By Laura Bergamo in Nice, France

The UN Ocean Conference (UNOC) concluded today with significant progress made towards the ratification of the High Seas Treaty and a strong statement on a new plastics treaty signed by 95 governments.

Once ratified, it will be the only legal tool that can create protected areas in international waters, making it fundamental to protecting 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030.

Fifty countries, plus the European Union, have now ratified the Treaty.

• READ MORE: Pacific civil society groups challenge France over hosting UN oceans event as political ‘rebranding’
• Other UNOC reports

New Zealand has signed but is yet to ratify.

Deep sea mining rose up the agenda in the conference debates, demonstrating the urgency of opposing this industry.

The expectation from civil society and a large group of states, including both co-hosts of UNOC, was that governments would make progress towards stopping deep sea mining in Nice.

UN Secretary-General Guterres said the deep sea should not become the “wild west“.

Four new pledges
French President Emmanuel Macron said a deep sea mining moratorium is an international necessity. Four new countries pledged their support for a moratorium at UNOC, bringing the total to 37.

Attention now turns to what actions governments will take in July to stop this industry from starting.

Megan Randles, Greenpeace head of delegation regarding the High Seas Treaty and progress towards stopping deep sea mining, said: “High Seas Treaty ratification is within touching distance, but the progress made here in Nice feels hollow as this UN Ocean Conference ends without more tangible commitments to stopping deep sea mining.

“We’ve heard lots of fine words here in Nice, but these need to turn into tangible action.

“Countries must be brave, stand up for global cooperation and make history by stopping deep sea mining this year.

“They can do this by committing to a moratorium on deep sea mining at next month’s International Seabed Authority meeting.

“We applaud those who have already taken a stand, and urge all others to be on the right side of history by stopping deep sea mining.”

Attention on ISA meeting
Following this UNOC, attention now turns to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) meetings in July. In the face of The Metals Company teaming up with US President Donald Trump to mine the global oceans, the upcoming ISA provides a space where governments can come together to defend the deep ocean by adopting a moratorium to stop this destructive industry.

Negotiations on a Global Plastics Treaty resume in August.

John Hocevar, oceans campaign director, Greenpeace USA said: “The majority of countries have spoken when they signed on to the Nice Call for an Ambitious Plastics Treaty that they want an agreement that will reduce plastic production. Now, as we end the UN Ocean Conference and head on to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations in Geneva this August, they must act.

“The world cannot afford a weak treaty dictated by oil-soaked obstructionists.

“The ambitious majority must rise to this moment, firmly hold the line and ensure that we will have a Global Plastic Treaty that cuts plastic production, protects human health, and delivers justice for Indigenous Peoples and communities on the frontlines.

“Governments need to show that multilateralism still works for people and the planet, not the profits of a greedy few.”

Driving ecological collapse
Nichanan Thantanwit, project leader, Ocean Justice Project, said: “Coastal and Indigenous communities, including small-scale fishers, have protected the ocean for generations. Now they are being pushed aside by industries driving ecological collapse and human rights violations.

“As the UN Ocean Conference ends, governments must recognise small-scale fishers and Indigenous Peoples as rights-holders, secure their access and role in marine governance, and stop destructive practices such as bottom trawling and harmful aquaculture.

“There is no ocean protection without the people who have protected it all along.”

The anticipated Nice Ocean Action Plan, which consists of a political declaration and a series of voluntary commitments, will be announced later today at the end of the conference.

None will be legally binding, so governments need to act strongly during the next ISA meeting in July and at plastic treaty negotiations in August.

Republished from Greenpeace Aotearoa with permission.

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

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About a week after President Donald Trump took office, Jonathan Guerrero was sitting at the Philadelphia car wash where he works when immigration agents burst in.

The agents didn’t say why they were there and didn’t show their badges, Guerrero recalled. So the 21-year-old didn’t get a chance to explain that although his parents were from Mexico, he had been born right there in Philadelphia.

“They looked at me and made me put my hands up without letting me explain that I’m from here,” Guerrero said.

An agent pointed his gun at Guerrero and handcuffed him. Then they brought in other car wash workers, including Guerrero’s father, who is undocumented. When agents began checking IDs, they finally noticed that Guerrero was a citizen and quickly let him go.

“I said, ‘Look, man, I don’t know who these guys are and what they’re doing,” said Guerrero. “With anything law-related, I just stay quiet.”

Less than two months into the new Trump administration, there has been a small but steady beat of reported cases like Guerrero’s.

In Utah, agents pulled over and detained a 20-year-old American after he honked at them. In New Mexico, a member of the Mescalero Apache nation more than two hours from the border was questioned by agents who demanded to see their passport. Earlier this month, a Trump voter in Virginia was pulled over and handcuffed by gun-wielding immigration agents.

In Texas, a 10-year-old citizen recovering from brain cancer was detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint and eventually deported to Mexico with her undocumented parents and other citizen siblings in February. The family said it was rushing her to an emergency checkup in Houston when Border Patrol agents ignored a hospital letter that the family had used to go through checkpoints before. An agency spokesperson said the family’s account was inaccurate but declined to provide specifics.

It’s unclear exactly how many citizens have faced the Trump administration’s dragnet so far. And while previous administrations have mistakenly held Americans too, there’s no firm count of those incidents either.

The government does not release figures on citizens who have been held by immigration authorities. Neither Border Patrol nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles interior immigration enforcement, would provide numbers to ProPublica on how many Americans have been mistakenly detained.

Experts and advocates say that what is clear to them is that Trump’s aggressive immigration policies — such as arrest quotas for enforcement agents — make it likely that more citizens will get caught up in immigration sweeps.

“It’s really everyone — not just noncitizens or undocumented people — who are in danger of having their liberty violated in this kind of mass deportation machinery,” said Cody Wofsy, the deputy director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Asked about reports of Americans getting caught up in administration’s enforcement policies, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that agents are allowed to ask for citizens’ identification: “Any US immigration officer has authority to question, without warrant, any alien or person believed to be an alien concerning his or her right to be, or to remain, in the United States.” The agency did not respond to questions about specific cases.

The U.S. has gone through spasms of detaining and even deporting large numbers of citizens. In the 1930s and 1940s, federal and local authorities forcibly exiled an estimated 1 million Mexican Americans, including hundreds of thousands of American-born children.

Spanning both Obama administrations, an NPR investigation found, immigration authorities asked local authorities to detain about 700 Americans. Meanwhile, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that immigration authorities asked to hold roughly 600 likely citizens during Trump’s first term. The GAO also found that Trump actually deported about 70 likely citizens.

The GAO report did not get into any individual cases. But lawsuits brought against federal immigration agencies detail dozens of cases where plaintiffs received a settlement.

When local deputies in Pierce County, Washington, arrested Carlos Rios on suspicion of drunken driving in 2019, not even the fact that he had his U.S. passport could convince the deputies — or the ICE agents who took him into federal custody — that he was a citizen.

Rios, who immigrated from Mexico in the 1980s and became a citizen in 2000, often carried his passport with him in case he picked up a welding job on a Coast Guard ship or a commercial fishing job that took him into international waters. But no one listened to him when Rios insisted repeatedly that he was a citizen and begged Pierce County jail officials and ICE officers to check his bag. Rios ended up being held for a week. ICE did not comment on the case.

Rios received a $125,000 settlement but is still haunted by his time in detention.

“I don’t even have to close my eyes,” Rios said. “I remember every single second.”

There are other, more recent instances too. This January, in the last days of President Joseph Biden’s time in office, Border Patrol conducted raids in Kern County, California, more than four hours from the border.

Among those detained was Ernesto Campos, a U.S. citizen and owner of a Bakersfield landscaping company. Agents stopped Campos’ truck and slashed his tires when he refused to hand over his keys.

At that point, Campos began recording on his phone and protested that he is a U.S. citizen.

In the video, agents said they were arresting Campos for “alien smuggling.” (His undocumented employee was in the truck with Campos.) Border Patrol told a local TV station that agents were also concerned about human trafficking.

Campos has still not been charged. His lawyer said he was held for four hours.

Campos’ case is mentioned in a recent lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California and the United Farm Workers contending that agents in the same operation detained and handcuffed a 56-year-old grandmother who is a legal permanent resident. The suit argues that Border Patrol agents “went on a fishing expedition” that profiled Latinos and farmworkers.

Asked about Campos’ case and the lawsuit, Border Patrol said it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

While there are a number of fixes the government could make to limit the wrongful detention of citizens, immigration authorities have often failed to follow through.

After a series of lawsuits against the Obama administration, ICE began requiring officers to consult with supervisors before detaining someone who claims to be a citizen, and to not arrest someone if the evidence of citizenship “outweighs evidence to the contrary.” But the GAO report on mistaken detention of citizens noted that ICE wasn’t actually training officers to follow the policy. (In response to the GAO report, ICE said it revised its training materials. It told ProPublica that agents are still following those policies for determining citizenship)

Border Patrol and ICE are not even required to track how often they hold citizens on immigration charges, the GAO found. While ICE agents could note in their database if someone they’ve investigated turns out to be a citizen, the GAO found that they are not required to do so. As a result, records are often wrong and left uncorrected even after agents have been told of a mistake. Someone flagged incorrectly in an ICE database once may be forced to deal with questions about their citizenship for years.

Peter Sean Brown, another U.S. citizen born in Philadelphia, was mistaken more than 20 years ago for a Jamaican national living in the U.S. illegally. When he was later arrested in 2018 for a probation violation, immigration officials requested he be held, despite their own records documenting the case of mistaken identity, his lawyer said.

Brown repeatedly insisted he was a citizen, a claim agents are supposed to immediately review.

“I’M TRYING TO OBTAIN INFORMATION CONCERNING A UNVALID ICE HOLD,” Brown wrote to guards on April 19, 2018, while still detained at the Monroe County jail in Florida. “IM A US CITIZEN…HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?”

ICE eventually released him — after three weeks in detention.

Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Foy.

The year 2023 saw the hottest Summer on record in the northern hemisphere while those in the southern hemisphere felt the hottest winter on record.  It was followed by a Fall with terrifying storms and floods across the globe.  The number of people attributing climate catastrophe to economic growth is mounting.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Don Fitz.

Not all agree that growth is the problem. Some respond that growth is here to stay and that the concept of “degrowth” is idealistic nonsense.

Many of the accusations against degrowth have been answered. Jason Hickel’s book Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020) is perhaps the best known and most readable. An excellent collection of articles (Planned Degrowth and Sustainable Human Development) is available in the July/August 2023 edition of Monthly Review.

Is “Degrowth” Anti-Worker?

One accusation still seems to lack an adequate response: Is the US working class inherently anti-degrowth because it would mean a massive loss of jobs? This makes it appear that pro-growthers have never heard of a shorter work week. It would be the first consequence of degrowth. For many US workers, actually having a 40 hour work week would be welcome relief.

So, are workers inherently against degrowth? My family, friends and neighbors generally work for a living and not a single person has ever told me, “I would hate a shorter work week.”

One of the greatest problems for US workers is absence of health care as a human right. Despite the rantings of insurance company apologists, Medicare-for-All would cost much less. It is another way that degrowth would play out. In my book on Cuban Medical Care, The Ongoing Revolution, I document that Cubans have a longer life expectancy than do those in the US, while costs in Cuba are less than 10% per person per year of US costs.

Since the book was published, research has shown that Covid reduced life expectancy by almost three years in the US while it actually went slightly up in Cuba. A health system which focuses on preventive care, maternal care and child care saves more lives and is vastly less expensive than one that focuses on insurance, providing too little care for those who need it most, giving too much treatment to some, over-medicating millions, and offering luxury hospital rooms.

No working person has ever said to me that “I want my elderly relatives to choose between treatment and food and I want super-expensive care that is less effective because that is what helps the economy grow.” With genuine degrowth, the cost for health care might not be just “less,” but could be much, much less and would result in longer lives.

There are several other things that I have never heard from working people…

I have never heard a truck driver say, “I want to buy things that fall apart quickly so I have to go out and buy another one that won’t work, go out of style or become obsolete. If products were built so that people could repair them themselves and would last a long time, that would mean fewer jobs; so, businesses should manufacture as much junk as possible.”

No secretary has told me, “I love food that travels for 2000+ miles before getting to me, has lost most of its nutritional value, and can contaminate everyone who eats it due to its chemical content. Having good food grown locally would mean fewer jobs.”

No grocery store checker has ever told me that he really wants packaging that costs almost as much as the product, banking with ever-increasing fees, insurance that does not pay when he needs it, and incessant advertising on TV, radio and billboards. These are just some of the ways that capitalism creates useless jobs which do not improve people’s lives and whose reduction or abolition would contribute to a shorter work week.

The other day an image of Dracula gazed at me as the phlebotomist put a rubber cord around my arm and I waited to hear if she would say, “I would hate having a smaller economy because that would mean that fewer people would get cancer from radiation and toxic chemicals. There would be fewer jobs from producing poisons and fewer jobs for every type of health care worker. I would be happy to increase cancer risks for myself, my family and my neighbors if that means more jobs.” For some reason, those words were never spoken.

Who Dislikes Degrowth?

So where are all these working people who passionately hate degrowth? They must be hiding behind a tree or underneath a bed because I have never run into them.

Maybe there is a place they could be where I never looked – they could be in the offices of union bureaucrats writing articles about how labor supports the corporate ideology of growth.

Actually, the claim that “working people are against degrowth” may well ring a bell for many. Those who work in armaments production as well as veterans and others who simply accept militaristic propaganda may be against degrowth because there is no way to degrow without massively shrinking the US military.

Degrowth means shifting resources to colonized peoples both inside the US and globally. The essence of degrowth is (a) decreasing useless and harmful production in rich countries, (b) increasing the production of necessities in poor countries, (c) while making sure that (a) is greater than (b). Growth does not and never has meant improving the quality of lives in the poor world. In contrast, reparations are essential for degrowth.

Saying that degrowth would never happen because working people would be against it is not only wrong – it is grossly immoral.

Abortion rights provide an illustration why. A majority of working people currently support women’s right to have an abortion. The reason to support abortion rights is not because most of labor is in agreement – the reason is that protecting women’s lives is the right thing to do (regardless of whether or not it is popular).

What does one do when confronting an opinion that does not jive with the mood-of-the-day? The movie Matewan portrayed a union organizer constantly struggling to overcome prejudices. He did not ignore them or cowtow to them.

Today, most progressives would agree that, when faced with those who hate Blacks or sympathize with efforts to eliminate Jews or Palestinians, it is necessary to confront them.

If it is good to challenge those who attack one group of humanity, then why would it be bad to challenge the destruction of all of humanity, as the ideology of infinite growth would set the stage for? Growth means expansion of fossil fuels, increased electronic colonialism (i.e. “alternative” energy), and extermination of Life on land, in the air and within the oceans.

Who Represents Workers?

Two common mistakes about American workers are that they all think the same and that thinking is represented by union leaders.

Anti-degrowthers often give the impression that they confuse the word “workers” with “unions.” At last count, only about 6% of US private sector workers are in unions and union bureaucrats often do a terrible job of representing them. Certainly the masses of union members did not ask or consent to their “leaders” conspiring with bosses to build “Free Labor Development” that would crush militant democratic unions internationally as Kim Scipes so carefully documents.

A core aspect of today’s union leadership is its intimate ties to the Democratic Party, one of the two giant corporate parties in the US. If union big shots oppose degrowth, that hardly condemns the idea as being opposed by all workers.

The portrayal of labor as a uniform blob who all think the same (“growth = good; degrowth = bad) is more than a little bit condescending and insulting to those of us who sell our labor power for survival. In addition to Democratic Party loyalists, “working people” includes millions who switch from one party to another, those who do not identify with any party, right-wing Trumpsters, and, yes, moderate and revolutionary socialists and anarchists. Union history is a mixed bag of the most magnificent heroes to the most vile traitors to inter-ethnic and international labor solidarity.

The UAW strike that began in September 2023 manifested a union waking out of its nearly century old Rip Van Winkle state to rediscover the demand for a 32 hour work week. Let us hope that this foreshadows a reawakening that spreads throughout labor, unorganized as well as organized.

Capitalism without Exploitation?

“Bread and butter” unionism is dedicated to preserving capitalism while getting a bigger and greasier pork chop before those in other countries do. “Social unionism” challenges capitalism’s assumption of that some should be vastly richer and more powerful than others.

Degrowth will require redefining every aspect of the economy, beginning with the length of the work week and extending to what is produced and relationships between those involved in production. Unionism that accepts capitalism as eternal would be poorly suited to such a task. Unionism that proudly announces its goal to be building a new world from the ashes of the old would be the cat’s meow.

You may have heard of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Ever since 1905 it has consistently sought to unify all working people, not just in the US, but across the globe. Perhaps it is time for existing unions to either emulate the IWW or be replaced by it or other solidarity unions that will seek to liberate humanity from the chains of corporate growth, whether they reside in the imperialist homeland or the colonized world.

Proposing growth without racist colonialism makes as little sense as advocating capitalism without exploitation. Colonialism was the method by which corporations amassed the “primitive accumulation of capital” which Marx wrote about.

Belief that the economy must grow assumes the eternal existence of capitalism. Genuine degrowth means reorganizing society so that destructive and useless production is brought to an end while protecting the well-being of all involved in affected industries. A total redesign of society could begin with a shorter work week and then expand to establishing new relationships, whether in an office or at a health facility or a factory. For the working class to take control of the economy and metamorphose it will be degrowth realized.

Is it time to ask if the concept of growth is what is inherently anti-worker? A shorter work week is the rock on which degrowth stands. If not that rock, it is the name of the rock that David put into his sling and hurled into the head of the corporate system called “Goliath.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Fitz.

The Ogallala Aquifer is buried deep throughout the High Plains. The water flowing underneath is as good as gold for farmers in the region, serving as a lifeline in years when the drought and Texas heat wither crops.

It is a critical resource for the agricultural industry — not just in Texas, but in the other seven states that it lies beneath.

“At the end of the day, the Ogallala is propping us all up,” said Eric Simpson, the farm manager at At’l Do Farms on the outskirts of Lubbock. “No matter what, I’ll probably have to use water from it this summer because, without that, I don’t think we could grow much in West Texas unless it’s a cactus or a mesquite tree.”

Following several years of dry land and hardly any rainfall, farmers like Simpson in the High Plains are depending more on the aquifer. And that has consequences that are coming into focus.

On the heels of Texas’ worst drought in a decade, a report from the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District shows water levels in the Ogallala Aquifer, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, have dropped consistently in the region over the last five years. More than 1,300 wells were measured earlier this year, including ones from the smaller Edwards-Trinity Aquifer, all of which show varying degrees of decline. The biggest decrease was in Parmer County, which sits on the New Mexico border in between Lubbock and Amarillo, where there was a decline of 1.30 feet in the water levels.

This has caused concern for the future of agriculture in the High Plains. Scientists have found that climate change has pushed average temperatures higher in Texas, making heat waves and droughts worse. And with the warm temperatures continuing at night — and offering less relief — it’s harder to get the bountiful crops of cotton, grapes and corn the region is known for.

“Out here in West Texas, the one thing that they’re so dependent on to grow crops is water,” said Melanie Barnes, a senior research associate in geosciences for Texas Tech University. “That’s the one thing that really controls whether you can economically survive out here.”

With only a finite amount of water to be shared throughout the U.S. High Plains region — Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and South Dakota — the Ogallala running dry could have devastating consequences nationwide. The aquifer provides water for about 30 percent of the nation’s irrigation systems, boosting up the farms and ranches that supply a quarter of the nation’s agricultural production. And for 82 percent of the people who live within the aquifer’s boundaries, it supplies their drinking water too.

With agriculture and domestic use, the aquifer is not naturally refilling from precipitation nearly as fast as the water is being taken out. According to the National Climate Assessment, the groundwater is being pumped for irrigation 10 times faster than it can be refilled from rain or snow.

Without rainfall in the Texas High Plains, the chances the aquifer can recharge are low.

“Some areas of the aquifer, you have a lot of water because of the Rocky Mountains, or you don’t have very much because you’re up on the banks of the river instead of the middle of it,” Barnes explained. “We do not get that recharge from runoff.”

The region was hit with rainfall for weeks, particularly in the Panhandle, where the national weather service reported between 10-20 inches of rain, which has caused flooding. But that doesn’t mean the ground is suddenly moisturized and ready for a good growing season — extremely dry, cracked soil can’t retain water and instead causes runoff.

In recent years, Simpson’s family has started incorporating regenerative agriculture techniques at At’l Do Farms, such as growing various crops year-round, that help the soil hold the water when it does rain.

“The rain can be like a silver bullet for our problems as farmers if we’re ready for it,” Simpson said. “But most of the time, we’re not ready for a big rain because we’re thinking about how to make one crop work really well.”

Simpson’s family grows corn, a crop known for needing a lot of water to grow, and runs the At’l Do Farms Corn Maze, an annual attraction near Shallowater, just 12 miles outside of Lubbock, that brings in visitors from around the state. It’s become a huge part of their business, so they notice when there’s a change, like stunted corn that can’t fill the maze.

“My dad and I kept talking about how, year after year, our corn is getting shorter,” Simpson recalled. “We’re having to overwater it, and the Ogallala is depleting to such an extent that the quality is becoming poor and making the soil more unhealthy. The soil just turns into a brick.”

The family decided to experiment last year, using cover crops to put various nutrients back into the soil. They planted sorghum-sudangrass, a substitute that looks like corn but doesn’t need as much water and can survive the drought.

It wasn’t easy, Simpson said, but those changes turned their parched land into a vibrant mix of plants and vegetables.

“Even with the one good rain we got that summer, our crop grew taller, greener and denser than any corn we’ve grown,” Simpson said. “Seeing that made me realize this can be done.”

Because of the declining aquifer levels, the mindset in the plains has become more focused on conservation. The High Plains Underground Water Conservation District publishes information on groundwater availability regularly, and most of its audience is connected with agriculture in some way. Informing people outside of agriculture, such as business and real estate developers, hasn’t been an easy task.

”It’s important for everyone to promote awareness of this,” said Jason Coleman, manager for the HPWD. “If you’re building a new shop for your business or whatever it is, you’re going to rely on groundwater. You need to have some understanding of the water resources.”

At’l Do Farms has already planted some crops this year. Simpson plans on growing cotton, broomcorn and pumpkins to prepare for the visitors this fall. He’s confident his family can keep the business going in a sustainable manner, even if the drought amps back up.

“Hopefully as farmers, we just pay attention to what our environment is telling us,” Simpson said. “Look for patterns and how the plants are responding to what we’re doing, and then make changes the next year as best we can.”

Disclosure: Texas Tech University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas farmers are worried one of the state’s most precious water resources is running dry. You should be, too. on Jun 24, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jayme Lozano Carver, The Texas Tribune.

After more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the U.S. Army is now officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000 recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the first months of this year, Army officials doubt they will achieve their objective this time around either. The commanding general at Fort Jackson, the South Carolina facility that provides basic training to 50% of all new members of the Army, called the recruiting command’s task the hardest since the all-volunteer military was launched in 1973. The Army’s leaders were alarmed enough to make available up to $1.2 billion for recruitment incentives and related initiatives.

Those incentives include enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000 and promotions for young enlistees who successfully bring in new candidates. Women recruits can now wear their hair in ponytails, and regulations have been updated to permit small, inconspicuous tattoos in places like the back of your ear.

The other branches of the military aren’t exactly doing well either. The Marines, for example, met their numbers largely through retention, not recruitment, and the Navy was forced to accept recruits who scored in the lowest-qualifying range on an entrance exam.

The tempo of recruitment has always swung back and forth, depending in part on whether the economy is bad or booming. Today, that economy may be a mess, but hiring is still remarkably robust, leaving high school graduates with more choices than just the Army or stocking shelves at Walmart (which, by the way, also offers college tuition assistance).

The labor market isn’t the only obstacle to filling the ranks. Covid not only kept recruiters largely out of schools — a traditional hunting ground — for a couple of years, but they also lowered the scores on military entrance exams. The Army has seen a 9% decrease in scores (already low when this round of measurement began) on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the all-important test that determines which branches of the military and which jobs you qualify for. An oft-cited statistic — and it’s alarming, no matter how you feel about the military — is that only about 23% of the Americans the Army aims to recruit qualify as physically, educationally, and mentally fit to enlist.

Then there’s what could be called the patriotic duty gap. The U.S. is no longer officially fighting any wars (though the global war on terror, even if no longer known by that name, never really ends). The lack of a rally-round-the-flag event like 9/11, along with the calamitous military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and 20th-anniversary reexaminations of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, have left Washington wary of starting a new conflict. Sure, tens of billions of dollars of weaponry are going to Ukraine and there are more than 900 U.S. troops still in fighting mode in Syria, where a drone strike recently killed an American contractor and injured U.S. troops, but we seldom hear much about such deployments, or similar ones in Iraq, Niger, Somalia, and other countries across much of Africa, until something goes wrong, so they’re hardly top-notch recruitment material.

Summing up the mood of the military’s present target generation, Major General Alex Fink, chief of Army enterprise marketing, observed, “They see us as revered, but not relevant in their lives.”

What’s a Recruiter To Do?

A year ago, an Army Career Center (aka a recruiting station) opened in my fairly affluent neighborhood. This was curious. After all, it’s an area surrounded by elite universities and not the most welcoming high schools when it comes to the military. I had walked by the station often, noting the posters in its windows advertising career training and the benefits of the Army Reserve. There was even one in Tagalog about an expedited path to U.S. citizenship. (And mind you, there isn’t a large Filipino population in this neighborhood either.)

Finally, as someone who’s worked for years with antiwar GIs and wrote the book War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, I decided to drop in for a chat, only to hesitate, anticipating suspicion, if not outright hostility.

Boy, was I wrong! The four noncommissioned officers stationed there, only one of whom had spent extended time in a war zone, couldn’t have been more eager to talk about the benefits of Army life. Their spiel was good, too: career training, college tuition, some control over the first duty station you’re likely to get, housing, health care, family benefits, competitive pay, even bonuses, not to speak of 30 days off each year and substantial responsibility at a young age. Admittedly, the tuition reimbursement offered wouldn’t faintly cover any of the universities near where I live and it takes a while for your salary to amount to much… still, it was an impressive pitch.

And they don’t take just anyone, either. Enlistment requirements are similar across the six branches of the military, except when it comes to age limits. (For the Army, you have to be between 17 and 35.) You must be a high school graduate or the equivalent, a citizen or Green Card holder, medically and physically fit, in good moral standing, and score high enough on the ASVAB entrance exam, which only about one-third of test-takers now pass. (Full disclosure: I couldn’t do the sample math questions.)

So, how’s recruiting going? The Army has about 9,000 recruiters at 1,508 locations nationwide whose pay and benefits are tied to their success. Each recruiter is responsible for signing up a minimum of one recruit for each of the 11 months they’re at work. If this had actually happened, the Army would have coasted to last year’s goal. (I can do that math.) My neighborhood recruiters, however, seem to be typical in coming in well under that quota.

A Necessary Revamp

Somewhere in our friendly chat, I pointed out that armies exist to go to war. They countered that, for every infantryman in the U.S. military, there are about 100 support personnel and pointed to wall posters advertising 130 Army career options. No one seemed inclined to delve any deeper into the subject of future battlefields.

Surely, anyone qualified to enlist in the Army should know that such forces exist for only one significant purpose: to fight wars. And the U.S. military — with its 750 bases around the world and its unending war on terror, while the pressures between China and this country only continue to escalate — might well find itself at war again any time. The Army’s website is clear enough on its mission: “To deploy, fight, and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt, and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of conflict as part of the joint force.” But curiously enough, on its recruiting website, the topic of fighting a war doesn’t show up under “reasons to join.” The system is clearly focused instead on all the remarkably peaceful opportunities the Army offers its soldiers.

That emphasis shines forth in the resurrection this spring of the oldie (but apparently goodie) ad campaign “Be All You Can Be,” which last appeared in 2001. It has now replaced the “What’s Your Warrior” ads, with their video-game visuals and bass-heavy soundtrack. The new campaign includes short YouTube videos, where likeably plain-spoken soldiers explain just what they appreciate about the Army. One features an Army rapper; in another, a woman talks about finding balance in her Army life, as images of soldiers with weapons and soldiers with families flash by.

Admittedly, there have been a few hiccups along the way to this gentler, hipper vision of that service. Take the two high-profile ads in the new recruitment campaign that featured actor Jonathan Majors (Antman, CreedIII) and were pulled shortly after their debut when he was arrested on charges of assault, harassment, and strangulation.

Get ‘Em Early, Get ‘Em Young

Army recruits tend to come from military families (83% of enlistees by one reckoning) and hometowns near military bases, where kids grow up around people in uniform and time in the military becomes part of their worldview. Elsewhere, the military works remarkably hard to introduce that worldview. High schools receiving certain kinds of federal funding, for instance, are required to give recruiters the same access as they do colleges or employers and provide the military with contact information for all students (unless their parents opt out).

While Covid-19 limited recruiters’ access to schools, there were always ways around that. Take Army J.R.O.T.C., which currently has programs in more than 1,700 high schools, a sizeable portion of them in low-income communities with large minority populations. (J.R.O.T.C. boasts about this, although a New York Times exposé on the subject revealed it to be more predatory than laudatory.) The literature emphasizes that it’s a citizenship and leadership program, not a recruitment one, and it’s true that only about 21% of Army enlistees attended a school with such a program. Still, it’s clearly another way that the service recruits the young. After all, its “cadets” wear their uniforms in school and are taught military history and marksmanship, among other things. “Co-curricular activities” include military drills and competitions.

And there have been problems there, too: among them, a report citing 58 documented instances of sexual abuse or harassment of students by instructors in all branches of J.R.O.T.C. between 2018 and 2022. (As with all statistics on sexual abuse, this is undoubtedly an undercount.)

J.R.O.T.C. is hardly the only program exposing young students to the military. Young Marines is a nonprofit education, service, and leadership program dating back to 1959, which promotes “a healthy, drug-free lifestyle” for kids eight years old through high school. Its website emphasizes that it isn’t a military recruitment tool and doesn’t teach combat skills. Nonetheless, “events that Young Marines may participate in may involve close connection with public relations aspects of the armed forces.”

Then there’s Starbase, a Defense Department educational program where students learn STEM subjects like science and math by interacting with military personnel. Its primary focus is socio-economically disadvantaged fifth graders. And yes, that would be 10- and 11-year-olds!

It’s good when extra resources are available to students and schools. In the end, though, programs like these conflate good citizenship with militarism.

Too Little — Or Too Much?

A recent student of mine, who joined Navy R.O.T.C. to help pay for the college education she wanted, told me her age group, Gen Z, a key military target, doesn’t view such future service as beneficial. Her classmates, typically enough, felt less than positive about her wearing a uniform. Only older people congratulated her for it.

Three senior Army leaders reached a similar conclusion when they visited high schools nationwide recently to learn why enlistment was so dismal. They came away repeating the usual litany of problems: tight job market, pandemic barriers, unfitness of America’s youth, resistance from schools, and especially a lack of public information about the benefits of an Army career.

But what if the problem isn’t too little information, but too much? Despite ever-decreasing reportage on military and veterans’ issues, young civilians seem all too aware of the downsides of enlisting. Gen Zers, who until recently never lived in a country not openly at war, have gobs of information at their fingertips: videos, memoirs, movies, novels, along with alarming statistics on sexual assault and racism in the military and the ongoing health problems of soldiers, including exposure to toxic waste, rising cancer rates, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And that’s not even to mention the disproportionate rates of suicide and homelessness among veterans, not to speak of the direct contact many young people have had with those who returned home ready to attest to the grim consequences of more than 20 years of remarkably pointless warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across all too much of the rest of the planet.

All of this probably helps explain what the Army found in surveys of 16- to 28-year-olds it conducted last spring and summer. That service described (but didn’t release) its report on those surveys. According to the Associated Press, the top three reasons cited for refusing to enlist were “fear of death, worries about post-traumatic stress disorder, and leaving friends and family.” Young Americans also made it clear that they didn’t want to put their lives on hold in the military, while 13% anticipated discrimination against women and minorities, 10% didn’t trust the military leadership, 57% anticipated emotional or psychological problems, and nearly half expected physical problems from a stint in the Army. Despite recent accusations from conservative members of Congress, only 5% listed the Army being too “woke” as a deterrent, which should put that issue to bed, but undoubtedly won’t.

Let me offer a little confession here: I find all of this heartening — not just that potential recruits don’t want to be killed in war, but that they’re aware of how dangerous joining the military can be to body and mind. And apparently the survey didn’t even explore feelings about the possibility that you could be called on to kill, too. In an op-doc for the New York Times that followed a group of American soldiers from their swaggering entry into the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in 2003 to their present-day lives, an off-screen voice asks, “So what does it do to a generation of young people during these deployments?” The answer: “They become old. They are old young men.”

If there’s one thing the Gen Zers I know don’t want, it’s to get old before their time. (Probably not at their time either, but that’s another story.) So, add that to the reasons not to enlist.

Early in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I met Elaine Johnson, a Gold Star Mother from South Carolina, so outspoken in her opposition to the Iraq War after her son, Darius Jennings, was killed in Fallujah in 2003 that she reportedly came to be known in the George W. Bush White House as “the Elaine Johnson problem.” Antiwar as she was, she also proudly told me, “My baby was a mama’s boy, but the military turned him into a productive young man.”

So, yes, the Army can be a place to mature, master a trade, take on responsibility, and learn lasting lessons about yourself, while often forging lifelong friendships. All good. But that, of course, can also happen in other types of organizations that don’t feature weapons and killing, that don’t take you to hell and back. Just imagine, for a moment, that our government left the business of losing the wars from hell to history and instead spent, say, half of the $842 billion being requested for next year’s military budget on [fill in the blank here with your preferred institutions].

Count on one thing: we would be in a different world. Maybe this generation of potential soldiers has already figured that out and will someday make it happen.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Nan Levinson.

Havar sculpture by Shahzia Sikander. Image: Madison Square Park Conservancy.

In his essay in the Opinion section of the New York Times on Feb. 1, 2023, “Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful,”[1] Ross Douthat’s seemingly amorphous warning is really aimed at the two new statues by citizen-of-the-world visual artist Shahzia Sikander, appearing in the public space of the roof of the New York Appellate Court and adjacent to it, in the shape of a flowering female form installed in Madison Square Park.

In one of the more bizarre columns of his that I’ve read, Douthat claims he wants to both “defend the rationality of this kind of spiritual experimentation” (which he sees manifested in Sikander’s work), then to warn us about its dangers. While I have no idea what he means by “the rationality of spiritual experimentation,” he attacks what he sees as three contemporary manifestations of it: the current Tik Tok craze, the DMT or “psychonautic” drug experimentation culture, and finally, Sikander’s “statue on a New York courthouse, occupying a plinth near famous lawgivers like Moses and Confucius. It’s a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with braided hair shaped like horns, roots or tendrils for arms and feet, rising from a lotus flower.” Whilst acknowledging that this “golden woman” who wears “a version of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar” is meant to evoke “female power in a historically male-dominated legal world and to protest Roe v. Wade’s reversal” as the artist herself has stated, what disturbs the liberal sentiments of Douthat nonetheless is the fact that “the work is clearly an attempt at a religious icon as well, one forged in a blurring of spiritual traditions.” It is this “blurring”, or more aptly, a “queering” of heteronormative, white Christian patriarchal belief systems that have shaped America’s justice system from its very founding, that I believe, most disturbs the equanimity of the critic, what gives him pause in his liberal, tolerant worldview. This “blurring” of spiritual traditions is evident to him in the fact that the statue on the rooftop instead of having feet firmly planted in our earthly firmament, instead arises, feet-less, all golden-bathed 8 feet of it, out of a lotus flower, thus evidencing some sort of pantheistic deity, evoking a “nature-spirituality” that turns the human female form into a “magical hybrid plant-animal.” Douthat’s discomfort, fear even, at this queering of the (white) female form, named “NOW” by the artist (which evokes both the need for abortion-rights female lawgivers such as the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg in our current moment when such rights are being repealed, as well as a sly reference to NOW, the premier US women’s rights organization),  mounts as he describes the statue it is in dialogue with, erected in the middle of Madison Square Park across from the courthouse. This one, an 18- foot- tall female form wearing a hooped skirt and stylized horns for hair with roots instead of feet, is named “WITNESS” and together the two sculptures make up “HAVAH: to breathe, air, life.” The word Havah, evoking the Arabic and Hebrew name for Eve, in Douthat’s view “mak[es] a feminist claim on the monotheistic tradition”; such a claim might even be acceptable to the liberal-minded side of Douthat, but the fact that the statue like the one atop the courthouse is evocative of a nature-animal-human triptych, is more than our critic, at bottom a Christian conservative (as he himself tells us), can bear. He bemoans, “finally it’s very hard not to see the braids-as-horns, the tendrils that look a bit tentacle-like, as an appropriation of Christian images of the demonic in a statue that stands against the politics of conservative Christianity.” His veiled critique of Shahzia Sikander’s “anti-Christian” statuary work is more clearly spelled out in the Christian Broadcasting Network’s statement,

The Bible tells us when Eve disobeyed God, sin entered the world. And that’s not exactly something Christians celebrate, much less honor with a statue.

Thus, whatever door to “reasonable spiritual experimentation” is opened up by such allegorical figures as Sikander’s statues, the fact that, in the final analysis, such “symbols… invoke multiple spiritualities at once,” causes grave disturbance in the unipolar, eschatological world view of Douthat, as clearly indicated in the warning with which he concludes his essay, “when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.”

Be. Very. Careful. What. You. Invite. In. Wow! In an age of increasing xenophobia, Islamophobia, and backlash against civil liberties, this is quite a statement to make.

It is Mr. Douthat who needs to be VERY CAREFUL what he says and by so saying, unleashes. The countless Instagram and twitter posts equating Shahzia Sikander’s work with that of the Devil following his own writing, is extremely dangerous—inviting “in” to civic discourse, voices of hate inciting violence against the statues, and by extension, their creator. Just one such twitter post reads, “The next Republican mayor of New York should not only remove but publicly destroy this monstrosity” (@michaeljknowles; my emphasis).

While “Havah” is indeed a reference to Eve, the moniker contains multitudes that ought to have been clear to Douthat and other critics of Sikander’s extraordinarily beautiful and thought-provoking work, experiencing which, brings together affect and intellect, a rare feat indeed. As the artist herself has pointed out, she interprets the term ‘havah’ as meaning (in Urdu, her native tongue), “to breathe,” which becomes a performative “to add air, to change a narrative, to add some space;” She clearly wants viewers to ponder that “Eve is also the first law-breaker, right?”

To break the laws of patriarchy, enshrined in a constitution based on notions of white male Christian supremacy in this nation since its founding, is clearly a bitter pill to swallow for too many, including it seems, Mr Douthat. One has only to think of the brilliant enfolding of the act of breathing into Sikander’s carefully chosen name for her Garden delight, to apprehend its fundamental importance as an act we share with all of God’s creatures on this earth, something this plant-woman embodies instinctively down to her floating roots. To add air, to change the narrative of laws that are unjust, to move, and create space for “other” realities than those seen through the heteronormative lens of dominant power, is the remit of “Havah: to breathe, air, life.” How, in this choice of title for her sculptural installation, can one fail to realize the depth of her political vision and solidarity with the first immigrants to these shores, Africans uprooted from their ancestral lands and sold into slavery to the Christian White Man? Sikander’s feminism is strongly intersectional and transnational in scope, as the title also invokes solidarity with Iranian women protesting for rights for “Woman, Life, Freedom.”  Her reference “to breathe” is simultaneously evocative of the “Let Me Breathe” movement for justice galvanized by the death-by- asphyxiation of George Floyd at the hands of racist cops, a gesture Douthat totally fails to notice.

If “NOW” can be seen as an homage to a (reconstituted) white woman (sporting RBJ’s iconic lace collar) as she breaks the legal glass ceiling by passing laws that safeguard(ed) women’s bodily autonomy and the constitutional right to choose, “WITNESS” asks us to pay attention to injustices and oppressions enacted on bodies of color: black, brown, Asian male, female, non-binary, trans. It asks us to bear witness queerly, like the female statue in the park, who even as she is embodied in her womanly form, is a shape-shifter, only part woman, mostly plant, all goddess. This female body that we witness, in dialogue with the golden woman atop the courthouse, “exists in excess of gender itself: it sprouts limbs and lotuses, it endlessly repeats, doubles, multiplies and circles back on itself.”[2] Her curved horns where we might expect to see hair when wearing our straight normative lenses, are not a reference to Satan (as her Christian critics aver)—but rather, viewed through a queer gaze, appear as multivalent references braiding together brown and black women who have been erased from masculinist art and world histories. They recall earlier hair representations in the artist’s oeuvre, including especially her creative depictions of gopi hair in motion. Traditionally seen as handmaidens to the Hindu God Krishna, gopis in her painting and its animation SpiNN, which is Sikander’s reimagining of Mughal court manuscript paintings set in a durbar hall/formal meeting space traditionally reserved for displays of Muslim male kingly authority, infiltrate this masculine-coded space in masses of shape-shifting black hair, to disrupt the rigid frames of patriarchy and sovereignty across religious traditions and colonial histories. The imposing braided horns also bring to mind magnificently braided hairstyles worn by African women, in their ornateness often signifying a decolonial impulse.  Anne Bailey tells us how Nigerian photographer J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, captured in over 1000 photographs, “ a wave of powerful and proud hairstyles that swept across Nigeria in the years following its independence from Britain in 1960”. Similar hairstyles can be seen in the imposing Benin statues from centuries ago, and as a website article tracing women’s hairstyles and their significance across Africa and its diaspora informs us, the

depictions of women with cornrows have been found in Stone Age paintings in the Tassili Plateau of the Sahara, and have been dated as far back as 3000 B.C. There are also Native American paintings as far back as 1,000 years showing cornrows as a hairstyle. This tradition of female styling in cornrows has remained popular throughout Africa, particularly in the Horn of Africa and West Africa.

According to an instagram post by @KnowYourCaribbean, rice was hidden in braids in order to help slaves survive the middle passage. The writer shares that “many African women braided rice or seeds into their hair before journeying the Middle Passage, on their way to enslavement or braided it into their children’s hair before separation, so that they could eat. 

That Sikander is deeply familiar with these palimpsestic her-stories of the symbols she chooses to deploy in her work with great deliberation as a result of lifelong research and empathy for those whom justice has not served, is manifested through the themes that resonate across, and shape, the body of her work over the past quarter century. And, as she herself has stated many times, these female avatars stand witness to women’s survival, resilience and courage across cultures, races, regions, temporalities.

The Art Newspaper points out, for instance, how “Sikander’s radiant figures” sport hair that is “braided like spiraling ram’s horns and strikes an arms-akimbo power stance.”[3] Spiralling ram’s horns (a recurrent feature across her oeuvre)–are “an ancient symbol, appearing in many cultures throughout history. In some cultures, the ram symbolizes strength and power while it represents fertility and abundance in others”. Sikander has stated many times, that her statues represent the strength and resilience of women, where male power is translated into female power via fertility which is the source of all creativity—including the artist’s own. The braids are thus a reminder of the creativity of the women brought to these shores as slaves, cleverly braiding rice seeds into their daughters’ hair, to resist the devilish power of the slavers. The braids also bring into a shared space of resistance, women gopis of the South Asian diaspora such as Sikander herself, banding together with each other to create a swarming mass of feminist empowerment and visibility in spaces from where they have been excluded for too long. In the same way, her statues and their horned braids recall her evolving painting from the early 2000s, PLEASURE PILLARS, where the central figure is a self-portrait with ram’s horns that joins together female bodies fragmented by the weight of masculinist histories embedded in colonialist and imperialist erasures of the Other.

Her statuesque sculptures like upright, confident Amazons, which as the Art Newspaper reviewer noted, strike “an arms-akimbo power stance,” can be seen also as an homage to the Black Power Salute of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, when an intersectional struggle for blacks’ and women’s rights ushered in sweeping progressive changes to the legislature. That era’s shape-shifting energy, when alliances were forged across differences of class, race, gender, sexuality, can be seen to inform this sculptural endeavor of Sikander’s, so badly needed NOW in our times of back-sliding into regressive norms here, there, everywhere. Surely it is no coincidence that this exhibition on the theme of justice, opened on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 16, 2023? A pursuit of justice requires that we constantly re-examine and challenge the stories that have been passed down through the colonial and imperial archives about race and gender and their representation in public space, or rather, lack thereof.

Thus, this work also draws attention to the need for south Asian female representation in the city that the artist has called home for a majority of her life, where the bulk of her oeuvre has taken shape, but where it took over 20 years of creating globally recognized and award-winning art before she received a solo exhibition (at the Morgan Library and Museum, 2021). Justice is representation, acknowledgment, respect for all denizens, no matter their race, ethnicity, color, sexuality, religion, country of origin or gender.

 The artist, who claims she “opted not to base the figures on recognisable historic women, but rather a broader representation of the feminine bridging race and culture (my italics)” shows us a way forward into a better, more just future for all, based on a full reckoning[4] of the past that is surely the need of the hour.

Notes.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/opinion/american-religion-spirituality.html

[2] Gayatri Gopinath, “Promiscuous Intimacies: Embodiment, Desire, and Diasporic Dislocation in the Art of Shahzia Sikander,” in Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities,” eds. Sadia Abbas and Jan Howard. RISD Museum: Hirmer, 2021, p. 125.

[3] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/01/13/shahzia-sikander-female-figure-manhattan-courthouse-madison-square-park

[4] Indeed, part of the installation at Madison Square Garden includes a video animation called “Reckoning.“

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fawzia Afzal-Khan.

The 1950s was a time of mass conformity. Americans thought, acted, and looked the same.

But their critiques proved short-lived: after all, by the late Sixties, the consumerist cornucopia made possible myriad, alternate “lifestyles,” most of which encouraged more hedonistic consumption, including sex (thanks to Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and the birth control pill). In fact, while disillusioned, idealistic youth bitterly rejected the racist, materialistic, and pro-war conventions of their elders, others embraced a conformist, hedonistic subculture (i.e., low-grade rock music, semi-promiscuous sex, disdain for work, and foolish drug use–the latter of which differed little from the alcohol over-use of their older generation). Rather than seeking intense enlightenment through the disciplined study of philosophy and literature, they often opted for the latest fad of LSD “trips” (little realizing the irony that the hallucinogenic drug was first developed by the CIA to brainwash its former agents). Communitarian belonging, no matter how small one’s commune, included sharing of assets, childcare, even sex–and inevitably led to disagreements and eventual dissolution. To be fair, young people of the time had read humanist intellectual Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960), and on the whole showed a generosity of spirit which contributed to the civil-rights movement, and mobilized the campus-wide anti-war revolt.

So here we are, some fifty-plus years later, with a constant media-blitz about celebrities and billionaires. Hardly envied role-models to those rebellious youth of yesteryear, they are now, for the most part, cultic super-human figures worshiped by their awestruck, “insignificant” acolytes. Yet even a “nobody”–especially an adolescent plagued by peer-pressure and parental demands–would love to be “famous for 15 minutes” (Andy Warhol). To be liked and admired–very human longings, but not the end-goal of a maturing, authentic selfhood.

Over a century ago, sociologist Charles Cooley introduced a highly influential but pernicious concept: the looking-glass self (1902). This theory claimed that the “self” is shaped entirely by: how I think I appear to others, what I imagine their judgment of me is, and how I respond by “presenting a self” which conforms to their expectations. Social psychologist G. H. Mead–and more recently, a bevy of deluded anthropologists–have promoted similar views. Although humanistic psychologists of the Sixties rejected this approach entirely, emphasizing self-awareness, meditation, and growth-oriented, often solitary, study, Cooley’s conformist outlook, demeaning to the dignity of self-directed, singular persons, has prevailed. (By contrast, Abraham Maslow wrote: “Far from needing other people, growth-motivated people may actually be hampered by them.”¹

So we come to “social media,” a distinctly 21st century phenomenon. “Only connect!” exhorted the depressed novelist Virginia Woolf, who met a tragic end a century ago. But now, the more urgent question is: “Why connect?” Admittedly, having enjoyed my youth in the free-spirited Seventies, I have had no desire to connect with social media. In fact, if a professor had demanded that the class do their work on a computer–much reviled in those days–I like many would have walked out, saying “I loathe computers.” But now, young people are for the most part so habituated and brain-addled to constant cyber-gadgets that very few indeed would consider dumping them into the nearest trash can. (I personally was able, thanks to a lifetime of evading authoritarian demands, to avoid even having a cellphone. Who, unless their job requires it, would willingly want to be constantly accessible and “on call”?!).

In the Sixties, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote brilliantly of the adolescent identity-crisis, in which a young person painfully separates from the authority of her parents and just as painstakingly seeks to forge a genuine identity composed of well-thought-out principles, values, and emotional cultivation. The goal, first and foremost: genuine individuation, not the social popularity which results from conformity to the demands of peers (or even, via Facebook in our time, thousands of “insignificant others”). As I previously wrote in my articles “The Sanctum of Self-Identity,” and “The Need for Alienation,” authentic self-identity is strengthened and integrated over a lifetime as one sustains one’s moral and intellectual integrity, the bedrock of one’s self-esteem as one confronts an often hostile, unappreciative social milieu.² As scholars such as Mary Aiken and Susan Harter have documented, the evidence is overwhelming that adolescents and young people, trying to elicit favorable approval and attention–as in generating “likes” and “followers”–are thereby becoming more vulnerable to depressing disapproval and feelings of insufficient self-worth.³

1. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being. Second edition, 1962, Van Nostrand, p.34.
2. At the age of 14, as a solitary reader of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, I learned this lesson well–and it has served me for a lifetime. Her libertarian, individualistic worldview–not to be confused with her later misguided, pro-capitalist Atlas Shrugged–was superbly crafted in, for me, perhaps the best of 20th century novel. Of course, I could also have learned this lesson, in more succinct form, from Thoreau or Socrates (esp. The Apology).
3. Mary Aiken, The Cyber Effect. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016. Also, as to the harmful effect of Cooley’s concept on children, see: Susan Harter, “The Perceived Directionality of the Link Between Approval and Self-Worth: The Liabilities of a Looking-Glass Self-Orientation Among Young Adolescents.” Journal of Research on Adolescence (3): 285-308, July 1996.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

It was the guacamole’s fault!

That’s the guy’s defense, anyway — that plus his right to carry four handguns, an AR-15 and a 12-guage shotgun into a supermarket in Atlanta. Oh yeah, and he was wearing body armor. This was in March 2021, barely a week after an actual mass shooting at several massage parlors in Atlanta, in which eight people were killed. And it was only two days after a mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, where 10 people were killed.

When another customer saw the guy in the store’s bathroom, with the AR-15 propped against a wall, and alerted store personnel to the presence of a possible mass murderer, the panic was certainly understandable. The store was evacuated, police came, the gun carrier was arrested. But, as the New York Times asked in a story about the incident nearly two years later: Did he break the law?

When I read this paradoxical story the other day — about how the arrestee hadn’t actually committed a crime and was not convicted of any wrongdoing — the psychological stratosphere broke open for me. Who are we . . . as a nation, as a planet, as an evolving species? Here’s the thing about paradox: You can’t simply shoot it, blow it apart, then move on. You have to swallow it whole. You have to transcend it.

What is freedom — in this case, the freedom to be armed and, you know, able to defend yourself? Does one man’s freedom force the rest of us to watch their country turn into a John Wayne movie?

The Times story informs us that the defense attorney told the court his client “had acquired the guns and the body armor . . . because he had felt threatened by someone in his neighborhood. On the day of his arrest, he had hoped to take his guns to a nearby shooting range but first had to run some errands, which included a stop at the grocery store.”

And, oh yeah, he didn’t have a car, which is why he had lugged the guns — handguns in his jacket pockets, the rifle and shotgun in a guitar case — into the store. While he was in the men’s room, he “had taken out some of the weapons, including the rifle, to clean them after discovering that some guacamole he had bought had caused a mess inside the bag.”

And there you have it. A normal American situation. Well, sure, as the Times points out: “All but three states allow for the open carry of handguns, long guns or both, and in many there is little the police can do.”

Hence, the paradox. Of course, there’s one small detail the Times story omits. The police dilemma can suddenly disappear if the person legally carrying a gun happens to be black, as the Philando Castile case demonstrated back in 2016.

Castile, a black man who was licensed to carry a handgun, was driving with his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter in a suburb near Saint Paul, Minnesota, when his car was pulled over. Castile explained to the officer that he was legally carrying a handgun, but as he was trying to pull out his driver’s license, the officer shot him seven times, killing him. The officer was later arrested and charged with manslaughter, but was acquitted.

So the paradox expands: weapons, force, fear, dehumanization and . . . racism.

“This is the American paradox in full blossom.” So I wrote last year, pondering the endless question.

“The more people there are carrying guns, especially in public places, the more dangerous it is simply to be out and about; and the more dangerous it is to be out in public, the more credibility Second Amendment aficionados have when they claim they are only safe if they’re carrying a weapon.”

Except they aren’t safe at all — they’re just swimming in the chaos, clinging to a belief that their guns make them safe. But such a belief is crucial. I understand the need to believe one is safe. When I moved to Chicago from rural Michigan — my God, almost half a century ago, in search of a career in journalism — I wasn’t sure how I’d fare in the dangerous big city. But I was a peacenik, not a gun guy. Here’s what I decided: I’ll look everyone in the eye. I will not be afraid.

That is to say, I gave myself agency. And this is what worked — the fact that I felt empowered. And I didn’t care what neighborhood I was in. The white-person mantra was: Stay out of such-and-such neighborhood . . . Cabrini-Green or whatever. You know, neighborhoods of color, a.k.a., ghettos. Don’t go there! I paid no attention to that, and the whole city became mine.

I’m not saying life has been perfect — free of trouble. I was once mugged by three teens in hoodies, a few blocks from my house. Life is what it is. The world is full of thorns and potholes. No one is fully safe, forever and ever.

And the paradox doesn’t go away. How much force is necessary to get what we want? Historian Timothy Snyder, in a recent interview with Rachel Maddow reflecting on the Jan. 8 attack on the Brazilian capital by supporters of defeated president Jair Bolsonaro (and its similarity to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. capital by Trump supporters), said:

“When you trash the place, you’re showing, symbolically, that institutions don’t matter. What matters is force. What matters is will. You disrespect an institution . . . a strongman should be running the country. You humiliate the institution, then you get the strongman.”

And the strongman may kill his enemies, but he can’t kill the paradox.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Koehler.

Fiji’s new Minister for Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation, Lynda Tabuya, plans to use surveys and online platforms as an integral part of her ministry

During her official welcome yesterday along with her assistant minister, Sashi Kiran, Tabuya said that over the years she had made it her life goal to help those less fortunate.

She was happy that she could continue what she loved to do on a national stage in helping all Fijians.

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“As an integral part of my ministry, I plan on asking you — the citizens of Fiji — about the best way forward utilising surveys and online platforms,” Tabuya said.

“One of the foundations for building a better Fiji is providing equal opportunities to all Fijians irrespective of age, gender, physical ability or income level.”

To promote inclusivity and development, her ministry would continue to serve all Fijians through:

• The care and protection of children
• Greater policy intervention for older persons and persons with disability
• More innovative and targeted income support to families living or caught in the cycle of poverty; and
• Promoting gender equality and empowering women to reach their full potential.

Tabuya looked forward to strengthening and building on good partnerships with organisations whose activities and outputs support the ministries strategic objectives and those who provide services in the area of child protection and safeguarding, older people, people with disability, gender equality, women’s empowerment and ending violence against women and girls.

“During the turmoil of the last couple of months, the hymn ‘We Shall Overcome’ was often used as a source of inspiration,” she said.

“At this juncture, Fiji faces daunting poverty levels and incidences of domestic violence, but despite all these challenges I believe with God’s help and everyone working together, we shall overcome.

“I’m looking forward to working for the most disadvantaged in our society and together rebuilding Fiji into the way the world should be.”

Talebula Kate is a Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.

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

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Organizations committed to changing the world for the better must deal with a fundamental tension: On the one hand, they need to present a vision for the kind of society they would like to create. On the other hand, they are forced to reckon with everyday realities of the existing economic and political order. In the community organizing tradition in the United States, this tension is often described as the conflict between “the world as it is” and “the world as it should be.”

Over the past half-century, some of the most prominent community organizing networks in the United States — ranging from the Gamaliel Foundation to Faith In Action to the Industrial Areas Foundation, or IAF — have taught about this divide as a key part of their introductory trainings, using it as a means of orienting new organizers to their approach to organizing. Over the years, the framework has been invoked by Barack Obama, Saul Alinsky and countless rank-and-file organizers. For advocates of this concept, understanding the “two worlds” dichotomy is fundamental to developing the type of people who can effectively produce change: namely, realistic radicals.

So what is the origin of this idea? And why might it be useful for us today?

In his 2003 memoir, “Roots for Radicals,” Edward T. Chambers, who led the Saul Alinsky-founded IAF from 1972 to 2009, explains the idea this way: “Until we die, we live with a tension under our skin at the center of our personhood. We are born into a world of needs and necessities, opportunities and limitations, and must survive there…”  Continuing, he writes, “Self-preservation, food, clothing, shelter, safety, health care, education and work are necessary for everyone. Large numbers of people agonize over these things every day of their lives; many of us think of nothing else.” Like it or not, these are the circumstances we are thrown into and the conditions we must confront. They are the world as it is.

But that is only one side of the story. As Chambers notes, “We also have dreams and expectations, yearnings and values, hopes and aspirations. “We exist from day to day with the awareness that things not only might, but could be, should be, different for ourselves and our children.” Our hopes and ideals for a better society make up the world as it should be. And these are integral to who we are as people. “Cynics deride vision and values as irrelevant in the real world,” Chambers wrote, “but the fact is that they are indispensable to our sanity, integrity and authenticity.”

To succeed, organizers are forced to deal with both worlds at once. They have to figure out how to reconcile them without sacrificing either a broader vision for change or the demand for concrete improvements in the here and now. Radical movements seeking to alter the material conditions of people’s daily lives must first contend with the constraints created by those conditions — including the despondency engendered by a system more accountable to moneyed interests than ordinary people. They must deal with the reality of power as a guiding force in the world. In the course of pushing for a given demand or policy change, organizers might find that winning requires navigating their way through very compromised institutions or entering into unsavory alliances. Therefore, they must weigh the costs and benefits of engaging with the system while also trying to remain true to their values.

While the need to balance the two worlds is challenging, the ongoing conflict between them can also become a creative force: “When these two worlds collide hard enough and often enough, a fire in the belly is sometimes ignited,” Chambers explains. “The tension between the two worlds is the root of radical action for justice and democracy[.]”

Alinsky, Obama and the problem of ideology

By the time Chambers wrote his memoir, activists had been discussing the tension between the two worlds for many decades. The roots of the framework can be traced to Saul Alinsky himself, a foundational figure in modern U.S. community organizing traditions, who deployed it as an argument for rejecting utopian self-isolation and being willing to interact with the system, with all its flaws and limitations. Barack Obama, who started his career as an Alinskyite community organizer, incorporated the phrase as part of his political worldview and occasionally referenced it after becoming president. However, it was Alinsky’s less famous successors who fleshed out the framework and adapted it for their organizations, weaving it into the DNA of community organizing networks such as the IAF.

Even as the framework attracted adherents, it has also drawn detractors. Critics of Alinsky’s model of community organizing see focusing on “the world as it is” as a way of avoiding ideology and hemming in a movement’s more radical aspirations. In a critique for Jacobin, socialist writer Aaron Petcoff argues that, coming out of the 1960s, Alinsky “tried to convince a new generation of radicalizing youth from the New Left to adopt his ‘pragmatic’ approach to organizing, which rested on accepting ‘the world as it is’ and rejecting more militant politics.”

While they may not entirely agree with Petcoff’s critique, a variety of organizers trained in the community organizing tradition have also noted the anti-ideological biases that were baked into their formation. In a 2018 essay for The Nation, journalist Nick Bowlin quotes Detroit organizer Molly Sweeney, who recalls that her training in Alinskyite organizing lacked “any analysis of the greater forces of white supremacy and capitalism that shape our world.” As Sweeney explains, “The ‘world as it is’ was articulated in my training void of any analysis of how the world became that way.”

Expressing similar sentiments, Katie Horvath of the Symbiosis Research Collective wrote in a 2018 reflection for The Ecologist about her experience with how the framework was used: “It’s framed as pragmatism: We don’t live in the world as it should be, we live in the real world, and we have to act according to its rules to get what we want,” she explains. “At training, this was always explained as a necessary strategy in order to achieve the world as it should be,” but Horvath found herself wondering about the limitations it imposed. Being overly pragmatic, she reflects, “constricts what is politically possible, as it means you end up working off of the lowest common denominator of shared values for fear of alienating member institutions.” She further argues, “The short-sighted focus on picking only concrete and winnable issues means never getting at underlying systemic problems that require longer campaigns or that cannot be solved at all within the constraints of the current system.”

Some of this criticism is justified. Alinsky favored organizing around narrow local demands that could be used to build community power rather than taking on galvanizing, morally loaded, and possibly divisive national issues. There are some positive aspects to this approach: Community organizers have devoted themselves to reaching out beyond self-identified groups of leftists, meeting people “where they are at,” and building broad-based coalitions by working on issues of concrete relevance in specific communities. And yet, the approach can sometimes feel more small-minded than visionary, never truly advancing an inspiring model of a different world. The IAF, in particular, has tended to hew to traditional community organizing principles, and it has been less flexible than many of its peer networks at incorporating criticisms of a variety of different aspects of the Alinskyite model.

That said, over the past two decades, the world of community organizing as a whole has evolved considerably. Most major networks have increasingly invested in political education and incorporated more structural analysis into their outlook and strategies — recognizing the need, as Oakland-based organizer Gary Delgado put it in an influential 1998 essay entitled ”The Last Stop Sign,” to “proactively address issues of race, class, gender, corporate concentration and the complexities of a transnational economy.” As organizers Daniel Martinez HoSang, LeeAnn Hall and Libero Della Piana recently wrote in an article for The Forge, “Today, nearly every community organizing group accepts the importance of centering racial justice.” Additionally, these groups have shown greater interest in campaigns that transcend neighborhood-level concerns, as well as in electoral interventions, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

Beyond mere pragmatism

As community organizing networks have begun to think bigger in their analysis and aspirations, can the “two worlds” remain useful guideposts?

Although, in practice, the framework has sometimes been used as a call to mere pragmatism, in its richest form it can be more than that. Indeed, its true value lies in its dialectical nature. The dichotomy does not merely warn against unchecked utopianism; it also rejects the impulse to become overly accommodating of the status quo. As Chambers puts it, “Understanding the world as it is while ignoring the world as it should be leads to cynicism, division and coercion.” In his view, ethical behavior is rooted in “stepping up to the tension between the two worlds” and recognizing the shortfalls inherent in being either overly starry-eyed or inured to existing conditions. Advancing a similar idea, leaders in IAF trainings highlight the role of both power and love in creating change. Echoing Martin Luther King Jr., they explain: “Power without love is tyranny. Love without power is sentimentality.”

The need, then, is to cultivate individuals who can manage both sides of the push-and-pull — or, in the words of former West Coast IAF Director Larry B. McNeil, the best community people with “double vision.” According to McNeil, “They can actually see what is not there, and they can see the practical organizing and political steps that make that vision a reality.” As he further notes: “Most people get stuck in the world as it is. They become so mired in the present that they forget to imagine. Utopians make the opposite mistake. They become so enthralled in their vision of the future that they fail to do the dirty day-to-day work to make their vision real.”

McNeil offered these words in a 1998 speech to a conference of the ​​Urban Parks Institute. At the conference, he promoted a hard-headed approach to building power and carefully selecting issues to organize around — “We have to take complex, multi-sided problems and turn them into specific, concrete, immediate issues,” he told the attendees. And yet, he insisted on the necessity of unfettered imagination, telling his audience in his closing remarks, to “make sure that your vision of what could be never succumbs to the limits of what is.”

Can we be both visionary and strategic?

Because the tension between pragmatism and idealism is such a persistent issue for social movements, a variety of different terminologies have been developed to discuss the dichotomy. Sociologist Max Weber, for one, made a distinction between the “ethic of ultimate ends” and the “ethic of responsibility.” Someone operating with a focus on ultimate ends acts according to ardent moral conviction; as Weber writes, this person follows the religious slogan, “The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord.” Meanwhile, political actors motivated by the ethic of responsibility are more pragmatic; they are concerned with the outcomes and with “the foreseeable results of one’s action.”

Pointing to other similar frameworks, movement theorist and trainer Jonathan Matthew Smucker argues that within movements, “We have to navigate and find a balance between the expressive and the instrumental aspects of collective action; between within-group bonding and beyond-group bridging; between the life of the group and what the group accomplishes aside from its own existence.”

Such divides are perhaps most commonly discussed as a tension between prefigurative and strategic politics. Popularized by sociologist Wini Breines, this dichotomy makes a distinction between groups oriented toward modeling a new society in the present (prefigurative) and those more focused on influencing and moving mainstream institutions (strategic). In principle, these two modes of practice could be integrated with one another. For example, as it rose to prominence with its sit-in actions in the early 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, sought both to prefigure the interracial “beloved community” imagined by the civil rights movement and to push strategically for changes within businesses and government. However, in her analysis of New Left groups, Breines perceived a tension between the two approaches — one that has been regularly borne out in recent decades. Often, the two tendencies lend themselves to different theories of change: Those leaning toward prefigurative concerns tend to focus on building alternative institutions or promoting personal transformation, while those more focused on strategic politics tend to gravitate toward inside-game politics and structure-based organizing that seek to win instrumental demands.

All of these frameworks attempt to provide language for discussing how visionary aspirations and real-world conditions push against one another in the pursuit of social change. One thing that makes the “two worlds” idea distinctive is that it is firmly integrated into the culture and training curriculum of networks such as the IAF. This is not an abstract concept with a home in academic sociology. Rather, it is something that community organizations talk about regularly and include as a key point of orientation for new members. It is the way they inoculate against ideological purists, on the one hand, and jaded insiders, on the other — those who would have them work exclusively within the channels of formal politics rather than deploying the power of organized people from the outside. The lesson the organizers impart is that we can afford neither to be ultra-righteous nor ultra-cynical.

There exist precedents for how other movements talk about this tension in their day-to-day practice. Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, likened the balance he thought radicals should strike to walking “a perilous tightrope.” He believed that radical vision must be married to “actual movements fighting not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread.” In the early years of DSA and its predecessor organizations, Harrington’s call to serve as the “left wing of the possible” functioned as a slogan that oriented its members to the group’s strategic outlook — in a manner similar to how the “two worlds” framework has operated in many community organizing spaces. In both cases, the rhetoric served as a way of making the tension a central part of how organizations can describe their theory of change and organizing vision.

An issue deeper than politics

What, then, is the proper balance between idealism and pragmatism?

Chambers and his colleagues do not give too much guidance for how to balance the two worlds they describe, and this can be considered a shortcoming of their dichotomy. At the same time, the “world as it is” framework suggests that the strategic questions it raises are not ones that can be answered in the abstract; they must always be determined amid consideration of real-world conditions. Nor are they questions that can be answered once and then regarded as definitively resolved. Rather, they must be reckoned with again and again.

As much as this reckoning involves political considerations, it is ultimately a spiritual and existential matter. Chambers insists, “the tension I’m naming here isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s the human condition.” For realistic radicals, “taking responsibility for our destiny means deliberately embracing the fearsome, creative tension that comes when we choose to live resolutely in between the world as it is and the world as it should be, refusing to be condemned either to materialism or false idealism as a way of life.”

While various social movements may reach different conclusions about how to act in accordance with their most deeply held values while also operating within the flawed conditions of our present society, none can avoid wrestling with the contradiction. The idea of “two worlds” in tension — one a messy reality and one a precious ideal of what could be — provides an accessible means of discussing this critical dilemma, intuitively understandable even to those with no prior experience in politics. For this reason alone, it is a concept worth appreciating.

Research assistance provided by Raina Lipsitz and Sean Welch.

This piece first appeared in Waging Nonviolence.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mark Engler - Paul Engler.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Laura Clancy.

Be responsible, righteous, honest, and lead by example.

That’s the advice from psychotherapist Selina Kuruleca to all fathers, as Fijians celebrate Father’s Day today.

Being a father was not only a biological thing, or a physical thing, Kuruleca said.

“It’s also an emotional thing, a mental, psychological attachment and part of that responsibility means being there, being there in all those aspects psychologically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually,” she said.

“Just so you know, you’re a father figure to someone.

“What does it mean? It means nurturing, it means protecting, it means loving, it means compassion.

“And it means being someone who can be trusted to protect and to provide for someone, who can listen and also partner with their spouses and paddling with their children in terms of uplifting their family, leading them in a manner that is good not only for the family but for the extended family, the community and the nation.”

Kuruleca saluted single fathers for the roles they played and urged them to continue looking after their children.

“For single fathers, continue to be there for your children, provide for them, for your nephews and nieces, for your grandchildren because they need it and no one else can fulfill that role.

“You take it from a biblical perspective. The Bible talks about the father being the head of the household. It doesn’t mean that you don’t play your part.

“You know, being the head of the household means doing everything to be that role. And that means monitoring things safely.”

Luke Nacei is a Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.

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

Fiji has no place for a partisan media using press freedom as a blank cheque to be a mouthpiece of government, says opposition National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad.

In a statement to mark World Press Freedom Day last week, Professor Prasad urged journalists to be fearless and amplify the truth and voice of the people at all times.

He said it was critically important for the media to be impartial and to amplify the voice of the people without fear — especially in an election year.

• READ MORE: RSF 2022 World Press Freedom Index
• Other Press Freedom Index reports

“Since September last year, the media, particularly The Fiji Times and Communications Fiji Ltd, operators of five radio stations and the vastly popular FijiVillage news site, have been repeatedly criticised by government for amplifying the voice of the people through their elected representatives,” he said.

“The Fiji Times and CFL are simply doing what any media organisation should do at all times. They are simply performing their fundamental role as an effective watchdog of government.

“They are the messenger of truth, but unfortunately the truth is unpalatable to the current government because its broken promises and failed policies that are severely hurting the people, are being exposed.

“The Attorney-General’s statement in Parliament on September 24 last year, while agreeing to the tirade against The Fiji Times and CFL by Assistant Minister Selai Adimaitoga for the media to declare which political party they support in their editorial policy, is the clearest indication of government preferring a pro-FijiFirst and partisan media in the country.

‘Freedom of expression’ right
“Instead, government must fully adhere to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states, ‘Everyone has right to freedom of opinion and expression’.

“This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through the media regardless of frontiers.

“This freedom and right are reposed in the people, which the state and politicians must respect at all times.

“Therefore, it is totally wrong and unethical for government or anyone to launch a tirade against the media organisation and their news director or editor-in-chief just because they don’t like the media amplifying the truth and voice of the people without fear.

“Do the right thing – shoot the message, not the messenger.”

MIDA Act ‘dangerous’ for Fiji media
Meanwhile, Pacific Media Watch reports that the Fijian Media Association (FMA) issued a statement welcoming the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2022 World Press Freedom Index, in which Fiji’s ranking slipped by 47 places to 102nd in 180 countries. RSF criticised the legislation in Fiji that “criminalised” journalism.

The statement said that while the Fiji media was under pressure “the Fijian media remains bold and thriving, and committed to fulfil its role”.

“Who defines what is against the public interest or what is against the national interest?” asked the statement by general secretary Stanley Simpson.

“While the Fijian media have been doing their best to be bold and free and abiding by their code of ethics — these laws are making many organisations and editors hesitate about publishing or broadcasting certain views that may go against the government based on how [it] may interpret that legislation and come after a media organisation.

“The fines are too excessive and designed to be vindictive and punish the media rather [than] encourage better reporting standards and be corrective.

“Media organisations are almost unanimous in seeking removal of the harsh fines and a review of the Act [Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) Act].

“It is dangerous for media freedom now and also in the future. The MIDA Act has been ineffective and has done little to nothing to raise media standards,” the FMA statement said.

RSF changed its system of analysis this year to include a breakdown on specific categories such as legal framework and justice system, technological censorship and surveillance, disinformation and propaganda, arbitrary detention and proceedings, independence and pluralism, models and good practices, media sustainability, and violence against journalists, which partially explains Fiji’s sudden major fall on the Index.

Luke Nacei is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission and additional reporting by Pacific Media Watch.

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

Diplomats watch as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses the United Nations Security Council via video on April 5, 2022, in New York.

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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The powerful countries that designed the U.N. structured it to be certain they could always thwart any U.N. action to hold them accountable.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.