.”

They call it The City of Angels, lady
that don’t mean that everybody who lives there is
Lots of tricks always bein turned
on the corner of Politics and ShowBiz
Jane you come walkin cross my mind
from time to time
Pushing CBD! There you are again
Great fame can mean that was now
and this is then.

The CBD product she’s shilling for is called “Uncle Bud’s” –a reference, I assume, to the wonderful salacious song.

I wonder if she knows that I’m the journalist who broke the CBD story? Not likely that Bill Zimmerman would have told her. (He’s the Santa Monica PR man funded by George Soros in 1996 to replace Dennis Peron as the campaign manager for Proposition 215, California’s medical marijuana initiative. In 1976 he was Tom Hayden’s campaign manager.)

The post Jane Fonda’s Victim Act appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fred Gardner.

Greenpeace USA Urges Biden to Act as Study Reveals Alarming Human Impact on Oceans

Newswire Editor — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 21:44:36 +0000

"Generative AI has the potential to help those with fewer resources or experience quickly learn and develop new skills," he noted. "The real challenge, though, is how to center the dignity and economic security of working-class Americans during the changes to come. And unlike the Industrial Revolution, which spanned half a century at least, the AI revolution is unfolding at lightning speed."

"Our generational task is to ensure that AI is a tool for lessening the vast disparities of wealth and opportunity that plague us, not exacerbating them."

Khanna stressed that "today the Democratic Party is at a crossroads, as it was in the 1990s, when the dominant wing in the party argued for prioritizing private sector growth and letting the chips fall where they may," ignoring prescient criticism from former Democratic Sens. Paul Wellstone (Minn.) and Russ Feingold (Wis.), as well as Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who then served in the House.

After failing to heed their warnings, he argued, "the Democratic Party cannot claim to be the party of the working class if we allow AI to erode the earnings and security of the working class. The party can be forgiven once for the mistake of abetting globalization to run amok, just not twice."

"Technologies—our technologies—are meant to complement and enhance human initiative, not subordinate or exploit it," he asserted. "We must push for workers to have a decision-making role in how and when to adopt technologies, and we must insist on workers' profiting from the implementation of these technologies. Our generational task is to ensure that AI is a tool for lessening the vast disparities of wealth and opportunity that plague us, not exacerbating them."

Underscoring the urgency of his message, Khanna pointed out that in September, "tech's biggest names trekked to Capitol Hill for a forum on artificial intelligence" that "was reminiscent of Davos conferences in the 1990s and early 2000s," and this year alone, tens of thousands of workers at hundreds of companies could be laid off and replaced with AI.

Already, AI is factoring into labor negotiations and legislative battles. After California legislators last year overwhelmingly approved Assembly Bill 316, which would have required a human driver on self-driving trucks weighing over 10,000 pounds that are transporting goods or passengers for at least five years, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it.

"Tech companies argue that replacing human drivers with AI is feasible, will reduce labor costs, and will therefore make it cheaper to transport goods and services. They lobbied heavily against the bill," explained Khanna. "I supported A.B. 316 because drivers say it's currently an unnecessary risk to have large trucks on public roads without a human on board. This is especially true if there is extreme weather, hazardous conditions, or heavy cargo on board. No one understands the safety risks at play here better than the drivers themselves, and it's both foolish and insulting to suggest they would make up such concerns to keep jobs that do not add value."

"It's not just the AI concerns of truck drivers that are causing divides in the Democratic coalition," the congressman continued, highlighting that the monthslong strikes of unionized writers and actors in Hollywood last year ended with deals that include provisions about artificial intelligence.

The California Democrat—who joined striking writers on the picket line—wrote that "even though writers' jobs are very different from truck drivers' jobs, labor solidarity is one of the few countervailing forces that can blunt the dehumanization of work motivated by short-term profit maximization in a world where AI is capable of suddenly disrupting both blue- and white-collar work."

Khanna—author of the 2022 bookDignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us—published the Times piece amid fears about how AI will impact everything from mass surveillance and misinformation to healthcare and war, not only in the United States but around the world.

His Thursday column won praise from progressives across the country. Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, head of the California Labor Federation, said that his piece is "truly a must-read for any policymaker" while Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation's editorial director and publisher, called it an "important read and issue for now and in '28."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Democrats Should Reject Any Deal That Cuts Spending Levels Beyond the Fiscal Responsibility Act

Newswire Editor — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 15:26:28 +0000

"Our generational task is to ensure that AI is a tool for lessening the vast disparities of wealth and opportunity that plague us, not exacerbating them."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Shame, Shame: My Field’s Failure to Act on Palestine

Aneil Rallin — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 21:39:29 +0000

As the leaders of this country, this settler-colonial imperialist United States of America, persist in dismissing international calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, I’ve been trying not to fall into utter despair, reminding myself daily despair isn’t an option. But it is difficult not to despair when during a televised genocide of Palestinians currently underway the morally repugnant US Congress puts on the spectacle of a congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses in these United States of America, inviting the heads of three elite private universities in these United States of America to testify, interrogating and castigating the heads of these elite private universities for their failures to denounce the students protesting on their university campuses what we are all watching unfold before our eyes, the genocide in Gaza, blaming the heads of these elite private universities for not doing enough for Jewish students on their college campuses, for creating unsafe conditions for Jewish students on their college campuses in these United States of America, rather than holding congressional hearings on the truly unsafe conditions, the unlivable conditions in Gaza, the annihilation of life and the living in Gaza by the genocidal apartheid settler-colonial state of Israel, fueled by my government, the government of these United States of America. As corporate media falls over itself to cover this spectacle faithfully, dutifully, social media images emerge of Israeli soldiers parading stripped, kidnapped Palestinian men, and news arrives that the state of Israel has killed, in a targeted assassination, the much loved Gaza activist professor and writer Refaat Alareer, who taught literature and writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and cofounded the organization We Are Not Numbers.

I did not know him, but I knew Refaat Alareer’s work. I knew Refaat Alareer was a potent activist teacher and writer, a motivating influence for countless students, a galvanizing force who inspired innumerable students to write, to write as witness to the horrific conditions they have been pressed into and forced to endure. As a fellow academic who taught rhetoric, writing, and literature, I also encouraged my students to write as vigilant observers of the landscapes we find ourselves in, to write as witness to the times we live in now. We know, my students would say, a smokescreen when we see it. We understand these congressional hearings, this summoning of these heads of three elite private universities in these United States of America, this invitation to testify before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce is smokescreen to detract from the real horrors taking place in Gaza, in occupied Palestine, as it becomes abundantly evident when the president of Harvard University later expresses remorse—remorse not for underscoring the horrors of the genocide Israel is currently carrying out in Gaza but remorse for not being clear during the congressional hearings that “calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

We do not buy it. The perilous conditions are not at these elite private universities in these United States of America where students may be crying “intifada, intifada” and calling for a liberated Palestine “from the river to the sea” in which all inhabitants will be free but in Gaza, where Palestinians are being humiliated, starved, tortured, maimed, and killed by the Israeli state. Cornel West sees it for what it is and tweets: “in the midst of actual genocidal attacks against Palestinians by Israeli forces enabled by the US government, Congress focuses on possible genocidal speech acts of students against Jews. This flagrant silence and indifference against Palestinian suffering speaks volumes on the hypocrisy and double standards in American society.” Ajamu Baraka sees it for what it is and tweets: “There are Jewish students across the country participating & sometimes in the leadership of protests against this moral outrage in Gaza. But the Israeli fascists are spinning the narrative of Jewish students being intimidated.” Rania Khalek sees it for what it is and tweets: “People always wonder how the Holocaust happened. Why did people look away? How could they let that sort of industrialized genocidal slaughter take place? How could so many remain silent, even supportive? Now we know how it happened. Gaza is showing us the answer to all of those questions.”

Gaza is showing up professional academic organizations in my own field of rhetoric, composition, and language studies in these United States of America for what they really are and what they really stand for. Committed only in theory to discourses of social justice, these professional academic organizations that represent a field attentive to the workings of language and power have in fact enduring histories of disappearing, of looking away, of remaining silent, of failing to rise up and stand on the right side of history when the times demand it. I was present at the keynote address at the biennial Rhetoric Society of America convention in 2018. Invited to reflect back on the founding of the organization fifty years ago as well as to look ahead, keynote speaker Andrea A. Lunsford noted, what stood out looking back from the vantage point of now was how nothing in the founding documents or the founding mission of Rhetoric Society of America pays any attention to what was going on during that year and around that time, a monumental period by any reckoning. 1968, the year in which the Rhetoric Society of America was founded, was the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, civil unrest here and elsewhere, the East Los Angeles student walkouts, student demonstrations in France, in Mexico, the Prague Spring, mass starvation in Biafra, the My Lai massacre, anti-Vietnam war protests, the fallout out from the black power salute at the Olympic games, the rise of queer activisms ignited by the Black Cat protests in Los Angeles a year before in 1967, the Stonewall Uprising in New York a year later in 1969. Evidently, Rhetoric Society of America founders (mostly white men) were not paying attention to what was right in front of them, or if they were, they didn’t, shockingly, think any of it was or should be of concern to rhetoric and to rhetoricians. These absences/silences are illustrative of the customary indisposition to contend with the detritus in the wake of heteropatriarchal, colonialist, imperialist, capitalist systems, and the war machineries of these United States of America. To its disgrace and to our shame, Rhetoric Society of America did not take a stand on the many monumental happenings unfolding before them.

To their disgrace and to our shame, leaders in our professional academic organizations in the field of rhetoric, composition, and language studies today (now no longer mostly white men) failed, shockingly, to take a stand swiftly on the monumental happening unfolding before us at this moment, even in light of the fact that this horrific situation, the current genocide underway in Gaza at the hands of the government of Israel abetted by the government of these United States of America, is televised. As university leaders in these United States of America rushed post 7 October 2023 to outdo each other in support of the colonial genocidal apartheid project destroying life and the living in Gaza without so much as acknowledging Palestinian lives and Palestinians’ suffering and the long ongoing brutal occupation, colleagues and I waited for our professional academic organizations in these United States of America to rise up, to speak up, to take action as these times demand it—to no avail.

We quickly came together to organize the open statement Rhetoric and Composition Scholars/Teachers/Administrators/Students for Palestine, issued on 13 November 2023, inviting colleagues to add their names. (Although issued a day later, Rhetoricians of Critical Conscience had by then already written a solidarity statement). I took it on myself to email on 27 November 2023 the Rhetoric and Composition Scholars/Teachers/Administrators/Students for Palestine statement, with the note below, to the 2023 Conference on College Composition and Communication Officers, Rhetoric Society of America Leadership and Board of Directors, Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition Executive Board Officers, Council of Writing Program Administrators Executive Board Members, and Modern Language Association Officers and Members of the Executive Council, calling on these professional academic organizations to stand in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians under occupation, speak up, take action.

We’ve been witnessing with horror the violence unleashed on the people in Palestine and watching national professional organizations in rhetoric and composition keep silent yet again on the violence and the question of Palestine, even as a number of other national professional organizations such as the American Studies Association, American Anthropological Association, Association of Asian American Studies, Caribbean Studies Association, Latinx Studies Association, Middle East Studies Association, and The National Women’s Studies Association have issued statements condemning the violence, joining the chorus for an immediate ceasefire and end to Israel’s war on Gaza and the people of Palestine, and calling for the liberation of Palestine from a long-standing occupation. Silence is complicity.

I write to share with you this open statement from Rhetoric and Composition Scholars/Teachers/Administrators/Students for Palestine and urge [name of professional organization] to stand on the right side of history. I call on you to issue a [name of professional organization] statement in solidarity with the struggles of Palestinians. On behalf of the signatories, I call on [name of professional organization] to stand in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians under occupation, speak up, take action.

We are still waiting, over two months into this televised genocide, for our professional academic organizations to stand incontrovertibly in solidarity with the struggles of Palestinians under siege. Even as Palestinian lives continue to be wrecked by the genocidal apartheid state of Israel, our professional academic organizations in these United States of America dedicated to writing and language studies research, theory, and teaching worldwide have not spoken up for Palestine, have neither named nor called out nor condemned the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli state nourished by the government of these United States of America. Modern Language Association responded to our call and declared in an email that “as a policy, the MLA’s Executive Council does not make statements about international political conflicts.” Rhetoric Society of America responded with an email to affirm that “RSA acknowledges receipt and the board will discuss” and followed up with another email to confirm that “the RSA Executive Committee conferred, and consulted with the full board. RSA will not be producing a statement at this time.” CFSHRC’s email response stated, “the Executive Board has drafted an email that we’ve sent to the Advisory Board for their consideration and then will be shared as/if appropriate.” It took until 19 December 2023 for CFSHRC president to share on behalf of The Coalition Advisory Board the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition Statement about Gaza and Israel that “urge[s] elected officials to use their authority as US politicians to call for a permanent ceasefire…encourage[s] feminist rhetoricians to do the same” and “reaffirms our commitment to rhetorical listening across differences and to ongoing dialogue unmarred by violence.” CCCC and CWPA so far have not bothered to respond. After the National Council of Teachers of English’s Committee on Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English released a Statement on Palestinian Genocide, leaders of NCTE (the larger organization that CCCC is part of) immediately sent an email to NCTE members (A Statement from NCTE Leadership, November 16, 2023), distancing NCTE from the Statement on Palestinian Genocide because it “openly supports one side of the conflict” (who knew there are two sides to support in a genocide and the subjects of genocidal assault must be held accountable for their own genocide) and clarifying that it “was not authorized by NCTE leadership” and “not published by NCTE or its leadership team.”

The reluctance of our professional academic organizations to stand unequivocally in solidarity with Palestinians long under occupation at this grave moment is a shameful failure. If these professional organizations in rhetoric, composition, and language studies in these United States of America cannot, even now, name, call out, and condemn the genocide against the Palestinian people that the state of Israel is presently carrying out, then we must insist on new principled professional academic organizations that will rush to stand with us and stand up for what is just and right, as and when the times mandate, that will be willing and unafraid to name, call out, and condemn genocide, as, when, and where it unfolds, at the same time as we demand an immediate permanent ceasefire and end to the genocide in Gaza, call for the prosecution of government officials in the state of Israel and in these United States of America, and push for a liberated Palestine from the river to the sea.

The post Shame, Shame: My Field’s Failure to Act on Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aneil Rallin.

The Endangered Species Act is Needed Now More Than Ever

George Ochenski — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 06:51:10 +0000

Bald Eagle pair, Colewort Marsh, along the Netul River, Lewis and Clark National Park, northwestern Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Humans tend to see the world with mankind as the most important species on the planet.

That concept has been reinforced through any number of ancient myths, particularly one that claims humans “have dominion over” all creation.

But of course the actual “web of life” has many, many more strands than the rather newcomers of the human race. The great wisdom of the Endangered Species Act, now 50 years old, is to consider and maintain all the strands.

We have, and continue to, extirpate plants and animals for a huge variety of reasons. In the past, those reasons mostly concentrated on fulfilling the basic necessities of life as perceived at the time.

We hunted and fished for meat and hides, killed dangerous predators from fear and self-preservation, destroyed entire ecosystems to replace them with the plants and animals we desired.

Now, however, the destruction caused by the human race has gone far beyond the practices of the past. Now, we don’t extirpate entire species for our immediate needs, we extirpate them with the vast amounts of pollution we produce to fulfill desires that go far beyond our basic needs

And that’s where the Endangered Species Act comes into play because it challenges us to consider what reasons are actually important enough to threaten, endanger and extirpate our fellow inhabitants on the planet we call home.

While Montana still has virtually all of the native species that were present when the Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled through 200 years ago, many are increasingly hanging on by an ever-thinner thread.

The fluvial Arctic grayling that once populated the entire Upper Missouri drainage has now been reduced to a mere handful, struggling with chronic irrigation dewatering and ever-warmer temperatures in their shrinking redoubt of the Upper Big Hole River. But less than 300 exist and they may not make it through another summer of low flows. Yet, due to resistance by myopic politicians, these beautiful native fish have been precluded from the protections and recovery of the Endangered Species Act.

Or how about the Glacial Stone Flies that rely on and are only found in the highest, coldest drainages of Glacier National Park whose chances of survival look grim as those glaciers disappear at an astounding rate.

Then there are wolverines, the newest addition to the Endangered Species List. What possible reason could humans have for continuing to trap and kill wolverines? We surely don’t eat them and the concept of trapping and killing species on the brink of extinction merely for their fur should be left in the dustbin of history.

Now saved from trapping, the greatest challenge for wolverines — and the rest of us — is the climate crises ravaging the planet. Wolverines need deep snow in which to build their dens, store food and raise their kits. And as is all too evident, humans have utterly failed to heed the decades old warnings from scientists that our atmospheric pollution is out of control and the impacts are stacking up faster than ever.

The examples are legion — in the forests, mountains, rivers and oceans species are disappearing as what has been called “the Sixth Great Extinction Event” continues at an accelerating pace.

In the end, it comes down to the “web of life.”

Our arrogant and ignorant politicians falsely believe humanity can continue to survive without all the other strands.

But it’s increasingly clear that as go the endangered species, sooner rather than later, so, too, go we — which is why the Endangered Species Act is more important and necessary now than ever.

The post The Endangered Species Act is Needed Now More Than Ever appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

Grizzly Bear Poachers Flout the Endangered Species Act — and Get Away With It

Ryan Devereaux — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Co-published in partnership with High Country News and Montana Free Press.

It was hunting season in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, and the Marine sniper was alone on a backcountry trail more than an hour’s hike from his vehicle. He carried a camouflage Remington rifle and was in sight of an elk herd when a grizzly bear emerged from the brush. In a series of audio and video recordings from that autumn day in 2015, he narrated what happened next:

“I just got attacked by a grizzly.”

“I fucking laid into him.”

“I don’t want a big bear like that where I hunt.”

“I’m smoking him.”

“This is destiny. That bear attacked the wrong man.”

Finally, after tracking down the federally protected grizzly he had shot, seeing blood along the way, he said, “Looks like I found a dead bear.”

Kneeling over the dead grizzly with his rifle in hand, the man took selfies and recorded a narration of his wilderness adventure. The bear’s coat was splattered in blood. The Marine cut off one of its claws then continued his hunt, spending two more nights in the woods.

It wasn’t until he completed his hunt several days later that he reported the bear’s death, as required by federal law. By then, investigators were already on the case, alerted to the grizzly’s killing by an anonymous tipster who had encountered the Marine during his trip. The Marine kept the bear claw as a souvenir, the tipster told investigators, according to their report.

The Marine, on reserve duty at the time, told U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents that the bear charged him. The killing was in self-defense, he said. He was “happy for the experience and thought it was pretty cool.” After killing the bear, the Marine admitted, he went on to kill an elk that he did not tag, ignoring his legal obligation to register the kill with state officials who issue a set number of hunting licenses each year. His plan, he told investigators, was to illegally use his tag for a future hunt.

The Marine, whose name is redacted in the report, had a history of legal infractions, the agents soon discovered, including a warning from a Wyoming wildlife law enforcement officer for harming or killing a kit fox. They seized his recording devices. Besides photos of the dead bear and elk, they found pictures of a bald eagle carcass. The Marine claimed he had nothing to do with the bird’s death.

Killing an endangered or threatened species in self-defense is not a crime. Cutting off a grizzly’s claw for a souvenir, however, is a clear violation of the Endangered Species Act and associated regulations. In their incident report, the feds determined that the Marine had likely violated a slew of federal and state laws.

The hunter was found guilty of wasting an elk under a Wyoming state law and ordered to pay a $640 fine. A federal prosecutor, however, declined to bring charges under the ESA. The Marine faced no consequences for desecrating a protected grizzly bear.

Photographs from the Aldrich Creek grizzly investigation report show a deceased adult male grizzly bear with one missing claw on its right front paw on Oct. 8, 2015.

Photo: Obtained by The Intercept

A Failure to Protect

Steve Stoinski was one of two Fish and Wildlife Service agents who interviewed the Marine. Based out of Lander, Wyoming, Stoinski had spent much of his adult life investigating wildlife crimes in the American West before retiring in 2020. He remembers the case well — especially the Marine’s shifting version of events.

“Parts of his story were just too hard to believe,” Stoinski recalled in an interview with The Intercept. “One minute he’s underneath it, shooting it. The other minute, he’s not being touched by it and firing a shot two feet away but couldn’t hit it.” Still, the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute was no surprise. Stoinski knew he and his partner were facing an uphill battle. The dismemberment of the bear was apparently not compelling enough for the U.S. attorney’s office to take the case. And with no direct witnesses and a victim that couldn’t speak even if it were alive, it would be next to impossible to disprove the claims of self-defense.

“You can’t charge people what you think they should be charged with,” Stoinski said. “You can only charge them with what you can really prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The Marine’s case is hardly an anomaly. Despite the Endangered Species Act’s fearsome reputation as a powerful tool for securing environmental protection, an Intercept investigation drawn from nearly 4,000 pages of Fish and Wildlife Service case files reveals that when it comes to grizzly bears, federal prosecutors rarely bring criminal charges under the landmark law. (The accounts of grizzly bear killings in this article are drawn from those case files, which The Intercept obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.)

The Endangered Species Act turns 50 years old this year amid a growing global crisis of biodiversity loss and increasing attacks by right-wing lawmakers who see predator control as a front in the battle over states’ rights. In theory, a law that the Supreme Court has called “the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species enacted by any nation” would serve as a critical bulwark against further ecological damage. Under Section 9 of the statute, Congress declared it illegal to kill, harm, harass, or otherwise “take” protected species; prohibited the transport or possession of such animals or their body parts; and established civil and criminal penalties for violators, including imprisonment of up to a year. Investigations into suspected ESA crimes fall to special agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which sits within the Department of the Interior. The investigators hand their files off to Justice Department prosecutors, who make the final call on whether to bring a case.

The factors that shape those decisions, however, reveal the limits of the country’s most famous conservation law. From 2015 through 2022, according to the records reviewed by The Intercept, the Fish and Wildlife Service completed 118 investigations for violations of the ESA stemming from the killing or harming of grizzly bears in their primary range in the Lower 48: Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Fourteen involved bears preying on livestock, while 74 others involved claims of self-defense, most stemming from hunters encountering bears in their habitats. Many of the cases contain evidence to support such claims. At least a dozen, however, show clear and, in some cases, flagrant ESA violations — from hunters admitting to stalking grizzlies before killing them, to dismembering animals for trophies, to describing efforts to cover up their kills. And yet only five of the cases led to criminal penalties under the ESA, and only two led to a prison sentence, one of which was overturned on appeal.

Grizzly bears were added to the endangered species list in 1975 and are currently considered a threatened species. An iconic symbol of American wilderness and a conservation success story, the bears are beloved by millions of people around the world. That adoration makes grizzlies a revealing barometer: If the ESA is failing to protect even them, what hope is there for the many imperiled species that don’t have a well-funded army of human defenders?

A Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson, in response to a series of questions from The Intercept, said the agency “prioritizes the investigation of take of ESA-protected species domestically and abroad,” including grizzly bears, and “works effectively and efficiently with state partners across the country.” (The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.)

Two surviving male grizzly bear cubs after their mother was shot by a hunter who said he mistakenly identified the mother grizzly as a black bear. Steve Stoinski, right, transported the cubs to a zoo in Nebraska to prevent them from being euthanized on Aug. 17, 2017.

Photo: Courtesy of Steve Stoinski

In his corner of Wyoming, Stoinski said, the story of the grizzly bear over the half-century since the ESA’s passage shows how the law’s lofty goals continue to clash with ingrained cultural beliefs. “It’s a rural area — lots of ranching influence, that Western cowboy mentality, if it isn’t in the greatest interest of cattle, then it needs to be removed from the landscape,” he said. “That generally seems to be the way some people operate — shoot these bears, shovel, and shut up about it.”

The experiences of seasoned federal agents like Stoinski raise serious questions about the nation’s commitment and ability to uphold the ESA. In the case of the grizzly bear, the data and associated case reports obtained by The Intercept show a federal government that has failed to robustly enforce the historic statute despite evidence that it is being flouted on the ground. The upshot is diminished security for grizzly bears, current and former federal officials say, a downstream consequence of the Fish and Wildlife Service losing its way — chasing headlining-making cases that span the globe while letting its domestic operations wither.

“They’re stuck spinning their wheels, trying to spend most of their time on these international smuggling cases, when they have so many incredible cases in their backyard that are just considered ‘game warden’ cases,” said one Interior Department official. The official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that this dynamic has huge implications for the grizzly bear: “They might as well be delisted right now with how we’re acting.”

No Deterrence

Over the course of more than three years, starting in 2015, Stoinski led a probe into another grizzly killing in the Shoshone National Forest. His investigation of the so-called Barbers Point grizzly (a reference to the 4-year-old sow’s kill site) culminated in a nearly 300-page case file — and one of the only ESA convictions in the records reviewed by The Intercept.

At points, Stoinski’s report reads like a dark episode of the popular “Yellowstone” TV show, with confidential informants passing on word of incriminating barroom boasts and a pair of offenders making every attempt to bury evidence of their crimes — sometimes literally.

A week after a pair of motorists discovered the dead bear on the side of the road, Stoinski made a critical break in the investigation: A source turned in an audio recording surreptitiously obtained at a bar 30 miles south of the kill site.

In the recording, a man boasted of killing the bear, which was well known to locals and not considered a problem animal. He described how he and a friend encountered the bear twice — harassing and throwing rocks at her on the first occasion, then killing her on the second. “I don’t give a fuck. I would have been in jail by now if they would have found out about it,” the man said as he pulled up photos and videos to show other bar patrons. “There are so many of those cock suckers around here, I don’t give a fuck anymore. Fuck them!”

The recording led Stoinski to two residents of Dubois, Wyoming: 27-year-old Kelly J. Grove, the man on the tape, and 25-year-old Matthew John Brooks.

When Stoinski first interviewed Grove, he denied having anything to do with the grizzly’s killing. “As much as I would have fucking loved to, I didn’t shoot that fucking bear,” Grove said — though he applauded whoever did: “They should be given a gold medal.”

Stoinski continued to pursue the case, interviewing witnesses and collecting evidence. In the summer of 2018, Grove and Brooks pleaded guilty to violating the ESA. In their plea agreement interviews, the duo said they decided to kill the bear to improve the poor hunting season they’d been having. Late one night, they staked out the site where they had seen the bear guarding an elk carcass. To prevent GPS tracking, the men turned off their cellphones and stuffed them in the console of the vehicle. When the bear emerged, they stepped out in the dark, each armed with a rifle. Brooks fired. The bear wheeled and headed back for the trees, where it let out a dying moan. The two men left the scene, but not before dusting the tracks left by their vehicle. Weeks later, they made a midnight journey to a remote creek where they buried Brooks’s rifle and the paperwork associated with the weapon.

Brooks admitted to prosecutors that he pulled the trigger and said it was the most irresponsible period of his life. Grove was less contrite. When asked why they killed the grizzly, he responded, “Because we hate bears up there.” He added, “I thought it was great! Another dead bear!”

A federal judge ordered them to pay thousands of dollars in restitution, temporarily revoked their hunting privileges, and placed them on unsupervised probation for five years.

If the intent of ESA prosecutions is to deter future violations of wildlife laws, it didn’t work on Grove. Just a few months after his sentencing, he was convicted on charges related to deer and elk poaching under Wyoming state law. The federal judge in the Barbers Point case then revoked his probation and sentenced him to six months in prison — half the maximum sentence allowable under the ESA. (Grove declined to comment for this story. Brooks did not respond to a request for comment.)

Like the handful of other convictions, the Barbers Point case broke from the typical trajectory of grizzly investigations in the West. As the Fish and Wildlife records reveal, most cases die the moment that a human — typically a hunter creeping around bear habitat at dawn or dusk — describes their fear during a bear encounter.

Making ESA cases more difficult still is a long-standing Justice Department policy requiring the government to prove that a suspect knew they were killing an endangered or threatened species when they did the deed. Known as the McKittrick policy — named after a Montana poacher who was convicted under the ESA for killing a Yellowstone wolf — the rule was established in 1999 as the result of a winding legal fight that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Among conservationists and wildlife investigators, it is derisively known as the “I thought it was a coyote” rule. When it comes to bears, if a hunter kills a grizzly but claims they thought it was a black bear, for example, the case is often dead on arrival.

A cinnamon-colored black bear near Soda Butte Creek in Yellowstone National Park in May 2015.

Photo: Neal Herbert/NPS

In 2013, two environmental groups sued the Justice Department over the policy, arguing that it was fueling the unlawful killing of Mexican wolves. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately dismissed the claim because the plaintiffs were not able to cite “any specific instance where the DOJ has declined to prosecute a wolf killing because of the McKittrick policy.”

When it comes to grizzlies, however, federal prosecutors declined to take on at least 18 cases under the ESA from 2015 to 2022 based on such claims of mistaken identity, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept.

In one of the most explicit examples, a rancher living near Big Timber, Montana, buried three bullets in a grizzly bear that had wandered onto his property in 2016. He told law enforcement officials that he went out to investigate a disruption in a cattle enclosure on his property in the early morning and encountered a bear. It was dark out, and he said he didn’t know what kind of bear it was, but he shot at it first when it started moving toward him and again when it began approaching his girlfriend. He only realized it was a grizzly, he said, after the bear bled out on the property.

Fish and Wildlife Service investigators later discovered several discrepancies in the rancher’s story and concluded that he “shot the grizzly bear in defense of his cattle and not necessarily in defense of his life.” The prosecutor who reviewed the case agreed that the rancher’s account was “implausible,” “inconsistent,” and “suspect in numerous respects.” Nevertheless, the Justice Department declined to bring charges. The reason was clear. “The primary difficulty we would encounter,” the prosecutor explained in an email, “is proving that [the rancher] knew he was shooting a grizzly bear.”

The difficulty of ESA enforcement also stems in part from the nature of the law itself. Despite its hefty maximum fine of $100,000 and potential year in prison, conviction under the ESA is a federal misdemeanor. The same Justice Department attorneys tasked with bringing such cases are responsible for enforcing every other federal crime. While a Fish and Wildlife agent’s most important investigations might fall under the ESA, a prosecutor’s priorities are different. Given their finite resources, public demand, and the potential for career advancement, government attorneys are structurally incentivized to chase felonies involving human victims over misdemeanors involving animals.

“Their priorities are felony prosecutions,” Stoinski said. “So when we show up and we say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got this misdemeanor whooping crane case,’ they hear misdemeanor; it’s almost like a switch, because they don’t have the time or resources.”

A grizzly crosses a road near LeHardys Rapids in Yellowstone National Park.

Photo: Eric Johnston/NPS

Alternative Methods

Given the hurdles federal agents must overcome to bring an ESA case, they’ve found other means to seek justice for poached grizzlies. Sometimes, that means assisting in cases that will be taken up by state, rather than federal, prosecutors.

In 2021, for instance, Fish and Wildlife investigators teamed up with Idaho game wardens after a bullet-riddled mother grizzly was found in a river on the western edge of Yellowstone National Park. It was the third such killing in just seven months. The public demanded answers. While regional nonprofits pulled together a $40,000 reward for information leading to the killer — or killers — local and federal officials went to work. They collected nearly 50 bullet casings from the scene and obtained a warrant allowing them to zero in on phone activity in the area. The warrant paid off. Phone data led investigators to a man who had traveled to and from the scene, repeatedly visited the Idaho Fish and Game department’s online ad seeking information on the bear’s killer, and attempted to sell 1,000 rounds of ammunition — the same kind found at the scene of the crime — weeks after the shooting. The man told state police that his father had joined him in killing the bear; they were arrested and pleaded guilty to state charges.

Whether such state-federal collaboration will continue across the West is an open question. In 2021, the Fish and Wildlife Service circulated an internal briefing saying that its state counterpart in Montana would no longer investigate grizzly kills without a federal agent present.

Federal agents facing challenging ESA cases often turn to the Lacey Act, a law passed in 1900 prohibiting the transportation of illegally killed wildlife that includes felony penalties. The files reviewed by The Intercept describe one such case in Montana, in 2017, in which a man turned up at a hunting camp bragging of shooting a grizzly and rolling it off a cliff. He was said to be “smiling” and “looked proud” as he showed off photos and video of the bear, investigators wrote. “In one video the bear was still breathing,” agents noted, adding that the man “did not mention anything about self-defense while he was showing everyone pictures and video.”

Investigators ultimately discovered that the bear’s front claws had been removed with a knife. An autopsy revealed that a bullet had obliterated the bear’s spine, paralyzing it — likely explaining why the shooter could take smiling selfies while the animal was still alive. Investigators soon identified the killer as a 35-year-old man from Marion, Montana. In an interview with the feds, the man claimed the bear charged him. He acknowledged ignoring his legal obligation to report the incident and admitted his attempted cover-up. “I rolled the dice on whether I’d ever see you guys or not, and obviously it didn’t pay off,” he said. When asked why he dismembered the bear, the man cited his “straight up hatred for these things.”

“I basically said, ‘Hey, fuck you.’ And I cut his claws off,” he said. “I wanted to keep them as a memento.”

Investigators in a grizzly bear poaching case show the dead bear’s removed claws after it was shot and rolled off a cliff on Sept. 22, 2017 in Montana.

Photo: Obtained by The Intercept

Facing a challenging self-defense claim under the ESA, federal agents instead pursued a Lacey Act charge for stealing the bear’s claws. The man was convicted, placed on probation for three years, and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

The case files reviewed by The Intercept account for only a portion of the total grizzly killings in the Northern Rockies between 2015 and 2022 — they are the ones the authorities know about. Chris Servheen, the president and board chair of the Montana Wildlife Federation, said that while the Fish and Wildlife Service’s case count of 118 is “a big number,” the death toll is undoubtedly higher.

“Illegal kills are certainly happening out there across the landscape,” Servheen told The Intercept. “The implications are serious because they’re ongoing.”

For nearly three decades, Servheen was the top Fish and Wildlife Service biologist responsible for grizzly recovery in the Lower 48. Having seen the application of the ESA in grizzly cases up close, he believes federal agents do their best with what are often difficult crimes to solve — taking place in remote locations, among distrustful communities, with victims that cannot speak — but in the vast reaches of the West, there’s only so much they can do.

At the time of his 2016 retirement, Servheen was a prominent supporter of turning grizzly bear management over to the states. In 2021, a wave of Republican-sponsored, anti-predator legislation — rooted, as he sees it, not in science but in politics — changed his mind. He’s been fighting for the grizzly’s continued federal protection ever since.

“If the grizzly was ever delisted, I worry that the illegal kills would increase,” he said. The state’s posture would send a message. “There’s going to be a certain category of the public that would feel that it’s easier now, it’s more relaxed now, I can just kill ‘em,” Servheen said. “The feds aren’t involved.”

“Animal Prejudice”

In some pockets of the West, biologists and wildlife officials say, an old anti-predator adage still reigns: shoot, shovel, and shut up.

Anti-predator hate is bound up in a long, complicated relationship going back to the beginning of westward expansion. In the early days of the nation’s founding, predators were a problem to be eradicated, mostly with guns and poison. As cultural attitudes toward ecology, wildlife, and conservation shifted over the course of a century, predators’ standing in the eyes of millions of Americans did too. Those shifts in thinking were foundational to the passage of the ESA, while also becoming a central conservative talking point in the West — symbolic of a country disowning its heritage and traditions to serve the interests of a coastal liberal elite, and of the federal government’s tyrannical disregard for states’ rights. The animals that most symbolized that shift — wolves, grizzlies, and the like — thus became avatars for a particular political class. Stoinski calls it “animal prejudice”: when frustrations over human politics are grafted onto animals. It came with the territory. Sometimes, he even heard it from his colleagues working in state agencies.

“Those animals die without a sound and the only voice they had was ours,” Stoinski said. “I was happy to champion grizzlies, even against the opposition of some of my state counterparts who are not fans of protecting them anymore.”

“Those animals die without a sound and the only voice they had was ours.”

Stoinski, articulating a complaint echoed by every current and former federal wildlife official that spoke to The Intercept, argued that the near-total absence of grizzly killing prosecutions speaks to a larger, more fundamental problem for the future of conservation: a multidecade failure on the part of Fish and Wildlife Service leaders in Washington to grow and adapt their agency in the face of difficult political, cultural, and environmental circumstances.

While major conservation initiatives have rescued grizzlies from extinction, their continued recovery hinges on human tolerance. In the nearly five decades since the bears became a protected species, human presence in grizzly habitat, clamoring by conservative lawmakers for the feds to relinquish management to the states, and the number of unsolved grizzly killing cases have all grown. At the same time, the number of federal agents conducting investigations on the ground — never more than 250 — has stayed the same.

“The only day I knew that we were close to 250 was the day I graduated the academy” in 1998, Stoinski said. “We had 248.”

“We never got that close in the next 25 years of my career,” he continued. “We were losing people as fast as we could hire them. On a good day, we probably had 200, and I did the math — 49 of those people were supervisors or managers of some sort, not even carrying a caseload anymore.”

When Stoinski arrived in Lander — having cut his teeth in Colorado, Alaska, and Wisconsin — he was one of two agents responsible for running down every grizzly poaching case in Wyoming, he said. The Justice Department had four assistant U.S. attorneys in the local office, focused mostly on the nearby Wind River Indian Reservation, and one prosecutor handling the wildlife docket for the entire state.

At first, Stoinski said, things were manageable. The prosecutor was motivated, and they got along well, but then a job opened up at a judge’s office and he left. A second prosecutor soon followed. Neither post was refilled. In Stoinski’s final years on the job, there were just two prosecutors in Lander responsible for everything the feds brought in: Homeland Security human trafficking cases, FBI agents investigating missing and murdered Indigenous women, Drug Enforcement Administration drug war operations, and finally, the Fish and Wildlife cop looking into dead bears.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency has two special agents in Idaho, two in Wyoming, and three in Montana — a total of seven agents covering more than 328,000 square miles, much of it rugged backcountry wilderness.

“I was one agent doing 18 different cases at one time,” Stoinski recalled. “I don’t know how detectives do it in cities — if you got like 10 homicides, does one guy do all the homicides himself, or do they got a team of people? Usually, I’m just an army of one, coordinating with state people to help.”

As the Justice Department presence contracted, Stoinski’s responsibilities expanded. “The last two years of my career, we were so shorthanded, I was covering southern Wyoming, western Colorado, and all of Utah,” he said. “By myself for two years.” Stoinski had wanted to be a game warden as far back as he could remember. While he still believed in his mission, making a meaningful impact felt impossible. “I was just fried,” he said. “I couldn’t get big picture things done. I was just fighting brush fires.”

A bear cub lies dead in the rocks after being hit by a vehicle on Oct. 13, 2019. The cub was an offspring of grizzly 863 and had been fed illegally along the busy mountain Highway 26 at Togwotee Pass in Wyoming.

Photo: Courtesy of Steve Stoinski

Rivers of Resentment

David J. Mattson and his wife Louisa Willcox live in southwest Montana, where bears venturing out from the protected confines of Yellowstone National Park run into an increasingly human-inhabited patchwork of public and private lands. The couple has made grizzly recovery their life’s work, with Willcox a full-time conservation advocate and Mattson one of the country’s leading scientific experts on grizzly habitat use.

The pair sees the “dead bear problem” — their term for the absence of accountability in grizzly killings — as a product of factors in both the ecosystem and the institutions of wildlife management, which are exacerbated by culture war politics.

In recent years, grizzlies have experienced reduced access to key food sources, Mattson explained. With declining populations of cutthroat trout, for example, the bears have increased their predation on ungulates, like elk, which they find by zeroing in on the areas where humans hunt and seeking out the animals they kill. Grizzlies have also descended from the remote high elevations where critical white bark pine populations have dwindled into areas where they can prey on livestock instead. In both cases, Mattson argues, bears are pursuing “anthropogenic meat” — that is, meat with a connection to humans — which can have deadly consequences.

“There are now two causes that account for probably 30-plus percent of the known and probable mortalities, and that’s conflicts over livestock — depredation — and encounters with big-game hunters,” Mattson told The Intercept. “It’s all plausibly linked to the demise of foods that kept bears out of harm’s way.”

As the bears’ diets have shifted, legal battles over their protected status have led many in the West — especially conservative lawmakers — to argue that grizzlies as a population are recovered and that the only thing keeping them under federal management are out-of-state environmentalists and well-funded nongovernmental organizations.

Whether grizzlies are truly recovered is a complicated question. The top scientific body tracking grizzly populations in the U.S., the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, where Mattson served as lead investigator from 1983 to 1993, tracks four fragmented populations of grizzlies in the Lower 48. Altogether, the four populations contain about 2,000 individual bears — up from the brink of extinction 50 years ago, but down from the estimated 50,000 bears that roamed the continent when settlers first marched West two centuries ago. Mortality records compiled by the team, meanwhile, show 456 known and probable grizzly bear deaths between 2015 and 2022 in the Greater Yellowstone region alone, with causes ranging from illegal killings, self-defense killings, and vehicle strikes to natural deaths and the killing of problem bears by government officials.

Numbers like that make fulfillment of the ESA’s ultimate aim — full recovery of imperiled species to their historic home range — difficult to imagine. “In terms of just looking at the science, to ensure long-term population viability in meaningful terms, you’re talking about ensuring that bears are going to be around almost certainly for 400 years,” Mattson said. That would require breeding between contiguous grizzly populations of as many as 2,500 to 9,000 bears. “We’re not even close to that in any of the populations we have,” Mattson argued. “Not even close.”

Population numbers are just one variable that goes into the federal government’s decision to keep an animal listed. States seeking to manage an animal population on their own must also show that they have a responsible regulatory structure in place to ensure continued recovery. It is on that point that Mattson and Willcox are most concerned.

In February, the Fish and Wildlife Service said that it would spend 12 months reviewing petitions from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho calling for the delisting of grizzlies under the ESA. Should the states prevail, it would open the door to legalized hunting seasons across the Northern Rockies.

The petitions are part of a wave of ESA-related, predator-centered GOP action in the West. Republicans are not only demanding that the Fish and Wildlife Service delist grizzlies through the ESA administrative process, but also backing federal legislation that would circumvent the scientific deliberation required under the ESA altogether and delist gray wolves nationwide — Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s “Trust the Science Act.”

While state and federal authority has long been contested, the balance of power has recently shifted. All three Northern Rockies states are now led by Republican governors backed by Republican legislatures who argue that the ESA has for too long served as a Trojan horse for paternalistic liberal intervention in the West. Now in the political driver’s seat, they are passing measures to slash the populations of large predators throughout the region, from wolves to mountain lions. Should grizzlies lose federal protection, conservationists fear the bear would be next. “Management of grizzly bears under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act has become so symbolically identified and tangled with the culture wars,” Mattson said, “that there’s just this manifest displacement of resentments onto bears.”

In the 1980s, Willcox recalled, the federal government understood that grizzly bear extinction was a real possibility. Given the stakes, federal authorities were willing to confront illegal grizzly killing, despite the social and cultural costs involved.

“That kind of stuff doesn’t happen now,” Willcox said. “And that’s because the fear, the concern, about potential extinction is gone.” In its place, she argued, is an anger that’s been bubbling for years: “Now you’ve got that river of resentment flowing into the river of resentment that’s the ultra-right crowd, increasing the decibel level of the anti-bear movement.”

David J. Mattson and his wife Louisa Willcox in Montana’s North Absaroka mountains in 2021.

Photo: Simon Peterson

Ambitions Abroad, Neglect at Home

It’s true, says Doug McKenna, a retired Fish and Wildlife investigator: Agents working grizzly killing cases face serious challenges — but they aren’t insurmountable. An experienced investigator can navigate the hurdles, provided they have two things: local connections and support at headquarters. And there was a time, he said, when agents on the ground had both.

McKenna grew up in Montana, went to college there, and became a state game warden in the 1980s, shortly after grizzly bears were added to the endangered species list. He was then recruited to join the feds and spent the next two-and-a-half decades working Fish and Wildlife cases from the Northern Rockies to the desert southwest before retiring in 2012.

In his more than 30 years of wildlife law enforcement, McKenna observed a steady, disturbing turn by Fish and Wildlife Service leadership away from domestic wildlife enforcement and toward flashy cases with international ties.

When McKenna became a federal agent in the late 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service was placing agents in remote, one-person stations across the region. McKenna spent a decade working out of one such outpost in New Mexico. He would ride deep into the Gila Wilderness on horseback, searching for poachers along the New Mexico–Arizona borderline. “I knew all the locals,” he said. Those bonds were critical. “You have to have the locals and the state game wardens on your side,” he said. “They’re generally in the know about the different suspects and places people frequent.”

“The powers that be, they came in and they wanted to centralize everything. That’s kind of an FBI concept, and it doesn’t work in wildlife enforcement.”

The method worked well, but around 2010, McKenna noticed a change. Agents were being called back from their posts — in Victorville, Flagstaff, Yuma, and elsewhere — and told to report to cities across the West.

“The powers that be, they came in and they wanted to centralize everything,” he said. “That’s kind of an FBI concept, and it doesn’t work in wildlife enforcement.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service defended the evolution of enforcement and investigative strategies in recent years. “The methods used by state and federal enforcement to obtain and investigate allegations of illegal take have changed and developed over time but are generally considered to be an improvement over strictly employing backcountry patrols,” a spokesperson for the agency said in an email. “The advent of cell phone, GPS, and satellite technology — as well as the availability of aircraft to reach remote areas — has increased the speed with which reports of take are received and can be acted upon.”

The desire McKenna sensed among leadership — to reshape the agency in the image of its more high-profile counterparts, projecting a modernized institution with a global reach — was real. And it wasn’t going away.

In 2013, during a visit to Tanzania, President Barack Obama announced an executive order establishing a new task force of 17 federal departments and agencies to train law enforcement personnel and park rangers across Africa. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s law enforcement agents would play a key role in the $10 million global initiative. The agency’s attaché program, a first-of-its-kind State Department-backed initiative unveiled in 2014, further propelled the international shift.

Washington’s new embrace of international wildlife enforcement claimed its first high-profile win in Operation Crash, a sprawling effort that bundled multiple investigations targeting the illicit trafficking of rhino horns under the same umbrella. The first arrests came in 2012 and snowballed from there. The operation soon became the largest Fish and Wildlife Service investigation in history, pulling in more than half of the agency’s special agents and involving its every office in the country.

By 2017, the Justice Department claimed Operation Crash had led to nearly 50 convictions and the recovery of roughly $7.8 million. That same year, Edward Grace, who designed and headed the investigation, was appointed assistant director of the Office of Law Enforcement at Fish and Wildlife Service, where he remains today.

It was a career-making case for Grace and an era-defining moment for the agency. In a 2018 interview, Grace likened his agents’ casework to that of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations wing. “We use informants, we use undercover operatives, we use the same investigative techniques you’ll see in the investigation of another commodity,” he said. “Instead of having cocaine as a commodity, you have rhino horns.”

None of the current or former officials who spoke to The Intercept questioned the importance of targeting the illicit, international wildlife trade. What they did take issue with was seeing their agency pluck personnel from a small pool of stateside investigators and then leave those positions unfilled — as though the United States, having somehow transcended its struggles with poaching and wildlife conflict management, now had agents to spare.

“I trained game rangers, and I did investigations,” McKenna said of the attaché program. The work was “fine and dandy,” he said. “But I think the priority needs to be the domestic wildlife, especially the threatened or endangered species, because that’s ours.”

The Interior Department official who spoke to The Intercept said the same. “They’re pushing so hard for agents to work these cases with criminal networks and international smuggling rings, which are great, but the agency doesn’t have the capability to do it like [Homeland Security Investigations] does,” said the official. For animals like grizzly bears, the official argued, there’s now an absence of proactive deterrence in the field: “People go out and they know there’s no one out there looking.”

Another former Fish and Wildlife Service official, Ed Newcomer, served 20 years with the agency before retiring in 2022. Rising through the ranks in Southern California, he became an expert in international wildlife trafficking and was appointed the agency’s attaché for southern Africa in 2015.

The problem went deeper than his former employer simply deprioritizing its domestic mandate in favor of a foreign one, Newcomer argued. It was a failure on the part of the service’s leadership to keep up with times and, specifically, to push Congress for the resources the agency needs to address domestic wildlife crimes with the same urgency that it now does abroad.

“Nobody is doing any long-term strategic thinking in the leadership at the Office of Law Enforcement,” Newcomer said. “We have not expanded our agent force, at all, since 1983. Forty years. We have not asked Congress to expand our agent force, despite the fact that we have taken on a hugely new and much different mission.” While the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Drug Enforcement Administration have national programs to draw new recruits to their mission, he added, “we have a very half-assed one. It’s in name only.”

A grizzly bear walks with her four cubs in Jackson, Wyoming, on June 15, 2020.

Photo: George Frey/Getty Images

A Fading Flame

Despite progress in recent decades, the grizzly bear still walks a delicate line in the West. While the crush of human development shrinks its habitat, the animals are continually run down on highways and gunned down in fields and forests. Meanwhile, frustrations in local communities — the kind that can lead to bears being poached — continue to fester.

“I am concerned that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to work itself into irrelevancy because they’re not getting enough done.”

Recently, Stoinski bumped into one of his old tribal counterparts at a local store in Lander. The game warden was frustrated. There were more and more grizzlies on the reservation and no support from the Fish and Wildlife Service to be found. For Stoinski, it was a testament to the regrettable reality of his final years as a federal agent. “We’re neglecting our state counterparts who need help. We’re neglecting our tribal counterparts,” he said. “They’re pulling people off to do these international things. Guys are sitting in their offices now looking on the internet for someone trafficking in some wildlife commodity, instead of being on the ground where the bears and the wolves and the eagles and all the other critters are living.”

“It’s just a huge disservice,” Stoinski said of the agency’s priorities. “I am concerned that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to work itself into irrelevancy because they’re not getting enough done.”

Hanging up his badge didn’t come easy for Stoinski. The veteran investigator had hoped to leave the state of conservation better than he found it. “You want to pass that torch to somebody,” he said. “You want to see them carry it, and you hope you’re leaving it in good hands.” He isn’t sure he did. “I think that’s the biggest regret I have about retiring — am I leaving it in better hands than I got it in?” he said. “I feel like the answer has become no.”

This project was made possible in part by support from the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

Join The Conversation

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Devereaux.

Why we need the Workplace Psychological Safety Act

Randy Jurado Ertll — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 23:04:15 +0000

There is an urgent need to counteract non-psychical abuse being tolerated or committed by employers, writes Randy Jurado Ertll.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Randy Jurado Ertll.

Why We Need the Workplace Psychological Safety Act

Randy Jurado Ertll — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 23:04:15 +0000

There is an urgent need to counteract psychological abuse being tolerated or committed by employers, writes Randy Jurado Ertll.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Randy Jurado Ertll.

Wisconsin’s Raw Deal Reversal of the New Deal: ACT 10 Labor Law. Don’t Let Your State Legislature Do This to You.

Jeffrey Sommers — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 06:55:37 +0000

Photograph Source: Tony Webster – CC BY-SA 2.0

Wisconsin, once a paragon of New Deal values that transformed workers into a middle class, changed when a Republican legislature and governor passed Act 10 a dozen years ago, reversing a century of progress. The legislation choked wage growth for all Badger State workers, public and private sector alike.

In normal labor markets workers often see pay rise above inflation in fat years, with pay held down in lean years. The average over good and bad years translated into wages keeping pace with inflation and a bit more on top of that to account for increasing productivity gains in the economy.

The law subverted this normal market practice by legislating wage decline. During rough times worker pay still fails to rise. But in good years pay for state public workers could only increase to the rate of inflation by law. Thus, over time pay drops and can never keep pace with inflation let alone productivity growth in the economy under Act 10.

Now, some in the private sector might wring their hands and say “tough break, but what does it mean for me?” Well, public and private sector workers alike exist in a common labor market, driving down the wages of one, drives them down for all. By pushing down worker pay in the public sector, private sector enterprises could pay all workers less.

Wages in Minnesota Show Negative Impact of Act 10

Comparing Wisconsin to our neighboring state Minnesota, we can see how massive a hit our workers took on inflation-adjusted median household incomes. In 2012, when the law took effect our median household incomes were $53,079 while neighboring Minnesota’s were $61,759. But a decade after Wisconsin’s anti-worker Act 10 was implemented, that spread grew from $73,330 in the Badger State to a whopping $90,390 in Minnesota. A median inflation adjusted household income spread of $8,000 and transformed it into a $17,000 gap between our states.

When Wisconsin workers get paid less, so do our small businesses. Labor uses most of its cash for necessities. If they have discretionary income it goes to corner taps and restaurants, hairstylists and barbers, landscapers, sports shops selling hunting rifles, fishing rods and bait, etc. In short, the velocity (circulation) of money in the economy increases, thus boosting the fortunes of Wisconsin’s small businesses. But if workers did not get this money the past decade, who did? Chiefly, to use a popular term, the “1%.” Money not paid to labor could be pocketed by big business.

Moreover, “savings” from Act 10’s anti-market legislated wage restraint reduced government budgets permitting tax cuts benefiting those who already have the most. Why does this matter? In addition to slowed worker pay increases, the wealthiest don’t spend as much of their money locally as workers. Extra money goes to vacations abroad, luxury consumption on fancy cars made in Europe and personal jet transport, and money parked in investments the world over. In short, the money leaves Wisconsin and our small businesses see less of the cash workers might otherwise spend at home.

In addition to legislating anti-market inflation-adjusted wage decline for public sector workers, thus reducing wage growth for private sector workers given the common labor market, the law also addressed health benefits for public workers. Chiefly, it limited what government would pay for them. Up to the passage of the law, public worker benefits were no doubt good. This largely resulted from public workers preferring more benefits over larger pay increases. As private sector worker health benefits declined resentments arose over the solid ones enjoyed by workers in the public sector. Over time increasing health costs have been a real burden on government budgets.

Unions Unfairly Blamed for Rise in Health Care Costs

But the culprit here is the US healthcare system not labor unions. We spend far more as a percent of GDP on health in the US while having shorter lifespans. We live 6 years less than top performing countries, while often paying twice per capita as they do as a percent of GDP. Restricting health benefits for public workers under the law was nonetheless politically popular and should be retained. Public and private sector workers alike can find common cause in state and national health benefits reform while in the short-term getting higher wages to compensate for increasing benefit expenses.

Regardless, Act10’s solution of merely shifting more of this failing system’s costs onto workers to support outsized profits for Big Insurance and Big Pharma is not the answer. Moreover, the same politicians legislating less pay for labor can’t claim to be saving Wisconsin money when they made the state one of only ten in the US (the others mostly in the deep South) having rejected the return of some $2 billion of Wisconsin’s tax dollars from Washington, DC to expand healthcare over the past decade.

Wisconsin is not “saving money” with Act 10. It is shrinking wage and small business growth while waterboarding the 1% with cash taken from its workers. This raw deal legislating low wages runs contra to the great New Deal that expanded our middle class. It’s more than time for Wisconsin’s State Supreme Court to reverse it.

This article originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The post Wisconsin’s Raw Deal Reversal of the New Deal: ACT 10 Labor Law. Don’t Let Your State Legislature Do This to You. appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey Sommers.

CPJ to EU: The time to act on spyware is now

Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the European Union to include effective legal safeguards in its planned legislation to rein in the abusive use of spyware against journalists.

Negotiations on the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), a draft EU law seeking to strengthen media freedom and pluralism in EU member states, are likely to conclude during a meeting scheduled for December 15.

CPJ is concerned that Article 4 of the EMFA on the protection of journalists and their sources could be problematic, despite its well-intended purpose, because EU member states have requested that a “national security” exemption be included to justify spyware against journalists.

A 2022 CPJ report found that zero-click spyware, which secretly takes over electronic devices without being detected, has had a chilling effect on press freedom worldwide by putting journalists at risk of increased harassment and violence and hampering their ability to find sources.

Around the world, spyware, which secretly takes over electronic devices without being detected, puts journalists at risk of increased harassment and violence, and sometimes precedes imprisonment.

Media law experts have consistently called for the EMFA to include precise judicial safeguards, like court orders or proportionality requirements, as detailed by CPJ in its report, “Fragile Progress: The struggle for press freedom in the European Union.”

Article 4, they argue, must also be in line with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its case law, which guarantee journalists’ right to protect their sources.

“The growing use of surveillance to spy on journalists has sent shivers around the media community in Europe, and governments have been using national security as a justification to avoid coming clean about their reasons for surveilling journalists,” said Tom Gibson, CPJ’s EU representative. “If the EU genuinely wants to protect journalists from spyware, it needs to insert clear legal checks and balances into the European Media Freedom Act.”

In light of the Pegasus Project revelations in 2021 that spyware was used to hack the phones of dozens of journalists, government officials and human rights activists globally, the European Parliament set up the PEGA Committee to investigate abuses of spyware. In May, it published its comprehensive recommendations, including to the European Commission, and called for EU action on the use of spyware.

In September, some 500 journalists complained to the European Parliament that intrusive surveillance threatened their ability to work, their right to privacy, and their sources’ confidentiality, and called for a complete ban on spyware.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

Fossil Fuel Production Rises Under the Inflation Reduction Act, Exacerbating Environmental Injustice

Newswire Editor — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 13:02:54 +0000

Wyden—a lead sponsor of the Government Surveillance Reform Act (GSRA), a bipartisan bill introduced earlier this month—shared some of what he has learned about the program and urged the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to release information about it.

Now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS), the program was initially revealed to the public as the Hemisphere Project by The New York Times in 2013. Information collected includes caller and recipient names, phone numbers, and dates and times of calls.

Based on what officials told Wyden's staff, "all Hemisphere requests are sent to a single AT&T analyst located in Atlanta, Georgia, and... any law enforcement officer working for one of the federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. can contact the AT&T Hemisphere analyst directly to request they run a query, with varying authorization requirements," the letter says.

The letter also explains that "although the Hemisphere Project is paid for with federal funds, they are delivered to AT&T through an obscure grant program, enabling the program to skip an otherwise mandatory federal privacy review" by the DOJ.

Citing a document provided by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), Wyden noted that "White House funding for this program was suspended by the Obama administration in 2013, the same year the program was exposed by the press, but continued with other federal funding under a new generic sounding program name, 'Data Analytical Services.'"

"ONDCP funding for this surveillance program was quietly resumed by the Trump administration in 2017, paused again in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, and then quietly restarted again in 2022," according to the senator.

"The public interest in an informed debate about government surveillance far outweighs the need to keep this information secret."

"I have serious concerns about the legality of this surveillance program, and the materials provided by the DOJ contain troubling information that would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress," he wrote, referencing materials the department gave his office. "While I have long defended the government's need to protect classified sources and methods, this surveillance program is not classified and its existence has already been acknowledged by the DOJ in federal court. The public interest in an informed debate about government surveillance far outweighs the need to keep this information secret."

WIRED pointed out that in addition to DAS not being subjected to a DOJ privacy review, "the White House is also exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, reducing the public's overall ability to shed light on the program."

While the White House "acknowledged an inquiry... but has yet to provide a comment," WIRED reported, AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson declined to comment, "saying only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena."

"There is no law requiring AT&T to store decades' worth of Americans' call records for law enforcement purposes," the outlet highlighted. "Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T's voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance."

Responding in a statement Monday, Demand Progress policy director Sean Vitka noted that the reporting comes as members of Congress are considering whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows warrantless surveillance targeting foreigners located outside the United States and will expire at the end of 2023.

"Hemisphere appears to be Exhibit A for mass domestic surveillance, the data broker loophole, and even parallel construction," said Vitka. "These new details add up to a horrifying picture that proves the need for Congress to close the data broker loophole and enact comprehensive privacy protections for Americans before reauthorizing any spying powers, most notably Section 702 of FISA. The fact that a White House office—one that is actively fighting FISA reform—restarted funding for Hemisphere in 2022, in spite of recent Supreme Court precedent, is scandalous."

Demand Progress is among the groups backing Wyden's recently unveiled legislation—which, as WIRED reported, would close various loopholes, "effectively rendering the DAS program, in its current form, explicitly illegal."

Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which also endorsed the GSRA, said of the reporting: "This is exactly why Congress must pass comprehensive surveillance reform as a precondition for ANY reauthorization of FISA Section 702. The Government Surveillance Reform Act would put an end to the abuses revealed in this latest bombshell story."

Freedom of the Press Foundation also acknowledged current reauthoriztion battle, saying on social media Monday: "So the [government] used loopholes to secretly restart a mass domestic surveillance program, and some lawmakers also want to re-up FISA Section 702 without real reforms because we can 'trust' authorities not to abuse their power to go after journalists and others? No thanks."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Lula’s political balancing act is paying off – for now

Bernardo Gutiérrez — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 13:05:12 +0000

The Brazil president has stabilised the economy, controls Congress and is popular. But Bolsonarism is holding on

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Bernardo Gutiérrez.

The Explosive Growth of U.S. Militarism after the End of the Soviet Union

Eric Zuesse — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 13:43:00 +0000

Instead of there being the U.S.-Government-promised ‘peace dividend’ after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, there has been soaring militarism by the U.S., and also soaring profits for the American producers of war-weapons. Both the profits on this, and the escalation in America’s aggressiveness following after 1991, have been stunning. Whereas there were 53 “Instances of United States Use of Armed Forces Abroad” (U.S. invasions) during the 46 years of 1945-1991, there were 244 such instances during the 31 years of 1991-2022, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. From a rate of 1.15 U.S. invasions per year during Cold War One (1945-1991), it rose to 7.87 per year during Cold War Two (1991-2022).

Furthermore: the U.S. Government began in 1948 its many dozens of coups (starting with Thailand in that year) to overthrow the leaders of its targeted-for-takeover countries, and its replacement of those by U.S.-chosen dictators. Ever since 25 July 1945, the U.S. Government has been aiming to take control over the entire world — to create the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire.

Cold War Two is the years when Russia had ended its side of the Cold War in 1991 while the U.S. secretly has continued its side of the Cold War. This deceit by America was done during the start of Russia’s Yeltsin years, when the G.H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Administrations sent the Harvard economics department into Russia to teach Yeltsin’s people how to become capitalists by partnering U.S. billionaires with whomever Russia would privatize its assets to, and so created an incredibly corrupt economy there, which would be dependent upon decisions by America’s billionaires — Russia was then in the process of becoming the U.S. Government’s biggest colony or ‘ally’ after it would be trapped fully in the thrall of America’s billionaires, which was the U.S. regime’s objective. Then, while getting its claws into Russia’s Government that way, Clinton lowered the boom against Russia, by blatantly violating the promises that Bush’s team had made (but which violation by Bush’s successors had been planned by Bush — Bush secretly told his stooges (Kohl, Mitterand, etc.) that the promises he had told them to make to Gorbachev, that NATO wouldn’t expand toward Russia, were to be lies) to Gorbachev, and that NATO actually would expand toward Russia and would exclude Russia from ever being considered as a possible NATO member-nation (i.e., Russia wasn’t to be another vassal nation, but instead a conquered nation, to be exploited by the entire U.S. empire). The expansion of America’s NATO toward Russia was begun by Clinton — on 12 March 1999 near the end of his Presidency — bringing Czechia, Hungary, and Poland, into NATO, blatantly in violation of what Bush’s team had promised to Gorbachev’s team.

Russia’s top leadership now knew that America’s top leadership intended to conquer Russia, not merely for Russia to become yet another vassal-nation in the U.S. empire; and, so, Yeltsin resigned as President on 31 December 1999, and passed the nation’s leadership (and Russia’s then seemingly insuperable problems from it) to Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who promptly began to clean house and to inform Russia’s billionaires that either they would do what he asks them to do, or else he would make sure that Russia would pursue whatever legal means were then available in order to get them into compliance with Russia’s tax-laws and other laws, so as for them not to continue to rip-off the Russian nation (as they had been doing). Even the post-2012 solidly neoconservative British newspaper Guardian headlined on 6 March 2022 “How London became the place to be for Putin’s oligarchs” and touched upon the surface of the escape of “Russian oligarchs” to London (and elsewhere in America’s EU-NATO portion of the U.S. empire), but their article didn’t mention the worst cases, such as Mikhail Khordorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky. Each of these were individuals who had absconded with billions in Russia’s wealth. (I previously posted to the Web my “Private Investigations Find America’s Magnitsky Act to Be Based on Frauds”, presenting in-depth the case of the American-in-Russia financial operator Bill Browder’s theft of $232 million from Russia, and documenting Browder’s lies on the basis of which President Obama got passed in the U.S. Congress the Magnitsky Act protecting Browder and sanctioning Russia on fake charges that were cooked up by Browder and by the billionaire George Soros’s ’non-profits’. Not all of the American skimmers from Russia were billionaires; some, such as Browder, weren’t that big. But their shared target was to win control over Russia; and this was the U.S. Government’s objective, too.)

The U.S. regime also changed its entire strategy for expanding its empire (its list of colonies or ‘allies’ — vassal-nations) after 1991, in a number of significant ways, such as by creating front-organizations, an example being Transparency International, to downgrade creditworthiness of the U.S. regime’s targeted countries (so as to force up their borrowing-costs, and thus weaken the targeted nation’s Government), and there were also a wide range of other ‘non-profits’, some of which took over (privatized) much of the preparatory work for the U.S. regime’s “regime-change” operations (coups) that formerly had been done by the by-now-infamous CIA.

One of these ‘non-profits’, for example, is CANVAS, Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which “was founded in 2004 by Srđa Popović, and the CEO of Orion Telecom, Slobodan Đinović.” Just about all that is online about Đinović is this, this, this, this and this. It’s not much, for allegedly the 50% donor to CANVAS. Actually, that organization’s major funding is entirely secret, and is almost certainly from the U.S. Government or conduits therefrom (including U.S. billionaires such as Soros), since CANVAS is always aiding the overthrow of Governments that the U.S. regime aims to overthrow.

Both Popović and Đinović had earlier, since 1998, been among the leading members of another U.S. astroturf ‘revolution for democracy’ organization, Otpor! (“Resistance!”), which had helped to overthrow Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia. Otpor! ended successfully in 2004, at which time Popović and Đinović founded their own CANVAS, which they designed to institutionalize and spread to Ukraine and other countries the techniques that Otpor! had used and which had been taught to Otpor! by the U.S. regime under Bill Clinton. These were techniques which had been formalized by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.

Even well before Popovic and Dinovic had joined in 1998 (during the U.S-NATO’s prior overthrow-Milosevic campaign to break up the former Yugoslavia) the Otpor student movement to overthrow Yugoslavia’s President Slobodan Milošević, the American Gene Sharp had created the detailed program to do this. Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute published and promoted Sharp’s books advocating pacifism as the best way to force a ‘dictatorship’ (i.e., any Government that the U.S. regime wants to overthrow) to be overthrown. Sharp presented himself as being an advocate of ’non-violent resistance’ as practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other actual anti-imperialists, but Sharp himself was no anti-imperialist (quite the contrary!); he was instead purely a pacifist, and not at all anti-imperialist. Einstein, like Gandhi, had been no pacifist, but didn’t know that Sharp, whom Einstein never met, accepted imperialism, which Sharp’s claimed hero, Gandhi, detested. So, Einstein unfortunately accepted the cunning Sharp’s request to write a Foreword for Sharp’s first book praising Gandhi, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, and Sharp then used that Foreword as ‘proof’ that Sharp was a follower of Einstein (even naming his Institute after the by-then deceased physicist) — which was as false as Sharp’s claimed advocacy of Gandhi’s philosophy was. Sharp was a master self-publicist and deceiver. Einstein’s 321-word, 1.3-page-long, Foreword praised the work and its young author, but he might just have cursorily skimmed the manuscript. He probably would have have been appalled at what followed from Sharp.

Sharp, thus, carefully avoided clarifying that, for example, he would have been a pacifist if he had been in America during the U.S. Revolutionary War, or even perhaps if he had been a northerner during the Civil War, or else been an anti-Nazi partisan during WW II (a pacifist ‘anti-Nazi’). Sharp’s recommendations are useful for the U.S. regime’s coups, because Sharp’s recommendations provide a way to make as difficult as possible for a head-of-state that the U.S. regime has targeted for removal, to remain in office. Sharp’s recommendations are for such a head-of-state to need to employ so much — and ever-increasing — violence against so many of his domestic opponents (fooled non-violent resistors — ‘martyrs’), as to become forced to resign, simply in order not to become himself a casualty of the resultant soaring backlash against himself as being viewed by his own public as simply a ruthless tyrannical dictator, for imprisoning or even killing those ‘democracy protesters’ who had been fooled by agents of the U.S. empire. So: Sharp’s methods are ideal to use so as to increase the public’s support for what is actually a U.S. coup. And that’s their real purpose: to facilitate coups, instead of to create any actual revolution. (As the commentator at the opening there noted, “Missing from Gene Sharp’s list are ‘Constructive actions’ – actions you take to build the alternative society you hope to create.” Sharp’s entire system is for destroying a Government — nothing to create a new one except that it should be ‘democratic’ — whatever that supposedly meant to his fools.) And, then, the coup itself is carried out, by the U.S. professionals at that, once the targeted head-of-state has become hated by a majority of his population. That’s the Sharp method, for coups.

This is an alternative to what had been the U.S. regime’s method during 1945-1991, which was simply CIA-run coups, which relied mainly upon bribing local officials and oligarchs, and hiring rent-a-mobs so as to show photographic ‘mass-support’ for overthrowing a ruler, in order to replace the local ruler with one that the U.S. regime has selected (like this).

On 12 November 2012, the pacifist John Horgan headlined at Scientific American, “Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money?,” and he wrote:

Defense-funded research has led to advances in civilian health care, transportation, communication and other industries that have improved our lives. My favorite example of well-spent Pentagon money was a 1968 Darpa grant to the political scientist Gene Sharp. That money helped Sharp research and write the first of a series of books on how nonviolent activism can bring about political change.

Sharp’s writings have reportedly inspired nonviolent opposition movements around the world, including ones that toppled corrupt regimes in Serbia, Ukraine [he was referring here to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’, but Sharp’s methods were also used in the 2014 ‘Maidan Revolution’], Georgia–and, more recently, Tunisia and Egypt [the ‘Arab Spring’]. Sharp, who has not received any federal support since 1968, has defended his acceptance of Darpa funds. In the preface of his classic 1972 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, he argued that “governments and defense departments — as well as other groups — should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics.” I couldn’t agree more.

So: Sharp’s pacifists are the opposite of anti-imperialists; they are neocons: agents to expand the U.S. empire, by means of (i.e., now preferring) coups instead of military invasions.

On 11 December 2000, the Washington Post headlined “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” and reported:

The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution’s ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

“What was most amazing to us was to discover that what we were trying to do spontaneously in Serbia was supported by a whole nonviolent system that we knew nothing about,” said Srdja Popovic, a former biology student. “This was the first time we thought about this in a systematic, scientific way. We said to ourselves, ‘We will go back and apply this.’ ”

Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharpe, whom he describes as “the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement,” referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist. Six months later, Popovic can recite Helvey’s lectures almost word for word, beginning with the dictum, “Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle.”

“Those Serbs really impressed me,” Helvey said in an interview from his West Virginia home. “They were very bright, very committed.”

Back in Serbia, Otpor activists set about undermining Milosevic’s authority by all means available. Rather than simply daubing slogans on walls, they used a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising. “The poll results were very important,” recalled Ivo Andric, a marketing student at Belgrade University. “At every moment, we knew what to say to the people.”

The poll results pointed to a paradox that went to the heart of Milosevic’s grip on power. On one hand, the Yugoslav president was detested by 70 percent of the electorate. On the other, a majority of Serbs believed he would continue to remain in power, even after an election. To topple Milosevic, opposition leaders first had to convince their fellow Serbs that he could be overthrown.

At a brainstorming session last July, Otpor activist Srdjan Milivojevic murmured the words “Gotov je,” or “He’s finished.”

“We realized immediately that it summed up our entire campaign,” said Dejan Randjic, who ran the Otpor marketing operation. “It was very simple, very powerful. It focused on Milosevic, but did not even mention him by name.”

Over the next three months, millions of “Gotov je” stickers were printed on 80 tons of imported adhesive paper–paid for by USAID and delivered by the Washington-based Ronco Consulting Corp.–and plastered all over Serbia on walls, inside elevators and across Milosevic’s campaign posters. Printed in black and white and accompanied by Otpor’s clenched-fist emblem, they became the symbol of the revolution.

However, a WikiLeaked email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton on 26 July 2011, about the Subject “Gene Sharp,” discussed Egypt’s “April 6 movement,” which had overthrown Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Sullivan told her that “In order to assess … the role of Gene Sharp’s ideas in the January 25 revolution, several members of the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) looked into the issue during a recent fact-finding trip to Egypt. They met with representatives of a wide range of protest groups — including the April 6 movement — major civil society organizations, and political parties.” And Sullivan concluded that “ the earlier reporting on these purported ties to Gene Sharp now seems somewhat overblown. … Most other analysts … credit this to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Sullivan wrote from ignorance. On 3 March 2018, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper headlined “The Resistance Guide That Inspired Jewish Settlers and Muslim Brothers Alike: Opponents of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and anti-government protesters in Iran have adopted the civil disobedience principles of the late Prof. Gene Sharp,” and recounted that, “Participants in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 also owe many of their achievements to Sharp’s ideas. In Egypt it’s known that at least four groups of activists were influenced by them. Even the Muslim Brotherhood [the group that Sullivan said was NOT influenced by Sharp’s ideas], whose tradition of violence struck fear into the hearts of many, viewed Sharp’s book as a manual and posted it in Arabic translation on its website.” And, for example, even Wikipedia, in its article on the “April 6 Youth Movement,” says: “The April 6 movement is using the same raised fist symbol as the Otpor! movement from Serbia, that helped bring down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and whose nonviolent tactics were later used in Ukraine and Georgia. Mohammed Adel, a leader in the April 6 movement, studied at the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, an organization founded by former Otpor! members.”

Jake Sullivan was stunningly ignorant — not merely arrogant. The U.S. intelligence community has intimately cooperated with Otpor, CANVAS, and other such astroturf ‘revolution’-generators for American billionaires. For example, Ruaridh Arrow, the writer and director of a eulogistic biopic on Gene Sharp, “How to Start a Revolution,” headlined “Did Gene Sharp work for the CIA? Correcting the Conspiracies.” He wrote: “Funds were provided by the NED and IRI to activists for Albert Einstein Institution projects, for example in Burma, but the Institution was never able to fund groups in its own right.” (And what is that “but”-clause supposed to mean?) However, Arrow also wrote there: “Gene Sharp never worked for the CIA, in fact he was highly critical of them and advised activists not to take money from intelligence services. He argued that reliance on outsiders could weaken their movement and make them reliant on a foreign state which could suddenly cut off money and support, causing serious damage to their cause. It’s one thing to deny involvement with the CIA, it’s quite another to go around the world giving convincing arguments NOT to take money from them. … See below for a video of Gene Sharp telling people NOT to take money from the CIA.”

Sharp’s operation, and that of the other ’non-profits’ such as CANVAS that adhere to it, don’t need money from the CIA, because they can get plenty of money from the billionaires who benefit from America’s coups. On 26 January 2001, David Holley in the Los Angeles Times headlined “The Seed Money for Democracy: Financier George Soros has put out $2.8 billion since 1990 to promote a global open society. His efforts include funding the student movement that helped oust Milosevic in Yugoslavia.” He wrote:

Yugoslavia was a case where everything democrats had worried about–extreme nationalism, ethnic conflict, corruption, media controls and bickering among opposition political parties–were at their worst. Yet, just as Soros had calculated, it was a grass-roots surge by strong citizen organizations that won the battle for democracy.

Soros’ branch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, was among the earliest backers of Otpor, which grew under young and decentralized leadership to strengthen the fractured opposition to Milosevic. “We gave them their first grant back in 1998, when they appeared as a student organization,” said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, the network’s branch here.

Foreign financial support helped Otpor surreptitiously print about 60 tons of posters and leaflets in the months before the Sept. 24 election that led to Milosevic’s ouster, said Miljana Jovanovic, a student who is one of the movement’s leaders. …

The vast majority of groups funded by Soros are not nearly as powerful as Otpor, nor do they play for such huge stakes.

More typical are efforts such as “horse-riding therapy” for disabled children, funded by the network’s Polish branch, the Stefan Batory Foundation.

I found that article only recently. On 18 April 2022, I had headlined “History of the Ukrainian War” and here was a passage in it that included the Stafan Battory Foundation, but I didn’t know, at the time, that this organization was actually Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Poland. Here is the relevant portion from that history of the Ukrainian war:

*****

On 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians.” The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:

An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE” editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw University of Technology and the National University of Technology in Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days. The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the assault on buildings. …

Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.

The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …

Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz – he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.

Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?

Miszczuk’s article’s mention of “the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz” referred to the key person (Dmitriy Yarosh) and the key group (his Right Sector paramilitary organization and political party) that has actually been running Ukraine behind the scenes ever since the coup, and they also were the key people who had led the snipers who were firing down from tall buildings upon the Ukrainian Government’s police and upon the anti-Government demonstrators at Kiev’s Maidan Square — the violence simultaneously against both sides — that the newly installed post-coup government immediately blamed against the just-ousted democratically elected President, so that the new top officials were all blaming the ones that they had replaced.

*****

On 4 October 2017, the historian F. William Engdahl, who unfortunately leaves many of his allegations not linked to his alleged sources, wrote:

Goldman Sachs and Stratfor

Even more interesting details recently came to light on the intimate links between the US “intelligence consultancy”, Stratfor — known as the ”Shadow CIA” for its corporate clients which include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and U.S. government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

It was revealed in a huge release of internal memos from Stratfor in 2012, some five million emails provided them by the hacker community Anonymous, that Popović, after creating CANVAS also cultivated very close relations with Stratfor. According to the Stratfor internal emails, Popović worked for Stratfor to spy on opposition groups. So intimate was the relationship between Popović and Stratfor that he got his wife a job with the company and invited several Stratfor people to his Belgrade wedding.

Revealed in the same Stratfor emails by Wikileaks was the intriguing information that one of the “golden geese” funders of the mysterious CANVAS was a Wall Street bank named Goldman Sachs. Satter Muneer, a Goldman Sachs partner, is cited by Stratfor’s then-Eurasia Analyst Marko Papic. Papic, asked by a Stratfor colleague whether Muneer was the “golden goose” money behind CANVAS, writes back, “They have several golden gooses I believe. He is for sure one of them.”

Now the very remarkable Mr Popović brings his dishonest career to Hungary where, not a dictator, but a very popular true democrat who offers his voters choices, is the target for Popović’ peculiar brand of US State Department fake democracy. This will not at all be as easy as toppling Milošević, even if he has the help of student activists being trained at Soros’ Central European University in Budapest.

If he had linked to those WikiLeaks documents, then copies of his article that were made before the U.S. regime removed some WikiLeaks files from the Web would have archived those files, but that didn’t happen; and, so, today, a Web-search for the 3-word string

Stratfor Popović wikileaks

produces finds such as

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1773778_meeting-canvas-stratfor-.html

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1792423_information-on-canvas-.html

of which no copies were saved at any of the Web archives.

However, a prior article, by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn of Occuy.com, on 2 December 2013, was headlined “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor,” and it has links to the WikiLeaks documents. From all of this, it’s clear that the obscure Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, are each well-connected to wealth, if not themselves quite wealthy, from their business, of fomenting coups for the U.S. regime, in the names of ‘peace’ and of ‘democracy’.

Apparently, CANVAS remains quite active today:

On 6 October 2023, Kit Klarenberg, at The Grayzone, headlined “A Maidan 2.0 color revolution looms in Georgia,” and reported that:

The arrest of US regime change operatives in Tbilisi suggests a coup against Georgia’s government could be in the works. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive fails, the West appears eager to open a new front in its proxy war.

On September 29, in a disclosure ignored by the entire Western media, the US government-run Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language portal Slobodna Evropa revealed that three foreign operatives had been summoned for questioning by the Georgian Security Service, for allegedly assisting opposition elements prepare a Maidan-style regime change scenario in Tbilisi.

The operatives were staffers of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies. …

The ruling Georgian dream [NO — it’s the Georgian Dream Party] has been portrayed in the west as a pro-Kremlin government. In reality, it’s simply reverted to a longstanding policy of balancing between East and West. For the neoconservative establishment, its true sin is being insufficiently supportive of the Ukraine proxy war. Thus Ukrainian elements are set to be involved in a possible color revolution. If such an operation succeeds, it would open a second front in that war on Russia’s Western flank.

The development seemingly confirms warnings from local security officials earlier this September. They cautioned “a coup a la Euromaidan is being prepared in Georgia,” referring to the 2014 US-backed color revolution which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and ushered in a pro-NATO government. The purported lead plotters are ethnic Georgians working for the Ukrainian government: Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Kiev’s deputy military intelligence chief; Mikhail Baturin, the bodyguard of former President Mikheil Saakashvili; and Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the notorious Georgian Legion.

A September 6 investigation by The Grayzone revealed that Georgian Legion chief Mamulashvili is centrally implicated in a false flag massacre of Maidan protesters, which was pivotal in unseating elected President Viktor Yanukovych. He apparently brought the shooters to Maidan Square to “sow some chaos” by opening fire on crowds, and provided sniper rifles for the purpose.

Georgian officials say that now they’ve uncovered evidence that young anti-government activists are undergoing training near Ukraine’s border with Poland to enact a similar scheme, which would feature a deadly bombing during planned riots meant to take place in Tbilisi between October and December, when the European Commission is expected to rule on whether Georgia can formally become an EU candidate country.

The Wikipedia article “Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies” says:

CANVAS’ training and methodology has been successfully applied by groups in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), The Maldives (2008)?, Egypt (2011)?, Syria (2011)? and Ukraine (2014). It works only in response to requests for assistance.

However: anyone who participates in such ‘Revolutions’ is placing oneself at severe personal risk, in order to facilitate a coup by the U.S. Government and its controlling owners, who are billionaires. People such as Sharp, Popović, and Đinović, are merely well-paid and maintained servants to America’s billionaires.

Here’s how they market their operation, to peaceniks:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230521063855/https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CANVAS-Core-Curriculum_EN4.pdf

https://canvasopedia.org/2023/01/05/examining-non-state-stakeholders-role-in-modern-nonviolent-conflict-2/

https://web.archive.org/web/20231025015004/https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/canvas_presentation.pdf

They open by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is mocking them — aping their influence, not spreading it.

And here is how the neoconservative Tina Rosenberg, in the neoconservative Donald Graham’s Foreign Policy magazine, promotes CANVAS, as being “Revolution U“:

As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world’s attention has been drawn to the causes — generations of repressive rule — and tools — social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter — animating the wave of revolt. But as the members of the April 6 movement learned, these elements alone do not a revolution make. What does? In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain — so what do we do?

The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning — tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough — it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Groups Oppose Use of Inflation Reduction Act Funding for Polluting Factory Farms

Newswire Editor — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 13:56:11 +0000

Today, nearly 200 groups sent a lett e r to Secretary Tom Vilsack urging the agency to reconsider its recent decision to include several “conservation practices” that support factory farms and the proliferation of factory farm gas to its list of Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry practices that will be prioritized under the Inflation Reduction Act. The letter warns that nearly $2 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding intended to boost climate-smart agriculture could go to polluting factory farms. Its delivery comes hours before a USDA webinar touting the expanded climate-smart agriculture funding opportunities.

Groups, led by Food & Water Watch, Animal Legal Defense Fund, Campaign for Family Farms and The Environment, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Southern Environmental Law Center, urged USDA not to further subsidize factory farms under the guise of climate action. The push also comes as nearly 200,000 Friends of the Earth members have signed a petition to USDA demanding the agency end its support of the factory farm system.

“Factory farm gas and its dirty methane digesters have no place in our clean energy future or sustainable agriculture,” said Food & Water Watch Senior Food Policy Analyst Rebecca Wolf, an organizer of the letter. “USDA’s latest approved practices only double down on pollution, and divert millions in much-needed federal climate funding from smaller, more sustainable producers. Secretary Vilsack must stop the flow of Inflation Reduction Act conservation funding toward Big Ag’s greenwashing schemes.”

As the letter states, factory farming and the production of factory farm gas are costly industrial practices that “will exacerbate climate change, waste taxpayer dollars, and harm Indigenous peoples and environmental justice communities. This directly contradicts the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act and the stated priorities of the Biden Administration.”

“EPA reporting is clear that factory farms are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ben Lilliston, Director of Climate Strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “It makes no sense to spend valuable conservation dollars on high cost practices that subsidize this factory farm system at the expense of real conservation practices that can benefit farmers and the climate.”

“By prioritizing Inflation Reduction Act climate spending on factory farming-related practices, USDA is diverting valuable taxpayer dollars away from farmers and ranchers who are truly fighting climate change and instead rewarding Big Ag’s pollution,” said Molly Armus, Animal Agriculture Policy Program Manager at Friends of the Earth. “Subsidizing expensive greenwashing practices like factory farm gas will further entrench industrial animal agriculture and allow for the unbridled polluting of rural communities to continue. This directly undermines the Biden Administration’s stated commitment to environmental justice. We urge USDA to change course and listen to the hundreds of organizations and 200,000 Friends of the Earth members asking it to stop subsidizing factory farms.”

As the letter points out, “according to an analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, just seven anaerobic digesters in California used nearly $2 million in EQIP funding – enough to support the average cost of 238 farms planting cover crops.”

“Using public money to build digesters for factory farm manure isn’t climate-smart,” said Patty Lovera of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, a coalition of state and national organizations working to change policies that prop up the factory farm system. “Independent family farms raising livestock sustainably have been shut out of conservation programs for years due to lack of funding, so it makes no sense to use new funding on expensive false solutions like factory farm gas.”

“Funding under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) should be reserved for true conservation practices that prioritize and advance sustainability, climate mitigation, and environmental protection,” said Alicia Prygoski, Strategic Legislative Affairs Manager at the Animal Legal Defense Fund. “The Animal Legal Defense Fund is extremely concerned to see that factory farms will be eligible to receive funding for practices that pollute our air and water, exacerbate the climate crisis, and harm animals – practices that directly contradict the goals of the IRA. We are proud to join nearly 200 other organizations in asking the USDA not to use conservation funding to prop up an industry that will further entrench us in an unsustainable animal agricultural farming system.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Groups Oppose Use of Inflation Reduction Act Funding for Polluting Factory Farms

Newswire Editor — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 13:56:11 +0000

“Factory farm gas and its dirty methane digesters have no place in our clean energy future or sustainable agriculture,” said Food & Water Watch Senior Food Policy Analyst Rebecca Wolf, an organizer of the letter. “USDA’s latest approved practices only double down on pollution, and divert millions in much-needed federal climate funding from smaller, more sustainable producers. Secretary Vilsack must stop the flow of Inflation Reduction Act conservation funding toward Big Ag’s greenwashing schemes.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Groups Oppose Use of Inflation Reduction Act Funding for Polluting Factory Farms

Newswire Editor — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 13:56:11 +0000

“Factory farm gas and its dirty methane digesters have no place in our clean energy future or sustainable agriculture,” said Food & Water Watch Senior Food Policy Analyst Rebecca Wolf, an organizer of the letter. “USDA’s latest approved practices only double down on pollution, and divert millions in much-needed federal climate funding from smaller, more sustainable producers. Secretary Vilsack must stop the flow of Inflation Reduction Act conservation funding toward Big Ag’s greenwashing schemes.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

We Need to Disarm the Discourse on China

Cale Holmes and Lawson Adams — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 19:23:47 +0000

From racist tweets to rising hate crimes, the media’s anti-China propaganda has created a climate of aggression. Two weeks ago, a man drove a car into the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, yelling “Where’s the CCP?” Arab Americans have been targeted during the Persian Gulf War, the War on Terror, and U.S.-backed atrocities in Palestine. It’s no surprise that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are in the crosshairs of white supremacy as the U.S. targets China. Back in April, a Columbia University found that three in four Chinese Americans said they’d suffered racial discrimination in the past 12 months.

When the Trump administration launched the China Initiative to prosecute spies, the Department of Justice racially profiled Chinese Americans and Chinese nationals. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of Chinese researchers who dropped their affiliation with U.S. institutions jumped 23 percent. The Biden administration has ended the initiative, but the Department of Justice and the congressional anti-China committee are still targeting political leaders in the Chinese community.

As Biden continues the crackdowns of his predecessor, his administration is also escalating in the Asia-Pacific region. From expanding military bases in the Philippines – including one potential base in the works intended to join contingencies in Taiwan – to building a fleet of AI drones to target China, militarists are creating conditions for a hot war in the Pacific. As the U.S. prepares for war, Forbes published an article on September 25 about an aircraft carrier “kill chain” and its potential use in a war with China. In February, CNN journalists accompanied a U.S. Navy jet approaching Chinese airspace. As a Chinese pilot warned the U.S. to keep a safe distance, an American soldier remarked: “It’s another Friday afternoon in the South China Sea.”

Not only are we normalizing U.S. aggression. We’re also relying on the military-industrial complex as an unbiased source. Pro-war propaganda is derailing China-U.S. ties, increasing anti-Asian hate, and hiding the realities of public opinion across the Pacific.

After launching the AUKUS military pact between Britain and Australia in 2021, as well as stiff export controls designed to limit China’s economy last year, the U.S. began 2023 with what appeared to be an olive branch. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to visit China in February. Then came the “spy balloon.”

A Chinese balloon was blown off course and eventually shot down by the U.S. military. The Wall Street Journal and NBC uncritically printed and broadcasted statements from US Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder about the balloon’s surveillance capabilities. On February 8, citing three unnamed officials, the New York Times said, “American intelligence agencies have assessed that China’s spy balloon program is part of global surveillance.” The same story mentions the U.S. State Department’s briefings to foreign officials that were “designed to show that the balloons are equipped for intelligence gathering and that the Chinese military has been carrying out this collection for years, targeting, among other sites, the territories of Japan, Taiwan, India, and the Philippines.”

On April 3, the BBC and CNN published conflicting stories on the balloon that cited anonymous officials but contained inconsistencies about its ability to take pictures. It wasn’t until June 29 that Ryder admitted no data had been transmitted. In September, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told CBS the balloon wasn’t even spying. This matched China’s statements about the balloon, as well as that of American meteorologists. But the damage was done. Blinken had postponed his trip to China. He eventually went in June, after a trip to Papua New Guinea, where its student protesters rejected his plans to militarize their country under a security pact.

On May 26, Blinken made a speech, referring to China as a “long-term challenge.” Politico went further, publishing a piece on May 26, called “Blinken calls China ‘most serious long-term’ threat to world order” with a same-day USA Today article also taking the liberty of using challenge and threat interchangeably.

A Princeton University study found Americans who perceive China as a threat were more likely to stereotype Chinese people as untrustworthy and immoral. Intelligence leaks about a China threat combined with the age-old Yellow Peril syndrome have allowed for incessant Sinophobia to dominate our politics.

Misinformation, the other pandemic

In May 2020, Trump told a scared country with 1 million recorded COVID-19 cases and almost 100,000 dead that the pandemic was China’s fault. Again, our leaders cited undisclosed intelligence. For its part, CNN showed images of wet markets after the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Walter Russell Mead called “China Is The Real Sick Man of Asia.” A year later, Politico eventually acknowledged Trump cherry-picked intelligence to support his claims but the Biden administration ended up also seeking to investigate the lab leak theory. And the media went along with it.

For the Wall Street Journal, pro-Iraq War propagandist Michael Gordon co-authored an article claiming that “three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.” An anonymous source said, “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality.” But the source admits it’s not known why researchers were sick.

The article relies on the conservative Hudson Institute’s Senior Fellow David Asher’s testimony and the fact China has not shared the medical records of citizens without potential COVID-19 symptoms. It is even admitted that several other unnamed U.S. officials find the Trump-era intelligence to be exactly what it is – circumstantial.

A year earlier, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries moderated by CNN, Dana Bash asked Bernie Sanders: “What consequences should China face for its role in its global crisis?” She asked the question referencing how Wuhan’s authorities silenced Dr. Wenliang but failed to mention China’s People’s Supreme Court condemned the city’s police for doing so. She also didn’t acknowledge how Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli revealed in July 2020 that all of the staff and students in her lab tested negative for COVID-19. Shi even shared her research with American scientists. Georgetown University COVID-19 origin specialist Daniel Lucey welcomed Shi’s transparency: “There are a lot of new facts I wasn’t aware of. It’s very exciting to hear this directly from her.”

But from the Page Act of 1875, which stereotyped Chinese as disease carriers, to job discrimination during the pandemic, it is Asian Americans who ultimately pay the price for the media’s irresponsibility and participation in medical racism. They are already among the casualties of the new cold war. But that war not only threatens residents of the U.S. but the entire planet too.

Profit, not principle

This summer, the U.S. armed Taiwan under the Foreign Military Transfer program, reserved for sovereign states only. This violates the one-China policy which holds that both sides of the Taiwan Strait acknowledge that there is one China. Biden is also trying to include Taiwan weapons funding in a supplemental request to Congress. Weapons sales to Taiwan go back to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, as well as Reagan administration’s assurances that the U.S. will keep sending weapons but not play any mediation role between Taipei and Beijing. In 1996, a military standoff between the U.S. and China erupted in the Taiwan Strait, followed by an increasing flow of lethal weaponry up to the present.

The New York Times published a story on September 18, mentioning Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which it says was “a show of support for the island.” Never mind that the majority of Taiwan residents surveyed by the Brookings Institute felt her visit was detrimental to their security. The media also often ignores voices from Taiwan who don’t want war, favor reunification, or reject attempts to delete Chinese history in their textbooks.

Still, Fox News continues to give a platform to lawmakers like Representative Young Kim who wrote a piece on September 20 advocating for more military patrols in the South China Sea. On October 17, The Washington Post published a story about the Pentagon releasing footage of Chinese aircraft intercepting U.S. warplanes over the last two years. The story does not share the context of U.S. expansionism or how multiple secretaries of defense have threatened Beijing over its disputed maritime borders. Microsoft is even getting in on the action, with articles from CNN and Reuters last month uncritically sharing the software company’s claims that China is using AI to interfere in our elections, despite no evidence shared with the voting public.

It demonstrates how war profiteers are edging us closer to a conflict. From sending the Patriot weapons system to Taiwan to practicing attacks with F-22 Raptors in the occupied Northern Marianas Islands, Lockheed Martin is raking in lucrative contracts while residents of the region fear an outbreak of war. RTX supplies Israel’s Iron Dome and is now designing engineering systems for gunboats in the Pacific. When arms dealers make money, victims of imperialism die. With strong links to the military, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft, News Corp, and Warner Bros. Discovery would care as long as their stocks go up too. Intelligence spooks and media moguls don’t know what’s best for people or the planet. And it’s time for a balanced and nuanced understanding of China. That begins with disarming the discourse and keeping the Pacific peaceful.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Cale Holmes and Lawson Adams.

CPJ calls on Sri Lanka to reconsider bills likely to undermine press freedom

Committee to Protect Journalists — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 20:01:27 +0000

New York, October 18, 2023—Sri Lankan authorities should withdraw the proposed Online Safety Bill and Anti-Terrorism Bill or significantly amend them in line with international human rights standards, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.

In parliament on October 3, Public Security Minister Tiran Alles tabled the Online Safety Bill, which would empower a five-member commission appointed by the president to direct internet service providers or social media platforms to block access to “an online location which contains a prohibited statement,” which could include news websites or accounts of journalists and media outlets.

The bill would also allow the proposed commission to prosecute journalists for publishing such content, and potentially order a prison term of up to five years and an unspecified fine.

Sri Lankan human rights lawyer Ambika Satkunanathan told CPJ that the term “prohibited statement” lacks a clear definition in the bill, and would be contingent on subjective interpretation, opening the door for state actors to suppress dissent.

Separately, on September 15, the Sri Lankan Ministry of Justice published a revised version of the Anti-Terrorism Bill after public and diplomatic pressure following the first draft in March. The bill would replace and repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which has been repeatedly used to jail and harass journalists for their work.

While the revised bill includes some welcome amendments, including removing the death penalty as punishment, it retains a vague and overbroad definition of terrorism and “could potentially criminalize nearly all forms of legitimate expression,” according to a statement by a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Sri Lanka’s proposed Online Safety Bill and Anti-Terrorism Bill are ripe for abuse against the media and would allow authorities to continue cracking down on press freedom and freedom of expression,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna. “We urge the government to reconsider the bills in their entirety or engage in a thorough consultation process with journalists and civil society to ensure the provisions adhere to international human rights law.”

Satkunanathan, who filed petitions challenging the constitutionality of both bills in the Supreme Court, said that she believes the government should withdraw the legislation and address the relevant offenses within the country’s existent criminal laws.

On Wednesday, October 18, the Attorney General told the Supreme Court that the government would make unspecified amendments to the Online Safety Bill.

The U.N. statement also expressed concern that the Anti-Terrorism Bill grants wide powers to the police and military to question, search, and arrest people without adequate judicial oversight.

Clause 9 of the Anti-Terrorism Bill prohibits supplying “confidential information,” defined as that which is “likely to have an adverse effect on national or public security,” to another person while “knowing or having reasonable grounds to believe” that it will be used to commit an offense under the law.

“Journalists gathering information on activities the government does not wish to be publicized are vulnerable to being targeted through this provision,” Satkunanathan said.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Alles did not receive any replies. When reached by phone, Sri Lankan Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe told CPJ he was unable to comment immediately. Rajapakshe did not respond to CPJ’s follow-up messages.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Postcards from a Police State: 22 Years of Blowback from the USA Patriot Act

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 13:05:40 +0000

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

— Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor

For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.

The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.

Now once again the drums of war are sounding on the world stage, not that they ever really stopped. Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis, and the rest of the world is bracing for whatever blowback comes next.

Here in the United States, as we approach the 22nd anniversary of the USA Patriot Act on October 26, we’re still grappling with the blowback that arises from allowing one’s freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.

Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.

Mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.

Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.

War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. That also does not include the more than hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions displaced from their homes as a result of endless drone strikes and violence.

The tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home. The horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, involved “US military personnel humiliating, hurting and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.” Adding to the descent into moral depravity, the United States government legalized the use of torture, including waterboarding, in violation of international law and in the so-called pursuit of national security. The ramifications have been far-reaching, with domestic police mirroring a battlefield mindset in their encounters with American citizens, including the use of torture tactics at secret locations such as Homan Square in Chicago.

Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. Not only did the USA Patriot Act normalize the government’s mass surveillance powers, but it also dramatically expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without much of any oversight. Thus, a byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We have all become data collected in government files.

News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.

If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.

Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.

As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.

Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 22 years after the USA Patriot Act was unleashed on a vulnerable nation, we are still reeling from the destruction it has wrought on our freedoms.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Postcards from a Police State: 22 Years of Blowback from the USA Patriot Act

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 13:05:40 +0000

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

— Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor

For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.

It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

NZ election 2023: Polls understated the right, but National-ACT may struggle for a final majority

APR editor — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 20:54:07 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Adrian Beaumont, The University of Melbourne

While the tide well and truly went out on Labour on election night in Aotearoa New Zealand, there are still several factors complicating the formation of a National and ACT coalition government.

Special votes are yet to be counted, with the official final result still three weeks away.

In past elections special votes have boosted the left parties. If that is the case this year, we will not know by how much until November 3. Consequently, the preliminary results may be slightly skewed against the left.

On these figures, National won 50 seats (up 17 since the 2020 election), Labour 34 (down 31), the Greens 14 (up four), ACT 11 (up one), NZ First eight (returning to Parliament), and Te Pāti Māori/the Māori party four (up two).

There are 121 seats overall (up one from the last parliament with a byelection to come).

While National and ACT currently have 61 combined seats, enough for a right majority, if past patterns hold they will lose one or two seats when the special votes are counted — and thus their majority.

Several variables in play
There are two other complications. First, there will be a November 25 byelection in Port Waikato after the death last Monday of an ACT candidate. The winner of that byelection will be added as an additional seat.

National is almost certain to win the byelection.

An honour and privilege to receive another mandate from our beautiful rohe.

Ngā mihi pic.twitter.com/HwkgKAnBB3

— Rawiri Waititi MP (@Rawiri_Waititi) October 14, 2023

Second, Te Pāti Māori won four of the seven Māori-roll electorates and Labour one. In the other two, Labour is leading by under 500 votes.

If Te Pāti Māori wins both these seats after special votes are counted, it would win six single-member seats, three above its proportional entitlement of three.

The new Parliament already has one overhang seat due to Te Pāti Māori’s electorate success. If it wins six, the new Parliament will have 124 members (including the Port Waikato byelection winner).

That would mean 63 seats would be needed for a majority.

National, though, would be assisted if Te Pāti Māori’s party vote increases from the provisional 2.6 percent to around 3 percent after special votes are counted, but it wins no more single-member seats. That would increase Te Pāti Māori’s seat entitlement to four and eliminate the overhang.

Then, if the right drops only one seat after special votes and National wins the byelection, National and ACT would have a majority.

While National performed better than anticipated given the late trend to the left in the polls, National and ACT are unlikely to have a combined majority once all votes are counted, and National will likely depend on NZ First in some way.

Polls understated the right
Party vote shares on the night were 39.0 percent National (up 13.4 percent), 26.9 percent Labour (down 23.1 percent), 10.8 percent Greens (up 2.9 percent), 9.0 percent ACT (up 1.4 percent), 6.5 percent NZ First (up 3.9 percent) and 2.6 percent Te Pāti Māori (up 1.4 percent).

For the purposes of this analysis, the right coalition is defined as National and ACT, and the left as Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. NZ First has sided with both left and right in the past, and supported the left from 2017 to 2020, so it is not counted with either left or right.

On the preliminary results, the right coalition won this election by 7.7 percentage points, enough for a majority despite NZ First’s 6.5 percent. In 2020, left parties defeated the right by a combined 25.9 points. But it is likely the right’s lead will drop on special votes.

The two poll graphs below include a late poll release from Morgan conducted between September 4 and October 8. I have used September 22 as the midpoint. This poll gave the left parties a two-point lead over the right, a reversal of an 8.5-point right lead in Morgan’s August poll.

The current result is comparable to the polling until late September and early October when there was a late movement to the left.

Overall, it looks as if the polls overstated the Greens and understated National. The polls that came closest to the provisional result were the 1News-Verian poll and the Curia poll for the Taxpayers’ Union.

In 2020, polls greatly understated the left; this time the right was understated.

It’s possible media coverage of the possibility of NZ First being the kingmaker drove voters back to National in the final days. By 48 percent to 26 percent, respondents in the Guardian Essential poll thought NZ First holding the balance of power would be bad for New Zealand rather than good. For now, any such concerns are on hold.

Adrian Beaumont, election analyst (psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Challenging Narratives: Unmasking Zionism, Media Bias, and the ‘EARN IT’ Act

Kate Horgan — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 16:56:33 +0000

Eleanor Goldfield opens the program with a conversation about Gaza; her guest, Nora Barrows-Friedman, rebuts common Israeli / US talking points, and identifies Zionism as the actual obstacle to peace.…

The post Challenging Narratives: Unmasking Zionism, Media Bias, and the ‘EARN IT’ Act appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

NZ elections 2023: It’s National on the night as New Zealand turns right

APR editor — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:22:22 +0000

By Debrin Foxcroft, Finlay Macdonald, Matt Garrow and Veronika Meduna, The Conversation

From winning a single-party majority in 2020, Labour’s vote has virtually halved in 2023 in the Aotearoa New Zealand general election.

Pre-election polls appear to have under-estimated support for National, which on the provisional results last night can form a government with ACT and will not need NZ First, despite those same polls pointing to a three-way split.

While the Greens and Te Pāti Māori both saw big gains, taking crucial electorate seats, it has been at the expense of Labour.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins . . . ousted as New Zealand prime minister with a stinging defeat for his party. Image: 1News screenshot/APR

Special votes are yet to be counted, and Te Pāti Māori winning so many electorate seats will cause an “overhang”, increasing the size of Parliament and requiring a larger majority to govern.

There will also be a byelection in the Port Waikato electorate on November 25, which National is expected to win.

So the picture may change between now and November 3 when the official result is revealed.

But on last night’s count, the left bloc is out of power and the right is back.

New Zealand Parliament party seats. Source: Electoral Commission

Big shift in the Māori electorates
Te Pāti Māori has performed better than expected in the Māori electorates – taking down some titans of the Labour Party and winning four of the seven seats.

The Māori electorate boundaries. Source: Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

The party vote remained at 2.5 perecent — consistent with 2020.

One of the biggest upsets was 21-year-old Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke’s win over Labour stalwart Nanaia Mahuta in the Hauraki-Waikato electorate. Mahuta has represented the electorate since 2008 and has been in Parliament since 1996.

This was a must-win race for Mahuta, the current foreign affairs minister, after she announced she would not be running on the Labour party list.

Labour won all seven Māori seats in 2017 and six in 2020.

Advance voting
In 2017, 1.24 million votes were cast before election day, more than the previous two elections combined.

In 2020, this rose to 1.97 million people – an extremely high early vote figure attributable to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, more than 1.3 million New Zealanders cast advance votes before election day – higher than 2017 but significantly lower than 2020.

The comeback kid
After a dismal showing at the 2020 election, NZ First’s Winston Peters has yet again shown himself to be the comeback kid of New Zealand politics. Peters and his party have provisionally gained nearly 6.5 percent of the vote, giving them eight seats in Parliament.

On the current numbers, the National Party will not need NZ First to help form the government. But the result is still a massive reversal of fortune for Peters, who failed to meet the 5 percent threshold or win an electorate seat in 2020.

The heart of Wellington goes Green
Urban electorates in the capital Wellington have resoundingly shifted left, with wins for the Green Party’s Tamatha Paul in Wellington Central and Julie Anne Genter in Rongotai.

Chlöe Swarbrick has retained her seat in Auckland Central.

The Wellington electorates had previously been Labour strongholds. But the decision by outgoing Finance Minister Grant Robertson to compete as a list-only MP opened Wellington Central to Paul, currently a city councillor.

Genter takes the seat from outgoing Labour MP Paul Eagle.

Both Wellington electorates have also seen sizeable chunks of the party vote — 30 percent in Rongotai and almost 36 percent in Wellington Central — go to the Greens.

Debrin Foxcroft, deputy New Zealand editor, The Conversation; Finlay Macdonald, New Zealand editor, The Conversation; Matt Garrow, editorial web developer, The Conversation, and Veronika Meduna, science, health + environment New Zealand editor, The Conversation. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

NZ election 2023: National, ACT poised to form new government

APR editor — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:35:35 +0000

RNZ News

Christopher Luxon and the National Party are on course to form a new government with the ACT Party in Aotearoa New Zealand, with National winning almost 40 percent of the party vote in yesterday’s general election.

National romped far ahead in the party vote in the election and were above 40 percent much of the night, but were falling just below at about 39 percent of the vote with 95 percent of results in the preliminary count as of nearly midnight.

That may mean the party needs New Zealand First to hit the numbers, but with special votes yet to be counted and a number of close electorate races, the final picture is not quite clear.

READ MORE: Other NZ election reports

Labour was sitting at about 26.5 percent of the party vote, and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins conceded there was no chance he could form a government and that Labour was heading out after six years and two terms in office.

The Green Party was at about 10 percent, ACT at 9 percent, New Zealand First at 6.4 percent and Te Pāti Māori at 2.5 percent with 94 percent of results counted.

Te Pāti Māori was poised to win most of the seven Māori seats with new candidate Hana-Rawhiti Maipi Clarke defeating Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta in the Hauraki-Waikato electorate, ousting the longest serving female MP and at just age 21 becoming the youngest MP in Aotearoa in 170 years.

It is a stunning reversal from 2020’s election, when Labour hit 50 percent of the vote as Jacinda Ardern’s government won a second term and National cratered with 25.6 percent.

One Labour supporter told RNZ that “Labour expected a slap on the wrist. This is a punch in the face.”

‘A new government and a new direction’ – Luxon
Greeting cheering supporters in Auckland, Luxon said the results were a mandate for change.

“You have reached for hope and you have voted for change,” Luxon told supporters. “On the numbers tonight, National will be in a position to lead the next government.”

“My pledge to you is that our government will deliver for every New Zealander, because we will rebuild the economy and deliver tax relief.

“We will bring down the cost of living, we will restore law and order, we will deliver better health care and we will educate our children so that they can grow up to live the lives that they dreamed of.

“That’s what you voted for and that’s what we will deliver.”

A joyous crowd chanted “back on track” as Luxon spoke.

‘I gave it my all, but that was not enough’ – Hipkins
Earlier last night, Labour leader Chris Hipkins conceded that the party had no path to return to power, saying that “the result tonight is not one that any of us wanted”.

Hipkins replaced Jacinda Ardern in January, but he joined other prime ministers like Mike Moore, Jenny Shipley and Bill English in failing to win election in their own right after taking over from another leader mid-term.

“I gave it my all to turn the tide of history, but alas, that was not enough.”

Outgoing Prime Minister Chris Hipkins speaks to media after conceding the election . . . “”We put people first, we refused to leave people behind.” Image: RNZ/Maree Mahony

Hipkins struck a defiant note in his speech and promised Labour would remain strong in opposition.

“When the tide comes in big it almost invariably goes out big as well . . . but Labour is still here, it is not going anywhere, and we will get up again as we have done many times before.

“We put people first, we refused to leave people behind, because that is what we do, that is what the Labour Party does.”

Many electorate seats were still too close to call, with only a few hundred votes separating candidates.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

CPJ joins call for India to release detained journalists, stop using counterterror law against media

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 15:46:42 +0000

The Committee to Protect Journalists on Friday joined 11 rights organizations in calling on the Indian government to immediately release all journalists arrested in politically motivated cases and to cease targeting critics under the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, pending its amendment in line with international human rights standards.

Read the full statement:

HRW India Statement Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

EU’s AI Act and Human Rights

Amnesty International — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 08:54:22 +0000

This content originally appeared on Amnesty International and was authored by Amnesty International.

Media education group, union protest over police demand for ABC ‘inside story’ climate protest

Pacific Media Watch — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:48:06 +0000

Pacific Media Watch

The Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) says it is “deeply concerned” at reports that Western Australian police are demanding the ABC hand over footage about climate protesters filmed as part of a Four Corners investigation.

“As researchers and teachers of journalism, we uphold the ethical obligation of journalists to honour any assurances given to protect sources,” said JERAA president Associate Professor Alexandra Wake in a statement.

“This obligation is imperative in supporting the Western democratic tradition of journalism and to investigative journalism in particular.”

The ABC case relates to an investigation due to be broadcast on Four Corners tonight: “Escalation: Climate, protest and the fight for the future”.

“I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.” Video: ABC Four Corners

WA police are reported to have demanded footage via “Order to Produce” provisions of the WA Criminal Investigations Act. The law compels organisations to comply.

One of JERAA’s core aims was to promote freedom of expression and communication, said the statement.

“The association is concerned that the WA police action represents a direct threat to media freedom and the practice of ethical investigative journalism,” Dr Wake said.

“We join the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) in urging the ABC to stand firm and not hand over footage which could potentially undermine assurances by the Four Corners team to their sources.”

The union for Australian journalists said it was alarmed at the reports that WA police were demanding the ABC hand over footage featuring climate activists filmed as part of the television investigation before it had even aired.

“Escalation” reported by Hagar Cohen goes to air tonight, Monday, 9 October 2023, at 8.30pm AEST on ABC TV and ABC iview.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Government Targeting Journalists in Canada

Redacted — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 15:12:48 +0000

The Trudeau government in Canada is doing the bidding of the World Economic Forum in creating its very own online news registry aimed at “disinformation”. This is code for censorship and control. Canada is also rolling out the Online Safety Act which will protect you from nefarious truth-tellers that speak out against government propaganda.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Redacted.

"Hell is coming down the Road because you didn’t Act in Time" | Roger Hallam | October 2023 #shorts

Just Stop Oil — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:07:14 +0000

This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

After more than 30 years fighting Dawn Raids practices – Soane Foliaki still hopes NZ will give migrants a fair go

APR editor — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 01:25:19 +0000

By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist

A Tongan RSE worker, whose case sparked an independent review of Immigration New Zealand’s “out-of-hours compliance visit” practices, is still on edge.

Pacific community members have compared the actions to the infamous “Dawn Raids”.

Keni Malie’s lawyer, Soane Foliaki, said his client’s case should have ended such exercises.

READ MORE: Ponsonby march highlights Dawn Raids pain and overstayer uncertainty

However, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) Immigration Compliance and Investigations team has only temporarily suspended “out-of-hours compliance visits” to residential addresses.

“At least until this work is completed,” MBIE Immigration Investigations and Compliance General Manager Steve Watson said.

He said the visits would not resume until new standard operating procedures came into effect and staff had been fully trained in the new procedures.

It is uncertain how these new procedures will be different, and what this will mean for migrant workers.

Detained in front of wife, family
In the early hours on April 19 this year immigration officials showed up at Keni Malie’s residence and detained him in front of his wife and children. He was then taken away and shortly after served with a deportation order.

An overstayer who cannot be named for privacy reasons sharing his story at a public meeting in Ōtara on 6 May 2023 that was sparked by a recent Dawn Raid of a Pasifika overstayer in Auckland. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis

“Four children were in the house, with three sleeping downstairs and at least one woken up by the activity,” the independent review states.

Malie’s lawyer broke the story to the media, out of desperation. The story gained traction and following a public outcry, Immigration New Zealand admitted this was not a one-off incident.

Keni Malie has since been granted a temporary visa while he and his lawyer work though his residency application but he said he was still nervous about it.

Malie explained in Tongan, as his lawyer translated:

“The hardest thing for me was trying to make sure that I can put a loaf of bread on the table for my children. I hope for the day that I can feel secure and get residence,” Malie said.

Immigration New Zealand has confirmed it has been conducting out-of-hours compliance visits — known as “Dawn Raids” — for the past eight years.

Auckland lawyer Soane Foliaki represented a Tongan man who was arrested for overstaying in New Zealand. He spoke at a meeting on overstaying and Dawn Raids in Otahuhu, Auckland. Image: Lydia Lewis/RNZ

Figures released under the Official Information Act show Pacific community members were the third highest after Indian and Chinese nationals of the total number of people located, between July 1, 2015, and May 2, 2023.

Out of 95 out-of-hours compliance visits, which in some cases multiple people were found, 51 were Chinese, 25 Indian and 17 Pacific.

There was one from the USA and one person from Great Britain on the list.

MBIE reviews
An independent review of what Pasifika community leaders have called MBIE’s Dawn Raids-style visits has now been completed.

The review was led by Mike Heron.

Leaders and members of the Pacific, Indian and Chinese communities were interviewed, along with immigration lawyers and advisers and representatives.

One of the reasons given for this review was that the raids of the 1970s were a “racist application of New Zealand’s law”.

“Immigration officials and police officers entered homes of Pacific people, dragged them from their beds, often using dogs and in front of their children. They were brought before the courts, often barefoot, or in their pyjamas, and ultimately deported,” Heron report reads.

Tongan community leaders were outraged to find out Keni Malie, who is Tongan, went through what they see as a similar trauma.

According to the report, Malie was in New Zealand as an RSE worker when he did not turn up to work because he was getting married.

Added to ‘process list’
After being stopped by police for driving without a licence, Crime Stoppers were also sent a notification for another issue. He was then added to Immigration’s National Prioritisation Process list.

In the Immigration Officers’ view, their “compliance visit” to Malie was carried out reasonably and respectfully.

“They stressed that the operation was calm, respectful and did not require any use of force,” the review states.

But his lawyer, Soane Foliaki disagrees that it was “respectful”.

“In the dark of the night they were back at it, you know, without any consideration? Why did the Prime Minister apologise?” Foliaki said.

To him this was reminiscent of the Dawn Raids. Something the former Prime Minister had only just apologised for.

An INZ spokesperson told RNZ Pacific at a Pacific community event earlier this year that in some cases officers sit down with a cup of tea to build rapport with overstayers.

Trauma for community
“I want to again acknowledge the impact the Dawn Raids of the 1970s had on the Pacific community and that the trauma from those remains today,” MBIE’s Steve Watson said.

We know we have more to do as we learn from the past to shape the future. This continues to be at the centre of our thinking as we move forward,” he said.

Lawyer Soane Foliaki who has been fighting for justice for 30 years still has hope, hope for his client and hope that there will be change.

“We always felt that New Zealand was always a decent country, they’ll always give us a fair go. This is also our home here,” Foliaki said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Businesses can’t be relied upon to deliver net zero – governments must act

James Angel, Lavinia Steinfort — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:27:15 +0000

The global energy transition is failing and the private sector is to blame. It’s time for green policies, not U-turns

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by James Angel, Lavinia Steinfort.

Two Nigerian journalists charged with cybercrime over corruption reports

Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 18:54:36 +0000

Abuja, October 3, 2023—Authorities in Nigeria should swiftly drop all charges against journalists Aiyelabegan Babatunde AbdulRazaq and Oluwatoyin Luqman Bolakale and allow them to work freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Tuesday.

On September 11, police officers detained AbdulRazaq and Bolakale, publishers of the independent news websites Just Event Online and The Satcom Media respectively, over their critical reporting about a local politician, according to the two journalists and their lawyer Taofiq Olateju, all of whom spoke with CPJ.

According to the charge sheet, reviewed by CPJ, the September 9 articles contained allegations of abuse of office by Jumoke Monsura Gafar, the former principal private secretary to north-central Kwara State governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, who is not related to the journalist.

On September 13, the two journalists were charged with cyberstalking—punishable by up to three years in jail and a 7 million naira (US$9,024) fine—and conspiracy—which carries a penalty of up to seven years in jail—under the Cybercrimes Act, according to the two journalists, their lawyer, and the charge sheet.

On September 20, the court granted the journalists bail and set a hearing date for October 4, the journalists and their lawyer said.

AbdulRazaq and Bolakale told CPJ that officers at the police headquarters in the state capital, Ilorin, called them in for questioning about their sources on September 11 and they explained that their reports were based on a press release from a political lobby group, which they had cited. The journalists said the police asked them for a contact for the signatory of the press release, which they were unable to provide.

“Authorities in Nigeria should swiftly drop all charges against journalists Aiyelabegan Babatunde AbdulRazaq and Oluwatoyin Luqman Bolakale and allow them to work without intimidation,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ Africa Program Coordinator, in Durban, South Africa. “Yet again we see Nigeria’s cybercrime law being abused to prosecute the press and the police intimidating journalists to reveal their sources. When will lawmakers act to ensure journalism is not criminalized?”

The Satcom Media published an article on September 18 retracting its original report and adding that “we never aimed at tarnishing the image of Ms Jumoke Gafar.” Just Event Online published the same message on its Facebook page. Just Event Online was offline at the time of publication, which AbdulRazaq said was due to a network issue unrelated to the case.

At the time of publication, The Satcom Media’s original report was still online.

The chairperson of the Association of Kwara Online Media Practitioners, Shola Salihu Taofeek, said the police also asked a third journalist, Oyewale Oyelola, managing editor of the Factual Times news website, to come to the station but he went into hiding for fear of being detained. The outlet also published an article on September 9 about Gafar, based on the same press release.

Kwara State police spokesperson Okasanmi Ajayi told CPJ that he was aware of the case but could not comment because it was before the court. CPJ’s calls and text messages to Gafar requesting comment did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

NY Governor Kathy Hochul Should Sign the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act into Law

Barry Scheck — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 16:00:00 +0000

NY Governor Kathy Hochul Should Sign the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act into Law

New York is just one of just a handful of states that won’t allow people convicted of crimes to obtain post-conviction relief with non-DNA evidence of innocence.

10.02.23 By Barry Scheck

(Image: Elijah Craig II/Innocence Project)

Today, freed and exonerated people, advocates, and policy makers gathered in New York City to call on Governor Kathy Hochul to help innocent New Yorkers in prison facing a nightmarish scenario.

Under current law and through court precedent, New Yorkers who pled guilty to a crime can only challenge their conviction with new evidence of innocence if the evidence was derived from DNA testing.

At the Innocence Project, which I co-founded in 1992, we have litigated hundreds of wrongful conviction cases, leading to the release and exoneration of more than 200 people. In 31 years of this work, we’ve seen that it is not uncommon for innocent people to plead guilty. In fact, of the more than 3,000 exonerations of innocent people which have been identified nationally since 1989, 24% pled guilty, according to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE). On the other hand, among the 347 exonerations in New York State, NRE data shows that DNA played a role in only 54 of those cases.

So it plainly follows that the prohibition against proving innocence through non-DNA evidence is not only unfair and arbitrary but the data shows it keeps an intolerable number of innocent people in New York prisons with no way to challenge their wrongful convictions. Governor Hochul has a chance to fix this. She can sign the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act, passed by the New York Senate and State Assembly, into law. As an attorney who has witnessed firsthand the trauma that wrongful conviction brings to our clients and their families, I urge her to do so.

Why do innocent people plead guilty? From the first moment a person is charged with a crime, all actors in the system—defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges—have an interest in a speedy resolution, which is why 95% of felony convictions in the United States are obtained through plea bargains.

Innocent people charged with serious crimes who cannot afford bail feel extraordinary pressure to plead guilty because they fear being subjected to violence or sexual assault in pre-trial detention facilities like Rikers Island, where there is an ongoing humanitarian crisis. In 2022, 17 people died in custody at Rikers Island or shortly after being released. Furthermore, people held at Rikers don’t have regular access to their lawyers and are not able to fully participate in their own defense. Incarceration in horrific conditions and isolation from family and friends incentivizes people accused of crimes to try to get home as soon as possible, even if that means pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit.

Then there’s the trial penalty, the grim reality that courts and prosecutors threaten to impose much harsher sentences than the plea offer if a client goes to trial and loses. “I never thought I would accept a guilty plea – until my life was hanging in the balance,” said Rodney Roberts, my colleague at the Innocence Project and an exoneree. He describes the decision to plead guilty to a sexual assault he did not commit as “sabotaging and saving himself at the same time.” His defense attorney told him that he would likely lose if he went to trial and would be sentenced to life in prison. He was advised to take a plea offer of a seven-year prison sentence where he would likely serve only two years in prison. Eager to get home to see his young son, and aware of racial bias in the criminal legal system, Mr. Roberts, who is Black, took the plea. He wound up spending 18 years in custody, both in prison and civil confinement, before DNA proved his innocence in 2013.

Data confirms that Mr. Robert’s decision was perfectly logical. Black and brown people are disproportionately impacted by the criminal legal system. A recent report by the NRE, “Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States 2022,” confirms alarming racial disparities in the criminal legal system. Black people are seven times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of serious crimes. Innocent Black people were almost eight times more likely than innocent white people to be falsely convicted of rape, The NRE also found in a 2015 study that innocent people who plead guilty almost always get lighter sentences than those who are convicted at trial, “Almost three-quarters of homicide exonerees who pleaded guilty were convicted of murder. It appears that the great majority did so to avoid the risk of execution.”

Given what we know about the realities of the criminal legal system, it’s shocking that New York is just one of just a handful of states that won’t allow people convicted of crimes to obtain post-conviction relief using non-DNA evidence of innocence. Even worse, post-conviction procedures in New York do not clearly authorize judges to order discovery of information that prosecutors, innocence organizations, and even judges themselves would like to obtain from third parties to make sure justice is done.

The Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act provides practical, measured, efficient solutions to the problems faced by innocent New Yorkers who were pressured into pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit. Governor Hochul has vowed to fight for justice for all New Yorkers. She should sign this legislation. Those who are experiencing these grave injustices desperately need a champion.

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The post NY Governor Kathy Hochul Should Sign the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act into Law appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Barry Scheck.

"Once you Know this, You can’t Unknow it, You have to Act" | Zoe Cohen | July 2023 | Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 19:33:18 +0000

This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

Turkey urged to act on death threats against journalist İsmail Arı

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 15:55:27 +0000

Istanbul, September 29, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalist calls on Turkish authorities to respond to reporter İsmail Arı’s criminal complaints regarding the online threats he has been receiving.

“Turkish authorities should stop turning a blind eye to reporter İsmail Arı’s criminal complaints about the online threats he is facing and take them seriously,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Arı has legitimate worries for his safety and authorities are legally obliged to protect him, and any other members of the media who are in danger, in every way they can.”

Arı, a reporter for the leftist daily BirGün, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on September 19 that he had been receiving death threats but prosecutors had not investigated his complaints.

Arı told CPJ that he had been targeted with online insults and threats since he started reporting on the activities of an Islamist group in southern Turkey after the area was struck by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake on February 6, killing tens of thousands.

Arı told CPJ that most of the threats came through X and Instagram. Some messages came from named accounts and some mentioned the Islamist group in their messages, Arı said.

Arı said Istanbul prosecutors had rejected at least 10 complaints that he and his lawyer had filed since February for “insults and threats.” In their rejections, authorities simply said that there were no grounds for investigating insults, and they did not mention the threats, he said.

“They purposefully do not recognize the threat,” he said.

CPJ emailed the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not receive a reply.

Since 1992, 31 journalists and media workers have been killed in Turkey, according to CPJ data.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

NZ election 2023: Overstayers issue kicks off Pacific communities debate

Pacific Media Watch — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 06:11:27 +0000

By Eleisha Foon, RNZ Pacific journalist

The Pacific Election 2023 debate kicked off today with one of the most pressing issues for Pacific communties — an amnesty for overstayers.

The Dawn Raids apology was two years ago, and weeks out from the election, the Labour Party has announced it would offer a lifeline for long-term overstayers in New Zealand.

It followed anger from Pacific community leaders, disappointed it had not happened in all the years following the apology.

On the panel were Labour’s Carmel Sepuloni, National’s Fonoti Agnes Loheni, ACT’s Karen Chhour and Teanau Tuiono from the Green Party.

Labour’s Sepuloni said the amnesty announcement was not an attempt at baiting voters.

“You have to think about everything that has been expected of Immigration New Zealand in the last couple of years and the immense pressure that they have been under,” Sepuloni said.

An amnesty would be granted “in the first 100 days if we are re-elected,” she said.

Green support for amnesty
The Green Party would also suppport an amnesty for overstayers.

“Amnesty for overstayers is more than timely. It is late,” said Green Party Pacific Peoples spokesperson Teanau Tuiano, criticising Labour for taking too long.

The Pacific Issues Debate. Video: RNZ Pacific and PMN

Meanwhile, both National and ACT would not back an amnesty.

National leader Christopher Luxon had previously said it would send the wrong message and encourage “rule breakers”.

National’s Pacific spokesperson Loheni said the the Dawn Raids was no doubt “discrimination and abhorrent”.

But, she took the side of people “working hard to go through the legal steps to become residents”.

RNZ Pacific has partnered with Pacific Media Network to question major parties on how their policies will benefit Pacific peoples. PMN’s Khalia Strong (left) and Greens’ Teanau Tuiono. Image: RNZ/Calvin Samuel

Health
Around 40 percent of New Zealanders — and half of Pasifika people — cannot afford dental care.

The Green Party plans to make dental care free for everyone — paid through a wealth tax system, which the Labour Party had already ruled out.

However, the Labour government said it would provide free dental care for everyone under 30 years old.

Dental care in New Zealand is free until a person turns 18 years old. But this excludes orthodontic care, i.e. braces because it is classed as “specialist dental care”.

National’s plan to tackle the health crisis was to attract an overseas workforce and plug the nurses and doctor shortage within New Zealand. Loheni reiterated her party leader’s stance and refused to back “race-based” policies but did acknowledge the hardships Pacific people faced.

“The numbers are grim for the Pacific. We need to get more of a workforce here,” Loheni said.

“The health system is in absolute crisis. We are 4800 nurses short. We are about 1700, GP’s short and about 1000 midwives short,” she said.

ACT Party candidate Karen Chhour said, “I’m hearing all around the country and especially up north and just the lack of GPs up north.”

Chhour said it was about helping to “ease pressure off hospital services” and “investing in the front line services”.

Two thirds of students experience poverty.

“Why would you go into university to study medicine . . . we would pay this through a wealth tax,” Greens Tuiano said.

This policy is expected to provide a guaranteed income for students or a person who has fallen out of work to help them get through university.

Labour said it would address health inequities because Pacific and Māori people were more disadvantaged.

“It has been incredibly ugly on the campaign trail . . . the level of racism that is resulted because of the rhetoric around measures like this, when they are purely equity measures and they should be embraced by everyone,” Sepuloni said.

She said seen since 2019, around 1000 health scholarships had been given to Pacific people.

Housing
One in 10 Pacific (11 percent) children live in damp and mouldy homes, where they are 80 times more likely to develop acute rheumatic fever, which can lead to heart disease and death.

Sepuloni said: “We have increased that by 13,000 homes, stopped selling them off. We have got 2700 Pacific people signed up with our programme that provides them with support to pathway into home ownership . . .

“Some of our Pacific populated areas are getting investment that they never had before. Like the NZ$1.5 billion we put into put it for housing revitalisation.”

But ACT’s Chhour hit back and said the “government should be held to the same account as landlords”.

“Kāinga Ora is one of the worst landlords in some cases where they do not meet those standards and where they have got extra time to meet those standards,” she said.

Green’s Tuiono said prices for rentals needed to be capped to protect tenants.

“There are 1.4 million renters within New Zealand and many of those people are our people.”

National’s Loheni said she “grew up in a state house with a crowd 15 people. One of my sisters has lived with asthma her whole life and it put her behind in school”.

She said under the Labour government “rents have gone up $180 per week.

“Unfortunately, we still need social housing, emergency housing. We have got 500 people living in cars at the moment. So we got a priority category to move those people who have been living in cars further up that social housing list.”

Education
Pasifika students face significant achievement gaps and underfunding, while teachers struggle with complex job demands and mental health issues.

“The government has failed our students,” Loheni said.

Loheni got emotional during the debate when sharing the declining pass rates of some Pasifika students.

“Only 14.5 percent Pasifika students reach the minimum curriculum for maths compared to the rest of the population of 41.5 percent,” she said.

“Please don’t say it’s covid because why is it Pasifika students, the lowest of all groups, and nothing has been done.”

Sepuloni defended her party, and said it had invested $5 billion into the education system – mainly “towards pay for teachers”.

Chhour said there’s a lot of pressure on teachers.

“Not only are they teachers, social workers, kids have been through a lot. They have effectively had interrupted education for the last three years.

“A lot of them are feeling anxiety about whether they agree with your exams. A lot of them are suffering from mental health issues . . . so teachers are dealing with all of this on top of actually trying to educate our kids.”

She said under the ACT party, they wanted to “bring back” charter schools and partnership schools for young people “who didn’t quite fit into the education system”.

Greens’ Tuiono said the government’s payout to support teachers was “vital”.

“I talked to some teachers where their pay rise hasn’t kept up with inflation for 10 years.”

Crime
Almost half of our Pacific children are likely to live around family violence. Pacific children are twice as likely to be hospitalised due to assault, neglect and maltreatment.

Sepuloni said it was about addressing “intergenerational impacts”.

She said sending more young people to prison was “an opportunity for gangs to actually recruit once they’re in there”.

Instead, a programme they had put in place addressed this issue and had seen more than 80 percent of young offenders not go on to reoffend.

“It actually requires full wraparound support for not just them but for their siblings and their families.”

Loheni said the National Party would address the rise of RAM raids and through “social investment,” and planned to put young people through military and cadet training, which studies had previously shown to be ineffective.

“We do have policies around military academies where they are going to have wraparound support, note that they do work.”

Tuiono disagreed. “Locking them up into boot camps that just won’t work.”

“We also have to address those underlying drivers of poverty because if you have the stable home life, there’s food on the table, you know the family can afford to keep the lights on, that helps to stabilise our families.

“That’s what we should be doing,” he said.

Climate change
National plans to “double renewable energy, help farmers clean up in the areas and invest in public transport,” Loheni said.

Sepuloni said Labour was “action oriented” and their “track record” with the Greens “goes to show that we have been able to reduce carbon emissions”.

Tuiono said “a vote for the Greens is a vote for climate action”.

“We have got some money set aside to support our towns and our councils to make their towns and councils more more climate resilient.”

ACT’s Chhour said the party would be looking at how “we’re building our infrastructure and adapting to climate change”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act Will Protect Every American’s Freedom to Vote

Newswire Editor — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 18:03:51 +0000

"We agree entirely with the position expressed by the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese," they wrote, pointing out that the Australian Labor Party leader—who is set to visit D.C. next month—said in May that "enough is enough when it comes to the ongoing incarceration of Julian Assange and that nothing is served from the ongoing incarceration of Julian Assange."

Assange lived at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London from 2012 until 2019, when Ecuador withdrew his asylum protections and he was arrested by British authorities. He remains imprisoned in the United Kingdom while fighting extradition to the United States, where he faces Espionage Act charges for obtaining and publishing leaked material from American whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

"Let there be no doubt that if Julian Assange is removed from the United Kingdom to the United States there will a sharp and sustained outcry in Australia," warns the letter, which also applauds the U.S. academics, civil society groups, human rights advocates, journalists, and lawmakers who have demanded freedom for the 52-year-old.

"We believe the right and best course of action would be for the United States' Department of Justice to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange," the letter says. "Alternatively, a decision to simply abandon the extradition proceedings would have the sensible, just, and compassionate effect of allowing Mr Assange to go free from a prolonged and harsh period of high-security detention. It is well and truly time for this matter to end, and for Julian Assange to return home."

The letter was led by co-convenors of the Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group: Liberal MP Bridget Archer, Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, Labor MP Josh Wilson, and Greens Sen. David Shoebridge. Joining Shoebridge for the U.S. trip are Liberal Sen. Alex Antic, Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, Independent MP Monique Ryan, Greens Sen. Peter Whish-Wilson, and Labor MP Tony Zappia.

"Members of the delegation have different reasons for wanting the U.S. to drop the charges against Assange, from characterizing him as a brave truth-teller to the broader fear, stressed by Joyce, that allowing the extradition of someone who hasn't been accused of wrongdoing in their country of citizenship would set a precedent that China, among other countries, might exploit," Jon Allsop noted last week in the Columbia Journalism Review. "Even Joyce, however, has echoed the argument of press freedom groups that the charges against Assange would effectively criminalize information-gathering and publishing practices that news organizations routinely engage in."

Gabriel Shipton—the WikiLeaks founder's brother and chair of the Assange Campaign, which raised money for the delegation's trip—told Allsop that the visit "will be pivotal" in creating "the political space" for Albanese to pressure U.S. President Joe Biden to let Assange return home when the prime minister travels to the United States in late October.

"The time to act to save Julian is now," Shipton said in a statement. "We have faith that the group's message will be heard in Washington, D.C.and officials will abandon attempts to extradite Julian to the United States in relation to unprecedented allegations of espionage."

"Julian's physical and mental health continue to deteriorate each minute he spends in prison," his brother added.

Shoebridge said last week that "the reason we are going is that Julian Assange is facing an unprecedented situation," and "the core crime he faces is the crime of being a journalist."

"We are hopeful that [in] the partisan world of Washington politics, such a broad cross-party visiting group will have some political cut through," the senator added. "We are at a critical point. In a matter of weeks Julian Assange could be put on a plane, in shackles, and sent to the U.S."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

A Nation of Snitches: DHS is Grooming Americans to Report on Each Other

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 13:44:09 +0000

There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.

— Professor Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler, March 2002

Are you among the 41% of Americans who regularly attend church or some other religious service?

Do you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law?

Do you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car?

Are you among the 44% of Americans who live in a household with a gun? If so, are you concerned that the government may be plotting to confiscate your firearms?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the government and flagged for heightened surveillance and preemptive intervention.

Let that sink in a moment.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you have just been promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

I assure you I’m not making this stuff up.

So what is the government doing about these so-called American “extremists”?

The government is grooming the American people to spy on each other as part of its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or CP3 program.

According to journalist Leo Hohmann, the government is handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

As Hohmann explains:

Whether it’s COVID and vaccines, the war in Ukraine, immigration, the Second Amendment, LGBTQ ideology and child-gender confusion, the integrity of our elections, or the issue of protecting life in the womb, you are no longer allowed to hold dissenting opinions and voice them publicly in America. If you do, your own government will take note and consider you a potential ‘violent extremist’ and terrorist.

Cue the dawning of the Snitch State.

This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, hyper-vigilant, technologically-wired age.

For more than two decades, the Department of Homeland Security has plastered its “See Something, Say Something” campaign on the walls of metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty. Colleges, universities and even football teams and sporting arenas have lined up for grants to participate in the program.

The government has even designated September 25 as National “If You See Something, Say Something” Awareness Day.

If you see something suspicious, says the DHS, say something about it to the police, call it in to a government hotline, or report it using a convenient app on your smart phone.

This DHS slogan is nothing more than the government’s way of indoctrinating “we the people” into the mindset that we’re an extension of the government and, as such, have a patriotic duty to be suspicious of, spy on, and turn in our fellow citizens.

This is what is commonly referred to as community policing.

Yet while community policing and federal programs such as “See Something, Say Something” are sold to the public as patriotic attempts to be on guard against those who would harm us, they are little more than totalitarian tactics dressed up and repackaged for a more modern audience as well-intentioned appeals to law and order and security.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own policing.

After all, the police can’t be everywhere. So how do you police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do you carry out surveillance on a nation when there aren’t enough cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not only track but analyze the transactions, interactions and movements of every person within the United States?

The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears. You hype them up on color-coded “Terror alerts,” keep them in the dark about the distinctions between actual threats and staged “training” drills so that all crises seem real, desensitize them to the sight of militarized police walking their streets, acclimatize them to being surveilled “for their own good,” and then indoctrinate them into thinking that they are the only ones who can save the nation from another 9/11.

Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted.

This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.

This is how you turn a people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.

It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other and shadowy forces from outside the country, they’re incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to home—namely, the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.

Community policing did not come about as a feel-good, empowering response to individuals trying to “take back” their communities from crime syndicates and drug lords.

Rather, “Community-Oriented Policing” or COPS (short for Community Partnerships, Organizational Transformation, and Problem Solving) is a Department of Justice program designed to foster partnerships between police agencies and members of the community.

To this end, the Justice Department identifies five distinct “partners” in the community policing scheme: law enforcement and other government agencies, community members and groups, nonprofits, churches and service providers, private businesses and the media.

Together, these groups are supposed to “identify” community concerns, “engage” the community in achieving specific goals, serve as “powerful” partners with the government, and add their “considerable resources” to the government’s already massive arsenal of technology and intelligence. The mainstream media’s role, long recognized as being a mouthpiece for the government, is formally recognized as “publicizing” services from government or community agencies or new laws or codes that will be enforced, as well as shaping public perceptions of the police, crime problems, and fear of crime.

Inevitably, this begs the question: if there’s nothing wrong with community engagement, if the police can’t be everywhere at once, if surveillance cameras do little to actually prevent crime, and if we need to “take back our communities” from the crime syndicates and drug lords, then what’s wrong with community policing and “See Something, Say Something”?

What’s wrong is that these programs are not, in fact, making America any safer while turning us into a legalistic, intolerant, squealing, bystander nation.

We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall, widening mass surveillance dragnet comprised of fusion centers, red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, terror watch lists, facial recognition, snitch tip lines, biometric scanners, pre-crime programs, DNA databases, data mining, precognitive technology and contact tracing apps, to name just a few.

This is how the government keeps us under control and in its crosshairs.

By the time you combine the DHS’ “See Something, Say Something” with CP3 and community policing, which has gone global in the guise of the Strong Cities Network program, you’ve got a formula for enabling the government to not only flag distinct “anti-government” segments of the population but locking down the entire nation.

Under the guise of fighting violent extremism “in all of its forms and manifestations” in cities and communities across the world, the Strong Cities Network program works with the UN and the federal government to train local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal.

What this program is really all about, however, is community policing on a global scale with the objective being to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police will identify, monitor and deter individuals who could be construed as potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats.

The government’s war on extremists has been sold to Americans in much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was sold to Americans: as a means of combatting terrorists who seek to destroy America.

However, as we now know, the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that has turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect.

Similarly, the concern with the government’s ongoing anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

For example, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists.

These reports, which use the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably, indicate that for the government, anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—can be labeled an extremist.

Fast forward a few years, and you have the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which each successive presidential administration has continually re-upped, that allows the military to take you out of your home, lock you up with no access to friends, family or the courts if you’re seen as an extremist.

Now connect the dots, from the 2009 Extremism reports to the NDAA and the far-reaching data crime fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.

Add in tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that will soon blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that identifies and tracks you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the circle, toss in the real-time crime centers which are attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.

If you can’t read the writing on the wall, you need to pay better attention.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless we can put the brakes on this dramatic expansion and globalization of the government’s powers, we’re not going to recognize this country five, ten—even twenty—years from now.

As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, things will get worse, not better.

It’s already worse.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Campaigners call on PNG govt to act over destructive logging

APR editor — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 19:06:53 +0000

By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

Civil society groups wanting to see an end to destructive logging practices by foreign companies in Papua New Guinea, say these companies are being given forest clearance authorities and then misusing them.

The PNG advocacy group, Act Now!, and Jubilee Australia said the forest clearance authorities (FCAs) are intended to allow limited pockets of forest to be cleared for agricultural or other use.

Eddie Tanago of Act Now! said a case study they conducted into West Sepik’s Wammy Rural Development Project, which is run by Malaysian logging company Global Elite Ltd, was meant to result in the planting of palm oil and rubber trees.

“Instead, it used it as a front. And we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of round logs being exported. Now, this particular operation has been going on for almost 10 years, and this company has sold more than US$31 million worth of round logs,” he said.

Tanago said there was no sign of any attempt to rehabilitate the land for other use.

ACT Now! said the Wammy project was also breaking other laws because the land was subject to the SABL (Special Agricultural Business Leases) Commission of Inquiry in 2013 and it was evident then that the landowners’ free, prior and informed consent had never been given, so there should not have been any logging on it.

Tanago said Wammy was just one of about 24 logging operations making use of an FCA licence, resulting in huge quantities of logs being exported.

“Together this activity exploiting FCAs covers about 61,800 hectares of forest, and that’s equivalent to about 11,000 football fields. So that’s really, really massive,” he said.

Act Now is “calling on the Forest Board and the PNG Forest Authority to extend the current moratorium on the new FCAs”.

“There was one that was announced in the beginning of this year that says that they were not going to issue any new FCAs. We want that to extend. We want logging in all the existing FCAs to be also suspended. And there should be a comprehensive public review of these projects.”

The PNG government has previously stated it wanted to end round log exports by 2025, but Act Now! points out that in the first six months of the current year exports have totalled 1.1 million cubic metres.

“The export log volumes now are currently very high. And the PNG Forest Authority is really failing to meet the reduction targets as set down in the medium term plan,” he sid.

“This is in breach of the targets that are set out by the government, plus, all the promises that we’ve seen, like the recent one bill made by Prime Minister [James] Marape when the French President was around.”

On the visit to PNG, President Emmanuel Macron and Marape visited a lookout in the Varirata National Park picnic area, renaming it the Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron lookout point.

The Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) reports that the walk through the lush national park was underlined by the signing of a new environment initiative — backed by French and European Union financing — that will reward countries that preserve their rainforests.

Marape said the country’s rainforest was the third largest and undisturbed tropical rainforest in the world and preserving its integrity was of the utmost importance.

Act Now! would agree, saying PNG has to be looking to preserve the rainforest and reduce deforestation, but the current signs are not good.

RNZ Pacific contacted Global Elite Ltd for comment on this story but there was no response.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. The audio was first broadcast on Friday, 15 September 2023.

Harvested logs in Papua New Guinea. Image: RNZI/Johnny Blades

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Frontline, Labor & Youth Voices Call on Biden to Immediately Act to Prevent Climate Catastrophe

Democracy Now! — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 14:38:45 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Labor, Frontline & Youth Voices Call on Biden to Immediately Act to Prevent Climate Catastrophe

Democracy Now! — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:47:09 +0000

During the rally at Sunday’s March to End Fossil Fuels in New York City, activists decried President Joe Biden’s continued investment in fossil fuels and his refusal to declare a national emergency over the worsening effects of climate change. Louisiana climate justice activist Roishetta Ozane said Biden is “personally accountable” for climate change-fueled natural disasters, while 16-year-old Fridays for Future organizer Helen Mancini proclaimed, “There is not enough time to put this off another term.” Both emphasized the role of impacted communities — from those living in the shadow of toxic production plants to youth facing the prospect of an increasingly uninhabitable planet — in demanding climate action, a call echoed by Teamsters Local 808’s Chris Silvera, who declared that the fight for climate justice “is a workers’ fight.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

5 ways to start repairing the damage of the Illegal Migration Act

Maya Esslemont, Emma Barnes-Lewis, Amy Romer — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 06:01:07 +0000

The Illegal Migration Act makes life harder for modern slavery survivors. Here's how we start repairing the damage

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Maya Esslemont, Emma Barnes-Lewis, Amy Romer.

Performance artist and writer Anya Liftig on making art as an act of survival

Andrea Kleine — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 07:00:00 +0000

You’re a performance artist known for your work with plants, animals, food, and staring back at Marina Abramovic at MOMA. Now you’ve written a memoir. What made you want to write a long-form thing that now exists as a book instead of a transcript of a performance that happened? Or is your book a transcript of a performance that happened?

Well, writing a book is cheaper than making a performance, and at the time when I started writing, I had no money. Working on my computer was the cheapest thing I could do. I think working on a book allowed me to sit with something in a way that I never have with a performance. See, I never really rehearse. My performances are about stepping into a situation and letting it fly in front of the viewer and then it’s over. Maybe there is a remnant in terms of documentation or some photographs, but it’s not really something that one can change and shape and consider again. So, the book was an experiment to see what happens if I hold onto something much, much longer.

What are the similarities between your writing practice and your performance practice?

A strong sense of intuition, a strong sense of improvisation, a strong sense of impulsiveness. One thing that is quite different is that I’ve never really used words in performance, but writing and performing are incredibly similar for me in the sense that creating feels like being submerged in some version of imperfect perfection.

Would you say there’s a performative aspect when you’re sitting down and writing?

I always thought that a memoir might be performative in the sense that one is playing a character about one’s life. But I discovered that memoir could be an unfolding of time. The reader could be an audience member you have a one-on-one connection with. I think the performative aspect was the questions I asked myself as I wrote. What could I say to the reader that I couldn’t express to an audience? Where could I go that I couldn’t go before? I think I found some of those places, but they were places that emerged after six years of writing and editing and revising.

I realized through the process of writing how impatient some of my performance work is and how it’s sometimes about wanting to feel something, and then being done with it. A great part of the difficulty of working on the book was just waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen, and trying to make something happen. Thinking I had something and chasing it and then discovering 50,000 words later that it had all just been a complete dead end.

The smallness of the community that you depicted in Holler Rat, the specificity of it, made me think about what constitutes a holler, to use that term as the name of a community. Your family seems very protective and tight-knit and unique because your mother was from Appalachia and your father was from an upper middle class, college-educated Jewish community. I felt like you were isolated growing up because of the make-up of your family. Did you feel like your nuclear family recreated a holler?

Oh, yeah. There are multiple ways that the holler is metaphorically reproduced. What are the mountains that are surrounding us, either by circumstance or by choice? I feel very reactive to depictions of Appalachia that are negative. At the same time, I also want to be true to my own experience. To romanticize it might be creating another type of falsehood. In the book, I wanted to start from the literal holler, and then, when we get to the end of the book, I’m facing a metaphorical holler in a very different situation. And then the whole holler of my life exploded. “The waters came arisin’” might be more accurate.

There’s a lot of great writing about the body in this book. Your childhood surgery and subsequent [physical and neurological] injury, the description of how your grandfather died, Mamaw and her pee can and cigarettes, and your tragic pregnancy loss. Your performance work also centers the body, and you’re often naked. How did you approach writing about the body and putting your body on the page?

I grew up with this very detached relationship to my body, probably from being poked and prodded so much when I suffered a major medical trauma at age six and then for the years afterwards during checkups, followed by years of intense dance training where you’re also poked and prodded and judged in such an intense way. I felt very much like a thing. There’s a music video of Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” It’s an Alice in Wonderland theme and there’s a shot at the end where Alice is lying on a table, she looks down, and she’s turned into a cake, and everyone at the tea party is eating her. She’s looking around like, “What the hell?” That’s very much the way I treat myself in performance. I’m just a cake. People are going to eat me. Some of them are going to say I taste disgusting. Somebody’s going to grab at me in an inappropriate way (there is always someone who grabs at you in an inappropriate way). But it’s okay. I’ve still got my head.

So much of your book is about survival. At one point you were visiting the holler as a teenager and hanging out with a teenage cousin who was pregnant, and you thought, “There, but for my mother who left the holler, go I.” What does it mean to survive a destructive marriage? What does it mean to survive the violence that was done to your body? I don’t quite know where I’m going with this question other than that I think there’s an unrecognized bravery in just continuing, which is what you seem to be doing.

I think of my Jewish father, who is kind of comic relief throughout the book but is a true polymath in actual life, and his complete obsession with the lengthy genealogy of my mother’s Scots-Irish and Huguenot family. I think of how he learned to play the bagpipes because he wanted to understand her ancestry more, how he wrote a book about her ancestors, how he is even petitioning my hometown to recognize an unmarked grave because he has evidence that it is connected to an ancestral settler. Recently I asked him why he was so damn obsessed. He said that on his side of the family, there are no records, there is nobody to find, everything has been destroyed, everyone died. For some reason, he says, “We survived. You survived.” On some days, I think I have found a reason.

Have you left your holler or have you stayed with your clan?

My holler is a place that I pick up and carry with me. I have carried it with me all over the world, but I definitely haven’t left it.

Anya Liftig Recommends:

Film: I Love You Alice B. Toklas. Lame brain corporate cog Peter Sellers turns-on and gets groovy.

Writing: AJ Liebling’s WWII War reportage, first-hand journalism like none other.

Place: Twillingate, Newfoundland. Lick an iceberg, fall in love with a seal.

Object: L’Eggs Pantyhose Egg, one of the greatest joys of the industrial age, especially the silver ones.

Book: Fact of Life by Maureen Howard, makes my brain go pop everytime.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Andrea Kleine.

Is the UK’s new security act comparable with Hong Kong’s security law?

By AFCL — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 14:15:27 +0000

Following the United Kingdom’s introduction of a new security act in July, the pro-Beijing Hong Kong news outlet Ta Kung Pao published articles claiming that British authorities “adopted a double standard” by enacting a law containing many powers “more stringent” and “more likely to be used to flout basic human rights” than the Hong Kong national security law.

Asia Fact Check Lab found that some of the paper’s claims are missing important context. While specific claims about several broad and potentially abusive powers granted by the law are mostly accurate, the paper failed to address fundamental differences in the rule of law between the United Kingdom and Hong Kong under Chinese rule.

Ta Kung Pao published an editorial on July 17 titled “British national security law exposes the true face of anti-China politicians in the West” while running one more on Aug. 15 titled “I have something to say/The US and UK security laws are more stringent.”

In both articles, Ta Kung Pao claimed British authorities “demonstrated hypocrisy and double standards” by introducing their own national security law after having severely criticized the Hong Kong national security law that came into effect in 2020 over its threat to the rule of law and international human rights and the city’s Basic Law promised to protect.

The U.K. passed a new National Security Act, or the NSA, on July 11, which aims to increase British law enforcement and intelligence agencies power in order to combat hostile foreign states.

Ta Kung Pao also criticized the NSA for granting the British government numerous expansive and potentially oppressive powers. These include allowing the government to arrest foreign nationals, search and detain suspects without a warrant, conduct secret tribunals, and impose mandatory restrictions on the behavior and movement of specific individuals. The Hong Kong security law contains many similar provisions.

While the above powers do exist, a Home Office spokesperson told AFCL they “are exceptional” and only available to be used against people “suspected of being involved in hostile activity linked to foreign states.”

AFCL also found that the articles still failed to address fundamental differences in the rule of law between the U.K. and Hong Kong under Chinese rule.

Hong Kong authorities recently used an extraterritorial clause outlined in the region’s 2020 National Security Law to declare eight fugitives abroad, some of whom are foreign nationals. (Photo/AP)

Differences in the rule of law

For one, the British legal system has significantly more constraints in place to curb potential government abuses of the NSA, including an independent judiciary and prosecuting attorney.

In contrast, China and Hong Kong currently have no legal institutions with sufficient power to stop Beijing’s interference in legal cases, particularly in cases related to national security.

Apart from that, British citizens can appeal to the European Court on Human Rights if they believe that their government has violated one of basic human rights ensured in the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Human Rights, including a fair trial and free expression. The court’s binding decisions can compel the U.K. government to redress any part of the NSA that conflicts with these rights.

However, there is no similar international legal tribunal able to constrain Beijing from interpreting Hong Kong’s national security law according to its own political needs.

The World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, which measures adherence to the rule of law from the citizen's point of view, shows the U.K. and China ranked 15 and 95 in 2022, respectively. Hong Kong saw a drop in ranking from 16 in 2020 to 22 in 2022 after introducing the national security law.

The U.K. parliament recently enacted a National Security Act that would grant the country greater powers to combat foreign interference. The legislation passed after being approved by both the House of Commons and House of Lords. (Photo/AP)

Make contact ‘transparent’

The U.K. government has repeatedly emphasized that the NSA will not limit either freedom of speech or diversity of political opinion.

The government’s primary objective is to ensure that individuals representing foreign powers are transparently registered. Once registered, these individuals are free to express support for any foreign government or criticize the British government.

“There is nothing in the Act about expressing opinions sympathetic to foreign government, let alone to penalise that; its aim is to make contacts [with foreign governments] ‘transparent’,” said Lord Wallace of Saltaire, a member of Parliament who participated in the act’s amending.

Edited by Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.

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NZ election 2023: Raucous Northland debate crowd rails at covid, te reo Māori mentions

APR editor — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 09:17:31 +0000

By Peter de Graaf, RNZ News

Northland MP Willow-Jean Prime walked into the lion’s den when she took part in an election debate in Kerikeri last night.

The traditionally blue seat is currently held by Labour — the election of 2020 was the first time it had been won by the left since 1938 — but polls suggest that won’t last much longer.

Five candidates took part in the live-streamed debate at the Homestead Tavern organised by right-wing lobby group the Taxpayers’ Union.

With a partisan audience and The Daily Blog editor/publisher Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury and libertarian Damien Grant as MCs — political commentators from opposite ends of the political spectrum — it was a rollicking, raucous ride, sometimes rude but never dull.

For Prime it was a foray into hostile territory with the Labour MP all but drowned out by shouts and jeers.

She had little chance to defend her party’s record or set out her priorities above the din.

The loudest reaction came after mention of the C word — that’s covid, of course.

Covid response ‘saved lives’
Prime defended the government’s response, saying it was one of the best in the world and had saved lives, but acknowledged some in the room did not agree with her.

The crowd at Kerikeri’s Homestead Tavern raises a toast to the upcoming election. Image: RNZ/Peter de Graaf

There were angry shouts from some in the near-capacity crowd anytime she used a word in te reo Māori, such as Aotearoa or puku [belly].

The other candidates received a warmer reception, with Matt King — the former Northland MP who quit National and set up DemocracyNZ in protest at the party’s covid policy — having the loudest supporters.

New Zealand First candidate Shane Jones continued his campaign theme of describing himself as the politician who delivered for Northland when he held the purse strings for the Provincial Growth Fund.

He also said it was time Northlanders broke their habit of electing lions, only to find they turned into lambs as soon as they took their place in Parliament.

Jones promised a “laser-like focus” on Northland’s infrastructure deficit, especially when it came to roads, rail and shipping.

Northland election debate MC Damien Grant grills candidates (from left) Shane Jones (New Zealand First), Grant McCallum (National), Willow-Jean Prime (Labour), Mark Cameron (Act) and Matt King (DemocracyNZ). Image: RNZ/Peter de Graaf

‘Squeezed middle’
National candidate Grant McCallum, a Maungaturoto farmer who won the party’s selection process to replace King, also promised a laser-like focus — but in his case it would be on costs and the “squeezed middle”.

He said middle New Zealanders had been hard hit by rising prices and interest rates.

King was initially denied a place in the debate, raising the prospect of a protest outside the venue by his supporters, with the Taxpayers’ Union saying he did not meet the criteria.

Those criteria included being a sitting MP or polling at least 5 percent in the electorate.

King was told on Monday he could join the debate after all because the weekend’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll put his support in Northland at 5 percent, once undecided voters were excluded.

King promised to “fight back for farmers” against what he called a “climate change catastrophist narrative”.

ACT list MP Mark Cameron, meanwhile, just wanted less government, saying New Zealanders should be left alone to do what they did best.

Gun register dismissed
He was questioned by MC Martyn Bradbury about ACT’s plans to reverse a ban on high-calibre semi-automatic weapons, which Cameron did not address — but he did say bringing in a gun register had not worked overseas and would not work in New Zealand.

Between the serious politicking there was also plenty of humour.

When New Zealand First was accused of being less interested in real issues than in culture-war talking points such as the use of public toilets by transgender women, MC Damien Grant asked — with some trepidation — how Jones defined a woman.

“Matua Shane Jones has 19 mokopuna [grandchildren],” Jones replied.

“And he has his beautiful wife sitting right in front. Bro, that’s a woman.”

The last word went to Prime, who warned the crowd a change of government would lead to cuts in basic services.

It is not clear, however, if anyone heard her above the jeers.

‘Lot at stake in election’
“There is a lot at stake in this election, and I implore you all, to ask the questions and do the research,” Prime said.

Earlier in the evening, the organisers released the results of a Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll conducted in the Northland electorate the previous weekend.

The poll showed McCallum had 43 percent of the electorate vote, followed by Prime on 18 percent and Jones on 13 percent.

Both King and the Greens’ Reina Tuai Penney, who did not take part in the debate, had 4 percent support with Cameron trailing on 2 percent.

However, the poll had a relatively small sample size of 400 and a margin of error of almost 5 percent.

The proportion of respondents who had not made up their minds was 11 percent. If they were excluded, McCallum’s share of the vote jumped to 49 percent.

The poll showed broadly similar trends when it came to the party vote, although personal support for Jones (13 percent) was much higher than support for his party overall in Northland (3 percent).

Situation reversed
The situation was reversed for Cameron who had just 2 percent support as a candidate while his party, ACT, polled 12 percent.

Cameron has, however, been campaigning for the party vote only and suggesting his supporters give their electorate votes to McCallum.

Respondents were asked what they believed was the most important issue facing Northland.

Unsurprisingly, given the state of the region’s transport network, 36 percent opted for roads, followed by the cost of living on 15 percent, health on 14 percent and law and order on 8 percent.