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This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Janine Jackson interviewed media scholar Victor Pickard about the Paramount settlement for the July 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Washington Monthly (6/2/25)

Janine Jackson: Faced with a groundless lawsuit claiming that an interview with Kamala Harris amounted to election interference in favor of Democrats, CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, could have struck a symbolic blow for press freedom by saying, “No,” pointing to any number of legal arguments, starting with the First (for a reason) Amendment.

But Paramount isn’t a journalistic institution. It’s a business with media holdings, and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone was in the middle of doing business, trying to sell the corporation to another Hollywood studio, a move that, perhaps quaintly, requires government approval. That now means approval of this government.

And so here we are, with a recent $16 million deal, which is being widely denounced as an outright bribe, and a cold wind blowing through every newsroom.

And yet here we are. The Paramount settlement, says Victor Pickard, is, yes, a stunning display of bribery, greed and cowardice. But we need to understand, it’s also a symptom of a deep structural rot in our media today, a system in which profit trumps democracy at every turn.

Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Victor Pickard.

Victor Pickard: It’s great to be back on the show, Janine.

JJ: Well, I hear that Paramount‘s market value has dropped since Shari Redstone threw press independence on the fire to warm shareholders’ hands. It’s almost as if folks thought it wasn’t a valuable journalistic institution.

Forbes (4/7/20)

I want to launch you into the bigger picture of which this is emblematic, but I first want to insert: Shari Redstone inherited Paramount from her father, Sumner Redstone, who, while some of us were working to show there was a conflict, declared it openly.

In 2004, then-head of CBS and Viacom Sumner Redstone stated at a corporate leader confab that he didn’t want to denigrate then–Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, but

from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal, because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people, but from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.

And, later, CBS head Les Moonves—CounterSpin listeners will have heard me say many times—declared laughingly, “Donald Trump is bad for America, but he’s good for CBS, so let’s do it.”

So the structural conflict you’re describing, it’s not a theory. It’s not the stuff of smoke-filled rooms. It’s out there for everyone to see, every day in every way. So the questions have to do with, once we diagnose this problem, what do we do about it?

The Nation (1/30/17)

VP: Thank you for opening up with that softball question. I mean, that is the main problem before us, and everything you just said leading up to this question really lays out that this is a systemic problem that we’re facing, and it requires a systemic fix. It’s not just a case of a few bad apples, or a handful of bad corporations and perhaps a bad journalist, even, but it really is a systemic structural problem. And so we really need to move our frame of analysis from just condemning the latest media malfeasance to really condemning the entire hypercommercialized media system in which we are all immersed, and so clearly serves only commercial values and not democratic values.

So the first step, of course, would be to decommercialize our media, much easier said than done, but that’s something we need to place on our horizon. And not only that, we also need to radically democratize our media, from root to branch, and that means bringing it back down to the local level, making sure that our media are owned and controlled by the public. Even our public media, our so-called public media, aren’t actually owned by the people.

So this is something that we need to work towards. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it’s something we need to start thinking about now.

JJ: I love the idea of a long-term and a short-term plan, and eyes on the prize. So let’s go back to that. It’s not that we’re going to change things legislatively or politically tomorrow, but there are things on the ground locally. There are models we can build on, yeah?

The Nation (4/15/25)

VP: That’s absolutely true. There’s a number of models that exist today, that have existed in our history and that exist around the world, and we really should be looking at some of those to expand our current imagination about what’s possible in the future. Obviously, we have some great independent local media, and those outlets, those institutions, we should be supporting in any way that we can, through donations, subscriptions, whatever we can, to help them. They’re all struggling, like all local media are right now.

We also, even though I made a sort of snarky comment about our public media a moment ago, I think we do need to look to, as I say, save our public media so that we can change it. As we know, the meager funds that we allocate to public media are currently on the chopping block. It comes out to about a $1.58 per person per year in this country, which is literally off the chart compared to most democratic countries around the world. So we need to look at how we can salvage that, but also, again, expand on it, and build, restructure our public media, so that it’s not just public in name but actually publicly owned.

There are other things that we could be doing, but we just have to start with recognizing that the current commercial system is failing democracy, and will always fail democracy.

JJ: When you talk about public media, and this is a thing, of course, folks are being encouraged to think about it now as “ideological” institutions. First of all, and you’ve said it, but they don’t get a lot of government support to begin with.

Neiman Reports (1/24/22): The US is virtually off the chart when it comes to its ratio of GDP to spending on public media.

But at the same time, progressives, we’ve had plenty of complaints about public broadcasting as it exists in this country. It had a beautiful ideal. It had a beautiful beginning. It hasn’t fulfilled that role.

We have complaints about it, but the complaints that we’re now hearing don’t have anything to do with the complaints that we have about it. So the idea of saving public media might land weird to some CounterSpin listeners, but there’s a reason that we need to keep that venue open.

VP: Absolutely. I mean, it is an ideal, just like democracy itself is an ideal, something that we have yet to actually achieve, but it’s something we can’t give up on just because the current iteration of this model that we have in the US, which is a kind of strange one, again, compared to other public media models around the world, it’s actually a misnomer. It’s mostly supported by private capital.

But if we were to actually fund it in accordance with global norms, we could have a very robust public media system that was not dependent on corporate sponsorships, that was not catering to higher socioeconomic groups, that, again, could actually spend more time engaging with and devoting programming for local communities.

So this is something that’s not inevitable. Like our entire media system, there was nothing inevitable with how we designed it. We need to understand the political economic structures that produce the kind of media that we’re constantly critiquing in order to change it, to create an entirely different kind of media system that’s driven by a different and democratic logic.

JJ: Let me just draw you out on that. We spoke last year, and I would refer interested people to that conversation, about separating capitalism and journalism, and talking about different ways of financing media in the service of the public.

And we understand complaints about “state media.” We hear all of that, and any kind of funding structure should be transparent, and we should talk about it.

But I want to ask you, finally, there are creative policy responses going on, and it’s not about kicking the final answers down the field; it’s really just about making a road while we walk it, and making examples of things, so that we can see that, yeah, they work, and they can move us towards a bigger vision.

CounterSpin (5/6/22)

VP: Absolutely. And as you already suggested, state media and public media are not the same thing. That we publicly subsidize media doesn’t mean it immediately has to become a mouthpiece for the state or the government.

And, indeed, government is always involved in our media. It’s a question of how it should be involved, whether it’s to serve corporate interests or public interests.

I think we can look to what’s happening at the state level, for example, in New Jersey, they’ve long had an Information Consortium network that’s focused on subsidizing various local journalistic initiatives. And it’s a proof of concept of how the state can make these public investments towards publicly accountable media. And we’re starting to see that in many states across the country.

A lot of experiments, some will survive, some won’t. The important thing is that we need to create these non-market means of support for the media that we need. I think that ideal of separating journalism and capitalism, which was always a match made in Hell, we need to find a way to do that, again, to be on our political horizon for the future.

Victor Pickard: “Much of what we’re talking about is really trying to figure out the structures that would allow journalists to be journalists.”

JJ: Well, I said that was my last question, but I want to ask you another one, because I think a mistake that folks make about FAIR, and possibly about you, is that we’re anti-journalism per se. But we are emphatically pro–good journalism that’s not public relations for power. It’s because we believe in the power of journalism that we are so concerned about these structural constraints.

VP: Exactly. I couldn’t agree more with that statement. And I think much of what we’re talking about is really trying to figure out the structures that would allow journalists to be journalists. Most journalists don’t go into the profession, they don’t follow the craft, to become rich, or to become mouthpieces of the already powerful. I think it’s generally a noble calling, and we just need to create the institutions and the structures that can allow them to be the great journalist they want to be.

JJ: All right, then. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center, and his most recent book is called Democracy Without Journalism?. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VP: Thanks so much for having me, Janine.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

My parents put me in out of convenience. My siblings were doing it, so they thought taking us all to one place would be easiest. I hated it at first because everyone played soccer in Oakville, where I lived—the suburban soccer capital of Southern Ontario. I was kind of embarrassed to go to ballet after school. I would wear big basketball shorts and pretend to be all sporty, and then I’d be like, “Ugh, off I go to ballet.”

What shifted?

In grade five, I started getting good. I played Clara in The Nutcracker at my little ballet school. One of my teachers, Mrs. Brown—who was so cool—suggested I audition for the National Ballet School. I just thought, “All right,” and didn’t give it much thought. I went to Toronto to audition, where I was amongst fifty little ten-year-old girls, each wearing a number, skipping and running around a big, beautiful studio. They’re looking at your body at that age to see if they could train it and mold it to be a successful dancer.

Were you aware of that at the time?

Not at all. I was like, “Woo-hoo!”

What did your parents think?

They were incredibly supportive, we all moved to Toronto so I could go. I don’t think they knew what to expect—sometimes, I wonder if they would have let me audition if they had. My mom has commented along those lines, but she also agrees that it was an incredible privilege and a wonderful way to grow up. I got to do what I love every day.

What did it look like when things didn’t go well?

If you had a really strict ballet teacher, you’d be getting yelled at in the studio every day—it’s incredibly discouraging. Then there’s the disappointment of not getting cast in a role or the setback of an injury.

Were there any other positive mentors?

Yes, there were a lot of great mentors, especially the artistic director of ballet school. I love her with all my heart; she’s one of the most amazing people in the world. She did her best to make ballet school a really supportive and, as best she could, safe place. She was looking out for people.

What parts felt unsafe?

It’s so competitive. Because you’re staring at your body in the mirror every day, I started thinking I was too fat when I was fourteen.

Did they have counselors?

They did. They had a nutritionist who came, but it’s complicated—I think even thinking about food too much is a lot for a young girl. We would also have therapists meet with our class as a group, but with a bunch of twelve-year-old, bratty ballet school girls, it didn’t really work as intended. Instead of using it to decompress and discuss our mutual difficulties, we would attack each other. All the competition and nasty classic high school girls’ stuff would come out. It’s hilarious in retrospect.

It’s wild to think that was your high school experience!

I went there from grade 6 to 12 and then another year after high school, which is the maximum amount of time. I had no friends outside of ballet because my entire life revolved around it. Our days started at 8 A.M. with academics—we’d spend the morning in our little uniforms doing schoolwork. After lunch, it was ballet until 6 P.M. or 7 P.M. Afterward, I’d go home, do my homework, and go to bed. There was just no time for anything else.

I was one of the only day students in my class—most classmates lived at the school, while I went home each night. It was such a sheltered environment, such a bubble. I think that’s why now, being outside of that world, I make such an effort to meet new people all the time—because I never had the chance for so long.

Do you feel like any parts of your life now are a reaction to that experience?

Whenever I try to psychoanalyze myself, everything goes back to ballet school. Trying to expand my world now feels like a massive rejection of living in that bubble for so long. It was an isolated environment; everyone around me was focused on the same thing. My sibling also went to ballet school, so my family was immersed in it, too.

I always joke that I’ve never seen a movie. All those classic films people watched during those years—there was just no time for them. So when I went to university, it was overwhelming to suddenly learn about the world and meet all these different kinds of people. I realized, “Oh my God, what have I been doing all this time?”

Can you talk about why you left ballet for university?

When I was eighteen, I moved to Mannheim, a small town in Germany. I was all alone. I ended up in this tiny, spider-infested apartment, living by myself. It was split between the school and the company, and a good landing pad where I could keep training and audition for ballet companies around Europe. I was so fragile back then, physically small, and had been struggling with injuries for the last two years of high school—I kept getting stress fractures in my feet. In the early days of ballet school, I was the best in my class, but then the injuries started catching up, and I began falling in the ranks. It was obvious to everyone, including me, what was happening, and it was a vulnerable feeling. But at the time, I was still convinced I’d make it in the ballet world and it felt like there wasn’t another option.

When I arrived in Mannheim, the director—who ran the school and the company—looked like a villain straight out of a movie. She was so thin, like a skeleton woman who had smoked two million packs of cigarettes in her life. She mostly only hired short, petite dancers. On the very first day, I went to class, and she pulled me aside and weighed me right in front of everyone. I’m 5’8”, so I was towering over everyone else, who were about 4’11”. In front of them all, she told me, “You need to lose 5 to 10 kilos before I cast you in anything.” She added, “It’ll take a gorilla to lift you.”

That’s horrible.

Of course, it was objectively ridiculous, but it affected me so much. Luckily, my best friend, Helen Clare, was in Düsseldorf, a four-hour bus ride away. On weekends, I’d visit her, get a bit of respite, and then return. But during the week, I was really trying to lose weight. One of the only moments of joy I had was when that director pulled me aside and said, “You’re losing a lot of weight. You’re looking good.”

I remember thinking, “Woo-hoo!” and literally jumping into the changing room. But the reality was that I was exhausted, weak, and really depressed. I did have a couple of good teachers, but I don’t know how they worked within an environment where all the favoured students were clearly not eating. I had never seen a ballet culture quite like that.

That sounds physically and psychologically exhausting.

Yeah, exactly. My ballet teacher there—I wish I remembered her name—was this Russian woman who only spoke German and Russian, so we had no solid way to communicate. But somehow, we got along, and I really liked her. I remember one day in class, I had been crying the entire time, staring at myself in the mirror, pinching at my body between every exercise. She pulled me aside and said, “You come in looking joyful on Monday. But by Friday, I see you disappearing.” She meant it literally—physically and emotionally. She was trying to give me a wake-up call… in Russian and German as best she could.

That Christmas, I returned to Toronto and told Mavis—the director I loved—about everything. She didn’t hesitate. She just said, “We’re getting you out of there.” She made one phone call to the director of a school in The Hague, and that was it. I returned to Germany, pretended I had a family emergency and left.

Wow, Mavis. What an icon!

Mm-hmm. She saved me.

Then what happened?

I injured my hip while there but kept dancing because I didn’t trust that I was hurt, so it got worse and worse. The injury meant I could no longer audition for companies, so my time in Europe ran out. I had to go back to Toronto—injured and jobless. It took another year before they finally diagnosed my hip injury. I really fought for a long time. When I first returned, I started training again at my old ballet school. I got cast in The Nutcracker with the National Ballet and told myself, “Okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to make it.” But then the pain took over and I couldn’t do the shows.

I remember going to Mavis’s office. I walked in, and she sat me down and got me a glass of water. Every time you walked into her office—a beautiful room in this beautiful old building—she’d offer you water. I’d always say no, and she’d give it to me anyway. We sat in these two big, comfy chairs. We just looked at each other, and she already knew. She asked, “This is it?” and I said, “This is it.” That was the moment I knew—I couldn’t do it anymore.

What was your relationship with dance like right after your surgery? Did you try to ease back into it or step away completely?

Right after my surgery, as part of my recovery, I returned to ballet school and took classes with 10-year-old boys. It was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had. They were so sweet. At that age, their bodies are entirely out of their control—they’re growing so fast and need specific training to keep up with themselves. And in a way, I was going through the same thing. My body felt brand new, unfamiliar. So, training alongside them actually helped me relearn how to move.

I was so scared of my hip. I was scared to do anything, so it was just back to the basics. It was nice, but it was also like, “What am I doing this for if I’m not going to dance?” So I just stopped, and then I focused on partying.

Did you stop completely?

Yeah, I think so. I was 21 at that point.

Did it feel like you were reliving your adolescence in a way?

Exactly—because I hadn’t really had the chance before. It was so much fun. But at the same time, I was still struggling with this deep feeling of failure. When that feeling was fresh, I was too embarrassed to keep in touch with anyone from ballet school. In that world, the biggest insult you could get was, “Oh, you’re just going to go to university.” And that’s exactly what I ended up doing.

I went to Concordia to study sociology and anthropology. When I applied to university, I had no idea what I wanted to do—I barely even knew what these majors were. Anthropology was the first one I saw… it started with the letter A.

Why Montreal?

Sometimes, I’d go there to party—I thought it was the coolest place in the world. I guess I just wanted change so badly. I was fresh out of hip surgery, and had been unable to leave my parents’ house for months.

So it made sense to me to go to school in Montreal. At first, I told myself, “I can’t stop dancing,” so I took a contemporary dance class at Concordia in my first semester. It ended up being the worst grade I’ve ever gotten—a C minus. My hip was hurting, and I started skipping classes. I couldn’t believe it. Another ego death.

How did your movement practice evolve after this point?

I would rent a studio and just go and do my own thing—it was really healing. I feel like the past ten years—basically since my surgery—have been me constantly workshopping my relationship with dance in different ways. First, I’m trying to rebuild a career, and then I’m just going to the studio to choreograph on myself with no real plan. Sometimes I’d collaborate on projects with people, but that didn’t feel right either—I still felt embarrassed that I wasn’t in a ballet company.

And yet, because I grew up in a classical ballet setting, I couldn’t shake this feeling of being a huge snob about dance. It’s this strange push and pull—being so hard on myself, feeling like a failure and the worst dancer in the world, and then secretly thinking I’m better trained than everyone else. I was constantly trapped between these two feelings. It’s been this massive identity crisis— I’m still in it.

How did you end up working at The Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal?

A lot of my classes had a social justice focus. Then, I took a few First Peoples Studies classes, and I felt, once again, embarrassed by how little I knew before. But then that feeling shifted to discomfort—sitting in a classroom full of well-off, white university students discussing issues like class and race struggles felt really gross and like I was in yet another elite bubble.

I remember talking to an acquaintance about that, and he mentioned he’d been volunteering at the shelter, so I just signed up. I was in my third year when I started volunteering there. I’d babysit the kids, and it was so fun.

Now, what is your role there?

Now, I’m a Family Care Worker, which means I get to work with Indigenous families in Montreal, mainly in the context of mothers who have had their children removed from their care by Youth Protection. I help them navigate the system and ideally work towards getting their kids back in their care, or help them keep their kids when they have them. It’s the best thing ever. One of the mothers I worked with today—who I’ve been closely involved with—her kids were the first ones I ever babysat when I started volunteering.

What aspects of dance do you still use in this job? Have you noticed any other parallels? I’m really curious about that.

I was actually thinking about this recently. This sounds annoying, but I learned to work incredibly hard—basically torturing myself for a goal. My job is truly exhausting—it takes everything out of me—but in a way, it’s nothing new. Instead of being physically drained at the end of the day, it’s more emotional exhaustion. I think I thrive under that pressure.

It’s strange because if I take a step back and think about it, my job can feel similar to my ballet school or private school experience, even though you’d imagine those fields could never connect. In reality, it gave me a lot of valuable tools that apply to everything.

You’re also teaching a community dance class now—where all ages and dance backgrounds are welcome, and there are no mirrors. Was that a deliberate choice?

No, but I’m really happy it turned out that way. If I had the choice, I would have made the same decision. As a teacher, having a mirror would help me see everyone, but as a dancer, I probably wouldn’t be teaching these classes if I had to see myself. Many people wouldn’t return if they had to see themselves either—it’s just the nature of mirrors.

What was your relationship with dance like before you started teaching these classes? Did you always feel open to returning to it?

While redefining my relationship with dance, I went through a phase of full rejection—wanting nothing to do with it. My old therapist had told me it sounded like it was time to officially close the door to dance so I decided I’d stop renting my studio and stop completely. That was probably the most recent phase before I started teaching these classes. So, the fact that people come in and actually enjoy it is wild to me. My most recent mindset was that ballet was the worst thing in the world, and now I see all these people showing up and saying, “This is fun,” and I almost can’t believe it. I had to break up with that therapist…

Ballet can feel exclusive and intimidating, but it is inspiring to see you reshape its context and history.

It feels really good to do. It’s nice to do it in baggy shorts and a baggy t-shirt with your hair all flopping around.

How has your understanding of movement changed since stepping out of traditional ballet?

I definitely learned that traditional ballet can be really hard on the hips! Now, when I teach these classes, there are moments where I catch myself thinking, “Oh God, this can’t be good for us.” I’ve had to adjust my expectations for my own body, but now I’m also thinking about other people’s bodies. It’s made me more aware—like, “Okay, actually, let’s not do that position,” because I can imagine the strain it could cause.

It’s funny because I feel so far from the body I once had—the classical ballet version of me and that whole mindset. But simultaneously, when I take a ballet class, it’s like my body just knows what to do. It’s so deeply ingrained, and it feels amazing. It’s surprising to realize how much of it is still there.

It’s also given me a new confidence in my body, dancing, and in myself, honestly. <spanclass =”highlight”>I’ve managed to let go of a lot of the embarrassment, sadness, and frustration and instead recognize, “Actually, I achieved a lot.”</span> And now, I get to share that with others. I feel fortunate to have gone through this shift.

What’s been the most fulfilling aspect of this new chapter in your life?

I feel so lucky that so much of my life is meaningful now. My job is really important to me and fulfilling. Still, I wouldn’t necessarily call it rewarding—there’s not a lot of tangible reward for the people I work with, who are facing so many barriers. But getting to know them and being part of their lives is the greatest privilege I could ever imagine. I also felt like dedicating myself to a career in classical ballet was an extremely selfish pursuit, so being able to dedicate myself to helping others feels like an intentional rejection of that.

And now, I have this ballet thing, which is meaningful in an entirely different way. It’s also a rejection of the selfish pursuit of a ballet career and a chance to share it with people who may not usually have access to it. I’ve finally bridged my two worlds—after going through that full-break identity crisis, the career-ending, the total despair of “Who am I?” For the first time in what feels like ten years, I’ve found this blend of dance-me, social-me, community-focused-me—and happy-me.

What advice would you give somebody going through an unexpected transition in their life?

There’s no rush. If you’re in a position where you don’t have to struggle just to survive, you can take your time to figure out what works. It’s worth it to go through trial and error and figure out what’s there because there are so many more options than we realize. For the first 21 years of my life, I thought there was only one path, but you can always pivot. It’s reassuring to know that life can have different phases, each with its own reality.

It feels so scary and weird when a door closes, but …one window opens?

[Laughs] I don’t know if that’s what they say. When one door closes, another one opens.

Or climb out the window.

Exactly—climb out the window.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

Today’s tech titans, like Frankenstein’s Victor, race to build superintelligent machines in their image: soulless wannabe-gods with devastating reach. Gil Duran, of the Nerd Reich newsletter, connects this to A.I. worship, quoting a billionaire obsessed with “creating God” through algorithms. M.I.T.’s annotated Frankenstein likens Victor’s horror to Oppenheimer’s nuclear regret. We’ve entered a new atomic age, but instead of bombs, it’s information weapons and hacked minds.

As Pulitzer-nominated journalist Carole Cadwalladr warns, this is what a digital coup looks like. A.I. is trained to replace journalists, strip away privacy, and deepen inequality, just as Gaslit Nation has warned since 2018.

What’s the answer? Community. Skill-sharing. Nature. The real world. Jack Welch, once worshipped like Musk is today, gutted G.E. with fear-based leadership. Now he’s a cautionary tale. So will today’s tech gods be.

Mary Shelley saw it coming. “Frightful must it be,” she wrote. We agree. But there’s power in human connection, in rejecting the machine's illusions. Frankenstein’s monster was abandoned. Let’s not abandon each other.

Join our resilience salons. Find your people. Build the future together.

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Show Notes

The song you heard in this week’s episode is “Unspoken Word” by Evrette Allen: https://soundcloud.com/user-726164627/unspoken-word-mix-13/s-GEvlnfQnmh4?si=954f31de09d644948d51a225224bd7ba&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Nerd Reich: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein

After two hundred years, are we ready for the truth about Mary Shelley’s novel? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein

Astronomers have determined the exact hour that Mary Shelley thought of Frankenstein. https://lithub.com/astronomers-have-determined-the-exact-hour-that-mary-shelley-thought-of-frankenstein/

AI's Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet's Hyper-Consumption Era Generative artificial intelligence tools, now part of the everyday user experience online, are causing stress on local power grids and mass water evaporation. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-energy-demands-water-impact-internet-hyper-consumption-era/

Short-term profits and long-term consequences — did Jack Welch break capitalism? https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism

Carole Cadwalladr TED Talk: This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOoT8AbkNE

Self-styled prophets are claiming they have "awakened" chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

We speak with the award-winning author and journalist Omar El Akkad, whose new book about the war on Gaza is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The book expands on a viral tweet El Akkad sent in October 2023, just weeks into Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian territory, decrying the muted response to the carnage and destruction unfolding on the ground. He wrote, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” He joins Democracy Now! and says the book explores how people respond to injustice and grapple with their own role in it. “It’s in large part trying to figure out my place in this society,” says El Akkad. “I happen to live on the launching side of the missiles, and as a result, it’s very, very easy for me to look away. And what happens when you decide you’re not going to look away?”

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

Fresh off posing before Venezuelans shipped to an El Salvador prison - which is a war crime - part-time DHS head and "embarrassment to hair extensions" Kosplay Kristi Noem just posed with ICE thugs in Arizona prepping to "get (some) dirtbags off the street." Rocking yet another Nazi outfit - "Every day is Halloween for this lady" - alas she also cradled a rifle aimed at one of the thug's heads. Also, shouldn't she be in D.C. trying not to deport the wrong people? Asking for many friends.

Elect a reality TV hack, get a reality TV government, with plenty of dress-up to distract the poorly educated. Cue Kristi Noem, former South Dakota Snow Queen, college dropout, wife, mother, rancher, Nazi, cosmetically enhanced aspiring Instagram model, bimbette attention-seeker and America's reigning Queen of Cosplay. As governor, Noem earned the name Barnyard Barbie from alarmed constituents for her COVID denialism, and all nine of the state's indigenous tribes banned her from their lands after suggesting tribal leaders were colluding with and profiting from Mexican drug cartels. Now she's evidently found her odious peeps with the current Best-In-Show regime, where she's stayed busy playing make-believe, always elaborately coiffed and made-up, from riding a horse (Border Barbie) to wrangling hoses (Firefighting Barbie): "Different action outfit for every day of the week.”

Last month, in one week, she flew sat in the cockpit of a Lockheed C-130 surveillance plane out of the Coast Guard base in Alaska, joined a Coast Guard Maritime Security Response Team on the water out of California ("Always ready"), rode a four-wheeler along the border wall at Nogales, tagged along to a (staged?) cocaine bust at San Diego's San Ysidro Port of Entry, complete with K-9 dogs who seemed nervous near her puppy-killing vibes. The packed photo-op schedule left observers suggesting DOGE look into what we're spending on her costume changes; others wondered when she'll unveil her limited-edition line of action figures or at least a Baywatch ICE Barbie doll, argued the dog-and-pony shows likely meant the workers couldn't really work, noted her "hair, makeup, and wardrobe team is logging a lot of miles," and helpfully added, "There's an opening for a pole dancer in Las Vegas."

Her most infamous piece of political theater was her March appearance, complete with $60,000 gold Rolex, fitted French shirt tuck, "pound of makeup smeared across her plasticized face" and ball-cap on her mismatched hair extensions, before hundreds of Venezuelan prisoners in a brutal El Salvador prison we're using to disappear enemies of her regime. Behind her, the inmates stand silent, unmoving, hands at their sides or clasped in front of them, with others further back "stacked like cordwood" on metal bunks, posed by their jailers, "every piece of this visual carefully engineered, a staged display of dominance to thrill the base, to dominate, isolate, terrorize, power over law, cruelty as spectacle." Noem "pauses in front of a cage where human beings have been posed to her liking," and sends her vicious message to "criminal illegal aliens: LEAVE NOW. If you do not leave, we will hunt you down."

Many observed that what Noem did - using prisoners’ bodies as weapons of political war - is a crime against humanity that violates international law under Articles 13 and 14 of the Geneva Convention, which protects prisoners from "insult (and) public curiosity.” They also noted such abuse is unsurprising from a cabal of hacks for whom deportations, like much else, are largely about optics. Still, they argued, democracies have standards of treatment for prisoners; they also have due process and legal pathways for those seeking refuge, and blasted Noem as a vile bitch, an evil ghoul, a Sturmabteilung (storm trooper) "making a dominatrix video for her Nazi audience." The Bulwark's Jonathan Last was blunt on the "Stasi-like DHS kidnappings and gulag photo-op. The message: America is no longer a shining city on a hill... It no longer stands on the side of liberty. This is the land of wolves now."

That became even more tragically true when researchers at CBS' 60 Minutes found no criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelan migrants the U.S. arbitrarily scooped up into an El Salvador prison; 22% had records of non-violent crimes like traffic offenses; just 3% were maybe gang members - in sharp contrast to the likely 75% of officials who targeted brown people in their ugly, deadly stunt who have or should have criminal records. Despite the gross illegality - and their bullshit about "waste" - the regime reportedly plans to spend an obscene $45 billion over the next two years - more than double what USAID ever spent each year, and over ten times what ICE spent on all its 2024 detention operations - ramping up private prisons and concentration camps to hold all the people they hope to deport, including innocents "accidentally" scooped up: "These things happen, too bad, so sad."

Meanwhile, Queen of Cosplay Kristi 'Lookit-me' Noem is still at it. On Tuesday, she surfaced "all dolled up on the streets of Phoenix, with flak jacket, full hair and makeup and, of course, that $50K Rolex, looking like she was ready to storm the city (Ballistic Barbie)." As usual, she posted a video. "Here we are with Marco and Brian today,” she prattled, standing between two beefy ICE goons. "They’re letting me roll with them...We’re going to go out and pick up somebody who I think is...got charges of human trafficking." Then she praised "the good work they do every day...working to make America safe." Alas, as she spoke, "Racism Barbie with Puppy-Murdering Action Rifle" was in fact extremely unsafely, also laughably awkwardly, holding her M4 rifle pointed at the head of the tatted, bicep-bulging guy on her left. Sorry, we don't know if it was Marco or Brian; these white supremacists all look alike.

After 100 agents found three victims, she posted, "Human traffickers. Drug Smugglers....(We're) arresting these dirtbags and getting them off of (sic) our streets." But safe gun owners were horrified by her clueless "fascism on parade. Never hold your gun like this." Arizona Rep/ former Marine Ruben Gallego: "1. Close your ejection port. 2. If you have no rounds in the chamber why do you have a magazine inserted? 3. Why are you flagging the guy next to you? 4. Stop deporting people without due process." Others: "That's what happens when you want the clothes but don't live the life," "Conservatives need a distinct aesthetic, but (the) Bukele visual isn't it," "This way she doesn't actually have to do her job," "Were any dogs killed?" "It's a community theater production of a government," "Nazi Barbie Fun Fact: The end with the hole is the shooty end," "This is very Plan 9 from Outer Space," and from a guy at a legal non-profit, "If Secretary Noem personally shoots or arrests you (or your dog), please email me." It takes a village.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Donald Trump promised that Americans “will always be free.”    That throwaway line assured another round of applause from his Republican devotees on Capitol Hill.  But will other Americans be as gullible or servile as members of Congress?

Americans are indoctrinated in government schools to presume that our national DNA practically guarantees we will always be free. But few follies are more perilous than presuming that individual rights are safe in perpetuity. None of the arguments on why liberty is inevitable can explain why it is becoming an endangered species. Presuming that freedom is our destiny lulls people against political predators of all parties and creeds.

Sorting out the absurdities in Trump’s “always be free” assertion is like peeling a political onion.

A key theme in the Trump’s presidential campaign last year was that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were tyrannizing American with censorship, DEI  mandates, and idiotic regulations.   When Trump said Americans “will always be free,” did he presume that the Biden presidency never happened, or what?   Were all of the Biden administration’s abuses expunged on the day that Trump took his oath of office as 47^th president? Trump has vigorously nullified many of Biden’s worst policies and executive orders.  But the feds were oppressive long before Sleepy Joe arrived in the Oval Office.

Trump raised  a similar claim six years ago in his 2019 State of the Union address. Trump announced, “America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”

Sure, except for armies of government enforcement agent waiting to imprison Americans for violating hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations or simply “pissing off the police.”

How can Trump’s “always be free” assertion be reconciled with more than ten million people being arrested every year – many for nonviolent crimes?  In early 2019, Trump bitterly complained that the FBI had used 29 people and armored vehicles to arrest Roger Stone. But SWAT teams conduct up to 80,000 raids a year, according to the ACLU, mostly for drug arrests or search warrants. Many innocent people have been killed in such raids.   Perhaps Trump doesn’t consider such raids a violation of freedom unless they are targeting his high-profile supporters.

Or maybe Trump believes that people forfeit their right to freedom after government suspects or accuses them of wrongdoing.  Trump is a champion of asset forfeiture laws which entitle law enforcement to confiscate people’s cash, cars, and other property based on the flimsiest accusation. Federal law-enforcement agencies seized more property via asset forfeiture  than all the burglars stole from homeowners and businesses nationwide. Trump’s new Bitcoin Reserve Fund and United States Digital Asset Stockpile will rely on asset forfeiture to finance acquisition.   The White House website noted that the Commerce and Treasury Secretaries “are authorized to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies impose no incremental costs on American taxpayers.” What could possibly go wrong?

How can Trump’s “always be free” proclamation be reconciled with the perpetual abuses of the Internal Revenue Service? Federal, state, and local tax burdens turn citizens into sharecroppers of their own lives. The average American is forced to labor for 20 years simply to support the government.   Americans are forced to pay more  in taxes than their total spending on food, clothing, and housing. Each week, scores of thousands of Americans have their bank accounts seized by the IRS, or have IRS liens put on their houses or land, or endure a tax audit, or receive notice of penalties and demands for additional taxes. Will people “always be free” even after government wrongfully seizes most of their income?

Does Trump’s “always free” claim last week have more credibility than his 2019 “born free/stay free” pledge? In early 2020, Trump praised the brutal tactics used by the Chinese government to supposedly thwart the spread of the virus.  On March 16, 2020, Trump endorsed “15 Days to Slow the Spread” — a slogan that would live in infamy. Trump promised: “If everyone makes this change or these critical changes and sacrifices now, we will rally together as one nation and we will defeat the virus and we’re going to have a big celebration together.” Freezing the economy and daily life would magically vanquish the virus On April 13, 2020, Trump proclaimed, “The federal government has absolute power. It has the power. As to whether or not I’ll use that power, we’ll see.” Politico reported that Trump’s Justice Department was considering asking Congress to approve suspending habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic, enabling the feds to detain anyone suspect of being infected or disobeying lockdown orders. Trump condemned many of Biden’s worst Covid policy abuses.  But that doesn’t expunge Trump’s guilt for knocking over the first Covid oppression dominos

Did Trump mean to imply that Americans “will always be free” but only as long as Trump is the supreme ruler?  Many Democrats and liberals have been histrionic ever since Election Day last November, proclaiming that practically any reform or statement that Trump makes proves he is the reincarnation of Hitler.

Trump is no Hitler but what about Napoleon?  Last month, Trump tweeted out an old saying attributed to Bonaparte: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”  The New York Times fretted that “taken at face value, Mr. Trump’s statement… suggested that even if what he is doing unambiguously breaks an otherwise valid law, that would not matter if he says his motive is to save the country.”  Trump zealots such as Laura Loomer responded to the Napoleonic invocation: ““Thank you, President Trump. We love you.” It doesn’t inspire confidence that Trump administration lawyers are invoking the same “unitary executive theory” to justify his legal decrees that President George W. Bush used to disregard congressional prohibitions on torture.

Anyone who blindly believes Americans will “always be free” is halfway to serfdom. Trump is one of a long series of commanders-in-chief who expanded and exploited the dictatorial potential of the presidency. Americans cannot afford to be less vigilant of their rights and liberties no matter who is promulgating decrees in the Oval Office. Trump’s occasional pro-liberty rhetoric provides no assurance against abuses of power that could end in a legal-constitutional Waterloo.

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

The post Trump’s “Always Be Free” Fairy Tale appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by James Bovard.

On Monday we mourned and honored the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., preacher, radical, orator, warrior and leader of America's civil rights movement; on the same dark day, of course, a loathsome churl, antithetical in every way, came to power. In the hope that love and justice will one day prevail - and honoring King's prescient warnings of "a time when silence is betrayal" - we summon his spirit. "We must accept finite disappointment," he said, "but never lose infinite hope."

Painfully, King's anniversary comes as a nation "whipsawed by a madman" moves toward rebuilding the walls of racism, classism, patriarchy and inequity that King and so many righteous Americans fought so hard to tear down. Not since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, notes Robert Reich, has the country seen such "vast conspicuous displays" of unaccountable wealth and political power flaunted "unapologetically, unashamedly, defiantly" in the name of helping a racist, hate-mongering demagogue recreate state-sanctioned discrimination, inequality and suffering for the vulnerable among us. Trump's crass, clueless bigotry - calling Black Nazi Mark Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids," claiming "nobody has crowds bigger than me," even "Martin Luther King, when he did his speech" - just highlights the tragedy that is his effectiveness at re-inflaming the hate King spent his life seeking to quell.

Almost exactly 60 years ago, King led thousands of allies on a pivotal, five-day, 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to protest Jim Crow laws blocking them from voting. Days before, marchers led by John Lewis had been attacked and beaten by state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday; Lewis had his skull fractured and later said he was sure he'd die that day. King set out with twice as many marchers, but having reached a compromise with LBJ, stopped at the bridge where police again awaited, led the crowd in prayer, and before marching back to Selma proclaimed, "All the world knows that we are here, we are standing before the forces of power (and) we are not about to turn around...we are on the move now, like an idea whose time has come." Amidst cries of "Yes, sir!" and "Amen!" he told those asking "how long?" that, "No lie can live forever...because you shall reap what you sow."

Those marching from Selma, said Linda Lowery, 74, "wanted America to change for the better." She was 14 when she marched with Lewis across the bridge; chased by a Selma deputy and a state trooper, she ran into a plume of tear gas and was struck from behind before state troopers beat and kicked her so hard she "rose off the ground" and passed out. She woke up on a stretcher being loaded into a hearse, jumped off, and ran. Almost 60 years later, she still remembers the faces of the men beating her; she says they had the same arrogant, impervious look as Derek Chauvin while he knelt on the neck of George Floyd in 2020. "I could not see where anything we had done had made a difference in the hearts of people," she said, other than some "cosmetic" changes. "People gave their lives to make a change. But it has not changed, and that is the hurting part. America has gotten where it is because there is still hate in people’s hearts."

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Trump, of course, is the arbiter of that hate, its awful exemplar, its malignant founding father. Could King, the ever-hopeful believer, have believed there could ever be a Trump, eagerly marshaling a barren, regressive clutch of bigots, fools and con-men to follow him? "Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that," he preached. "I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear." He praised "the brave children of Birmingham and Selma for putting the 'unity' in 'community.'" "Anybody can serve," he asserted. "You only need a heart full of grace." "Only" seems the operative word here: For some time now, grace has been exceedingly rare on the right side of our political landscape. In truth, King remained aware of the fragility and capriciousness of the movement's white allies, never so elegantly, courteously, wearily expressed in his famed Letter from Birmingham Jail after he was arrested for peacefully protesting segregation.

Responding to a statement of "concern" by eight white Southern church leaders suggesting the protests were “unwise and untimely," King wrote a long impassioned defense essentially arguing, "The time is always right to do what is right." He allowed himself both snark - "Never before have I written so long a letter (but) what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?" - and bitter, "disappointed" criticism of white faith leaders "more devoted to 'order' than to justice." The pastors had commended Birmingham police for their restraint; he noted they may not have "if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes." Having negotiated with the city's business leaders, "Our hopes had been blasted...promises made, promises broken," and they took to direct action to "present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the community."

To the classic charge he and the activists were "outsiders," he said, "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here... Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." As to "unwise," he insisted, "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." And "well-timed" protests don't exist: "For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. We have waited for more than 340 years for our Constitutional and God given rights...This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'" Years later, his friend and fierce supporter Harry Belafonte told a panel the last thing King said to him before his assassination was that he worried "we are leading the nation on an integration trip that has us integrating into a burning house." "Most politicians I know make promises and then walk into the faces of power and deny us," Belafonte said. "I'm here to look through the ravages of the Democratic party and see if anything is really worth salvaging."

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Today, of course, both he and King would find virtually nothing worth salvaging in a GOP now greedily cojoined by tech oligarchs Elmo, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Cook et al. "Everybody is coming!" Trump crowed as they trudged to kiss the stubby ring. Their lurch rightward was so dramatic an exultant Three-Shirts Bannon called it "an official surrender" akin to the Japanese surrender to Allied forces in 1945. And the money keeps coming. Hours before taking office, Trump raked in $58 billion, at least on paper, after issuing a $TRUMP meme coin, whatever that is, which accounts for almost 90% of his net worth. The move, which means “anyone in the world" can deposit money into his bank account, was blasted by ethics experts as "the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency." Still, meme-based cryptocurrencies are so volatile that, hours after $MELANIA's token landed - Be Best - $TRUMP plummeted 50% from $75 to $30. Cry me a (teeny, surreal) river.

When Martin Luther King Jr. died, he had a net worth of less than $6,000. As radically anti-capitalism as anti-war, he often railed against "excessive materialism" and the false god of money as "a power that corrupts and an instrument of exploitation." Weeks before his murder, he was preparing to launch a Poor People’s Campaign to gain economic justice for "The Other America,” those people, often of color, who "find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity." Citing government help deemed "subsidized" for the rich and "welfare" for the poor, he decried "socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.” "God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty," he said. "The problems of racial and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of wealth for all God's children."

What would he make of today's madness - the obscene economic excess and inequity, the flagrant racism and fear-mongering, a political rise celebrated by white supremacist Proud Boys and an unhinged oligarch giving a Nazi salute - no, two Nazi salutes - a new emperor's regime so petty, vindictive and void of substance that within hours he took down the new portrait of a general who criticized him and a government website advising women of their reproductive rights. What a falling off was there. Still, a glimmer of light: Literally minutes before he left office, Biden commuted the life sentence of native rights advocate and political prisoner Leonard Peltier, now 80 and in poor health, to serve the rest of his sentence at home. For 50 years, Peltier had proclaimed his innocence and intergenerational advocates had vowed, "Our resistance will never stop." Peltier: "It's finally over. I'm going home." Martin Luther King Jr.: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Take care of yourselves and each other. Given the lack of alternatives, onward.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Wald, who is a director at a health and environment center at the University of Southern California, is among the lucky ones. Her neighborhood in central L.A. was never directly threatened. Her house is intact; her children, husband, and all they own are safe. Nevertheless, Wald, like millions of other Angelenos, can’t escape the health effects of the blazes. Experts expect those impacts to linger. 

The wind-driven fires that have leveled a broad swath of Los Angeles have killed at least 25 people, consumed approximately 12,000 homes, schools, and other structures, and burned more than 40,000 acres since January 7. In the aftermath of such disasters, the focus is rightfully on treating the injured, mourning the dead, and beginning the long process of recovery. In time, though, attention shifts to the health consequences that reverberate days, weeks, even years after the danger has passed. 

Wildfires, a natural part of many ecosystems, particularly in the West, typically occur in forests or where wildlands meet communities. It is extraordinarily rare to see them penetrate an American city, but that’s exactly what happened in the nation’s second-largest metropolis.

As state and federal agencies assess the damage, researchers say the health effects of the wildfires must be tallied just as meticulously. 

“These fires are different from previous quote unquote wildfires because there are so many structures that burned,” said Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Everything in the households got burned — households, cars, metal pipes, plastics.” 

Wildfire smoke is toxic. Burning trees and shrubs produce very fine particulate matter, known by the shorthand PM 2.5, which burrow deep into the lungs and can even infiltrate the bloodstream, causing cold and flu symptoms in the short term and heart disease, lung cancer, and other chronic issues over time. 

But the fires that raced through Los Angeles burned thousands of homes, schools, historic buildings, and even medical clinics, blanketing the city in thick smoke. For several days after the first started, the city’s air quality index, or AQI, exceeded 100, the threshold, typically seen during wildfires, at which air becomes unhealthy to breathe for children, the elderly, and those with asthma. In some parts of the city, the AQI reached 500, a number rarely seen and always hazardous for everyone. 

At the moment, air pollution experts know how much smoke fills the air. That’s shown improvement in recent days. But they don’t know what’s in it. “What are the chemical mixtures in this smoke?” asked Kai Chen, an environmental scientist at the Yale School of Public Health. “In addition to fine particulate matter, there are potentially other hazardous and carcinogenic organic compounds — gas pollutants, trace metals, and microplastics.” 

Previous research shows that the spikes in unhealthy air quality seen during such events lead to higher rates of hospitalizations for issues like asthma, and even contribute to heart attacks among those with that chronic disease. A 2024 study on the long-term effects of smoke exposure in California showed that particulate matter from wildfires in the state from 2008 to 2018 contributed to anywhere from 52,000 to 56,000 premature deaths. A health assessment of 148 firefighters who worked the Tubbs Fire, which burned more than 36,000 acres in Northern California in 2017 and destroyed an unusually high number of structures, found elevated levels of the PFAS known as forever chemicals, heavy metals, and flame retardants in their blood and urine.

The L.A. county department of public health has formally urged people to stay inside and wear masks to protect themselves from windblown toxic dust and ash. Air quality measurements don’t take these particles into account, which means the air quality index doesn’t reveal the extent of contaminants in the air. 

Zhu and her colleagues have been collecting samples of wildfire smoke in neighborhoods near the fires. It’ll be months before that data is fully analyzed, but Zhu suspects she will find a dangerous mix of chemicals, including, potentially, asbestos and lead — materials used in many buildings constructed before the 1970s. 

The risk will linger even after the smoke clears. The plumes that wafted over the landscape will deposit chemicals into drinking water supplies and contaminate soil. When rains do come, they’ll wash toxic ash into streams and across the land, said Fernando Rosario-Ortiz, an environmental engineer and interim dean of the University of Colorado Boulder environmental engineering program. “There’s a lot of manmade materials that are now being combusted. The potential is there for contamination,” he said, noting that little research on how toxic ash and other byproducts of wildfires in urban areas currently exists. “What we don’t have a lot of information on is what happens now.” 

After the Camp Fire razed Paradise, California, in 2018, water utilities found high levels of volatile organic compounds in drinking water. Similar issues have arisen in places like Boulder County, Colorado, where the Marshall fire destroyed nearly 1,000 structures in 2021, Rosario-Ortiz said, though the presence of a contaminant in a home doesn’t necessarily mean it will be present in high levels in the water. Still, several municipal water agencies in Los Angeles issued preemptive advisories urging residents not to drink tap water in neighborhoods near the Palisades and Eaton fires. It’ll be weeks before they know exactly what’s in the water. 

As wildfires grow ever more intense and encroach upon urban areas, cities and counties must be prepared to monitor the health impacts and respond to them. “This is the first time I’ve ever even witnessed or heard anything like this,” said Zhu, who raised her daughter in Los Angeles and has lived there for decades, said. “Even being in the field studying wildfires and air quality impacts, I never imagined that a whole neighborhood, a whole community in Palisades, would burn down.”

Wald is back home. She’s still got a nasty cough, but her other symptoms are starting to subside as the smoke in her neighborhood clears. The fires gave her a scare, but she’s not making long-term plans to move on just yet. “I wouldn’t say that here where I am right now, I’m that worried,” she said. “But, I mean, it’s not great.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire smoke is are always toxic. LA’s is even worse on Jan 17, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

The decision is a new blow to press freedom in Guatemala. Zamora, president of the now defunct elPeriódico newspaper, had already spent 813 days in jail and experienced years of government harassment after his reporting challenged the country’s political elite. 

Zamora was sentenced to six years imprisonment in June 2023 on money laundering charges, which were widely criticized as politically motivated. An appeals court overturned his conviction in October 2023; the retrial has been delayed by ongoing procedural hurdles.

CPJ has repeatedly urged the Guatemalan government, especially President Bernardo Arévalo, to end Zamora’s prosecution and the harassment of his family and the journalistic community. 

In an interview with CPJ before the overturning of his house arrest, Zamora discussed the personal toll of these charges, his unyielding commitment to press freedom, and the growing threats faced by journalists in Guatemala’s increasingly repressive environment.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is it like to return home after more than 800 days in prison?

Returning home has been an experience full of intense emotions and unexpected moments. When I arrived home, my friends who had supported me throughout the entire process came with me to my house — 10 people who, during my imprisonment, brought me food and visited me once a week. After spending the night with them, I only slept for a few hours. 

When I woke up, I found out that the directors of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), who were gathered in Córdoba, Argentina, wanted to speak with me. And from there, calls and interviews began, one after another.

Diplomats and media from all over the world want to speak with me, and when I go for my daily walk — about 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] a day — people stop to greet me, take photos, and offer their support. 

I appreciate the affection, but sometimes I feel overwhelmed. I wasn’t prepared for so much attention. I’m a shy person; I feel more comfortable writing than speaking in public, and this has been a big change. I also have health issues that I need to attend to, but I am here, trying to adapt.

I’m prepared, knowing they could come to take me back at any moment. And I’m ready here for when they come, to go back again. And I will come out again, and the time will come when they have to let me go free. 

How was your experience in the Mariscal Zavala prison, located at a military base in northern Guatemala City? 

Mariscal Zavala was a shock. They took me [in July 2022], with 18 armed men, and put me in a cell without any explanation.

I spent 14 days without sleep, with purple lights, and unable to communicate with my lawyers. During that time, they put insects in my cell that left wounds on my arms and legs. I also got poisoned by an insecticide that I managed to obtain to control the pests. Despite all this, my conditions improved when the new government changed: I was given better conditions, with light, heating, and more dignity.

The prosecutor’s office says it does not pursue you as a journalist but as a business owner. How do you respond to these statements?

For me, it is hard to conceive that José Rubén Zamora is not a journalist, as I have dedicated my entire life to this profession. They persecuted me and tried to imprison me just for doing my job. And when you add that they were seeking sentences for up to 20 years — the same maximum sentence given for crimes like money laundering or extortion — and they show as evidence my opinion columns, the argument that they are after me as a businessman loses all credibility.

Who is behind this, and why are they pursuing you?

What we’ve lived through in Guatemala has been a sinister metamorphosis of our democracy. Every four years, we elect a president who, rather than being a legitimate leader, is a thief, and he governs with the support of high-ranking military structures, organized crime, and monopolies. They’ve always been bothered by the fact that our newspaper did not align with their interests, that we were independent and denounced corruption and drug trafficking, which are part of that system.

Since 2007, a criminal structure has consolidated its power. It’s a web of interests that has taken over the country and is indifferent to the people’s problems. This is a power alliance that, although it has succeeded in persecuting me, has paid a high price. I think it would have been better for them if I had continued with my newspaper because, in the end, exposing their corruption was less damaging than my imprisonment.

​​This is not the first time you’ve found yourself in a dangerous situation because of your reporting. How has this affected you and your family?

My children never gave up. Despite the damage to their lives, they were always relentless. They worked tirelessly for my liberation and didn’t feel ashamed. The youngest one aimed to be an academic, was building a solid career and had to leave with her mother because they were after him. They even sent people to arrest him, but they were able to leave the country first. Now, he’s without a job, without documents, and his future is uncertain. It has been very tough for them and me, but they keep moving forward with strength.

In 2023, the Court of Appeals annulled your sentence on money laundering charges. What does this mean for you legally and personally?

I still don’t know the final impact. I have requested that we return to the hearing for the presentation of evidence, and I hope to present the testimonies of experts and the person who made the transaction with me. Additionally, I trust that the case regarding the travel receipts and the obstruction charge, which I consider ridiculous, will be dismissed at the intermediate hearing. The case has been intentionally delayed, but sooner or later, it will have to be resolved. If that happens, it will allow my wife to return.

What is the current status of the legal cases you are facing?

The trial that will be repeated is the most important, and I hope to present my evidence at that time. For this, the first hearing for the charges of money laundering and extortion is scheduled for September 25, 2025; there, they will set up a second hearing, likely in 2026. The case has no foundation, as the prosecutor’s office is setting up an extortion case, but they have no people to testify against either for that or for money laundering.

At one point, I was offered the possibility of going home if I accepted the charges and apologized to [former president Alejandro] Giammattei, his associate Miguel Martínez, and the press for my “immoralities.” When I refused, they began to create a second case to persecute my wife and my young son with charges of document falsification. The prosecutor’s office claims the signatures were fake, but those travel documents were legally issued by immigration.

Also, all of this happened in a unilateral hearing where I was not informed of the charges nor allowed to defend myself. This case has no evidence, but what the prosecutor’s office does is that every time there is a hearing, the judge is denounced, and the prosecutors do not show up, which leaves the case stalled.

What has the freezing of your accounts and seizure of all assets meant for you? How did the closure of the newspaper impact you?

It was devastating. Before the pandemic, I had no debts, but now I have obligations with the banks that I can’t even cover since my accounts have been frozen for two years. It’s a constant pressure.

Now elPeriódico is closed. How did you experience that process?

It was a solitary process. I witnessed the collapse of everything without being able to do anything. 

I came to believe that no matter who defended me — whether the best lawyer in the world or someone without experience — the result was going to be the same. That acceptance gave me a deep sense of serenity because I understood that I no longer had control over anything. It was a moment where I decided to just go with the flow, let myself be carried by the current, and I even thought that I might spend the rest of my life in prison. 

If it weren’t for organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), who not only helped me get out but also gave me solidarity and support I never expected, I don’t know how I would have been able to continue.

What impact do you think elPeriódico’s closure had on Guatemala and its press?

Guatemala lost one of its most belligerent and irreverent voices. Although the country still has several media outlets, our newspaper stood out for being against abuses of power, state terrorism, impunity, and corruption. We fought for democracy, freedom, and equality of opportunities. We were probably the most uncomfortable and bothersome media for the powerful. 

Despite being small, we knew that we caused significant moral damage to the country’s big thieves, which gave us great satisfaction.

How do you view the current press freedom situation in Guatemala, especially in relation to the journalists who investigate and publish the abuses of power under this government, compared to the previous one?

This president is an exception. He is a decent man, but he lacks control over Congress and the judicial system. The prosecutor’s office is also going after him, and I am sure they will try to remove his immunity to subject him to a legal process.

It’s encouraging to see that many journalists are still working and haven’t given up, even though they face constant risks. The fight for freedom is not philosophical; it is existential. It’s a daily conquest that is achieved by rejecting the abuses of the established power.

Looking ahead, do you see yourself continuing in journalism?

I would like to continue in journalism, but my lawyers have advised me to be cautious. They imprisoned me for two reasons: for traveling too much and because I can influence the media. That’s why, until at least the next two years pass, I must avoid speaking publicly, although it is very difficult for me to stay silent. 

Despite everything, I will always keep fighting. We must maintain our patience, courage, and faith without losing hope. It’s essential to develop the ability to overcome our fears and, whenever possible, break barriers. 

In the end, freedom is the fundamental pillar of democracy.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Dánae Vílchez.

Joakim Wei Bernild: I’m not going to get into how we met, but as to how the band started out, I think Anton was the initiator—he’d made some music and called me up, right?

Anton Falck: I had made a demo song and some music guy had heard it, randomly, and wanted to book me for a festival, and I was like, “What the fuck?” And then I felt like I had to make a band. Joakim was a natural choice, because we were both noobs, so we were on the same level, on the same page.

JWB: Even though we only had one or two songs, we were given a 45-minute slot.

AF: We didn’t understand then that we had the power to say that we wouldn’t be able to play for that long.

JWB: We sat down and made 45 minutes’ worth of songs.

AF: Really long songs.

I’m going to assume that “Holiday,” one of your earliest singles, which is fairly standard-length and radio-ready, wasn’t one of them. I love the journey—the sort of “breakup in paradise” plot line—that “Holiday’s” lyrics chart. Its first lines—“Good, skin-kissing summer days/ Sun City, I’m here to stay”—capture the feeling, the boundless optimism, that characterizes the first moments of going on vacation. I still like to listen to it whenever I’m stepping out of an airplane, down one of those staircases on wheels. It’s the perfect score for that moment: the humid air of somewhere tropical hitting you in the face, and you’re all hyped up about how much leisure lies ahead of you.

AF: It’s funny because I’m really not a vacation person. I’ve never traveled to a warm country with palm trees just to relax. I tried doing it for the first time two years ago. I went on a normal holiday because we’d been traveling so much, seeing the world, but always through the lens of being on tour. It is a very different way of traveling. I find that going—just going—on a vacation is really, really weird. I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s not for me. I think that, for me, the song is more of a metaphor, somehow—a state of mind.

I had taken the song’s refrain—“Our love was a holiday”—and the plea that it ends on—“Won’t you just hold me one last time?”—to describe a kind of romance that can’t be fitted into a routine, and can only exist in this exceptional, time-out-of-time space of a vacation.

JWB: We had a few years, three or four years, during which we toured a lot, and that’s when we wrote that song.

AF: When you’re a musician at our level of the industry, the work of touring is its own reward, because you know you’re not going to come home with a ton of money. It was always about trying to have as much fun as possible while away. We knew it was a specific time in our lives that we would look back on at some point, one that wouldn’t last forever. Touring is this weird kind of holiday. You’re away from home, but it’s still work.

You’re both from Denmark. A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of the outsized success that Scandinavians—and, I think, Swedes in particular—enjoy in the field of popular music. There’s this cultural hypothesis that it’s because they place a great deal of emphasis on music education programs and choral music in early childhood.

AF: It could also have something to do with the way a language is built. When Swedish people talk, they sound like they’re singing. I speak Swedish, and for a long time when we were writing songs, I would sing in Swedish first to come up with the melodies, then translate the lyrics, because we don’t want to release music in Swedish.

JWB: We’ve done something similar with Japanese. We don’t speak Japanese, but we can emulate the way it sounds to come up with melodies.

AF: Languages really change the way you sing. Japanese songs rarely rhyme, but somehow they don’t sound weird. If you were to sing without rhyming in Danish, it would sound really, really strange.

Did you guys see that movie Triangle of Sadness? So much of the dialogue didn’t hit my ear right, and I think that had a lot to do with the fact that Ruben Östlund, the film’s writer and director, was working outside his native language. It struck me that what might figure as a hurdle for someone writing a film in which the characters engage in believable exchanges might actually be ideal for someone writing really moving pop songs, which tend to deal in hyperbole and cliché. To write a pop song in English, you don’t necessarily need to be extremely acquainted with how native speakers actually go about using it in their day-to-day lives. What do you make of your choice to write and record music in English?

AF: We never could have written the same songs in Danish; listening to them would probably make us want to throw up. Then, of course, there’s the practicality of wanting to be understood by as many people as possible, to have an audience outside of little baby Denmark, a country of only six million people. When I write in English, I find myself falling into using the same 500 words that are nearest to me. In English, we can get away with expressing ourselves in a way that is somehow more blunt and honest. I spend a lot of time reading thesauruses, looking words up online, or even taking my lyrics and translating them into Latin or Portuguese, then translating the output into yet another language, back and forth a few times in Google Translate, and then bringing them back into English. Somehow, Google Translate will fuck it up or add some weird extra layer, and sometimes—by doing shit like that—I’ll find the most beautiful words. We proudly use a lot of cheat codes.

There’s this line in your song “Someone New” that goes, “Hey baby, this is goodbye. Like, ‘talk to you never.’” How eye-roll-inducing that would be as a line of dialogue in a film or a novel! Yet it plays so well in the context of a pop song; it really lands.

AF: We’re always trying to position ourselves right on the cusp of irony and a kind of seriousness that can be cringe. It might be hard for people to decipher, but we actually—most of the time—mean everything we say.

JWB: It’s difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to listen to our music as a native English speaker. I often think about that with rap music, where all of these really harsh things are said. If the same things were being said in Danish, I don’t know if I could bear being out in society—to hear that playing in the background, very casually, in the supermarket while I shop.

Speaking of supermarkets, I wanted to ask you guys about money—

AF: How much do you need?

A lot! Last year, you had an installation at the Copenhagen Contemporary, a kind of popup shop called the First Hate Supermarket, stocked with items—such as framed portraits and towels with your faces printed on them—that far surpassed the typical merchandise offering for bands.

AF: I don’t know how this compares internationally, but in Denmark right now, people are really focused on owning the right apartment, the right designer clothes, the right car—maybe a Tesla if they can. Everybody’s having kids and everything has to look perfect. For a while, we were also considering where to take this project, sort of along those lines. Did we want to follow our guts and keep making weird, alternative pop music? Should we record a song in Danish and make it a national hit in Denmark and try to make money off it? We put so much work into the music, but when it comes down to it, with the way the music industry is put together now, with Spotify and streaming, we aren’t really making any money from the music. We want to make a living from what we do, but people only want to buy things. The “Supermarket” was a provocation. We wanted to make money by selling all of this stuff that is external to the music, while also drawing attention to the reality that it’s one of the only ways that we can make a living.

Much of the merchandise was emblazoned with this logo, a sort of amalgamation of various planetary symbols, that appears throughout your imagery as a band. Your song “Fortune Teller” features a play on words in the phrase “pull up,” which means both the action of drawing a Tarot card and, in contemporary slang, of arriving somewhere in style. Is astrology something you believe in? Is magic?

AF: It’s a funny tendency how, in the last few years, everyone in our generation got a deck of Tarot cards or downloaded some kind of astrology app, but these things have definitely always been a theme for us. The First Hate symbol is more than just a logo; it’s also a rune or a sigil. It’s a way of directing a lot of energy into a single symbol—and it doesn’t have to be something that other people understand for it to make sense to us. I mean…maybe if you know, you know.

Your first full-length album was titled A Prayer for the Unemployed. What kinds of jobs have you guys held—or not held?

AF: We’ve always been hustling different jobs. Our friend Dee, who’s from Scotland, found a laminated card in a church where she grew up that said “A Prayer for the Unemployed,” and we thought that was really funny.

When your song “Commercial” was released in the spring of 2022, I and many other barely employed members of our generation’s creative class were, perhaps a little cynically, banking on the belief that investing in cryptocurrencies and other digital assets would be our ticket to long-term financial solvency. I would listen to that song on repeat during the days when it was my job to moderate a group chat for the owners of an NFT—a literal .gif that they had purchased for hundreds of dollars. I was supposed to whip them into a frenzy, insisting that the token’s value was poised to surge, and muting or blocking users for expressing what we called “F.U.D”—which, initially, I thought stood for “fucked-up discourse,” but actually stood for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” It was weird, the way that song’s refrains of “Money loves me” and “Pump the prices” were uncanny echoes, almost word for word, of the sorts of sentiments I was being paid to encourage and reward.

JKB: What you were doing there is very much what major labels do with their artists. They take an artist and pump them up and give them loans—money, but also jewelry and fancy cars—and then they push the image that a certain rapper, a certain singer, is so successful, that people come to believe it. And then they are! That’s also like a magic spell, in many ways.

The chorus of your new song “Run Down Love” goes: “Run down love/ Run down my thighs/ Run down love / cruising tonight.” It seems to be about cruising for sex, the chance sexual encounter in a public place. How do things like chance, serendipity, and randomness play into your process of composing and recording songs?

JWB: This feels like a bit of a cliché, but sometimes when we are recording, the first attempt will sound the absolute best, and you can’t replicate it, and you can’t edit it.

AF: When we’re writing lyrics, sometimes a sentence pops out of nowhere, and then we build a whole song around that. All of these small moments of luck are much more valuable than sitting down with the intention of working with a theme, somehow. And yeah, that song is about cruising, which is, as you said, all about luck: you never know who’s hiding in the bush.

How did you land upon your band’s name? Is it an inversion of “first love?” A play on “first date?”

AF: Thank you bandnamemaker.com.

Really? That’s a bit of randomness.

AF: Most of the things we do are very random. Things don’t have to make sense to begin with.

JWB: You can always give them meaning later.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Karim Kazemi.

I think there was always a clear path in my mind. I always wanted to do music. I was talking to my partner recently about how I used to say that as a kid you’re like, “I want to be whatever,” and I would say, “I want to be a singer.” That’s just the cutest thing you can say. And I was telling him that and he was like, “Well, you are a singer.” I think that’s just so cute.

Did you always know that you wanted to pursue music?

In some way or another. When I was younger I was doing classical music and it was a much more restrictive technique. I could have gone to school for that. I could have had a very different path of music, but still be involved in it. So there’s probably different me’s in the universe somewhere doing something else, but I’m sure it’s always in music.

Are you still incorporating your classical training and background into your new work in any way?

I would love to do more. I think there’s so much untapped history and potential with that in terms of just arrangements, or even implementing some sort of operatic saying or classical singing. I haven’t yet. I do try to use the technique that I’ve learned with breath control and stuff, but [it’s different] with the indie singing, singer-songwriter-y vibe.

You’ll probably hear in a lot of my old music that I was so strict with that technique. You hear it really high in my voice. You can hear it being very nasal. I can’t really listen to a lot of my old songs because of the vocal memory of how I sang them. It was probably a lot healthier, but I don’t really sing that way anymore.

It’s more of a relaxed style now?

Yeah. And farther back in my throat. Growing up, I thought that singing from your chest voice was illegal. It was very airy, very high voice, and now I’m big and down deep, and it feels really good to sing the way I’m singing now. But I definitely am losing a lot of that classical technique.

Have you always been comfortable on stage, or what did it take to improve your performance skills?

I have typically been comfortable on stage. Even when I was really small, one of my earliest music memories is being at a family dinner and my mom asking me to sing the national anthem to the table of six people. And I was petrified, and I cried and said no, and then a year later I’m on stage at a recital, happily singing to 100 people in the theater or something. I’ve always been a little bit more comfortable doing that than having such an intimate crowd watching me.

On your own terms.

Yeah, on my own terms, and I do feel I got comfortable from having my YouTube channel in my early twenties, and performing on there, and exercising that side of my brain of talking to viewers.

When you’re on stage, you’re talking, but no one’s really talking back to you. You are just screaming into the void unless people heckle you, which I do love. I love being heckled. But that’s the same as making videos and the vlogs that I would do. I would just talk to an audience that couldn’t really respond back. So it was great exercise and I treat my stage presence as if I’m talking to [anybody or nobody]. I’m sure on the subconscious level, that’s what I’m doing.

Early days you were producing independently. What has the transition been like to now being signed to a major label?

It’s been fun. I produced Wisecrack outside of Arts and Crafts. so I haven’t yet produced an album under the label and their direction. I’ve been having some really great chats in preparation for the next project. A lot of support. It’s cool.

Do you find you’re able to really pause and take in these major milestones?

No. I don’t know. I have a hard time pausing and reflecting on things like [milestones] because the more these milestones occur, the more pressure I put on myself. So this will be a good reminder to reflect today.

Do you find that as an artist, you sometimes feel pushed to fit within a single genre? Or how have you avoided being pigeonholed into one genre of writing?

I change my mind every second in terms of decision making. I am very bad at making decisions. I think I just let things happen and I don’t really like to stay too monotonous.

I am curious about this upcoming project—having a label, and having more of an idea of a well-rounded vision of a musician, and a brand and stuff. They’re doing business just like anybody else. [I wonder if] I’ll feel the constraints of that genre-wise and vibe-wise. But I just like to be a little bit all over the place. I love all sorts of music, so why not make all sorts of music?

It’s refreshing to see you thrive in the freedom of that space. People have so many opinions on what it takes to be a successful artist. You need to be a good performer, you have to be outputting constantly. You have to have this super engaging, consistent online presence. Have you felt those pressures along the way to deliver in all these different areas, or what’s your process like for balancing it all?

Definitely, I do feel like in the last three or four years I’ve been too overwhelmed by that. So I’ve taken a step back and tried to not think too hard about that. The other day I was like, “Maybe I should try again and just see if it works.” So here I am editing a really stupid video, because it’s fun to keep trying to see what works. I’m a bit resentful of the fact that artists have to do this, but anyone with any sort of business does, and it’s good to sometimes have a reality check that this is a livelihood and a business, even though it’s a passion. Especially living in Vancouver and its expensiveness is draining, and when you have to think of your project and your passion as a moneymaker because you need to pay rent, it does get disheartening. I think that’s why I’ve proudly stepped back and been like, “I’m not going to be an influencer, or I’m not going to play the game. I’m not playing their game,” Now I need money. And I’m like, “Oh, sure!”

How do you have healthy boundaries with it?

I don’t know if you can when the internet’s involved. I think that on the surface I have a healthy relationship, and then when I get sad about it, that’s when I unveil how insecure and strange it feels to be in this career in this time of 2024 where [there’s pressures of] the internet, and TikTok, and record labels, and whether or not you do need one, and whether or not you need to be this brand machine. It’s all very overwhelming.

How do you find balancing your creative work with your relationships and your life?

I don’t know. It’s again, one of those things that I don’t know if I actively think about, because maybe it would create some more structure and whatever. My boyfriend and I, we’re both creatives. He’s a writer and a filmmaker, and we both have been having this discussion about how when we’re both in the house, we just want to hang out with each other, and go do something, and go get a coffee, and go get lunch, and go to shops. We never are too inspired together to make art when we’re living together. It’s when he leaves the house, I’m like, “I need to write a song.”

I don’t know if I work amazingly unless I’m secluded. I think that’s what I’m used to and that’s how I work best. In terms of it crossing over with my relationships, I guess it doesn’t really. But it would be great for me to figure that out so I could have the freedom.

And going on tour a lot, it’s nice to miss someone but the distance is hard a lot of the time. I might take a little break this next year and just kind of focus on being at home, and exercising that relationship, versus art, versus cohabitation thing.

How would you say you take care of your creative side when you’re not working?

I love being in nature. I had a sort of life-changing flight. I used to be very scared of flying, and I played a festival in Yellowknife a month ago, and when we were flying back on that flight, I actually looked out the window for the first time and I saw these insane clouds, the craziest thing. And I’m like, “God, this world is truly a gorgeous thing.” So I really think that natural elements and the sky really inspire me. You think, what really matters in life?

Do you have any habits or creative tics that you sometimes have to fight against and how do you do it?

I’m a bad procrastinator and putting off things because it doesn’t feel like the right time. In terms of songwriting and stuff, it’s not a forced thing to me. So if the elements aren’t right, I’ll be like, “Well, not today.” And I think that can be a bad habit and a bit inhibiting.

I’ve seen some of your videos where you talk about your love of scents and the connection to memories. Have you always been more sensitive to smell? And when did you discover there was comfort in it for you?

I think always for both of those. I became more aware of it and used it to my advantage in the last few years. Buying perfume is a really expensive habit, but it really brings me so much peace—finding a new smell, breaking it down, and seeing why I like it. And usually the reason that I like smells is because it’s a memory attributed to them.

What’s your earliest memory of a scent that evoked some emotional response?

I really love white floral scents, like lilacs, or honeysuckle, or Jasmine. It really takes me back to being in my uncle’s backyard. I think the last time I was there I would’ve been four, and I can just see the white flowers. That definitely is the first. That’s a scent memory that I come back to a lot.

Is it safe to say that you often write from memories? What do you think draws you back to the past to write from?

I think I do. I tend to really, really be crushed under the weight of my own nostalgia.

It definitely is me working out a lot of things. As I’m writing it, I’m going through something that I hadn’t yet processed. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it, and why I’ve been in a bit of a creative block this last year in terms of songwriting, just because I think that all my songs were about my past, my childhood, and things that have happened to me. I’m like, “Okay, I’m at peace with that. Now what do I write about?” Now I have to live in the present, Oh great!

Would you say your writing is really intentional then, or do you ever just write something because you like it?

I’m trying to do that. I think it’s a great songwriting technique and frees up a lot of space in my brain to just write whatever. But in the past and up until now my writing is really intentional. I always want it to be super personal and almost too vague for anybody to understand, but so specific to me.

What is your approach to writing typically like? Is it very collaborative?

No, it should be. Again, there’s so many things that it would be great for me to experiment with more, to unlock a new form of songwriting for me. I’d love to do that and I’m open to it, but in the past it’s been very independent and kind of no plan, no structure, no schedule. I never was looking at the clock at 2:00 PM, “Okay, now let’s write for two hours.” It happens in the shower, on a walk, gotta run home something’s sparked.

It’s kind of unrealistic that way because it takes a long time to get songs out.

I really admire people who can just set aside their whole morning, and they’re writing a song A to B, or just trying to figure it out. Got to work on that. I’ve said this for years too, by the way.

Are you someone that’s typically very assertive in the production process, or what have you found works best when you’re working with others in the studio?

I’m typically very open. When I was recording my first album Below the Salt, I was really not familiar with the studio vibe at all, and I didn’t really know what to do. I had the band Tennis come in and do a couple songs for me and Alaina from Tennis said one thing that I always try and bring into every studio session is just “see every idea through, even if you know it’s a bad one, see it through, because you might change your perspective by the end.”

So I try to do that, and be really open. Typically, up until now, I brought full songs into the studio and we just produced them. We don’t write them. So they seem very precious and very, very special to me. So if a producer says, “Well, let’s cut this verse.” In my mind I’m like [husky screaming] but actually the song flows so much better, and I have to sit with it and be like, “Okay, actually that was a better idea,” because you have a completely different view on this song that to me is so special, and to you, it’s just a song right now. So you can have fun with it.

So that’s what I try to do and just be really open. I could definitely be more assertive. I do think it’s hard because if I am out of my comfort zone—I’m not well versed in producing and all the little details that go into it—so I do get a little intimidated, but we’re always learning. I feel like this next time I’ll go into the studio, I’ll be even more confident than I was.

How do you start a project typically?

I typically will look and see if I have enough songs that I’ve written over a course of however long. For Wisecrack, it was a very conceptual album to me, so I had such a vision and when I met Dave Vertesi who produced it, he just understood it. And so it was really easy. I didn’t have to look anywhere else for producers, he was just kind of like, “Okay, this is what we’re doing and this is what I want it to be, and you get it.” And so it’s super easy and really painless.

And with Below the Salt, to me that was more of a compilation album. There was really no through line conceptually. The songs were really different from one another. I worked with a couple of different producers on them. I was very young and I didn’t really know what I was doing.

And so for this next one, I don’t really know how to approach it because I don’t really know what it is yet. I have some ideas, I have some songs. I feel like I want to go in a different direction genre-wise, but I’m not sure what that is. So this one is going to be a mixture of the past two in terms of vision, but I don’t really know how to approach this one. I’m kind of stumped.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path?

Well, I don’t know if this is surprising, but it’s something that I’ve been realizing is that it’s really hard for me to be a boss. When you’re on tour and you have a big band that you have to take care of, you are technically the boss. And I think it’s a weird balance of having the sense of unity as a band, but then these people are just here for your project. And it is a bit of a weird imposter thing in my brain where I’m like, “That’s a lot of pressure.” And it’s hard to be a boss.

What’s something you wish someone told you when you began to make music?

There are no rules, none at all. You can really do whatever you want if you’re brave enough. There’s no limits. I’ll listen to a song and I’ll still have a moment where I’m like, “You can do that? I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.”

What do you think writing music and being an artist has taught you about yourself?

I think that I really need it and that I can always be better than I am right now. There’s always room to learn more about myself, even if I think I have it figured out. And I think that’s always important to reflect on, that no matter what you put out or write, you can always write something completely different and learn from that the next day.

Always evolving.

Yeah, constantly evolving, and like I said, I have a bad time making decisions, and maybe that favors me in some way.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hannah Harlacher.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle of … the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
— (BAP Principle of Unity)

Today, October 7, 2024, the world commemorates – some in horror, others in celebration – a full year of a genocidal war, prosecuted in real time in occupied Palestine. In spite of the commonly accepted lie that the Al Aqsa Flood on October 7 was the beginning, this “war” actually began on November 29, 1947, with the passing of the UN resolution that led to the creation of the Israeli settler colonial state. For the next seventy-six years, with the backing of Western governments the state of Israel would lead a war of conquest, ethnically cleansing and massacring hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, displacing and maiming millions, and establishing an apartheid state. Therefore, the Black Alliance for Peace views the Al-Aqsa Flood as a legitimate resistance operation by the besieged Palestinians – the only party with an internationally recognized right of resistance. We support Palestinian resistance against the violent military domination by white supremacist imperialism and colonialism that began, first in the form of British colonialism, and continues in the form of zionism.

In response to the prison breakout of October 7, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IDF) unleashed a horrific wave of state terror with indiscriminate bombing, targeting of civilian infrastructure, rape, torture and starvation with an obvious and specific target – the non-combatant civilian population. The result – a second Nakba – another catastrophe for the Palestinian people, with tens of thousands slaughtered with impunity. This systematic state terrorism has now engulfed Lebanon, with Israel replicating its depraved, anti-human tactics from Gaza. It began with an attempt to terrorize the resistance group Hezbollah including the killing of the group’s revered leader and anti-colonial fighter, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah. This terrorism has continued with the indiscriminate massacre of civilians in an attempt to force the Lebanese people into submission.

Over the last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) along with all the other Western-run international bodies that claim to defend human rights have proven themselves complicit, acting as mere puppets of U.S. imperialism. As global protests erupt in fury, Israel continues its slaughter, understanding clearly that the U.S. settler-state and the white West will continue to provide it protection.

What the last year has reconfirmed for BAP is that the violence we have witnessed is part of a global system of white supremacism dependent on unrestrained state terror in order to continue the extraction of value from still colonized and oppressed non-European peoples, working classes and nations.  The militarization of police, from the Israeli Occupation Force in Gaza to the deadly exchange programs in domestic colonized communities, is the extension of fascist settler colonialism. If we understand the U.S. as a settler project, then its global expansion can only result in one thing – replicating systems of dominance and repression everywhere. Here, we must also recognize that the attacks on Gaza and Lebanon mirror the looming assault on Haiti. Both represent the deep-rooted racist violence that has always been at the core of the Pan-European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy since this system of oppression emerged in 1492.

Speaking out against this system of global white supremacy, whether here or abroad, is met with criminalization. From resisting austerity and Cop Cities in the U.S., to the prosecution of the “Uhuru 3” as agents of Russia, to curtailing speech and protest in hopes of dismantling the ‘student intifada’ across campuses, to the Palestinians and Lebanese fighting occupation, the message is clear: dissent is dangerous. But we must stand firm in truth. The real terrorists are those upholding the illegal zionist settler-colonial apartheid regime. The Black Alliance for Peace condemns Israel’s decades-long barbarism and fully supports the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation. Decolonization and self-determination are not simply demands – they are central to the realization of human rights. And since there is no real justice for Palestinians in Western-controlled international laws, we stand by their right to fight for their humanity. Collective resistance is a central principle of the People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework that guides BAP’s approach to the human rights issue.

Fifty years into the future, the zionist massacre of Palestinians and invasion of Lebanon will be widely recognized for the war crimes that they are. But in the same way that it takes little courage today to oppose the segregation of the 1950s, the time to stand up against genocide and colonialism is right now – today. And we do not have the luxury of waiting for history to vindicate the Palestinians’ just struggle; we must act to help end the zionists’ ever-expanding genocidal war now, once and for all.

Our struggles are intertwined: we are bound by the shared reality of living under white supremacist, settler-colonial states. When one of us suffers, we all do. And together, we will resist. Long live the resistance. Glory to the martyrs. Palestine will be free – and so will the world once our peoples unite to defeat the U.S./EU/NATO Axis Domination.

Resist the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination

Defeat the war in the U.S. being waged against the resisters

Smash the Duopoly

No Compromise! No Retreat!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

The English theologian Thomas Fuller is credited with first saying: “It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

The usage was meant figuratively to refer to bad times being followed by good times.

Literally, however, as the sun approaches the horizon there is a gradual brightening of the sky.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

For the budget-minded types, the Olympics, and analogous monumental sporting events, continue to lose their appeal – along with the finances.  The extortionate strain on the public wallet, the bleeding of funds from budgets, has made them most unattractive propositions for the hosts.  To this can be added the disruptions to commerce, the occupation of valuable real estate along with environmental harm, the forceful displacement of residents, instances of gentrification and the redirecting of labour from vital infrastructure projects.

Even for the sports-crazed Australians, such events as the 2026 Commonwealth Games proved unappetising, with the state Victorian government cancelling the event in July 2023.  The whole matter had been grossly irresponsible on the part of the Andrews government, given its initial praise of the games leading up to their re-election.  The Victorian Auditor General was deeply unimpressed by the episode, subsequently finding that the cancellation had cost A$589 million, comprising A$150 million in terms of employee and operating costs and the A$380 million settlement.

In March this year, there were media rumblings that Brisbane, the planned host city for the 2032 Olympics, was considering a similar response.  The Queensland state government had sought advice about how much it would cost cancelling the entire effort and received an estimate lying anywhere between A$500 million and A$1 billion.  A further $3 billion in federal funding would have also been compromised.  The fractious venture was set to continue.

With six months to go, Paris was awash with the logistical disruptions that come with such an event.  Transit fares had increased.  The bouquinistes with their book stalls along the Seine, a feature made permanent by Napoleon III in 1859, were threatened by the city’s police with closure for the duration of the Games, a threat that President Emmanuel Macron eventually scotched.  Public sector employees demanded pay increases and unions got busy planning strikes.

The night before the opening of the Games saw thousands of activists gather at the Place de la République, coordinated by the activist collective La Revers de la Médaille (the Other Side of the Medal).  The event, featuring some 80 grassroot organisations, had been billed the “Counter-Opening Ceremony of the Olympics” and inspired by the statement “des Jeux, mai pour qui?” (“Games, but for whom?”)

Representing a broader coalition of groups, La Revers de la Médaille had released a statement in Libération prior to the gathering mocking official claims that Paris 2024 would leave a society more inclusive in its wake.  This could hardly be reconciled with the eviction of some 12,500 vulnerable individuals as part of an effort described as “social cleansing”.

In their “Oxford Olympics Study 2024”, co-authors Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg conclude that the Olympics “remain costly and continue to have large cost overruns, to a degree that threatens their viability.”  All Games, “without exception”, run over budget.  “For no other type of megaproject is this the case, not even the construction of nuclear power plants or the storage of nuclear waste.”  For organisers of the event, the budget is an airy notion, “a fictitious minimum that was never sufficient” typical of the “Blank Check Syndrome”.

The authors acknowledge the efforts made by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reform the games through such efforts as Agenda 2020 and Agenda 2020+5 but find their overall efforts patchy and unsuccessful.  Despite these programs, the cost of the Games were “statistically significantly increasing.”  Admittedly, the instances of cost overruns had significantly decreased until 2008, after which the trend was reversed.  The costs for Paris 2024, based on estimates available at the study’s publication, came to $US8.7 billion, a cost overrun of 115% in real terms.  “Cost overruns are the norm for the Games, past, present and future.  The Iron Law applies: ‘Over budget, over and over again.’”

Such events are, however, always attractive to the political classes willing to find some placing in posterity’s shiny ranks.  As the money they play with is almost never their own, expense is less significant than the pyrotechnics, the noisy show, the effort, the collective will that figures such as Albert Speer understood so well when planning the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  Give the public, and the sporting fraternity, flags, standards, pageantry.  Let them perform in large stadia, on pitches, and in water.  The world will soon forget the killjoys worried about money or weepy about the displaced.

It pays remembering those words of lamentation from US foreign correspondent William Shirer in his diary, penned on August 16, 1936: “I’m afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda.  First, the Nazis have run the Games on a lavish scale never before experienced, and this has appealed to the athletes.  Second, the Nazis have put up a very good front for the general visitors, especially the big businessmen.”

Such a formula has, for the most part, worked for decades, despite the odd hiccup of dissent and forensic critiques of the Blank Check Syndrome.  Be they despotic, authoritarian or democratically elected, if corrupt representatives, this is a show that is bound to go on with profligate persistence.

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

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Former president Donald Trump was recently convicted by a New York jury after prosecutors claimed he was guilty of  “hoodwinking” voters in the 2016 election by paying to cover up his boinking a beefy porn star.   Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg proclaimed that Trump was guilty of taking steps with “the end of keeping information away from the electorate.”

Cue the casino scene from the movie Casablanca, with the French officer lamenting that he was “shocked, shocked” to find gambling on the premises.

Lying is practically the job description for politicians. Economist John Burnheim, in his 1985 book Is Democracy Possible?, observed of electoral campaigns: “Overwhelming pressures to lie, to pretend, to conceal, to denigrate or sanctify are always present when the object to be sold is intangible and its properties unverifiable until long after the time when the decision to buy can be reversed.”

A successful politician is often merely someone who bamboozled more voters than the other liar running for office. Dishonesty is the distinguishing trait of the political class. Thomas Jefferson observed in 1799, “Whenever a man casts a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” One carpetbagger Reconstruction-era Louisiana governor declared, “I don’t pretend to be honest. I only pretend to be as honest as anybody in politics.”

A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.  Legitimacy in contemporary democracy often consists merely of lying to get a license to steal. Candidates have almost unlimited prerogative to deceive the voters as long as they do not directly use force or violence during election campaigns. And once they capture office, they can use government power against those they deceived.

Trump is being legally hounded eight years after a presidential campaign that was a bipartisan farce. Americans recognized they had a choice of scoundrels.  A September 2016 Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary Clinton was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Trump. Gallup noted, “Americans rate the two candidates lowest on honesty.” The combined chicanery of Clinton and Trump made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year. But according to prosecutor Bragg, Trump’s alleged payoff to  Stormy Daniels was  a greater sin against democracy than Hillary Clinton deleting 30,000 emails from her time as secretary of state that a congressional committee subpoenaed in 2015 and her lying to FBI agents in July 2016.

America is increasingly a “Garbage In, Garbage Out” democracy. Politicians dupe citizens and then invoke deluded votes to sanctify and stretch their power. Presidents and members of Congress take oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution. But, as former U.S. senator Bob Kerrey explained in 2013, “The problem is, the second your hand comes off the Bible, you become an asshole.”

The era of nearly boundless cynicism did not begin with Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office. A 1996 Washington Post poll found that 97 percent of people interviewed trusted their spouses, 87 percent trusted teachers, 71 percent trusted the “average person,” but only 14 percent trusted politicians. A 1994 poll found that only 3 percent of those surveyed had a “high” opinion of politicians. Burns Roper, the director of the Roper poll, observed, “Those in government-related occupations are at the very bottom of the list of occupational groups thought well of.”  A 1995 survey by the Washington Post, Harvard, and the Kaiser Foundation found that 89 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “politicians tell voters what they want to hear, not what they will actually try to do if elected”; only 10 percent disagreed.

Public opinion polls on trusting politicians reveal perverse preferences. A 1997 CNN–USA TODAY–Gallup poll asked, “Is Clinton honest and trustworthy?”; 44 percent of respondents said yes and 51 percent said no. Yet, when asked, “Is Clinton honest/trustworthy enough to be president?” 55 percent said yes and 41 percent said no. Apparently, the more power a person acquires, the more irrelevant his character becomes. Someone who is not scrupulous enough to sell used cars somehow becomes sufficiently honest to commence wars.  It is almost as if people presume a politician’s power magically compensates for his moral depravity.

The same subversive assumptions rescued George W. Bush. A Time magazine poll in late September 2004 found that only 37 percent  of registered voters believed that Bush had been “truthful in describing the situation” in Iraq, while 55 percent said the “situation is worse than Bush has reported.” Ironically, exit polls on Election Day showed that “Voters who cited honesty as the most important quality in a candidate broke 2 to 1 in Mr. Bush’s favor.” (Both Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry flogged the truth.)  In 2004, many voters apparently concluded that Bush was trustworthy despite his false statements and misrepresentations on Iraq.  The vast extent of Bush’s Iraq lies was covered up until after his re-election.

While New York prosecutors are legally impaling Trump for lies tied to the 2016 election, President Biden has faced to no legal consequences for an endless torrent of falsehoods.  From fabrications on foreign conflicts, to his denials of Biden family kickbacks from foreign governments, to the January 6^th Capitol clash, to those Pfizer vaccines that would magically keep everyone safe from Covid, Biden has uncorked one howler after another.  But as long as he occupies the Oval Office, he enjoys sovereign immunity from the truth.

Lies are political weapons of mass destruction, obliterating all limits on government power. Lies subvert democracy by crippling citizens’ ability to rein in government. Citizens are left clueless about perils until it is too late for the nation to pull back. Political lies are far more dangerous than Leviathan lackey intellectuals admit. Big government requires Big Lies—and not just about wars but across the board. The more powerful government becomes,  the more abuses it commits and the more lies it must tell. Unfortunately, Americans have no legal way to commandeer government files until long after most power grabs are consummated.

The pervasiveness of political lies goes to the heart of whether Leviathan can be reconciled with democracy. How much can the people be deceived and still purportedly be self-governing? Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote of the “most essential political freedom, the right to unmanipulated factual information without which all freedom of opinion becomes a cruel hoax.” But any such right has become practically extinct since her time. Even when much of the public becomes convinced that the government has lied, there is still little or no pressure on Congress or from Congress to force executive agencies to disclose facts.

When people blindly trust politicians, the biggest liars win. There is no reason to expect politicians to be more honest in the future than they were in the past. Biden’s lies on Ukraine are eerily similar to the Obama administration’s lies on Libya, which resembled the Bush team’s lies on Iraq and the Clinton administration’s lies on Kosovo. It is folly to trust whoever wins the next presidential election to morally redeem the U.S. government.

Any fantasy about a pending age of honest politicians is a bigger delusion than anything Trump or Biden are peddling. America is increasingly a “Garbage In, Garbage Out” democracy. Politicians dupe citizens and then invoke deluded votes to sanctify and stretch their power. The easiest way to stack the deck in favor of honesty is to reduce the number of cards politicians can hold. The smaller the government, the fewer dead bodies it will likely need to hide.

Deceiving voters is as much a violation of their rights as barring them from the polling booth. Only if we assume that people consent to being lied to can pervasive political lies be reconciled with democracy. And if people consent to being deceived, elections become little more than hospital patients choosing who will inject their next sedatives.

An earlier version of this piece appeared at the Libertarian Institute.

The post Politicians Will Always Be Shameless Liars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by James Bovard.

The day the news axe fell: Presenters, insiders fear ‘huge blow for democracy’

The future of New Zealand’s media landscape is becoming clearer by the day, with confirmation that it will no longer feature one of the country’s big two TV news networks.

Warner Bros. Discovery has revealed that all of Newshub’s operations will be shut down, effective July 5. That includes the flagship 6pm bulletin, The AM Show, and the Newshub website.

294 staff are set to lose their jobs.

It’s also been confirmed that TVNZ’s programme Sunday will be cancelled, following yesterday’s announcement that Fair Go, as well as both 1News at Midday and 1News Tonight, are being canned in their current format.

New Zealand’s media industry has been rocked by the bleeding obvious which is that their failed ratings system for legacy media was always more art than science.

The NZ radio ratings system is a diary that you fill in every 15 minutes — which no one ever fills in properly.

The NZ newspaper ratings are opinion polls and the NZ TV ratings system is a magical 180 boxes that limits choice to whoever had the TV remote.

When the sales rep told the advertiser that 300,000 people would read, see, hear their advert, it was based on ratings systems that were flattering but not real.

With the ruthlessness of online audience measurement, advertisers could see exactly how many people were actually seeing their adverts, and the legacy media never adapted to this new reality.

What we see now is hollowed out journalism competing against social media hate algorithms designed to generate emotional responses rather than Fourth Estate accountability.

New Zealand has NEVER had the audience size to make advertising based broadcasting feasible, that’s why it’s always required a state broadcaster — with no Fourth Estate who will hold this hard right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing government to account?

Minister missing in action
Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee has refused to support the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill that Labour’s former minister Willie Jackson put forward that would at least force Google and Facebook to pay for the journalism they take for free.

Lee has been utterly hopeless and missing in action here — if “Democracy dies in darkness”, National are pulling the plug.

This government doesn’t want accountability, does it?

Instagram this year switched on a new filter to smother political debate and we know actual journalism has been smothered by the social media algorithms.

I don’t think that most people who get their information from their social media feeds understand they aren’t seeing the most important journalism but are in fact seeing the most inflammatory rhetoric to keep people outraged and addicted to doom scrolling.

When Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters does his big lie that the entire mainstream media were bribed because of a funding note by NZ on Air in regards to coverage of Māori issues for the Public Interest Journalism fund — which by the way was quickly clarified by NZ on Air as not an editorial demand — he conflates and maliciously spins and NZ’s democracy suffers.

Muddled TVNZ
Television New Zealand has always come across like a muddle. It aspires to be BBC public broadcasting yet has the commercial imperatives of any Crown Owned Enterprise. If Labour had merged TVNZ and RNZ and made TVNZ 1 commercial free so that the advertising revenue could cross over to Newshub, it would have rebuilt the importance of public broadcasting while actually regulating the broken free market.

When will we get a Labour Party that actually gives a damn about public broadcasting rather than pay lip service to it?

Ultimately Newshub’s demise is a story of ruthless transnational interests and geopolitical cultural hegemony.

Corporate Hollywood soft power wants to continue its cultural dominance as the South Pacific friction continues between the United States and China.

New Zealand is an important plank for American hegemony in the South Pacific and as China and American competition heats up, Warners Bros Discovery suddenly buying a large stake in our media was always a geopolitical calculation over a commercial one.

Cultural dominance doesn’t require nor want an active journalism, so they will keep the channel open purely as a means of dominating domestic culture without any of the Fourth Estate obligations.

That bitter angry feeling you have watching Warner Bros Discovery destroy our Fourth Estate is righteous.

Social licence trashed
They bought a media outlet that has had a 35-year history of being a structural part of our media environment and dumping it trashes their social licence in this country.

That feeling of rage you have watching a multibillion transnational vandalise our environment is going to be repeated the millisecond you see the American mining interests lining up to mine conservation land with all their promises to repair anything they break.

Remember — the transnational ain’t your friend regardless of its pronouns.

That person they rolled in with the soft-glazed CEO face to do the sad, sad crying is disingenuous and condescending.

Now Warner Bros has killed Newshub off, we have no option as Kiwis but to boycott whatever is left of TV3 and water down Warner Bros remaining interests altogether.

They’ve burnt their bridges with us in New Zealand by walking away from their social contract, we should have no troubles returning the favour!

The only winners here are rightwing politicians who don’t want their counterproductive and corrupt decisions to be scrutinised.

We are a poorer and weaker democracy after these news cuts.

Why bother having a Minister of Broadcasting if all they do is fiddle while the industry burns?

Welcome to your new media future in Aotearoa New Zealand . . .

Republished with permission from The Daily Blog.

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

8 March was not always International Women’s Day, nor has there always been any such day at all. The idea emerged from the Socialist International (also known as the Second International), where Clara Zetkin of the German Social Democratic Party and others fought from 1889 to hold a day to celebrate working women’s lives and struggles. Zetkin, alongside Alexandra Kollontai of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, sustained a struggle with their comrades to recognise the role of working women and the role of domestic labour in the creation of social wealth. In a context in which women across the North Atlantic states did not have the right to vote, these women intervened in a debate that was taking place among delegates of the Socialist International over whether men and women workers must be united under the banner of socialism to fight against their shared experience of exploitation or whether women should stay home.

In 1908, the women’s section of the Socialist Party of America held a mass rally in Chicago on 3 May to celebrate Woman’s Day. The following year, on 28 February 1909, this expanded to National Woman’s Day, held across the US. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen in 1910, a resolution was finally passed for all sections of the Socialist International to organise Women’s Day celebrations that would take place the following year. Socialist women organised public events in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland on 19 March 1911 to commemorate the March Revolution of 1848 in Germany. In 1912, Europeans celebrated Women’s Day on 12 May, and in 1913, Russian women marked the date on 8 March. In 1917, women workers in Russia organised a mass strike and demonstrations for ‘bread and peace’ on 8 March, which sparked the wider struggles that led to the Russian Revolution. At the Communist Women’s Second International Conference in 1921, 8 March was officially chosen as the date for annual celebrations of International Working Women’s Day. That is how the date became a fixture on the international calendar of struggles.

In 1945, communist women from around the world formed the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a body that was instrumental in establishing International Women’s Day. In 1972, Freda Brown from Australia’s WIDF section and the Communist Party of Australia wrote to the United Nations (UN) to propose that it hold an International Women’s Year and that it advance the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Pushed by WIDF, Helvi Sipilä, a Finnish diplomat and the first woman to hold the position of UN assistant secretary-general (at a time when 97% of senior positions were held by men) seconded the proposal for the International Women’s Year, which was accepted in 1972 and held in 1975. In 1977, the United Nations passed a resolution to hold a Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace, which is now known as International Women’s Day and held on 8 March.

Each March, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research honours this tradition by publishing a text that highlights an important woman in our struggle, such as Kanak Mukherjee (1921–2005) of India, Nela Martínez Espinosa (1912–2004) of Ecuador, and Josie Mpama (1903–1979) of South Africa. This year, we celebrate International Women’s Day (though perhaps International Working Women’s Month would be better) with the publication of dossier no. 74, Interrupted Emancipation: Women and Work in East Germany, produced in collaboration with the Zetkin Forum for Social Research and International Research Centre DDR (IFDDR). We have published two previous studies with IFDDR, one on the economic history of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and the other on healthcare in the DDR. The Zetkin Forum is our partner on the European continent, named after both Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), whose work contributed to the creation of International Working Women’s Day, and her son Maxim Zetkin (1883–1965), a surgeon who helped build the new healthcare system in the Soviet Union, fought as part of the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic (1931–1939), and became a leading physician in the DDR.

Interrupted Emancipation traces the struggles of socialist women in East Germany in various women’s platforms and within the state structures themselves. These women – such as Katharina ‘Käthe’ Kern, Hilde Benjamin, Lykke Aresin, Helga E. Hörz, Grete Groh-Kummerlöw, and Herta Kuhrig – fought to build an egalitarian legal order, develop socialist policies for childcare and eldercare, and bring women into leadership positions in both economic and political institutions. These programmes were not designed merely to improve the welfare and wellbeing of women, but also to transform social life, social hierarchies, and social consciousness. As Hilde Benjamin, the DDR’s minister of justice from 1953 to 1967, explained, it was essential that laws not only provide a framework to guarantee and enforce social rights, but that they also ‘achieve further progress in the development of socialist consciousness’.

Women entered the workforce in large numbers, fought for better family planning (including abortions), and demanded the dignity that they deserved. Interrupted Emancipations teaches us how so much was achieved in such a short time (a mere forty years). Leaders like Helga Hörz argued for women’s entry into the workforce not merely to enhance their incomes, but to ensure the possibility of women’s participation in public life. However, changes did not take place at the speed required. In December 1961, the politburo of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) condemned the ‘fact that a totally insufficient percentage of women and girls exercise middle and managerial functions’, blaming, in part, ‘the underestimation of the role of women in socialist society that still exists among many – especially men, including leading party, state, economic, and trade union functionaries’. To transform this reality, women set up committees in workplaces as well as housewives’ brigades to build mass struggles that fought to win society over to women’s emancipation.

The destruction of the DDR in the 1990s and its incorporation into West Germany led to the erosion of the gains socialist women had made. Today, in Germany, these socialist policies no longer remain, nor do mass struggles retain the level of vitality that they achieved in the four decades of the DDR. That is why the dossier is called Interrupted Emancipation, perhaps a reflection of the authors’ hope and conviction that this dynamic can be brought back to life.

Gisela Steineckert was one of the women who benefitted from the transformations that took place in the DDR, where she became a celebrated writer and worked to develop the cultural sector. In her poem ‘In the Evening’, she asks, is the struggle worth it? Without much pause, she answers: ‘the heart of the dreamer is always overly full’. The necessity of a better world is a sufficient answer.

In the evening, our dreams rest their heads against the moon,
asking with a deep sigh if the struggle is even worth it.
Everyone knows someone who suffers, suffers more than anyone should.
Oh, and the heart of the dreamer is always overly full.

In the evening the mockers come, a smile on their lips.
Belittle our every asset, turn pounds into chips.
They like to come at us with their lines, no one’s spared it.
Oh, and they advise us: Nothing was worth it.

In the evening, the sceptics come with creased faces,
leaf through old letters, don’t trust our words.
They stay away from it all, age ahead of their time.
Oh, and their pain and suffering are sublime.

In the evening, the fighters take off their boots,
eat dinner with relish, hammer three nails into the roof.
They want to contend with half a book, fall asleep at the end of a line,
amid captured weapons, next to red wine.

The post The Struggle for Women’s Emancipation Will Always Be Worth It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/21/the-struggle-for-womens-emancipation-will-always-be-worth-it/feed/ 0 465416 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/journalist-reports-from-rafah-i-always-imagine-myself-being-blown-up/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/journalist-reports-from-rafah-i-always-imagine-myself-being-blown-up/#respond Thu, 15 Feb 2024 15:50:01 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a6136abe06672775ea379cb11d4f3c46
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/journalist-reports-from-rafah-i-always-imagine-myself-being-blown-up/feed/ 0 459011 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/i-always-imagine-myself-being-blown-up-journalist-in-rafah-on-dire-situation-as-invasion-looms/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/i-always-imagine-myself-being-blown-up-journalist-in-rafah-on-dire-situation-as-invasion-looms/#respond Thu, 15 Feb 2024 13:16:42 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=e87f2cdef98365dc83de1b2dc1c7f182

We speak with journalist Akram al-Satarri, reporting from Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza bordering Egypt, where more than a million Palestinians are now packed together following forced relocations from elsewhere in the territory. Israel is threatening to launch a ground invasion of Rafah, which Israel had previously designated as a safe zone. Al-Satarri describes how hunger, thirst and other pressures are impacting the displaced population as the death toll continues to rise from Israel’s assault. “Every single time I walk one step in Gaza, I always imagine myself being blown up,” he says. “The killing is massive. The killing is thorough. And I think no one in Gaza is protected, no safe haven.”

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/i-always-imagine-myself-being-blown-up-journalist-in-rafah-on-dire-situation-as-invasion-looms/feed/ 0 458913 https://grist.org/politics/joe-manchin-senate-jim-justice-climate/ https://grist.org/politics/joe-manchin-senate-jim-justice-climate/#respond Fri, 10 Nov 2023 23:50:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=622383 Joe Manchin announced his first Senate campaign in 2010 with an ad showing him taking a shot at the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill with a rifle. It proved to be a metaphor for his time in Congress. 

During the 13 years the Democrat represented the people of West Virginia in the upper chamber, he proved to be an essential supporter of climate legislation even as he stood in the way of climate legislation. He had no qualms about withholding votes on key legislation like the Build Back Better Act or demanding concessions — often in support of fossil fuels — to support party priorities like the landmark Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022. In a closely divided Senate, his ability to stymie President Joe Biden’s agenda made him a fickle ally in the climate fight — but an ally just the same.

And now he’s quitting.

Manchin, 76, was gearing up for his third Senate run and was widely expected to face Jim Justice, West Virginia’s Republican governor and a billionaire coal operator. He was looking at a tough race but earlier this year defiantly declared, “Make no mistake. I will win any race I enter.”

Apparently, he’s had second thoughts. Manchin announced on Thursday that he believes in his “heart of hearts” that he has “accomplished what I set out to do for West Virginia” and will not run after all. He didn’t say what he might do next, but said he is leaving Congress in favor of a “movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.”

Some have speculated that Manchin may be on the cusp of a third-party presidential run, which would, yet again, make him a thorn in Biden’s side — a particular strength of his. Regardless, his departure likely ensures a stronger Republican presence in the Senate, if not a GOP takeover of the chamber, and will make passing any kind of climate legislation a whole lot harder.

“I would think the implications are straightforward for climate policy,” Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard University, told Grist in an email. “If Manchin is (surprisingly) replaced by another Democrat, that could have positive implications for federal climate policy. If he is replaced (as seems likely) by a Republican, then the implications will be decidedly negative, particularly if it means a change of the Senate majority party.” 

Not that Manchin ever made passing any kind of climate legislation easy. He is socially conservative and a big supporter of coal, both because of where he comes from and because his family owns a coal processing plant that earns him $600,000 per year. 

Since arriving in Washington in 2010, he has rejected efforts to cap carbon emissions, opposed the Clean Power Plan, and supported building a petrochemical hub in the Ohio River Valley. He also voted with President Donald Trump about 50 percent of the time. But Manchin, being Manchin, also endorsed wind energy in his home state, came out against mountaintop-removal coal mining, and worked with the United Mine Workers Association to help protect miners from black lung disease. 

Biden took office in 2021 with Democrats holding a one-seat advantage in the Senate. That gave Manchin outsized power to influence the president’s agenda, as he was often the deciding vote. He refused to sign on to a little-known but vital piece of legislation, called the Clean Energy Performance Program, that would push the nation toward renewables even after multiple changes, and infamously refused, at the last minute, to support Build Back Better, even if it did ultimately pass.

However, as Democrats will grit their teeth and admit, what climate legislation did pass during Biden’s presidency did so largely because of Manchin’s support. He has played a role in the passage of several large climate bills and cosponsored the Energy Act of 2020, aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions, which passed as part of the year’s omnibus spending bill. And he did get the IRA passed, ushering in the nation’s first sweeping effort to address climate change.

Still, Manchin made his support of Biden’s signature legislation contingent upon Democratic approval of a permitting reform bill. Although he framed it as a means of accelerating clean energy projects, environmental groups noted that it also cleared the path for fossil fuel projects, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline that will carry natural gas 304 miles across West Virginia to Virginia. Manchin boasted in September that “because of the IRA, we are now producing fossil fuels at record levels.” He also was quick to remind voters in the bright-red Mountain State that the law was a bipartisan victory. “The Inflation Reduction Act isn’t a red bill or a blue bill, and it sure isn’t a green bill,” he said. “It’s an American bill.”

Still, his popularity at home took a hit. Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, believes Manchin genuinely thought his support of the IRA would play better among his constituents. “I think he was kind of taken aback by the backlash that he received. The IRA is massive and throws a lot of money in different directions,” Rabe said. “He had every expectation [that] a lot of that would end up in West Virginia.” 

But Manchin’s once reliably blue state has changed during his time in Congress. The socially conservative, labor-friendly Democrats who used to run things there are a vanishing breed, replaced by Republicans at every level. Despite Manchin’s efforts to appeal to the middle, Eric Engle, the board president of the Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action, says voters are increasingly partisan. A successful Democratic candidate must offer a genuine alternative to Republicans rather than try to appeal to everyone with the occasional bipartisan gesture. Otherwise, voters are likely to lean toward Jim Justice — and the GOP knows it. 

“We like our odds in West Virginia,” Republican Senator Steve Daines, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement. 

The sole Democrat left in the Senate race is Zach Shrewsbury, a Marine Corps veteran and coal miner’s grandson who is running as a worker-friendly candidate. He is a relative unknown, while Justice, who has been endorsed by Trump, is immensely popular, despite his history of business mismanagement and refusal to address his companies’ dangerous unreclaimed coal mines.

Justice is widely expected to win the Republican primary in February. Should he make it to Congress, Engle says Justice won’t be any help addressing climate change. His record as governor and a businessman shows he is no friend of environmental regulations.

“Justice has never seen a bill or a lawsuit or a liability that he didn’t try to weasel his way out of,” Engle said. “He’s trying to use being in political office to dodge accountability, and to maybe change rules and regulations as they apply to him.” 

Nationally, political analysts say Manchin’s decision may not change much given that public opinion was already tilting against him. But with Manchin out, Republican and Democratic organizations probably won’t pay much attention to the state and instead focus on contested races in places like Ohio and Florida.

Rabe looked even further down the road, to what the U.S. and West Virginia might look like not just after Manchin, but after whoever comes after him. His efforts to play both sides — sometimes supporting climate policies while sometimes supporting fossil fuels — probably won’t play any longer. That could force the state’s Democrats to embrace something other than the middle-of-the-road energy and environmental policies Manchin, and other representatives of fossil fuel-producing states, have embraced for so long.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Joe Manchin as the Democratic senate majority leader.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Joe Manchin wasn’t always a climate ally, but his successor will be worse on Nov 10, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

]]> https://grist.org/politics/joe-manchin-senate-jim-justice-climate/feed/ 0 438560 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/19/the-mississippi-supreme-court-moved-to-ensure-poor-criminal-defendants-would-always-have-a-lawyer-its-not-working/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/19/the-mississippi-supreme-court-moved-to-ensure-poor-criminal-defendants-would-always-have-a-lawyer-its-not-working/#respond Thu, 19 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000 https://www.propublica.org/article/mississippi-supreme-court-poor-criminal-defendants-lawyer by Caleb Bedillion, The Marshall Project

This article was produced in partnership with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, formerly a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, and The Marshall Project. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Three months after Mississippi’s Supreme Court directed judges in the state to ensure that poor criminal defendants always have a lawyer as they wait to be indicted, one of those justices acknowledged that the rule isn’t being widely followed.

“We know anecdotally that there’s a problem out there,” Supreme Court Justice Jim Kitchens said during a state House of Representatives committee meeting on the public defense system last week.

That means Mississippi’s “dead zone” — the period during which poor people facing felony charges are left without a lawyer while they await indictment — persists in many counties.

At the first court hearing after someone is arrested for a felony, a judge is supposed to decide whether the defendant can be released from jail and should appoint a lawyer if they can’t afford one.

In many Mississippi courts, that lawyer stays on the case for a short time to handle initial proceedings, including a possible motion for bond reduction, and then exits. Only after the defendant is indicted, which often takes months, is another lawyer appointed. In the meantime, no one is assigned to the case, even if the defendant is in jail.

“Mississippi stands alone as the only state that has this problem,” public defense expert David Carroll said at the state House hearing.

Carroll is the executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, a nonprofit that studies state public defense systems and advocates for improvements. The center released a report in 2018 that found many defects in Mississippi’s public defense system, including the dead zone.

The Supreme Court’s rule, approved in April, was supposed to eliminate this problem. It says a lawyer can’t leave a case unless another one has taken over. All courts in the state must follow it.

Individual judges could face sanctions for not complying with the rule if someone files a complaint against them, Kitchens told legislators. Beyond that, however, Kitchens said it’s outside the purview of the Supreme Court to monitor local courts. “It’s not for us to go out and investigate whether that rule is being complied with,” he said.

When the rule went into effect in July, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica found that many courts were unprepared to comply. Some local court officials were unaware of it. Others suggested that their practice of appointing lawyers for limited purposes would satisfy the rule, even though those attorneys do little beyond attending early court hearings.

State Rep. Nick Bain, a Republican from northeast Mississippi’s Alcorn County, convened the hearing on the weaknesses in the state’s public defense system. He also practices as a defense attorney in about 10 counties and regularly talks with lawyers who work around the state.

“There are wide swaths all over Mississippi where that rule is not being followed,” he said at the hearing.

In one circuit court district that did take action in response to the Supreme Court’s rule, there are signs that appointed defense attorneys are not doing much more than they did before.

In the 1st Circuit Court District, which covers seven counties in northeast Mississippi, chief Circuit Judge Paul Funderburk issued an order in July directing lower court judges in the district on how to meet the new requirements for indigent representation. He said an attorney in the lower court, where defendants first appear, must stay on the case until the defendant is indicted.

State Sen. Daniel Sparks, a Republican from Tishomingo County, represents those defendants in the county’s Justice Court, which hears misdemeanors and some early felony matters. He acknowledged that under the new Supreme Court rule and Funderburk’s order, he remains the attorney for indigent clients until they are indicted.

He said that although he will take calls from defendants and offer advice after they appear in justice court, he believes there is usually little defense work to do before an indictment. “I don’t think it changes my work dramatically,” he said of the Supreme Court’s rule.

He believes problems linked to the dead zone have been exaggerated by reform advocates.

Lee County Justice Court, based in Tupelo, is in the same circuit court district as Tishomingo. In July, the Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica reported that the part-time appointed counsel for Lee County Justice Court, Dan Davis, typically did little more than file for a bond reduction for defendants who remained in jail for more than a month. After the new rule became effective in July, Davis told the court he didn’t want the job anymore.

Bill Benson, the administrator for Lee County, said last week that it’s not clear when a replacement will be available. “We’re trying to find someone who will stick with the defendants all the way through like the rule says,” Benson said.

Funderburk said he expects strict adherence to the new indigent defense rule and warned that courts “ignore it at their peril.”

Courts across Mississippi have ignored a broader rule regarding public defense, the Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica have found. That rule, part of a 2017 push to standardize how courts across the state operate, requires judges to send to the Supreme Court their policy on how they fulfill their constitutional obligation to provide lawyers for poor criminal defendants. Just one circuit court district, covering three rural counties in southwest Mississippi, has complied.

“The counties need to come up with a plan,” Kitchens told lawmakers. “The justice courts, the circuit courts, the supervisors — all of them need to collaborate and come up with a plan.”

He called on lawmakers to fix problems with public defense that the Mississippi Supreme Court has been unable to remedy by imposing rules on local judges. The state is responsible for ensuring that its public defense system is adequate, he said. “The bottom line is the counties cannot do it alone.”

Bain, whose term ends in December after a primary defeat, said Mississippi must eliminate the dead zone and address other problems, including a lack of full-time public defenders and payment arrangements that encourage lawyers to cut corners.

“I think Mississippi is really stretching the limits of our constitutional obligations,” he said.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Caleb Bedillion, The Marshall Project.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/19/the-mississippi-supreme-court-moved-to-ensure-poor-criminal-defendants-would-always-have-a-lawyer-its-not-working/feed/ 0 435362 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/10/politics-the-cults-we-will-always-have-with-us/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/10/politics-the-cults-we-will-always-have-with-us/#respond Tue, 10 Oct 2023 05:50:57 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=297753 In an October 6 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, 2016 presidential also-ran Hillary Clinton doubled down on her critique of the voters who subsequently rejected her in favor of Donald Trump. Back then,  half of them were “deplorables” — “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” — but the other half were, at least potentially, wise and More

The post Politics: The Cults We Will Always Have With Us appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/10/politics-the-cults-we-will-always-have-with-us/feed/ 0 433134 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/07/schools-have-always-been-the-site-of-struggle-counterspin-archival-interviews-with-alfie-kohn-diane-ravitch-and-kevin-kumashiro-on-education/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/07/schools-have-always-been-the-site-of-struggle-counterspin-archival-interviews-with-alfie-kohn-diane-ravitch-and-kevin-kumashiro-on-education/#respond Thu, 07 Sep 2023 21:59:17 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9035253 "What they’re interested in is cutting the cost of education, and the most expensive aspect of public education is teachers."

The post ‘Schools Have Always Been the Site of Struggle’ appeared first on FAIR.

]]>  

The September 1, 2023, episode of CounterSpin was an archival show, featuring interviews with Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on education and media. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

      CounterSpin230901.mp3

 

Janine Jackson: It’s back to school week here in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on media’s front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids?

So while what’s happening right now is new, it has roots. And it does no disservice to the battles of the current day to connect them to previous battles and conversations, and that’s what we’re going to do today on the show.

We will hear from three of the many education experts it’s been our pleasure to speak with: Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro.

***

Today’s media debates about education always include politicians politicking; often include right-wing parents, who watched a video and now say their kids are being indoctrinated because queer people…exist; and they sometimes include teachers who say they are underpaid and beleaguered.

You know what they rarely include? Kids: the ones going to school and dealing with the daily fallout of arguments had about them, but without them. What children are, mainly, is fodder, proof of this or that argument. They’re stupid, they’re entitled, they’re, frankly, whatever a pundit needs them to be.

No one wants reporters to shove a microphone in a 10-year-old’s face, but if you’re doing a story about children, shouldn’t you be at least a little bit interested in children?

***

CounterSpin has talked many times with one of the researchers genuinely interested in kids, and the way they are treated and portrayed, Alfie Kohn. He is author of many books, including The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting.

CounterSpin’s Peter Hart spoke with Alfie Kohn in April of 2014. Let’s start with Peter’s introduction for some context.

***

      CounterSpin230901Kohn.mp3

 

Alfie Kohn: “There must always be losers: That’s built into the American concept of excellence and success.”

Peter Hart: Kids these days. They think they’ve got it all figured out. Their self-esteem, for no good reason, is through the roof, and they get trophies just for showing up.

You hear this stuff almost everywhere, from casual conversations to the newspaper op-ed pages.

A new book argues that this conventional wisdom about kids and parenting isn’t just misguided or inaccurate; it forms a worldview that is not only deeply conservative in many ways, but it is one that reinforces and recommends a specific political ideology.

Alfie Kohn is the author of the new book The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting. It’s out now. Alfie Kohn, welcome back to CounterSpin.

Alfie Kohn: Thank you.

PH: Now, I used to keep a file of these “Every kid gets a trophy these days” newspaper columns, and I was always surprised that there wasn’t much of a political pattern to it. The right wingers and the liberals both had the same complaints.

And it seems that this is part of what inspires the book, that a set of very conservative ideas about parenting and about children, these ideas have become a kind of conventional wisdom.

AK: Yes, that’s quite right. And interestingly, the charges hurled at kids and parents sometimes are hard to reconcile with each other.

On the one hand, we’re told that parents are too permissive, that they don’t set limits for kids, and in the next breath, we hear that parents are overprotective, that they’re being helicopter parents. They don’t let kids experience frustration and failure and so on.

And there are these charges that kids get things too easily: We praise them when they haven’t earned it. We give them stickers and A’s and trophies without their having shown adequate accomplishments, and kids are growing up narcissistic and entitled and so on.

And the truly extraordinary thing is how, as you say, regardless of where people are on the political spectrum on most issues, they tend uncritically to accept this deeply conservative set of beliefs about kids and parenting.

(Da Capo Books, 2014)

PH: Teaching kids to be tough, and to expect or maybe anticipate failure, and to really put their nose to the grindstone, all of this—this just seems like good advice. Part of the book is arguing that there isn’t a lot of research that suggests that kids are better off as a result of these lessons we’re teaching them.

AK: That’s right. But what’s fascinating is the kind of defenses that are argued of this notion that kids have to be rewarded when they accomplish something impressive, and conspicuously go unrewarded when they don’t.

And, in fact, it’s not enough to accomplish something impressive; they have to defeat other people. There’s this notion that scarcity defines the very idea of excellence. If everyone is celebrated, that means we’re endorsing mediocrity. There must always be losers: That’s built into the American concept of excellence and success.

And I think underlying a lot of this is the notion, something I call BGUTI, which stands for “Better Get Used To It,” which basically says it’s a tough world out there, it’s very unpleasant, kids are going to experience a lot of unpleasantness when they’re older, and the best way to prepare them is to make them miserable while they’re small.

And when you show the illogic of this, and the fact that evidence, psychologically, shows exactly the opposite, they quickly pivot and reveal the ideological underpinning of this argument: Well, they lost! They’re not supposed to get a trophy, for Pete’s sake! You know?

And it’s very clear that it’s really a moral conviction underlying this, that you can’t get anything, including love and appreciation, or feel good about yourself, until you’ve earned it.

And so in the book I say, this is where the law of the marketplace meets sermons about what you have to do to earn your way into heaven. It’s an awful hybrid of neoclassical economics and theology, and it’s been accepted, even by liberals.

PH: And so many of these stories have a distinct media component. You kind of pull them all together in the book. A school wants to get rid of dodgeball, and suddenly that’s a national news story, because it teaches us some fundamental lesson about how soft kids are these days, and how they’re not taught to take their abuse from, I guess, the stronger kids. The self-esteem movement in the mid- to late ’90s—suddenly we’re teaching kids self esteem, and it’s a big waste of time. Why do you think media latch onto these stories?

AK: I think there’s a softer, more ideological idea that’s just in the water in this culture, and that has achieved the status of received truth.

Just like you can smear a political candidate with untruths and political ads to the point that people start to see the candidate that way, regardless of whether it’s accurate, or you hear this claim that self-esteem isn’t earned, that kids feel too good about themselves. And very few reporters or social commentators take a step back and ask, “Well, wait a minute, what does the psychological research say?”

Actually, what it says is that unconditional self-esteem, where you have a core of faith in yourself, your own competence and value, is tantamount to psychological health. Where people get screwed up is precisely where they’re taught as children, “I’m only good to the extent that I….”

That conditionality is what’s psychologically disturbing, and that’s at the core of this conservative notion that hasn’t been identified as conservative.

The amusing thing is that when you read yet another article in the vi or the Atlantic, or hear yet another radio commentator on this, what’s amazing is that all these writers and commentators congratulate themselves on their courage for having the nerve to say exactly what everyone else is saying.

***

JJ: That was Alfie Kohn, interviewed by CounterSpin’s Peter Hart back in 2014.

Alfie Kohn mentioned charter schools and the attacks on teachers unions in that conversation. We talked about that with education historian and author Diane Ravitch in May of 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdown, when politicians couldn’t fix their face to say whether people needed to be in the workplace, or needed to be remote, or which people or why.

And some of them somehow landed on the side of, “You know who we don’t need to show up? Teachers.”

I asked Diane Ravitch, co-founder and president of the Network for Public Education, why billionaires like Bill Gates, who dabble in life-or-death issues, call themselves, with media accolade, “reformers” when it comes to education.

***

      CounterSpin230901Ravitch.mp3

 

Diane Ravitch: “What they’re interested in is cutting the cost of education, and the most expensive aspect of public education is teachers.”

Diane Ravitch: In my book Slaying Goliath, I refer to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and all these tech titans, and Wall Street and on and on, as “disruptors.” They have lots of ideas about how to reinvent and reimagine American education. It always involves privatization. It always attacks public control, and democratic control, of schools. And it very frequently involves technology, because what they’re interested in is cutting the cost of education, and the most expensive aspect of public education is teachers.

And also, from a different point of view, the most important part of education is teachers, because I think that we’ve learned during this pandemic that sitting in front of a screen is not the same as being in a classroom with a human being.

What frightens me is that if these people get their way—and we have a very conservative Supreme Court, that’s on the cusp of ruling that states are not allowed to deny funding to religious schools—we will see this country go backwards educationally, because having a strong public school system is a pillar of democracy.

A public school system that’s open to all kids, that doesn’t push out kids because they can’t speak English, that doesn’t exclude the kids because they have disabilities, and that has a full program, and doesn’t indoctrinate kids into a religious point of view: This is what made America great, and because of the people like DeVos and Trump, and the Bill Gateses and other billionaires in the world who are funding all this privatization stuff, we can see our country go backwards. And that’s what’s frightening.

JJ: Finally, it’s galling to see the Gates Foundation issuing a response to complaints about this New York initiative, saying, “We believe that teachers have an important perspective that needs to be heard,” as though that were a gracious concession. But then, media and others still hanging on to this notion that riches equal expertise, and pretending that we don’t know what actually works. If I see another report about, “Hey, there was a study that said kids do better in smaller-sized classes”—we know this. It’s just about who they listen to. What would you like to see more of, or less of, in terms of education reporting?

DR: The scary thing about the pandemic is that every school system in the country is going to be faced with dramatic budget cuts. And what I would like to see reporters focused on is the funding. And the funding should be, not following the child—I mean, this is what Betsy DeVos wants, and what all the right-wingers want, is to see the funding diverted to wherever the child goes. If they go to religious schools, the money goes there. If they homeschool, the money goes there. This is public money; this is our taxpayer dollars—and it should go to public institutions.

I would like to see reporters understand that children learn best when they have human teachers, and when they have interaction with their peers.

And I would like to see them follow the money. Who is funding the charter movement? I know who’s funding it, read my book: It’s mainly the Walton Foundation, which hates unions, and which is responsible for one out of every four charter schools in the country. I would like to see them follow the money to the extent of saying, “What really matters is that kids have small enough classes”—and the research on small class size is overwhelming. And I would like to see them expose this hoax that somehow promoting privatization benefits the neediest children, when, in fact, privatization hurts the neediest children.

And they need to look at the research, the research on increased segregation and the defunding of the schools where the poorest kids attend. This has now grown overwhelming.

And when Betsy DeVos publicly urges the states to split the money between low-income public schools and high-income private schools, this is sick, and it should be reported as a disgrace. And so many disgraceful things are happening in education, and the reporters need to be all over it.

***

JJ: That was Diane Ravitch on CounterSpin in 2020.

And, finally, we see that many of the most visible attacks right now are on teachers themselves, or on teachers unions. But it’s also become clear that the heart of many of these attacks is actually on education itself, on the very notion that anyone from any walk of life could be exposed to critical thinking, basically.

This is not new. The decisions about who gets to learn what have been part of this country since before it was a country. So if we’re going to have this conversation around education now, well, let’s have it.

That was the message from Kevin Kumashiro, former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, and author of, among other titles, Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture, when we spoke with him in June of 2019. We started out on the issue of student debt.

***

      CounterSpin230901Kumashiro.mp3

 

Kevin Kumashiro: “We need to be changing the system of education, not simply individual access.”

JJ: When you’re watching corporate media debate on an issue you care about, it’s hard to know whether to spend time combating the particular myths and misinformation in the conversation as it is, or to simply have a different conversation, with different premises and, frankly, participants.

If people are saying they oppose “government handouts,” for instance, you may feel a need to say, “Well, what about handouts to corporations?” But then you’re still stuck in this frame of seeing government as a separate force, apart from people, that’s giving things and taking them away, rather than a system that’s meant to be working to serve the common good.

Can we begin, though, with your overall take on the plans put forth by Sanders and Ilhan Omar, by Warren and Julián Castro, among others, as compared to the status quo? And then, what do you make of the arguments, those that we are hearing, against those plans?

Kevin Kumashiro: I think it’s really exciting that student debt relief is being elevated to the level that it is. It’s about time that we’re having this conversation. As you’ve mentioned, we know that there is over $1.6 trillion in student debt currently; that affects about 45 million people in this country. And this is a number, this is an amount, that has actually ballooned over the past couple of decades.

So one of the things that I think the proposals force us to think about is, what are our priorities right now, and how should that be reflected in our national budgets? Budgets reflect priorities, and if we were to fairly tax the rich and the corporations, and if we were to invest in education rather than in instruments of violence and repression, like prisons and war and so on, I think we would be able to create a budget that reflects that. This is absolutely affordable.

One of the things that I like to argue, however, is that as ambitious, as controversial as some people think that these proposals are, I actually would say that they don’t quite go far enough, in the way that we’re talking about it still.

And what I mean by that is, right now, the debate seems to be, how do we make education more affordable?—as if education is a commodity, where those who have the wealth can afford to buy the best.

And what I would say is, “Yeah, we could engage in that debate, but maybe the bigger debate is, should education be seen and treated as a commodity in the first place?” Right?

Education, I think many of us would argue, is so fundamentally important, not only to individual wellness and livelihood and success, but also to the health and well-being of the community and the society, right? It strengthens democracy, it strengthens participation, social relations, global health.

And so one of the things we should be thinking about is how education should be a fundamental human right for everyone. And what does it mean to invest in that? Where pre-K through college, you have the right to get the level of education that you need to be successful and happy in the world. And I think that’s where I would like to see the conversation going. And, hopefully, that’s a reframing that we are heading towards.

USA Today (6/26/19)

JJ: I have seen sympathetic portrayals of people trapped in student loan debt. USA Today, on June 26, had an article evoking how people can get caught up, and how they are left open to predations from scam debt-consolidation companies, for instance. And then, on another tack of the issue, the Washington Post had a data-driven piece about the negative impacts on the overall economy of student loan debt, which is something that I know that you’ve thought about, and that noted that the $1.6 trillion in debt that US families are carrying has doubled since the mid-2000s, which you also just said, and which a lot of newspaper articles leave out.

I would also say that media are doing a pretty good job of leaving most of the moralizing to the op-eds—you know, things like “I Worked as a Janitor to Keep My Student Loans Low. Wiping Debt Punishes Students Like Me,” which was in USA Today.

But what I’m not getting is what you’re talking about, which is the idea that, in reality, this is a bigger question about the role of education in society. I wonder how you see us moving the conversation from this specific conversation about Warren, about Sanders, and those plans: How do we push it to that bigger dialogue that you’re looking for?

KK: Yeah, it’s a great question, because overlapping with the ballooning of student debt over the last two decades is something that’s fueled that ballooning, which is the disinvestment by the public sector in public education.

Atlantic (5/3/18)

So higher education is a great example, where it’s hard to call public universities public universities, because such a small percentage of their budget actually comes from the public sector. So what we’ve seen in the past 20 years is a massive decline, in some cases half, maybe even more than half, lost—in terms of what the states used to be contributing to, for example, state-run universities.

And where does that shortfall now get taken up? Well, some of it gets taken up in fundraising. And some of it gets taken up in corporate sponsorships. But the vast majority of budget shortfalls gets taken up by tuition increases. So there’s a direct connection between disinvesting in public institutions—in other words, making them less public—and seeing the students take on the burden.

And when we talk about the difference between public and private education, I think it’s also important to think about who these universities serve. Right? Public universities serve a far more racially diverse population, they have more first-generation students, more working-class students, more immigrant students; it’s actually serving the students most in need.

And I think for many public universities, that was the vision, right, is that they would actually be the universities for the people; they were a counter to the elite private universities.

And so when we see public universities less able to serve their mission of reaching this much more diverse, underserved population, because we’re disinvesting in them, why are we now surprised, then, that the people with the least resources are now shouldering the greatest burden, in terms of trying to get education?

So, yeah, I think pushing the conversation, in terms of saying, well, what is the responsibility of society to educate its next generation? And how do we build up institutions where everyone can really benefit from that?

And let me just say one more thing, to even push the conversation a little further. One of the things that I like to argue is that we should not be debating, how do we give equal access to higher education as it currently exists? That actually isn’t what we should be debating.

Because the reality is that higher education is not equitable right now. The current state of higher education is that it’s sort of like public schools—you have a handful of very elite institutions that serve the more elite population. And then you have a vast number of underfunded, under-resourced institutions that are serving the masses.

We don’t want to give equal access to that. What we actually want to do is level the playing field, by saying that the institutions themselves need to be more equitable.

So when I talk about reforming education, and thinking about the funding of education, I don’t argue that we simply need to equalize how individuals finance their education. I actually argue that we need to be thinking more equitably about the funding of the system, and how that then changes the hierarchy that currently exists between educational institutions. We need to be changing the system of education, not simply individual access.

(New York Post, 4/23/19)

JJ: And some of the opponents, on this particular issue of debt forgiveness, I think have a more comprehensive vision, because some of them are the same people who are also fighting affirmative action—in higher education, in particular; some of them are the same who are against the very idea of public education that you’re talking about.

And I feel like latent in a lot of debate is the idea that education is supposed to be unobtainable for many, because otherwise, it’s not as valuable as a stratifier, as a screen. And among other things, to pick up on what you just said, that’s not the historical vision of education in this country, is it? I mean, if you look back at the history, education had a democratizing impulse behind it.

KK: So that’s such a great reminder, is that the history of education in this country is a very complicated and contested one. And when we look throughout the last century and a half, for example, what we can see is that different groups have argued for competing purposes of education. They’ve put forth different arguments of what education should be about.

So what I like to argue is that, let’s start with public schools, K–12, elementary, secondary schools. When we first created public schools in this country, we didn’t create them for everyone; we created them for only the most elite. And as we were forced to integrate more and more, we just came up with more and more ways to divide and sort them, such as through segregated schools, or tracked classrooms, or labeling, discipline and disenfranchisement.

And so, when we think about the achievement gap, or this gap in performance among students, many people say that that’s a sign that schools are failing. I like those who make the slightly more provocative argument, that actually the achievement gap is a sign, in some ways, that schools are succeeding, that they were doing exactly what they were set up to do.

So one of the things that we need to be arguing is not that we simply need to tinker with the system because it’s not really working well. What we actually need to recognize is that the system was built on really problematic assumptions, ideologies and exclusions from its very beginning. And our job is not to wish them away; our job is actually to dive into that contradiction and that messiness, and to say, “Well, how do we work in institutions that maybe were never intended for us, but still make them into the liberatory, revolutionary, democratizing institutions that they have the potential for?” Right?

Alongside the history of sorting and stratifying, you have an equally long history of people arguing that schools can play a democratizing force, and have been very forceful and persuasive at changing policies and institutions to move us in that direction. Schools have always been the site of struggle.

And this is another moment when we need to dive in and say, “Yes, we need to struggle, and we need to put forward a much bolder vision than we’re currently pursuing.”

***

JJ: That was author and advocate Kevin Kumashiro, talking with CounterSpin in 2019.

 

 

 

The post ‘Schools Have Always Been the Site of Struggle’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/07/schools-have-always-been-the-site-of-struggle-counterspin-archival-interviews-with-alfie-kohn-diane-ravitch-and-kevin-kumashiro-on-education/feed/ 0 425573 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/23/its-always-about-oil-cia-mi6-staged-coup-in-iran-70-years-ago-destroying-democracy-in-iran-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/23/its-always-about-oil-cia-mi6-staged-coup-in-iran-70-years-ago-destroying-democracy-in-iran-2/#respond Wed, 23 Aug 2023 14:33:48 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a9dea73f38ab323d0433effd47bd207e
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/23/its-always-about-oil-cia-mi6-staged-coup-in-iran-70-years-ago-destroying-democracy-in-iran-2/feed/ 0 421146 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/23/its-always-about-oil-cia-mi6-staged-coup-in-iran-70-years-ago-destroying-democracy-in-iran/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/23/its-always-about-oil-cia-mi6-staged-coup-in-iran-70-years-ago-destroying-democracy-in-iran/#respond Wed, 23 Aug 2023 12:29:21 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=554099c4520c12366cf84103864237fc

We look at the 70th anniversary of the August 19, 1953, U.S.- and U.K-backed coup in Iran, which took place two years after Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry that had been controlled by the company now known as British Petroleum. “If nationalization in Iran of oil was successful, this would set a terrible example to other countries where U.S. oil interests were present,” explains Ervand Abrahamian, Iranian historian and author of Oil Crisis in Iran: From Nationalism to Coup d’Etat and The Coup: 1953, The CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations. While the CIA has historically taken credit for Mosaddegh’s overthrow, “the British have not admitted their leading role,” notes Iranian filmmaker Taghi Amirani, whose documentary film Coup 53 uncovers the influence of MI6 agents who sought to preserve their imperial-era access to Iranian oil and pulled in the Americans by promising a “slice.” Seventy years later, says Amirani, “We are still living with the ripples of this disastrous event.”

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/23/its-always-about-oil-cia-mi6-staged-coup-in-iran-70-years-ago-destroying-democracy-in-iran/feed/ 0 421133 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/07/should-there-be-a-supreme-court-its-role-has-always-been-anti-democratic/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/07/should-there-be-a-supreme-court-its-role-has-always-been-anti-democratic/#respond Fri, 07 Jul 2023 06:05:52 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=288249

“Brown, J., an’ Harlan, J., is discussin’ th’ condition in th’ Roman Impire befure th’ fire …” Political cartoon by Frederick Opper, 1890. Library of Congress.

Vested interests create “checks and balances” primarily to make political systems non-responsive to demands for social reform. Historically, therefore, the checks are politically unbalanced in practice. Instead of producing a happy medium, their effect often has been to check the power of the people to assert their interests at the expense of the more powerful. Real reform requires a revolution – often repeated attempts. The Roman Republic suffered five centuries of fighting to redistribute land and cancel debts, all of which failed as the oligarchy’s “checks” imposed deepening economic dependency and imbalance.

The Supreme Court is America’s most distinctive check. Its deepening bias since its takeover by “conservatives” claiming to be “originalist” interpreters of the constitution, has led to the most widespread protests since Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the court in the 1930s by expanding its membership to create a more democratic majority. Although appointed by presidents and consented to by Congress, the judges’ lifetime tenure imposes the ideology of past elections on the present.

So why are they needed at all? Why not permit Congress to make laws that reflect the needs of the time? The Court’s judges themselves have pointed out that if Congress doesn’t like their rulings, it should pass its own laws, or even a constitutional amendment, to provide a new point of reference.

That is not a practical solution in today’s world. The most obvious reason is that Congress is locked in a stalemate, unable to take a firm progressive step because of how far the U.S. political as well as judicial system has long been dominated by corporate and financial interests. wielding enormous sums of money to corrupt the election process since the Citizens United ruling in 2010 even at the nomination stage to determine the candidates. The Federalist Society has embarked on a five-decade lobbying effort to groom and promote judges to serve the vested interests.[1] When today’s Supreme Court act as mediums to ask what the original drafters of the Constitution wanted or meant, they simply are using these ghostly spirits as proxies for today’s ruling elites.

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court’s “originalist” seances rejecting as unconstitutional laws that most Americans want – on the excuse that they are not what the wealthy New England merchants and southern slave-owners who drafted the Constitution would have intended – classical Greek and Roman oligarchies created their own judicial checks against the prospect of Sparta’s kings, Athenian popular assemblies and Roman consuls enacting laws at the expense of the vested interests.

Sparta had two kings instead of just one, requiring their joint agreement on any new rules. And just in case they might join together to limit the wealth of the oligarchs, they were made subject to a council of ephors to “advise” them. A kindred Roman spirit called for two consuls to head the Senate. To ward against their joining to cancel debts or redistribute land – the constant demand of Romans throughout the Republic’s five centuries, 509-27 BC – the Senate’s meetings could be suspended if religious authorities found omens from the flight of birds or other airy phenomena. These always seemed to occur when a challenge to the oligarchy seemed likely to pass.

The historian Theodor Mommsen called this tactic “political astrology.” The most blatant attempt occurred in 59 BC when Julius Caesar was elected consul and proposed an agrarian law to settle some of Pompey’s veterans as well as urban plebs on public land in Italy. Additional land was to be bought from private owners, using funds from Pompey’s campaign in Asia Minor.

 Cato the Younger led the Roman Senate’s Optimates who feared Caesar’s (or anyone’s) popularity. Opposing any change in the status quo, he started one of his famous all-day speeches. Caesar ordered him led away, but many senators followed Cato out, preventing a vote from being taken. Caesar then simply bypassed the Senate to put the measure before the Centuriate Assembly, composed largely of army veterans. That was a tactic that the reformer Tiberius Gracchus had perfected after 133 to promote his own land redistribution (for which he was assassinated, the oligarchy’s traditional fallback defense in all epochs).[2]

When Caesar’s opponents threatened violence to block the popular vote, Pompey threatened to use his own force. And when the time came for the Senate to ratify the law, Caesar and Pompey filled the Forum with their soldiers, and a large crowd gathered. Cato’s son-in-law, M. Calpurnius Bibulus was Caesar’s annoying co-consul, and tried to suspend the voting by claiming to see bad omens, making public business illegal.

Caesar overruled Bibulus, based on his own higher authority as pontifex maximus, leading Bibulus to declare the rest of the year a sacred period in which no assemblies could be held or votes taken. But the crowd drove him away and broke his insignia of consulship, the ceremonial fasces carried by his lictors, and beat the tribunes allied with him. Cato likewise was pushed away when he tried to force his way to the platform to block the vote. He and Bibulus fled, and Caesar’s bill was passed, including a clause requiring all senators to take an oath to adhere to it. Bibulus went home and sulked, insisting that the entire year’s laws be nullified because they were passed under threat of violence. It was the oligarchy, however, that settled matters by assassinating Caesar and other advocates of land and debt reform.

Athens, which turned oligarchic in the 4^th century BC after losing the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, used a tactic closer to today’s Supreme Court by trying to subject laws to conformity with an alleged “ancestral constitution” that presumably should never be changed – at least in a way that would favor democracy. Claiming to restore the supposed constitution of Solon, the Thirty Tyrants installed by Sparta’s oligarchy in 404 BC downgraded the Athenian boule’s governing five hundred citizens into a merely “advisory” group whose views had no official weight.[3]

The great watershed in Athenian history had been Solon’s seisachtheia – literally “shedding of [debt] burdens” in 594 BC, cancelling personal debts that bound debtors in near bondage. New demands for debt cancellation and land redistribution remained the primary democratic demands for the next four centuries. Androtion (ca. 344 BC), a follower of the oligarchic Isocrates, sought to claim the authority of Solon while denying that he had actually cancelled debts, claiming that he merely revalued the coinage, weights and measures to make debts more easily payable.[4] But there was no coinage in Solon’s time, so this attempt to rewrite history was anachronistic. That often happens when mediums claim to channel the spirit of the dead who cannot speak.

In a similar tradition, the authors of America’s constitution created the Supreme Court to provide a check on the danger that political evolution might lead Congress to pass laws threatening oligarchic rule. There no longer is a pontifex to block democratic lawmaking by claiming to read auspices in the flight of birds or other airy phenomena. Instead, there is a more secular subordination of new laws to the principle that they must not be changed from what was intended by the authors of the Constitution – as interpreted by their counterpart elites in today’s world. This approach fails to take into account how the world is evolving and how the legal system needs to be modernized to cope with such change.

I have found it to be an axiom of the history of legal philosophy that if the popular political spirit is for democratic reform – especially supporting taxes and other laws to prevent the polarization of wealth between the vested interests and the economy at large – the line of resistance to such progress is to insist on blocking any change from “original” constitutional principles that supported the power of vested interests in the first place.

The U.S. political system has become distorted by the power given to the Supreme Court enabling it to block reforms that the majority of Americans are reported to support. The problem is not only the Supreme Court, to be sure. Most voters oppose wars, support public healthcare for all and higher taxes on the wealthy. But Congress, itself captured by the oligarch donor class, routinely raises military spending, privatizes healthcare in the hands of predatory monopolies and cuts taxes for the financial rent-seeking class while pretending that spending money on government social programs would force taxes to rise for wage-earners.

The effect of the corporate capture of Congress as well as the Supreme Court as the ultimate oligarchic backstop is to block Congressional politics as a vehicle to update laws, taxes and public regulation in keeping with what voters recognize to be modern needs. The Supreme Court imposes the straitjacket of what America’s 18^th-century slaveowners and other property owners are supposed to have wanted at the time they wrote the Constitution.

James Madison and his fellow Federalists were explicit about their aim. They wanted to block what they feared was the threat of democracy by populists, abolitionists and other reformers threatening to check their property “rights” as if these were natural and inherent. The subsequent 19^th century’s flowering of classical political economists explaining the logic for checking rentier oligarchies was far beyond what they wanted. Yet today’s Supreme Court’s point of reference is still, “What would the authors of the U.S. Constitution, slaveowners fearful of democracy, have intended?” That logic is applied anachronistically to limit every democratic modernization from the right of unionized labor to go on strike, to abortion rights for women, cancellation of student debt and the right of government to tax wealth.

Even if Congress were not too divided and stalemated to write laws reflecting what most voters want, the Supreme Court would reject them, just as it sought for many decades to declare a national income tax unconstitutional under the theory of “takings.” The Supreme Court can be expected to block any law threatening the victory of the Thatcherite and Reaganomics doctrine of privatization, “small” government unable to challenge the power of wealth (but big enough to crush any attempts by labor, women or minorities to promote their own interests), a state of affairs that is an anomaly for a nation claiming to be a democracy.

A nation’s constitution should have the flexibility to modernize laws, taxes and government regulatory power to remove barriers to broadly-based progress, living standards and productivity. But these barriers have been supported by oligarchies through the ages. That was why the Supreme Court was created in the first place. The aim was to leave the economy in the control of property holders and the wealthiest families. That anachronistic judicial philosophy is helping turn the United States into a failed state by empowering a wealthy minority to reduce the rest of the population to economic dependency.

We are repeating the economic polarization of ancient Greece and Rome that I have described in my recent book The Collapse of Antiquity. The 7^th– and 6^th-century BC crisis of personal debt and land concentration led to social revolution by reformers (“tyrants,” not originally a term of invective) in Corinth, Sparta and other Greek-speaking city-states and Aegean islands. Solon was appointed archon to resolve the crisis in Athens. Unlike reformers in other Greek cities, he did not redistribute the land, but he did cancel the debts and removed the land’s crop-payment stones. The ensuing 6^th century saw Solon’s successors lay the groundwork for Athenian democracy.

But the next three centuries saw the rise of creditor oligarchies throughout Greece and Italy, using debt as a lever to monopolize land and reduce citizens to bondage. These increasingly aggressive oligarchies fought, with more and more overt violence, against new reformers seeking to cancel debts and redistribute the land to prevent the economy falling into austerity, clientage and reliance on the dole. Their oligarchic ideology was much like that of today’s right-wing Supreme Court in its approach to constitutional law. The common denominator is an age-old drive to prevent democratic change, above all by using wealth as a means of controlling the political process. That is the philosophy outlined in the Powell Memo, and in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling permitting the political campaign system to be financialized and, in effect, privatized in the hands of the Donor Class.

As in classical antiquity, the exponential rise in debt has polarized wealth ownership. Personal debt bondage no longer exists, but most home buyers and wage earners are obliged to take on a working-lifetime debt burden to obtain a home of their own, an education to get a job to qualify for mortgage loans to buy their home, and credit-card debt simply to make ends meet. The result is debt deflation as labor is obliged to spend an increasing proportion of its income on debt service instead of goods and services. That slows the economy, while creditors use their rising accumulation of wealth to finance the inflation of housing prices, along with stock and bond prices – with yet more debt financing.

The conflict between creditors and debtors is a red thread running throughout American history, from the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s to the monetary deflation of the 1880s as “hard money” creditor interests rolled back prices and incomes to be paid in gold, increasing the control of bondholders over labor. Today, U.S. debt and tax policy is passing out of the Congress to the Supreme Court, whose members are groomed and vetted to make sure that they will favor financial and other rentier wealth by leading the Court to impose the founders’ pre-democratic philosophy of constitutional law despite the past few centuries of political reforms that, at least nominally, have endorsed democracy over oligarchy.

The victory of rentier wealth has led to the deindustrialization of America and the resulting predatory diplomacy as its economy seeks to extract from foreign countries the products that it no longer is producing at home. This is why foreign countries are moving to pursue a philosophy rejecting debt deflation, privatization and the shift of economic planning from elected governments to financial centers from Wall Street to the City of London, the Paris Bourse and Japan.

Any resilient society’s constitution should be responsive to the evolution of economic, technological, environmental and geopolitical dynamics. U.S. legal philosophy reflects mainstream economics in trying to lock in a set of principles written by creditors and other rentiers fearful of making the financial system, tax system and distribution of wealth more conducive to prosperity than to austerity and economic polarization. While there no longer is an attempt to roll back the clock to impose the outright slavery that most framers of the Constitution endorsed, the spread of debt deflation and debt dependency has become a form of economic bondage that is the modern “conservative” counterpart to the racial slavery of old. It is what the “original” power elite are thought to have wanted if we choose to go back in a time machine and ask them, instead of looking toward a less oligarchic future.

Notes.

[1] The Lewis Powell memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971 laid out this plan. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/. For a review of how this almost conspiratorial propaganda and censorship attack was financed see Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history,” Harpers, September, 2004. Available at: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm.

[2] See Cassius Dio, Roman History 38.2.2. I discuss this affair in The Collapse of Antiquity, chapter 18.

[3] Athēnaion Politeia 35.2 and Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3.2 and 11.

[4] Plutarch, Solon 15.2.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Hudson.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and The Marshall Project. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In April, the Mississippi Supreme Court changed the rules for state courts to require that poor criminal defendants have a lawyer throughout the sometimes lengthy period between arrest and indictment. The goal is to eliminate a gap during which no one is working on a defendant’s behalf.

That mandate went into effect Saturday. But few of the state’s courts have plans in place to change their procedures in a way that is likely to accomplish what the justices intended.

A survey of courts by the Daily Journal, ProPublica and The Marshall Project found that some local court officials are unaware of the new rule. Others have not decided how they will respond. Some officials suggested that their current practice of appointing lawyers only for limited purposes will fulfill the new requirement, even though those attorneys do little beyond attending early court hearings.

That reporting suggests that impoverished defendants in many Mississippi counties are likely to remain deprived of meaningful legal assistance as they wait, often in jail, for prosecutors to decide whether to pursue felony charges.

“There’s really not a plan,” said Chuck Hopkins, a judge in a county-level justice court in northeast Mississippi’s Lee County. He fears that if officials don’t come up with one, the court could be “hung out there waiting for a lawsuit to happen.”

André de Gruy, who runs Mississippi’s Office of State Public Defender and is recognized throughout the state as an expert on indigent defense, said just four of the state’s 23 circuit court districts have asked him for advice on how to comply with the new rule. He responded by developing a model process they could use.

After someone is arrested for a felony in Mississippi, that person has an initial appearance in court. A judge informs the defendant of the charges against them, sets the conditions for being released from jail, and appoints a lawyer if the defendant can’t afford one. Under current rules, in many courts that lawyer handles just the initial appearance and, in some cases, an optional preliminary hearing when evidence is presented. After that, the lawyer exits the case.

Only after the defendant is indicted, which often takes months, is another lawyer appointed. Critics have dubbed the period between lawyers the “dead zone.”

Mississippi gives district attorneys unlimited time to indict someone after an arrest, and it’s among a handful of states where defendants can be jailed indefinitely as they await indictment, according to recent research by Pam Metzger, a legal scholar who runs the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law.

“Mississippi is among the worst of the worst on this issue,” Metzger said.

Cliff Johnson, a lawyer who pushed for the revised indigent defense rule, has documented how those two factors — the lack of an indictment deadline and the lack of legal representation in the “dead zone” — can cause defendants to be jailed for months or years. Without a lawyer, defendants may have a hard time fighting their charges or striking plea deals.

Johnson, who leads the Mississippi office of the MacArthur Justice Center, a civil rights law firm, said advocacy organizations like his will monitor courts for compliance with the new rule.

“This structural change means nothing,” he said, “if local judges don’t create and implement new comprehensive plans for indigent defense.”

The new rule on indigent defense makes one key change: It says a lawyer may not withdraw from a case pending indictment until another has been appointed.

Ordering that change now looks like the easy part. Implementing it is another story, largely because of the patchwork of courts in Mississippi.

Criminal defendants may move through as many as three different court systems, each with its own system of public defense, as they go from arrest to a plea deal or verdict.

Mississippi is one of only eight states without state oversight of public defense, according to the Sixth Amendment Center, which advocates for robust indigent defense. Instead, local governments bear almost all the responsibility of providing poor criminal defendants with an attorney, as guaranteed by the Constitution.

A few local governments employ full-time public defenders. Most rely on part-time public defenders or contract with private attorneys. They all generally have high caseloads.

Now, officials in those different court systems must figure out how to ensure that defendants maintain legal representation as they move from courtroom to jail to courtroom.

To understand how courts will do that, the Daily Journal, ProPublica and The Marshall Project contacted officials in all 23 circuit court districts, most of which cover more than one county, as well as more than a dozen officials in municipal courts and separate county-level justice courts. We spoke with more than 20 judges, public defenders, prosecutors, court clerks and private defense attorneys.

Only a few circuit districts said they were working to have a new policy by Saturday, including two on the Gulf Coast and one in southwest Mississippi. Many other court officials said they don’t know exactly how they’ll coordinate among the appointed lawyers who represent defendants, sometimes briefly, in court. Some officials worry they’ll have to pay to defend people who have charges pending in a different jurisdiction.

In Tupelo, located in northeast Mississippi’s Lee County, officials say they’re struggling to figure out how to bridge the gap between the municipal court, where people charged with felonies often have their initial appearance, and circuit court, where those charges are ultimately decided.

Indigent defendants are represented in Tupelo’s municipal court by a full-time public defender, Dennis Farris. He generally makes a case for a low bond so his client can be released from jail and advises the defendant on whether to request a preliminary hearing.

But after the initial hearing is held or the defendant waives their right to it, the municipal court loses jurisdiction over felony cases.

City officials agree that the new rule means Farris cannot withdraw from those cases, but they want local circuit judges to agree to appoint felony public defenders immediately after the preliminary hearing is held or waived so Farris can focus on the job he’s paid to do in municipal court.

Officials in the municipal court for Southaven, in the Memphis suburbs, want their circuit judges to agree to the same thing.

Farris spends most of every workday in municipal court, handling the steady stream of misdemeanors and felony initial appearances, with little time to tend to cases that will eventually be handled by another court system.

“If I’m still on those cases, what am I supposed to do? Send a bill to the county?” he asked. “I’ll do what I can. But I’m only one person.”

Lee County’s justice court faces a different, but common, challenge in following the new rule: The private attorney who handles indigent defense typically has a limited role. Dan Davis handles only bond reductions, weeks after a defendant’s initial appearance in court.

Davis doesn’t attend initial appearances and rarely requests preliminary hearings for his clients. He acts on behalf of defendants only if they remain in jail after 30 days. If so, he contacts them to gather information to file a bond reduction motion.

“If someone bonds out, my part is basically done” except in rare circumstances, Davis said. “They’re off my list.”

Given that the justice court has limited expectations of what he must do, Davis believes he fulfills his obligations to defendants.

He anticipates little change in how he does his job under the new rule. Since he never files motions to withdraw from his cases, Davis said, he will remain a defendant’s attorney until an indictment, and the new rule will appear to be satisfied.

But he believes it is “very unusual” for a defendant to require much legal assistance after bonding out. If he were to find his workload increasing, he may not want to keep the job. Hopkins, the justice court judge, said the county may need to find a full-time public defender.

Experts say during the first few months after someone is arrested for a felony, there’s important work to be done: interviewing witnesses, securing evidence, perhaps seeking an early plea deal. If someone is jailed for months without being indicted, their attorney can ask the DA what’s taking so long or file a motion to dismiss the case.

Justin Cook, the former head of the state public defender’s association, warned attorneys against superficial adherence to the new requirement.

“You owe an indigent defendant effective representation under the Constitution,” he said. “You are not nominally their lawyer. You are their lawyer, and you have duties and obligations to them.”

A case in Hinds County that is wending its way through federal appeals shows what can happen if an appointed lawyer doesn’t act early and aggressively to investigate a defendant’s claims of innocence.

Sedrick Russell has spent more than 15 years arguing in court filings that he lacked representation after he was arrested for a nonfatal shooting with no eyewitnesses.

From his arrest in December 2006 until February 2008, Russell claims, he spoke with a public defender just once, briefly. During that time, he sent seven handwritten letters to the court alleging that his right to a speedy trial had been violated and complaining that he hadn’t spoken to an attorney.

Russell has claimed in court filings that at his preliminary hearing in January 2007, he tried to tell a lawyer with the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office about an alibi. But he didn’t get far.

Russell claims that before the shooting, he got into a car driven by a friend he knew only as Ron Ron, and the two left the site where the shooting later took place.

“The assistant public defender who came to his preliminary hearing brushed off Russell’s request to get Ron Ron to testify, telling Russell, ‘It was just a preliminary.’ She never came back,” U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves later wrote, after Russell had appealed his conviction.

In February 2008, the state trial judge removed the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office from the case and appointed a private lawyer, Don Boykin. Within about a month, Boykin told prosecutors that Russell intended to raise an alibi defense. But Boykin never found Ron Ron.

Russell was convicted in a jury trial in January 2009 and sentenced to two life terms because he had been deemed a habitual offender.

It took years for Russell to exhaust his appeals in state court. When he took his case to federal court, Reeves ruled that Russell had been denied his Sixth Amendment right to an attorney, even though, as far as the local courts were concerned, he was represented by indigent counsel the entire time. The judge determined that Russell had been “completely abandoned by counsel” for 14 months, including eight before he was indicted.

Reeves vacated Russell’s conviction but stayed his order pending an appeal to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In May, the appeals court reversed Reeves’ ruling and reinstated Russell’s conviction. The three-judge panel ruled that Reeves had overstepped his limited authority to overturn a state court, given a federal law that sets a high standard for doing so. The court also expressed doubt about whether Ron Ron even existed, let alone whether his testimony would’ve exonerated Russell.

Alysson Mills, Russell’s federal court-appointed attorney, said her client intends to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cook, who handles state-level appeals for indigent defendants, said at least half of the defendants he represents claim that key witnesses or other evidence have gone missing. But he can’t introduce new evidence on appeal, and even if he could, it can be difficult to verify those claims.

“Hopefully that is what will get remedied by this new rule,” Cook said. “People can meet with their lawyers and that investigative work can happen early.”

Gail Lowery, the head of the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office, said she has discussed Reeves’ ruling with attorneys in the office. She said she stressed the need to investigate cases early and to locate key witnesses or evidence before it can be lost.

Lowery said she doesn’t know whether Russell’s public defender ignored his alibi claim. She didn’t work there at the time, and two key people involved have since died. But if his claim was ignored, Lowery said, “that will never happen again.”

The public defender initially assigned to a case, she said, interviews the defendant, typically within a week of an arrest, and seeks to identify witnesses and key evidence.

“That pre-indictment time, it’s critical. We’ve been doing it, but we’re shoring it up in light of the changes” to the rule on indigent defense, Lowery said. “I’m reminding everyone, we need to be vigilant.”

She acknowledged, however, that there’s limited time for investigative work given caseloads and limited resources.

Johnson, the MacArthur Center head who pushed for the rule change, knows this.

“The next step in our fight,” he said, “is to convince legislators to provide our public defenders with resources equal to those given to prosecutors and law enforcement.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Caleb Bedillion, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.

The victory of Novak Djokovic in the latest French Open had the usual mixed reception in Australia.  While Australians pretend to like radicals, larrikins and the occasional deviant, the contrary is true.  Tight buttoned, properly behaved and conformist to the point of invisibility, the boringly predictable are always preferred.  You can rely on them.

Even in Melbourne, a town where his following is strong (he has won 10 Australian Opens), the call back circuit on the local ABC radio station qualified, ignored, even denigrated the Serb’s latest achievement.  At best, 23 grand slams, making him the most accomplished player in the open era, had to be seen alongside other caveats.  “He did not,” one caller churlishly insisted, “do the grand slam in one year, twice!”  Another, showing the sort of maturity demanded in some spectators, insisted that a French Open without Rafael Nadal was not a tournament worth seeing.  Even the radio host joined in, regretting that “it had to be Novak” getting his nose in front.

Of the big three who have dominated tennis for almost two decades – Roger Federer, Nadal and Djokovic – the Serbian has tended to be seen as one playing catch-up, his talent formidable, colossal, yet limping behind the anointed ones.  But the views of him as a player have rarely remained technical or specific to his craft.  There is always something else about him that irritates and enrages, necessitating his diminishing.  He does not play the role of what might be termed “the nice person”.

Cathal Kelly, writing for The Globe and Mail, wistfully recalls that other villain of tennis: the young Andre Agassi.  “Young Andre Agassi was insufferable.  He was so easily detestable that Esquire magazine named its yearly razzy sports awards after him.”  But the insufferable became palatable: Agassi lost the wig, “became a nice person.  It was a real disappointment.”  He also found himself a wife of unquestioned goodness: another stellar tennis performer, Steffi Graf.

Djokovic, however, presents something of a puzzle for Kelly.  For one, he has barely changed in appearance.  “Same build, same hair, same everything.”  But instead of moving from the insufferable to the drearily palatable, he has done something quite different.  “He’s mellowing into the bad guy.”  He might have tried, at the beginning, to impress, being “a charming dweeb”.  There were those impressions of his colleagues.  People laughed, barely.

Federer and Nadal, the good students of the tennis classroom, express no views of any consequence or interest, behave with impeccable dullness off the court, and will not be remembered for anything other than their tennis.  Bravo, many will say.  For them, it’s the game, and sponsorship deals.  In a sense, they are ideal sportsmen – from the perspective of administrators, politicians and most spectators, they do what is expected of them.  Each has a role, and a brand.  The world external to that, other than bank balances and prudent investments, is of no consequence.

Not for Djokovic.  Be it the issue of vaccinations (he refuses to take them); his political views about Kosovo (how dare he have them); the treatment of tennis players more broadly (how dare he speak for them), Novak has shown himself willing, to the point of being comically absurd, to stick his slender neck out.  His passion remains scorching, his mental resilience awe inspiring.

His treatment by the authorities prior to the Australian Open in 2022 was schizophrenic and scandalous: granted a visa to enter the country after supposedly satisfying COVID-19 entry requirements despite not being vaccinated; detained by the border authorities for not satisfying those same requirements; triumphant on a judicial review of his case; permitted to train for a week till the revocation of the visa, a decision affirmed by the Federal Court.

The then immigration minister, Alex Hawke, weighed up the issue of whether letting him remain might be good for the tournament or bad for Australia’s COVID-19 program.  Little consideration was given to the fact that the country’s vaccination rate, at that point, was so high as to make any views Djokovic might have on vaccination irrelevant.  The jabs had been accepted by an obedient populace; why not just let the man play tennis?  But the antivaxxers, loathed and reviled as “covidiots” and any other number of opprobrious tags, had come to terrify the political classes.  To let this figure remain in Australia might sow the seeds of some unhelpful ideas.  His deportation, deemed necessary, was celebrated with a lynch mob’s smug satisfaction.

Along the way, Djokovic, in reliable fashion, dragged another issue into the spotlight: Australia’s wretched, criminal treatment of refugees. While he only did a brief stint of slumming at a hotel in Melbourne incarcerating such unfortunates, he managed to get a sneak peek of a barbaric policy, promising to expose it widely.

Refugee advocates such as Paul Power of the Refugee Council of Australia, showing little gratitude for that fact, scorned him.  Instead of seeing the virtue of exposing the mistreatment of those seeking asylum in Australia, the handling of Djokovic had been a model of speedy, administrative justice, the very sort not afforded lowly plebs seeking sanctuary down under.  “Refugees seeking asylum in Australian airports don’t even get access to lawyers before they are put on the next flight out of Australia, let alone a chance to argue their case.”

Perhaps now Novak, Nole, the Joker, or simply Djokovic, might be appreciated for being the remarkably accomplished tennis player that he is.  But this is unlikely to be so.  He is simply too interesting to be appreciated merely for that.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Even in Melbourne, a town where his following is strong (he has won 10 Australian Opens), the call back circuit on the local ABC radio station qualified, ignored, even denigrated the Serb’s latest achievement. At best, 23 grand slams, making him the most accomplished player in the open era, had to be seen alongside other caveats. “He did not,” one caller churlishly insisted, “do the grand slam in one year, twice!” Another, showing the sort of maturity demanded in some spectators, insisted that a French Open without Rafael Nadal was not a tournament worth seeing. Even the radio host joined in, regretting that “it had to be Novak” getting his nose in front.

Of the big three who have dominated tennis for almost two decades – Roger Federer, Nadal and Djokovic – the Serbian has tended to be seen as one playing catch-up, his talent formidable, colossal, yet limping behind the anointed ones. But the views of him as a player have rarely remained technical or specific to his craft. There is always something else about him that irritates and enrages, necessitating his diminishing. He does not play the role of what might be termed “the nice person”.

Cathal Kelly, writing for The Globe and Mail, wistfully recalls that other villain of tennis: the young Andre Agassi. “Young Andre Agassi was insufferable. He was so easily detestable that Esquire magazine named its yearly razzy sports awards after him.” But the insufferable became palatable: Agassi lost the wig, “became a nice person. It was a real disappointment.” He also found himself a wife of unquestioned goodness: another stellar tennis performer, Steffi Graf.

Djokovic, however, presents something of a puzzle for Kelly. For one, he has barely changed in appearance. “Same build, same hair, same everything.” But instead of moving from the insufferable to the drearily palatable, he has done something quite different. “He’s mellowing into the bad guy.” He might have tried, at the beginning, to impress, being “a charming dweeb”. There were those impressions of his colleagues. People laughed, barely.

Federer and Nadal, the good students of the tennis classroom, express no views of any consequence or interest, behave with impeccable dullness off the court, and will not be remembered for anything other than their tennis. Bravo, many will say. For them, it’s the game, and sponsorship deals. In a sense, they are ideal sportsmen – from the perspective of administrators, politicians and most spectators, they do what is expected of them. Each has a role, and a brand. The world external to that, other than bank balances and prudent investments, is of no consequence.

Not for Djokovic. Be it the issue of vaccinations (he refuses to take them); his political views about Kosovo (how dare he have them); the treatment of tennis players more broadly (how dare he speak for them), Novak has shown himself willing, to the point of being comically absurd, to stick his slender neck out. His passion remains scorching, his mental resilience awe inspiring.

His treatment by the authorities prior to the Australian Open in 2022 was schizophrenic and scandalous: granted a visa to enter the country after supposedly satisfying COVID-19 entry requirements despite not being vaccinated; detained by the border authorities for not satisfying those same requirements; triumphant on a judicial review of his case; permitted to train for a week till the revocation of the visa, a decision affirmed by the Federal Court.

The then immigration minister, Alex Hawke, weighed up the issue of whether letting him remain might be good for the tournament or bad for Australia’s COVID-19 program. Little consideration was given to the fact that the country’s vaccination rate, at that point, was so high as to make any views Djokovic might have on vaccination irrelevant. The jabs had been accepted by an obedient populace; why not just let the man play tennis? But the antivaxxers, loathed and reviled as “covidiots” and any other number of opprobrious tags, had come to terrify the political classes. To let this figure remain in Australia might sow the seeds of some unhelpful ideas. His deportation, deemed necessary, was celebrated with a lynch mob’s smug satisfaction.

Along the way, Djokovic, in reliable fashion, dragged another issue into the spotlight: Australia’s wretched, criminal treatment of refugees. While he only did a brief stint of slumming at a hotel in Melbourne incarcerating such unfortunates, he managed to get a sneak peek of a barbaric policy, promising to expose it widely.

Refugee advocates such as Paul Power of the Refugee Council of Australia, showing little gratitude for that fact, scorned him. Instead of seeing the virtue of exposing the mistreatment of those seeking asylum in Australia, the handling of Djokovic had been a model of speedy, administrative justice, the very sort not afforded lowly plebs seeking sanctuary down under. “Refugees seeking asylum in Australian airports don’t even get access to lawyers before they are put on the next flight out of Australia, let alone a chance to argue their case.”

Perhaps now Novak, Nole, the Joker, or simply Djokovic, might be appreciated for being the remarkably accomplished tennis player that he is. But this is unlikely to be so. He is simply too interesting to be appreciated merely for that.

Image credit: Tennis Head

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

For many, the current hysteria among blindly bigoted, supposedly God-fearing troglodytes eerily echoes the white fear and hate that spewed forth during the Civil Rights Movement, when oppressed Black people dared to seek polite entry to the nation's schools and lunch counters. Today, the anti-trans/queer/other delirium has reached such fever pitch that a Texas school district just cancelled a planned field trip to see a theater production of James and the Giant Peach - wherein a young orphan boy escapes cruel relatives in a giant magic peach, embarks on a whirlwind, surreal journey with similarly giant magic insects, and learns about friendship and tolerance - because some of the actors dress as the other gender to play their insect and human parts. "We are keeping our son home (about) the drag queen role," parents squawked. Also, "Do you see how they are coming after our kids? They sneak it in!" and, "That's drag to me. It's all grooming no matter how you dissect it." Sigh.

Unimaginably, this is the bonkers, toxic environment in which first-term, duly elected, transgender Rep. Zooey Zephyr, representing 11,000 constituents in relatively liberal Missoula, has bravely fought to claim her place. From the moment the ugly GOP-controlled legislative session began, said one queer, Indigenous ally, "There are truly new lows being explored by the super-majority.” "There is such disdain, such animus, such disgust with queer people, Indigenous people, people that don’t fit in within their vision of what Montana is," he said, "they’re now weaponizing the institutions to exclude us." During last month's debate of a GOP bill to ban gender-affirming care for youth (because it's definitely the most vital issue facing the state), Zephyr was silenced when she argued GOP perpetrators would have “blood” on their hands" in the bill's tragic fallout. Afterwards, hundreds of outraged protesters showed up to chant, "Let her speak!" Capitol police in riot gear were deployed, seven people were arrested, and the GOP majority voted to ban Zephyr from the House floor for using "uncalled-for language."

Nevertheless, she persisted: Along with Montana's ACLU, Zephyr sued, arguing her censure violated her 1st Amendment rights, denied the right of her constituents to "just representation," and was a “direct threat to the bedrock principles that uphold our entire democracy.” She endured vicious harassment: Bigots taunted and misgendered her; mockingly posted pre-transition photos though she'd never hidden she was transgender; and, when her partner trans journalist Erin Reed announced she'd been "swatted" - calling in a SWAT team against an innocent target - the vitriol on "self-caused hate crimes" was savage: "Oh poor victim...On today's episode of 'Things That Didn't Happen'...What a narcissist." Meanwhile, a rabid GOP forged ahead with its anti-trans health bill, which the governor's own non-binary son denounced as "immoral, unjust (and) a violation of human rights.” They also passed an anti-drag bill so vague - no "parodic persona with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and make-up” - it could bar music concerts, Shakespeare plays, Halloween costumes and Lady Gaga.

After her banishment - though Speaker Matt Regier tried to stop her - Zephyr began working on a bench outside the chamber; an orange Post-It note declared the ad-hoc office Seat No. 31, her desk on the Floor. "I am here working on behalf of my constituents," she wrote, "as best I can given the undemocratic circumstances." This week, a judge put an abrupt end to the standoff by barring her return to the House, ruling he couldn't interfere with "legislative authority." The GOP called the decision "a win for the rule of law"; Zephyr slammed it as an "affront to democracy...(The) House is the People’s House, not Speaker Regier’s." At the same time, wives of GOP legislators began arriving early each day to park themselves on the bench Zephyr had been using; photos show them mean, smug, sneering like the racist crowds that met the Little Rock Nine and lunch counter warriors of the civil rights era. The resilient Zephyr calmly moved to a nearby lunch counter, where - irony alert - she stood. "Seat 31 has moved," she tweeted. "I'm up and ready to work. Plus, I hear standing desks are all the rage these days."

But her supporters were enraged by petty, hateful "Christo-fascist bigots" with such a "small, sad life." "Imagine telling your family, 'I'll be gone all day because I have to oppress (someone) my religion doesn't like,'" wrote one. Also, "JFC, did they tell her to get to the back of the bus too?" They swiftly organized revolving crews into a "Blue Bench Brigade" to arrive early each day, claim the spot, and "make sure @ZoAndBehold (is) surrounded by kind people who support her." Many celebrated the small, sweet action: "This. is. awesome" and "I never thought we’d be fighting over a bench, but here we are." A grateful Zephyr thanked the "lovely friends who saved me a spot" so "seat 31 is back to its home-away-from-home"; she thanked "folks who brought me the earrings and corsage," "everyone who sent flowers," those whose "love and support filled that room...I am carrying your kindness with me." When the Legislature abruptly adjourned, she was still in the hall, yet still sanguine: "Despite all the cruelties, I believe people saw a glimpse of what our country can be if we stand up for democracy & one another." A glimpse, just barely. God bless Zephyr's strength: She - we all - will need it.

She remained banned, but Zephr's desk overflowed with flowers sent by supporters.Twitter photo.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

The post Always a Carney at Heart appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

In the early 1940s a young Sergeant Alexander Brown from Mangaia, Cook Islands, was killed in action.

“His siblings, all my uncles and aunts all passed away without knowing where he was. He was 24,” former member of the Cook Islands Parliament Tamaiva Tuavera — affectionately known as captain Tama — said.

The “boy from Mangaia” left his home land as a teenager and went to study in New Zealand.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: ‘Captain Tama’ talks
• Other Anzac reports

World War Two broke out, so he left school and signed up for the Royal Air Force.

He made his way to Canada for training and became a navigator on the bombers.

Alex became Sergeant Alexander Brown, the first Cook Islander to be enlisted in the Royal Air Force.

“Taking part in bombing missions over Germany, he was killed in action,” captain Tama said.

Burial site unknown
Nobody ever told the family where their Alex was buried, a deep pain carried for generations.

“Especially my mother, Mrs Jessie Mary Tuavera née Brown. Tears always fall when she talks about her baby brother,” He said.

Seventy four years after he was killed his great niece, Cassey Eggelton, went searching for him.

She found him in Kiel, Germany.

They now know, thanks to the research of captain Tama’s sister, that Sergeant Alexander Brown was killed in action over Somme and then moved to the Commonwealth Military Cemetery in Kiel, Germany.

“And that’s one of my uncles during the war. I’ve got other great uncles, those in the First World War and the Second World War,” Captain Tama said.

Captain Tama wants the next generation to remember the sacrifices made by soldiers who fought for freedom, “the veterans and war heroes before us”.

‘I get a lump in the throat’
Captain Tama is a former member of the Cook Islands Parliament and soldier and Anzac Day holds some serious weight in his heart.

“It’s hard to describe at times. It’s a feeling that only comes back during Anzac when you remember the ones that have passed from your ancestors to your mate,” he said.

“See for us because we served, we know our ancestors went to war, the First World War, the Second World War, and all the conflicts in between. And so it’s always hard but Anzac always brings back, the memory keeps coming back.”

Anzac Day in the Cook Islands is to be celebrated a day after Aotearoa.

Captain Tama has organised an event where a 300 strong crowd is to be hosted the day before the official Cook Islands Dawn service, in conjunction with commemoration services in Aotearoa.

“A reunion for ex serving and currently serving soldiers, female and male,” he said.

A teary eyed Cook Islands RSA president, Thomas Annas, said the reunion was already very touching, with his old mates already arriving.

Southeast Asia reunion
“We have a reunion over here for soldiers that served in Southeast Asia, from 1974 to 1989. And they have decided that for this year’s reunion, they would hold it here in the Cook Islands,” Annas said.

He is proud it is being held at his small RSA of around 80 members.

This is personal for him too, reuniting with people he hasn’t seen for many years.

“I left Singapore in 1978 and I just lost contact with them,” he said.

One of the old comrade’s expected to attend is a long lost mate who he has not seen for 26 years.

“I get a lump in the throat, you get the odd tear in your eye now and again when you meet up with someone,” he said.

There were just under 500 soldiers from the Cook islands who volunteered in World War, they were rejected, but being ‘warriors from the Cook Islands’ they wanted to go, so raised money and eventually they did go attached to the 28th Maori Battalion.

“They said 30 of these Cook Islanders did the work of over 100 British soldiers,” Annas 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.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

In early March 2023, President Joe Biden embedded in his proposed 2024 budget to Congress revenue increases through tax measures that the rich and corporations do not like. Like his predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, he doesn’t really mean what he says.

Biden’s four proposed increases are significant because they would restore the corporate tax rate to 28% from Trump’s decrease to 21% in 2017, raise the top rate for income above $400,000 a year from 37% to 39.6%, raise the 1% excise tax on massive stock buybacks to 4% and get rid of the gaping super-rich private fund managers’ “carried interest” loophole, so as to tax such income at ordinary rates.

He even tossed in a proposal to tax capital gains at the same rate as income for households with more than one million dollars in annual income.

The restorative taxes on these affluent tax escapees, compliments of Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Congressional Republicans, are little more than a wink to the major donors that Biden is summoning to Washington the weekend after next to grease his re-election campaign.

Here are my suggestions to President Biden:

Mr. President: Like other Democrats’ verbal support for a $15 federal minimum wage and a public option added to Obamacare, the citizenry doesn’t believe you are going to fight for your proposed corporate super-rich tax proposals. Why should they? Your words on Capitol Hill are insufficient without the subsequent presidential and Democratic Party muscle to make these restorative increases credible.

For example, where is your presidential tour publicizing these necessary revenue increases? If you are really “Scranton Joe” you could start by going to Scranton, Pennsylvania and standing with blue-collar union workers to show the contrast in their federal tax rates compared to the plutocrats and the often zero-paying giant corporations. You could jar the sleepy Democratic National Committee to galvanize all Democratic members of Congress to barnstorm their districts to promote these overdue reforms during their numerous “recesses” back home.

You could make a major primetime address about redressing these deeply felt inequities, shouldered by liberal and conservative Americans alike, and urge your party to hold press conferences filled with examples and images that demonstrate serious resolve to make Capitol Hill shake from the electrified pressure back home.

Leading newspapers would print your op-eds on this subject. NPR, PBS and the Sunday talk shows would want to interview leading Democrats.

Join with leading citizen advocacy groups to tap into the civic community, so long skeptical of Democratic Party rhetoric not producing determined actions.

You can reject prejudged defeatism by your Democratic colleagues who say the corrupt and cruel Republicans have the votes to block such legislation. The Democratic-controlled Senate Committees can hold powerful attention-getting public hearings. If the Democrats had really championed tax justice, the GOP might not have taken the House of Representatives in the last election. (See: winningamerica.net).

The benefits of generating real muscle would serve as a contrast to the Republicans’ just-released 300-page sadistic assault on the well-being of all Americans, misleadingly titled the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023.” This legislation is a historic and shameful example of Congressional Republicans’ beholdenness to crass corporatism.

Don’t add to the pile of throwaway reformist lines. You need inspiring words to show the people that you are “Scranton Joe” and not “Delaware Joe” – from the notorious corporate state of weak laws relating to corporate power. (You might remember that in 1973 we published a book titled The Corporate State about DuPont’s enormous power over Delaware. DuPont then owned the two major newspapers in Wilmington and provided charitable contributions that were a fraction of its state and local tax concessions.)

A good start is to tell your visiting big donors that in their patriotic service to America, what is urgently needed is productive, paid-for public budgets. It is time for their tax holidays to end.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Biden’s four proposed increases are significant because they would restore the corporate tax rate to 28% from Trump’s decrease to 21% in 2017, raise the top rate for income above $400,000 a year from 37% to 39.6%, raise the 1% excise tax on massive stock buybacks to 4% and get rid of the gaping super-rich private fund managers’ “carried interest” loophole, so as to tax such income at ordinary rates.

He even tossed in a proposal to tax capital gains at the same rate as income for households with more than one million dollars in annual income.

The restorative taxes on these affluent tax escapees, compliments of Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Congressional Republicans, are little more than a wink to the major donors that Biden is summoning to Washington the weekend after next to grease his re-election campaign.

Here are my suggestions to President Biden:

Mr. President: Like other Democrats’ verbal support for a $15 federal minimum wage and a public option added to Obamacare, the citizenry doesn’t believe you are going to fight for your proposed corporate super-rich tax proposals. Why should they? Your words on Capitol Hill are insufficient without the subsequent presidential and Democratic Party muscle to make these restorative increases credible.

For example, where is your presidential tour publicizing these necessary revenue increases? If you are really “Scranton Joe” you could start by going to Scranton, Pennsylvania and standing with blue-collar union workers to show the contrast in their federal tax rates compared to the plutocrats and the often zero-paying giant corporations. You could jar the sleepy Democratic National Committee to galvanize all Democratic members of Congress to barnstorm their districts to promote these overdue reforms during their numerous “recesses” back home.

You could make a major primetime address about redressing these deeply felt inequities, shouldered by liberal and conservative Americans alike, and urge your party to hold press conferences filled with examples and images that demonstrate serious resolve to make Capitol Hill shake from the electrified pressure back home.

Leading newspapers would print your op-eds on this subject. NPR, PBS and the Sunday talk shows would want to interview leading Democrats.

Join with leading citizen advocacy groups to tap into the civic community, so long skeptical of Democratic Party rhetoric not producing determined actions.

You can reject prejudged defeatism by your Democratic colleagues who say the corrupt and cruel Republicans have the votes to block such legislation. The Democratic-controlled Senate Committees can hold powerful attention-getting public hearings. If the Democrats had really championed tax justice, the GOP might not have taken the House of Representatives in the last election. (See: winningamerica.net).

The benefits of generating real muscle would serve as a contrast to the Republicans’ just-released 300-page sadistic assault on the well-being of all Americans, misleadingly titled the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023.” This legislation is a historic and shameful example of Congressional Republicans’ beholdenness to crass corporatism.

Don’t add to the pile of throwaway reformist lines. You need inspiring words to show the people that you are “Scranton Joe” and not “Delaware Joe” – from the notorious corporate state of weak laws relating to corporate power. (You might remember that in 1973 we published a book titled The Corporate State about DuPont’s enormous power over Delaware. DuPont then owned the two major newspapers in Wilmington and provided charitable contributions that were a fraction of its state and local tax concessions.)

A good start is to tell your visiting big donors that in their patriotic service to America, what is urgently needed is productive, paid-for public budgets. It is time for their tax holidays to end.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Huang Yicheng was among them, turning up at a spontaneous protest at Shanghai's Urumqi Road, only to be detained and mistreated by cops, who hung him upside down at one point, as he described in an earlier interview with Radio Free Asia given under the pseudonym Mr.Chen.

Now in Germany, Huang spoke to RFA Mandarin about his plans for the future:

Huang Yicheng: I'm from Shanghai. I am 26 years old and a graduate of the Chinese department of Peking University. I am currently a postgraduate student at the University of Hamburg, Germany. On Nov. 27, 2022, I was arrested by the police on Urumqi Middle Road, Shanghai, put onto a bus, and then escaped from the bus. Then a white man helped me escape the scene. 

RFA: You were interviewed by me on Nov. 27, the weekend when the "white paper" movement took place. You were interviewed anonymously then, so why did you choose to disclose your real name and appearance now?

Huang Yicheng: This is because I have now left China. I saw that there were so many people around the same age as me who took part in the white paper movement with me, who have been arrested and imprisoned. So I feel that I will always be in pain and have uncontrollable anxiety if I don't stand up and speak out on their behalf, even though there are great risks involved in doing so.

I hope that everyone can call for the release of Cao Zhixin and the other peaceful demonstrators who are now behind bars. 

The government should tell us how many people were arrested in each city after the white paper movement, and issue a complete list of names for each city, so the rest of the world knows exactly what is going on.

RFA: You just said that you are aware of the great risk of doing so. How would you deal with this risk?

Huang Yicheng: This is very hard to think about, because now I have revealed my true identity, educational background and my true appearance. But I want to use this to encourage others in the same boat. But I also think it's almost impossible to remain entirely anonymous in the current online environment. So instead of talking about how scared we are, we should face up to the risk and the fear.

In that way, I hope that the next generation, or our own generation, within the next 10, 20 years or even sooner than that, will get to live in a society without the need for such fear, where we are free to express our thoughts without fear.

RFA: Did you decide to study abroad due to safety concerns, or were you planning to do that anyway?

Huang Yicheng: I had originally planned to study abroad, but it was very, very difficult to get a visa during the zero-COVID restrictions. I started this application before the Shanghai lockdown [of spring 2022], and it took more than a year to come through.

This delay was one of the reasons that I took part in the white paper protests in the first place, as well as the three-month lockdown in Shanghai. It was an experience that changed my life.

RFA: Were you worried that you might be prevented from leaving the country because you had taken part in the protest?

Huang Yicheng: Yes, yes I was. I think everyone else had similar worries. They had already taken away two busloads of detained protesters from Urumqi Road in Shanghai between the evening of Nov. 26 and the early morning of Nov. 27. The video clips being shot at the time were very worrying. I never thought going into it that I would get detained. That's why I want to speak out in support of the people who were detained. Hopefully we can put some pressure on [the authorities] and get them released.

RFA: When I interviewed you on Nov. 27, when you had gotten back home, you said that you were very worried that the police would come looking for you, so you asked for anonymity. Did they come looking for you?

Huang Yicheng: No, they didn't. My identity was kept well hidden, and they didn't find me.

RFA: How did you manage to protect yourself?

Huang Yicheng: I just hid at home and cut off all contact with friends at home and abroad. I don't know if they used facial recognition or anything like that. I also made a video statement to be posted in case I got arrested and gave it to a friend I trust. He would have posted it if I had been detained.

RFA: Given that you were actually caught by the police and put on the bus, it's pretty lucky that you managed to escape – a fluke, wasn't it?

Huang Yicheng: When I think about it now, I can hardly believe it. It was a bit dream-like. When I was detained and put on the bus, it was parked on the southwest side of the intersection between Urumqi Road and Wuyuan Road. I was probably in the second row, near the door.

The policeman got off the bus and went to detain other demonstrators, but he didn't handcuff us. We could see from the Twitter account “Mr Li is not your teacher” that there was a trans woman at the back of the bus. The police attacked her repeatedly then closed the bus curtains to stop people filming the attack from outside. Some people filmed the attack with their phones and posted the video of the violence against the transgender person. Some people might think it incredible that we could still shoot video like that after being detained on the bus. But they didn't handcuff us and they didn't watch us very closely, which meant I had an opportunity to escape.

RFA: You mentioned the Twitter account “Mr Li is not your teacher,” which is run by a Chinese student studying in Italy. Do you think the videos he posted were credible?

Huang Yicheng: All the photos he posted were real, and I think at least two were taken by me. One was a street sign of Urumqi Middle Road with someone holding flowers and a candle. The other was a white placard calling for artistic freedom. I sent both of those photos to him. I didn't dare to shoot the video of the police attacking protesters, as the atmosphere was very tense at the time. But I basically saw everything that he posted [on the ground].

RFA: Did anyone you know get arrested?

Huang Yicheng: No one I knew directly was arrested. However, Cao Zhixin works at Peking University Press, so I can confirm that Cao Zhixin is indeed still in custody through my connections with Peking University alumni, and that she hasn't been released yet.

RFA: We have confirmed this via other channels, too. Did you ever expect to be treated like this by the Chinese government?

Huang Yicheng: No, no, because I was thinking about the situation in Hong Kong [during the 2019 protest movement], where they had the brave defenders on the front line, with the peaceful demonstrators behind them. The only reason I went there was to call for the release of those detained. I didn't even hold up a blank sheet of paper, and I didn't shout any slogans other than calling for them to release people. I stood further back to protect myself.

I met a lot of inexperienced people there who went to stand in the front row, but I told them not to stand there, that they should try to protect themselves, because they always start detaining people who are in the front row. 

What makes me want to cry the most is that all of the people standing in the front row were women. All the people holding up the sheets of blank paper were women, standing there in front, facing off with the police. There were almost no men there. They took away about one woman every 10 minutes on average. Some men were detained, but very few – it was almost all women. They went for the women every time, not always the ones in the front row.

There was a tall plainclothes cop ... people were talking about him on Twitter because he was the one who said "I just can't understand you people." He was communicating with someone via a walkie-talkie, and he would suddenly point at a person, maybe in the second or third row, and then all the officers with earpieces would rush to grab them. That's how I got detained.

RFA: Why do you think it was mostly women in the front row and not men?

Huang Yicheng: It wasn't just young women, but also queer people and other sexual minorities. They had the strongest presence in the white paper movement, maybe because China's political system is highly patriarchal. So I think they weren't just challenging the government, but also the patriarchy.

One thing that made a huge impression on me was three women hugging each other and crying on the eastern sidewalk of Urumqi Road. I asked them, "Why are you crying? Did your friend get taken away yesterday?"

But they replied: "No, none of our friends were taken away, but we saw on Weibo that there was a little girl who burned to death in Urumqi, part of the Uyghur family."

RFA: This wasn't the first time your classmates were detained, was it?

Huang Yicheng: A whole bunch of people from the Peking University Marxist Society were detained in 2018, maybe a dozen or as many as 20. Out of them, I had the closest relationship with [labor activist] Yue Xin. I have so many memories of her. I want to write more about that, so we can remember what happened. So many young people in China have lost their personal freedom just because of their thinking ... including Cao Zhixin mostly recently. 

I burst into tears when I saw Cao Zhixin's video, because I feel that, if she is in prison, then so am I. She's the same age as me. So now I've managed to get away, I should say a few words for her.

RFA: Would you call yourself a young leftist?

Huang Yicheng: I did take part in the Peking University Marxist Society, and I made some posts to their official social media account. But gradually I moved further away from that stance. The white paper movement wasn't just about leftists. It was mostly young people who were dissatisfied with the zero-COVID policy.

RFA: Do you think that the white paper movement was a political movement?

Huang Yicheng: I think so. We can see from the slogans of various cities that Shanghai's slogans were relatively radical, but we still saw a number of ... political appeals in other cities. Human rights were a very important issue, because countless tragedies were caused by the lack of human rights during zero-COVID. The white paper movement that followed had solid public support. Even though not that many people took part in Shanghai, there was a huge base of support there.

RFA: Do you think that the white paper moment brought about the end of the zero-COVID policy?

Huang Yicheng: I think it must have. Because the zero-COVID policy in China had totally ended just two weeks after the white paper movement. It was a total U-turn. 

But the heartbreaking thing is that while the Chinese government may actually meet our demands, they still insist on punishing everyone. I think this has been their logic for thousands of years, not just under the Communist Party. So it means that all of our bravest people, who are willing to stand up and plead on behalf of ordinary people, and push for freedom, get eliminated [from further social activism].

So who will speak up the next time we get such insane government policies in China? We have to keep the focus on those people, and call on the rest of the world to put pressure on China.

We have to stand up bravely, and express our true thoughts, and then people all over the world will respect us. If we all just go along with their lies, then as a nation we won't be worthy of respect.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wang Yun for RFA Mandarin.

Why “Always Wanting More?”

The ancient Greek poet Ovid had an answer, “the Goddess of Plenty.” America’s power elite are like Erysichthon, the greedy timber merchant in Ovid’s ancient tale. Erysichthon cuts down a sacred tree, angering Ceres, the Goddess of Plenty. She condemns him to eat everything in sight including himself after all else had been consumed.

Well, “thanks Ovid,” but I’d like several other sources to chime in with their explanations, not that I expect them to be anymore edifying than you explanation.

The Journalists’ Answer

I always rely on good journalism as a source for my writings. Guess what I found? A handbook on hedonism, no less! It’s a step-by-step guide to gluttony. The author is a New York Times best-selling author.² I bet it is a best seller among America’s super rich!

The Philosophers’ Answer

While there must be millions of PhD philosophers on our planet who think for a living, trying to find them on the Internet is a chore. The first one I stumbled upon was a philosopher’s article entitled “The Feels Good Theory of Pleasure.”³ In order to read it I would have had to pay $39.95 for a PDF copy! Had I stumbled upon a case of the greedy writing about greed?

The Psychoanalysts’ Answer

Whom better to turn to than the guru of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud? Human beings, he posited, were born greedy. That may be revealing about him, but not about me, nor I would guess about any readers of this article. Yet Freud may be right about one class of human beings, if we can call them that, namely, the evil super power elite of America’s corpocracy. While I did examine their upbringing in my psychoscoping them, I did not look at their birth certificates for authentication of their greed’s birth mark.

The Psychologists’ Answer

It is with some trepidation that I turn to my own profession. As with all other professions that of psychology is splintered into many different disciplines, 54 to be exact. I picked Division 23. Consumer Psychology for possible edification on the role of greed in selling and buying. A H— of a large role I should think!

There are no insights to be gained about greed in reading APA’s gloss about its Division 23. So, I went searching for ANY psychologist. I stopped after finding this one, a social psychologist, PhD.⁴ He blamed greed on capitalism. Good Grief, I beg to differ, Dr. Kasser! I have written at some length that there is bad capitalism and good capitalism.⁵

In Closing

1. Always wanting more is a matter of life and death due to America’s corpocracy. Greed plays a big hand in the power elites’ unquenchable thirst for more power and will lead to Doomsday if not stopped. The Doomsday Clock, created 23 years ago by atomic bomb scientists, is now only “90 seconds to midnight,” the closest it has ever been.” “We are living in a time of unprecedented danger” reports the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

2. Readers, what are your answers?

1. Brumback, GB. KABOOM! Wolves in Suits Leading Humanity to Doomsday and How to Stop the Doomsday Clock and End Human Misery. Penguin BookWritersGroup, in press.
2. Flocker, M. The Hedonism Handbook: Mastering the Lost Arts of Leisure and Pleasure. Da Capo Press, October 13, 2004.
3. Smuts, A. “The Feels Good Theory of Pleasure. Philosophical Studies, 155, 241-265, 2010.
4. Azar, B. “How Greed Outstripped Need.” American Psychological Association, January 2009, Vol. 40, No. 1.
5. Brumback, GB. The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch. Author House, 2011. See p. 155-180 Setting the Stage for True Economic Reform, and Appendix C. Creative Economic Thinking From A to Z Minus E for Economists.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Brumback.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Roger Thompson.

A new Biden administration policy that will reserve federal manufacturing funds for companies that help their employees access childcare will only perpetuate a system in which far too many U.S. families struggle to find care, one expert on the crisis said Monday.

The Commerce Department on Tuesday unveiled a new rule tied to the CHIPS and Science Act, which includes $39 billion in federal subsidies to invest in semiconductor manufacturing.

That money would only be available to companies that help their employees access childcare in a number of potential ways, including building childcare centers exclusively for workers' families near factories, paying existing care providers to make space for the children of employers, or subsidizing childcare costs.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo assured the public that the policy will ensure the semiconductor industry can "expand the labor force" and recruit more women, but childcare policy expert Elliot Haspel raised a number of questions about the plan, including whether the Biden administration is aware of the current shortage of childcare workers in the U.S. and the shortage of available spaces for children and daycare centers that it's caused.

"Do any of these companies need to ensure [childcare] educators get a competitive wage?" asked Haspel. "What happens if their workers just end up on waiting lists? Doesn't feel fully thought out."

"Making childcare a job-linked benefit means that when you lose your job, you lose your childcare and your kid loses a caregiver."

As The New York Times reported Monday, nearly 58,000 childcare jobs have been lost since the coronavirus pandemic began, forcing centers to reduce their capacity. The shortage of childcare workers has been linked to chronically low pay in the industry, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating that employees make an average of $27,680 per year or $13.31 per hour.

A Household Pulse Survey taken by the U.S. Census Bureau in January 2022 found that 1 in 4 families with children under the age of five were unable to secure childcare, and a study by the Bipartisan Policy Center in 2020 found a shortage of three million open childcare slots across 35 states. Nationwide, the average time a family spends on waiting lists for childcare is 18 months. Once families do secure a spot, more than half spend at least 20% of their income on childcare, according to the First Five Years Fund.

Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America's Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, expressed appreciation for the administration's call for employers to provide on-site childcare, which he said "helps parents and is good for businesses."

However, he warned, tying childcare to employment instead of treating it as a public good like K-12 education risks leaving millions of struggling families out and causing the childcare crisis to snowball into an even bigger problem, just as the U.S. healthcare system has since the for-profit insurance system was established after World War II.

"One reason why we do not have universal healthcare? It was more politically expedient to make it an employer-linked perk," said Haspel. "The idea caught on, and the train left the station. We're still paying for that decision today."

As Haspel explained at Early Learning Nation in November:

While no longer widely remarked upon, in 1945 President Truman proposed a national health insurance program that would have been folded into the Social Security system. The proposal would have created a comprehensive, universal, single-payer system akin to the U.K.'s National Health Service which emerged in the same post-war period.

Truman's proposal set off a vicious debate (including lots of accusations about socialism, and the American Medical Association launching a multi-million-dollar campaign to oppose it)...

Of course, we know the end of this story. By 1958, 75% of Americans had an employer-sponsored plan. This choice had consequences. The entrenchment of health insurance as a private job-linked issue has led to a dysfunctional, unpopular, expensive, ineffective healthcare system—and one which has proven almost impossible to overhaul. People don't like the system but are used to the linkage, and the health insurance lobby is a mightily powerful opponent.

The Biden administration is unveiling its CHIPS-linked childcare scheme more than a year after right-wing Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) opposed a number of proposals to invest in the economic well-being of U.S. families, including through subsidized childcare.

As the Times reported, Raimondo told staffers after the Democratic Party's failure to pass childcare legislation as part of the Inflation Reduction Act last summer, “If Congress wasn't going to do what they should have done, we're going to do it in implementation" of bills that President Joe Biden did sign into law.

"Something is not always better than nothing," tweeted Haspel. "I'm as upset as anyone that real childcare reform died thanks to unified opposition from the GOP and then Joe Manchin. But we must fight for a system that works rather than accept a fatally flawed premise."

Establishing a system in which childcare is linked to employment raises questions about what will happen to a worker's children if they lose their job or if a company changes its benefits, he added.

"You don't want these things bundled with employment for the obvious reason that people want these services to be continuous as they move from job to job," Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project concurred.

To solve the childcare crisis, said Haspel, the care of children must be treated as a public good—one that's paid for through fair taxation of corporations.

"Employers SHOULD have skin in the game for childcare," he added, but the way to ensure they do is not through "an ad hoc move."

"Levy taxes and use those dollars to build a system that works for everyone!" he said.

He compared the Biden administration's plan to one in which companies would be required to ensure their employees' children have access to elementary education, if the federal government didn't provide public schools.

"The question isn't 'on site childcare or no'," said Haspel, "it's whether we support on-site childcare as part of a comprehensive, publicly-funded childcare system that provides options for all parents, or simply as a discrete perk for a given number of employees working at a given site until they leave/are fired from their job or the company decides they don't want to run a center anymore."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Liu Yi: northern_square on Instagram 

Bored under a pandemic lockdown, U.S.-based artist Liu Yi in May 2020 opened an Instagram account he called "Northern Square" to organize and publish images of the pro-democracy movement in China. A photo of the 1979 Democracy Wall movement was his first post.

As a millennial, Liu didn't witness either the 1979 debates on whether China needed the "fifth modernization" that was democracy or the student-led mass protests in Tiananmen Square that called for an open society and ended in a massacre on June 4, 1989.

He longed for nevertheless a greater political freedom for the people of China akin to what had been permitted for a time by late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping during the economic reforms of the 1980s.

"[The Tiananmen protests] were the achievement of that era, but they also marked the end of it," Liu says. "You can see a vitality that our generation lacks in those young people on the square."

Liu's own political awakening came when his account on the social media platform Weibo in 2009, which many believed at the time would make government censorship much harder despite growing controls.

He started using circumvention software to bypass the Great Firewall of blocks, filters and human censorship, and read content that wasn't available to most Chinese internet users.

Nearly two years after opening Northern Square, Liu asked his rapidly growing number of followers a simple question: "What are people currently under lockdown thinking right now?"

In nearly 200 replies, people poured out their frustration at the endless lockdowns and COVID-19 testing programs of the zero-COVID restrictions and at their inability to express themselves on Chinese social media thanks to their government overseers.

"Like an exile in my own country," came one reply. Liu said he began to realize that his Instagram account, which he had started on a whim, had become a relatively safe space for people to air grievances, exactly the sort of content that would be blocked instantly and sanctioned if it were sent inside the Great Firewall.

"This account had acquired a new meaning. It wasn't just mine any more: it belonged to everyone," Liu says. "I found they needed an anonymous platform to express their thoughts and experiences, something that's not allowed in China."

The number of followers Liu’s account attracted rose the most during the nationwide protests of the "white paper" movement in late November 2022, with followers sending him new footage, photos or comments on the protests every minute, he says.

By Jan. 13, his account had 87,000 followers.

"We often talk about how atomized society is, and about information bubbles," Liu says. "A lot of people feel lonely because they can't see content that reflects their own lives, but they get very happy and excited when they see it here.”

Zhang Xiaofang:  confusingchina on Instagram 

Zhang recalls getting hundreds of private messages and contributions every day at the height of the protests in late 2022, many of which included footage and photos of protests across the country.

"I opened this Instagram account because I want to keep posts that had been 404ed on the Chinese internet, or content people think is absurd," says Zhang, who used voice-altering software during his interview.

But he has seen traffic fall off sharply since authorities started detaining young people who took part in the protests against the zero-COVID policy or held memorials for the victims of a fatal lockdown apartment fire in Xinjiang's regional capital Urumqi.

"Many people have been powerless to resist the settling of scores in the wake of those events, so reducing the amount they discuss or pay attention to the white paper movement is an act of self-protection," Zhang says.

Nonetheless, Zhang believes that the movement has served a purpose: People now know that they can express their demands and resist an unreasonable government. 

"This is just the beginning," he says.

Xia Hao: @CitizensDailyCN on Twitter and Instagram, @VoiceOfCN on Telegram  

Millennial Xia Hao, who lives in Canada, says she started her account in response to the death of Li Wenliang, the whistleblowing Wuhan doctor who was punished for trying to warn people about the emerging pandemic despite a government cover-up, only to succumb to the virus himself.

The account was inspired by the subtle ways people found on Chinese social media to get around censorship to express their condolences over Li's death, with oblique references to the self-criticism he was forced to write for his attempt to warn the world about COVID-19.

Her account came on the heels of other news discussion groups on Telegram, which themselves took inspiration from accounts used to share ideas, information and strategy during the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong. She hopes the growing number of groups like hers push Chinese authorities to rethink their efforts to control online discourse.

"If I go back to China, I really hope that there won't be any need to circumvent the Great Firewall any more, and that there'll be a bit more freedom," Xia says. "I don't want to have to be fearful and make myself small.

"If your country is truly a great power, then it should instill its citizens who live overseas with confidence," says Xia.

Xia started off by simply posting satirical photos, but that changed when Peng Lifa made his solo demonstration from a Beijing traffic overpass on the eve of the 20th party congress in October.

After Peng's "Bridge Man" protest, Xia's account became dedicated to all-out advocacy. She began to post photos of overseas Chinese hanging up replicas of the banner, which called on ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping to step down and call elections, in cities around the world.

"A lot of [anti-Beijing] accounts are on Telegram, while there are more overseas student accounts on Instagram," Xia says.

She started an Instagram account in a bid to influence more younger Chinese people, whether they are still in China or overseas. Users aged 18-24 make up more than 60% of Instagram's 1.44 billion users worldwide.

"Ideally, content should be generated in China ... then amplified overseas," Xia says. "That worked before the crackdown on the protests, but it's kind of hard to make any big moves right now.

"All we can do from overseas is to try to keep a record of the movement."

Xiao Lei: @tears_in_rainbow on Instagram 

Xiao Lei, who runs the "Tears in Rainbow" account on Instagram, takes a similar approach.

"Despite stricter censorship in China in recent years, some people are still able to read content from voices that are different from the government's preferred theme tune," she says. 

She found the effort to learn the truth to be moving, and planned to open the account to keep a private record of such things.

Then, the discovery of a woman chained in an outbuilding in the eastern province of Jiangsu in January 2022 took China's internet by storm.

Amid growing public frustration with conflicting official statements on the woman's origin and status, Xiao Lei decided to take her account public and post more often.

"I think overseas Chinese accounts have been more active lately, starting from the woman in chains, and all through the white paper movement," she says. "The anger has always been there, and has always been strong.

"I used to believe that young [Chinese] people were different from us, because they had been so brainwashed," she says. "Lately, I discovered that we're all pretty similar.

"There will always be a small number of people who wake up, realize what's happening, and decide they are going to cast off their shackles, no matter how much brainwashing goes on," Xiao Lei says.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Jim Snyder.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Liya for The Reporter/RFA Mandarin.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

On February 6, massive earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, inflicting ghastly damage across a geographic region that has already borne a great deal of earthly devastation in recent decades. The ongoing war in Syria has produced millions of refugees, many of whom have now found themselves victims of seismic activity in the Turkish south.

The death toll from Monday’s quakes quickly jumped into the thousands and will no doubt soar to far more macabre heights. An untold number of people remain buried beneath the rubble. Traumatised survivors contend with frigid temperatures and aftershocks; refugees contend with the loss of any semblance of refuge.

The natural disaster has served to underscore what should hardly be earth-shattering news: that life for the global poor is extremely precarious and plagued by multiple, simultaneous crises from which recovery is often futile.

To be sure, the dwellings inhabited by the have-nots of the earth can be structurally less reliable and potentially more vulnerable to tectonic tumult – as was seen, for example, in the Peruvian earthquake of 2007, when homes collapsed across poor neighbourhoods in the province of Ica. But in a world structured upon capitalist foundations, precarity goes much deeper than shoddy construction materials or disregard for building codes.

For starters, capitalism’s insistence on acute inequality and the tyranny of an elite minority means there are major global fault lines between rich and poor – ones that are becoming ever more pronounced in the era of climate change and attendant ecological calamity. And while aid pledges inevitably come pouring in after high-profile disasters, they often only exacerbate the divide by lining the pockets of the aid industry rather than benefitting the disaster-stricken themselves.

There is also the reality that, for much of the world’s precarious population, life constitutes a more or less continuous disaster, but one that generates no attention. In June, The New Humanitarian news agency noted gross disparities in disaster relief, with almost half of all emergency funding for 2022 “going to only five protracted – and largely conflict-driven – crises”. Citing a recent United Nations estimate that the number of annual disasters will increase to some 560 by the year 2030, the agency described how victims of under-the-radar disasters are often forced to remain in unsafe locations – thereby setting the stage for new crises.

Take the case of Afghanistan, where an ongoing dependence on aid has done nothing to make the country safe. In August, floods killed more than 180 people, just two months after an earthquake had killed more than 1,000. In May, the NGO Save the Children reported that the country was suffering its “worst hunger crisis on record”, with nearly 50 percent of the population going hungry on account of a raging drought and continuing economic breakdown.

Such are the toxic legacies of two decades of a United States-led “war on terror” that devastated the lives, livelihoods and futures of millions of Afghans and sucked in billions of dollars of “recovery funds”.

For another illustration of how politics, greed and mismanagement overlap with and compound environmental catastrophe, we need look no further than the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where in 2021 a devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake was followed by a deadly storm and landslides. More than 2,200 people were killed and 130,000 homes destroyed, in addition to a number of schools and hospitals.

This came just over a decade after a 2010 earthquake killed some 220,000 people and rendered 1.5 million homeless. Only a smidgen of the billions of dollars that flowed in to “rescue” Haiti actually reached poor Haitian earthquake victims, going instead to aid organisations, international security forces, and other supposedly competent folks – like the UN peacekeepers who promptly unleashed a cholera epidemic upon the nation.

As for me, my own personal experience with earthquakes includes a tremor in southwestern Turkey in 2010 and the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that rocked Mexico’s Oaxacan coast in June 2020. I can safely say that the latter episode was akin to feeling my world combust – but only momentarily, as it entailed no lasting damage to my house or person. In other words, it was a far and privileged cry from the experience of the latest earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria, many of whom – displaced by war – had undoubtedly already felt their respective worlds combust even prior to the quake.

Following the news of Monday’s cataclysm, I spoke here in Oaxaca with a working-class Mexican man who, in September 1985, assisted in extracting bodies from the rubble of the Mexico City earthquake that officially resulted in the deaths of 10,000 people but probably killed many more. Shaking his head, he professed to still think regularly of three bodies in particular: a humble mother hunched in vain over her two children, dressed in school uniforms.

And as if the poor needed any more reminders as to the negligible value assigned to their lives, the perennial tremors of the earth in Mexico mean that earthquake-related psychological trauma is easily revived.

As for things not easily revived, in September 1986, one year after the Mexico City quake, the Washington Post reported that no fewer than 80,000 people remained homeless. Indeed, the city never quite fully recovered from either the physical damage or the disaster mismanagement. Precarity is nothing new.

And yet things are getting more precarious by the minute, as capitalism breaks new ground in the field of obliterating any and all aspirations toward a common humanity or planetary wellbeing – and the “disaster relief” industry concerns itself with maintaining its own viability while poor communities lurch from one disaster to the next.

While the rich insulate themselves from the fallout, the poor bear the brunt of military conflict, economic upheaval, climate-related havoc, and the coronavirus pandemic – which has left the earth’s have-nots on even shakier ground.

As with all other present earthly afflictions, Monday’s quakes in Turkey and Syria will hit the poor the hardest. And the only way out of a world where profit for the few means precarity for the many would be a total seismic shift.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Belén Fernández.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

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The post It Has Always Been a ‘Religious War’: On Ben Gvir and the Adaptability of Zionism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

“The Jewish people had just returned to its holiest site, from which it had been denied access for centuries, only to effectively yield sovereignty at its moment of triumph,” Halevi wrote with a lingering sense of pride, as if the world owes Israel a ton of gratitude in the way it conducted itself during one of the most egregious acts of violence in the modern history of the Middle East.

Halevi’s pompous discourse on Israel’s heightened sense of morality – compared to, according to his own analysis, the lack of Arab appreciation of Israel’s overtures and refusal to engage in peace talks – is not in any way unique. His is the same language recycled umpteen times by all Zionists, even by those who advocated for a Jewish state before it was established on the ruins of destroyed and ethnically cleansed Palestine.

From its nascent beginnings, the Zionist discourse was purposely confusing – disarranging history when necessary, and fabricating it when convenient. Though the resultant narrative on Israel’s inception and continuation as an exclusively Jewish state may appear confounding to honest readers of history, for Israel’s supporters – and certainly for the Zionists themselves – Israel, as an idea, makes perfect sense.

When Israel’s new National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir raided al-Aqsa Mosque on January 3 to re-introduce himself to Jewish extremists as the new face of Israeli politics, he was also taking the first steps in correcting, in his own perception, a historical injustice.

Like Halevi, and, in fact, most of Israel’s political classes, let alone mainstream intellectuals, Ben Gvir believes in the significance of Jerusalem and its holy shrines to the very future of their Jewish state. However, despite the general agreement on the power of the religious narrative in Israel, there are also marked differences.

What Halevi was bragging about in his piece in the Atlantic is this: soon after soldiers raised the Israeli flag, garnished with the Star of David, atop the Dome of the Rock they were ordered to take it down. They did so, supposedly, at the behest of then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, quoted in the piece as saying to the army unit commander: “Do you want to set the Middle East on fire?”

Eventually, Israel conquered all of Jerusalem. Since then, it has also done everything in its power to ethnically cleanse the city’s Palestinian Muslim and Christian inhabitants to ensure an absolute Jewish majority. What is taking place in Sheikh Jarrah and other Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is but a continuation of this old, sad episode.

However, the Haram al-Sharif Compound – where Al-Aqsa Mosque, Dome of the Rock and other Muslim shrines are located – was nominally administered by the Islamic Waqf authorities. By doing so, Israel managed to enforce the inaccurate notion that religious freedom is still respected in Jerusalem even after Israel’s so-called ‘unification’ of the city, which will remain, according to Israel’s official discourse, the “united, eternal capital of the Jewish people”.

The reality on the ground, however, has been largely dictated by the Ben-Gvirs of Israel who, for decades, have labored to erase the Muslim and Christian history, identity and, at times, even their ancient graveyards from the Occupied city. Al-Haram Al-Sharif is hardly a religious oasis for Muslims but the site of daily clashes, whereby Israeli soldiers and Jewish extremists routinely storm the holy shrines, leaving behind broken bones, blood and tears.

Despite American support of Israel, the international community has never accepted Israel’s version of falsified history. Though the Jewish spiritual connection to the city is always acknowledged – in fact, it has been respected by Arabs and Muslims since Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab entered the city in 638 – Israel has been reminded by the United Nations, time and again, regarding the illegality of its Occupation and all related actions it carried out in the city since June of 1967.

But Ben Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit Party. like all of Israel’s major political forces, care little for international law, authentic history or Palestinians’ rights. However, their main point of contention regarding the proper course of action in Al-Aqsa is mostly internal. There are those who want to speed up the process of fully claiming Al-Aqsa as a Jewish site, and those who believe that such a move is untimely and, for now, unstrategic.

The former group, however, is winning the debate. Long marginalized at the periphery of Israeli politics, Israel’s religious parties are now inching closer to the center, which is affecting Israel’s priorities on how best to defeat the Palestinians.

Typical analyses attribute the rise of Israel’s religious constituencies to the desperation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is arguably using the likes of Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Aryeh Deri to stay in office. However, this assessment does not tell the whole story, as the power of religious parties has long preceded Netanyahu’s political and legal woes. The Zionist discourse has, itself, been shifting towards religious Zionism; this can be easily observed in the growing religious sentiment in Israel’s judicial system, among the rank and file of the army, in the Knesset (Parliament) and, more recently, in the government itself.

These ideological shifts have even led some to argue that Ben-Gvir and his supporters are angling for a ‘religious war’. But is Ben-Gvir the one introducing religious war to the Zionist discourse?

In truth, early Zionists have never tried to mask the religious identity of their colonial project. “Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine,” the Basel Program, adopted by the First Zionist Congress in 1897, stated. Little has changed since then. Israel is “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people,” Netanyahu said in March 2019.

So, if Israel’s founding ideology, political discourse, Jewish Nation State Law, every war, illegal settlement, bypass road and even the very Israeli flag and national anthem were all directly linked or appealed to religion and religious sentiments, then it is safe to argue that Israel has been engaged in a religious war against Palestinians since its inception.

The Zionists, whether ‘political Zionists’ like Theodore Hertzl or ‘Spiritual Zionists’ like Ahad Ha’am’ – and now Netanyahu and Ben Gvir – have all used the Jewish religion to achieve the same end, colonizing all historic Palestine and ethnically cleansing its native population. Sadly, major part of this sinister mission has been achieved, though Palestinians continue to resist with the same ferocity of their ancestors.

The historic truth is that Ben-Gvir’s behavior is only a natural outcome of Zionist thinking, formulated over a century ago. Indeed, for Zionists – religious, secular or, even atheists – the war has always been or, more accurately, had to be, a religious one.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

“China’s foreign affairs are always fascinating, but following you has made my life even more so,” she wrote.

“Niuniulovegungunbaobao” responded with a bit more equanimity. She urged Zhao’s fans to “look at Uncle’s healing smile and bid him farewell properly.”

Zhao, she added, is “just changing a position and continuing to safeguard the motherland.”

That Zhao has developed a fervent fan base may surprise some people outside of China, where online expressions of love and devotion are typically reserved for movie stars and famous musicians – the Ryan Reynoldses and Taylor Swifts of the world as opposed to the Ned Prices (the U.S. State Department spokesman).

But while Zhao’s glasses and conservative sartorial style suggest career bureaucrat more than hunky celebrity, his penchant for slapping down the United States with his tough -- some say offensive -- rhetoric and his ability to stir international controversy through Twitter posts has prompted an online fan group of more than 76,000 members.

Almost daily, Zhao fanatics create music videos highlighting his most swoon-worthy moments, like when he responds confidently to questions at a press conference or adjusts his glasses, a signature Zhao move. His decision to wear a red or blue tie can set Weibo alight with new posts.

“He is always perfect in my heart,” Weibo user Wojiushiwoxiyue said. “Whatever he does, I support it, whatever he says, I follow it.”

The adoration of Zhao fits into China’s embrace of nationalism under leader Xi Jinping, according to experts. The reaction from global leaders, though, has been more mixed, to say the least. While Zhao’s supporters in China appreciate his unusually aggressive remarks in the usually cautious world of international diplomacy, counterparts in other countries have often been put off by the comments.

Wolf warrior

In July 2019, for example, Zhao, then the deputy chief of mission of the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, wrote on Twitter in apparent response to the Chinese government persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang that white people didn’t go to southeast Washington, D.C., “because it’s an area for the black & Latin.”

Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, responded by calling Zhao a “racist disgrace.”

“To label someone who speaks the truth that you don’t want to hear a racist, is disgraceful & disgusting,” Zhao wrote in response, although his posts were soon after deleted, according to news reports.

In 2020, Zhao suggested that the U.S. Army might have brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, which is widely accepted as ground zero for the COVID pandemic.

And he angered Australia by posting a fake image of a soldier holding a knife against the throat of an Afghan child, a reference to an Australian Defense Force inspector general’s report on alleged war crimes committed by a small group of the country’s forces.

It’s through these types of posts that Zhao has come to be seen as a chief practitioner of a more assertive, “wolf warrior” diplomacy. The term refers to a series of nationalistic Chinese films about a special forces soldier.

Despite the international ill will Zhao has inspired, it isn’t clear that his announced move represents a demotion. Zhao may not be as much in the public eye as deputy director-general of Boundary and Ocean Affairs, but he will likely play a large role in one of the most sensitive diplomatic issues facing China -- its claims to the South China Sea.

Other countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, say China is encroaching on territory that belongs to them.

The wife

Some online posters, however, have interpreted the switch as a slight to their hero. And they are clear on who’s to blame: Zhao’s wife, Tang Tianru, whom he met while posted in Pakistan.

“You’ve got your wish. It’s like a curse has been brought upon Zhao’s family by bringing such a worthless, untalented, and unkind beast into their home,” Cuicanchulian posted.

That level of vitriol toward Tang is actually not all that unusual within the chat group, particularly among her husband’s more fervent “girlfriend” fans.

Weibo user Youlanfeimo analyzed photos posted online of the two and declared that they didn’t really love one another. Others have criticized Tang for everything from oversharing to wearing a Patek Philippe watch, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

She’s also been pummeled online for appearing in public without a mask despite her vocal support for “zero-COVID” policies and for describing her life in Germany as “plain and true.” She apparently lived in the country for a time during the pandemic, despite travel restrictions.

Occasionally the anger spills over onto Zhao, as when Xiaobabeibei revealed the deep betrayal the relationship had sparked within her. “What sickens me is that your actions completely make me lose faith in love and completely destroys the impression of men in my heart,” she wrote.

A new diplomacy

Gabriele de Seta, a sociologist who has studied celebrity worship, said Zhao’s fan base may be an outgrowth of an effort by Xi’s government to use social media to promote China as it moves to challenge the United States as another global superpower.

Fan participation can help to amplify the messages the government wants to convey. As such, maintaining an active online presence is now part of a Chinese diplomat’s job description, he said.

“It’s how the ecosystem works,” de Seta said. “The fandom is actively creating more content or amplifying it.”

Every spokesperson within the Foreign Ministry has a fan base that on Chinese Weibo coalesce in Super Topic groups. The Zhao Lijian Super Topic has more than 76,000 followers and 39,000 posts. Hua Chunying, the assistant minister for Foreign Affairs, has 60,000 followers. So does Wang Wenbin, another Foreign Ministry spokesperson. Wang Yi, China’s highest-ranking diplomat, has 36,000. 

Bright star

The idea of politicians engendering heated comments on social media platforms is of course not wholly unheard of in the United States. President Donald Trump had millions of followers on Twitter – and millions of detractors -- before he was removed from the platform. (New owner Elon Musk has said he’s welcome back on.)

Trump administration spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany has a Twitter fan club with more than 20,000 followers that reposts pictures of her family and promotes her post-administration accomplishments, like the release of a new memoir.

Michelle Obama has 22 million followers. Her husband has more than 133 million. Zhao has nearly 2 million Twitter followers. 

But the fervency of Zhao’s fans seems to set them apart. 

Zhao has not been seen in public since a December media briefing, which has prompted worries he had contracted COVID (and more nasty comments directed at Tang).

Woshiweilaiyidaoguang urged Zhao to take care of himself. 

“Don’t worry too much about your work during this period, your dedicated and responsible colleagues will handle it well… A diplomatic position needs a vigorous Spokesperson Zhao, and what the fans long to see is also a shining, healthy you.”

Occasionally, a skeptical voice shows up in the chats. A post by Hanliangyishi prompted an incredulous reply and a charge of brainlessness from one commenter. 

“I’ve seen people fawn over singing stars and movie stars, but I’ve never seen anyone obsess over a government official!” the commenter said.

Hanliangyishi wasn’t having it: “Not only are you brainless, but you’re also blind! Can’t you see that Uncle Zhao is a star brighter than any other?”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mary Zhao for RFA.

We speak with civil rights leader Ben Jealous about his new memoir, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” which examines his long career as an activist and organizer, and growing up the son of a white father and a Black mother. He discusses the lessons he drew from his mother, Ann Todd Jealous, and his grandmother, Mamie Todd, about the racism they experienced in their lifetimes. Jealous has led the NAACP and the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, and is set to be the next executive director of the Sierra Club.

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

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is hoping you'll see his health-care fight with Ottawa as just more federal-provincial mud wrestling, rather than as a battle for the country's heart and soul.

That may sound lofty, but if anything could be said to represent this country's heart and soul, it's our public health-care system.

In 2004, when the CBC ran a six-week TV series to determine who could be crowned "the Greatest Canadian" in history, more than 1.2 million votes were cast. In the end, Canadians passed over prime ministers, wartime generals and inspirational figures like Terry Fox, to selectTommy Douglas, the father of medicare.

Privatizers basically subscribe to a theory sometimes called "the tragedy of the commons"—the notion that humans are, by nature, purely self-interested, so society should be organized around private property and the marketplace, with everyone looking out for themselves.

Canadians appear to have a special fondness for a system that, quite simply, enshrines access to health care as based on need, not money.

In an age dominated by billionaires and their extravagance (and idiocy), this unadorned, egalitarian principle of medicare shines like the brightest star in a dark and deranged firmament.

But, beloved as it is, medicare has always been endangered, threatened by those who prefer that the vast health-care field be open for private profit.

Back in 1960 when Douglas, then premier of Saskatchewan, introduced the first public medical insurance system in North America, local doctors staged a bitter, three-week strike. They had backing from business, the Canadian Medical Association, and strong financial support from the American Medical Association, which was determined to prevent public medicine from establishing a beachhead in North America.

Remarkably, Douglas prevailed and, in 1966, Parliament voted for a Canada-wide medical insurance system by a stunning margin of 177-2.

But the privatizing forces have never given up. Over the years, they've launched pricey court challenges to medicare and enlisted support from politicians—both Conservative and Liberal—who've helped by underfunding the public system.

Now, with hospitals overwhelmed by the pandemic and years of underfunding, Ford and other premiers see a splendid opportunity to shift the blame for today's serious health-care crisis to Ottawa, and advance their privatization agendas in the process.

The premiers argue, correctly, that the federal contribution to health care has dropped significantly over the years. The Trudeau government accepts that Ottawa must increase its contribution. The real battle is over whether there will be strings attached. The premiers don't like strings.

But without strings, the floodgates will open to privatization. This is particularly true in Ontario and Alberta, where staunchly pro-business premiers appear to have learned nothing from the disastrous privatization results in areas like long-term care, which is now dominated by corporate nursing home chains. Care is often so inadequate that, at the height of the pandemic, theCanadian military was brought in to manage some of the worst private facilities.

Privatizers basically subscribe to a theory sometimes called "the tragedy of the commons"—the notion that humans are, by nature, purely self-interested, so society should be organized around private property and the marketplace, with everyone looking out for themselves.

But the anthropologist Karl Polanyi (as well as the ancient philosopher Aristotle) came to a different conclusion: while it's true that humans are self-interested, we are social animals first and foremost, reliant on society for our survival, sustenance and well-being. Yes, we fight—but mostly we co-operate.

At our best, we devise collective solutions which benefit us all—like public health care and education—to ensure we all have a chance to live healthy, educated lives and that each of us has a shot at developing to our fullest potential.

Rather than tragedy, our public health-care system represents the triumph of the commons.

This isn't just wishful thinking. Most advanced nations, Canada included, have developed successful public health-care systems. Imagine how much more successful these systems would be if they weren't constantly undermined and sabotaged by privatizers and their political allies.

We must never let the privatizers rob us of what we can achieve collectively. We must never allow their limited view of human nature—and their schemes for profiting from it—confine us to the grim, every-woman-for-herself world of the private marketplace.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Linda McQuaig.

One of the most explosive revelations in the just released House Oversight Committee report on Big Oil disinformation is that the oil industry never saw methane, what they euphemistically rebranded "natural gas," as a "bridge fuel" to a clean energy future: they always saw it as a "destination," an ongoing addiction they planned to do everything in their power to maintain.

What the "bridge fuel" fantasy always ignored was the terrible impacts that gas has up and down its supply chain.

For years, oil companies, politicians, and even some environmental groups, promoted gas as a "bridge fuel" to a clean energy future, the idea being that gas could help "bridge the gap" between an energy system stuck on coal and renewable energy that wasn't ready for prime time. For a brief moment, one could be forgiven for believing this narrative: the CO2 emissions from gas are indeed lower than coal and in the early 2000s clean energy was still significantly more expensive than fossil fuels. The idea of gas being a "bridge" was so compelling that President Obama made it a central part of his administration's strategy to reduce emissions.

What the "bridge fuel" fantasy always ignored was the terrible impacts that gas has up and down its supply chain. From the fracking needed to produce the gas (which contaminates water and poison communities), to the leaking pipelines that transport it (which spew planet heating methane into the atmosphere), to the burning of it in our homes and power plants (which releases dangerous chemicals like nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde), gas has always a climate wrecking poison.

Even as these impacts became unignorable, and the price of renewables and batteries rapidly dropped, making them the cheapest source of new energy, the fossil fuel industry worked hard to not only maintain the "bridge fuel" narrative—but simultaneously try and reframe gas as not only a "bridge" but a "destination." 

One of the documents released by the House Oversight Committee on Friday is the slide from a 2017 strategy presentation made for BP by the Brunswick Group, a leading fossil fuel PR firm. In the presentation, Brunswick frames the goal of their "campaign" as to "advance and protect the role of gas—and BP—in the future of energy conservation." A different internal BP document, titled the "Role of Gas," describes BP America's goal as to, "Prevent further erosion of near-term support for gas vs. other fuels, protect role of gas as a bridge in a low-carbon transition, and position gas as a destination fuel for the long term" (emphasis added). In another email, BP executives told their colleagues not to "concede the point" that gas didn't have a future by "referring to it mainly as a 'bridge.'"

Other documents show the great lengths the industry has gone to try and make gas a permanent part of our energy mix. In 2021, the American Petroleum Institute released what was branded as a comprehensive "Climate Action Framework," but according to internal emails obtained by the committee, the real purpose of the framework was "the continued promotion of natural gas in a carbon constrained world."

We've all seen the results of this strategy: nonstop advertising campaigns on TV and across social media platforms touting the benefits of gas and pretending it's a key climate solution. While one rarely sees a commercial for old fashioned crude oil, "natural gas" has become the friendly face of the fossil fuel industry.

The documents released by the committee cut through this greenwash and show gas for what it really is: the industry's latest ploy to keep us hooked on their product. Gas was never meant to be a "bridge," that whole rhetorical frame was simply a way to deepen our dependence on a dangerous fossil fuel and hold back real climate solutions.

Our job now is to educate the public about what gas really is: climate wrecking methane. Another dirty fossil fuel which is putting our families and communities at risk. A poisonous gas that the industry has piped into our homes, harming the health of our children and ourselves. An increasingly volatile and expensive source of energy, especially now that cheaper and safer alternatives exist.

That's the important work of campaigns like Gas Leaks, which is combating gas industry propaganda, Clean Creatives, which is going after the PR and advertising agencies that greenwash gas and other fossil fuels, and Rewiring America, who are pushing to electrify homes, schools and buildings across the country.

By revealing gas for what it really is, today's House Oversight Committee Report is a boost to all those efforts. The industry may want methane to be our final destination, but we can choose to move in a different direction. Let's go.  

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News &amp; Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jamie Henn.

The B-21 Raider is unveiled during a ceremony at Northrop Grumman’s Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, Calif., on Dec. 2, 2022. The high-tech stealth bomber can carry nuclear and conventional weapons; it’s designed to be able to fly without a crew on board and is on track to cost nearly $700 million per plane.

Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

There is no actual shortage of defensive weapons in the U.S.

MIM-104 Patriot short-range anti-aircraft missile systems produced by Raytheon, located at Rzeszow Airport, close to the Ukraine border on July 24, 2022 in Poland.

Photo: Christophe Gateau/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jeremy Scahill.

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The day before doctors had scheduled Amanda Duffy to give birth, the baby jolted her awake with a kick.

A few hours later, on that bright Sunday in November 2014, she leaned back on a park bench to watch her 19-month-old son Rogen enjoy his final day of being an only child. In that moment of calm, she realized that the kick that morning was the last time she had felt the baby move.

She told herself not to worry. She had heard that babies can slow down toward the end of a pregnancy and remembered reading that sugary snacks and cold fluids can stimulate a baby’s movement. When she got back to the family’s home in suburban Minneapolis, she drank a large glass of ice water and grabbed a few Tootsie Rolls off the kitchen counter.

But something about seeing her husband, Chris, lace up his shoes to leave for a run prompted her to blurt out, “I haven’t felt the baby kick.”

Chris called Amanda’s doctor, and they headed to the hospital to be checked. Once there, a nurse maneuvered a fetal monitor around Amanda’s belly. When she had trouble locating a heartbeat, she remarked that the baby must be tucked in tight. The doctor walked into the room, turned the screen away from Amanda and Chris and began searching. She was sorry, Amanda remembers her telling them, but she could not find a heartbeat.

Amanda let out a guttural scream. She said the doctor quickly performed an internal exam, which detected faint heart activity, then rushed Amanda into an emergency cesarean section.

She woke up to the sound of doctors talking to Chris. She listened but couldn’t bring herself to face the news. Her doctor told her she needed to open her eyes.

Amanda, then 31, couldn’t fathom that her daughter had died. She said her doctors had never discussed stillbirth with her. It was not mentioned in any of the pregnancy materials she had read. She didn’t even know that stillbirth was a possibility.

But every year more than 20,000 pregnancies in the United States end in stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more. That number has exceeded infant mortality every year for the last 10 years. It’s 15 times the number of babies who, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, in 2020.

The deaths are not inevitable. One study found that nearly one in four U.S. stillbirths may be preventable. For pregnancies that last 37 weeks or more, that research shows, the figure jumps to nearly half. Thousands more babies could potentially be delivered safely every year.

But federal agencies have not prioritized critical stillbirth-focused studies that could lead to fewer deaths. Nearly two decades ago, both the CDC and the National Institutes of Health launched key stillbirth tracking and research studies, but the agencies ended those projects within about a decade. The CDC never analyzed some of the data that was collected.

Unlike with SIDS, a leading cause of infant death, federal officials have failed to launch a national campaign to reduce the risk of stillbirth or adequately raise awareness about it. Placental exams and autopsies, which can sometimes explain why stillbirths happened, are underutilized, in part because parents are not counseled on their benefits.

Federal agencies, state health departments, hospitals and doctors have also done a poor job of educating expectant parents about stillbirth or diligently counseling on fetal movement, despite research showing that patients who have had a stillbirth are more likely to have experienced abnormal fetal movements, including decreased activity. Neither the CDC nor the NIH have consistently promoted guidance telling those who are pregnant to be aware of their babies’ movement in the womb as a way to possibly reduce their risk of stillbirth.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the nation’s leading obstetrics organization, has been slow to update its own guidance to doctors on managing a stillbirth. In 2009, ACOG issued a set of guidelines that included a single paragraph regarding fetal movement. Those guidelines weren’t significantly updated for another 11 years.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that federal goals for reducing stillbirths keep moving in the wrong direction. In 2005, the U.S. stillbirth rate was 6.2 per 1,000 live births. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in an effort to eliminate health disparities and establish a target that was “better than the best racial or ethnic group rate,” set a goal of reducing it to 4.1 for 2010. When that wasn’t met, federal officials changed their approach and set what they called more “science-based” and “realistic” goals, raising the 2020 target to 5.6. The U.S. still fell short. The 2030 goal of 5.7 was so attainable that it was met before the decade started. The 2020 rate, the most current according to the CDC, is 5.74.

By comparison, other wealthy countries have implemented national action plans to prevent stillbirth through awareness, research and care. Among other approaches, those countries have focused on increasing education around stillbirth and the importance of a baby’s movements, reducing rates of smoking and identifying fetuses that grow too slowly in the womb.

The efforts have paid off. The Netherlands, for instance, has reduced its rate of stillbirths at 28 weeks or later by more than half, from 5.2 in 2000 to 2.3 in 2019, according to a study published last year in The Lancet.

Dr. Bob Silver, chair of the obstetrics/gynecology department at University of Utah Health and a leading stillbirth expert, coauthored the study that estimated nearly one in four stillbirths are potentially preventable, a figure he referred to as conservative. He called on federal agencies to declare stillbirth reduction a priority the same way they have done for premature birth and maternal mortality.

“I’d like to see us say we really want to reduce the rate of stillbirth and raise awareness and try to do all of the reasonable things that may contribute to reducing stillbirths that other countries have done,” Silver said.

The lack of comprehensive attention and action has contributed to a stillbirth crisis, shrouded in an acceptance that some babies just die. Compounding the tragedy is a stigma and guilt so crushing that the first words some mothers utter when their lifeless babies are placed in their arms are “I’m sorry.”

In the hospital room, Amanda Duffy finally opened her eyes. She named her daughter Reese Christine, the name she had picked out for her before they found out she had died. She was 8 pounds, 3 ounces and 20 1/2 inches long and was born with her umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck twice. The baby was still warm when the nurse placed her in Amanda’s arms. Amanda was struck by how lovely her daughter was. Rosy skin. Chris’ red hair. Rogen’s chubby cheeks.

As Amanda held Reese, Chris hunched over the toilet, vomiting. Later that night, as he lay next to Amanda on the hospital bed, he held his daughter. He hadn’t initially wanted to see her. He worried she would be disfigured or, worse, that she would be beautiful and he would fall apart when he couldn’t take her home.

The nurses taught Amanda and Chris how to grieve and love simultaneously. One nurse told Amanda how cute Reese was and asked if she could hold her. Another placed ice packs in Reese’s swaddle to preserve her body so Amanda could keep holding her. Amanda asked the nurses to tuck cotton balls soaked in an orange scent into Reese’s blanket so the smell would trigger the memory of her daughter. And just as if Reese had been born alive, the nurses took pictures and made prints of her hands and feet.

“I felt such a deep, abiding love for her,” Amanda said. “And I was so proud to be her mom.”

On the way home from the hospital, Amanda broke down at the sight of Reese’s empty car seat. The next few weeks passed in a sleep-filled fog punctuated by intense periods of crying. The smell of oranges wrecked her. Her breast milk coming in was agonizing, physically and emotionally. She wore sports bras stuffed with ice packs to ease the pain and dry up her milk supply. While Rogen was at day care, she sobbed in his bed.

In the months that followed, Amanda and Chris searched for answers and wondered whether their medical team had missed warning signs. Late at night, Amanda turned to Google to find information about stillbirths. She mailed her medical records to a doctor who studies stillbirths, who she said told her that Reese’s death could have been prevented. They briefly discussed legal action against her doctors, but she said a lawyer told her it would be difficult to sue.

Amanda and Chris pinpointed her last two months of pregnancy as the time things started to go wrong. She had been diagnosed with polyhydramnios, meaning there was excess amniotic fluid in the womb. Her doctor had scheduled additional weekly testing.

One of those ultrasounds revealed problems with the blood flow in the umbilical cord. Reese’s cord also appeared to be wrapped around her neck, Amanda said later, but was told that was less of a concern, since it occurs in about 20% of normal deliveries. At another appointment, Amanda’s medical records show, Reese failed the portion of a test that measures fetal breathing movements.

At 37 weeks, Amanda told one of the midwives the baby’s movements felt different, but, she said, the midwife told her that it was common for movements to feel weaker with polyhydramnios. At that point, Amanda felt her baby was safer outside than inside and, her medical records show, she asked to schedule a C-section.

Despite voicing concerns about a change in the baby’s movement and asking to deliver earlier, Amanda said she and her husband were told by her midwife she couldn’t deliver for another two weeks. The doctor “continues to advise 39wks,” her medical records show. Waiting until 39 weeks is usually based on a guideline that deliveries should not happen before then unless a medical condition specifically warrants it, because early delivery can lead to complications.

Amanda would have to wait until 39 weeks and one day because, she said, her doctors didn’t typically do elective deliveries on weekends. Amanda was disappointed but said she trusted her team of doctors and midwives.

“I’m not a pushy person,” she said. “My husband is not a pushy person. That was out of our comfort zone to be, like, ‘What are we waiting for?’ But really what we wanted them to say was ‘We should deliver you.’”

Amanda’s final appointment was a maximum 30-minute-long ultrasound that combined a number of assessments to check amniotic fluid, fetal muscle tone, breathing and body movement. After 29 minutes of inactivity, Amanda said, the baby moved a hand. In the parking lot, Amanda called her mother, crying in relief. Four more days, she told her.

Less than 24 hours before the scheduled C-section, Reese was stillborn.

Four months after her death, Amanda, then a career advisor at the University of Minnesota, and Chris, a public relations specialist, wrote a letter to the University of Minnesota Medical Center, where Amanda had given birth to her dead daughter. They said they had “no ill feelings” toward anyone, but “it pains us to know that her death could’ve been prevented if we would have been sent to labor and delivery following that ultrasound.”

They noted that though they were told that Reese had passed the final ultrasound where she took 29 minutes to move, they had since come to believe that she had failed because, according to national standards, at least three movements were required. They also blamed a strict adherence to the 39-week guideline. And they encouraged the hospital staff to read more on umbilical cord accidents and acute polyhydramnios, which they later learned carries an increased stillbirth risk.

The positive feelings they had from speaking up were replaced by dismay when the hospital responded with a three-paragraph letter, signed by seven doctors and eight nurses. They said they had reexamined each medical decision in her case and concluded they had made “the best decisions medically possible.” They expressed their sympathy and said it was “so very heartwarming that you are trying to turn your tragic loss into something that will benefit others.”

Amanda felt dismissed by the medical team all over again. She didn’t expect them to admit fault, but she said she hoped that they would at least learn from Reese’s death to do things differently in the future. She was angry, and hurt, and knew that she would need to find a new doctor.

A spokesperson for the University of Minnesota Medical School told ProPublica she could not comment on individual patient cases and did not respond to questions about general protocols. “We share the physicians’ condolences,” she wrote, adding that the doctors and the university “are dedicated to delivering high quality, accessible and inclusive health care.”

For many expectant parents, it’s hard to muster the courage to call a doctor about something they’re not even sure is a problem.

“Moms self-censor a lot. No one wants to be that mom that all the doctors are rolling their eyes at because she’s freaking out over nothing,” said Samantha Banerjee, executive director of PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy, a nonprofit based in New York state that works to prevent stillbirths. Banerjee’s daughter, Alana, was stillborn two days before her due date.

In addition to raising awareness that stillbirths can happen even in low-risk pregnancies, PUSH teaches pregnant people how to advocate for themselves. The volunteers advise them to put their requests in writing and not to spend time drinking juice or lying on their side if they are worried about their baby’s lack of movement. In the majority of cases, a call or visit to the hospital reassures them.

But, the group tells parents, if their baby is in distress, calling their doctor can save their life.

Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya is fighting another narrative: that stillbirths are a rare fluke that “just happen.” When her daughter Autumn Joy was born without a heartbeat in 2011, Haine Vijayvergiya said, her doctor told her having a stillborn baby was as rare as being struck by lightning.

She believed him, but then she looked up the odds of a lightning strike and found they are less than one in a million — and most people survive. In 2020, according to the CDC, there was one stillbirth for about every 175 births.

“I’ve spoken to more women than I can count that said, ‘I raised the red flag, and I was sent home. I was told to eat a piece of cake and have some orange juice and lay on my left side,’ only to wake up the next day and their baby is not alive,” said Haine Vijayvergiya, a New Jersey mother and maternal health advocate.

She has fought for more than a decade to pass stillbirth legislation as her daughter’s legacy. Her current undertaking is her most ambitious. The federal Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act, named after her daughter, would authorize $9 million a year for five years in federal funding for research, better data collection and training for fetal autopsies. But it is currently sitting in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Not all stillbirths are preventable, and medical experts agree more research is needed to determine who is most at risk and which babies can potentially be saved. Complicating matters is the wide range of risk factors, including hypertension and diabetes, smoking, obesity, being pregnant with multiples, being 35 or older and having had a previous stillbirth.

ProPublica reported this summer on how the U.S. botched the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant people, who faced an increased risk for stillbirth if they were unvaccinated and contracted the virus, especially during the delta wave.

Doctors often work to balance the risk of stillbirth with other dangers, particularly an increased chance of being admitted to neonatal intensive care units or even death of the baby if it is born too early. ACOG and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have issued guidance to try to slow a rise in elective deliveries before 39 weeks and the potential harm that can result. The Joint Commission, a national accrediting organization, began evaluating hospitals in 2010 based on that standard.

A 2019 study found that the risks of stillbirth slightly increased after the rule went into effect, but fewer infants died after birth. Other studies have not found an effect on stillbirths.

Last year, the obstetric groups updated their guidance to allow doctors to consider an early delivery if a woman has anxiety and a history of stillbirth, writing that a previous stillbirth “may” warrant an early delivery for patients who understand and accept the risks. For those who have previously had a stillbirth, one modeling analysis found that 38 weeks is the optimal timing of delivery, considering the increased risk of another stillbirth.

“A woman who has had a previous stillbirth at 37 weeks — one could argue that it’s cruel and unusual punishment to make her go to 39 weeks with her next pregnancy, although that is the current recommendation,” said Dr. Neil Mandsager, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Iowa and a medical advisor to a stillbirth prevention nonprofit.

At or after 40 weeks, the risk of stillbirth increases, especially for women 35 or older. Their risk, research shows, is doubled from 39 weeks to 40 and is more than six times as high at 42 weeks. In 2019 and 2020, a combined 1,200 stillbirths occurred between 40 and 42 weeks, according to the most recent CDC data.

Deciding when a patient should deliver entails weighing the risks to the mother and the infant against a possible stillbirth as the pregnancy continues, said Dr. Mark Turrentine, chair of ACOG’s Clinical Consensus Committee-Obstetrics, which helped create the guidance on managing a stillbirth. He said ACOG has addressed stillbirth in other documents and extensively in its 2021 guidance on fetal surveillance and testing, which is done to reduce the risk of stillbirth.

ACOG said it routinely reviewed its guidance on management of stillbirth but was unable to make significant updates “due to the lack of new, evidence-based research.” While prevention is a great concern to ACOG, Turrentine said it’s difficult to know how many stillbirths are preventable.

He said it’s standard practice for doctors to ask about fetal movement, and ACOG updated its guidance after new research became available. Doctors also need to include patients in decision-making and tailor care to them, he said, whether that’s using aspirin in patients at high risk of preeclampsia — a serious high blood pressure condition during pregnancy — or ordering additional tests.

After Reese’s death, Amanda and Chris Duffy wanted to get pregnant again. They sought out an obstetrician-gynecologist who would educate and listen to them. They set up several consultations until they found Dr. Emily Hawes-Van Pelt, who was recommended by another family who had had a stillbirth.

Hawes-Van Pelt cried with Amanda and Chris at their first meeting.

“I told her I was scared to be involved,” Hawes-Van Pelt said. “It’s such a tricky subsequent pregnancy because there’s so much worry and anxiety about the horrible, awful thing happening again.”

Amanda’s fear of delivering another dead baby led to an all-consuming anxiety, but Hawes-Van Pelt supported her when she asked for additional monitoring, testing and an early delivery.

When Hawes-Van Pelt switched practices midway through Amanda’s pregnancy, Amanda followed her. But the new hospital pushed back on the early delivery.

“We intervene early for poorly controlled diabetes,” Hawes-Van Pelt said. “We intervene early for all sorts of medical issues. Anxiety and prior stillbirth are two medical issues that we can intervene earlier for.”

Hawes-Van Pelt said she learned a lot from caring for Amanda, who made her reevaluate some of her own assumptions around stillbirths.

“I had a horrible fear of scaring women unnecessarily, and then realized that I was just not preparing women or educating them because of my own fears around it,” she said. “If you can carry a human being in your body and birth that human being and take care of it, you can hear those words.”

The hospital eventually agreed to let Hawes-Van Pelt schedule Amanda for a 37-week C-section. But after Amanda was again diagnosed with polyhydramnios, she went in for a C-section even earlier. She gave birth in 2015 to a healthy boy she and Chris named Rhett. Two years later, Amanda and Hawes-Van Pelt followed the same pregnancy plan, and she delivered a girl named Maeda Reese. Amanda chose the name because, when said quickly, it sounds like “made of Reese.”

Federal agencies, national organizations and state and city officials have mobilized in recent years to address maternal mortality, when mothers die during pregnancy, at delivery or soon after childbirth. They have focused on improving data collection, passing legislation and creating awareness campaigns that encourage medical professionals and others to listen when women say something doesn’t feel right.

In 2017, ProPublica and NPR documented the U.S. maternal mortality crisis, including alarming racial disparities.

According to CDC data, Black women face nearly three times the risk of maternal mortality. They also are more than twice — and in some states close to three times — as likely to have a stillbirth than white women, meaning not only are Black mothers dying at a disproportionate rate, so are their babies.

Janet Petersen, a state senator from Iowa, said it gives her hope to see how the country has turned its attention to maternal mortality and disparities in health care. She simply cannot understand why stillbirth isn’t being met with the same urgency.

In 2020, the CDC reported 861 mothers died either while pregnant or within six weeks of giving birth. That same year, 20,854 babies were stillborn.

Stillbirth, Petersen said, is a missing piece of the puzzle. Research shows the likelihood of severe maternal complications was more than four times higher for pregnancies that ended in stillbirths, and mothers who died within six weeks of delivery were more likely to have had a stillbirth.

“We see it over and over again that stillbirth is one of the maternal health care issues that continuously gets ignored,” said Petersen, a Democrat.

Petersen was a young legislator in 2003 when her daughter Grace was born still. Devastated, she thought of her grandmother, who lost a baby to stillbirth in 1920, just a few weeks before women got the right to vote.

“I was laying in my hospital bed thinking, ‘How could this still be happening in our country?’” Petersen recalled. “And it seemed, from the medical perspective, that, well, stillbirth happens. We can’t do anything to prevent them.”

Over the next few months, Petersen heard from other mothers who had lost their babies and wanted to spark change. As an elected official, Petersen was in a position to do that. In 2004, she introduced legislation that required the Iowa Department of Public Health to create a stillbirths work group, later securing funding through the CDC to create a stillbirth registry.

But the CDC didn’t renew the funding and never analyzed the data from the registry, though a CDC spokesperson said the Iowa Department of Public Health examined the data. Officials from the department did not respond to requests for comment.

Petersen and her fellow mothers pivoted. After hearing how researchers in Norway were able to increase awareness around fetal movement, they co-founded a nonprofit aimed at doing the same in the U.S.

The group, Healthy Birth Day, created colorful “Count the Kicks” pamphlets — and later an app — teaching pregnant people how to track a baby’s movements and establish what is normal for them. Monitoring a baby’s movements is the earliest and sometimes only indication that something may be wrong, said Emily Price, chief executive officer of Healthy Birth Day. One of the organization’s main messages is for pregnant people to speak up and clinicians to listen.

“Unfortunately, there are still doctors who brush women off or send them home when they come in with a complaint of a change in their baby’s movements,” Price said. “And babies are dying because of it.”

One Indiana county, which recorded 65 stillbirths from 2017 through 2019, reported that 74% had either some chance or a good chance of prevention, according to St. Joseph County Department of Health’s Fetal Infant Mortality Review program. For mothers who experienced decreased fetal movement in the few hours or days before the stillbirth, that estimate jumped to 90%.

Although there is not a scientific consensus that kick counting can prevent stillbirths, national groups, including ACOG, recommend that medical professionals encourage their patients to be aware of fetal movement patterns. ACOG also advises medical professionals to be attentive to a mother’s concerns about reduced movement and address them “in a systematic way.”

One complaint the CDC hears too often, an agency spokesperson said, is that pregnant people and those who gave birth recently find that their concerns are dismissed or ignored. “Listening and taking the concerns of pregnant and recently pregnant people seriously,” she said, “is a simple, yet powerful action to prevent serious health complications and even death.”

The CDC, she said, is “very interested” in expanding its research on stillbirth, which is “a crucial part of the development of any awareness or prevention campaigns.” In addition to working to improve its stillbirth data quality, the agency has funded some pilot programs at the city and state level to better track stillbirths, survey people who have had a stillbirth and research risk factors and causes. The Iowa registry, she said, led the CDC to fund different research projects in Arkansas and Massachusetts, which are ongoing.

In 2009, the CDC acknowledged that fetal mortality remained a “major, but often overlooked, public health problem.” Officials wrote that much of the public health concern had been focused on infant mortality “in part due to lesser awareness of the magnitude of fetal mortality, its causes, and prevention strategies.”

But little has changed over the past 13 years. Echoing its earlier message, the CDC this year declared that “much work remains” and that “stillbirth is not often viewed as a public health issue, so increased awareness is key.”

A spokesperson for the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which is part of the NIH, said the agency has continually funded research on stillbirths, even after one of its key studies ended. The agency, she said, also supports research on conditions that increase the risk of stillbirth.

As a scientific research institute, it does not issue clinical guidelines or recommendations, she said, though it did launch the Safe to Sleep campaign in 1994, two decades after Congress put it in charge of SIDS federal research efforts. That campaign, which educates parents and caregivers on ways to reduce the risk of SIDS, highlights recommendations issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics. She said the agency will continue to collaborate with organizations that raise awareness about stillbirth and other pregnancy complications “to amplify their messages and efforts.”

“NICHD continues to support research on the prevention, causes, frequency, and risk factors of stillbirth,” the spokesperson said in an email. “Our commitment to enhancing understanding of stillbirth and improving outcomes focuses on building the scientific knowledge base.”

But getting laws on the books that could raise awareness around stillbirth — even when they don’t require additional funding — has been a struggle. Petersen and Price are pushing Congress to pass legislation that would add stillbirth research and prevention to the list of activities approved for federal maternal health dollars.

Though the bill doesn’t ask for any additional funding, it has not yet passed.

In addition, the SHINE for Autumn Act breezed through the House of Representatives in December 2021. After Haine Vijayvergiya, the New Jersey mother who has championed it, secured bipartisan support from U.S. Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., she thought the most comprehensive stillbirth legislation in U.S. history would finally become law.

Neither bill has sparked controversy.

But months after press releases announced the SHINE legislation and referred to the U.S. stillbirth rate as “unacceptable,” lawmakers and the families they represent are running out of time as this session of Congress prepares to adjourn.

“From the day that the bill was introduced into the Senate,” Haine Vijayvergiya said, “approximately 13,000 babies have been born still.”

Last month, on a brilliant fall day much like the one when Reese was stillborn, Amanda Duffy bent down to kiss her son Rogen’s head before they walked on stage.

She wore a soft blue T-shirt tucked into her jeans that read “Be courageous.” The message was as much for her as it was for the crowd on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., many of them like her, mothers who didn’t know stillbirth happened until it happened to them. Since Reese’s death, she has coached doctors and nurses on improving care for patients who have suffered pregnancy loss. Among her many suggestions, she tells them their first words when a concerned patient reaches out should be “I’m so glad you called.”

A few hundred people had gathered for The Big PUSH to End Preventable Stillbirth, billed as the first-ever march on the issue. As part of an art installation, Amanda wrote a note to Reese: “You’re pretty magical & for that I’m grateful. You’re a change maker and you are so very loved. Love, Mama.” Before she slipped the folded paper into a sea of more than 20,000 baby hats, Rogen added his own message: “Hope you are having a good time — Rogen.”

Reese would have turned 8 this month.

Before Amanda spoke, she took a deep breath and silenced her nerves. She walked onto the stage and called on Congress to pass the stillbirth legislation before it. She didn’t ask. She demanded.

“It’s time to empower pregnant people and their care providers with information that leads to prevention,” she insisted.

With the afternoon sun bearing down, Amanda and Rogen disappeared into the crowd of families marching toward the Capitol. Many carried signs. Some pushed empty strollers. Amanda was still wearing the orange-scented oil she had rubbed on her wrists that morning.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Duaa Eldeib.

I either try to power through or pray.

So by powering through you keep writing even if everything’s coming out poorly, then edit it later?

Exactly. Most of the time if I just keep writing, even if it’s stressful and feels bad, because my feelings aren’t always trustworthy in relation to what’s happening on the page.

The Novelist is a full-length novel that takes place over the span of a few hours. How did you manage the time dilation, and why did you make the choice to do so?

I read Nicholson Baker and Thomas Bernhard, and their books took place over the course of a short period of time. I realized if I did that, I could go anywhere I wanted and include a bunch of different rants and so on. I think in terms of making it fun to read or making it readable, I realized that his thwarted desire to write was a good plot device to keep the momentum going. Like, he kept wanting to write and was unable to write and he kept getting distracted. So that’s always lingering in the background, sort of propelling the narrative forward. And in terms of the time dilation, I think I was trying to pay really close attention to what actually happened when I was using the computer and getting distracted. And so it made sense to get into the minutia of the various activities that take place in the morning.

I also think when I was focusing on the concrete actions and concrete sentences, even things like navigating the internet, scrolling and clicking and stuff like this, it helped. Because I thought since there’s not really that much of a plot, there would be a risk of it feeling stagnant or too abstract. A lot of the concrete actions and the active sentences help to still make the book feel…I keep using the word active, but active.

Speaking of the online distractions, your protagonist spends a good deal of time on social media. How would you define his relationship with it? How would you define your own?

I think for him, he has these ideas of himself as some kind of writer, or he oscillates between positioning himself, in his head at least, above the lit world or other writers. But then when he logs into social media and is actually confronted with other people in the form of tweets or Facebook posts or whatever, he shrinks into himself and either feels bad about himself or starts shitting on other people. And so I think it serves the role, especially since the whole book takes place where he’s basically just in front of the computer, of him being confronted with other people and having an uncomfortable experience with that.

I definitely get distracted by it, too. And I think part of the impetus for the novel was just me trying to find a way to make that feel productive, where it was almost like, okay, well, I’m not going to be able to overcome this compulsive clicking and scrolling because I’ve tried different ways and I can’t really do it. And so maybe instead I can try and incorporate that into the work itself so it’s at least sort of generative. But now that I’m not working on a novel that takes place mostly on the internet, it feels much more egregious and difficult, because I’m still just clicking all the time. Now it’s harder to justify.

It felt very real to the experience of just automatically opening an app and being like, wait, what?

That’s almost totally my experience. It was fun to try and watch myself and pay attention to what’s actually going on when I get sucked in. Because it really does feel like getting sucked in; it doesn’t feel like I’m choosing to do it.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned from writing and/or being around other writers?

I think one of the most surprising things that I’ve learned from writing is how full of shit that I am a lot of the time. I think a lot of the impetus to write for me comes from a sort of reactionary place. The first thing I wrote in The Novelist was the rant against his friend, Eric. And at the time I really thought I was just sort of owning this person and self-righteously proving a point or something. And then when I went back to read it, I was like, oh, wow, this is really ugly and kind of frantic and pathetic almost. And it always feels surprising.

I know that I have blind spots and I know that there are dark crevices of my consciousness, but it’s always surprising to see it on the page and be like, Oh, wow. I was totally coping here, or like, Oh, wow. I was totally just indulging the kind of ugly impulse, which happens. It happened with the novel I’m working on now, too.

And then the most surprising thing I’ve learned about being around other writers is maybe that a lot of them don’t seem to actually write much and are more concerned with things like social dynamics or politics or other things other than writing.

I’ve always hated that.

When I was younger, I always bristled when people would describe themselves as writers. And that’s partly why the title, I think, is so tongue in cheek. It’s like, “I’m a novelist,” or like, “I’m working on my novel.” I’ve always felt like there was something kind of cringe about parading that around as some kind of identity or a way in which you unironically perceive yourself. Even though, of course, I am a writer and I did write a novel, so it’s not inaccurate. But I hate the social game of it. It’s always shocking when I hear other writers talk and they’re totally abreast of everything that’s going on in literature and what this person said in this interview, and can you believe this person got this much money for this? It always just sounds so pathetic.

The Novelist celebrates change and is critical of those who are unwilling to put in the work. In what ways can we change positively?

I think on the one hand it’s tempting to say things like, “We can become more loving. We can become more tolerant. We can become more generous,” or whatever. And that’s all true, but I think that the way change happens is through concrete decisions that are embodied in one’s own life. I think a lot of the time people have the temptation to try and change the world or change something in politics or something like that. And it’s very easy for emotions like envy or resentment or hatred to sneak in because you’re not holding yourself accountable and you’re not having to manifest these things in your own life. And for me, a lot of the positive change that has happened in my life or in people’s lives around me starts with adopting a sense of personal responsibility, where it’s like, it’s not other people’s job to change, it’s my job to change.

And I think that’s simultaneously empowering but also realistic because change spreads. Good change spreads out from the individual as opposed to this top-down imposition. And I think there’s momentum involved in that. It’s like, if I choose to accept responsibility for something and I want the world to be a more loving place, I take it upon myself to become more loving. Then that can spread out to my friends and my family and so on, in an authentic and dynamic, living way. It’s also an endless pursuit. I can always be working on something like that, because it’s not like I’m going to fully eradicate these things within myself.

But the moment I start pointing fingers and blaming others or absolving myself of responsibility, I can immediately start scapegoating other people or becoming hateful or envious or resentful. And I can use a kind of metanarrative to self-justify terrible interpersonal relations. And so I think for me, it starts with responsibility and then it snowballs from there. And you see these people that for decades just become increasingly sour and bitter, and they have all the “right opinions,” but they don’t actually help anyone. Change occurs gradually over time through concrete actions.

Your choice to include a character named Jordan Castro in the novel interested me, especially because the narrator never meets him. What do you think of their relationship, and does it remind you of any real life dynamics?

That character sort of emerged; I didn’t plan it. In some ways, the Jordan Castro character is just a model for the narrator. He’s someone who’s a successful novelist, whereas the narrator is not. He’s someone who has a life-affirming worldview, whereas the narrator’s sort of struggling back and forth between attempting to have one, but not really having one.

The Jordan Castro character is so far away from the narrator that he can use him as a model without all the personal baggage he has with his friends on social media. I’ve noticed for myself that when I’m learning something new, especially something that is foreign to my current understanding of the world, or even the current way that I perceive myself, I almost have to take on this perspective like I’m imitating it in order to really understand it.

The narrator finds himself imitating Jordan Castro’s language, even. I mean, it’s common to read something or listen to someone talk then find yourself imitating their speech patterns. A lot of the way we learn is acquisitive in this way where it’s like we’re not only learning what someone thinks but also almost adopting who they are in some sense. It’s imitative, you know? And so the book deals with imitation and I think that’s just another way in which positive change can occur, through the process of learning from another person.

And for me, there was definitely a period of time in 2016 to maybe 2018 where I was encountering these shitstorms on Twitter, or I would see a person’s name constantly associated with someone who you should hate or whatever, and I would engage directly with the people’s work. I started reading and watching stuff from other corners of culture that I was previously unfamiliar with. And so there was also that anxiety where it’s like, I know I’m not supposed to be liking this person’s thing, but also finding myself attracted to it and seeing that some of it made a lot of sense.

There’s something frantic and false about the way people in online crowds try to enforce a kind of brutally incurious attitude toward people they perceive as their ideological enemies. I’ve always been interested in thinking things through and reading widely and coming to my own conclusions. It occurred to me a long time ago that when I was a kid, I was really, really involved in radical left-wing politics, but I knew absolutely nothing of what other people thought. So I was like, I’ll just spend some time reading this stuff. And come to find out, they’re not these boogeyman monsters! And I think that process, which is really the process of actually learning, is important.

Your novel made many salient points on cancel culture. What’s your take?

My take is that it’s bad. On the one hand you hear people say it doesn’t exist, but then those same people will say it’s good. I care a lot about literature, art, free expression, and the ability of art to exist in this space that isn’t clean or clear. I think ideology often, whether it’s right-wing or left-wing, sort of wants to map the world in this really clean, binary, easily understandable way, as if graphed.

My favorite art honors the complexity and the beauty, but also the darkness, of human experience, as cringe as that sounds. And I think this sick attempt by ideologues to censor art creates a culture of uniformity, and it also assumes art can be boiled down into bullet points. They read with a red pen and say, “Well, does this check off these boxes?” I’m not interested in that at all.

But I would never use the term “cancel culture.” There’s the normy conservative pundit way of talking about it where they’re just like, “Cancel culture’s out of control.” And I don’t exactly feel that way either.

If you get stuck on that, you can just become an evil twin of your enemy, where you just complain, feel resentful, and so on. I’ve seen so many people be like, “As a white man, you can’t get published.” And it’s like, I’ve seen rejection letters from major houses to friends of mine, who’ve won awards and who have been published in major presses that say things like, “We don’t need another book by a white man right now.” I’ve literally seen that. And I’ve heard people talk like that behind closed doors, too. So I know it’s real. But instead of complaining or becoming resentful, I wrote the best novel I could and hoped it’d work out. And it is working out, so maybe I defeated cancel culture.

What advice would you give to writers who are just starting out?

Read a lot. Keep writing. A lot of people only write for a little while and then quit, but just keep doing it. Find a few writers that you really, really like and figure out why you like them. Look at their sentences, look at what they’re doing, and imitate them.

When I was younger, I liked Bret Easton Ellis a lot, and I remember watching an interview with him where he talked about how he basically just copied Joan Didion. He was like, “You only need one or two writers that you really, really like in order to become a writer.” And then when I read Joan Didion, especially Play It as It Lays, I was like, oh my god, Bret Easton Ellis totally took this from Joan Didion! I’ve had that experience so many times where I’ve read someone then read who they’re influenced by and it makes so much sense. It’s a great way to learn.

I was at an event with this writer, Sam Riviere. He’s an academic who studies imitation. He was talking about the common advice in workshops of: find your voice. He said, “I don’t even know what that would mean.” I don’t either.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

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A politically connected COVID-19-testing company with a stunningly high error rate in Nevada has become a key issue in the state’s closely fought governor’s race.

In May, a ProPublica investigation detailed how Gov. Steve Sisolak’s administration fast-tracked the license for Northshore Clinical Labs, a company with ties to a family that has donated nearly $50,000 to his political campaigns since 2011, including $40,000 to his gubernatorial races. The investigation also revealed that the company missed 96% of COVID-19 cases in a sample of 51 PCR tests from the University of Nevada Reno campus, used questionable billing practices and had widespread problems with the testing it provided to five government agencies. The article also noted how the lab was allowed to continue operating in the state despite repeated warnings from public health scientists.

Now, as Sisolak, a Democrat, seeks a second term, he is fending off relentless Republican attacks labeling him “corrupt” and pointing out that he failed to notify the public of the problematic tests. His opponent, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, as well as the Republican Governors Association and an independent political action committee, have spent millions of dollars on mailers and television, radio and digital ads hyping the issue. Lombardo’s Republican allies in the Legislature have unsuccessfully asked for audits and investigations into Northshore’s dealings. And the two candidates for governor spent nearly 10 minutes arguing the issue this month in their only debate.

“Gov. Sisolak covered up a public health crisis for five months,” Lombardo’s spokesperson, Elizabeth Ray, said. “Sisolak knew about this crisis back in January, and he failed to alert the public. His inaction in this ‘pay-to-plague’ scandal could have cost Nevadans their lives.”

In response, Sisolak’s campaign has accused Republicans of exaggerating the nature of the testing problems and the governor’s role in it.

“Joe Lombardo and national Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars spreading lies, misconstruing the truth and misleading Nevadans,” Molly Forgey, Sisolak’s campaign spokesperson, said. “Plain and simple: Republicans are desperate. Lombardo doesn’t have any real plans or vision so instead, he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel in an attempt to shift the narrative away from his pattern of corruption and his out-of-touch stances.”

Shortly after ProPublica published its investigation, a government spokesperson for the Sisolak administration said his office was exploring legal avenues to hold the company accountable for botched testing services that put its customers’ health at risk. This week, however, the spokesperson confirmed the administration has yet to take action beyond assisting federal investigators looking into Northshore’s practices.

“I don’t have many updates for you,” spokesperson Meghin Delaney said.

Northshore and its representatives have consistently declined to comment on ProPublica’s reporting.

As the debate has raged, both sides have bent the facts in making their cases to the voters. According to ProPublica’s extensive reporting on the issue, which included a review of more than 3,000 pages of internal emails, here is what both sides have gotten wrong.

Among Republicans’ most repeated errors is the claim that Sisolak handed a state contract to the testing company. In some cases, Republicans have accused Sisolak of giving Northshore a $165 million contract.

In reality, the state did not sign a contract with Northshore, nor did it pay the company $165 million. That figure is the total amount of money the company, which says it operated in more than 20 states at the height of the pandemic, billed the federal government for COVID-19 tests it said it provided to people with no health insurance.

The Sisolak administration, however, did let Northshore jump ahead of other companies waiting for inspections so it could more quickly obtain its state laboratory license.

Northshore had contracted with brothers Gregory and Angelo Palivos to build clientele and manage its operations in Nevada. Their parents, Peter and Vicky Palivos, have donated heavily to Sisolak’s campaign and are personal friends of the governor’s. The Palivos brothers worked with an influential lobbyist who used his ties to the administration to help Northshore with its state laboratory license.

After the lobbyist emailed Sisolak’s chief of staff, the head of the licensing bureau urged the health inspectors to move up Northshore’s inspection.

“I want to let you know how frustrating it is to have my staff schedule their inspections only to have labs use previous directors to influence or pressure us into having businesses that they represent, jump ahead of others that are patiently waiting for their inspections,” the state’s lead inspector wrote to his boss in an email obtained by ProPublica.

In a written statement earlier this year, a spokesperson for the Palivos brothers said they were unaware of Northshore’s problems when they were hired to manage its Nevada operations. The spokesperson said they were driven by their desire to help Nevada in the middle of a testing crisis and that they relied on Northshore “for standard operating procedures, licensing, compliance, test supplies, molecular lab work, reporting of test results, and billing.” She also said the Palivos brothers pushed the company to fix the problems with its tests before the state became involved.

Sisolak has repeatedly said he had no conversations about Northshore with Palivos family members. The Palivos brothers also said they never spoke with the governor about their testing business.

“This guy — on my life, on my mother, my children, my wife’s life — never asked me about this testing company,” Sisolak said during the Oct. 2 gubernatorial debate, referring to Peter Palivos. “Never talked to me. Never sent me an email. Never made a phone call. Never sent me a text. Never did anything. They followed the procedures. That’s what happened.”

The Pavilos family’s political donations didn’t stop amid the Northshore debacle. On Jan. 17, three days after the state scheduled its investigation into complaints about Northshore’s operations, a limited liability company operated by Peter and Vicky Palivos donated $10,000 to Sisolak’s campaign.

Both the Lombardo campaign and the Better Nevada PAC, which said it has spent more than $1 million on ads about Northshore, have claimed Sisolak is being investigated by the federal government.

ProPublica confirmed that the Inspector General’s Office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expanded its investigation into Northshore to Nevada after the initial story ran in May. An email from the OIG investigator did not indicate that Sisolak or his administration were under investigation.

“Myself and other law enforcement agencies have had a case opened regarding Northshore Clinical Lab for quite some time,” wrote Special Agent Peter Theiler, who is based in Chicago. “After reading the ProPublica article on Northshore Clinical Lab regarding Nevada patients, we are interested in obtaining records related to testing for COVID-19 for Northshore Clinical Lab rapid test results and PCR test results for Nevada.”

Spokespeople for both Lombardo’s campaign and the Better Nevada PAC point to the Sisolak administration’s comments about the OIG investigation as evidence Sisolak himself is under investigation.

But that’s not supported by public records. The OIG has declined to comment on the investigation.

The state never revoked Northshore’s license. Instead, it tried working with the company to bring it into compliance before ultimately closing the license at the company’s request.

Delaney declined to address this inaccuracy when ProPublica asked about it. His campaign spokesperson also did not explain the inaccuracy.

That’s not to say Sisolak’s administration ignored the problem. The Nevada Bureau of Health Care Quality and Compliance immediately began investigating after the Washoe County Health District filed a complaint detailing errors with the company’s PCR tests.

Northshore had been conducting both rapid and PCR tests. In “several hundred”cases, the rapid test came back positive, but the PCR test came back negative, according to a Jan. 10 email from Washoe County Health District’s epidemiology manager. At state and local health officials’ urging, Northshore voluntarily stopped using PCR tests. However, state officials allowed the company to continue conducting rapid tests across the state despite it not having the proper licensing to do that.

In their investigation, state inspectors noted deficiencies with Northshore’s operations and were working with the company to correct them. During that process, Northshore abruptly announced it was pulling out of the state and asked for its license to be closed.

State officials closed the license but also reported their findings to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the State Board of Nursing and the company itself.

During the debate, moderator Jon Ralston asked Sisolak why he never alerted the public to the problems with Northshore’s tests when he became aware of them in January 2022.

“We were cooperating in a federal investigation into the company, which we’re still cooperating with,” Sisolak answered.

According to documents obtained by ProPublica, however, the federal investigation into Northshore didn’t include its Nevada operations until May, after the ProPublica story ran.

The governor may have misspoken. (Delaney and Forgey also refused to address this inaccuracy.) At the time, Nevada health officials had launched a state investigation into the reported testing inaccuracies and told local media they could not comment on the ongoing investigation.

Sisolak’s answer drew an attack from Lombardo, who said the governor had owed the public a warning for their personal safety.

“You should have, front-facing as the leader of this state, said, ‘Hey, if you took this test, come in and get another test because we have determined they are all false, or the percentage of them, the majority of them were false,’” Lombardo said during the debate.

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Anjeanette Damon.

Global non-proliferation campaigners said Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin's latest threat to use nuclear weapons—and insistence that he isn't bluffing—represents a dangerous escalation of the Ukraine war and provides further evidence that the status quo of nuclear posturing and brinkmanship risks calamity.

In a televised address—a full transcript of which can be read here—Putin warned that if his nation's "territorial integrity" is threatened as Moscow continues its assault on Ukraine and attempts to seize large swaths of the nation's land, "we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia."

"We need to show strong global unity against nuclear use and nuclear threats."

Accusing the West of "nuclear blackmail" and threats, Putin said that he "would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries," a clear reference to Russia's vast nuclear arsenal.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), responded with alarm to Putin's remarks, which the Nobel Prize-winning group characterized as his most aggressive to date.

"As long as nuclear weapons exist, the fate of the world rests on men like President Putin [choosing] not to use them," ICAN tweeted. "Russia's threats to use nuclear weapons have heightened tensions, reduced the threshold for use, and greatly increased the risk of nuclear conflict and global catastrophe."

"A single nuclear detonation would likely kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and injure many more; radioactive fallout could contaminate large areas across multiple countries. Widespread panic would trigger mass movements of people and severe economic disruption," the group added. "The international community must strongly condemn nuclear threats, work to reduce the risks of nuclear weapons being used, and reverse the trend towards normalization of use."

Watch Putin's speech:

Beatrice Fihn, ICAN's executive director, said Putin's nuclear comments are "very worrying" and shouldn't be downplayed as mere rhetoric.

"You'll probably see some analysts saying, 'Cool down, don't worry, it is a bluff,'" Fihn wrote. "In one way, sure, nuclear threats and nuclear deterrence is always a bluff. Until it isn't. And none of us know when he'll go from bluffing to doing it."

"This is how the world inches our way closer to the line where using nuclear weapons will be crossed," Fihn continued. "We need to show strong global unity against nuclear use and nuclear threats. All countries, international organizations, and people around the world need to condemn, stigmatize and delegitimize the threats, use, and possession of these nuclear weapons."

"It is essential that NATO does not take the bait and fuel his false narrative by explicitly threatening nuclear retaliation."

Putin's remarks came as he announced that Russia's military will be calling up reserves to bolster its attack on Ukraine amid a major counteroffensive by Kyiv that—with the help of a massive influx of weapons from the U.S. and other western powers—has forced Moscow to pull its forces back from parts of northeastern Ukraine.

Following Putin's announcement, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in a televised address that 300,000 Russian reservists would be called up to serve in the "partial mobilization."

"We're at war with the collective West," Shoigu declared.

Putin and Shoigu's remarks came as four Moscow-controlled regions of eastern and southern Ukraine are set to hold votes this week on whether to become parts of Russia.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba denounced the planned votes as "an act of desperation for Russia, but it is not going to help them."

Analysts warned that Putin's "territorial integrity" comments Wednesday indicate that the Russian president will consider any attempts by Kyiv to retake Ukrainian regions as an assault on Russia itself, setting the stage for possible nuclear escalation.

"Unlike the generic nuclear threat issued at the start of his attack on Ukraine in February, this threat is explicitly linked to the military situation in Ukraine," said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project.

Kristensen noted that Putin's new stance appears to go beyond Russia's official nuclear doctrine, which authorizes the use of atomic weapons in response to a nuclear attack or a conventional attack that "threatens the very existence of the state."

"This sounds like another round of chest-thumping, but it is clearly the most explicit nuclear threat Putin has made so far," Kristensen argued. "As before, it is essential that NATO does not take the bait and fuel his false narrative by explicitly threatening nuclear retaliation."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News &amp; Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nolan Higdon.

The return of Chris Cuomo to television is the latest reminder that there is little accountability to speak of in corporate news media. Chris was ousted at CNN in late 2021 amidst an ethics investigation that claimed he utilized his position at the cable news juggernaut to consult his brother, then governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. At the time, the governor was facing a series of sexual misconduct allegations. Chris was using his professional connections to identify what reporters knew about the allegations, and then using that information to consult Andrew on how to respond, all while hosting Andrew on his daily CNN program. In July 2022, Cuomo returned to television to promote his podcast The Chris Cuomo Project. Cuomo appeared on Dan Abrams show on NewsNation (where Cuomo recently secured a position and I have served as an expert guest) and Real Time with Bill Maher.

Cuomo’s appearances – both of which were with close friends, Maher and Abrams – were clearly an attempt to rebrand himself from unethical propagandist to fearless journalist. Cuomo explained that he was an optimistic person who was not bitter about what had happened at CNN. Looking back on his departure from CNN he said “I feel like I lost a sense of purpose for a while because of how things ended.” Cuomo’s recollection concealed that he was clearly bitter, so much so that he threatened a lawsuit against CNN and demanded $125 million in restitution for the damages to his reputation. 

Nonetheless, Cuomo claimed that he wanted to serve the American people with his podcast and broadcast program by breaking the hyper-partisan frame used in most reporting. This is rich coming from someone whose success is owed to a CNN program that preached to the Democratic Party choir by ritually lampooning Trump.

Chris also took the opportunity to rewrite the historical record on what happened at CNN. Chris’ version of events is that he used his professional contacts to consult his brother, it was unethical, but anybody would do the same for their family. Fair enough, but still unethical, and that is not the entire story. He also utilized his platform – with the approval of CNN leadership – to effectively campaign for his brother. Andrew appeared frequently on Chris’ show where they performed lighthearted sketches that humanized Andrew, such as debating who their mother loved more or Chris bringing in a giant Q-tip as a prop to mock the size of his brother’s nose. This fed into media narratives at the time that claimed that Andrew was “America’s governor” during the COVID-19 pandemic and a potential presidential contender in 2020.

The jovial segments were propaganda, distracting from the corruption of Andrew Cuomo’s reign as governor. At the time, Andrew was forcing nursing homes to take COVID-19 patients when hospitals were full. This raised the chances of spreading the virus to the most vulnerable – older and sick people. Moreover, Andrew was concealing from the public the actual number of deaths that this policy caused. To make matters worse, Andrew granted immunity to nursing homes – known as a liability shield – for their mismanagement of care after they donated to his campaign. The cute segments with his brother concealed the deadly crisis Andrew’s corruption had wrought on New York’s most vulnerable citizens. In addition to re-writing history about the impact of his CNN reporting, Chris failed to report that CNN fired him, in part, due to his sexual misconduct.

Sadly, Chris Cuomo’s return to news media after being exposed as a propagandist does not make him an outlier. For example, Judith Miller was rewarded for lying to New York Times readers to garner support the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq with a job at Fox News Channel. Brian Williams, who manufactured stories of being shot down in a helicopter in a war zone, was given a brief respite before returning to MSNBC. Similarly, Bill O’Reilly remained at Fox News Channel after falsely claiming he was an earwitness to the gunshot suicide of Lee Harvey Oswald associate, George de Mohrenschildt. Rachel Maddow was rewarded with a $30 million annual contract from MSNBC after fear mongering about Russia, often baselessly for years, known as Russiagate. Even those who made a career out of lying in government are often welcomed guests in corporate media: Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame (Fox News Channel), and Karl Rove who perpetuated the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie (Fox News Channel).

Audiences lack of faith in news media has not been lost on the industry. Case in point, in an effort to address the credibility gap in news media, the New York Times ran a July 2022 series titled “I Was Wrong About” which actually underscored rather than addressed the problem. The series saw opinion writers admit they had been wrong about somethings. Paul Krugman apologized for his work on inflation. Michelle Goldberg did the same about Al Franken, David Brooks on Capitalism, Zeynep Tufekci wrote about The Power of Protest, Farhad Manjoo wrote about Facebook, and Gail Collins wrote about Mitt Romney.

Rather than restore faith in legacy media, the articles reveal the ways in which dominant legacy media manufacture consent of the public for elite opinion, even when it is baseless. For example, Bret Stephens professed that his sin was chiding Trump supporters rather than understanding the disruption to their communities. In the article he admits that his judgment was clouded by the groundless claims regarding Russiagate. While it is great that someone in dominant legacy media admits that the Russia fear mongering was overblown, it does nothing to repair the careers of those who were shunned for holding the same opinion four years earlier. Nor does it alleviate the fact that four years of Russia fear mongering distracted from other stories – including substantive ones regarding corruption in the Trump administration. Worse, Stephens‘ atonement does not change the fact that baseless Russian conspiracies remain acceptable and digestible excuses to dismiss and marginalize pundits and policy makers from the left and the right of the ideological spectrum.

In terms of manufacturing consent for elite opinion, Stephens cannot hold a candle to Thomas Friedman. With four decade’s worth of options, one has to wonder how Friedman chose only one topic for the “I Was Wrong About” series. He has been wrong about so many issues from domestic policy to education to the international economy. In 2000, he incorrectly proclaimed that Colin Powell would not be challenged or overruled in the George W. Bush Administration. In 2001, he encouraged readers to “keep rootin’ for Putin” because he would lead Russia to be a democracy and U.S. ally. Within the first months of the Afghanistan invasion, Friedman told readers that “America has won the war in Afghanistan,” “the Taliban are gone,” and the talk of civilian casualties was nonsense. Discussing what Friedman has been wrong about is more of a dissertation topic than an op-ed.

In his article for the “I Was Wrong About” series, Friedman admitted that he was too optimistic in believing that China would become a free and open society once they adopted the free market and global trade. Friedman’s article was not exactly revelatory as others in news media had noted previously that he was wrong on the issue of China. Regardless, Friedman’s articles primed readers to accept free trade and other global policies that not only failed to deliver a more democratized world as promised – indeed democracy is threatened around the globe – it also did not improve and in some cases worsened economic conditions for the majority of U.S. citizens. Rather than hold writers like Friedman accountable for the damage caused by misleading the public to adopt elite opinion, they are lauded for admitting they were wrong. 

These articles and Cuomo’s homecoming illustrate that corporate media personalities are not accountable to the public. They are accountable to the elites they serve. It is elites, not the public, who can provide them with a privileged platform and improved material conditions regardless of the magnitude or frequency of their errors, corruption, or ineptitude. To be clear, errors in journalism are expected and that is why corrections are a standard part of reporting. However, errors should only be excused when the circumstances mislead the reporter, not when the reporter misleads the people, gets caught, and feigns surprise. This is what happened to Chris Cuomo. Cuomo was not ousted for temporary lapse in judgment or an error that any rational person would make. He was ousted for abusing his privilege and position to serve elite interests. That does not make him a reputable media figure in the tradition of respectable journalism, but it does make him a quintessential prototype for corporate media.

The post Elite Lapdogs Always Welcome in the Corporate Media appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Photograph Source: Mark Dixon – CC BY 2.0

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is the most reactionary ever in American history.  Its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision taking away abortion rights from American women is the first time the Court has ever overturned a constitutional precedent to take away rights.  But let us not forget that this Court has also killed the Voting Rights Act by declaring most of it unconstitutional in  Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee.  It has also killed union rights and unleashed corporate political money in Citizens United.  And it has consistently chipped away at the separation of Church and State as evidenced in the recent Carson v. Makin.  For a Chief Justice so worried about his legacy and the reputation of the Court, history will not be kind to him.

Ironically, history is central to the Roberts Court assault on rights.   Better yet it is the abuse of history in its method of legal analysis and reasoning.

Starting back with Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese conservative jurists, including Justice Antonin Scalia and the members of the Federalist Society, argued that the Constitution should be interpreted in light of the intent of the framers.  Such an approach, asking us what a bunch of slaveholders, bankers, and land speculators who were White and Christian thought about the rights of average people such as women, the poor, and people of color most certainly would doom their rights.  That is why Justices such as  Earl Warren, William Brennan, and others argued that rights need to be looked at in terms of the evolving standards of decency that mark the maturing of society.  We need to read our Constitution with an evolving political morality that reflects political sensibilities reflective of today, not fixed in stone in 1787.

While some argued that an intent of framers methodology was a neutral tool of interpretation, it really was window dressing for a conservative political ideology.  It was no coincidence that the so-called most faithful adherents of such an interpretative approach were conservative and consistently ruled against individual rights.

But now the Roberts Court this term has taken its interpretive tool further by asking whether a right is  “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”  If it is so deeply rooted then it is a right protected by the Constitution, if not the Court will not protect it.  In Dobbs, the Court offered its version of history to conclude “that that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”  Conversely, the Court invoked history in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association to strike down a gun law by arguing  that the right to carry a gun in public for self-defense is consistent with the “Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding.”  Finally, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District the Court upheld the ability of a public school football coach to kneel and do prayers after a game, despite concerns by the school about First Amendment Establishment Clause issues.  The Court declared that the ”Establishment Clause must be interpreted by “ ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’ ”  Apparently praying after football games is deeply rooted in our history.

The three opinions all have something in common—the use and abuse of history.  The Court invokes history to support its outcomes, but it just so happens that its history supports a Christian, misogynist, gun-toting view of the world.  It is an opinion that is revolutionary and reactionary at the same time.

A central premise of American law is that it is supposed to be precedent based.  Once the Supreme Court decides an issue it is settled law and unless there are extraordinary reasons to overturn a prior opinion, one is expected to follow precedent. Precedent is law. It is part of the Constitution along with text. Over time some of the most fundamental rights in American history, the right to vote, privacy, marriage,  and use of contraceptives have been the product of Court opinion, reading into the Constitution rights reflective of an evolving political morality and sensibility.

This is what makes the appeal to history and tradition so dangerous.  It pits the text of the Constitution, the historical sensibilities of its framers, and an American history and tradition of racism, sexism, and Christian parochialism against reform.  It freezes right back to 1787 or, as pointed out in Dobbs, to a point at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.   Dobbs, as Clarence Thomas’ concurrence declares, sets up the Court to reconsider the right of same sex couples to marry, the right to birth control, and the right of same sex couples to engage in private consensual sexual acts.  Such an interpretive approach is not neutral—it is inherently in opposition to rights.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Schultz.

RFA: Congratulations on being released and starting a new life in the U.S. Could you please share with us your feelings when you arrived here?

Ho Duc Hoa: When I just landed in the U.S., the land of freedom, the first feeling came to me was that I missed my mother; my lost father, who passed away when I was in prison; and my younger sibling, who also died when I was in prison. I also thought of those who had supported and advocated for me to be released. I remembered the staff from the U.S. Embassy [in Hanoi] and the State Department who received me and organized my trip to the U.S.

Now I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude and send my prayers to those who I may or may not know in person but who had always supported me until I was released. I don’t know how to return your favor except to ask God to bless you, and wish you all health, peace and safety.

RFA: In your time in Vietnam, it seems that you have been transfered among various prisons. What can you say about the life of political prisoners in those places?

Ho Duc Hoa: In fact, I have lived in four detention centers, of which three were temporary ones and the last was a permanent one. The first one was B34 Detention Center in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). The second was Detention Center No. 34 in Hanoi,  and the third was Nghi Kim Detention Center in the central province of Nghe An. The last one where I stayed for the longest time was Nam Ha Detention Center in the northern province of Ha Nam.

Among them, the detention center in Nghe An province was the worst in terms of living conditions.

I lived in the areas for political prisoners, which were separated from the places for ordinary prisoners. I quickly recognized discrimination towards political prisoners right after arriving at each detention center. For example, we had to live in hot and tiny cells and lie next to the toilet. The water was so contaminated that we often got sore eyes and became itchy after having a shower. We had made a lot of complaints, of which some had been addressed but many just dropped into silence without any response.

RFA: How do Vietnamese prisons treat religious prisoners like you? Do you receive scriptures and religious books? How do they respond to requests to allow religious practice?

Ho Duc Hoa: Actually, when I was being held at temporary detention centers, I was allowed to receive scriptures and read them daily. However, things changed since 2020, when I was at Nam Ha Detention Center. They tightened the policy and only allowed me to read scriptures once a week–every Sunday.

As I strongly demanded the right to read scriptures on a daily basis, they issued a document accusing me of violating the detention center’s rules. Then I went on a 10 day hunger strike to fight for the right to read scriptures. I believe religious practice is a right, not a favor. However, they did not change their harsh policies towards religious prisoners. I was very weak during my hunger strike and my health has been deteriorating significantly since then.

RFA: Could you tell us more about other inmates’ fight for their rights and the outcomes of these efforts?

Ho Duc Hoa: We always fought against things which were unreasonable or contradictory to the rules and regulations of the [Nam Ha] detention center. As I said, some issues have been resolved but many haven’t: Firstly, the right to read scriptures daily; Secondly, the contaminated water; Thirdly, we requested to have the toilet moved out of the cell (when someone used the toilet, others suffered from the smell) and; Fourthly, we requested to be moved to a larger cell with more space and light. However, none of these issues had been addressed at the time I was set free. Among them, I think the right to read scriptures daily is the most critical.

RFA: Tell us about the lives of ‘orphan’ prisoners, i.e. those who don’t have family support.

Ho Duc Hoa: You are right. ‘Orphan’ prisoners are the ones who don’t receive supplies or get very little supplies from their family. These people fully depend on the food provided by the detention center, which certainly does not have sufficient nutrients. As prisonsers have to work everyday while their food is poor, their health often goes from bad to worse. Some kind inmates do share food with the ‘orphans,’ but their kind act, of course, cannot help much. Most of the ‘orphan’ prisoners are ethnic minority people. They were also convicted for political reasons.

RFA: If you could send a message to your inmates who fight for democracy in Vietnam, what would you say?

Ho Duc Hoa: Since I was released, my mind has been full of the images of the inmates who I know in person, or not in person, but are still held in detention centers in Vietnam. The very first ones are those who have shared the same prison with me such as Le Dinh Luong, Nguyen Nang Tinh, Pham Van Troi, Nguyen Van Nghiem, Nguyen Viet Dung and Vo Quang Thuan.

I would like to say to them: You should take good care of your health, both mentally and physically, and that we’ll stay with you, pray for you and continue our advocacy efforts to get you released, as well as better care, especially for those with serious health issues. I’ll pray for you and wish you health and strong determination despite the harsh prison environment.

RFA: Now that you have arrived in the U.S, what is your plan for the time being?

Ho Duc Hoa: As you all know, the key thing that brought me to the U.S. was my health concerns. My health has seriously deteriorated since 2017. Also because of my health conditions, I could not say hello and express my gratitude to our audience until today when I feel a little bit better. Therefore, my first and most important plan now is to improve my health both mentally and physically.

Translated by Anna Vu.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Trung Khang for RFA Vietnamese.

Bankman-Fried lives in the Bahamas. He considered his contribution a particularly “effective” investment. A few million can go a long way in a primary, he noted in a podcast before the election. More

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonathan Woodrow Martin.

Reading books is the only way I can learn things. I read like 20 books at once, and a big part of my writing is just reading. I learn new forms, new structures; how I want to sound. Just breaking down ideas of poetics for me. Then I integrate it into my poetry; things I love, things I’m particularly inspired by in that moment.

My new book is, in a lot of ways, my influences broken down. I’m inspired by my friends, being around my friends, experiencing their work. That malleable form. I can’t imagine writing, or thinking at all, without my friendships. They perpetuate the space for my work… I discover things through people I love.

Do you ever sit down and try to imitate work that you like?

It’s more natural than that. I read something or I’ll hear something in my mind; it’ll distill it down into something that I’ve been thinking about. I’m always falling in love with everyone’s work, but I can’t write in anyone’s form but my own. I find inspiration in everything; it’s like this sensation of staring into the sun. I’m trying to be possessed by everything—trying to meet myself at the place I’m at—but that’s always changing.

A lot of people who are younger and just starting to write don’t feel confident about their own voice or style.

I feel like I’m pretty confident in my style and in sounding like me, but you can look at my work and see a lot of Dana Ward’s influence or Bhanu Kapil and Ben Fama. I value their work, but it’s still intrinsically me. I can’t create in a vacuum: My work is more of a conservation and my process reflects that.

When you sit down to write how do you start?

I write mostly in my bedroom. I don’t have a desk. I have at least 10 or 12 books that I’m reading at the time around me and I flip through different things. I have poems that I’m reading on my computer and I flip through those. I usually start by journaling. I journal every night, and that’s where most of my poems come from. Or notes in my phone that I pick through and Frankenstein morph into poems. In the end, it’s just me trying to boil down my gibberish and self-recriminations into some destruction and rebirth of me trying to give flesh to my memories.

So you don’t sit down and write a poem start to finish?

No, I’ve actually never done that before. I’m not the kind of person who can sit down and say, “Today I’m going to sit down and write a great poem, and it’s going to be beautiful.” That’s impossible for me to do. Writing a poem is like a huge journey. I have all these fragments like, “Okay, this is something I was writing while walking in the street the other day.”

I’ve started doing a thing where I walk around and talk to myself a lot and that’s how most of my work gets done. Me walking around and recording it. I’ve started recording it on my phone voice notes: that’s me sitting down to write a poem. Me walking in the streets analyzing what’s going on in my head… that’s where most of my poems come from.

Are you working on one poem at a time or a lot at once?

It’s a lot of poems at once. And then these small fragments at once. This book I’ve been working on—I’ll think a poem belongs in one thing, and I sit down to write it and transcribe it, and that’s not where it should be at all, and it’s a whole different poem. The other day, in sitting down to write a poem I think is a poem, I accidentally wrote a short story.

How do you know when a poem is done when you’re piecing things together?

For a long time, I didn’t think a lot of my poems could be finished. I’m always going back and deleting things and editing them. But I think I know when it’s done when I look at it and I feel satisfied. It’s something I can read and feel weirdly at peace about. Most of my poems are me working through something. And it’s not done until I feel like, “Oh, I understand now. I get what was going on in that place.” I can’t afford therapy so I write poetry.

It’s really nice to watch you read because it’s so clear that you’re speaking in your own voice. You make it seem so easy and casual like, “Of course Precious’ poetry would come out like this.” Do you talk while you write?

I talk to myself all the time… it’s a litany of my madness. I’m reading my poems back and forth to myself and striking through things and realizing that’s what I was trying to say. A lot of my poems are a mad woman having a conversation with herself. That’s essentially what I am.

Do you get stuck?

Um, yes.

How do you unblock yourself?

I moved to New York and I live in this place. I find myself getting frustrated with the space that I’m in. For a while I couldn’t finish my manuscript. I was stuck on page 45 for a couple months. “Back on my bullshit” or something along those lines. I couldn’t write at all. There was a lot going on in my life and I was really stressed out. I felt like I didn’t have the time or the mental capacity to give myself creative space or freedom. I started trying to do things to make myself happier. I’ve started cooking a lot, teaching my dog tricks. I spent a lot of time teaching Rainbow to walk on ledges. (On my roof there’s a lot of telephone wires—not like “Oh my dog, push him off the roof.”) It gave me a lot of clarity trying to teach my dog to do impossible things. Like, “Oh, maybe I can go back to writing now.”

Sometimes I think I just have to give myself leniency to not feel like I have to be producing things. I feel like if you are stuck maybe you’re stuck for a reason, because maybe you need to be doing something else in that time and not forcing yourself. I think that as an artist, people are prone to force themselves to create. A lot of time that can be good—forcing yourself to create out of a necessity to survive—but sometimes maybe you just need to chill.

Your last book ends with a poem that’s like text messages between two people. I’m curious what you feel like is the relationship between your work and the internet and cell phones.

I’m on the internet quite a bit. It almost makes me insane. Ben [Fama] has this line in a poem, “The internet is my home/ where it’s easy to be beautiful.” I agree with that like to the max. I’m constantly on my phone. I read my poems off my phone. I write on my phone. My phone is constantly in my hand. Being a contemporary poet and being on the internet go hand in hand. A tweet is a little poem. I send my friend a text—that’s a love poem! I want literature that’s not made from literature, like let’s destroy this idea of a pure form… everything is cross mutation of particles that merge with one another.

Some people feel like tweeting or texting friends can steal the energy that would otherwise get put to their work.

No. That’s all my writing. You can’t steal something that’s a part of everything, if it’s all connected and it’s all the same thing. What makes it different? I write it on paper so it’s more holy than if it’s on my phone or in a tweet or a text to a friend? No. The space your words are in shouldn’t matter more than your words. Some of my best lines will come from a manic Facebook post when I’m pissed off at someone. Little things that I don’t even think about, and I go back like, “Oh, that is a good line.” Everything is one big great poem. Why pretend otherwise?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Willis Plummer.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.