This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

This story is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

NEWTOK, Alaska — A jumble of shipping containers hold all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, Alaska, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.

Late last year, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.

Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved 9 miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik. But much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.

Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaskan communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. And it highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica and KYUK radio in Bethel, Alaska.

Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for the relocation, which began in 2019 and is expected to cost more than $150 million. But while the federal government supplied taxpayer dollars, it left most of the responsibility to the tiny Newtok Village Council. The federally recognized tribal government lacked the expertise to manage the project and has faced high turnover and internal political conflict, according to tribal records and interviews with more than 70 residents as well as dozens of current and former members of the seven-person village council.

Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.

But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.

“We’re physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities,” said Don Antrobus, a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. “And the fact that we don’t have a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem, it’s a national problem.”

Newtok’s relocation follows the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, where land vanished under rising sea levels. Both relocations have been labeled as “blueprints” for the federal government’s response to climate change. Both have been mired in complicated and disjointed funding systems and accusations that the government neglected traditional knowledge.

For centuries, the area’s Indigenous Yup’ik residents lived a nomadic subsistence lifestyle, timing their seasonal movements with the arrival of migratory birds in spring, fish in summer and the ripening of berries in early fall. But that changed in the 1950s after a barge, loaded with construction materials to build a school, got stuck near present-day Newtok and couldn’t navigate farther upriver. So the Bureau of Indian Affairs built the school there.

At the time, elders knew the location wasn’t fit for permanent settlement because the low-lying ground would shift as the permafrost froze and thawed seasonally, said Andy Patrick, 77, one of two residents who remember life in the old village before Newtok.

“My grandma used to tell me, ‘It’s going to start wobbling,’” he said. But they moved because the BIA required their children to attend its school.

Born and raised in Newtok, Jack Charlie was relieved when he moved into a modest brown house in Mertarvik in 2022. His old plywood home in Newtok was moldy and sinking into the tundra as the permafrost that supported the land thawed.

But within months, the light fixtures in his new house filled with water from condensation, and gaps formed where the walls met the ceiling in his bedroom. Charlie started stuffing toilet paper into the cracks to keep out the persistent coastal winds.

“Once I found it was leaking and cold air drifting in, I said: ‘Hell! What kind of house did they build?’” he said.

Charlie is one of multiple residents who complained about problems with their newly built houses. When KYUK asked for inspection reports, the tribe and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said they didn’t have any. In the absence of an official inspection, KYUK hired a professional with expertise in cold climate housing to examine seven of the 46 homes in Mertarvik, which were built by three different contractors.

According to the inspection performed last year, Charlie’s home is among 17 houses, built by one contractor, that are rapidly deteriorating because they were designed and constructed the same way. The foundations are not salvageable, and the buildings do not meet minimum code requirements, said the inspector, Emmett Leffel, an energy auditor and building analyst in Alaska.

“This is some of the worst new construction I’ve ever seen, and the impact is so quickly realized because of the coastal climate,” Leffel said in an interview.

His inspection report concluded: “The totality of the work needed to correct these conditions and issues may cost substantially more than the original construction.”

There are other problems beyond housing. The BIA committed more than $6 million for roads but failed to coordinate with other agencies to install water pipes underneath, according to a former project manager, the tribal health consortium and the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency tasked with providing critical infrastructure support to Alaska’s most remote communities. As a result, none of the houses in Mertarvik has a flush toilet or shower. Residents go to the town’s small well to fill jugs for household use.

As more people have moved to Mertarvik, the town’s power plant hasn’t kept up with electricity demand, leaving residents without heat or power in the winter, said Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator. And a wastewater system that handles sewage from the school, health clinic and a dormitory for construction workers has been overwhelmed for more than a year, he said. Last spring, sewage backed up into the school’s basement.

The BIA, the largest funder of the relocation that helped plan the community, did not agree to an interview request. The agency said in an email that it’s working closely with the Newtok Village Council and that the council has established a plan to repair the homes. The tribe’s attorney, Matt Mead, said, “NVC does have a repair plan and is seeking funding from multiple sources to allow for implementation of the plan.”

That was news to council secretary Della Carl and council member Francis Tom, whose home has some of the worst problems. Both said they knew of no such plan, and Mead declined to provide one. Four other council members (one seat is vacant) declined to comment or didn’t return calls or emails. Mead said the plan to fix the houses needs to be better communicated to council members and residents. He said the tribe disagrees that the homes are deteriorating and declined to comment about its management of the project.

Patrick LeMay, the Anchorage-based contractor whose company was hired by the tribe to build Charlie’s and 16 other deteriorating houses, was fired last year because of the construction and design problems, according to tribal council members. LeMay didn’t respond to questions or comment on Leffel’s report other than to say, “I do not work for Newtok any longer.”

Greg Stuckey, administrator for HUD’s Office of Native American Programs in Anchorage, said the agency is not required to inspect the LeMay houses because the grant went directly to the tribal government. Federal law allows tribes to administer government programs themselves to recognize their independence and cultural needs.

“So they can’t say it’s the federal government,” Stuckey said, “because they chose this.”

Mead said the Newtok Village Council didn’t dispute that.

The Government Accountability Office, however, has repeatedly recommended that federal agencies provide more technical assistance to small tribes in climate relocations.

“When you have 20 or 30 different programs that can all interact together and they all have different rules,” said Anna Maria Ortiz, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, “that’s going to cost more in the long run and can be nearly impossible for some villages.”

In 1996, after decades fighting erosion from storms and the deteriorating permafrost, the Newtok tribe began negotiating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to exchange land for the relocation. Congress approved the trade in 2003. For the next two decades, the tribe worked with federal and state agencies to plan the new community at Mertarvik. Storm damage shut down the public school for good last year, and the Newtok Village Council voted to finish the evacuation.

Dozens of remote communities in Alaska face similar threats from climate change, according to a 2019 report by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issues affecting such communities are well understood in Arctic regions around the world, but policymakers aren’t heeding warnings from relocation experts, said Andrea Marta Knudsen, a relocation and disaster recovery specialist in the Iceland prime minister’s office.

“It’s not like this is a new thing or hasn’t been researched,” she said. “The government should maybe say: ‘Oh wow, we’re dealing with a disaster or relocation. Who knows this? Let’s have a team of experts working with the government on this.’”

Over the years, several government bodies tried to coordinate efforts in Newtok. At first, Alaska’s commerce department formed the Newtok Planning Group to coordinate assistance for the relocation. But in 2013, the group’s work stalled because the BIA paused its funding for the tribe after a political dispute resulted in two competing tribal governments. The planning group has met only three times since 2019.

The Denali Commission took on project management responsibilities in 2016 but ceded control to the BIA three years ago after the agency announced a $25 million grant funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

This inconsistent oversight and coordination has significantly affected the quality of housing, according to experts who have worked on the relocation.

The first two housing projects in Mertarvik received high ratings from Leffel, the inspector hired by KYUK. The Alaska-based nonprofit Cold Climate Housing Research Center designed 14 homes to maximize energy efficiency and withstand the harsh weather. The houses also provide space for residents to cut fish, dress moose and host large family gatherings — activities integral to the Yup’ik lifestyle. An additional 15 houses were built by a regional housing authority that has decades of experience on Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Charlie’s home and 16 others were part of a third round of houses, designed and built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. At various times, LeMay was also employed by the tribe in other roles, including tribal administrator and relocation coordinator. Representing the tribe while simultaneously earning money from it could create a potential conflict of interest, said Ted Waters, an attorney who specializes in federal grants administration.

According to Leffel’s inspection, the foundations of Charlie’s home and the others designed and built by LeMay “do not meet minimum code requirements for corrosion resistance, adequate supports” or “structural integrity requirements.” Two years of fuel usage data provided by the tribe shows residents in the LeMay houses pay more than twice as much for energy each year compared with the other two housing projects.

Francis Tom, the council member, said outside entities like LeMay and federal agencies often ignored his community’s needs. “They don’t know. They weren’t born here,” he said. “They don’t spend enough time here.”

A year before Leffel examined the houses, a group of BIA officials took a tour and saw the water pooling in light fixtures and moisture damage in several of the LeMay homes, council members said. It’s unclear what they did with that information. The BIA said its staff has made three trips to Mertarvik since, and the tribe’s attorney said multiple homes were inspected by independent engineers this past year, something both council members Carl and Tom disputed. Charlie and nearly a dozen other residents said no one other than Leffel had been inside their homes to inspect them. The attorney declined to provide copies of any inspections.

HUD was also made aware of problems after a 2022 report submitted by the tribe showed occupancy numbers that exceeded the agency’s overcrowding standards.

In addition to the problems with the LeMay homes, several other residents said they’re facing similar issues with some of the temporary tiny homes that were shipped in by barge in the fall because of the urgent need to move. Rosemary John’s was among the last families to relocate. John, who grew up in Newtok and raised her six kids there, said the move has been agonizing. Seven people are now living in her house. This winter, John posted a video to social media that showed water running down a wall and pooling on the floor.

Next door, in Dionne Kilongak’s temporary house, the windowsills are already covered in mold. She works at her kitchen table every day while her children, ages 2 and 4, scurry up and down the narrow hallway. She said winds bring water into her house.

“I think these aren’t for Alaska,” she said.

With no solution in sight, Charlie has tried to make his house feel more homey. Tired of white paint that did nothing to hide the water damage, he found scrap paneling from one of the housing authority’s projects and fastened it to his walls.

Like most people in these houses, he said he hopes they’ll be fixed, but he’s unsure where to turn.

“I have no idea who’s gonna be responsible for these homes,” he said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Emily Schwing, KYUK.

Labor’s decline over the past half century has devastated working-class communities, undermined democracy, and deepened the grip of big business over our work lives, our political system, and our planet,” Eric Blanc writes in his new book, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. “To turn this around, we need tens of millions more people forming, joining, and transforming unions”; however, to achieve that level of growth, “a new unionization model is necessary because the only way to build power at scale is by relying less on paid full-timers and more on workers.” In this episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore in Baltimore on March 27, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Blanc about his book and how worker-to-worker organizing campaigns at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are breathing life back into the labor movement.

Eric Blanc is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, and director of the Worker to Worker Collaborative.

Additional links/info:

• Eric Blanc website, Facebook page, and X page
• Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) website
• Red Emma’s website, Facebook page, X page, and Instagram
• Eric Blanc, University of California Press, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big
• Eric Blanc, Jacobin, “Bet on Worker-to-Worker Organizing”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “Want to unionize your workplace? These worker-organizers have some advice”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, thank you so much, Analysis. Thank you as always to the great Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore cafe gathering space. Please, please, please support Red Emma’s however you can. We need spaces like this and many more now more than ever. And thank you all for coming out tonight. It’s a real shot to the heart to see your faces in these dark times. And we are here to talk about fighting the bosses, fighting the oligarchs, building worker power, and taking our world back. Does that sound all right to you guys? Oh, come on. I said who wants to talk about building worker power? Hell yeah. And we are here to jump into that discussion with a really, really vital new book by brother Eric Blanc. It is called We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, which you can buy right over there.

Our goal here is not to try to condense this book into a 30 minute talk. Our goal is to try to get you to read it, to think about it, to let Eric know what you think about it, use what’s usable in it, build on it. Alright, so Eric, I’m going to shut up and I want to toss things to you. There’s so much that I could ask you about here, but I wanted to start, since both of our books grew out of Covid—and the book that I’ve got over there, that Analysis mentioned, was interviews with 10 workers during the first year of Covid. And you have a really, I think, touching part in this book where you talk about the first call that you took as a member of what would become EWOC (Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee). And you talk about Enrique. I wanted to first ask if you could just tell us a little bit about that call, and you have a line here where you said, “without the resistance of workers like Enrique,” and I’ll let you tell what that resistance was, “many thousands more people would likely have died across the US.” I wanted to ask if you could take us to that moment: what was happening with Enrique, your involvement with it, and how this book grew out of it, but also, in that telling, can you say a little bit about how the story of Covid—when we’re not talking about government policy and total death tolls… What does that story look like when we look at it from the ground, through the stories of working people like the ones you spoke to in the book?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question and thanks to all you for being here. Thanks Maximillian for discussing, thanks to Red Emma’s. And yeah, going back, it’s interesting going back to that moment of crisis, I felt like the last few months I’ve had this visceral sense of almost deja vu of this very intense crisis. And trying to think what that looked like in early 2020, I had been labor organizer for the Bernie campaign. And what ended up happening is once Covid hit, we started getting inundated with workers reaching out from all over the country just saying, my boss is making me go in. Nobody has masks. My coworkers are being forced to come in because, so just give a concrete example. So Enrique is a meat packing worker in Pennsylvania and reached out because he knew that his coworker had covid had to keep on coming in because at that factory, if they had missed more than three days total, they would just get the boot.

There was no job protection. And so there was just a level of fear for people’s lives. That was a crisis for all of them. There’s hundreds of workers at this meat packing plant. And so they reached out to the Bernie campaign. And because I spoke Spanish, I ended up talking to Enrique and helping him for weeks and eventually months and trying to build a fight back campaign. And they ended up doing some really brave actions, including not showing up to work. They wrote an open letter and got over WhatsApp chat and got a huge number of their workers not to show up until basic safety demands were met. They won many of those through this struggle. So yeah, exactly that courage, that heroism because it was terrifying for them. A lot of were undocumented and they had no idea what was going to happen to them.

And so I just think about so many stories. You got no press, nobody ever heard about it. And we don’t even know the numbers of workers that did that basic level of collective action and militancy all over the country and frankly just saved so many people’s lives. And it’s exactly what you said. And it seems to me, again, just to bring it back to this moment, that there is a similar thing going on right now where people, the labor movement, we talk about it in general, but it does ultimately come down to these initial acts, the first people who are willing to speak out when other people aren’t. And it’s risky and it’s something I think is worth celebrating though in the hindsight when things seem impossible and things seem like everything is against us, you can see that those actions did make a real difference.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I know that obviously this story goes back before Covid and your first book, and you talk about this in your current book, you talk about the sort of lineage going to the red bread teacher strikes. You can trace that lineage even further back with the sort of revitalization of the Chicago Teachers Union. It depends on where you want to start the clock. But sticking with Covid for a moment, I wanted to ask if you could just condense a little bit, I don’t think we fully reckoned as a society with how much Covid fucked our brains and our society. Pardon my friends. But there are parts of that story that can get lost easily if we’re not looking at the shop floor struggles that emerged in response to it. So I wanted to ask first, since you talked about some of the major struggles that working people were facing in the midst of a deadly pandemic, so what was the organizing response to that that sort of led to this book in this argument that you make in it? And how was that sort of changing what had been the dominant trends in organized labor up until Covid?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, it’s a good question. And you’re right that the thrust of worker to worker organizing in some ways predates the pandemic. I would really would say this sort of wide scale worker led organizing. The first really big instance of it in recent memory we have was the 2018 teacher strikes that were initiated over these viral Facebook groups. And a lot of the dynamics we’ve seen in recent years were presaged there. But the pandemic sort of supercharged this all over the country because it showed overnight that the bosses didn’t care whether you died. And the organizing and the questions that led to this book, frankly as you mentioned, came out of that the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee emerged literally as a Google form that we had to set up because we were getting so many workers reaching out like Enrique who were just saying, give us any help.

Well, how can we fight back? And so we set up a Google form and connected these workers reaching out with volunteer organizers, a lot of people coming out of Bernie World, out of Democratic Socialists of America, out of United Electrical Left Union. And we were able to start building a really interesting project to help workers start. And the book in many ways comes out of this direct organizing experience. We’re just trying to figure out, well, how do you organize and help support large numbers of workers when you have very few staff? We were just volunteers, right? We didn’t have any staff at first. And then the question becomes, well, what kind of organizing matters are possible when you’re giving workers the tools to start self-organizing in a way that doesn’t require the traditional model where you have a full-time staff organizer, very intensely coaching every worker because that actually can be very effective, but we just didn’t have the staff to do it.

And I think we’ve seen that similar dynamic with a lot of the other early covid sparks. So Starbucks would be a classic example. Late 2021, they win one union election in Buffalo, New York to their great surprise, because this wasn’t a plan to organize Starbucks nationally. They had no plan on doing that. They were just trying to organize very modestly upstate New York, see if you could get some Starbucks, get other coffee shops at upstate New York. Well, to their great surprise, hundreds and then thousands of workers start reaching out nationally and saying, we want to do what you did. And if they had tried to do a staff intensive model, they just literally wouldn’t have had the ability to talk to so many workers. There weren’t enough staff, they had a couple staff barely. And so they had to have workers jump on Zoom to talk to all of their coworkers nationally. So you do get a sense then of the question of scale. How do you get enough workers? Organizing is not possible. These moments of crisis of urg through a very staff intensive way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s unpack that just a little bit more, right? You have a great line, many great lines, and I think one of the real strengths of this book is your ability to articulate very clearly. I mean these three points of analysis that help us, I think move past what have been very slow moving debates. And you succinctly put that Labor’s powerful approaches haven’t been scalable and labor’s scalable approaches haven’t been very powerful. So I wanted ask if you could unpack that statement a little more and then give us some sort of more of the concrete details about what a worker to worker organizing camp, what makes it different from say a staff model. I mean, you give the example of Bessemer, Alabama that was workers at Amazon leading a campaign, but with the help of an established union didn’t win. Then Amazon workers in Staten Island do a more work of the worker model and they win. So maybe we could use that as sort of the concrete example to show people what we’re talking about.

Eric Blanc:

Sure. So yeah, the argument is that both for labor and frankly for social movements more generally, I try to say that we’re in this impasse where the most powerful methods we have are too small scale. And so you have real, very strong unions that have been able to win very important gains for their members across the country. And so I actually don’t try to diminish the importance of staff or the importance of this model. The problem is that there hasn’t been a way to generalize that for reasons essentially of costs too expensive and takes too much time through staff intensive ways to organize tens of millions of workers that way. It’s true frankly for community organizing as well. You have a lot of really smart, deep base building organizations that haven’t had the mechanisms to build that power widely. On the other hand, you’ve had had then as a response to that scale issue attempts to go really big.

So you have things like our Walmart or Fight for 15, which in the labor world did make, they made some differences. They were able to get wage increases for a large number of workers, but they weren’t trying to do the traditional power building of deep organizing in which the ideas, the union is built from the workers from below by talking to your coworkers, building solidarity, having an organized committee. These basic building blocks of worker organizing were sort of dropped because the assumption is you couldn’t do that on a nationwide level. And so what you see in the recent period is the merging of this national scalable meeting, the moment using digital tools type ethos and structure, but combining that with really classic structures and tactics of deep labor organizing. And that’s really exciting. And I think the example I would give is maybe not Bessemer and Amazon because a little messy, all these are a little bit messy.

But just to give one other example of a worker to worker drive that I think is really, really sort of emblematic beyond Starbucks is the news. So not everybody follows the news guild, but this is one of the main unions that organizes in media and there’s been massive wins against really evil hedge funds that have taken over media companies. And the News Guild over the last five years has organized hundreds of newspapers in very intense battles. These are not easy fights by any means. You have people who’ve been striking for over a year in some cases currently as we speak. And they won through a thing called the Member Organizing program in which their ethos is every worker leader should be trained to do anything a staff person normally does. And so this is in some ways the thesis of the book is that it turns out worker leaders can do many of these things that traditionally we assume that only full-time staff could do.

So that’s concretely initiating campaigns. Crucially, it’s coaching other workers. Normally it’ll be a staff person has to coach another worker and how to build power. We hear workers are coaching other workers and there’s some staff in the background, staff and resources play a big role, but really it’s workers talking to other workers and then strategizing who’s making the big decisions over the campaign. Well, staff can be in there, but are workers going to have a decisive say? And that turns out it makes a big difference for workers’ ownership over their drives for their ability to not get burnt out. They feel it truly, the union is us. We are the union unions always say this. This is a classic thing that unions say. The question is actually how do you do it and how do you make it feel real and how do you make it be real? And I think that the recent worker to worker drives have put the meat on that in a way that traditional organizing hasn’t to the same extent.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that creates sort of opportunities for success that maybe we didn’t anticipate ourselves three years ago. I think a lot of what’s happened in that time has been surprising even to folks in the neighborhood world or I know so, but you are also very careful in this book to sort of make it clear. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. Don’t take away the wrong lesson here that union staffers are evil, bad, stupid people. Just flip the ways that we’re looking at this, understanding it. And in that vein, I wanted to sort of ask about the particular challenges that come with a worker to worker organizing model, what that lack of institutional support along with a labor law that’s stacked so heavily in favor of the bosses and anemic NLRB that now is I’m dysfunctional at the current moment. So what are some of the real drawbacks to a work of the worker model or what have we learned from the past couple of years about those?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I would say that the first thing is there’s really different varieties of worker, worker unions going as much to completely independent unions like in the Amazon JFK eight where they had no institutional backing or very little to worker to worker drives like Starbucks or the News Guild in which you have really driving things and having this worker to worker approach but with serious resources. And I think that one of the lessons of the book and the research and recent experience is that if you’re going up against the biggest companies, you do need actually this sweet spot of combined resources with the worker leadership that it’s very hard to win and to sustain your organizing without some level of institutional backend for basic reasons that you can imagine organizing is so hard. It’s so labor intensive that it’s easy to get burnt out.

It frankly is easy to get burnt out. And so I would say that this is both the power of the new model is that it depends on workers’ leadership, but then people have jobs, people have families. And so you have to have a realistic assessment of how far you can ask people to go. And it turns out they can go very far, but there’s still limits. There’s still limits to what you can do without any staff and union backing. So I think that’s one big lesson. And then I would say that one of the things we’re seeing right now is it’s a very open question about what new organizing in the private sector looks like under Trump. And I’m actually very optimistic about that labor can keep up its momentum. It might be through fighting defensive battles, you can win and defeat Musk and Trump.

That would be a historic victory, whether that will mean we’re going to get tens of millions of new workers in unions under the next four years. Those are separate questions. So I do think that we need to be sober about the ability to organize tens of millions of workers, doesn’t just depend on having the right models. There has to be some combination of right strategy, good organizing, and frankly favorable conditions, whether it’s in the political sphere or things like the covid crisis that can galvanize people. And so it’s not just a question of putting out the right ideas and then inevitably you’ll win. You have to have the meeting of the various conditions, and that’s not always clear how far you can go at a given moment. It’s an open question. Right now

Maximillian Alvarez:

We got about, let’s say 10 more minutes and then we want to open it up to q and a, but I thought it was really eyeopening for me and helpful for me to read in this book how you’re showing how this applies beyond later, and these are lessons that can be learned and implemented and built on in other social movements. I wanted to ask if you could unpack that a little more. What does Worker to worker organizing teach us about how we can improve on our existing social movements and build the ones that we don’t have, but also you give Sunrise movement as also another example of a different kind of model that doesn’t have the worker to worker ethos and actually suffered from that. So I was wondering if you could touch on that as well.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah. This goes to the earlier question of wide but shallow or a small, but deep, right? You have this impasse. The really big things aren’t powerful enough. And we’ve seen that in social movements in part because the big national campaigns we’ve had are still for the most part, imbued with kind of a nonprofit top down type structure in which you’re not building membership organizations. There’s not really a truly democratic structure to which people can sustain themselves. And it doesn’t mean that these aren’t effective. In some ways, the Bernie campaign was tremendously effective, but then Bernie closed up shop and the organizing went home. And similar with the Sunrise and some of these other distributed campaigns, it’s not to say what they did was unimportant, but if you’re not building membership democratic organizations in the process of these national campaigns, you’re really limiting your ability to build sustained power because people don’t keep on dedicating themselves.

They don’t keep on showing up unless they feel real ownership and have real ownership over the organizing. And so just to give a concrete example, as we speak, as we speak, you might be aware that there’s an authoritarian coup in our country and they’re trying to destroy all public services and they are rounding up people off the street. Did you see this at Tufts yesterday just for speaking out on Palestine? So it’s a pretty intense moment we’re in, and it’s worth thinking through. Well concretely, what does this mean for that? Because frankly, if we’re not talking about this moment, then I am not sure why we’re here. So I just want to be really specific about naming that. And to me, one of the limitations we’ve seen right now is that there’s so many people who are angry about what’s going on but don’t know how to get plugged in.

There’s not a clear onboarding mechanism to get literally the millions of people right now who are up in arms against what’s happening with social security or around democracy or free speech, any of these things. You need to have a mechanism to train up hundreds of thousands of new organizers. So to be really concrete, for instance, I love Bernie and AOCs rallies, they’ve been amazing. They show that people want to fight back. But the thing that was missing there, and this goes to your question, is a direct ask of people to get involved and organized. And that’s different than just showing up for another action. You basically need to give all the people who went to that rally to know that they need to get their coworkers and their friends and their family members to go to the next action. In other words, they need to become an organizer.

And you need to have a structure for those organizers to keep on organizing. That is the missing thing we have. We just tell people to go from one action to another, and then people go home and they don’t know how to develop themselves, and we’re not building sustained power. So one of the things that I’m working on now, there’s other people in this room who are even more involved, is the Federal Unionist Network, which is building this type of bottom up worker to Warrior Shout out to fund, which is building this kind of worker to worker network and the federal unionist to overcome these divisions and to really train up workers to fight back in conjunction with the community. And so that I think is a type of model that hopefully we can see replicated more widely. And one shout out is if you want to get involved, you should go to save public services.com. And I’m getting into it. And in Baltimore specifically, there’s a signup sheet there that everyone should sign up for it because the organizing starts now, if you’re not already involved, now is the moment. So please sign up. There’s an upcoming action that will get announced in the q and a.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, you anticipated me, brother. That was going to be my last question. But I’m really, you’re absolutely right. If we’re not talking about what we can do right now to stop what’s happening and what alternative future we’re fighting for that we’re not having the right conversation, we’re not in the game, and we need to get our heads in the game yesterday. And with the final sort of minutes that we’ve got, before we open up the q and a, I wanted to kind of hook that urgency to the other urgent question you’re addressing here, which is before the technical fascist takeover really got supercharged in this new administration, we were already facing the crisis that produced this monstrous administration and our monster politics, which is decades of neoliberal rot, corporate consolidation, mass inequality, climate destroying economics and politics, collapse in popular faith in the institutions of government to represent the people.

I could go on and on and on. And with that, a corresponding and even causative decline in organized labor power. So the less unions we have, the less organized workers are, the more the bosses win and the more the bosses start taking over society and making it such. And we’ve ended up here. So the urgency in your book, which you couldn’t fully anticipate the urgency that we’re feeling right this second, was like we are in a society destroying crisis that needs to be fixed by workers getting organized and in the millions, the tens of millions. And this is the model that can actually help us scale to that number. So I wanted to ask if you could drive home that point, why do we need to organize so many workers? Why does this model help us, and what does an organized working class mean for saving democracy and society?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, that’s a great question slash maybe you also gave the answer in the question, but it’s the question. And I would say that the graph that is the graph to understand this is the relationship between income inequality and union density. The income inequality goes up when union density goes down. And that’s one reflection of the basic question of power. Do working people have power? Do corporations have power? And what is the relationship between these two? How much power do workers have? And we frankly had our power decline, decline and decline for decade. And that is why we’re in the crisis we’re in across the board. It’s why Trump was able to get elected. It’s why we’re in climate catastrophes, why we don’t have the power yet to stop the genocide and Gaza and Palestine. And so the urgency of this is no matter what question you feel most strongly about, no matter what issue it is, that is deeply rooted in the power imbalance between working people and the bosses.

And our best way to turn that around is through organizing ourselves as working people by the millions. And so that is a scale question. It’s a question of how you get to power that can actually defeat the fascists and the millionaires. And I think that one of the things I didn’t fully even anticipate in the book, and we was just talking about this earlier over dinner, is the extent to which this model turns out to be extremely important, even for the defensive battles. So if you just think about what is going to stop, what is it going to take to stop Musk in Trump’s coup, essentially, right? Well, it turns out there’s not enough staff in the labor movement to organize tens of millions of federal workers, right? If you’re going to organize tens of millions of workers generally, and millions of workers to fight back, the only mechanism to do that is workers start organizing each other.

Obviously you need to support the unions. We need the labor movement to be doing a lot more. So again, this isn’t to say we don’t need the unions, we need ’em doing a lot more. But I think the model to how we win in this moment, it’s going to look a lot more like the 2018 teacher strikes where when the workers lead from below, then the leaders in quotes of the official unions will follow if we do our organizing and we have to get to that kind of scale. And I’m personally optimistic. I was saying just before I’m actually, this is the least depressed I’ve been for a couple months because A, I’ve just been too busy organizing to doom scroll. But then there is actually, I think something about the moment we’re in where Musk and Trump are overreaching, what they’re doing is extremely unpopular.

It’s not a popular thing. It turns out to destroy people’s social security to take away their Medicaid. These, they’re playing with fire, they’re frankly playing with fire, and it’s up to us to make them pay and not just pay in the short term. They make it so that this movement that they have goes away for good. And I think that we can do that, but it’s going to require, at this moment, a leap of faith for everybody out there to go all in on organizing. Because the major obstacle we still have at this moment is so many people feel a sense of resignation and a sense of despair. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think nothing can be done, if you think Trump is all powerful, then you don’t go out and you don’t spend all your time organizing. And so you just have to, I think, believe that it’s possible. It is go all in and then history will would be made. And I think actually we in a very good position to defeat these bastards, but it’s going to take a lot of organizing and I hope that we do it all together.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Give it up, give it up for Eric.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

Reporters Without Borders

The 2025 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has revealed the dire state of the news economy and how it severely threatens newsrooms’ editorial independence and media pluralism.

In light of this alarming situation, RSF has called on public authorities, private actors and regional institutions to commit to a “New Deal for Journalism” by following 11 key recommendations.

The media’s economic fragility has emerged as one of the foremost threats to press freedom.

• READ MORE:  Rabuka salutes Fiji media but warns against taking freedom for granted
• NZ fares well in latest RSF press freedom index as authoritarian regimes stifle Asia-Pacific media
• RSF 2025 World Press Freedom rankings
• RSF World Press Freedom Index 2025: economic fragility a leading threat to press freedom

According to the findings of the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, the overall conditions for practising journalism are poor (categorised as “difficult” or “very serious”) in half of the world’s countries.

When looking at the economic conditions alone, that figure becomes three-quarters.

Concrete commitments are urgently needed to preserve press freedom, uphold the right to reliable information, and lift the media out of the destructive economic spiral endangering their independence and survival.

That is where a New Deal for Journalism comes in.

The 11 RSF recommendations for a New Deal for Journalism:

1. Protect media pluralism through economic regulation
Media outlets are not like other businesses and journalism does not provide services like other industries.

Although most news outlets are private entities, they serve the public interest by ensuring citizens’ access to reliable information, a fundamental pillar of democracy.

Media pluralism must therefore be guaranteed, both at market level and by ensuring individual newsrooms reflect a variety of ideas and viewpoints, regardless of who owns them.

In France (25th), debates around media ownership consolidation — particularly involving the Bolloré Group — have highlighted the risks to media pluralism.

In South Africa (27th), the Competition Commission is considering solutions to mitigate the threats posed by giant online platforms to the pluralism of the digital information space.

RSF 2025 World Press Freedom Index summary.   Video: RSF

2. Adopt the JTI as a common standard
News outlets, tech giants, and governments should embrace the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), an international standard for journalism.

More than 2000 media outlets in 119 countries are already engaged in the JTI certification process. Launched by RSF, the JTI acts as a common professional reference that does not judge an outlet’s content but evaluates the processes in its production of information, improving transparency around media ownership and editorial procedures, and promoting trustworthy outlets.

This certification provides a foundation to guide public funding, inform indexing and ranking policies, and enable online platforms and search engines to highlight reliable information while protecting themselves against disinformation campaigns.

3. Establish advertisers’ democratic responsibility
Governments should introduce the principle that companies have a responsibility to help uphold democracy, similar to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Advertisers should be the first to adopt this concept as a priority, as their decision to shift their budgets to online platforms — or, worse, websites that fuel disinformation — makes them partially responsible for the economic decline of journalism.

Advertisers should be encouraged to link their advertising investments to criteria on reliability and journalistic ethics. Aligning advertising strategies with the public interest is vital for fostering a healthy media ecosystem and maintaining democracies.

This notion of a democratic responsibility for companies has notably been promoted by the steering committee of the French General Assembly of Information (États généraux de l’information) and may be included in the bill that will be examined in 2025 by the French National Assembly.

4. Regulate the gatekeepers of online information
Democratic states must require digital platforms to ensure that reliable sources of information are visible to the public and remunerated.

The European Union’s Copyright Directive and Australia’s (29th) News Media Bargaining Code in — the first legislation regulating Google and Facebook — are two examples of legally requiring major platforms to pay for online journalistic content.

Canada (ranked 21st) has undertaken similar reforms but has faced strong resistance, particularly from Meta, which has retaliated by removing news content from its platforms.

To ensure the economic value generated by online journalistic content is fairly distributed, these types of laws must be broadly adopted and their effective implementation must be guaranteed.

Public authorities must also ensure fair negotiations so that media outlets are not crushed by the current imbalance of power between economically fragile news companies and global tech giants.

Lastly, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has made the need for fair remuneration for content creators all the more urgent, as their work is now used to train or feed AI models. This is simply the latest example of why regulation is necessary to protect journalistic content from new forms of technological exploitation.

5. Introduce a tax on tech giants to fund quality information
The goal of introducing such a tax should be to redistribute all or part of the revenue unfairly captured by digital giants to the detriment of the media. The proceeds would be redirected to news media outlets and would finance the production of reliable information.

Several countries have already committed to reforms that tax major digital platforms, but almost none are specifically aimed at supporting the production of quality information from independent sources. 

Indonesia (127th) implemented a tax on foreign digital services, while also requiring platforms to remunerate media outlets for the use of their content starting in 2024. France also established a specific tax on digital companies’ revenues in 2019.

6. Use public development aid to combat news deserts and strengthen reliable information from independent sources
As crises, conflicts and authoritarian regimes multiply, supporting reliable information from independent sources and countering emerging news deserts has never been more important.

Official Development Assistance (ODA) must incorporate support for independent journalism, recognising that it is indispensable not only for economic development but also for strengthening democratic governance and promoting peace.

At least 1 percent of ODA should be allocated to financing independent media outlets in order to guarantee their sustainability.

At a time when certain support mechanisms — such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — are under threat, commitments from donor states are more crucial than ever.

Australia (ranked 29th) and New Zealand (ranked 16th) are positive examples of this commitment, showing support through regional media development programmes, notably in the Pacific Islands.

7. Encourage the development of hybrid and other innovative funding models
It is essential to develop support mechanisms that combine public funding with private contributions (donations, investments, and loans), such as the IFRUM, a fund proposed by RSF to reconstruct the media in Ukraine (62nd).

To diversify funding sources, states could strengthen tax incentives for investors and broaden the call for donors beyond their own residents and taxpayers.

8. Guarantee transparency and independence in the allocation of media aid
Granting public or private subsidies to the media must be based on objective and transparent criteria that are subject to oversight by civil society. Only clear, equitable aid distribution can safeguard editorial independence and protect media outlets from political interference.

One such legislative solution is the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which will come into force in 2025 across all European Union member states. It includes transparency requirements for aid distribution, obliges member states to guarantee the editorial independence of newsrooms, and mandates safeguards against political pressure.

Other countries have also established exemplary frameworks, such as Canada (21st), which has implemented a transparent system combining tax credits and subsidies while ensuring editorial independence.

9. Combat the erosion of public service media
Public service media are not state media: they are independent actors, funded by citizens to fulfil a public interest mission. Their role is to guarantee universal access to reliable, diverse information from independent sources, serving social cohesion and democracy.

Financial and political attacks against these outlets — seen in many countries — threaten the public’s access to trustworthy information.

10. Strengthen media literacy and journalism training
Supporting reliable information means that everyone should be trained from an early age to recognise trustworthy information and be involved in media education initiatives. University and higher education programmes in journalism must also be supported, on the condition that they are independent.

Finland (5th) is recognised worldwide for its media education, with media literacy programmes starting in primary school, contributing to greater resilience against disinformation.

11. Encourage nations to join and implement international initiatives, such as the Partnership for Information and Democracy
The International Partnership for Information and Democracy, which promotes a global communication and information space that is free, pluralistic and reliable, already counts more than fifty signatory countries.

RSF stresses that journalism is a vital common good at a time when democracies are faltering.

This New Deal is a call to collectively rebuild the foundations of a free, trustworthy, and pluralistic public space.

Republished by Pacific Media Watch in collaboration with Reporters Without Borders.

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

As the Trump administration goes after universities, law firms and more, some argue that the free press will eventually become a target. Trump’s attacks on the press have already begun, with the president filing a number of baseless lawsuits against organizations like ABC and CBS, including a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over how the network edited an interview with Kamala Harris last year on 60 Minutes. The White House has also banned the Associated Press from covering some presidential events over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. “I didn’t want to be an activist, but when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism,” warns Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, whose new site Rappler faced attacks from former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte. We also speak with The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner, who has a new piece headlined “Is the Press Next?”

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

The Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering is designed to be a turnkey program that makes it financially feasible and logistically approachable for households of all income levels to adopt solar panels, heat pumps, and batteries, and to realize the amplified benefits of using the resources together. These technologies slash emissions, reduce utility bills, and increase a home’s resilience during power outages, but are often only adopted by wealthier households due to their upfront cost.

“We are going to be advancing this as a model that should be emulated by other states across the country that are trying to achieve decarbonization goals,” said Todd Olinsky-Paul, senior project director for the Clean Energy Group, a nonprofit that produced a new report about the program.

In total, the program is providing free or heavily subsidized solar panels and heat pumps to 55 participating households, 12 of which also received batteries at no cost. Work should be completed on the final participating home this month.

“This is the first and only instance where solar and battery storage are being presented in combination with electrification and traditional efficiency,” Olinsky-Paul said. ​“Instead of having several siloed programs, it’s all being presented to the customer in a package, which makes everything work together better.”

It’s a strategy that program planners hope can help address the disproportionate energy burden felt by lower-income residents of the region, where households making less than one-third of the area median income spent an average of 27 percent of their income on energy as of 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. (The updated figure is unavailable because the federal tool that provided this data is no longer live.)

Read Next

The quest to fix the irony at the heart of every heat pump

Matt Simon

The initiative is a project of the Cape Light Compact, a unique regional organization that negotiates electric supply prices and administers energy-efficiency programming for the 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. The compact first proposed the pilot in 2018, but regulators rejected the idea. The organization submitted a revised version in 2020 and 2021, but it wasn’t until 2023 that the state finally gave the program the green light.

An energy-efficiency contractor partners with each program participant to assess their home, then coordinates the necessary work, including any preparations that need to be completed before solar panels, heat pumps, or batteries can be put in. The batteries installed through the program are enrolled in ConnectedSolutions, a state program that pays battery owners who send power to the grid when needed. Because the pilot footed the bill for the batteries, these payments will go to the Cape Light Compact, rather than residents, to help defray the cost of the program.

Bringing the program to life was not always a smooth process. The original proposal called for 100 homes to participate in the pilot, but the final number fell well short of that target. Some homeowners who originally expressed interest were put off by the requirement to remove all fossil fuel systems from their homes, particularly if they had recently invested in new gas or propane heating, said Stephen McCloskey, an analyst with the Cape Light Compact and the program manager for the pilot.

In some cases, homeowners balked at upfront costs. Moderate-income households that did not live in deed-restricted affordable housing had to pay 20 percent of the cost for heat pumps and any cost over $15,000 for solar panels. If a roof was too shady for solar, homeowners were responsible for removing trees and branches.

“At the end of the day, each customer and their decision-making process is different,” McCloskey said.

The original plan called for installing batteries in 25 participants’ homes, but unexpected limitations lowered that number, McCloskey said. Houses without basements, for example, couldn’t receive batteries. In some cases, the combined capacity of solar panels and a battery would have exceeded the local utility’s threshold for connecting a system to the grid.

The compact also had not fully accounted for the array of barriers that needed to be addressed before weatherization could be done. Some homes had mold or needed electrical upgrades. Others required roof work before solar panels could be installed.

These challenges are not dealbreakers but lessons learned for utilities or organizations that attempt to emulate the program in the future, McCloskey said. And Olinsky-Paul sees great potential for similar plans to be pursued nationwide. Nearly half of U.S. states have adopted 100 percent clean energy targets, he said, and distributed-energy programs like the Cape and Vineyard’s can make those goals more achievable by reducing the cost and strain electrification can create for the grid.

“If you’re going to do decarbonization, you have to do electrification,” Olinsky-Paul said. ​“And so there is going to be a huge need for some way of doing this without inadvertently causing massive new fossil fuel use” to generate more power.

The Cape Light Compact intends to release a full report on the deployment of the pilot in August, but feedback so far has been very positive from participants who appreciate the turnkey approach to comprehensive electrification, McCloskey said.

“There are definitely things that whoever is facilitating that program would need to look at, to game plan for,” he said. ​“But this is a great model.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Massachusetts home-electrification pilot could offer a national model on Apr 12, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sarah Shemkus, Canary Media.

The following is an extract from the introduction to the book Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes (2024) by Devan Hawkins.

In the predawn hours of April 3, 1948, rebels assembled on the slopes of Mount Hallasan, a volcano that is located at the center of Jeju Island. On that highest peak in South Korea, the rebels lit fires that were meant to signal the start of armed resistance against both the occupation of South Korea by the United States and in support of the reunification of Korea, which had been divided in half since the end of the World War II. This uprising was preceded by previous incidents in which police fatally fired on protesters.

In a letter sent to residents of the island, the rebels wrote:

Fellow citizens! Respectable parents and siblings! Today, on this day of April 3, your sons, daughters, and little brothers and sisters rose up in arms for the reunification and independence of our homeland, and for the complete liberation of the people. We must risk our lives for the opposition to the betrayal of the country and the unilateral election and government. We rose up in arms against the brutal slaughter done by American cannibals that force you into hardship and unhappiness. To vent your deep-rooted rancor we rouse up in arms. You should defend us who fight for the victory of our country and should rise up along with us, responding to the call of the country and its people.

Over the course of the next day, these rebels would launch attacks on police outposts and on other locations thought to contribute to repression on the island.

This was the beginning of the Jeju Uprising. Following failed negotiations with police, additional troops would be sent to the island to crush the rebellion. During the next several months, periodic fighting would continue between rebels on the island and Korean forces. Following an incident where members of the South Korean military sent to the island mutinied and killed many of their commanders, dictator Syngman Rhee declared martial law. As part of the military’s efforts to end the rebellion, horrific incidents including the destruction of entire villages, mass rape, and the massacre of thousands of civilians occurred. Reports of the number of dead vary significantly from a low of 15,000 to a high of 65,000. The vast majority of civilian deaths were the responsibility of South Korean security forces. Tens of thousands fled from Jeju to Japan to escape the violence. Three hundred villages and tens of thousands of houses were destroyed.

If you were a dedicated reader of The New York Times—the paper which declares on its front page that it publishes “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—during the Jeju Uprising you would know very little about the horrors that transpired on Jeju Island in 1948 and 1949. Using the Times search database, I only identified eight articles that discussed Jeju (then rendered as Cheju) for the entirety of 1948 and 1949. All of these articles were fairly short reports, appearing in the newspaper’s back pages. Many of them focused on the activities of the rebels:

     Communists on Cheju Attack Villages—Demand Police Surrender, No Election

     Constabulary Chief on Cheju Shot While Sleeping

     Snipers Fire at U.S. Plane At Airport in South Korea

As well as alleged involvement by the Soviet Union:

     Soviet Submarines Said To Help Reds in Korea

In the last article identified about Jeju, on April 1949, the Times devoted less than 50 words to publishing a United Press report about “1,193 Koreans Slain on Cheju” and the thousands more left homeless. The report makes no mention of responsibility for those dead, despite the fact that the vast majority of civilians were killed by the South Korean military. The number reported as being killed is an underestimate, at least by a factor of ten.

On the same day that last report about Jeju was published by the Times, a story appeared in the Times about the Berlin Airlift, an operation led by the United States and United Kingdom to supply West Berlin (an exclave of the United States-allied West Germany) with supplies after it had been blockaded by the Soviet-allied East Germany, which surrounded it. The period of the blockade and the airlift that followed almost perfectly matched with the period of the Jeju Uprising. During this period, there were over a hundred articles describing the blockade and the airlift that followed, many featured on the front page of the Times.

There are numerous reasons why the Berlin Airlift likely received more attention than the uprising and massacre on Jeju Island. Berlin is located in the center of Europe, while Jeju is a relatively remote island in East Asia. However, a year after the Jeju Uprising when the Chinese Communists captured Hainan, another remote island in East Asia, from the Chinese Nationalists, the Times published dozens of articles about the operation, suggesting that remoteness does not make significant reporting impossible.

Berlin was also seen as the frontline of the Cold War, while in the years before the Korean War, the Korean Peninsula was often treated as a periphery issue. However, during the period of the Jeju Uprising, the Times published hundreds of stories about Korea, many of which focused on infiltration of communists from the north into the south. Furthermore, the United States was already heavily invested in Korea, having occupied the southern half of the peninsula since the end of

World War II. At the time of the uprising, there were thousands of US troops in Korea. Indeed, a report from the South Korean government published decades after the uprising found that the United States shared responsibility for the military operations on Jeju Island.

The role that disregard for non-Europeans might play in the dearth of coverage should also be considered. Jeju Islanders, unlike Berliners, were East Asians and, therefore, potentially less sympathetic in the minds of some readers of the Times. To compare Jeju Island to another contemporaneous issue in Europe, the final operation of the Greek Civil War, which occurred a few months after the conclusion of the Jeju Uprising, received more coverage in one month than the Jeju Uprising received in a whole year. The fact that the Greek Civil War involved Europeans may have been a factor in this higher level of coverage.

There is another possible cause for the general lack of coverage of the Jeju Uprising: geopolitics. Berliners were a sympathetic population who were being oppressed by the new official enemy of the United States—the Soviet Union. In contrast, the people of Jeju Island were the victims of a regime that had been put into place and supported by the United States with the goal of preventing the spread of Soviet-aligned communism.

Stated another way, the people of Berlin were worthy victims and the people of Jeju Island were unworthy victims.

This formulation of Worthy and Unworthy victims was first developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their seminal book Manufacturing Consent. As they wrote:

Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found “worthy” and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage than those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly “unworthy.” Put another way, the media will be more likely to portray the victims of actions of official-state enemies in unfavorable terms, while portraying the victims of allies in more favorable terms.

In the book Herman and Chomsky go on to show how crimes committed in client states of the Soviet Union received far more attention than crimes in client states of the United States. For example, the murder of Catholic Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko “not only received far more coverage than Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered in the U.S. client-state El Salvador in 1980; he was given more coverage than the aggregate of one hundred religious victims killed in U.S. client states, although eight of those victims were U.S. citizens.” Herman and Chomsky’s book has been influential in how the US media and Western media are viewed more broadly, with writers like Robert McChesney, John Nicholas, and Alan MacLeod expanding on the work.

This formulation of “Worthy and Unworthy victims” is part of Herman and Chomsky’s larger Propaganda Model, which postulates that “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”

Herman and Chomsky’s argument is compelling and provocative because it argues that despite the fact that media in the United States is not state-run and press freedom is generally protected in the country, the media still serves a similar purpose as it did in the Soviet Union and other countries where media is
predominately state-run and where journalists do not have the same press freedom protections.

To explain their Propaganda Model, Herman and Chomsky proposed that there are five filters that tend to restrict media coverage in Western countries, particularly the United States. These filters are:

Ownership: Media companies are mostly large corporations with the fundamental imperative to make a profit. These companies are disincentivized from covering topics that may threaten their profit.

Advertising: In a similar way, almost all media companies are dependent on advertising for their revenue. Therefore, media companies are also disincentivized from covering topics that may lose them advertisers.

Sourcing: Media outlets frequently use official, government sources for their information. These sources will tend to reflect the biases of the government.

Flak: Individuals who provide dissenting viewpoints will often face concerted campaigns to discredit them. These campaigns will make journalists less likely to decide to cover stories that may result in such flak, including those that may portray allies of the United States in a negative light.

Anti-Communism/Fear: Reporting will often play into the fears of official enemies (Communists during the Cold War, Islamic Terrorism during the War on Terror, etc.). Playing into these fears will often mean that official state enemies will receive more coverage.

Together, these filters create a situation where even in a country, like the United States, with relatively few state controls on the media, reporting will tend to reflect the official standpoint of the government.

This tendency for reporting to reflect the standard positions of the government is seen most powerfully in foreign affairs.

Unlike domestic issues, where there is at least some daylight between the two major parties, with respect to foreign policy there is much less difference in foreign affairs. While the language used and the particular issues emphasized will often be different, the fundamental positions of both Democrats and Republicans do not tend to differ substantially. For example, if you compare each party’s platforms 5,6 before the 2016 election (in 2020 the Republicans did not adopt a new platform, not allowing for a direct comparison) with respect to Venezuela, Iran, Israel, China, and Russia, you generally see only minor differences. This book will try to make the argument that this same general uniformity in political perspectives about foreign affairs is reflected in media coverage in the United States.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Devan Hawkins.

The ruling Communist Party’s propaganda machine has been churning out stories about Lei washing his comrades' feet and darning their socks after a long march, propaganda posters of him helping villagers lay sandbags or wielding hand-grenades in a snowstorm, as well as a slew of books and patriotic movies about his life.

Much of the story is fiction, many commentators say, but it’s officially sanctioned and may not be questioned.

March 5 has been designated “Learn from Lei Feng Day,” and young people across the country attended ideological courses on him, “so that the Lei Feng spirit will shine in the new era,” state broadcaster CCTV said.

Meanwhile, volunteers turned out in cities and rural areas to offer their skills and expertise for free, from haircuts and blood pressure checks to lessons in how to use technology, it said.

“Young volunteers are ... patiently teaching the elderly to use smartphones, and popularizing anti-fraud knowledge,” CCTV said. “In the fields, volunteers bring professional agricultural technology training to growers [and] deliver practical agricultural knowledge to farmers.”

The party-backed Global Times newspaper described Lei as “a late soldier renowned for his generosity and altruistic deeds” in a post to X on March 5.

“Groups of volunteers, including soldiers, police officers and lawyers, provided various free services for residents and visitors, such as hairdressing, legal consultation and career planning in downtown #Shanghai,” the post said.

Image protected by defamation laws

Lei’s image as an icon of Chinese communism is protected by laws banning the “defamation” of People’s Liberation Army personnel, and of the Communist Party’s “revolutionary heroes and martyrs.”

In 2017, TV host Liang Hongda sparked a furious backlash in state media for “defaming” Lei after he suggested that much of the propaganda around the soldier was staged.

(Public Domain)

“Lei Feng is a role model that all Chinese young people learn from,” state news agency Xinhua wrote in a 2023 feature article about people who take Lei’s reported selflessness as a model.

“Times change, but we still need the Lei Feng spirit,” the article said. “The things he did may seem trivial, but behind them was a nobility that we can all achieve.”

It cited the sacrifice of a character in science-fiction author Liu Cixin’s blockbuster novel The Wandering Earth who gave his life to save the planet, saying Lei’s spirit of self-sacrifice still has a place in an age of high technology.

Born to poor peasant family

According to the official account, Lei Feng was born in a poor peasant family in Hunan’s Wangcheng county in 1940, and “lived a life of hunger and cold from childhood.”

After Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Lei became a diligent disciple of Mao’s political writings, the story goes, although there is widespread skepticism around the official hagiography of Lei.

(Aly Song/REUTERS)

“Under the nourishment of Mao Zedong Thought, he grew up to be a great proletarian revolutionary fighter, an outstanding member of the Communist Party of China, and a good son of the motherland and the people,” according to the description of a 1963 book about Lei Feng’s life titled: Lei Feng: Mao Zedong’s Good Soldier.

The official account of his death in 1962 -- that a power pole fell on him -- was overturned in 1997 when his former comrade Qiao Anshan confessed to having crushed Lei by reversing into the power pole with a truck that the pair of them had been ordered to wash.

RELATED STORIES

China passes ‘patriotic education’ law to reinforce party line

Comics Chief Pays Tribute at Chinese Hero’s Memorial After Internet Ban

Chinese Media Denounces TV Host Who ‘Defamed’ Communist Hero

China moves to boost ‘patriotic education,’ including in Hong Kong

The ongoing veneration of “revolutionary heroes” is part of a nationwide enforcement of patriotic feeling under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

The Patriotic Education Law, which took effect on Jan. 1, 2024, was passed in a bid to boost patriotic feeling among the country’s youth, and applies to local and central government departments, schools and even families.

It also forms part of the government’s “ethnic unity” policy, which has included forcible assimilation schemes targeting Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, along with bans on ethnic minority language-teaching in Inner Mongolia and among Tibetan communities in Sichuan.

Little interest

Li Meng, a resident of the eastern province of Jiangsu, said there is scant interest in Lei Feng among ordinary Chinese, however.

“They’re promoting learning from Lei Feng, but ordinary people living in the real world don’t buy it,” Li told RFA Mandarin in an interview on Thursday.

“Telling the truth, doing good deeds and helping others don’t always have a good outcome.”

The government has to work extra hard to get people to think about Lei, said a resident of the eastern province of Shandong who gave only the surname Lu for fear of reprisals.

“Everyone knows that local governments are just intervening to get people to [learn from Lei Feng],” she said. “It’s all fake, and not worth bothering with.”

“They tell so many lies, they even believe them themselves,” Lu said.

Scholar Lu Chenyuan said Lei Feng’s image is a product of the party propaganda machine.

“Lei Feng’s actions, including the photos, were staged,” Lu said. “Anyone with a little bit of intelligence knows that.”

“There’s no way that such a fake idol can improve the morality of the Chinese people.”

He said figures like Lei Feng are a feature of totalitarian rule.

“They promote illusory moral idols and try to reshape social morality with the help of past propaganda models,” Lu said. “But it won’t have any practical effect.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang for RFA Mandarin.

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

I was born on a farm about 15 minutes outside of Iowa City. My dad still lives on that farm and so I still get to go back there and a lot of my family is out there. I grew up kind of all over the US with my mom because my parents divorced when I was quite young. So my experience of Iowa itself was mostly in relation to taking trips out there and spending downtime on the farm, in the fields.

In terms of movement, my mom really likes ballet and so I did have the experience of taking some classes when I was in middle school, but then with trying to figure out my gender and sexuality and stuff towards the end of middle school and high school, I just kind of shut down physically in my body in terms of wanting to be in that kind of creative movement at all. It wasn’t until I moved to New York City for college when I was 17 that I had the space to re-evaluate what I wanted to spend my time doing, what I wanted to explore, and I decided to just start taking classes at the dance program of Hunter College.

My understanding is that you moved to New York at 17, so that seems to be where you got engaged with music, trans activism, acting, and modeling. Was EmergeNYC a big part of that?

Oh, yeah. That was a program that I was a part of right after I graduated from college. Around that time, I was very much figuring out how I wanted to deal with my own [gender] transition, and to own the way that I needed to relate to the world.

[The EmergeNYC] program was definitely a big stepping stone for me to start to think about the ways that my presence in the world could do things to change it. Or, to use my art practice, that was centered in movement at the time, to try to really affect people with the way that I use my body and put my body in a public space, because we did public performances and staged performances, too.

At that time, I was thinking a lot about the way that trans bodies get dehumanized in daily interactions. In that program, I was trying to figure out how to use my body, just make my body be in public, in a way that was a response to that dehumanization. I wanted to stop people in their tracks to [push them to] consider the way that they would register a body that they perceive as male, but it’s engaging in feminine truth.

What sort of timeframe are we looking at for those performances, early 2000s?

That was 2014 and 2015. Then, the trajectory of my life did change a lot where I got wrapped up in dealing with my transition, and getting these surgeries that I needed to feel in my body. It was after getting those gender-affirming surgeries, and needing to take a break for months from life basically, because of recovery time and things like that.

I ended up shifting a lot of the way that my life was structured, and I ended up randomly getting connected to this Mother [Agency, NYC] agent, Timothy Rosado, who I had met through someone else who was part of that EmergeNYC program. And Timothy asked me, “Do you want me to act as your agent, and help you model or something like that?” And I was just so raw and unsure of myself at that point in my life. I was just like, “Okay, I’ll just do whatever. This seems like a thing that I shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to try.” So, modeling became my main work and thing that I was known for.

I know that you went to New York to dance initially, and you got involved in the public performances, then you went through the transition and modeling entered the picture. At what point did music enter the picture, because I’m going to ask about TRANSA?

I have always played music, and always loved music, and that’s always been a part of my life from when I was very little. When I was living in New York, which was up until 2020, I would go to things, and I had a lot of friends and community who made music, and stuff like that.

I’ve put so much of my heart into this huge musical project that is TRANSA. That happened because I had all this space and time in my life around 2020 and 2021 where I was not in the daily grind of New York, and I had time to consider working with Red Hot [Organization] and with [executive director of Red Hot and co-producer on TRANSA] Dust [Reid] specifically, who asked me to work with them on this project, TRANSA.

How did it begin? Was it an email, or a phone call, or a text? And had you worked with Dust on anything before that?

We met on this short film shoot [in 2020]. I was in this short film [City Bird] about the idea of returning to nature, and connecting with a sense of ourselves beyond just being in the grind of city life. That was on NOWNESS [in 2021], and Dust was friends with the filmmakers. He was on set as a playlist and vibes curator. It was really cute actually, because that whole day I was just talking with Dust about the beauty of the music that they had put together, and a lot of the songs were from artists that were my favorite artists. It was people like Beverly Glenn Copeland, who ended up as one of the key pillars of TRANSA, that we connected on really deeply.

So, we met on that and then stayed in touch. It was in the beginning of 2021, after the passing of [music producer, and trans activist] SOPHIE, that Dust reached out to me and was like, “Hey, I’ve had the idea of doing something that relates to the trans community through Red Hot.” Dust had made a project with Red Hot before and just reached out to me to see if I would want to concept this thing with them, and pitch this to Red Hot, and try to make it with them. In the beginning of 2021, we started working on that.

How do you like to work on artistic projects? Are you naturally a collaborator or do you like having control over every aspect? And on top of that, how do you deal with conflicting ideas or plans?

I love collaborating. I think that, in my life, I’ve had the experience of having a really strong, almost spiritual vision of something that I want to make, or that I need to see happen in the world. I’ve often been through a kind of meditative listening to my inner heart, and that’s been a defining process for me.

In the context of working on this project, I spent a lot of time thinking about it in that same meditative way, but it was this different experience of going in with Dust initially, to kind of concept this whole thing out, and ultimately to do that kind of collaborative work.

In the process of making this project, we really wanted all the music that we asked for, from specifically the trans artists that we asked, on the project to be something that came from their dreams, and hopes, and desires. So, it was a lot of working with them to just make a dream happen, which is such a beautiful process.

Once you and Dust committed to TRANSA, how did you approach artists? And if any of them said no, was it difficult not to take that personally?

Doing something like this is such a crazy, unique thing to be working on, where you’re doing all these levels of outreach and communication, and trying to field things to so many different artists. Our approach with each artist was to have a different way that we thought would be best to approach them. [We might do that] through personal connections we had to each artist, or where we had certain kind of connections to different parts of artists’ management, or teams, or things like that. For every artist, it was a different tactic. We did have to be tactical about this project, because it’s hard to convince management, teams, and people who are trying to make money that it’s meant to be raising awareness about, and supporting, trans people. That’s the reality of being an artist in capitalism, where it’s hard to get enthusiasm about a non-profit project.

What was your hit rate like? Were there many people who said no?

For the most part, we actually had a lot of “yes’s,” and you can see evidence by the sheer breadth and scope of the project, which is amazing. We did get definite “no’s”, which a lot of the time were [teams or managers] saying that “this person’s not available,” or “they’d love to, but they don’t have the time,” which is fine.

I’m familiar with that as a freelance writer, I assure you.

Oh my god, I’m sure. But it is interesting to think about that in this context where we are asking for something that is related to an—unfortunately—controversial topic, in some way. It was hard not to sometimes think about the reasonings behind why certain artists might not be available, and we did actually have some notes from trans artists, too, who didn’t want to be part of a project that really centered around transness, which is totally so understandable because I’ve been in places in my life where I didn’t want to talk about, or relate things, to my transness because it can be really vulnerable and kind of a difficult thing to talk about at times.

And I would assume that people don’t want to contain their identity right down to this one aspect of who they are.

Right. Yes. But, in my thinking, or in my feeling, at least in the way that I relate to it personally, that aspect of my identity has been this really beautiful font of creativity and connection, and one of the most magical things that I am so grateful for, ultimately.

Dust is older than you. He’s had a longer career. What did you learn from him during the years of working together?

I appreciate you bringing it up because I think I’ve thought a lot about how, in the context of the music industry, it is still in many ways a guy’s club. It is an industry that has historically been really dominated both by men in general, but also by a kind of paternalistic attitude towards women, specifically, and this way of talking down to women. I am so grateful to have had Dust help me learn how to navigate all these peculiarities and specificities of the music industry.

How heavily were you involved in the technical elements and were there practical skills as far as production and making a music album that were new to you? How’d you go with that?

I have some degree of experience with running live sound, and these different things that are part of the technical side of the industry. I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to be in a professional, very well set-up recording studio before. And so that has been a beautiful thing to be able to be brought into as part of this project. I think that is something that a lot of specifically trans artists, and artists who don’t have a lot of resources, or are marginalized in different ways, often have a lot of trouble just being able to be in rooms like that, where you have a $10,000 piece of recording equipment that creates this beautiful sound.

What skills or methods, maybe it’s something relating to time management or ways of communicating or dealing with conflict, did you absorb during those years of working on TRANSA with so many artists who would’ve had, I assume, really different approaches to making music or working with other people? And in addition, were those skills something that you were able to use in modeling and acting?

I think one of the big things that I’ve learned over the years of working on this project, in terms of communication, is to approach everyone with a lot of grace about what they’re coming to the table with. I mean, you never know what is going on with the process of an artist trying to make a recording happen, in terms of things being delayed, or difficult, or things like that. I had to accept that, in some ways, in working with so many different people, my communication wouldn’t be perfect.

And, particularly in working on something that is meant to be this celebration of trans people, and this nonprofit venture, I wanted to take the utmost care with every little bit of communication that I could.

I’ve tried to do that, but I’ve also had to be able to let go in some ways, and be like, “I am trying very hard with how I handle communication with a hundred different artists.” You can’t be perfect, and I think I’ve learned that that’s something that comes with working on a larger-scale project. It’s not something that I’ve necessarily reconciled in myself.

Things will be late, and deadlines will get missed, but I think the thing that makes it harder for me is that I’m on this project as a trans person who is very familiar with the ways that any kind of media industry is very quick to exploit and discard trans people. I know we’re not doing that in working on this project. I know that everyone who’s touched this project has given so much of their heart to it, but I also know that none of us are perfect, and we will miss an email, or something will happen that we weren’t able to figure out in time for making a recording happen, or we didn’t have the right outreach to the right artists at the right time.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Cat Woods.

Early on Election Day, highways in the St. Louis area were inundated with water. Over several days, intense storms battered Missouri, bringing six to 10 inches of rain — record-breaking amounts for November.

The flash flooding killed at least five people, including two elderly poll workers whose vehicle was swept from a state highway.

Mayors along the Mississippi River have watched for years as intensifying rain storms and flooding wreak havoc on their communities.

Take Grafton, Illinois, which escaped Election Day flash flooding but suffered $160,000 to $170,000 in damages from a heavy rain event in July. The town’s main intersection was blocked with logs and debris, and the storm blew out a water line and left streets in need of repair.

But Grafton never received a federal disaster declaration and was not eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Instead, it paid for road and water-line repairs through its Department of Public Works’ annual budget. As a result, the city could no longer purchase new trucks for snow plowing this year, as it had planned.

“What it means is that we’ll limp through another year, keep the vehicles running,” said Grafton Mayor Michael Morrow, who oversees the $1.2 million annual budget for the small riverfront city of about 600.

River communities have suffered repeated losses. But federal disaster funding can take weeks, months or even years to pay out. Traditional insurance programs are tied to property and require proof of loss for a payout, which can be burdensome and lengthy to assemble. 

So this fall, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI) announced a new insurance pilot, with hopes of better helping river towns recover. 

MRCTI, which represents 105 cities along the 10 mainstem states of the Mississippi River Basin, is working with Munich Re, a German multinational insurance company, to create the insurance product. 

The resulting pilot will test a novel type of insurance pool — called parametric insurance — that is designed to rapidly fund emergency response after natural disasters such as flooding. 

Pilot will test usefulness of new “parametric” insurance policies

The likely cause of intensifying rainfall and floods is human-caused climate change, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a scientific report created every four years for the United States Congress and the President, to help explain the impacts, risks and vulnerabilities associated with a changing global climate.

In 2019, communities in the Basin saw months of flooding, spanning across the Mississippi, Missouri and Arkansas rivers. Reported losses totaled almost $25 billion across at least 17 states, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The central U.S. is emerging as a new flash flooding hotspot, according to research published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal. With its new role as a hotspot comes more disaster damage – and need for insurance that addresses that.

While conventional indemnity insurance requires insured owners to prove specific losses by amassing evidence and presenting pre-storm documentation, parametric insurance pays out quickly after agreed-upon “triggers” – such as wind speeds or river heights – reach a certain level. 

For the MRCTI pilot, Munich Re has suggested using watershed data from the U.S. Geological Survey to determine the best gauges along the river to measure flood depth. Once the river flooding reaches a certain depth, the payout would be triggered. 

Getting that trigger right is key, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, chief executive officer of Climate Resilience for All, a nonprofit focused on climate adaptation.

“You want to have sufficient understanding of how you set the triggers at a certain place and why,” she said. “There’s a lot of engagement necessary to get everybody on the same page about what the product is, how it works, what the trigger should be.”

The goal of Munich Re’s pilot program is to demonstrate in real-time how a parametric insurance payout policy would function in current insurance-market conditions and how swift payouts could better assist a city’s disaster response in the immediate days following a flood.

First, Munich Re will develop a mock-up of the insurance policy for one hazard – flooding – with the understanding that multiple hazards, like intense heat, or drought, could be added later, said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of MRCTI, and, as of November 6, a newly elected state representative for Missouri District 105. 

The mock-up would calculate a range of premium costs and theoretical payout options that would be available for cities of varying sizes along the river. But the pilot won’t cost the cities a cent – and it won’t pay them anything either, until the pilot moves into implementation. It’s unclear which entities will ultimately foot the bill of the pilot and eventual product because it’s so early in development.

When Munich Re moves into implementation, individual city governments would hold the policies and receive payouts. Wellenkamp hopes to convince larger corporations that rely on a healthy and functioning Mississippi River hydrology to pick up the tab on the premiums, he said. 

Quick payouts could take burdens off cities

“In the first 24 to 72 hours after a disaster event, very little money can help a whole heck of a lot,” Wellenkamp said. “We use that time for evacuations and to move people out of additional harm’s way in the aftermath.”

But soon after the initial emergency response, municipalities start to look for funds for longer-term cleanup and repair. Under the current paradigm, that money can be hard to tap.  

In the spring of 2019, major flooding on the Mississippi inundated many communities, including Grafton, where the downtown partially closed and people were forced to evacuate. 

The Trump administration didn’t declare a major disaster until September of that year, months after flood waters had receded. It took until 2022 for federal money to reach Grafton, Morrow said.

“The former administration went through that flood,” Morrow said. “I’m the mayor now and I was getting some of the money that they had put in years ago.”

Read Next

Climate-fueled extreme weather is hiking up car insurance rates

Kiley Price, Inside Climate News

That wait places stress on a city’s finances, especially smaller ones like Grafton, Morrow added. 

Traditional insurance doesn’t always help either. Grafton has a flood policy but it only covers property owned by the city. Residents and businesses in the community would need to take out their own flood protection. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which underwrites many flood insurance policies, has various coverage restrictions. For example, NFIP doesn’t cover roads or wastewater infrastructure. 

The policies also require proof of loss before issuing a check because they cover specific damage, like to a particular building or its contents. This “proof” can take days to document, and longer to process, which delays how fast a local government can begin repairs. Without proper pre-storm documentation, damage can sometimes be nearly impossible to prove.

Parametric insurance – which works with measurable triggers and isn’t tied to documentable losses – could ease the process. 

Cities from the headwaters to the mouth of the Mississippi could buy into the policy, creating a pool that spreads out the risk that any individual community faces. 

“Not every city is going to flood every year, but the flooding will impact at least one section of the river,” said Raghuveer Vinukollu, head of climate insights and advisory for  Munich Re in the U.S.

The insurance pool would protect a town from the risk of ruin, and a more timely payout would increase the town’s resiliency through swift reinvestment in its infrastructure, he added.

Parametric insurance in the Mississippi Delta and beyond

For flooding on rivers, this kind of insurance risk pool is new territory, Vinukollu said. As climate risks become more extreme, the insurance industry is working with a number of communities to address their evolving needs, he said.

While parametric insurance is still developing, one early example stands out to Vinukollu—the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF).

CCRIF pools risk for Caribbean countries, which face hurricane risks each year. By pooling risk together each island can receive a larger payout than if it had taken out an individual policy. 

In July, a mere 14 days after Hurricane Beryl devastated 90 percent of buildings and agriculture on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, the government of Grenada received its first payout from CCRIF to fund disaster recovery. 

The tropical cyclone policy paid more than $42 million to Grenada, the largest single payout from CCRIF since its inception in 2007.

In the Mississippi River Basin, Vinukollu hopes to apply this kind of shared risk pool to insure cities at risk for inland flooding. 

Read Next

The flood that forced a housing reckoning in Vermont

Zoya Teirstein

“The triggers are different, the perils are different, but the concept is the same,” said Vinukollu.

Given its position near the end of the Mississippi River, New Orleans is no stranger to the devastating impacts of extreme weather. Several city-run institutions, such as NOLA Public Schools, have taken out parametric insurance policies to protect important infrastructure. 

One of the first tests of these policies came in September when Hurricane Francine‘s storm surge, rain and winds pelted southern Louisiana. 

But NOLA Public Schools did not receive a payout from its policy with Swiss Re. 

While wind speeds were high, they were not high enough to meet the policy’s triggers of more than 100 miles per hour for one minute.

New Orleans is more likely to experience repetitive, severe losses from named storms than a city in the upper Basin, such as Minneapolis, so cities closer to the Gulf Coast may end up paying higher premiums once the policy officially rolls out, said Wellenkamp, of MRCTI.

Cities that choose to cover more hazards or lower-level disasters may pay higher premiums, because it could result in more frequent payouts, Wellenkamp said. Ultimately, municipalities could still end up footing the bill for events like the July flooding in Grafton or the Election Day storms in St. Louis.

McLeod argues communities shouldn’t expect payouts from parametric insurance all that often. “Just by the nature of the product it shouldn’t [pay every year],” she said. “Insurance is for the worst of the worst.”

Munich Re advises that parametric insurance works best to complement – not replace – traditional insurance policies. But company officials believe that these new policies offer the chance for insurance to adapt to changing risk landscapes, as weather events become more extreme.

Despite its potential to facilitate faster disaster response, parametric insurance is no silver bullet, said McLeod, of Climate Resilience for All. 

The best solution to her is reducing the underlying risk from climate change. 

“The big picture is it’s a really important tool in financing and managing the risks of climate change, and we need every tool,” she said. 

But more than any new financial tool, McLeod said, the most effective financial step would be addressing the root causes of climate change, and building – or rebuilding – more natural protections, like wetlands.

“You’ve got to reduce the risk [or] you won’t be able to afford the insurance on it,” she said. “It’s not insurance if you know this thing is going to happen.”

The Lens’ Marta Jewson contributed reporting to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri. Disclosure: both the Desk and MRCTI receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Support our independent reporting network with a donation. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mississippi River towns pilot new insurance model to help with disaster response on Nov 23, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Delaney Dryfoos, The Lens.

Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans, but they share the same strategy: Fear works.

Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that are dangerous.

This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry (Psychology Today, 12/27/21), resulting in the old press adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Politicians, too, are aware of this brain hack (Conversation, 1/11/19)—and no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President Donald Trump (New York Times, 10/1/24).

This is why coverage of issues in this election season have dovetailed so well with the Trump campaign’s lines of attack against the Biden/Harris administration—even in outlets that are editorially opposed, at least ostensibly, to Trumpism.

Scary issues

Corporate media rarely point, as this New York Times graphic (7/24/24) did, that crime has fallen dramatically since 1991, and continued to fall during the Biden/Harris administration.

Take immigration, a topic that could easily be covered as a human interest story, with profiles of people struggling to reach a better life against stark challenges. Instead, corporate media tend to report on it as a “border crisis,” with a “flood” of often-faceless migrants whose very existence is treated as a threat (FAIR.org, 5/24/21).

This is the news business deciding that fear attracts and holds an audience better than empathy does. And that business model would be undermined by reporting that consistently acknowledged that the percentage of US residents who are undocumented workers rose only slightly under the Biden administration, from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022 (the latest year available)—and is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24; FAIR.org, 10/16/24).

With refugees treated as a scourge in centrist and right-wing media alike, is it any wonder that Trump can harvest votes by promising to do something about this menace? Eleven percent of respondents in NBC‘s exit poll said that immigration was the single issue that mattered most in casting their vote; 90% of the voters in that group voted for Trump.

Crime is another fear-based issue that Trump hammered on in his stump speech. “Have you seen what’s been happening?” he said of Washington, DC (Washington Post, 3/11/24). “Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.”

Trump could make such hyperbolic claims sound credible because corporate media had paved the way with alarmist coverage of crime (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). It was rare to see a report that acknowledged, as an infographic in the New York Times (7/24/24) did, that crime has dropped considerably from 2020 to 2024, when it hit a four-decade low (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).

‘Classic fear campaign’

Republicans spent so much on transphobic ads (Truthout, 11/5/04) because they knew voters had been primed by media to fear trans people.

Trans people, improbably enough, are another favorite subject of fear stories for media and MAGA alike. “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people this election cycle,” Truthout (11/5/04) reported, with Trump spending “more money on anti-trans ads than on ads concerning housing, immigration and the economy combined.”

Journalist Erin Reed (PBS NewsHour, 11/2/24) described this as “a classic fear campaign”:

The purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you’re willing to throw everything else away because you’re scared.

Transphobia has been a major theme in right-wing media, but has been a prominent feature of centrist news coverage as well, particularly in the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23). Rather than reporting centered on trans people, which could have humanized a marginalized demographic that’s unfamiliar to many readers, the Times chose instead to present trans youth in particular as a threat—focusing on  “whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly,” as FAIR noted.

‘Alienating voters’ with ‘progressive agenda’

The New York Times (11/6/24) didn’t want people to vote for Trump—but its reporting contributed to the perception that “an infusion of immigrants” and “a porous southern border” were among “the nation’s urgent problems.”

But rather than examining their own role in promoting the irrational fears that were the lifeblood of the successful Trump campaign, corporate media focused on their perennial electoral scapegoat: the left (FAIR.org, 11/5/21). The New York Times editorial board (11/6/24) quickly diagnosed the Democrats’ problem (aside from sticking with Biden too long):

The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election…. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.

It’s a mind-boggling contortion of logic. The Times doesn’t say which aspects of Democrats’ “progressive agenda” were so alienating to people. But the media all agreed—based largely on exit polls—that Republicans won because of the economy and immigration. The “persuasive message” and “vision…to improve the lives of all Americans” that Democrats failed to offer was pretty clearly an economic one. Which is exactly what progressives in the party have been pushing for the last decade: Medicare for All, a wealth tax, a living minimum wage, etc. In other words, if the Democrats had adopted a progressive agenda, it likely would have been their best shot at offering that vision to improve people’s lives.

More likely, the paper was referring to “identity politics,” which has been a media scapegoat for years—indeed, pundits roundly blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump on identity politics (or “political correctness”) (FAIR.org, 11/20/16). Then, as now, it was an accusation without evidence.

‘Democratic self-sabotage’

The Washington Post‘s Matt Bai (11/6/24) thought Trump’s anti-trans ads resonated with “a lot of traditionally Democratic voters who feel like the party is consumed with cultural issues.”

At the Washington Post, columnist Matt Bai‘s answer (11/6/24) to “Where Did Kamala Harris’s Campaign Go Wrong?” was, in part, that “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics,” naming Trump’s transphobic ads as evidence of that. (In a Post roundup of columnist opinions, Bai declared that Harris “couldn’t outrun her party’s focus on trans rights and fighting other forms of oppression.”)

At the same time, Bai acknowledged that he does “think of Trump as being equally consumed with identity—just a different kind.” Fortunately for Republicans, Bai and his fellow journalists never take their kind of identity politics as worth highlighting (FAIR.org, 9/18/24).

George Will (10/6/24), a Never Trumper at the Washington Post, chalked up Harris’s loss largely to “the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president.”

Bret Stephens (10/6/24), one of the New York Times‘ set of Never Trumpers, likewise pointed a finger at Democrats’ supposed tilt toward progressives and “identity.” Much like other pundits, Stephens argued that “the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity.”

Of the Harris campaigns’ “tactical missteps,” Stephens’ first complaint was “her choice of a progressive running mate”—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He also accused the party of a “dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.” Here he mentioned trans kids’ rights, DEI seminars and “new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive,” none of which Harris vocally embraced.

But underlying all of these arguments is a giant fundamental problem: It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive. News articles (e.g., Slate, 9/5/24; Forbes, 11/5/24) regularly acknowledged that Harris, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, for instance, shied away from centering her gender or ethnic background, or appealing to identity in her campaign.

‘Wary and alienated’

In a rare instance of actually listening to left-wing voices, a New York Times article (10/24/24) focused on pre-election warnings that Harris “risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”

The Times‘ own reporting made Harris’s distancing from progressive politics perfectly clear not two weeks ago, in an article (10/24/24) headlined, “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated.” In a rare example of the Times centering a left perspective in a political article, reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green wrote:

In making her closing argument this month, Ms. Harris has campaigned four times with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman, stumping with her more than with any other ally. She has appeared more in October with the billionaire Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers and one of the nation’s most visible labor leaders.

She has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.

Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Photograph Source: Presidential Executive Office of Russia – CC BY 4.0

The Biden administration is in denial regarding the dangerous Cold War that currently exists between the United States, China, and Russia that qualifies as Cold War II.  The current Cold War promises to be more dangerous, more costly, and more implacable than its predecessor, which dominated the 1950s and early 1960s.  Fortunately, the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon lessened the impact of the Cold War in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, and the U.S. failure in Vietnam, respectively.

The Kennedy administration learned from the Cuban crisis in 1962 that it must  enhance dialogue between the superpowers and, as a result, created a Hot Line between Moscow and Washington.  Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev also put the two nations on the road to arms control and disarmament with the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963.  Kennedy had to take on the opposition of the Pentagon to gain support for the PTBT, which was a decisive marker in the bureaucratic politics of the 1960s.  The arms control dialogue opened the door to detente.

The Nixon administration moved even more adroitly in the 1970s as National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger developed a strategy of triangular relations that allowed the United States to have better relations with the Soviet Union and China than Moscow and Beijing had with each other.  This triangularity led the Kremlin to seek closer relations with Washington, leading to two major arms control agreements, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.  U.S. relations with China also became more stable and predictable.

The Kennedy and Nixon national security teams understood that George F. Kennan’s policy of Containment that had dominated U.S. strategy in the international arena since the end of World War II had outlived its usefulness.  Unfortunately, the Biden administration is relying on its own policy of Containment—indeed Dual Containment—to control its relations with both Russia and China.  The idea that China can be contained by U.S. power is counter-productive because the Chinese have developed a strong military and economic posture in the Asian arena, dominating trade in the Indo-Pacific region as well as making significant progress in the Global South at the expense of U.S. interests. 

Dual Containment is failing for a variety of reasons.  First, the policy of painting both Russia and China with the same brush, which is supported in the mainstream media and the foreign policy community, is senseless.  The policy has helped to push Moscow and Beijing together, which finds them in their closest relationship in history.  In terms of triangulation, the United States is now the odd man out, and the Biden administration is doing nothing to change the dynamics.

Moscow and Beijing were ideological allies in Cold War I, but currently they are driven by very different policy interests.  They have avoided a mutual defense treaty, and China has resisted Russia’s efforts to get Beijing to agree to a new natural gas pipeline (“Power of Siberia 2”) between the two nations.  China, moreover, has avoided providing Russia with lethal weaponry for the war in Ukraine. China’s hesitancy should provide diplomatic openings for the United States.

Second, the conventional wisdom regarding Russia is driven by a Cold War model that exaggerates Russia’s power and influence.  Much was made out of President Vladimir Putin’s recent trip to North Korea, including hysteria about the threat of war in Asia and the possibility of an “October surprise” between Moscow and Pyongyang that would target the United States.  Rather, I would argue Putin’s trip to North Korea was a sign of Russian weakness, with Moscow needing more weapons to deal with a stalemated situation in Ukraine and pointing to a struggling Russian military economy that requires assistance from such weak nations as North Korea and Iran.  

Third, many nations throughout Asia, Africa, and South America want no part of a Cold War between the United States, Russia, and China.  Biden’s national security team seems to be echoing the policy of President Eisenhower’s Cold War secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who preached to the international community that you’re “either with us or against us.”  It’s simply not working!  The global community isn’t buying into U.S. exaggerations of the international power and influence of Moscow and Beijing.  Unlike the United States, Russia and China are not trying to ideologize or politicize their relations with the Global South…and they are having far more success than the United States as a result.

Fourth, the cost of Cold War II will increase significantly if we do not reverse course.  The Pentagon’s budget is already approaching $900 billion, and the total cost of national security spending exceeds $1.2 trillion, which is greater than the budgets of all the nations in the global community combined.  As a result of the worsening triangular situation, we are witnessing the start of a strategic and nuclear arms race that will benefit no one, except weapons manufacturers.  The increased costs of military spending and nuclear modernization is ignoring the fact that we have weakened Russia with the expansion of NATO on its western border, and that we have outpaced China by expanding relations with Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea.  Most NATO nations are significantly expanding their defense budgets, and the nations of the Indo-Pacific that I’ve cited are doing so as well.

The post The US is Mired in a Cold War Model From the 1950s appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

Students and faculty at The New School, home to the first faculty Gaza solidarity encampment, have announced they reached a deal with the university to hold a vote on divesting from Israel by June 14. The agreement comes after months of campus protests, encampments and the occupation of a university building to demand The New School divest its endowment from companies arming and supporting Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank. The school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter has said the university currently has ties to several companies that are “actively involved in, and benefiting from, the genocide in Palestine,” including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Google and Caterpillar. “What this is not is an end to war or famine or occupation, and so we’re keeping our eyes on the bigger picture, which is Palestine,” says Alexandra Chasin, a professor at The New School and member of the faculty encampment negotiating team. “We hope to be a model, or at least to help organizers at other universities, as well.”

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

After AstraZeneca’s admission in court, many social media users claimed that the government removed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image from the vaccine certificates after its side effects had been revealed.

Congress’ Professor Varsha Eknath Gaikwad shared one such vaccine certificate that did not feature Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image. While sharing it, she claimed that his image was removed from the vaccine certificate since AstraZeneca admitted that its vaccine could cause heart attacks.

Retired Indian Air Force fighter pilot Rajiv Tyagi also made a similar claim in a tweet.

Supreme Court senior advocate Prashant Bhushan also made a sarcastic jab at the prime minister while promoting the claim, calling it a wonder of Modi.

Fact Check

Alt News performed a keyword search using terms related to this issue, which led us to an article published on May 1 by ‘The Print‘. According to an officer of the health ministry cited in the report, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image had been removed from the COVID vaccine certificate as per the election Model Code of Conduct.

Another article covering this was found on on ‘The Hindu‘ website. It states that the Election Commission had instructed the Union health ministry to remove Prime Minister Modi’s image from COVID vaccine certificates before elections commenced in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry.

It is pertinent to add that the same was done during assembly elections in various states in 2022 as well. This January 9, 2022 report in the Deccan herald headlined “No photo of PM Modi on Covid vaccination certificates in 5 poll-bound states as MCC kicks in” states that “Covid vaccination certificates issued in the five poll-bound states (Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur and Goa) will not have Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s photo since the model code of conduct has come into force there…”

To sum it up, several politicians have falsely claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image was removed from vaccine certificates after rare side effects of Covishield were revealed. However, in reality, the image was removed from the vaccine certificate to comply with the Model Code of Conduct in poll-bound states.

The post PM Modi’s photo removed from vaccine certificate as per model code; nothing to do with AstraZeneca side effects appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Assam’s roads – Before and after Modi Government pic.twitter.com/baIwad7Vxc

— Himanta Biswa Sarma (Modi Ka Parivar) (@himantabiswa) April 25, 2024

Fact Check

In the part of the video that apparently shows roads before the Modi government came to power, we spotted a car with the registration number AS01DT6808. Upon checking this registration number on the CarInfo website, Alt News found that the vehicle had been registered on August 2, 2018. This means that the video of the potholed road was not from before the Modi government came into power, but from 2018 or later, when the BJP was in power both in Assam and at the Centre.

BJP has been in power in the state since May 24, 2016, and at the Centre since May 26, 2014, with Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister.

The video posted by Himanta Biswa Sarma was edited and flipped, so we have flipped it back in the screenshot below to display the car’s registration number correctly.

In the same video, a car with LED daytime running lamps (DRLs) resembling arrows can also be seen. Upon searching, we discovered that this vehicle is a Hyundai Grand i10 Nios Facelift launched in 2023. This model introduced the new DRL design. Several news websites and automotive magazines had also published reports about this new design. Therefore, the clip depicting the broken road, claimed by Himanta Biswa Sarma to be from before the Modi government, is actually from 2023 or later.

To sum it up, the clips of potholed and waterlogged roads tweeted by Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma as the condition of roads before the Modi government were definitely shot after the Modi government had come to power in 2014.   

The post Assam CM’s blooper: Car registered in 2018, 2023 facelift model in Sarma’s tweet showing roads ‘before Modi govt’ appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

It’s a double-edged sword. For me it was integral because I was incredibly bored when I was young. I was homeschooled, lived out in the middle of nowhere. The only way I could entertain myself was through music and art. It’s something I think about a lot even now because I still live in Amarillo. Sometimes I think being entertained is the death of creativity. Boredom can be one of the greatest things to inspire creativity. Boredom forces me to do things because there’s a sense of paranoia, a fear of missing out. Musically, the culture is not in Amarillo. Whenever I go to L.A., it feels like everything’s happening, it kind of blows my brain. I always knew if I lived in L.A. I would be so overwhelmed that I probably wouldn’t make things anymore.

I’d imagine it pushed you to be more self-sufficient as well.

Absolutely. When I was a teenager, I got into John Fahey, like a lot of others have. I dove into it head first, but I wasn’t associated with any kind of regional scene, I had none of that. It opens up this whole Pandora’s box. We’re living in this post-genre, post-everything age. I was reading about this shoegaze band, they’re super young and their influencers are wild, all over the place. Thinking about bands like 100 Gecs, the post-genre idea, about how awesome that is. I saw it bubbling up when I was younger with people like James Ferraro and Ariel Pink. To me, they were early post-genre, post everything musicians. We’re in this post-genre age because we have access to everything. We don’t really have regional music anymore. Everything from western swing music from a certain part of Texas, like Bob Wills or hill country blues, like R. L. Burnside.

I think it encourages bands to skip that stage and go on tour right away.

I didn’t tour at all for eight, nine years. I started putting out music when I was 18, and only started touring in the past two years. I waited a crazy long time. My first four albums were made in Garageband at home. Rough, minimal recordings. I only just now feel like I’m coming into my own with my music and understanding what it is that I do. I wouldn’t have wanted people to hear me live five years ago.

How did Odd Future impact your approach to releasing music?

I discovered Odd Future when I was 18. I was a little late to them. They had already gotten quite a bit of buzz. I was into blog-era experimental music. There was a website called Mutant Sounds that I was obsessed with. I hadn’t listened to a ton of rap music, but was intrigued by their aesthetic. It was brash, obnoxious, and it clicked with my sense of humor.

I was more interested in their aesthetic and approach before getting into the music. All of a sudden, it started to make sense. I was like, “What if I take Odd Future’s approach and attach it to what I do?” That’s why I ended up reaching out to people I wanted to collaborate with through Facebook, and how things started to grow from there. That was part of the internet that I really enjoyed.

Did you have any hesitation when you started reaching out?

I didn’t have a lot of fear. The reason why is because I was homeschooled the entire way. I never went to public school. I was very isolated, and didn’t have friends growing up. I’ve always said that if you’re homeschooled, it rewires your brain. I think public schooling, for better or worse, instills in you a kind of social hierarchy. You understand a chain of command in terms of how things are done. For most public schoolers, if they wished chicken strips were on the menu, they wouldn’t walk down to the principal’s office, knock on the door and say, “Hey, I want chicken strips on the menu. How can we get this done?” They would understand that would be kind of inappropriate, and wouldn’t do that. If I wanted chicken strips for dinner, I would go talk to my mom, she was also my school teacher.

Immediately the hierarchy is different because the hierarchy is my parents and I feel comfortable to go talk to them. Once I got on the internet, I was an incredibly odd, forward kid. I probably have so many embarrassing Facebook messages that are cringey because I was like, “Hey, I have this idea.” It was unreal how many people I was reaching out to, but I was probably too dumb to know how weird I looked. That was the whole deal, I didn’t understand that I looked strange, but it worked to my benefit that I was overly forward with people asking, “Hey, want to work together?” My intentions were good, people picked up on the fact that I wasn’t doing it for clout, I was doing it for interest.

It’s important to start from a place of pure excitement.

I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago on tour. I was in San Francisco and stayed with my friend Chip Lord. I believe he’s 80 years old. He’s one of three guys that created Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo. An absolutely unreal artist. While I was there, he was showing me pieces he’d made over the years. While he was telling me about them, his passion was so tangible that I said, “The reason why your stuff is so great is when I look at it, before I even think about art, I see the interest.” The best art should have the same feeling as when a 5-year-old kid is telling you why he loves his train set. That’s the truest interest you’ll ever see. This 80-year-old artist still has that same interest as a five-year-old kid.

You are now doing music ‘full-time.’ What are the pros and cons of holding down a day-job?

For over 10 years I was working at bank jobs. For a long time, there was this level of intrigue. Playing in experimental noise bands and working at a bank during the day. There was chaos in it that I liked. Two opposite things clashing together into this messy hodgepodge of insanity. It feels more insane than being a full-time artist or musician. There’s something far more chaotic about it. I liked the dual personality thing.

I would also have some of my best ideas on the clock. I feel weird saying this, but sometimes I would do the bare minimum and pretend to be on the computer while I was reading articles about music and art. I was also sending emails to record labels. I signed with Mexican Summer while on the clock. Signed my contract and scanned it on the workplace copier. There’s an element of being sneaky, trying not to get caught.

In 2016 or ‘17, I took a trip to San Francisco to perform. After the show I met Christopher Owens from Girls, who I’d looked up to forever because he lived in Amarillo. We stayed up walking around till 1 A.M. talking about music. It felt like a dream. The next morning I get on the plane, fly home, then I’m in my cubicle at the bank. That was the worst part, it felt like I was giving myself brain damage. The whiplash was too much. I realized going back and forth is actually dangerous and not healthy.

Have you felt more at ease since leaving?

Yes and no. Yes because I’ve been able to focus on what I do, and that is incredibly liberating, but also terrifying because it makes you view what you do in a more serious way. It’s a different type of pressure and expectation from yourself. People say, “Oh, you’ll feel more pressure to make stuff when it’s your full-time thing.” I appreciate having pressure to do something I enjoy versus the pressures I had at banks to get work done that I had no interest in. There’s nothing worse than pressure to do something you don’t care about. It can be scary to have pressure to do something you deeply care about. I feel honored that I feel pressured to do something that means a lot to me. I take it incredibly seriously. I can seem silly on social media, but I care a lot, even when it’s joking around, posting something dumb or writing an essay or posting a photo.

Do you feel pressure to finish songs or albums quickly?

I opened up this discussion the other day on Instagram. I was talking about streaming killing the album and the pressure of constantly having to produce singles, EPs, Bandcamp subscriptions, etc. I had a caveat where I was saying, look, for some people being prolific and releasing a lot of stuff works. I understand that. It’s not inherently bad. I’m a motivated person, but I don’t like being motivated by stuff I don’t care about. I view albums like films. No one ever asked Stanley Kubrick to release short films in between his movies. It’d feel weird. “Can you release a 15-minute short film before you release The Shining?” No one ever would ask that of him. He always produced intriguing, bizarre films that are different from each other. You can see the time that went into then.

I try to hold tight to the fact that I don’t owe anyone anything when it comes to my music. I don’t owe it to people to put it out. Ultimately I want to impress myself. If I do that, it’s good for everyone else. I have no interest in fulfilling expectations in terms of how much I put out or when people want to hear more. Unfortunately streaming, Bandcamp Fridays, things like that put pressure on me to go faster, even though I don’t want to. That’s bad motivation. That’s not the positive motivation that I naturally have.

You’ve described yourself as a competitive person. Does competition create motivation?

Absolutely. Again, it’s this double-edged sword. I’ve been competitive with other people, along with being competitive internally. Being competitive to create, to me, is like nitrous oxide with a car. It will make it go faster and it works, but there’s a high risk of blowing up your engine. It works well until it doesn’t. I can get into trouble quickly with that mentality. It’s a young thing. When you’re in your 20s, you’re very competitive. That can be a great motivator, but it’s not a sustainable motivator.

You speak about stage fright during performances. What led to wanting to be vulnerable with audiences?

This past summer I went on tour with Jenny Lewis. I agreed to do that, but didn’t actually think about what was required to do those opening sets. It wasn’t until I showed up to the first show in Chicago, an 8,000 capacity venue, that I realized, “Wait, I don’t know if I can do this.” I agreed to play these shows without knowing if I can play a solo guitar set to this many people. It was pure terror, but also this belligerent “Hell, no, I can’t let this stop me. I have to do everything in my power to ensure I can play this show.” Luckily, the first show I played I held on for dear life and made it.

It was terrifying, but I made it through. I started to get my confidence up, had one show where I nearly lost it on stage. I thought I was going to have to walk, my nerves were so high. I had my head pressed against the guitar, as if I was going to fly away. The first three shows had gone great, then that fourth one went so bad. I was terrified the next night because I thought it would be a repeat. From there I started talking about my stage fright. I saw massive improvements when I was just addressing it. Mentally this wall was broken because the audience had context. Internally I started having this mentality of, I don’t care if I look insane or dumb on stage. A lot of that came from comedians like Nathan Fielder. You know he’s the most confident person because he doesn’t care how embarrassing he looks. That translates to live music, this idea of “I don’t care what the audience thinks of me” as a tool to know that I really do care. The best way to give them my best performance is not considering what they think.

What happens if you get stuck?

If by the second or third day I’m stuck and it’s not working, I usually will scrap it. I find an open tuning and start picking around until I find a melody or something I like. I follow that melody to the end of the song. I have to be willing to scrap the entire thing and move on because I can’t waste a lot of time. Everyone has a different approach with writing, this long excursion, excavating out of the ground, like you’re digging and finding it can be this long process. For me it’s more like following a bird. If it flies away too quickly, it just wasn’t meant to be.

How do you deal with the post-release come down?

That goes back to why I don’t write a single piece of music for over a year. A lot of people don’t understand, you can write a whole other record four months after the last one, but it could potentially be B-sides because you haven’t given enough time to create a new thing. I think of music like going to a greasy-spoon style diner. The joke being that on those grills, you can taste everything. You get a burger, you can still taste the pancakes or bacon. There’s a beauty in that, but when it comes to music, I don’t want people to hear my record and be like, “Well, this feels a lot like that last record.” I’m always trying to give myself enough room to tell a different story.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jeffrey Silverstein.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The stillbirth of her daughter in 1999 cleaved Kristina Keneally’s life into a before and an after. It later became a catalyst for transforming how an entire country approaches stillbirths.

In a world where preventing stillbirths is typically far down the list of health care priorities, Australia — where Keneally was elected as a senator — has emerged as a global leader in the effort to lower the number of babies that die before taking their first breaths. Stillbirth prevention is embedded in the nation’s health care system, supported by its doctors, midwives and nurses, and touted by its politicians.

In 2017, funding from the Australian government established a groundbreaking center for research into stillbirths. The next year, its Senate established a committee on stillbirth research and education. By 2020, the country had adopted a national stillbirth plan, which combines the efforts of health care providers and researchers, bereaved families and advocacy groups, and lawmakers and government officials, all in the name of reducing stillbirths and supporting families. As part of that plan, researchers and advocates teamed up to launch a public awareness campaign. All told, the government has invested more than $40 million.

Meanwhile, the United States, which has a far larger population, has no national stillbirth plan, no public awareness campaign and no government-funded stillbirth research center. Indeed, the U.S. has long lagged behind Australia and other wealthy countries in a crucial measure: how fast the stillbirth rate drops each year.

According to the latest UNICEF report, the U.S. was worse than 151 countries in reducing its stillbirth rate between 2000 and 2021, cutting it by just 0.9%. That figure lands the U.S. in the company of South Sudan in Africa and doing slightly better than Turkmenistan in central Asia. During that period, Australia’s reduction rate was more than double that.

Definitions of stillbirth vary by country, and though both Australia and the U.S. mark stillbirths as the death of a fetus at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy, to fairly compare countries globally, international standards call for the use of the World Health Organization definition that defines stillbirth as a loss after 28 weeks. That puts the U.S. stillbirth rate in 2021 at 2.7 per 1,000 total births, compared with 2.4 in Australia the same year.

Every year in the United States, more than 20,000 pregnancies end in a stillbirth. Each day, roughly 60 babies are stillborn. Australia experiences six stillbirths a day.

Over the past two years, ProPublica has revealed systemic failures at the federal and local levels, including not prioritizing research, awareness and data collection, conducting too few autopsies after stillbirths and doing little to combat stark racial disparities. And while efforts are starting to surface in the U.S. — including two stillbirth-prevention bills that are pending in Congress — they lack the scope and urgency seen in Australia.

“If you ask which parts of the work in Australia can be done in or should be done in the U.S., the answer is all of it,” said Susannah Hopkins Leisher, a stillbirth parent, epidemiologist and assistant professor in the stillbirth research program at the University of Utah Health. “There’s no physical reason why we cannot do exactly what Australia has done.”

Australia’s goal, which has been complicated by the pandemic, is to, by 2025, reduce the country’s rate of stillbirths after 28 weeks by 20% from its 2020 rate. The national plan laid out the target, and it is up to each jurisdiction to determine how to implement it based on their local needs.

The most significant development came in 2019, when the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence — the headquarters for Australia’s stillbirth-prevention efforts — launched the core of its strategy, a checklist of five evidence-based priorities known as the Safer Baby Bundle. They include supporting pregnant patients to stop smoking; regular monitoring for signs that the fetus is not growing as expected, which is known as fetal growth restriction; explaining the importance of acting quickly if fetal movement changes or decreases; advising pregnant patients to go to sleep on their side after 28 weeks; and encouraging patients to talk to their doctors about when to deliver because in some cases that may be before their due date.

Officials estimate that at least half of all births in the country are covered by maternity services that have adopted the bundle, which focuses on preventing stillbirths after 28 weeks.

“These are babies whose lives you would expect to save because they would survive if they were born alive,” said Dr. David Ellwood, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Griffith University, director of maternal-fetal medicine at Gold Coast University Hospital and a co-director of the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence.

Australia wasn’t always a leader in stillbirth prevention.

In 2000, when the stillbirth rate in the U.S. was 3.3 per 1,000 total births, Australia’s was 3.7. A group of doctors, midwives and parents recognized the need to do more and began working on improving their data classification and collection to better understand the problem areas. By 2014, Australia published its first in-depth national report on stillbirth. Two years later, the medical journal The Lancet published the second report in a landmark series on stillbirths, and Australian researchers applied for the first grant from the government to create the stillbirth research center.

But full federal buy-in remained elusive.

As parent advocates, researchers, doctors and midwives worked to gain national support, they didn’t yet know they would find a champion in Keneally.

Keneally’s improbable journey began when she was born in Nevada to an American father and Australian mother. She grew up in Ohio, graduating from the University of Dayton before meeting the man who would become her husband and moving to Australia.

I’m smart. I’m educated. How did I let this happen? And why did nobody tell me this was a possible outcome?

When she learned that her daughter, who she named Caroline, would be stillborn, she remembers thinking, “I’m smart. I’m educated. How did I let this happen? And why did nobody tell me this was a possible outcome?”

A few years later, in 2003, Keneally decided to enter politics. She was elected to the lower house of state parliament in New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital. In Australia, newly elected members are expected to give a “first speech.” She was able to get through just one sentence about Caroline before starting to tear up.

As a legislator, Keneally didn’t think of tackling stillbirth as part of her job. There wasn’t any public discourse about preventing stillbirths or supporting families who’d had one. When Caroline was born still, all Keneally got was a book titled “When a Baby Dies.”

In 2009, Keneally became New South Wales’ first woman premier, a role similar to that of an American governor. Another woman who had suffered her own stillbirth and was starting a stillbirth foundation learned of Keneally’s experience. She wrote to Keneally and asked the premier to be the foundation’s patron.

What’s the point of being the first female premier, Keneally thought, if I can’t support this group?

Like the U.S., Australia had previously launched an awareness campaign that contributed to a staggering reduction in sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. But there was no similar push for stillbirths.

“If we can figure out ways to reduce SIDS,” Keneally said, “surely it’s not beyond us to figure out ways to reduce stillbirth.”

She lost her seat after two years and took a break from politics, only to return six years later. In 2018, she was selected to serve as a senator at Australia’s federal level.

Keneally saw this as her second chance to fight for stillbirth prevention. In the short period between her election and her inaugural speech, she had put everything in place for a Senate inquiry into stillbirth.

In her address, Keneally declared stillbirth a national public health crisis. This time, she spoke at length about Caroline.

“When it comes to stillbirth prevention,” she said, “there are things that we know that we’re not telling parents, and there are things we don’t know, but we could, if we changed how we collected data and how we funded research.”

The day of her speech, March 27, 2018, she and her fellow senators established the Select Committee on Stillbirth Research and Education.

Things moved quickly over the next nine months. Keneally and other lawmakers traveled the country holding hearings, listening to testimony from grieving parents and writing up their findings in a report released that December.

“The culture of silence around stillbirth means that parents and families who experience it are less likely to be prepared to deal with the personal, social and financial consequences,” the report said. “This failure to regard stillbirth as a public health issue also has significant consequences for the level of funding available for research and education, and for public awareness of the social and economic costs to the community as a whole.”

It would be easy to swap the U.S. for Australia in many places throughout the report. Women of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds experienced double the rate of stillbirth of other Australian women; Black women in America are more than twice as likely as white women to have a stillbirth. Both countries faced a lack of coordinated research and corresponding funding, low autopsy rates following a stillbirth and poor public awareness of the problem.

The day after the report’s release, the Australian government announced that it would develop a national plan and pledged $7.2 million in funding for prevention. Nearly half was to go to education and awareness programs for women and their health care providers.

In the following months, government officials rolled out the Safer Baby Bundle and pledged another $26 million to support parents’ mental health after a loss.

Many in Australia see Keneally’s first speech as senator, in 2018, as the turning point for the country’s fight for stillbirth prevention. Her words forced the federal government to acknowledge the stillbirth crisis and launch the national action plan with bipartisan support.

Australia’s assistant minister for health and aged care, Ged Kearney, cited Keneally’s speech in an email to ProPublica where she noted that Australia has become a world leader in stillbirth awareness, prevention and supporting families after a loss.

“Kristina highlighted the power of women telling their story for positive change,” Kearney said, adding, “As a Labor Senator Kristina Keneally bravely shared her deeply personal story of her daughter Caroline who was stillborn in 1999. Like so many mothers, she helped pave the way for creating a more compassionate and inclusive society.”

Keneally, who is now CEO of Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation, said the number of stillbirths a day in Australia spurred the movement for change.

“Six babies a day,” Keneally said. “Once you hear that fact, you can’t unhear it.”

Australia’s leading stillbirth experts watched closely as the country moved closer to a unified effort. This was the moment for which they had been waiting.

“We had all the information needed, but that’s really what made it happen.” said Vicki Flenady, a perinatal epidemiologist, co-director of the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence based at the Mater Research Institute at the University of Queensland, and a lead author on The Lancet’s stillbirth series. “I don’t think there’s a person who could dispute that.”

Flenady and her co-director Ellwood had spent more than two decades focused on stillbirths. After establishing the center in 2017, they were now able to expand their team. As part of their work with the International Stillbirth Alliance, they reached out to other countries with a track record of innovation and evidence-based research: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland. They modeled the Safer Baby Bundle after a similar one in the U.K., though they added some elements.

In 2019, the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, was the first to implement the Safer Baby Bundle. But 10 months into the program, the effort had to be paused for several months because of the pandemic, which forced other states to cancel their launches altogether.

“COVID was a major disruption. We stopped and started,” Flenady said.

Still, between 2019 and 2021, participating hospitals across Victoria were able to reduce their stillbirth rate by 21%. That improvement has yet to be seen at the national level.

A number of areas are still working on implementing the bundle. Westmead Hospital, one of Australia’s largest hospitals, planned to wrap that phase up last month. Like many hospitals, Westmead prominently displays the bundle’s key messages in the colorful posters and flyers hanging in patient rooms and in the hallways. They include easy-to-understand slogans such as, “Big or small. Your baby’s growth matters,” and, “Sleep on your side when baby’s inside.”

As patients at Westmead wait for their names to be called, a TV in the waiting room plays a video on stillbirth prevention, highlighting the importance of fetal movement. If a patient is concerned their baby’s movements have slowed down, they are instructed to come in to be seen within two hours. The patient’s chart gets a colorful sticker with a 16-point checklist of stillbirth risk factors.

Susan Heath, a senior clinical midwife at Westmead, came up with the idea for the stickers. Her office is tucked inside the hospital’s maternity wing, down a maze of hallways. As she makes the familiar walk to her desk, with her faded hospital badge bouncing against her navy blue scrubs, it’s clear she is a woman on a mission. The bundle gives doctors and midwives structure and uniform guidance, she said, and takes stillbirth out of the shadows. She reminds her staff of how making the practices a routine part of their job has the power to change their patients’ lives.

“You're trying,” she said, “to help them prevent having the worst day of their life.”

Christine Andrews, a senior researcher at the Stillbirth Centre who is leading an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness, said the national stillbirth rate beyond 28 weeks has continued to slowly improve.

“It is going to take a while until we see the stillbirth rate across the whole entire country go down,” Andrews said. “We are anticipating that we’re going to start to see a shift in that rate soon.”

As officials wait to receive and standardize the data from hospitals and states, they are encouraged by a number of indicators.

For example, several states are reporting increases in the detection of babies that aren’t growing as they should, a major factor in many late-gestation stillbirths. Many also have seen an increase in the number of pregnant patients who stopped smoking. Health care providers also are more consistently offering post-stillbirth investigations, such as autopsies.

In addition to the Safer Baby Bundle, the national plan also calls for raising awareness and reducing racial disparities. The improvements it recommends for bereavement care are already gaining global attention.

To fulfill those directives, Australia has launched a “Still Six Lives” public awareness campaign, has implemented a national stillbirth clinical care standard and has spent two years developing a culturally inclusive version of the Safer Baby Bundle for First Nations, migrant and refugee communities. Those resources, which were recently released, incorporated cultural traditions and used terms like Stronger Bubba Born for the bundle and “sorry business babies,” which is how some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women refer to stillbirth. There are also audio versions for those who can’t or prefer not to read the information.

The U.S. is not pulling its weight in relation either to our burden or to the resources that we have at our disposal.

In May, nearly 50 people from the state of Queensland met in a large hotel conference room. Midwives, doctors and nurses sat at round tables with government officials, hospital administrators and maternal and infant health advocates. Some even wore their bright blue Safer Baby T-shirts.

One by one, they discussed their experiences implementing the Safer Baby Bundle. One midwifery group was able to get more than a third of its patients to stop smoking between their first visit and giving birth.

Officials from a hospital in one of the fastest-growing areas in the state discussed how they carefully monitored for fetal growth restriction.

And staff from another hospital, which serves many low-income and immigrant patients, described how 97% of pregnant patients who said their baby’s movements had decreased were seen for additional monitoring within two hours of voicing their concern.

As the midwives, nurses and doctors ticked off the progress they were seeing, they also discussed the fear of unintended consequences: higher rates of premature births or increased admissions to neonatal intensive care units. But neither, they said, has materialized.

“The bundle isn’t causing any harm and may be improving other outcomes, like reducing early-term birth,” Flenady said. “I think it really shows a lot of positive impact.”

As far behind as the U.S. is in prioritizing stillbirth prevention, there is still hope.

Dr. Bob Silver, who co-authored a study that estimated that nearly 1 in 4 stillbirths are potentially preventable, has looked to the international community as a model. Now, he and Leisher — the University of Utah epidemiologist and stillbirth parent — are working to create one of the first stillbirth research and prevention centers in the U.S. in partnership with stillbirth leaders from Australia and other countries. They hope to launch next year.

“There’s no question that Australia has done a better job than we have,” said Silver, who is also chair of the University of Utah Health obstetrics and gynecology department. “Part of it is just highlighting it and paying attention to it.”

It’s hard to know what parts of Australia’s strategy are making a difference — the bundle as a whole, just certain elements of it, the increased stillbirth awareness across the country, or some combination of those things. Not every component has been proven to decrease stillbirth.

The lack of U.S. research on the issue has made some cautious to adopt the bundle, Silver said, but it is clear the U.S. can and should do more.

There comes a point when an issue is so critical, Silver said, that people have to do the best they can with the information that they have. The U.S. has done that with other problems, such as maternal mortality, he said, though many of the tactics used to combat that problem have not been proven scientifically.

“But we’ve decided this problem is so bad, we’re going to try the things that we think are most likely to be helpful,” Silver said.

After more than 30 years of working on stillbirth prevention, Silver said the U.S. may be at a turning point. Parents’ voices are getting louder and starting to reach lawmakers. More doctors are affirming that stillbirths are not inevitable. And pressure is mounting on federal institutions to do more.

Of the two stillbirth prevention bills in Congress, one already sailed through the Senate. The second bill, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education for Autumn Act, includes features that also appeared in Australia’s plan, such as improving data, increasing awareness and providing support for autopsies.

And after many years, the National Institutes of Health has turned its focus back to stillbirths. In March, it released a report with a series of recommendations to reduce the nation’s stillbirth rate that mirror ProPublica’s reporting about some of the causes of the crisis. Since then, it has launched additional groups to begin to tackle three critical angles: prevention, data and bereavement. Silver co-chairs the prevention group.

In November, more than 100 doctors, parents and advocates gathered for a symposium in New York City to discuss everything from improving bereavement care in the U.S to tackling racial disparities in stillbirth. In 2022, after taking a page out of the U.K.’s book, the city’s Mount Sinai Hospital opened the first Rainbow Clinic in the U.S., which employs specific protocols to care for people who have had a stillbirth.

But given the financial resources in the U.S. and the academic capacity at American universities and research institutions, Leisher and others said federal and state governments aren’t doing nearly enough.

“The U.S. is not pulling its weight in relation either to our burden or to the resources that we have at our disposal,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of babies dying, and we’ve got a really bad imbalance of who those babies are as well. And yet we look at a country with a much smaller number of stillbirths who is leading the world.”

“We can do more. Much more. We’re just not,” she added. “It’s unacceptable.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Duaa Eldeib.

The post The Price of Amazon Prime’s Business Model is Our Bodies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Denise Kohr.

Kia ora koutou. Ko Ngāpuhi tōku iwi. Ko Ngāti Manu toku hapu. Ko Karetu tōku marae. Ko Myles Thomas toku ingoa.

I grew up with David Beatson, on the telly. Back in the 1970s, he read the late news which I watched in bed with my parents. Later, David and I worked together to save TVNZ 7 and also regional TV stations.

The Better Public Media (BPM) trust honours David each year with our memorial address, because his fight for non-commercial TV was an honourable one. He wasn’t doing it for himself.

• READ MORE: Other Better Public Media reports
• Better Public Media website

He wasn’t doing it so he could get a job or because it would benefit him. He fought for public media because he knew it was good for Aotearoa NZ.

Like us at Better Public Media, he recognised the benefits to our country from locally produced public media.

David knew, from a long career in media, including as editor of The Listener and as Jim Bolger’s press secretary, that NZ’s media plays an important role in our nation’s culture, social cohesion, and democracy.

NZ culture is very important. NZ culture is so unique and special, yet it has always been at risk of being swamped by content from overseas. The US especially with its crackpot conspiracies, extreme racial tensions, and extreme tensions about everything to be honest.

Local content the antidote
Local content is the antidote to this. It reflects us, it portrays us, it defines New Zealand, and whether we like it or not, it defines us. But it’s important to remember that what we see reflected back to us comes through a filter.

This speech is coming to you through a filter, called Myles Thomas.

Commercial news reflects our world through a filter of sensation and danger to hold our attention. That makes NZ seem more shallow, greedy, fearful and dangerous.

The social media filter makes the world seem more angry, reactive and complaining.
RNZ’s filter is, I don’t know, thoughtful, a bit smug, middle class.

The New Zealand Herald filter makes us think every dairy is being ram-raided every night.

And The Spinoff filter suggests NZ is hip, urban and mildly infatuated with Winston Peters.

These cultural reflections are very important actually because they influence us, how we see NZ and its people.

It is not a commodity
That makes content, cultural content, special. It is not a commodity. It’s not milk powder.

We don’t drink milk and think about flooding in Queenstown, drinking milk doesn’t make us laugh about the Koiwoi accent, we don’t drink milk and identify with a young family living in poverty.

Local content is rich and powerful, and important to our society.

When the government supports the local media production industry it is actually supporting the audiences and our culture. Whether it is Te Mangai Paho, or NZ On Air or the NZ Film Commission, and the screen production rebate, these organisations fund New Zealand’s identity and culture, and success.

Don’t ask Treasury how to fund culture. Accountants don’t understand it, they can’t count it and put it in a spreadsheet, like they can milk solids. Of course they’ll say such subsidies or rebates distort the “market”, that’s the whole point. The market doesn’t work for culture.

Moreover, public funding of films and other content fosters a more stable long-term industry, rather than trashy short-termism that is completely vulnerable to outside pressures, like the US writer’s strike.

We have a celebrated content production industry. Our films, video, audio, games etc. More local content brings stability to this industry, which by the way also brings money into the country and fosters tourism.

We cannot use quota
New Zealand needs more local content.

And what’s more, it needs to be accessible to audiences, on the platforms that they use.

But in NZ we do have one problem. Unlike Australia, we can’t use a quota because our GATT agreement does not include a carve out for local music or media quotas.

In the 1990s when GATT was being negotiated, the Aussies added an exception to their GATT agreement allowing a quota for Aussie cultural content. So they can require radio stations to play a certain amount of local music. Now they’re able to introduce a Netflix quota for up to 20 percent of all revenue generated in Aussie.

We can’t do that. Why? Because back in the 1990s the Bolger government and MFAT decided against putting the same exception into NZ’s GATT agreement.

But there is another way of doing it, if we take a lead from Denmark and many European states. Which I’ll get to in a minute.

The second important benefit of locally produced public media is social cohesion, how society works, the peace and harmony and respect that we show each other in public, depends heavily on the “public sphere”, of which, media is a big part.

Power of media to polarise
Extensive research in Europe and North America shows the power of media to polarise society, which can lead to misunderstanding, mistrust and hatred.

But media can also strengthen social cohesion, particularly for minority communities, and that same research showed that public media, otherwise known as public service media, is widely regarded to be an important contributor to tolerance in society, promoting social cohesion and integrating all communities and generations.

The third benefit is democracy. Very topical at the moment. I’ve already touched on how newsmedia affect our culture. More directly, our newsmedia influences the public dialogue over issues of the day.

It defines that dialogue. It is that dialogue.

So if our newsmedia is shallow and vacuous ignoring policies and focussing on the polls and the horse-race, then politicians who want to be elected, tailor their messages accordingly.

There’s plenty of examples of this such as National’s bootcamp policy, or Labour’s removing GST on food. As policies, neither is effective. But in the simplified 30 seconds of commercial news and headlines, these policies resonate.

Is that a good thing, that policies that are known to fail are nonetheless followed because our newsmedia cater to our base instincts and short attention spans?

Disaster for democracy
In my view, commercial media is actually disaster for democracy. All over the world.

But of course, we can’t control commercial media. No-one’s suggesting that.

The only rational reaction is to provide stronger locally produced public media.

And unfortunately, NZ lacks public media.

Obviously Australia, the UK, Canada have more public media than us, they have more people, they can afford it. But what about countries our size, Ireland? Smaller population, much more public media.

Denmark, Norway, Finland, all with roughly 5 million people, and all have significantly better public media than us. Even after the recent increases from Willie Jackson, NZ still spends just $44 per person on public media. $44 each year.

When we had a licence fee it was $110. Jim Bolger’s government got rid of that and replaced it with funding from general taxation — which means every year the Minister of Finance, working closely with Treasury, decides how much to spend on public media for that year.

This is what I call the curse of annual funding, because it makes funding public media a very political decision.

National, let us be honest, the National Party hates public media, maybe because they get nicer treatment on commercial news. We see this around the world — the Daily Mail, Sky News Australia, Newstalk ZB . . . most commercial media quite openly favours the right.

Systemic bias
This is a systemic bias. Because right-wing newsmedia gets more clicks.

Right-wing politicians are quite happy about that. Why fund public to get in the way? Even if it it benefits our culture, social cohesion, and democracy.

New Zealand is the same, the last National government froze RNZ funding for nine years.

National Party spokesperson on broadcasting Melissa Lee fought against the ANZPM merger, and now she’s fighting the News Bargaining Bill. As minister she could cut RNZ and NZ On Air’s budget.

But it wouldn’t just be cost-cutting. It would actually be political interference in our newsmedia, an attempt to skew the national conversation in favour of the National Party, by favouring commercial media.

So Aotearoa NZ needs two things. More money to be spent on public media, and less control by the politicians. Sustainable funding basically.

The best way to achieve it is a media levy.

Highly targeted tax
For those who don’t know, a levy is a tax that is highly targeted, and we have a lot of them, like the Telecommunications Development Levy (or TDL) which currently gathers $10 million a year from internet service providers like Spark and 2 Degrees to pay for rural broadband.

We’re all paying for better internet for farmers basically. When first introduced by the previous National government it collected $50 million but it’s dropped down a bit lately.

This is one of many levies that we live with and barely notice. Like the levy we pay on our insurance to cover the Earthquake Commission and the Fire and Emergency Levy. There are maritime levies, energy levies to fund EECA and Waka Kotahi, levies on building consents for MBIE, a levy on advertising pays for the ASA, the BSA is funded by a levy.

Lots of levies and they’re very effective.

So who could the media levy, levy?

ISPs like the TDL? Sure, raise the TDL back up to $50 million or perhaps higher, and it only adds a dollar onto everyone’s internet bill. There’s $50 million.

But the real target should be Big Tech, social media and large streaming services. I’m talking about Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube and so on. These are the companies that have really profited from the advent of online media, and at the expense of locally produced public media.

Funding content creation
We need a way to get these companies to make, or at least fund, content creation here in Aotearoa. Denmark recently proposed a solution to this problem with an innovative levy of 2 percent on the revenue of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney.

But that 2 percent rises to 5 percent if the streaming company doesn’t spend at least 5 percent of their revenue on making local Danish content. Denmark joins many other European countries already doing this — Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France and even Romania are all about to levy the streamers to fund local production.

Australia is planning to do so as well.

But that’s just online streaming companies. There’s also social media and search engines which contribute nothing and take almost all the commercial revenue. The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill will address that to a degree but it’s not open and we won’t know if the amounts are fair.

Another problem is that it’s only for news publishers — not drama or comedy producers, not on-demand video, not documentary makers or podcasters. Social media and search engines frequently feature and put advertising around these forms of content, and hoover up the digital advertising that would otherwise help fund them, so they should also contribute to them.

A Media Levy can best be seen as a levy on those companies that benefit from media on the internet, but don’t contribute to the public benefits of media — culture, social cohesion and democracy. And that’s why the Media Levy can include internet service providers, and large companies that sell digital advertising and subscriptions.

Note, this would target large companies over a certain size and revenue, and exclude smaller platforms, like most levies do.

Separate from annual budget
The huge benefit of a levy is that it is separate from the annual budget, so it’s fiscally neutral, and politicians can’t get their mits on it. It removes the curse of annual funding.

It creates a funding stream derived from the actual commercial media activities which produce the distribution gaps in the first place, for which public media compensates. That’s why the proceeds would go to the non-commercial platform and the funding agencies — Te Mangai Paho, NZ On Air and the Film Commission.

One final point. This wouldn’t conflict with the new Digital Services Tax proposed by the government because that’s a replacement for Income Tax. A Media Levy, like all levies, sits over and above income tax.

So there we go. I’ve mentioned Jim Bolger three times! I’ve also outlined some quite straight-forward methods to fund public media sustainably, and to fund a significant increase in local content production, video, film, audio and journalism.

None of it needs to be within the grasp of Melissa Lee or Willie Jackson, or David Seymour.

All of it can be used to create local content that improves democracy, social cohesion and Kiwi culture.

Myles Thomas is a trustee of the Better Public Media Trust (BPM). He is a former television producer and director who in 2012 established the Save TVNZ 7 campaign. Thomas is now studying law. This commentary was this year’s David Beatson Memorial Address at a public meeting in Grey Lynn last night on broadcast policy for the NZ election 2023.

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

“Rather than staying abroad, he decided the best place to launch his career was in Beijing,” read a June 2014 article about Abdulhabir Muhammad in the state-run Global Times that included a photo of him in a dark suit and tie, smiling and sitting confidently behind an office desk.

In Beijing, he founded A.B.U. Education, which provides support services to young people wanting to study abroad.

“I want to be an international businessman and show people that we, as Uyghurs, are more than just vendors who wear 'flower hats' and sell kebabs, naan and nut cake," Muhammad said in the article, referring to a cap worn by many Uyghur men, also known as a doppa. 

“Unfortunately, many people don’t realize there are other business possibilities.”

But in mid-2022, authorities arrested Muhammad, who is now 33 and proficient in English, Chinese, Arabic, Turkish and the Uyghur language, on religious extremism and national separatism charges, people with knowledge of the situation said. 

And later that year, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, police in Xinjiang, the far western region of China that is home to more than 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs, the sources told Radio Free Asia.

Murky reasons

It is not entirely clear what prompted his arrest. 

As with so much in China, especially concerning the Uyghurs – an ethnic group whose language, religion and culture Beijing has tried to suppress – the details surrounding his case are virtually impossible to know, and RFA has been able to confirm his conviction only now, several months later.

By one account, authorities may have arrested Muhammad for discussing the benefits of halal food a decade earlier in Xinjiang. By another, he may have gotten in trouble for communicating with his brothers while studying in the United States.

One source familiar with the situation, who suggested that Muhammad was arrested for discussing halal food, said an entity in Beijing that monitors Uyghur businesspeople had been observing Muhammad for several years and cooperated with police during his arrest. 

Radio Free Asia contacted the Xinjiang People's Assistance and Management Office in the capital to try to find out more information about his arrest, but an employee said the matter was classified and details could not be disclosed. 

A former classmate of Muhammad, who requested anonymity to speak freely without risking retribution, also said it was possible that years earlier the man had discussed the advantages of halal food, prepared according to Islamic law, in terms of hygiene and safety.

Muhammad’s father was a representative in Aksu for the Arman Foods Group, which distributes locally produced and imported food to supermarkets throughout the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

“All the Arman stores in Aksu were under his parents’ management,” he said. “Since it’s an Arman store and related to food, perhaps during work he advocated for the abundance of halal food available at Arman stores.”

Nearly 20 people attended the event where Muhammad discussed the benefits of halal food, said the source, including people who lived near his hometown, Araaymaq village.

In recent years, Chinese authorities have clamped down aggressively on religious practices among Uyghurs, including keeping Islamic holidays and dietary practices, and even praying in mosques, many of which have been shuttered.

In 2017 and 2018, authorities detained an estimated 1.8 million Muslims in camps and prisons to combat what China deemed religious extremism and terrorism. China called them “re-education” camps, and says they have all been dismantled, but other reports say they persist.

Brothers tried with him

Another possibility is that Muhammad was taken into custody for communicating by phone with his brothers, who stood trial for being in contact with him while he attended the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he graduated with a master's degree in business administration in January 2014.

A person familiar with the situation said four policemen from Aksu detained him in Beijing and transported him directly to Kelpin county in Xinjiang for interrogation. He was tried along with more than 10 of his associates at the end of 2022, the source said.

A village police officer in the Xinjiang city of Aksu, where Muhammad had lived for several years, confirmed the sentence and said that some of those tried alongside him were his brothers.

“Abdulhabir has been sentenced to 15 years, but I’m not aware of where he is serving his sentence,” said the police officer. “There were also brothers arrested for communicating with their sibling while he was abroad, and this was mentioned during the meeting.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s public television broadcaster TVNZ is planning significant cuts to content production, programmes and operational spending in response to commercial clients’ reduced spending on advertising.

Future projects are under review and pay rises for executives and top-earning staff have also been scrapped at the state-owned broadcaster.

Staff were informed of the changes in a memo and video address today from acting chief executive Brent McAnulty.

• READ MORE: Other TVNZ reports
• Other Mediawatch reports

The memo says senior executives have identified “all the possible cost savings opportunities we have” in recent weeks.

“Content budgets have been reduced, both for local production and international content. Remuneration reviews have been cancelled for our exec team and our other highest-earning employees,” it said.

“There have been some really tough calls to make here, but we need to live within our means,” McAnulty told staff.

“All projects are being reviewed to decide whether they should continue, be paused, or be cancelled for this financial year,” the memo said.

Digital technology overhaul
TVNZ currently has a tender out for a major overhaul of its digital technology and internet infrastructure.

“We’re also putting tighter controls on capital expenditure and we’re looking at how we can reduce casual and contractor labour costs,” the memo said.

“The TV advertising market is tough right now, and as the biggest player we are being impacted,” McAnulty told staff in today’s memo.

“Local businesses have been reducing their advertising spend because of the economic conditions, and uncertainty in the lead up to the election,” it said.

The memo urges staff to use up their leave this year.

Recruitment for vacant roles is “paused until 2024” and TVNZ is “choosing not to fill some other vacant roles” and will defer the starting dates for some roles.

TVNZ has more than 750 staff. More than 300 of them earn more than $100,000 a year.

Annual allowance dropped
An annual allowance of $350 paid to all staff — which was effectively a covid-19 relief initiative — will not be paid this year.

TVNZ has “paused” all travel for 2024 except “business-critical travel related to newsgathering, commercial clients and content negotiations”.

TVNZ will also spend less on social media and online marketing and promotion and market research, according to the memo.

“We’re pausing all internal events — though we’re still hopeful that we’ll have Christmas celebrations in our three main offices,” the memo said.

TVNZ reported revenue of $180.3 million in the six months to December 2022, but forecast a loss of $15.6m in the 2023/24 financial year.

The broadcaster has previously signalled that it may need to respond to financial difficulties in the near future.

TVNZ’s most recent Statement of Intent (pdf) says alignment of revenues and costs was under “increasing pressure”.

A ‘dynamic approach’
“We’ll adopt a dynamic approach to the allocation of business resources between investing to sustain our core TV business and accelerating the growth of our future online business. The stronger the commercial performance of our core business, the more actively we’ll be able to invest in shaping our future,” the document says.

Brent McAnulty assured TVNZ staff in today’s memo that TVNZ still had a strong share of television audience and revenue and its online platform TVNZ+ had an “impressive growth trajectory.”

Previous CEO Kevin Kenrick persuaded the government in 2019 to allow TVNZ to effectively forgo dividends to the Crown to allow it to invest in programmes and digital services.

This angered rival commercial media rivals who could expect no such backstop, while also competing with offshore-owned streaming services as well other broadcasters for audience and revenue.

TVNZ has invested heavily in TVNZ+ and recently launched live sport on the platform after securing rights held by Spark Sport until it ceased in July.

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

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

The complaint, which CPJ reviewed, was filed by Md Shahinur Islam, who identified himself to The Daily Star as a reporter for the newspaper Amar Somoy, which supports the ruling Awami League party. It accused the journalists and other unnamed members of the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party and Bangladesh Nationalist Party of working together to commit “anti-state crimes” and disseminate “conspiratorial news” in a July 27, 2023, Dainik Fulki article.

That article, titled “Asia’s longest-serving prime minister is finally resigning,” covered the resignation announcement of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen but mistakenly used a photo of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, president of the Awami League. The next day, the newspaper published a correction and apology, which CPJ reviewed.

Haque left Dainik Fulki around 2019 and was not involved in the article, the journalist told CPJ.

Sakib said he believed he was being targeted to undermine his campaign in the election for Savar Press Club president, which is set to be held in the coming months. He is opposed by about five journalists who strongly support the Awami League, he said.

Similarly, Haque said he believed he was being targeted for his campaign to be the press club’s organizing secretary. He is opposed by two journalists who strongly support the ruling party, he told CPJ.

The Savar Press Club is a trade group in the Dhaka district that advocates for issues, including wage distribution, labor rights, and journalist safety.

Sakib and Haque said they do not know Islam. Islam told CPJ via messaging app that his complaint was “accurate” and claimed the two journalists were involved in “information terrorism.” Islam did not respond to CPJ’s follow-up question about his journalistic background. CPJ called, messaged, and emailed the Amar Somoy newspaper for comment, but did not receive any replies.

Separately, on July 30, Sakib received a notice from the Dhaka district deputy commissioner’s office, reviewed by CPJ, ordering the journalist to explain within seven days why Dainik Fulki’s license to operate should not be canceled following an application filed by Manjurul Alam Rajib, chair of a local government unit and an Awami League leader in Savar. The notice alleges that the July 27 article “achieved the task of tarnishing the image of the state.”

Sakib’s response, dated August 6 and reviewed by CPJ, denied that allegation, expressed regret over the “unintentional mistake,” and mentioned the published correction and apology. Haque told CPJ that he did not receive a similar notice at that time.

Bangladesh’s next national election is set for January 2024 and expected to be met with increasing violence. In late July 2023, police fired at opposition party protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and beat them amid mass arrests of Bangladesh Nationalist Party leaders and activists.

In response to the government’s announcement on August 7 that the Digital Security Act will be replaced, CPJ called on authorities to ensure the new Cyber Security Act complies with international human rights law.

Hasan Mahmud, Bangladesh’s information minister and Awami League joint secretary, and Dipak Chandra Saha, officer-in-charge of the Savar Model Police Station, did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment sent via messaging app. CPJ also contacted Rajib and Anisur Rahman, Dhaka district deputy commissioner, via messaging app for comment, but did not receive any replies.

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

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

[For more technical details, view this story on our website.]

This year at ProPublica, we’ve paired computer modeling with traditional reporting to explore questions around viral outbreaks: What causes them and what can be done to prevent the next big one?

One of the most feared diseases is Ebola, which kills about half the people it infects and has shown that it can pop up in unexpected countries such as Guinea. The virus jumped from a wild animal to a human there in 2013, leading to an epidemic that ultimately left 11,000 dead around the globe.

Researchers studying how outbreaks begin have learned that deforestation can increase the chances for pathogens to leap from wildlife to humans. Jesús Olivero, a professor in the department of animal biology at the University of Malaga, Spain, found that seven Ebola outbreaks, including the one that started in Meliandou, Guinea, were significantly linked to forest loss. We found that, around five of those outbreak locations, forests had been cleared in a telltale pattern, increasing the chances that humans could share space with animals that might harbor the disease.

We wondered: Could we use what we learned about these locations to find places that had not yet experienced outbreaks but could be at risk for one? Were there places where Ebola could emerge that look a lot like Meliandou did in 2013?

With the help of epidemiologists and forest-loss experts, along with one of ProPublica’s data science advisers, Heather Lynch, professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University, we developed a machine-learning model designed to detect locations that bore striking similarity to places that had experienced outbreaks.

The result? Out of a random sample of nearly 1,000 locations across 17 countries, ProPublica’s model identified 51 areas that, in 2021 (the most recent year that satellite image data on forest loss was available at the time of our analysis), looked a lot like places that had experienced outbreaks driven by forest changes.

These locations fell within forested zones in Africa that have wildlife believed to be carrying Ebola; that had recently experienced extensive forest fragmentation (that is, clearing of forests in many small, disconnected patches); and that have a population baseline that could sustain an outbreak if one emerged. To our surprise, 27 of the locations were in Nigeria, where an Ebola outbreak has never started.

After reviewing our findings, one of the researchers we consulted, Christina Faust, a research fellow at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, called the analysis a “best estimate of risk,” in light of the many outstanding questions about how Ebola arises.

“You’ve clearly identified ecological features that are consistent across the spillover locations,” Faust said. “And these ecological conditions and human conditions are cropping up in other places. And given that we don’t know so much about the reservoirs, I think this is our kind of best ability to do a risk analysis.”

This model was developed out of an earlier analysis we published in February. We used satellite imagery and epidemiological modeling to show that villages where five previous Ebola outbreaks occurred are at a greater risk of spillover happening today, including Meliandou, Guinea, the site of the worst Ebola outbreak in history.

In five locations where outbreaks had occurred, we found a distinctive pattern in how forests erode over time. At the highest level of fragmentation, the areas where humans and virus-carrying animals might interact, or “mixing zones,” are largest, and risk is at its peak. But after the forest becomes so eroded by human activity that it can’t sustain wildlife anymore, risk decreases.

That analysis focused on the research led by Olivero and an epidemiological model created by Faust and her colleagues that tracked how spillover risk changes as forests become increasingly fragmented. But there was also other intriguing research on the link between land use and Ebola spillover that caught our attention.

One paper, by a team led by Maria Rulli at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, found a relationship between increased forest fragmentation over time and Ebola outbreaks. We came across a couple other papers that mapped out where Ebola is likely to exist in wild animals, including one by Olivero himself.

As part of the first project, we created a data set of ecological characteristics from satellite imagery. We were curious if some of the factors, like the number of forest patches or proportion of mixing zones around those patches, could shed additional light on how susceptible a location could be to disease spillover.

Months in, we asked ourselves, could we combine the 23 environmental and population characteristics and what we learned from work by Olivero, Faust and Rulli into a single model? Could such a model reveal new insights into the conditions related to forest change that make it possible for Ebola to jump from animals to humans?

On the advice of Lynch, our science adviser, we started by looking for any clear patterns or clusters among the characteristics.

But after squinting at lots of tiny scatter plots, nothing jumped out. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, because we had only seven outbreaks to compare. When the number of characteristics far outnumbers the events you’re interested in, it can be hard to tease out clear relationships. So Lynch suggested something straight from her own research playbook: decision trees and random forests.

Decision trees, Lynch explained, are machine learning algorithms that create chains of binary decisions to help distinguish groups from one another. We hoped they could help us find places that looked a lot like locations where Ebola outbreaks had occurred. These trees — not to be confused with the leafy trees in our forest data — are useful because they can sort and cluster data based on combinations of characteristics that might not be obvious when considering each individually, and flag potential matches.

Decision trees helped us figure out which population and forest characteristics best explain the differences between locations we’re interested in, and all others.

Here’s an example of one decision tree generated by our model.

Most importantly, they’re easy to understand. Unlike many machine learning models, it’s easy to pop the hood on a decision tree and examine the choices made at each step. But easy doesn’t mean unsophisticated. Many decision trees, each with random, slight differences, can be combined into something called a random forest, which aggregates the results of multiple decision trees. Random forests are a popular and versatile technique that has been used widely in academia and journalism.

Computers can generate many decision trees, each with slight differences. Together, they make up a random forest.

Any single location that is flagged by a majority of trees in a random forest is considered a location of interest.

We created a random forest made up of 1,000 trees. If a location was flagged by the random forest, then it was classified as similar to locations where Ebola outbreaks had been linked to forest loss, and reviewed by us.

Our ultimate goal was a model that could figure out which characteristics were distinctive in places that had experienced Ebola outbreaks. So we created three buckets of data: outbreaks linked to forest loss, outbreaks that had other origins and random places where outbreaks never happened.

Collecting the first two buckets was easy: the seven Ebola outbreaks previously linked to forest loss by Olivero and his collaborators went into one. The rest of the outbreaks since 2000 (the earliest year for which forest loss data from Hansen/Global Forest Watch is available) went into the other.

For the third bucket, we had lots of options. We started with a database of villages and hamlets in 28 countries. Then, we found which of them overlapped with Olivero’s data that maps where conditions are favorable for wild animals to harbor Ebola. In all, we had 11 million locations to examine.

It was unfeasible to query all 11 million, so we collected a random sample of 50,000 and collected population statistics for each. We then determined which of the 50,000 locations were at least 100 kilometers, about 62 miles, away from the outbreaks already in our two buckets. Finally, we narrowed the sample to villages and hamlets where the human population was within the range of populations in our outbreak buckets, because they might interact with the forest in similar ways; for example, for firewood or hunting. The populations couldn’t be too small, either — spillover events require, by definition, human hosts to jump into.

Our last step was to filter for locations similar to those in our second bucket. In other words, these locations had characteristics that could sustain an Ebola outbreak, maybe even due to a spillover event, but for reasons unrelated to forest loss. We selected 21 of those random locations for our third bucket of data.

For all 35 locations, which we refer to as our training data, we calculated 23 different characteristics about forest change and population using a variety of data sources.

Seven locations used as training data were outbreaks tied to forest loss.

The other locations fell into two buckets: outbreaks not tied to forest loss, or locations where outbreaks were never recorded.

With training data in hand, we set about trying to get the model to find insightful patterns. It’s a real possibility, especially when the input data is limited, that machine learning models will find patterns where there actually are none. This is called overfitting; think of it as a computer interpreting polka dots as a connect-the-dots game.

To avoid overfitting, we trained multiple random forest models, each time withholding some of the data. This is a common strategy in ecology, where data can be scarce and it’s important to make sure that a model is not overly influenced by the idiosyncrasies of any one data point. In our case, Ebola is such a rare disease that excluding one of seven outbreaks in each training round allowed us to see if any of them were disproportionately affecting the models.

The results from each training round also gave us a better idea about which of the 23 characteristics were most important. Only four characteristics were ranked as important across all training rounds: the number of patches the forest is divided into, the forest area at two points in time and changes in forest fragmentation.

This set of characteristics was exciting, because it confirmed that key concepts from the work by Olivero, Faust and Rulli could be combined into a single model.

Before we ran with these results, though, we wanted to gut-check one last possibility: that whatever pattern our model had found was too general. Sure, maybe we’d built something that identified a handful of shared traits among seven outbreaks, but perhaps our approach would always find key characteristics among a small number of data points.

To test this hypothesis, Lynch proposed something called, intriguingly, a “garbage model.”

Think of an English-Spanish dictionary, except the word pairs are all shuffled — “cat” is linked with “perro,” instead of “gato.” Using the dictionary to translate an English sentence would result in a totally nonsensical Spanish sentence.

Shuffling our data, Lynch said, should result in similarly nonsensical classifications of the data withheld from training. If not, then our approach was likely too general. But if the garbage model generated garbage classifications for the withheld data, then we could have some reassurance that whatever patterns our actual model found were genuine.

We tried it and — out came basura, as expected. It was time to create the final model.

Our final model only used the four most important characteristics of the nearly two dozen we’d started out with: how much patchier the forest had become in the two years leading up to an outbreak, how much bigger the mixing zones had gotten in that time, the amount of total forest in the year the outbreak happened and the amount of forest two years before that.

Finally, it was time to test the model by showing it completely new places and then asking which of them look like the set of outbreaks in the first bucket.

We took another random sample of approximately 1,000 places from the 50,000 previously sampled random set of settlements. Calculating fragmentation statistics in Google Earth Engine is time consuming — it took us about a week to process 1,000 locations. Collecting data for more locations would not have been feasible.

Out of nearly 1,000 test locations, we found that 51 were consistently flagged. About half of the locations were in southwest Nigeria. Sixteen were in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the remaining handful were in Ghana, Burundi and Benin.

Given that a spillover-induced outbreak of Ebola has never been recorded in Nigeria, we were surprised by the results. But a literature review revealed other papers that warned of the potential for Ebola spillover events in Nigeria. These papers, plus the locations flagged in the Democratic Republic of Congo — the site of the most recent Ebola outbreak with confirmed links to a spillover event — gave us the confidence to hit pause on all the coding and modeling to do some reporting.

You can read about it in our story.

Caroline Chen contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Irena Hwang and Al Shaw.

Photograph Source: Prime Minister’s Office – Government Open Data License – India

The deal with Micron during PM Modi’s visit to the United States has made headlines as a major technological breakthrough and a new dawn for India’s electronics chip-making industry. Implicit in this hurrah for the Micron deal is that India has completely missed the bus on the key technologies involved in electronic chip making. And for those who know technology would realize that the Micron deal is only for packaging of the chips, their assembly and testing, a relatively low end of the electronics industry. It does not touch the core technologies of designing and fabrication of chips, let alone the holy grail of chip-making technology: the lithographic machines that are central to chip fabrication.

The U.S.-India ties had hit a rocky patch, with India refusing to sanction Russia or aligning with the West and G-7 on a “rule-based international order.” Where the West makes all the rules. With Prime Minister Modi and President Biden both facing what could be difficult elections soon, they both urgently needed a reset in U.S.-India ties. For India, it is getting technology for critical sectors in India and declaring a new dawn. For Biden, India is part of its derisking and long-term plan to disengage its industries and market from China.

Late as it already is, the Modi dispensation is finally beginning to understand that technology is not something that, if you have money, you can buy from the global market. It is the closely-held knowledge of companies and countries. Today, it is electronics that drive everything: from the battlefield to artificial intelligence, from your lowly washing machines to the most expensive fighter planes. In the Ukraine war, a few dollars worth of chips are at the core of cheap drones to the most expensive aircraft and missiles. In war, tanks and artillery are also integrated with missiles and drones, shaping the modern battlefield, with radar and satellites providing real-time information to those running the battles. Modern electronic chips are the “brains” of all of this equipment, just as it is in almost any industry and device.

If India has to maintain its autonomy in global affairs, it has to start thinking about the future of its electronics industry. What sits at the heart of the electronics industry is the ability to make the latest generation of chips. If not today, then at least tomorrow. And we need to start today, as we missed the chip-making bus when we decided not to rebuild the chip fabrication plant—the SemiConductor Complex—we had built in Mohali. The plant, a critical component of our self-reliance in electronics, had mysteriously burnt down in 1989.

So what is the Micron deal? Micron is a major manufacturer of memory chips, and it is this realm of business that has made it one of the world’s leaders in the semiconductor industry. It would have the necessary credentials if it decided to set up a memory fabrication plant in India, unlike the Foxconn-Vedanta fabrication proposal greeted with a lot of fanfare, where Foxconn does not have any experience in chip-making. But that is not what Micron is offering. It has offered to set up a plant in Gujarat to only “assemble, package and test” chips that Micron has fabricated elsewhere. Micron has such chip fabrication plants in the United States and also in China, whose products, the chips will be packaged and tested in India. So if chip-making was India’s goal, it would not be delivered through the Micron deal. What we are getting is the lowest end of the chip-making technology, assembling and testing chips that have been made elsewhere. We are not competing with the United States, China, South Korea, and Japan on chip making but with countries like Malaysia. Malaysia is already streets ahead of us in this area, with about 13 percent of the world’s in OSAT outsourcing market. Locating such plants in Malaysia and now India would be a part of the de-risking strategy of the U.S. companies, where they shift the low end of the chip production to countries like Malaysia and India while encouraging new high-end chip fabrication to the United States, such as Micron’s $100 billion mega-fab in Clay, Washington.

Let us look at the investments involved in setting up the Micron plant and who is footing the bill. The total cost of setting up the plant is estimated to be $2.75 billion, with the central government providing a 50 percent subsidy and the Gujarat state government throwing in another 20 percent. Micron is investing only 30 percent of the total capital! In other words, Micron will hold 100 percent ownership in a plant costing $2.75 billion, in which they would have invested would have invested only 0.825 billion! Even industry reports—e.g., eeNews Europe—calls this an “extreme level of subsidy.” In other words, to burnish Modi’s image, tarnished by BJP’s loss in Karnataka and the continuing riots in Manipur, this is a part of the public relations exercise that his team is doing. If we look at this deal for getting low-level technology—assembly and testing—we are “subsiding” a leading U.S. manufacturer so that we can assemble and test the chips built in Micron’s high-end plants in the United States and China.

India is not the only country providing subsidies for technology and setting up plants. So are the United States and China. The United States has a $52 billion government kitty for subsiding chip manufacturing and other core activities. China has a National Fund and another popularly called the Big Fund (National Integrated Circuits Industry Development Investment Fund), both investing $73 billion in China’s chip-making industry. But both these countries are funding the high end of the electronics tech stack, advanced chip making, devices, CAD tools, lithographic machines, etc., virtually nothing (only about 5 percent) in the assembling and testing of chips. Even when they do invest, they do much lower amounts and also as a fraction of the total cost. According to the South China Morning Post, quoted by Yahoo Finance, China gave $1.75 billion in subsidies to 190 Chinese firms, with China’s leading chip fabricator SMIC, receiving roughly about 20 percent of that amount!

There is no question that India, having missed the chip-making bus, needs to ramp up its ambitions and bootstrap a chip-making industry. To do this successfully, it has to have a plan, where to invest and how much to invest, and when to invest. Yes, it has to return to old-fashioned planning, dismissed by BJP-RSS ideologues as “socialism.” And yes, every country plans its science and technology, including how to develop people, the key to technology development. Not one-off shots and driven by which companies come and what they offer. Instead, what is our path forward, and what do we need? And paying 70 percent of the cost while offering our land, cheap labor so that a U.S. company can get 100 percent of the ownership, in a segment where countries like Malaysia are streets ahead of us, is not investing in technology. It is simply a PR exercise.

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Prabir Purkayastha.

“There has to be a source of absolute truth,” then–CNN CEO Christ Licht told the Atlantic (6/2/23)—but also denounced “the media’s habit of marginalizing conservative views.”

After less than a year, Warner Bros Discovery has ousted CNN chair and CEO Chris Licht. The move comes after the network has suffered dismal ratings, layoffs, an embarrassing town hall with Donald Trump and, most recently, a withering 15,000-word profile of Licht in the Atlantic (6/2/23).

But don’t hold your breath hoping for a better CNN with Licht’s departure.

Licht was recruited by Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav after Warner Media merged with Discovery Inc in 2022 to create a new parent company for the network. As FAIR wrote at the time of the merger (2/17/22), libertarian billionaire John Malone, an influential board member and stakeholder at Discovery, had been vocal about his desire to see CNN become more like Fox News. And Zaslav had said he wanted to distinguish CNN from cable news “advocacy networks” (Wall Street Journal, 4/14/22).

After Licht took the helm, he quickly axed the network’s most outspoken Trump critics, including longtime media reporter Brian Stelter—who had also pushed back forcefully and publicly (CNN, 2/7/22) against Malone’s characterizations of CNN as a place that did not “actually have journalists.”

FAIR (8/25/22) called Licht’s ouster of Stelter and cancellation of his long-running show, Reliable Sources, “the first evidence of a shift away from critical journalism at CNN, at a critical time.”

‘Democracy itself’ at stake

In the New York Times (12/18/22), Licht denounced “uninformed vitriol, especially from the left,” and referred to the middle of the political spectrum as “normal” people.

Last December, the New York Times (12/18/22) published a fawning profile of Licht that presented him as a competent idealist just trying against tough odds to make the world a better place. The piece opened:

When Chris Licht told his boss, Stephen Colbert, the host of the CBS program Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in February that he had been offered the chief executive job at CNN, Mr. Colbert was blunt: “Definitely don’t go do that.”

But for Mr. Licht, nothing less than democracy itself was at stake. He argued he could make CNN a news channel that people trusted, as opposed to one that monetized partisan combat.

Licht complained to the Times:

The uninformed vitriol, especially from the left, has been stunning…. Which proves my point: so much of what passes for news is name-calling, half-truths and desperation.

It’s not clear exactly what Licht was referring to, but “name-calling, half-truths and desperation” certainly would seem to be appropriate characterizations of the May event he orchestrated that marked the beginning of the end for his tenure.

With “democracy itself” at stake, Licht decided to give Donald Trump a town hall event stocked with supporters, in which little effort was made to rein in the presidential candidate’s lies and insults. The outcome? As the Atlantic‘s Tim Alberta put it, “The only one who wasn’t angry, it seemed, was Trump, most likely because he’d succeeded in disgracing the network on its own airwaves.”

‘Speaking hard truths’

The Trump town hall fiasco drove CNN‘s ratings down below even those of the far-right conspiracy theorists at Newsmax (Yahoo, 5/16/23).

But it wasn’t Licht’s poor journalistic ethos that got him fired. His ouster could be attributed more to his inability to turn around CNN‘s tanking ratings, and to gain the confidence of his staff (CNN Business, 6/7/23). Those failures are little surprise. CNN‘s ratings are evidence that there is little audience for journalism that treats right-wing lies respectfully while not fully buying into them—and little enthusiasm from the journalists being asked to perform that act.

On the contrary, Licht’s approach to journalism aligns neatly with too many other news execs (and reporters) who see themselves as non-ideological truth-tellers, pushing back against left and right in the service of democracy. (“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” anyone?) Yet they bend over backwards to both-sides every issue and avoid any appearance of anti-Republican bias, while forcefully rejecting what they see as a creeping “wokeism” on the left.

From the Atlantic:

Licht insisted that his media critiques were not ideological; that he was rebuking not a liberal slant on the news, per se, but rather a bias toward elite cultural sensibility, a reporting covenant in which affluent urban-dwelling journalists avoid speaking hard truths that would alienate members of their tribe. When we returned to the question of covering transgender issues—specifically, the science around prepubescent hormone treatments and life-altering surgeries—he suggested that the media was less interested in finding answers and more worried about not offending perceived allies.

“We’ve got to ask tough questions without being shouted down for having the temerity to even ask,” Licht said. “There is a truth in there, and it may not serve one side or the other. But let’s get to the truth. Some of this is right, some of this is wrong; some of this is wrong, some of this is right.”

If Licht’s take sounds familiar, it’s because it’s quite similar to the New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s defense of his paper’s misleading trans coverage. Sulzberger suggested (CJR, 5/15/23) that the paper’s high-profile articles that boosted misleading anti-trans narratives were likewise getting at what is “true” and “important,” and that “suppressing” unsupported anti-trans viewpoints would make the paper “overtly political.”

‘Do not virtue signal’

Like Licht, New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger (CJR, 5/15/23) seems most concerned about not alienating a right-wing audience that has basically no trust in what his outlet says.

The Atlantic profile continued:

He paused. “And I will add, this is where words matter. You immediately force some people to tune out when you use, like, ‘person capable of giving birth.’ People tune out and you lose that trust.” He took another pause. “Do not virtue signal. Tell the truth. Ask questions getting at the truth—not collecting facts for one side or collecting facts for another side. Ask the tough questions. It’s an incredibly sensitive, divisive issue of which there is a Venn diagram that this country can agree on, if we get there with facts.”

Again, Licht echoes Sulzberger. A “greater journalistic risk” than both-sidesing, Sulzberger asserted (CJR, 5/15/23), is “to actively embrace a journalistic one-sideism to signal that they are on the side of the righteous.” Better to include bigoted, false and/or conspiratorial viewpoints, these brave leaders suggest, than to “signal” that you’re taking the other side by excluding them.

Both men seem to believe that, while gaining trust is vital for news outlets, the trust they need to gain is from a sector of the public that supports election lies and conspiracy theories—not the sector deeply skeptical of a corporate media system that found a Trump candidacy “damn good” for their bottom line. And the people with ultimate power in our media system seem more concerned about bigoted victims of criticism than about victims of bigotry.

Licht’s journalistic perspective is hardly a disqualifier for corporate news leadership; it’s closer to a job requirement. As long as corporate media continue to emphasize  appearing unbiased against an increasingly radical right, and on being “tough” on the left rather than holding the powerful to account, their purported goals of saving democracy and gaining public trust will both be equally out of reach.

The post CNN Needs More Than a New CEO—It Needs a New Model of Journalism appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

The number of bodies found on the nation, which has long been a place where people have come north after crossing the border, grew exponentially from an average of 49.5 (2015–18) to 82.5 (2019–22). The report also connects MPP and Title 42 with increased violence against migrants, including incidents of robbery, disappearance, and sexual assault, which it documents using a large data set from Human Rights First. “We explain how those official policies led to unprecedented violence carried out from Jan. 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022 through migrant expulsions by CBP [ U.S. Customs and Border Protection] and by multinational criminal organizations,” the authors write.

Out of Sight Out of Mind: An Interpretive Human Rights Report on U.S. Mexico Border Violence under MPP and Title 42 is well timed, on the cusp of May, the month that begins the hot season in the desert, when crossing the border becomes more life threatening.

But the report doesn’t stop there. It situates these human rights abuses within the broader economic dynamics of globalization, particularly free trade agreements between the United States and Mexico (NAFTA), as well as Central America (CAFTA). By doing this, the researchers offer not only a bigger and broader context about why people are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border to begin with, who’s crossing borders, why people are crossing borders, and what are some of the root causes of dispossession and displacement, but it also situates the hyper-militarized U.S. Mexico border as one puzzle piece in an “economic pipeline.”

As the authors put it:

“Workers displaced from NAFTA and CAFTA in free trade states became unwitting human capital for economic exploitation by operators of the pipeline within the regional neo-liberal model. In the free trade countries, hollowed out governance structures were supportive of the military suppression of workers’ access to employment and corporate capture of natural resources.”

The researchers continue, “Migration, and its myriad of political and human costs, became a major tradeoff in the Meso-American regional economy. In parallel, a glaring pattern of human rights violations dotted major migration routes and borders.”

By looking at the border policy as a kind of business model, the report reveals the extractive tentacles of the state, corporations, and organized crime. Violence against migrants, it argues, becomes an “investment policy” that enables this state-corporate-criminal nexus to extract and profit from people who are on the move, whether through dispossession in their home countries or smuggling costs to get across the border, not to mention the lucrative contracts that surveillance companies receive, among other things.

In this sense the report contends with MPP, Title 42, and the resulting rapid mass expulsions and vulnerability imposed on people who stay on the Mexican side—all these, the report argues, work in tandem with criminal networks that would exploit these same people for profit. This becomes an important point because CBP is so often pitted against crime, which justifies its budgets. But really, the researchers say, the Homeland Security agency and its deportations help fuel the deaths and violence. And the border becomes a place where the free market, border militarization, and crime collide.

And now, entering the summer months, we can predict that people who right now are otherwise healthy will die crossing the border. If trends continue, the Tohono O’odham Nation will yet again be a place where bodies will be recovered and people will disappear. This is far from an anomaly Out of Sight Out of Mind makes clear, the violence is a predictable part of the system of mass border militarization and mass deportation. All in all, it has become a matter of the business of the border.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Todd Miller.

On a 1919 trip to the United States, King Albert I of Belgium visited three of the country’s national parks: Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the newly established Grand Canyon. The parks represented a model developed by the U.S. of creating protected national parks, where visitors and scientists could come to admire spectacular, unchanging natural beauty and wildlife. Impressed by the parks, King Albert created his own just a few years later: Albert National Park in the Belgian Congo, established in 1925. 

Widely seen as the first national park in Africa, Albert National Park (now called Virunga National Park), was designed to be a place for scientific exploration and discovery, particularly around mountain gorillas. It also set the tone for decades of colonial protected parks in Africa. Although Belgian authorities claimed that the park was home to only a small group of Indigenous people — “300 or so, whom we like to preserve” — they violently expelled thousands of other Indigenous people from the area. The few hundred selected to remain in the park were seen as a valuable addition to the park’s wildlife rather than as actual people. 

And so modern conservation in Africa began by separating nature from the people who lived in it. Since then, as the model has spread across the globe, inhabited protected areas have routinely led to the eviction of Indigenous peoples. Today, these conservation projects are led not by colonial governments but by nonprofit executives, large corporations, academics, and world leaders.

Although the system has evolved, the results are the same: ongoing evictions, murders, persecution, and loss of culture, and a global apparatus that poses an existential threat to Indigenous peoples around the world. And as world leaders call for more protected areas in response to climate and biodiversity crises, Indigenous peoples are sounding the alarm. This is the latest phase of a centuries-long conflict over what it means to protect nature, and what some are willing to sacrifice for it.

Read more on the history of conservation

How protecting the Earth became an excuse for murder

Gord Hill

For much of human history, most people lived in rural areas, surrounded by nature and farmland. That all changed with the Industrial Revolution. By the end of the 19th century, European forests were vanishing, cities were growing, and Europeans felt increasingly disconnected from the natural world.

“With industrialization, the link with the natural cycle of things got lost — and that also led to a certain type of romanticization of nature, and a longing for a particular type of nature,” said Bram Büscher, a sociologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. 

In Africa, Europeans could experience that pure, untouched nature, even if it meant expelling the people living on it. 

“The idea that land is best preserved when it’s protected away from humans is an imperialist ideology that has been imposed on Africans and other Indigenous people,” said Aby Sène-Harper, an environmental social scientist at Clemson University in South Carolina. 

For Europeans, creating protected parks in Africa allowed them to expand their dominion over the continent and quench their thirst for “undisturbed” nature, all without threatening their ongoing expansion of industrialization and capitalism in their own countries. With each new national park came more evictions of Indigenous people, paving the way for trophy hunting, resource extraction, and anything else they wanted to do.

In the mid-19th century, European colonization of Africa was limited, largely confined to coastal regions. But by 1925, when King Albert created his park, Europeans controlled roughly 90 percent of the continent. 

At the time, these parks were playgrounds for wealthy Europeans and part of a massive imperial campaign to control African land and resources. Today, there are thousands of protected national parks around the world covering millions of acres, ranging from small enclosures like Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis to sprawling landmarks like Death Valley in California and Kruger National Park in South Africa. And the world wants more. 

Scientists, politicians, and conservationists are championing the protected-areas model, developed in the U.S. and perfected in Africa. In late 2022, at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, nearly 200 countries signed an international pledge to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and waters by 2030, an effort known as 30×30 that would amount to the greatest expansion of protected areas in history.

So how did protected parks move from an imperial tool to an international solution for accelerating climate and biodiversity crises? 

In the early part of the 20th century, the expansion of colonial conservation areas was humming along. From South Africa to Kenya and India, colonial governments were creating protected national parks. These parks provided a host of benefits to their creators. There were economic benefits, including extraction of resources on park land and tourism income from increasingly popular safaris and hunting expeditions. But most of all, the rapidly developing network of parks was a form of control.

“If you can sweep a lot of peasants and Indigenous peoples away from the lands, then it’s easier to colonize the land,” Büscher said. 

This approach was enshrined by the 1933 International Conference for the Protection of the Fauna and Flora of Africa, which created one of the first international treaties, known as the London Convention, to protect wildlife. The convention was led by prominent trophy hunters, but it recommended that colonies restrict traditional African hunting practices.

“Conservation is an ideology. And this ideology is based on the idea that other human beings’ ways of life are wrong and are harming nature, that nature needs no human beings in order to be saved,” said Fiore Longo, a researcher and campaigner at Survival international, a nonprofit that advocates for Indigenous rights globally. 

The London Convention also suggested national parks as a primary solution to preserve nature in Africa — and as many African countries saw the creation of their first national parks in the first half of the 20th century, the removal of Indigenous peoples continued. The convention was also an early sign that conservation was becoming a global task, rather than a collection of individual projects and parks. 

This sense of collective responsibility only grew in the aftermath of World War II, when many international organizations and mechanisms, like the United Nations, were created, ushering in a new period of global cooperation. In 1948, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, the world’s first international organization devoted to nature conservation, was established. This would help pave the way for a new phase of international conservation trends.

By the middle of the 20th century, many countries in Africa were beginning to decolonize, becoming independent from the European powers that had controlled them for decades. Even as they lost their colonies, the imperial powers were not willing to let go of their protected parks. But at the same time, the IUCN was proving ineffective and underfunded. So in 1961, the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, an international nonprofit, was founded by European conservationists to help fund global efforts to protect wildlife. 

Sène-Harper said that although the newly independent African countries nominally controlled their national parks, many of them were run or supported by Western nonprofits like WWF.

“They’re trying to find more crafty ways to be able to extract without seeming so colonial about it, but it’s still an imperialist form of invasion,” she said.

Although these nonprofits have done important work in raising awareness of the extinction crisis, and have had some successes, experts say that the model of colonial conservation has not changed and has only made the problem worse. 

Over the years, WWF and other nonprofits have helped fund violent campaigns against Indigenous peoples, from Nepal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And amid it all, climate change continues to worsen and species continue to suffer. 

In 2019, in response to allegations about murders and other human rights abuses, WWF conducted an independent review that found “no evidence that WWF staff directed, participated in, or encouraged any abuses.” The organization also said in a statement that “We feel deep and unreserved sorrow for those who have suffered. We are determined to do more to make communities’ voices heard, to have their rights respected, and to consistently advocate for governments to uphold their human rights obligations.”

“I think most of [the big NGOs] have become part of the problem rather than the solution, unfortunately,” Büscher said. “The extinction crisis is very real and urgent. But, nonetheless, the history of these organizations and their policies are incredibly contradictory.”

To Indigenous people who had already suffered from decades of colonial conservation policies, little changed with decolonization.

“When we got independence, we kept on the same policies and regulations,” said Mathew Bukhi Mabele, a conservation social scientist at the University of Dodoma in central Tanzania. 

In 1992, representatives from around the world gathered in Rio De Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The Earth Summit, as it has come to be known, led to the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as the Convention on Biological Diversity, two international treaties that committed to tackling climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable development. 

Biodiversity is the umbrella term for all forms of life on Earth including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi. 

Although the Earth Summit was a pivotal moment in the global fight to protect the environment, some have criticized the decision to split climate change and biodiversity into separate conferences. 

“It doesn’t make sense, actually, to separate out the two because when you get to the ground, these are going to be the same activities, the same approaches, the same programs, the same life plans for Indigenous people,” said Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, who is Kankana-ey Igorot from the Northern Philippines and one of the lead negotiators of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. 

In the years following the Earth Summit, biodiversity efforts began to lag behind climate action, Corpuz said.

Protecting animals was trendy during the early days of WWF, when images of pandas and elephants were key fundraising tactics. But as the impacts of climate change intensified, including more devastating storms, higher sea levels, and rising temperatures, biodiversity was struggling to gain as much attention. 

“There were 100 times more resources being poured into climate change. It was more sexy, more charismatic, as an issue,” Corpuz said. “And now biodiversity wants a piece of the pie.” 

But to get that, proponents of biodiversity needed to develop initiatives similar to the big goals coming out of climate conferences. For many conservation groups and scientists, the obvious solution was to fall back on what they had always done: create protected areas.

This time, however, they needed a global plan, so scientists were trying to calculate how much of the world they needed to protect. In 2010, nations set a goal of conserving 17 percent of the world’s land by 2020. Some scientists have supported protecting half the earth. Meanwhile, Indigenous groups have proposed protecting 80 percent of the Amazon by 2025. 

In 2019, Eric Dinerstein, formerly the chief scientist at WWF, and others wrote the Global Deal for Nature, a paper that proposed formally protecting 30 percent of the world by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050, calling it a “companion pact to the Paris Agreement.” Their 30×30 plan has since gained widespread international support. 

But other experts, including some Indigenous leaders, say the idea ignores generations of effective Indigenous land management. At the time, there was limited scientific attention paid to Indigenous stewardship. Because of that, Indigenous leaders say they were largely ignored in the early years of international biodiversity negotiations.

“At the moment, we did not have a lot of evidence,” said Viviana Figueroa, who is Omaguaca-Kolla from Argentina and a member of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. 

Some experts see the push for global protected areas as a direct response to community-based conservation, which grew in popularity in the 1980s, and saw local communities and Indigenous peoples take control of conservation projects in their area, rather than the centralized approach that had dominated during colonial times. 

“The roots of [the push for 30×30] should be looked at as the backlash against community-based conservation,” Bram Büscher, the sociologist from Wageningen University, said.

Read more on 30×30

30×30 is conservation’s flashy new goal. Now countries need to figure out what it actually means.

Blanca Begert

Some of the chief proponents of 30×30 bristle at the suggestion that they do not support Indigenous rights and say that Indigenous land management is at the heart of the initiative.

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson from WWF pointed to its website, which outlines the organization’s approach to area-based conservation and its position on 30×30: “WWF supports the inclusion of a ‘30×30’ target in CBD’s post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF) only if certain conditions are met. For example, such a target must ensure social equity, good governance, and an inclusive approach that secures the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities to their land, freshwater, and seas.”

“People have cherry-picked a few examples of where the rights of locals have been tread upon. But by and large, in the vast majority of situations, what’s going on is support of local communities, really, rather than anything to do with violation,” said Dinerstein, who now works at Resolve, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on environmental, social, and health issues. 

But Indigenous advocates say if that were true, they would not keep pushing a model that has already led to countless human rights violations.

“Despite having this knowledge and knowing that people who are not contributing to the destruction of the environment are going to pay for these protected areas, they decided to keep on pushing the target,” Survival International’s Longo said. 

The new 30×30 framework agreed to by nearly 200 countries at the UN Biodiversity Conference in December came after years of delay and fierce negotiation. The challenge is now implementing the agreement around the world, a massive task that will require buy-in from individual countries and their governments.

“What was adopted in Montreal is hugely ambitious. And it can only be achieved by a lot of hard work on the ground. And it’s a great document, but it is only a document,” said David Cooper, acting executive secretary of the UN’s Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. 

Part of that work is figuring out what land to protect. And although Indigenous negotiators and advocates did manage to get language that enshrines Indigenous rights into the final agreement, they are still concerned. Over a century of colonial conservation has shown that it only serves the powerful at the expense of Indigenous peoples. 

“European countries are not going to evict white people from their lands,” said Longo. “That is for sure. This is where you see all the racism around this. Because they know how these targets will be applied in Africa and Asia. That’s what’s going on, they are evicting the people.”

Dinerstein, however, would argue that European countries have less natural resources to preserve, but more financial resources to help other countries.

“There’s a lot that can be done in Europe,” he said. “So we shouldn’t overlook that as well. I’m just making the point that there’s the opportunity to be able to do much more in other countries that have much less resources.”

Cooper said that in addition to implementation, monitoring and ensuring that rights are upheld will be a crucial task over the next seven years. “There will need to be a lot of work on monitoring. There’s always a justified nervousness that any global process cannot really see what’s happening at the local level and can end up with supporting measures that are perhaps not beneficial at the local level,” he said. 

Although Indigenous leaders are going to keep fighting to ensure that the expansion of protected areas does not lead to continued violation of their rights, they are worried that the model itself is flawed. “It’s inevitable that the burden is going to fall again on developing countries,” Corpuz said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence on Apr 13, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Lee.

In a display described by some as a "red loyalty dance" in honor of the opening of the National People's Congress' in Beijing, hundreds of students dressed in full military uniform, bearing placards of calligraphy and wearing red armbands, marched through the streets of Shangrao on Sunday, singing songs of praise for Lei Feng. They were escorted by rows of uniformed police, a video clip provided to RFA showed.

Local media reports said officials in the town had agreed to let the display go ahead because March 5 marked both the opening of China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress, in Beijing, as well as being National Lei Feng Day.

Radio Free Asia was unable to reach any of the students or staff who took part in the heavily choreographed parade, and several schools in the city denied having taken part when approached about the event.

Shangrao officials also seemed keen to distance themselves from the "loyalty dance."

An official who answered the phone at the municipal bureau of education on Monday said the event had nothing to do with them, and was organized by the Xinzhou district education and sports bureau.

An official who answered the phone at the Xinzhou district education and sports bureau said they didn't know which schools had taken part in the event, adding that some of the schools in the district are administered by the city education bureau.

"This wasn't organized by us ... there are district-run schools and city-run schools, and I don't know which schools you are referring to," the official said.

"Learning from Lei Feng is normal ... it's quite normal for schools to organize activities that promote it," the official said. "Maybe copying the clothes worn by Lei Feng is part of red education, but it's not formalistic."

Calls to the Xinzhou district government and Shangrao city government hadn't responded to requests for comment by the time of publication.

No nostalgia

A Shangrao resident who gave only his surname Xu, for fear of reprisals, said the parade was held on Dongmen Road, that has the reputation for being "retro," but that local people hadn't welcomed the display of nostalgia for the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a decade of factional street fighting and political turmoil that saw teachers and doctors locked up in cowpens and their places taken -- sometimes to disastrous effect -- by revolutionary youths.

"March 5 was 'Everyone Learn from Lei Feng Day'," so they were trying to create some momentum for that," Xu said. "They set up Dongmen Road to look as if it was back in the 1980s."

"But this Red Guard craze will blow over," he predicted. "It can't become a trend in the absence of orders from people at the highest level."

A Guangdong-based lawyer who requested anonymity said the display had aroused feelings of disgust on social media, with many worrying that China will accelerate its move towards leftist ideology and wind up back in a situation similar to the Cultural Revolution, a concern that was also reflected in slogans hung from a Beijing traffic flyover ahead of the 20th party congress on Oct. 13.

"It's unclear whether this was spontaneous, or whether it was Xi Jinping's intention [for it to happen]," the lawyer said. "I really don't think it can develop into the red fever that we saw under [now jailed former municipal party secretary] Bo Xilai in Chongqing."

"But things have changed a lot in the past 10 years ... and [Xi] certainly seems to hope that everyone can be brainwashed into loyalty dances and singing red songs," he said. "But it'll probably be hard for him to achieve that in a short time frame after 40 years of market economics."

Red songs were temporarily banned in Chongqing and Beijing after Bo Xilai’s fall from power, amid unconfirmed rumors that he and his political allies had been planning a coup in Beijing.

A Shanghai-based entrepreneur warned however that a society that hasn't fully reflected on the tragedy of Maoist politics will inevitably wind up repeating it.

"Back in the days of economic development, everyone could make some money, but those days are gone forever," the entrepreneur warned. "If there is no money to hand out, then there is going to be a serious problem, like in North Korea -- it's inevitable."

"Things are getting worse -- if there are no monuments to the Cultural Revolution or to the Great Famine, then they will both happen again," they warned.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Xiaoshan Huang and Chingman for RFA Cantonese.

The shocking death of the socialite, 28, whose body parts are believed to have been cooked into soup at a Hong Kong flat, has gripped headlines around the world.

Choi’s ex-father-in-law, Kwong Kau, 65, has been charged along with sons Alex Kwong, 28 and Anthony Kwong, for her murder and dismemberment after body parts, a meat grinder and two vats of soup containing human tissue were found at a property rented by the elder Kwong.

Now former police superintendent Lai Ka Chi has told Radio Free Asia that Kwong Kau had been a police detective stationed in Mong Kok, a busy Hong Kong shopping district. He resigned from the position in 2004 amid an allegation that he had sexually assaulted a woman linked to an investigation he was involved in.

Kwong was not charged in that 2004 incident.

Unnamed police sources have also confirmed to Hong Kong media that Kwong served in the police department.

Reported dispute over property

Media reports said the murder came amid a dispute between Choi and her ex-in-laws over the sale of a multimillion-dollar property in the upmarket neighborhood of Kadoorie Hill, in Ho Man Tin district.

Kwong’s son and Choi’s ex-husband Alex Kwong was also known to police prior to his murder arrest on Sunday, Lai said. The younger Kwong has been wanted by authorities since jumping bail for an arrest for robbery in 2015.

He was arrested on suspicion of stealing jewelry as well as gold bars and nuggets, Lai said, adding that he did not know how Kwong was able to evade arrest for eight years without being apprehended. 

The disclosures come as police are continuing the investigation into Choi’s murder.

Along with the three men, Choi's former mother-in-law Jenny Li, 63, has also been charged with obstructing investigators and a 47-year-old woman -- reportedly Kwong Kau's girlfriend -- was also arrested on suspicion of "assisting offenders" in the case, police said.

Neither Hong Kong authorities nor lawyers for the accused have returned requests for comment.

Choi's ex-husband Alex Kwong was arrested on Feb 25 at a pier in Tung Chung, about to board a speedboat in possession of around H.K.$500,000 in cash and several luxury watches worth around H.K.$4 million.

The Straits Times, citing police, reported that another suspect was arrested in connection with Choi’s murder: a 41-year-old man surnamed Lam, who allegedly tried to help Alex Kwong escape for a fee of H.K.$100,000.

Police have been searching landfills near the site where Choi's missing body parts were found, the English-language South China Morning Post reported.

Kwong Kau rented the ground-floor flat where the human remains were found in early February. Choi was reported missing on Feb 21.

Her skull was discovered with a hole where pathologists believe she was fatally struck, Police Superintendent Alan Chung told reporters earlier this week.

Densely populated Hong Kong has seen a number of murders by dismemberment, with several grisly cases making headlines since the 1980s.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Boer Deng.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cheryl Tung for RFA Cantonese.

A rail labor leader on Wednesday sent a scathing letter to Ohio's Republican governor warning that Norfolk Southern's business model poses a threat to communities across the U.S.—one that must be met with swift regulatory action.

"I am writing to share with you the level of disregard that Norfolk Southern has for the safety of the railroad's workers, its track structure, and East Palestine and other American communities where NS operates," reads the letter by Jonathon Long, general chairman of the American Rail System Federation (ARSF) of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (BMWED), which represents nearly 3,000 Norfolk Southern employees tasked with constructing, inspecting, and maintaining railroad tracks.

Long, who has been a Norfolk Southern maintenance of way employee for nearly three decades, wrote to Ohio Mike DeWine that Norfolk Southern is "one of many freight railroads operating under the cost-cutting business model, 'precision scheduled railroading,' otherwise known as 'PSR.'"

"This business model was foisted upon the railroad industry by Wall Street 'activist investors' and hedge funds starting around 2015," Long noted. "What this business model really involves is running longer, heavier behemoth trains that the track structures are not necessarily designed to handle."

"It also involves the concentrated slashing of employees from the workforce (30% industry-wide since 2015, 21% for NS Maintenance of Way Employees) and then shifting the workload onto those remaining workers, pushing them to work faster and longer hours," he continued. "Additionally, PSR involves eliminating fail-safes or preventative safety precautions that promote safer rail operations and help prevent disasters such as derailments."

Emphasizing the rail giant's lack of concern for worker health and safety, Long wrote that he received reports from employees indicating that Norfolk Southern "neither offered nor provided" adequate protective equipment to those who were instructed to assist clean-up efforts in the wake of last month's toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

According to Long:

One worker shared with me that he called his supervisor and requested to be transported off the derailment site due to concerns of his safety caused by the exposure to the chemicals which were causing him nausea and migraines; the supervisor stated he would get back to the employee, but he never heard back from his supervisor and the employee was left on the job site. Many other employees reported that they continue to experience migraines and nausea, days after the derailment, and they all suspect that they were willingly exposed to these chemicals at the direction of NS.

Long argued that such blatant neglect is "a basic tenet" of Norfolk Southern's "cost-cutting business model," which he called "dangerous to America" because it "disregards the sanctity of human life for the sake of more record profits."

The labor leader went on to reveal that during recent talks over paid sick leave, Norfolk Southern urged union negotiators to drop their opposition to the company's "experimental automated track inspection program," which workers fear is a ploy to replace and ultimately weaken existing track inspection protocols.

Long attached a copy of the company's request to his letter to DeWine, noting that "while BMWED and NS reached an agreement on paid sick leave, I absolutely did not agree with NS' proposal to support their experimental track inspection program."

"NS' proposal was ultimately for the union to be complicit in NS' effort to reduce legally required minimum track safety standards through supporting their experimental track inspection program without a sensible fail-safe or safety precautions to help ensure trains would not derail," Long wrote.

"In other words," he added, the rail company's plan "was to use your community’s safety as their bargaining chip to further pursue their record profits under their cost-cutting business model. They gamble with your money, and you hold all the risk if they lose by putting a toxic train in the ditch in your community."

Long's letter came as lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate pushed new legislation this week aimed at strengthening regulations for trains carrying hazardous materials and increasing penalties for companies that violate safety rules.

"It shouldn't take a massive railroad disaster for elected officials to put partisanship aside and work together for the people we serve—not corporations like Norfolk Southern," Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said in a statement Wednesday marking the introduction of a bipartisan Senate bill for which he is one of the lead Democratic sponsors.

"Rail lobbyists have fought for years to protect their profits at the expense of communities like East Palestine and Steubenville and Sandusky," Brown added. "These commonsense bipartisan safety measures will finally hold big railroad companies accountable, make our railroads and the towns along them safer, and prevent future tragedies, so no community has to suffer like East Palestine again."

In his letter Wednesday, Long warned that unless concrete action is taken at the state and federal levels to rein in Norfolk Southern and other rail giants, more trains will "go off the rails in communities like East Palestine."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Change is afoot in Latin America. The region—battered by COVID, inequality and environmental crisis—is seeing a second wave of progressive governments elected, most significantly with the recent victory of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. This is a unique opportunity for us to build a new trade model that puts people and the planet first. Stopping the harmful EU-Mercosur trade deal is a good place to start.

Now Brazil is back, the priority is people over profit

In his election victory speech Lula outlined some of the government’s priorities. The focus was on fighting hunger and poverty, while also repositioning Brazil as a major player in regional and international affairs. Lula committed to re-negotiating the EU-Mercosur trade deal. He stated, “Brazil is back. We are back to help build a peaceful world order based on dialogue and multilateralism.” This will give a much needed boost to global human rights, climate action and diplomacy that have been under threat from the rising far right.

Initiatives from Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Colombia indicate that the region as a whole is keen to discuss regional integration as well as the strategic economic and political foundations on which to base our relationship with the world.

Timing is everything. The world’s vulnerabilities have been laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and further heightened by the impact of the war in Europe. A war which is now taking place in key countries for the supply of energy and raw materials for the agro-industry. This alone should inspire an interrogation of international economic relations and the dominance of transnational corporations in determining trade and investment flows and national production patterns.

This is a unique opportunity for us to build a new trade model that puts people and the planet first. Stopping the harmful EU-Mercosur trade deal is a good place to start.

While some politicians are trying to use Lula’s election as a reason to accelerate the ratification of the deal, Friends of the Earth International and our allies around the world know that now is the time to prioritise social needs, such as access to medicines, healthy food and the environment. It is time to confront the obsolete, neo-colonial and neo-liberal trade model, driven by the supply and market demands of European companies.

The winners and losers in the harmful EU-Mercosur trade deal

The EU-Mercosur deal is a powerful symbol of the failed old trade model. In negotiation for over 20 years between Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay—known collectively as Mercosur—and the European Union, the trade agreement is beset by disagreements from both regions. It contradicts many progressive governments’ policies and election mandates. It would restrict reindustrialisation policies, undermine public procurement and open up the free trade in harmful products, thereby accelerating deforestation, climate change and human rights violations.

The treaty liberalises trade tariffs, which will affect over 90% of the Mercosur goods portfolio. The London Schools of Economics sustainability impact assessment sees the beef, soya, derivatives, paper and beverages sectors as Mercosur’s economic winners and the vehicle, chemical, pharmaceutical and industrial sectors as the losers. Mercosur exports of ethanol from sugarcane production will also increase considerably. In Brazil the ethanol sector relies on huge concentrations of land, intensive agrochemicals and poor working conditions. This colonial legacy severely impacts the biomes and Indigenous Peoples of Mata Atlantica, Cerrado and Pantanal biomes. The trade deal also looks set to impact negatively on Uruguay’s dairy and beverage sectors.

Far from resolving environmental concerns, this agreement will herald further expansion of the agricultural and extractive sectors, such as the energy mining sector, with inevitable impacts on deforestation, land grabbing, biodiversity, water, and food quality.

It would also scupper the chance for Mercosur countries to develop public policies to value-added manufacturing and increase economic diversity, a particular problem for the newly elected Brazilian government. The EU has ruled out protection clauses for developing industrial sectors and the transfer of technology in investments. The agreement would open up state procurement, depriving countries of an important social and industrial promotion policy, thereby providing highly competitive EU companies with an extremely attractive market.

Far from resolving environmental concerns, this agreement will herald further expansion of the agricultural and extractive sectors, such as the energy mining sector, with inevitable impacts on deforestation, land grabbing, biodiversity, water, and food quality. This in turn results in increased violence against and displacement of the collective rights of communities. According to the report prepared by the Left in the European Parliament (GUE), trade with the European Union is directly linked to 120,000 hectares of deforestation in Mercosur countries. That is one soccer field of deforestation every three minutes.

The EU-Mercosur deal expands the private protection of intellectual property—increasing the protection provided for by WTO obligations. This will likely push up the cost of medicines while undermining technology transfer. The corporate-friendly text on the patenting of seeds and plant varieties reduces farmers’ rights to seeds and undermines food sovereignty.

A new trade model based on democracy and justice

Lula has repeatedly committed to reopening EU-Mercosur negotiations and is urging cohesion within the Mercosur block, in the face of threats by Uruguay to go their own way on trade policy. On the EU's side some are racing to conclude the agreement as quickly as possible, while other governments want the deal stalled. Yet the new Brazilian government's victory must set the scene for an in-depth evaluation of the treaty’s impacts, not just a whitewashing of some of its more delicate elements. The new balance of power within Mercosur underscores the need for profound changes, even in elements that form the backbone of the agreement, such as the space for industrial policy in the region. Lula is calling for renegotiation because the treaty does not respect Brazil's development needs.

The EU’s proposal to improve the deal through a new protocol or environmental annex and other false solutions does not address the core unsustainability of the agreement. An example of a real solution would be to end the export of European pesticide agro-toxins (produced mainly by BASF and Bayer-Monsanto). Ironically these pesticides - a key part of the agribusiness global chain - are banned from use in Europe, but are exported for use in Mercosur countries' agricultural sectors, the produce of which is then exported to the EU.

New progressive governments provide an opportunity for the Mercosur region to broadly discuss some of the treaty's components that may have more harmful impacts on our development from a social and environmental justice perspective. It also provides us with the opportunity to discuss the trade models needed today for the region’s peoples and countries.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Viviana Barreto.

On December 25, in the Rangunia region of the southeastern Chittagong division, a group of six to seven men confronted Azad, a reporter covering the environment and politics for the privately owned newspaper The Business Standard, while he was photographing brick kilns that were allegedly operating illegally, according to multiple news reports and the journalist, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Azad identified himself as a journalist, and the men then forced him into a vehicle at gunpoint, and they threatened to kill him; they then beat him and brought him to a local government official’s office, where they assaulted him further and robbed him, he told CPJ, saying he was released after about 90 minutes.

Azad suffered a neck fracture and pain in his chest, abdomen, and hands, according to the journalist and medical documents that CPJ reviewed.

“The abduction and gruesome beating of Abu Azad demonstrate the grave dangers facing journalists who cover environmental issues in Bangladesh,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must swiftly and thoroughly investigate this incident and hold the perpetrators accountable. Bangladesh must put an end to its dreadful record of impunity involving attacks on journalists.”

Azad told CPJ that one of the attackers was Mohiuddin Talukder Mohan, a member of the Islampur Union Parishad government unit, and said he was brought to Mohan’s office, where three additional men joined the others. The men deactivated the office’s security cameras, beat him with their hands and pistols, kicked him repeatedly, and confiscated his mobile phone, wallet, and identification card, Azad told CPJ.

At the office, Mohan called Sirajul Islam Chowdhury, chair of the Islampur Union Parishad, who threatened the journalist, saying, “nothing will happen if a journalist like you was killed,” and then ordered the men to beat Azad further and destroy his phone, Azad told CPJ.

The men withdrew all the money from Azad’s mobile banking app, bKash, and stole 10,000 taka (US$97) in cash that he carried with him, the journalist told CPJ, adding that they demanded an additional 50,000 taka (US$486) as ransom, which he did not provide.

While releasing him, one of the men hit Azad on the neck with a steel rod, the journalist told CPJ. As of Wednesday, January 4, Azad had not received his phone, wallet, money, or identification card, he said.

CPJ contacted Mohan via messaging app for comment but did not receive any reply. CPJ texted Chowdhury for comment but did not receive any response.

On December 26, Azad filed a police complaint against 10 people, including Mohan and Chowdhury, for assault, extortion, kidnapping, and attempted murder, according to the journalist and The Business Standard.

Police arrested one suspect that day, identified as the manager of a brick kiln, who appeared in court on Wednesday, January 4, and was ordered to be transferred to jail, the journalist and The Business Standard said. On Tuesday, January 3, the Bangladesh High Court granted anticipatory bail to Mohan and Chowdhury, protecting them from arrest for four weeks, Azad said, adding that the other suspects have not been apprehended.

CPJ sent a request for comment via messaging app to Md Mahbub Milky, officer-in-charge at the Rangunia Model Police Station, where Azad filed his complaint, but did not receive any response.

Mohan and Chowdhury are both members of the ruling Awami League party and both have business and political interests in the kilns, Azad told CPJ.

CPJ emailed the Awami League for comment but did not receive any reply.

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

Unlike the group’s first appearance on September 2, the number of fighters who took part in the rally in the Old City of Nablus on December 9 was significantly larger, better equipped, with unified military fatigues and greater security precautions.

“The Den belongs to all of Palestine and believes in the unity of blood, struggle and rifles”, a reference to the kind of collective Resistance that surpasses factional interests.

Needless to say, the event was significant. Only two months ago, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz undermined the group in terms of number and influence, estimating their number to be “of some 30 members”, pledging to “get our hands on them (..) and eliminate them”.

The Palestinian Authority was also actively involved in suppressing the group, although using a different approach. Palestinian and Arab media spoke about generous PA offers to Lions’ Den fighters of jobs and money, should they agree to drop their weapons.

Both the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships have greatly misread the situation. They have wrongly assumed that the Nablus-born movement is a regional and provisional phenomenon that, like others in the past, can easily be crushed or bought.

The Lions’ Den, however, seems to have increased in numbers, and has already branched out to Jenin, Al-Khalil (Hebron), Balata and elsewhere.

For Israel, but also for some Palestinians, the Lions’ Den is an unprecedented problem, the consequences of which threaten to change the political dynamics in the Occupied West Bank entirely.

As Lions’ Den insignias are now appearing in every Palestinian neighborhood throughout the Occupied Territories, the group has succeeded in branching out from a specific Nablus neighborhood – Al Qasaba – to become a collective Palestinian experience.

A recent survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) demonstrated the above claim in an unmistakable way.

The PCPSR public poll showed that 72% of all Palestinians support the creation of more such armed groups in the West Bank. Nearly 60% feared that an armed rebellion risks a direct confrontation with the PA. A whopping 79% and 87% respectively refuse the surrender of the fighters to PA forces, and reject the very idea that the PA has the right to even carry out such arrests.

Such numbers attest to the reality on the street, pointing to the near complete lack of trust in the PA and the belief that only armed Resistance, similar to that in Gaza, is capable of challenging the Israeli Occupation.

These notions are driven by empirical evidence: lead among them is the failure of the financially and politically corrupt PA in advancing Palestinian aspirations in any way; Israel’s complete disinterest in any form of peace negotiations; the growing far-right fascist trend in Israeli society, which is directly linked to the daily violence meted out against Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The UN Mideast Envoy Tor Wennesland has recently reported that 2022 is “on course to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since (…) 2005”. The Palestinian Health Ministry reported that 167 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank this year alone.

These numbers are likely to increase during the new term of incoming rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The new government can only remain in power with the support of Bezalel Smotrich from the Religious Zionism Party and Itamar Ben-Gvir from the Otzma Yehudit Party. Ben-Gvir, a notorious extremist politician is, ironically though not surprisingly, slated to become Israel’s new security minister.

But there is more to the brewing armed rebellion in the West Bank than Israeli violence alone.

Nearly three decades after the signing of the Oslo Accords, Palestinians have achieved none of their basic political or legal rights. To the contrary, emboldened right-wing politicians in Israel are now speaking of unilateral ‘soft annexation’ of large parts of the West Bank. None of the issues deemed important in 1993 – the status of Occupied Jerusalem, refugees, borders, water, etc. – are even on the agenda today.

Since then, Israel has invested more in racial laws and apartheid policies, making it an apartheid regime, par excellence. Major international human rights groups have accepted and reported on the new, fully racist identity of Israel.

With total US backing and no international pressure on Israel that is worthy of mention, Palestinian society is mobilizing beyond the traditional channels of the past three decades. Despite the admirable work of some Palestinian NGOs, the ‘NGO-ization’ of Palestinian society, operating on funds largely obtained from Israel’s very western backers, has further accentuated class division among Palestinians. With Ramallah and a few other urban centers serving as headquarters of the PA and a massive list of NGOs, Jenin, Nablus, and their adjacent refugee camps have subsisted in economic marginalization,  Israeli violence and political neglect.

Disenchanted by the PA’s failed political model, and growingly impressed by the armed Resistance in Gaza, an armed rebellion in the West Bank is simply a matter of time.

What differentiates the early signs of a mass armed Intifada in the West Bank from the ‘Jerusalem Intifada’, also termed the ‘Knives Intifada’ of 2015, is that the latter was a series of disorganized individual acts carried out by oppressed West Bank youth, while the former is a well-organized, grassroots phenomenon with a unique political discourse that appeals to the majority of Palestinian society.

And, unlike the armed Second Palestinian Intifada (2000-2005), the ensuing armed rebellion is rooted in a popular base, not in the PA security forces.

The closest historical reference to this phenomenon is the 1936-39 Palestinian Revolt, led by thousands of Palestinian fellahin – peasants – in the Palestine countryside. The last year of that rebellion witnessed a large split between the fellahin leadership and the urban-based political parties.

History is repeating itself. And, like the 1936 Revolt, the future of Palestine and the Palestinian Resistance – in fact, the very social fabric of Palestinian society – is on the line.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

The post New Portland Police Oversight Board, Could be Strongest in the Nation and Create a National Model appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Mazza.

• CPC 20th National Congress outcomes
• The China model of modernization
• World’s first perennial rice variety
• Hope for Chinese women’s football

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

Israel has closed the main roads with roadblocks and checkpoints to impede traffic and has largely prevented residents from exiting or entering the city.

The strict closure has affected every aspect of daily life and has completely disrupted commercial activities in the city, which is normally a major commercial hub in the occupied West Bank.

Since the siege, traders in the city have reported a sharp decline in income, employees have struggled to access their workplace, and farmers have been denied access to their land.

The siege has also hampered the education and health sectors in Nablus and surrounding areas.

“Territorial fragmentation of the occupied West Bank and the creation of isolated enclaves are at the core of Israel’s settler colonial endeavour,” Alaa Al-Tartir, policy adviser for Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, told The New Arab.

“It’s been implementing these policies for decades, which allows Israel to impose a siege, like the one currently imposed on Nablus, quickly and easily.”

The post Siege of Nablus: How Israel is applying the ‘Gaza model’ to the West Bank appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Alaa Tartir.

The Military Court of Dagon Myothit (North) Township on Tuesday ordered Nang Mwe San to serve a six-year jail term for publishing “sexually explicit” photos and videos online in violation of Article 33 (a) of Myanmar’s Electronic Communications Act and tarnishing the country’s cultural image.

The sentence marks the first time that someone has been prosecuted under the act, which was enacted during the 2011-2016 administration of former President Thein Sein.

Nang Mwe San’s friend confirmed to RFA Burmese that the military court in Dagon Myothit issued the sentence after what she said was a nearly month-long closed trial.

“The sentence was six years imprisonment, handed down by the military court,” said the friend, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They said [the trial] was faster than usual because the northern part of Dagon is a martial law region.”

Attempts by RFA to contact Nang Mwe San’s family members by phone for more details about her case went unanswered Wednesday. The junta has yet to release any information about the court ruling.

Nang Mwe San participated in street protests after the military takeover on Feb. 1, 2021, and, in March that year, posted comments to social media decrying the junta’s deadly crackdown on the unrest. Shortly thereafter, the junta announced that she would be arrested under Section 505 (a) of the Penal Code for defamation against the state and she went into hiding. Sources close to the doctor said that she eventually signed a bond with authorities whereby she was permitted to return to her home in Dagon Myothit (North).

However, on Aug. 5, the military arrested Nang Mwe San, along with film actress Thinzar Wint Kyaw, for “distributing suggestive photos and videos on a foreign website for a fee.”

Nang Mwe San’s friend told RFA that because Thinzar Wint Kyaw is from Yangon’s Mayangone township, which is not a martial law zone, “her case will be decided by a civil court.”

Sources close to the Mayangone Township Court said Thinzar Wint Kyaw stood trial on Sept. 14, although further details about the actress’s case were not immediately available.

A veteran lawyer, who did not want to be named for security reasons, called Tuesday’s ruling “unjust” and said it did nothing to promote Burmese culture.

“This legal action is just an excuse and I’m sure there are other undisclosed reasons behind it,” he said. “And Myanmar's culture will not benefit because of this action against [the two women]. Can [the junta] really stop this sort of thing? I don't think it’s possible.”

He added that Section 33 (a) of the Electronic Communications Act is too vague in its definition of what content can be considered “harmful” to the country’s culture.

Zaw Ran, a human rights activist from the Yangon People's Advocacy Network, told RFA that instead of sentencing people to lengthy jail terms, first-time offenders who violate Section 33 (a) should be given a warning.

“I wonder if these women, Nang Mwe San and Thinzar Wint Kyaw, understand the relevant laws,” he said. “People feel so sorry for them. If they didn’t know about the law, they should have been informed about it before they were punished.”

Zaw Ran condemned the military court ruling for its lack of transparency and said Nang Mwe San was denied access to a proper legal defense.

Saw Han Nway Oo, a writer, told RFA that arresting and jailing women for such actions is a violation of their rights, noting that in nearly every country there are people who earn money the same way.

"I think it's unfair to hand down such a harsh sentence for exposing your body online for a fee,” she said.

“There are so many people doing this nowadays, even if they say ours is a country where Buddhism and culture flourish and that this is not compatible with our culture. And I think using this Communications Law to jail them is just wrong.”

She added that there are many models showing off their beauty for a living in Myanmar but those who support the military have not been arrested or prosecuted.

Artists from the music, film and theatrical industries took to the streets to protest the military takeover in Myanmar, prompting the military to announce that hundreds of celebrities would be arrested and charged under Section 505 (a).

Among them, actor Pyay Ti Oo, Eindra Kyaw Zin, Lu Min, pop singer Po Po and make-up artist Win Min Than were arrested. Some were later released while others were imprisoned by the military.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

A new series examines how protests that erupted over a police killing three decades ago offer important lessons for the Black Lives Matter movement today. We speak to the family of Phillip Pannell, a 16-year-old Black boy who was fatally shot in the back in 1990 by a white police officer later acquitted for the killing. Pannell is the subject of “Model America,” a new four-part series by MSNBC that looks at the racial divide in the U.S. through the lens of the small town of Teaneck, New Jersey, where the shooting took place. “Here we are 32 years later, and it’s still happening,” says his sister, Natacha Pannell. His mother Thelma Pannell-Dantzler says the police officer, Gary Spath, lied on the stand about the shooting and “should be prosecuted” for perjury. We also speak with the series’s co-director, Dani Goffstein, who was raised in Teaneck and says he became interested in the story after noticing parallels with the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

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

By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

There is mounting pressure on tech titans Google and Facebook to pay local news media to carry their news online.

Google has already done deals with some for its News Showcase, but other big names in news are still trying to get the platforms to pay — and the government is hinting it could force the issue soon.

“Are you putting the hard word on them to secure deals to pay for content? Are you going to legislate?” Newshub Nation host Simon Shepherd asked Willie Jackson last weekend, putting the hard word on the broadcasting and media minister.

“Are you putting the hard word on them to secure deals to pay for content? Are you going to legislate?” Newshub Nation host Simon Shepherd asked Willie Jackson a week ago, putting the hard word on the broadcasting and media minister.

“I’m trying really hard. I have said to them, [in] three months let’s see the deals in the marketplace,” the minister replied.

For years local news media have griped about getting very little from the platforms distributing their stuff to huge audiences  — and profiting from it.

The thing most likely to persuade the tech titans to pay local newsmakers is the likelihood of the government forcing the issue with legislation — and this was the first time that a government minister had set any kind of deadline publicly.

‘I want to see fairness’
“I want to see some fairness. I want to see all these Kiwi news organisations looked after . . and these big players have the funding and the resourcing to be able to do that,” Willie Jackson told Newshub Nation.

Some of the deals that have been done were revealed earlier this month when Google launched the local version of its News Showcase service, now available via Google’s websites and apps.

The first Kiwi outlets ever to get regular payments from Google for that include The New Zealand Herald’s owner NZME and its subscriber subsidiary BusinessDesk, RNZ, online sites Scoop and Newsroom and the Pacific Media Network. There is also a handful of local outlets too like Crux, which serves the Southern Lakes region, and Kapiti News.

“It’s part of our commitment to continuing to play a part in what we see as a very important shared responsibility to ensure the long term sustainability of public interest journalism in New Zealand,” Google’s local country representative Carolyn Rainsford told RNZ’s Gyles Beckford recently.

Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson described that as “a good start, but not enough” — while the Spinoff’s founder Duncan Grieve was also underwhelmed.

He reckoned it was actually Willie Jackson that Google had in mind with the Showcase launch “to create a sense that Google is now a solid and public spirited ally to the news industry”.

For now, Google News Showcase is far from a comprehensive or compelling service for Kiwis. It offers nothing from our biggest national news producer Stuff or other big names in news like TVNZ and Newshub — or smaller outlets such Allied Press and The Spinoff.

Bargaining collectively
Several publishers — including Stuff — have banded together with the News Publishers Association to bargain collectively with Google and Meta (the parent company of Facebook).

Earlier this year the Commerce Commission gave them permission to negotiate a deal for a 10-year period.

So how’s that going?

“We can’t comment much on the status, but we are engaging with the NPA,” was all Google’s regional head of partnerships Shilpa Jhunjhunwala would tell RNZ earlier this month.

A recent report by the Judith Nielsen Institute estimate Google and Facebook paid Australian media companies about A$200m last year.

“Unfortunately an interview won’t be possible,” Google New Zealand told Mediawatch last week (without explaining why).

Instead they gave us a statement attributable to Caroline Rainsford, country director Google New Zealand:

“We are proud of the launch of Google News Showcase and continuing our conversations with other local news media businesses.”

“We can’t give you any kind of commercial numbers because they’re all commercial and in confidence,” Google’s regional head of partnerships Shilpa Jhunjhunwala told RNZ’s Gyles Beckford earlier this month.

When pressed, she said Google’s global commitment to News Showcase was $1 billion over three years.

“But beyond that, we’re not able to share anything specific to New Zealand,” she said.

Why is there no deal with other New Zealand news publishers yet?

‘No serious offers on table’
“Those negotiations are underway, but neither of those companies have put any serious offers on the table,” Stuff chief executive Sinead Boucher told Mediawatch.

She said the Australian deals were their benchmark.

“What we produce is very similar kind of content and we operate in very similar markets. We’d be looking for payments that equate to more like NZ$40 million to $50 million a year into the industry here,” she said.

“I think the government and Minister Jackson have made clear that the government expect fair deals to be done — and that they are prepared to legislate in the near term to ensure that happens,” she said.

“The only way to materially address this is to create an environment where we can negotiate fair commercial payment from these giant multinationals who have built their businesses entirely off content created by other people,” she said.

“You could think of any search term and put it into Google and look down the results and see that a new story created by somebody is part of the results. What we are focused on negotiating a commercial payment for that content in the same way that you would for any other product,” she said.

“If you invested in a car and someone started running it as a taxi, you would expect them to compensate you for that — not to build their own business without recognising your investment,” Boucher told Mediawatch.

“Our problem is that these platforms are very reluctant to come to the table and have a fair negotiation. That’s why the sort of legislation has been needed in Australia and other countries and also here in New Zealand,” she said.

The tale across the Tasman.

The man who forced the platforms to pay up
Rod Sims has been called “the man who forced Google and Meta to pay for news.”

For more than a decade, he chaired the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Australia’s competition regulator.

“It was fraught at times, but we presented the report to government in mid-2019 and they accepted the recommendation to have a News Media Bargaining Code six months later. It was legislated in February 2021. That’s pretty quick in terms of policy development in Australia,” Sims told Mediawatch.

“Google’s done a deal with essentially all media businesses. Meta has only done a deal with media businesses which that employ 85 percent of (Australia’s) journalists. It’s crucial that . . . it’s widely shared and you need legislation so that everybody has the ability to bargain.

“I know for a fact that the payments were well in excess of A$200 million — so NZ $40 million to $50 million sounds absolutely the right number to be spread across all media,” he said.

“Google and Meta were required to bargain with all eligible media businesses — and if they could not reach agreement, then arbitration would come into place. The threat of that evened up the bargaining power,” he said.

“The second component was that if Google and Meta did a deal with one media player, then they were required under law to do a deal with all media players. So their choice was either have no media content on their platform, or do deals,” he said.

“They chose to do deals with media companies because there’s value to them,” he said.

Arbitration threat needed
“I’m a bit concerned that in New Zealand you don’t have arbitration at the end of the negotiation period negotiations fail,” he said.

A Google officer once told me struggling news media pleading for “compensation” were like redundant drivers of horse-drawn carriages and rickshaws expecting today’s taxi drivers to pay them.

“No, that’s completely wrong. This is not like the car taking the place of the horse and carriage or smartphones taking the place of Kodak film because Google and Facebook don’t produce any journalism. So they haven’t taken the place of media, because they’re just not in the media business,” Rod Sims told Mediawatch.

“For Google to be a good search engine, it needs to bring in media into its search just about every time. But they don’t need any particular media company. So only by the News Media Bargaining Code could you even up the bargaining power,” he said.

“Unless we get payment for media that’s being taken and used for free, we’ll have a lot less media and less media harms society,” he said.

“It’s not up to me to tell the New Zealand government what to do, but my advice would be to pass the Australian News Media Bargaining Code,” he said.

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

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

At the end of July, the International Monetary Fund warned of a "gloomy outlook" for the world economy. It was doing so not because of a spike in poverty, a widening of inequality, or a surge in carbon emissions. Quite the contrary: the IMF was making its pessimistic assessment because it was revising down its forecast for global GDP growth for 2022 from 3.6 percent to 3.2 percent. In other words, the global economy was growing, but not enough, and that for the IMF was cause for concern.

Economic growth is also unsustainable because it requires enormous inputs of resources, and those resources are limited.

At the same time that the IMF was making its announcement, the U.S. government was trying to dispel concerns that a second successive quarter of economic contraction—a decline of .9 percent that followed a 1.6 percent decrease in the first quarter of 2022—meant that the country was on the verge of a recession. The U.S. economy was not growing, and that for the government was cause for even greater concern.

Economic expansion remains the yardstick of success at the global and national levels. Robust growth garners positive headlines; anemic growth and contraction generate anxious forecasts. This remains the case despite the widely acknowledged link between economic growth and the climate crisis, a connection reinforced during the COVID pandemic when carbon emissions dropped considerably as a result of the economic shutdowns in many countries.

"The goal of almost all economists and politicians is continued economic growth," explains Josh Farley, a professor in Community Development & Applied Economics and Public Administration at the University of Vermont, in a Zoom seminar sponsored by Global Just Transition. "For anyone who knows anything about complex systems, exponential growth is always ephemeral. It cannot be sustained in any finite system. Exponential growth must always collapse."

One way of postponing collapse, and to combine growth and environmental protection, has been "sustainable development." But as Ashish Kothari, the co-founder of Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group in India, points out, "even sustainable development is a very superficial way of trying to deal with the multiple crises that we are in. It doesn't address the structural roots of the crises, which can be found in much older systems of racism and patriarchy or new systems of capitalism and nation-state domination."

More recently, the "Green New Deal" has been an effort to combine decarbonization with an economic shift to clean energy that nevertheless promises a growth in jobs and benefits to disadvantaged communities. "The Green New Deal faces opposition and also resistance from movements and governments in the Global South because it is seen as a northern approach," says Dorothy Guerrero, the head of policy and advocacy at Global Justice Now in the United Kingdom. "It is indeed a big task for Green New Deal politics to counter that view that it's a northern alternative and break down the prevailing neo-liberal politics that pits workers and jobs against environment."

More radical attempts have been made to identify economic models that are not predicated on exponential growth. Some of these are national-level models of a "steady-state" economy. Others focus on local alternatives that stress more democratic politics and a more integrated approach to nature. But as Katharine Nora Farrell, an associate professor in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogota, notes, the challenge is not just theoretical or even practical, but moral as well.

"We need to take responsibility in social and economic contexts for our role in stipulating how systems function," she notes. "The failure to face up to this is part of the problem. It's embarrassing to say that 'I have these good things because you are being exploited.' It's hard to be moral toward someone when you discover that you have your heel on their neck."

Unsustainable economic growth relies on just such a heel: on the necks of workers, marginalized communities and nature itself. But that growth is now coming under enhanced scrutiny and greater criticism, from within the status quo and from those who have suffered the most from its effects.

The Problem with Growth

For 3,000 years, until 1750, economic growth per person averaged about .01 percent per year. After 1750 and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, however, that rate went up to 1.5 percent. To express this radical change a different way, the global economy took 6,000 years to double before 1750. Afterward, the economy doubled every 50 years.

"When the World Bank says that there's 3.2 percent economic growth, that doubles the size of the global economy every 24 years," Josh Farley notes. "In the past 100 years, we've quadrupled the human population and increased the per capita consumption nine-fold for a 36-fold increase in the size of the economy. That can't be sustained."

One popular image of economic growth is a rising tide that lifts all boats. But in reality, economic growth lifts yachts much higher than dinghies. "All forms of monetary wealth grow much faster than the economy as a whole," Farley continues. "Not only is this unsustainable, we're systematically transferring our resources to the owners of capital." Similarly, the growth in interest-bearing debt "shifts resources from debtors to creditors, the people that the government gave the right to create money out of thin air."

Farley uses two comparisons to drive home the unsustainability of growth. "If your lilies are doubling in a pond every few days so that in 30 days it's full, when is the pond half full? In 29 days. So, if we use up half our oil, it's all used up after one more doubling period," he says. "I was growing exponentially until I reached 18 and then I stopped growing. We've all reached maturity and we need to stop growing,"

Economic growth is also unsustainable because it requires enormous inputs of resources, and those resources are limited. The climate crisis is one indication of many that economic growth has outstripped the resource capacities of the planet. "The Biden administration's plan calls for a shift to electric cars," Ashish Kothari points out. "That sounds good but where will all the mining take place to get all the materials for those cars? Again, this is based on the inequality between north and south, including patterns of consumption."

Yet, as Dorothy Guerrero adds, a consensus is emerging that humanity has to reduce its reliance on these resources. "The idea of leaving fossil fuels in the ground has gained legitimacy as the most viable response to climate change," she explains. "The political consensus among climate activists and scientists is that renewable energy must now be fast-tracked and developed where it is not developed."

"We need to develop an economy whose main goal is not growth but secure sufficiency for all," concludes Josh Farley. "Our planet is too small to achieve much more than sufficiency. More and more consumption can no longer be our goal. We should instead be focusing on systems in which production is fun. Collaborating with others to meet our basic needs should be our reward."

The Role of Markets

Economic growth is at the heart of capitalism, and markets have played a central role in generating growth.

"Capitalism is defined by private property rights, individual choice, competition, and pursuit of individual profit," Josh Farley points out. "But for the social dilemmas that we're facing—global climate change, loss of biodiversity, loss of the ozone layer—private property rights are not worth talking about, and individual choice is impossible. I cannot choose how stable a climate I want. We are faced with situations in which the physical characteristics of the resources are no long compatible with a capitalist system. This isn't to say that we necessarily eliminate capitalism altogether, but we can't rely on it to solve certain problems."

The capitalist system encompasses much of the world, north and south. But markets, despite the ideology of a disinterested "invisible hand," favor certain parts of the world over others.

"In addressing the current climate emergency, who will reap the benefits and who will pay for the costs of the adjustment?" asks Dorothy Guerrero. "There has been an unequal ecological exchange between core countries and countries on the periphery. We need to address the issue of monopoly capitalism where, in the case of vaccines, corporations have introduced life-saving vaccines for their own profit. The transition to clean energy—whether it's orderly or destructive, peaceful or violent, market-led or regulated—will be determined by the conflicts between north and south, between core and periphery as well as the balance of forces within societies."

Like it or not, globalized capitalism is the system "we are dealing with today," Katharine Nora Farrell points out. "Unregulated markets can and do generate enormous damage, human and environmental. But it's a poor musician that blames their instrument. Markets are created by human societies, relying on norms and customs established by humans. Sometimes those norms are consolidated into law, sometimes not. Rather than say that markets are all bad or all good, we have to determine when and how and under what conditions markets work or do not work."

The market economy is not the only game in town. "I ask my students, 'what type of economy has most affected your life,' and they say, 'Oh, we're a market economy,'" says Josh Farley. "And I reply, 'Oh, really? Your parents charge you for room and board?' Your main experience is the core economy, the economy of reciprocity and gifting and providing for your close kin and community, which is totally outside the market."

The market with its emphasis on self-interest, he continues, is not well-suited to the social dilemmas that humans currently face. "If I catch all the fish, I get all the benefits even if I wipe out the population and future generations suffer," he continues. "If I spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, I get the benefit while others suffer. Instead of the invisible hand that Smith talked about, social dilemmas create an invisible foot that kicks the common good to pieces."

Moving toward Transformation

Many of the proposed solutions to the climate crisis are market-driven, such as carbon trading systems. Some are even predicated on growth strategies.

"We are confronting so-called solutions that are coming to us from the systems that created the problems in the first place," explains Ashish Kothari. "These are mostly Band-Aids, such as techno-engineering solutions or the 'net zero' that most countries have said that they will achieve in terms of carbon emissions by 2050 or 2060 or 2070. These so-called solutions tend to sustain these structures and even greenwash them."

The origin of many transformative solutions, on the other hand, come from resistance on the ground to mining, large-scale hydroelectric plants, and similar efforts to generate the electricity and inputs to sustain economic growth at unsustainable levels. Kothari recalls the movement in central India 30 years ago against two large hydroelectric projects. "We didn't want these projects not just because they would displace our villages and destroy our livelihoods, but because the river on which these dams are built is our mother and we won't let our mother be shackled by your dreams of progress," he says. "You can see in this resistance movement alternative ways of being, acting, dreaming, and relating to each other and to nature."

This alternative way of relating to nature challenges the anthropocentrism that lies at the heart of unsustainable economic growth. "In Western modernity, there is a divide between humans and nature," he continues. "You can see it even in the way we speak. We don't say 'humans and the rest of the nature.' At school we learned about a pyramid in which humans are on top. Actually, there is a circle of life in which all species have equality."

This different approach to nature, he continues, can be found "in the solidarity economy, in movements for food and energy sovereignty, and among those fighting for self-determination like the Zapatistas who say that we will be the ones who will govern our communities in ways that are more equitable and just."

The challenge is to inject this kind of thinking into the efforts to address global challenges.

"What we lack–and what ecological economics is trying to promote—are economic institutions that preserve, enhance, and restore the biotic community of which humans are a part," Josh Farley adds. "Over the last 50 years, we have been through a neoliberal revolution that has taken everything from the care economy and the public sector economy and put it all into the market. We're now trying to put the natural resource base into the market. This is the wrong approach because of the physical characteristics of the resources. We need to flip the dialog around and start taking things out of the market economy and put them into other sectors of the economy."

Mechanisms of Change

The current economic system is ill-suited to handle challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss. Worse, it is directly responsible for these problems in the first place. Alternatives exist, but are they replicable and scalable?

"While we have amazing examples of alternatives around the world, we need to create scale to challenge the mega-problems," Ashish Kothari explains. "We need much greater horizontal networking among these amazing initiatives. It's not about upscaling but outscaling across horizontal networks of solidarity, then creating the critical mass to affect those larger problems."

Alternatives like the Zapatista struggle, he adds, "are not replicable. You can't copy them in India and make them successful. But we can learn and exchange these values and ethics and principles and create horizontal solidarity networks around the world. We can become more resilient based on the understanding that there is a pluriverse of politics, ideologies, ecologies, and economies, all of which are important and worth respecting in so far as they do not undermine other ecologies, ideologies, and so on. These are expressed in different languages as swaraj, ubuntu, buen vivir, and so on."

The role of cooperation—as opposed to the competition fostered by markets—will prove critical in any response to the climate crisis. "Mainstream economists argue that humans are inherently selfish, that we always act in our own self-interest and can't cooperate, which is absolutely absurd," Josh Farley argues. "Humans are the most cooperative species ever to evolve. Think about what you had for breakfast. How many people were involved in getting the food to your plate, between truckers and farmers and producers of fertilizers and farm machinery. Think about how many people were involved in developing the knowledge necessary to do that—agronomy, metallurgy, geology. The knowledge required to meet your basic needs every day was generated by billions of people over thousands of years. Humans cannot live apart from society any better than a cell can live apart from an individual body."

Farley sees culture as the medium through which cooperative ideas and approaches can evolve at a rapid pace. "Within a society, the most selfish individuals outcompete other individuals," he notes. "But the most cooperative and altruistic group outcompetes other groups. So, we have dual forces selecting for self-interested and cooperative behavior. We need to evolve to cooperate at larger and larger scales, at the scale of problems like climate change."

Humans pass on their genes to successive generations. Bacteria, on the other hand, "swap genetic information called plasmids horizontally," he continues. "At times of stress and difficulty, they do so more quickly. For humans it's culture where we swap ideas horizontally. We're at a time of crisis. We need to grab ideas from other cultures. That's this pluriverse idea. There is not one idea; different cultures and ecosystems need different solutions. A socially just, sustainable transition is the goal, and we need to test all our policies against that goal. If the policies work toward that goal, we accept them; if not, we reject them."

Species evolution takes multiple generations. "Cultural evolution can be astonishingly fast," Farley adds. "Look at World War II. The United States went from being a capitalist economy to a form of state capitalism very quickly. How many cars did we produce in Detroit in World War II for the public? Zero. The government just took over the industry. We suddenly rationed everything—food, gasoline—and people accepted it. We faced a serious challenge, we stopped focusing on individual needs and started focusing on collective needs, and we did this very fast."

Ashish Kothari agrees. "There are elements in the Green New Deal or some of the other programs around the world that we can encourage," he says. "Which of these transitions will lead to systemic transformations and which ones will entrench the current system? A shift from fossil fuel to electric cars only entrenches the system of inequality between north and south. But if we're talking about a transition from private cars to public transportation, that would lead toward a more transformative system. A transition also has to move toward radical forms of democracy or self-determination (swaraj or ubuntu). It has to move toward economic democracy, worker control, cooperatives, and a social economy that does not use GDP as yardstick of progress."

Kothari points to a number of examples of local initiatives that move in this direction, including forms of agriculture that don't require much in the way of external energy inputs. "There are 5,000 Dalit women farmers in south India who are growing not just enough for their families but also enough to participate in the local market and provide food relief to others during COVID," he relates. "They're doing this with dryland farming, completely rain-fed, with their own seeds and no external inputs. They're relying entirely on their own knowledge and labor."

Another example comes from the Ladakh region of India. "We have two models there," he continues. "One is mega solar built by corporations, and the other is decentralized passive and active solar. Ladakh has over 300 days of sunlight in a year. By constructing buildings with a blend of traditional and new technology, you can trap the sunlight during the day and it warms you without artificial heating even when its minus 20 degrees at night."

Farley similarly identifies the commons as a key element of any socially just transition. That includes a "Green knowledge commons," which shares knowledge transnationally, as well as a social media commons where the algorithms encourage people to focus on ecological limits and social justice rather than on buying more stuff and and the polarizing images and language that facilitate that commerce. And it would include an atmospheric commons that asserts that no one owns the atmosphere.

Dorothy Guerrero puts ownership at the top of the list of factors to consider. "Any conversation that doesn't put nationalization on the table would mean leaving the terms of transition to fossil fuel executives," she notes. "Acknowledging that we can't do this transition overnight, we have to discuss what we do with existing fossil fuel? First, we take control of it. If states don't own these resources, they can't control them or design a program of transition involving them. I don't disregard totally the small, the independent, because they have roles to play. But when you talk about transition, it has to be at a certain scale, at a national level, and there should be national ownership. Yes, small is beautiful but big is beautiful too because that is how we control geopolitics"

Nationalization implies a focus on the national or state level. "I often say that one weakness of the left is that we're so good at being in opposition, but it is so difficult when it comes to us governing," notes Guerrero. "There are many discussions in Latin America now with Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and hopefully Brazil: will it be the pink tide again and will there be more red in the pink? What were the economic problems that weren't addressed before? Politically it was a success. But even the radical governments didn't make very radical changes in the economic realm, because they were also scared of being crushed—and they would be crushed by the United States not wanting them to succeed."

National control applies equally to renewable energy. "We have to ask what this energy is for," she says. "We need to clarify who will build it up, where and for what purpose. There is also a threat that fossil fuel companies are portraying themselves as key players in renewable energy buildup but they are not actually investing in the development of renewable energy." Meanwhile, the countries that are already investing in the infrastructure of renewable energy will control this technology through patent protections. "This debate will determine which countries will dominate and which countries will be excluded," she continues. "The United States, China, and Germany are competing to see who will dominate the renewable energy sector. But Haiti and Bangladesh won't be players."

For climate justice movements and those pushing against fossil fuels, "we need to increase solidarity with mineral-producing countries," she continues. "OPEC is a an important example that we need to look at. At the same time, we have to avoid weakening the labor movements in those countries. We need solidarity in both political and economic terms. During a transition, someone will pay, and it's usually those without voice or bargaining power."

Implementing change at a local, national, and global level will not be easy. For one, powerful forces benefit from the current status quo. "It's not enough to wish and work for alternatives but to be aware that the stronger the alternatives, the greater the forces against them," Dorothy Guerrero warns.

Another challenge is the time frame. Serious decarbonization should have started decades ago. "If scientists tell us that we have only 10 years left to reverse the climate crisis, we can't transform the situation in 10 years," says Kothari. "We're talking about a multigenerational transformation. We 're dealing with structural forces that have been around in some cases for thousands of years like patriarchy or hundreds of years like capitalism. To say that we need to do this in a single generation is unrealistic."

Truth and Reconciliation

When Pope Francis visited the Nunavit region of Canada this summer, he apologized to the indigenous community for the role played by the Catholic Church in Europe's colonization of the country and the forced assimilation of native peoples. Some responded that that apology has not been matched by action. But in Manitoba, the Pope received a very visible token of appreciation: a headdress that he wore during the event.

"This stunning image of Pope Francis wearing an indigenous headdress placed on his head by the representatives of a consortium of indigenous chiefs of Canada was a ritualistic act and very symbolic," says Katharine Nora Farrell. "We have to deal with reconciliation and peace and apology, as well as embarrassment and shame for all the horrible things that have been done."

"It's not just about the pope but about these incredible indigenous leaders," she continues. "They're saying, 'You came here in good faith to apologize and we're not going to rub your face in it. Instead, we're going to say you're just like us and we're going to do this in the most majestic and symbolic way by giving you this headdress. You can't wear this headdress unless you have earned it. By placing it on his head, they said that he had earned their respect."

The crimes of colonialism and forced assimilation also have had an ecological dimension since the land of indigenous peoples was often stolen for precisely the kind of polluting industry responsible for the huge uptick in carbon emissions during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the Global North bears the lion's share of the responsibility for all the carbon emissions currently in the atmosphere.

"Climate reparations are at the center of the climate justice struggle," Dorothy Guerrero says. "We need to highlight the need to create historically informed approaches that confront colonialism and imperialism and the climate crisis simultaneously. That's gaining traction in the UK among young people who see the role of the UK in extracting resources from countries and impoverishing those countries by doing so."

Such reparations can be understood as not only an apology for past actions but also a concrete effort to repair the harm done. What the Pope attempted in Canada is taking a different form in Colombia where Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez recently took over as leaders. "Marquez, the vice president, is the winner of Goldman Environmental Prize," Farrell says, referring to a picture of Marquez. "She's angry in this photo and she's right to be angry. And the people of the Choco region, with a large Afro-Colombian population, are also right to be angry. It's a mega-biodiverse region with a lot of violence inhabited mostly by poor people. Marquez appealed to these voters in the last days of the election and many people think that's what swung the election. She said, 'if you're a nobody, vote for me, because I'm a nobody. This will be a government of the nobodies.' She and Petro have put together an incredible coalition of individuals in the new government with plans to introduce agricultural tax reform and manage the resource economy."

"We need to recognize that economic processes are anthropogenic," Farrell continues. "We have to link ecological economics to moral theories connected to questions of responsibility. "These issues motivate activists to get involved. Look at the indignation in Greta Thunberg's arguments. Someone has to answer for what has happened. Only then we can get involved in fixing it. The damage done has been brutal. Until we as a global community comprehend this great tragedy, I don't think we'll able to pick and move beyond this."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by John Feffer.

The post Los Angeles Is Creating a Model for Fighting Mass Incarceration appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

In the late spring and summer of 2020, protests for racial justice erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd. Mobilizations spread throughout the country and continued for months, producing what scholars identified as arguably the largest wave of mass protest in U.S. history.

You can cut the jail population in half through comprehensive diversion programming, and it will have better public safety outcomes.

However, as with other surges of popular uprising, the actions died down over time. At that point, critics claimed that protesters made a lot of noise and drew public attention but were unable to translate their discontent into concrete policy gains. When the moment of peak protest passed, these detractors held, the movement disappeared with little to show for its efforts.

This narrative overlooks ongoing organizing efforts that have made important gains both before and after mass protests captured the spotlight. And there are few better places to see such organizing in action than Los Angeles County.

While their work has gotten little national attention, organizers in L.A. have amassed some impressive victories. First, in 2019, a coalition against mass incarceration succeeded in stopping a prison expansion plan that the county claimed would cost $2 billion, but that activists and community leaders charged could drain in excess of $3.5 billion in public funds. Subsequently, grassroots groups steered the work of a county Alternatives to Incarceration Workgroup, which in 2020 produced a set of recommendations that JusticeLA, a coalition of more than fifty community organizations, unions, and activist groups, called “a groundbreaking roadmap for decarceration and service expansion.”

Adopted by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors as official policy in 2020, the Care First, Jails Last agenda includes a detailed set of recommendations that “aim to provide treatment and services to those in need, instead of arrest and jail.” Among them are mandates to dramatically scale back cash bail, broaden implementation of community-based harm reduction strategies, channel funding to programs for at-risk youth, establish pretrial services in highly impacted communities to replace law-enforcement supervision, provide beds for those released from jail who are in need of interim or supportive housing, and create urgent care centers to provide trauma-informed mental healthcare throughout the county.

To make sure that these policies would actually be carried out—and that budget shortfalls would not be used as an excuse for stonewalling—activists secured a funding stream that is set to channel hundreds of millions of dollars each year toward alternatives-to-incarceration initiatives. In the wake of the George Floyd mobilizations, organizers successfully pushed for the passage of Measure J, requiring that 10 percent of the county’s unrestricted general funds be invested in implementing the agenda. In principle, this could translate to well over $300 million annually. Vox called it “perhaps the most significant victory for the police reform movement since [the] summer’s protests.”

No doubt, the wins thus far are only partial ones. Activists have been forced to fight against both bureaucratic intransigence and legal challenges from deputy sheriffs. In March, they issued a report card to county administrators full of failing grades, accusing these officials of falling short of their commitments. Court rulings impeded the initial implementation of Measure J, although activists have since pushed the county to honor the funding requirements. In spite of all the difficulties, the model put forth by grassroots groups in L.A. holds genuine promise, representing an effort to fundamentally reorient the county’s approach to public safety and care.

Lex Steppling, a native of Los Angeles and National Director of Organizing for Dignity and Power Now, has been present throughout these battles. His group has been at the core of coalition drives to pressure officials for change from the outside—and also to engage with the county in its internal processes to craft and implement new policies. Among other related efforts, Dignity and Power Now is part of the executive committee of the JusticeLA coalition. We recently spoke with Steppling about the model coming out of L.A. County and the significance of local organizing to advance racial justice and oppose mass incarceration for people in other parts of the country. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Mark Engler: If we were to make a timeline, what would you say was the first big campaign in the current drive against mass incarceration here? Was it stopping L.A. County’s plan for prison expansion?

Lex Steppling: Timelines are difficult because nothing has a starting point. Our organizing is always drawing off generational work. Los Angeles plays a really important role in abolition conversations. We go all the way back to George Jackson [the author of Soledad Brother], and to what came before him. The origin stories of the modern conversation around abolition in some ways started with him. That generational lineage is very fresh here.

Plus, the postmodern version of mass incarceration we see today was first workshopped in L.A.: SWAT teams, the militarization of police, policies like “three strikes,” gang databases and injunctions—the whole legacy of Daryl Gates [LAPD chief from 1978 to 1992], and prior to him William Parker [LAPD chief from 1950 to 1966].

But yes, the recent condensed policy timeline started with us stopping the jail plan through the JusticeLA campaign. They were going to build multiple jails. Between 2018 and 2020, we were stopping all of it. We were able to do that through grassroots power, collective pressure, and having an alternative vision. The Alternatives to Incarceration Workgroup came out of that.

Often, when you put pressure on a local government against something they want to do, they’ll say, “Well, what are we supposed to do instead? You guys are only good at diagnosing the problem, not figuring out what to do.” 

We anticipated that and developed a very comprehensive plan around what you could do instead of expanding the largest jail system in the world. We put together the Los Angeles County Decarceration Report, and we published two editions of that report. When we did stop the jail plan—which was a big and profound win that no one thought was possible, because the expansion plan had already been put in motion—the county moved forward with a workgroup inviting all the stakeholders to develop an agenda around what we do instead of building these jails. And we were ready.

I don’t know whether their intentions with this workgroup were good or not, but it actually became an excellent example of how civic democracy can work in a participatory context. Because everybody came to the table—not just us, not just people from the community, [but opponents as well]. 

Paul Engler: When I look at the alternatives to incarceration program, I’m shocked by all the groups and individuals that have signed on to it. It ranges all the way from abolitionists to very mainstream people. 

Steppling: It speaks to the fact that we mobilized a bigger base than anyone else. We essentially overwhelmed the county with a critical mass of well-informed people. And we welcomed them to try to tell us where we were wrong. Every analysis that we put forth, every demand that we put forth, we had vetted it. We knew that we had to be accountable for everything we were saying.

Local governments try to use think tanks and the consultant class to counter your vision. In L.A. County, they tried to do that with the RAND Corporation. But then RAND issued a study that echoed what we said—which was that you can cut the jail population in half through comprehensive diversion programming, and it will have better public safety outcomes.

In creating our vision, many of us in the community were able to draw on things we knew had worked before. For example, I drew on my experiences from the mid-to-late 1990s, when we saw a bunch of public health and public safety improvements. During the HIV crisis, a lot of resources, relatively speaking, came into the community through public health grants. Some of them found their way into the hands of local community-based service providers, and a lot of dynamic programming came out of it. You had free clinics, comprehensive sex ed, outreach to sex workers, and genuine harm reduction health services, where people could go and get the care they needed without being judged. And you had youth programming that saved my life.

I didn’t finish school. The last grade that I finished was the tenth grade, and I was out on my own for a number of reasons. I was able to get a job at the L.A. free clinic to work with other “at-risk” youth. At sixteen or seventeen years old, I became a certified HIV counselor and worked with other young people to develop our own curriculum to teach people in the community about safety. We transitioned some of that into doing neighborhood peace work, working intergenerationally to help stop the violence. All these dynamic approaches were happening whether the government or the nonprofit health funders realized it. And as a result, you had service clusters, you had drop-in centers, you had clinical spaces, you had housing programs, and you had job training programs, all done in a very unconditional way. It wasn’t punitive.

I saw people coming through our programs having so much success. But I also saw that my family members and friends who were going through the court system were having horrible outcomes. I realized it was simple: those who were facing the same risk factors as people getting incarcerated, but who were getting treatment and services in ways that were set apart from the court system, were having success. Those going through the court system were not.

That was obvious to those of us who have been impacted by these systems by virtue of where we’ve lived. We knew that the system of law enforcement didn’t care about success; it cared about punishment. It cared about the mass corralling of people. In contrast, these public health models care about safety and health.

When the Alternatives to Incarceration process started, we took so much of that perspective and essentially tried to force it into the workgroup’s recommendations. In the final recommendations, so much of what I just shared with you is in literally the first pages of the report. That was something we were conspicuously able to muscle in, because there was no real logic against it. And the recommendations passed in full because the county felt the pressure from the community.

Paul Engler: It seems like Dignity and Power Now and the other progressive forces in the workgroup were able to get all the civil-society groups to coalesce and have some alignment around your vision.

Steppling: That’s a good way of putting it. There was a coalescing between the civil-society forces and the abolitionists around a vision. And it was because that vision was undeniably the right direction. There were more moderate people in the room, and I always would say to them, “There’s a way forward, and there’s a way backward, but there’s no way around this.” To be frank, if we had let them dictate the direction, we would have gone back toward the center. So we held a line: “If anybody tries to water down what we’re doing, we will hold you accountable. Because we have no choice.”

We could only do all that because we had the two editions of our report laying out a very granular plan. Whether fair or not, we had to have answers for everything. So we spent a lot of time developing that. The county used the term “stakeholders,” but we would not have even been considered a stakeholder if we had not forced our way into the room by virtue of being the only ones who actually designed something.

Part of how we were able to be part of the governance process was by having very intentional conversations internally. This is always a tricky thing to do in an activist community—to say, “We’re not going to just do the protest stuff that they expect us to do. We’re not going to just shut it down.” We had to say, “We’re building something. We’re creating something, and it has to be collaborative.”

But there’s a difference between collaboration and negotiation. We said, “There is no negotiation. We will not accept anything but these demands, but there will be collaboration, because we have to get there together.” The only way you achieve that is by overwhelming them with force. But it has to be a constructive force. To play the inside game, we let the county take credit for a thing that we developed and wrote—the recommendations are literally based off of our two decarceration reports. You want the county to feel a sense of proprietary energy, because then they’re more likely to carry it out.

The tag line for the policy recommendations became “Care First, Jails Last.” On the community side, we would have said, “Care First, Jails Never.” But if you read the recommendations, it’s essentially an abolitionist vision.

Mind you, we had to be very tactful because we also had the sheriffs in the room. We had the probation department in the room. I was often the one asked to go sit at the table with the sheriffs. That was a really interesting experience, developing this alongside them.

Paul Engler: In a lot of other cities, we see efforts to take small bites out of the issue of criminal justice reform—for example, bail reforms, or reducing sentences for nonviolent offenses, or treatment of juveniles, or “ban the box” campaigns. But your approach seems to be different, in that it unifies these different issues into a single campaign with a common vision.

Steppling: I learned something a long time ago, when I stepped into this more nonprofit, criminal justice reform world. I encountered this professionalized version of advocacy, and I felt pretty horrified at a few things. One was the siloing of the issues. Saying, “OK, we’re just doing bail reform. We’re not talking about those other things.”

We have to tell people the truth. And the truth is that the issues are unified. One doesn’t exist without the other. We can close as many brick-and-mortar jails as we want. But all we’re going to do is pave the way for them to build new jails if we don’t tie it to the policies that feed jails. And the policies that feed jails then have to be tied to the policies that feed poverty, and so on—so that we’re including not just the economic justice conversation, but also one that talks about trauma, that talks about what family separation actually looks like and the disruption it causes in communities.

I’ve always felt like the word “radical” can be a canard. So much of what we demand is really sensible. It’s only radical in relationship to the status quo. And the status quo is actually what’s radical. A system of mass punishment and brutality—to me that’s radical; that’s the hard line. 

I think the abolitionist vision is very sensible, because it’s about models of well-functioning civic life. It’s about actual safety.

Mark Engler: In many situations, progressives might try to win a policy change but leave it to the politicians to figure out how to fund it. In the case of Measure J, you went directly after the money. How did you land on that strategy?

Steppling: Measure J was a kind of addendum to Alternatives to Incarceration. It was developed to ensure—or at least to try to ensure—that they wouldn’t be able to use austerity as an excuse to not implement the recommendations.

Measure J was a real stroke of genius on the part of [Dignity and Power Now colleague Ivette Alé]. Ivette saw an opportunity: At the county level in California, we have a ballot measure system. Usually it requires signature gathering, which takes a lot of time and money. But the County Board of Supervisors can also put something on the ballot by virtue of a motion. And so we wrote a motion saying, “We want L.A. County’s discretionary budget to be protected from law enforcement, so they can’t dip into it. And we want 20 percent of that discretionary budget, every year in perpetuity, to go to funding the ATI recommendations.”

The supervisors came back to us and were like, “That’s insane.”

But we didn’t let up. We asked for 20 percent knowing that they might say it was completely impossible. But to us, everything’s possible. We ended up getting 10 percent of L.A. County’s discretionary budget into a measure, which for us was still a massive thing. On average, it’s about half a billion dollars per year. And we got them to put it on the ballot.

They didn’t do it because they liked us. They did it because we had them cornered, and because we had mobilized a critical mass. This was right before the pandemic. Even then, we were anticipating them creating an austerity narrative to not fund the vision they just agreed to. And then the people promoting Measure J became their own coalition, because groups such as the United Way reached out to us wanting to help.

Mark Engler: Can you explain why this discretionary pool of money is so important?

Steppling: The policies of how budgets work feel very conspicuously designed to take agency away from communities. It’s one of the ways that they limit democracy, or the power of democratic mandates.

The county wanted to do a jail expansion that we argued would have cost $3.5 billion. So early on in JusticeLA, we went to people and asked, “What could you do instead with that $3.5 billion?” It’s always a good exercise for people to think about what we should actually be investing in.

But the reality is that those billions that were earmarked for the jail expansion plan cannot legally be taken and just put into schools, for example. There are capital construction laws in California that are complex and very difficult to get information on. As far as public dollars are concerned, it’s easier in California to build a prison than it is to build a library—or even to build a stadium or a shopping mall.

Discretionary money at the county level is one of the few places where there’s more flexibility. It’s up to the county to decide what to spend it on. A lot of times, they don’t spend it at all. They just try to develop a surplus. So we said, “Out of that discretionary budget, you can easily find the money to fund Alternatives to Incarceration.” The service clusters and clinical spaces we need, the youth development work that saved my life—all that can be funded with the discretionary budget.

Paul Engler: It seems like a lot of your work has not just been about getting these changes passed, but about getting them implemented once they’ve already been adopted as policy. And that has involved fighting inertia and taking on government bureaucracies that are not excited to carry out the changes. 

Steppling: We’ve had to deal a lot with the county CEO’s office. It’s a very bureaucratically oriented office that doesn’t seem to face the same pressure as politicians. In some ways, we let them off the hook for about six months when we were embedded on the inside—because we thought we were working with them in good faith to develop the ins and outs of how the policy was going to be implemented. And then when it was time to implement it, we saw that they didn’t want to. This included not only Measure J, but also things like closing Men’s Central Jail, or implementing our model for independent pretrial services that do not rely on law enforcement. They’re dragging their feet on that now, too. 

You encounter limitations in local government where they’re afraid to do things that go against how they’ve been trained to administer. It’s outside of their comfort zone, outside of how they’ve been taught to do this. They agree with us that Measure J is good, yet there’s still inertia. Sometimes we work with them to engineer things perfectly, and then they still don’t do it.

Working in good faith on the inside worked really well with the Alternatives to Incarceration recommendations. With implementation, it didn’t work as well. To me, that has to do with the fact that our outside game got diluted a bit.

There’s that great saying, “Don’t confuse access with influence.” Once you have consistent, effective access to the inside, sometimes folks get confused. And that’s where a lot of stuff goes wrong. Just because you’re inside doesn’t mean shit. The inside game is only so valuable. You have to always have a strong presence on the outside. And that’s where I come from, politically.

Paul Engler: If you were to take stock of the things you’ve won and try to describe them for people outside of Los Angeles, what would you say?

Steppling: The fact that we stopped the jail plan in less than a year is amazing—let alone that we developed the visions that are now in place. Alternatives to Incarceration is in place. Our vision for pretrial services is approved. Measure J passed by a huge margin. An earlier ballot measure—Measure R, giving subpoena power to the Sheriff’s Civilian Oversight Commission [in investigating complaints against the Sheriff’s Department]—passed by more than 70 percent. We’re doing work around coroner accountability, and a huge report just came out from UCLA. I could go on and on. It’s almost like there have been too many wins for us to even articulate.

And then there’s where our minds are at day in and day out. I know that when we talk to activists, a lot of times it’s only negative, because they talk about their frustrations. I don’t feel that way; I don’t feel negative about any of this. I try to make sure I’m looking at everything honestly, neither glass half empty or glass half full.

For me it’s always, “How can we make sure that we’re politically evolving, both drawing on history and in anticipation of what’s coming? We’ve encountered the limitations of one kind of collaborative relationship with local government. What new strategies do we develop to make that collaboration better, while also reminding ourselves that the outside has to still be the most robust force in all of this?”

Some of the people that I respect the most get bogged down on the inside sometimes. And it’s because they really want to make it work. It’s easy to forget that the only reason we won in the first place was that we overwhelmed them from the outside. The inside game only exists because of the outside game.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Mark Engler, Paul Engler.

Gov’t Mule live at the Leverkusener Jazztage Germany 2017. Photo: Andreas Lawen, Fotandi. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Bruce Springsteen quipped that “talking about music is like talking about sex. It’s better when demonstrated.” Gov’t Mule, the legendary band of the rock and roll jam world, has given ample demonstration of its musical power and prowess, and in the spirit of Springsteen’s accurate joke, any verbal or literary description of the live Mule experience will fall short of the intensity and virtuosity with which the band dazzles its audiences. Because he alone is such a musical act of nature, it is often tempting to narrow one’s concentration on Gov’t Mule founder, singer/songwriter, and lead guitarist, Warren Haynes. While Haynes and late bassist Allen Woody were in the Allman Brother Band in the 1990s, they aspired to resurrect the power trio in contemporary rock, citing Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Led Zeppelin, which qualified on the technicality that singer Robert Plant never played an instrument, as main sources of inspiration. Expecting the “side project” to record one album, and complete a single tour, they were as surprised as anyone to keep the Mule kicking into clubs and theaters for decades, even after Woody’s sudden death in 2000. As they now celebrate 28 years of making extraordinary music, Haynes shows no sign of relenting. At their August 19^th performance in Fishers, Indiana, Haynes was primal – threatening to demolish nearby real estate with guitar solos that steadily gained aggression like a supercell storm system settling over the Dakota badlands, and pelting the crowd with his growling and shouting vocals. The explosive energy of Haynes is deceptive, because far from instinctual alone, it emanates out of a commitment to excellence and craft, and requires an intellectual awareness of intent and effect. Allen Ginsberg claimed that the masterful poet should have the ability to translate the heart through the mechanism of the head without taking a breath. It becomes natural – so it seemed for Haynes on a summer night outside of Indianapolis.

It is important to resist the temptation of reducing Mule to its leader. The chemistry and dexterity of the band, along with its unique, aesthetic sweet spot between heavy jam rock and soul-jazz, is a collective creation. Mule’s newest member, bassist Jorgen Carlsson, who joined in 2008, plays grooves as eccentric as Chris Squire and as thunderous as Lemmy Kilmister. Carlsson might have summarized Mule’s musical approach best when he called it, “Rock and roll according to a jazz formula.” Danny Louis stirs another critical ingredient into the mix: A keyboard that he once told me is “Deep Purple meets ‘Bitches Brew.’” Louis is also a utility player, picking up the rhythm guitar on occasion, and even the trombone. At some point during every live Mule show, Haynes will shout out like a preacher making an altar call, “Matt Abts on the drums!” The other surviving founder of Mule, Abts can play with the muscular simplicity of AC/DC’s Phil Rudd, but also throw in fills that sound as if they came from Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.

During one of my interviews with Abts and Haynes, I asked how they deal with the thorny but inevitable question of genre. While they acknowledged that they are a “jam band,” they also insisted that they are a “rock and roll band.” Abts was particularly insistent that there is improvisation with Mule, but not “noodling.” “We have actual songs,” he said. Haynes said that while all the labels they’ve seen have some applicability – “hard rock,” “jam rock,” “blues rock,” “Southern rock” – none of them quite fit. Rather than tailor one of the already existing suits, Mule has crafted something of its own. It is best to merely call their music, “Mule’s music,” and leave it at that. Almost their own genre, Haynes said that they try to take a cue from Miles Davis, who he described as inventing new forms, confusing and frustrating critics. “By the time everyone caught up to what Miles was doing,” Haynes said, “and started praising it, he was moving onto something else.”

Another obvious element in Mule’s equation is the Grateful Dead. Although much more of a rock band, and much heavier, than the Dead, improvisation is important, and Jerry Garcia’s influence is audible. Haynes even toured with Dead and Company in 2013 and ’14, taking on Garcia’s role. When The Grateful Dead became an unlikely stadium band in the 1980s, Jerry Garcia offered the best theory to explain their newfound commercial success: “We represent an alternative reality for large numbers of people disenchanted with the passionless, lame America.”

While Gov’t Mule hasn’t reached the level of The Grateful Dead’s success (few do), they do have a large and loyal following, helping them to sell out most shows in venues like the Beacon Theatre of New York, the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans, and on August 19^th, the Nickel Plate District Amphitheater in Fishers, Indiana. “We used to come around here and play at a place called ‘The Vogue,’” Haynes said toward the end of the night in reference to the music club in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University. When he asked how many were there, cheers scattered throughout the crowd. It is impossible to gauge the honesty of people yelling in unison, but Mule’s base of fans trade stories of performances like young boys with baseball cards, and follow setlists of each tour, as they attend show after show, to the extent that Haynes carefully considers each night’s setlist according to songs played not only at previous concerts on the tour, but previous concerts in that night’s host city dating back several years.

Radically altering the setlist from night to night and stretching jams out over 15 minutes is standard operating procedure for Gov’t Mule. Also part of the regular formula is releasing albums like their latest, Heavy Load Blues, which includes songs like the Haynes original, “If Heartaches Were Nickels” – a slow burning soul blues song that breaks out into a “Moondance”-like jazzy jam in the middle – and their ten minute Sun Records meets Black Sabbath rendition of Howlin’ Wolf’s “I Asked Her for Water.”

The first time I interviewed Haynes was when the band was promoting the release of a boxset containing shows from one of their first tours. Reflecting on two decades of musical excellence and popularity without any help from MTV, corporate rock radio, television commercials, or anything in the flat, unflavored mainstream of US culture, Haynes said the following: “We’ve blindly and luckily been able to do what we thought was best for us — from a musical and personal standpoint. We’ve never second guessed our decisions based on the audience or the commercial demands of the music business. We consider ourselves getting away with murder. Everything we do is uncompromised. We’ve done that from the beginning, and to whatever extent it is working, we are creating an audience of likeminded people. I think there is a need for that, but regardless, it is what we need.”

The kinship between independent-minded, self-willed artists and their audiences grows stronger as commercial fixations devour every aspect of American cultural life. Art and commerce have always maintained a necessary, if often fraught, relationship. Gov’t Mule cannot travel the country for free, and therefore their fans can’t watch them play for free. No one expects a great musician to take a vow of poverty. The musical giants Haynes cites as inspirational – Miles Davis, Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, et. al. – also enjoyed financial prosperity, but they never gave their fans or critics the idea that they were soulless avatars of profit extraction. Jay Z rapped as a boast, without a hint of irony, “I’m not a businessman / I’m a business, man.” His brethren in hip hop and pop have made product placement, television advertisement licensing, and “brand” promotion so routine that it no longer seems to embarrass anyone. John Legend appears in a commercial serenading vegetables, Lil Nas X dances with a bottle of vitamin water, and Taylor Swift brandishes her cardigan collection on behalf of Capitol One. Young pop stars have learned from the best: The Rolling Stones, U2, and Madonna began lending their songs to ads for big pharma pills, investment firms, and Silicon Valley behemoths long ago. For decades Springsteen rejected multimillion dollar offers to allow his songs to play in commercials. Last year he imitated Clint Eastwood in an ad for Jeep, driving around a Kansas small town, stopping in a church to pray for the future of America. The jokes write themselves.

At least when Springsteen, the Stones, and the “Material Girl” wrote their songs they were not planning for commercial license. Sources now report that the state of the record industry, radio, and other traditional means of promotion have fallen to such unstable depths that many young songwriters and bands compose music with the intention of commercial placement. Even if it is a longshot, it is their best hope for wealth. “Selling out,” as Douglas Rushkoff showed in his documentary on young Americans’ relationship with multinational corporations, social media, and mass marketing, no longer has meaning. Most of his interview subjects interpreted the phrase as laudatory: “Congratulations on selling out!”

It is hardly a surprise that pop hits now sound exactly like commercial jingles – using a looped beat ad nauseam, repeating the same phrase over and over, and rapping or singing lyrics that more closely resemble slogans than poetry. It is only a matter of time before some enterprising pop or hip hop performer samples, “By Mennen!”

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in musicology to detect how the most popular songs of any genre now sound almost exactly alike. In 2015, a YouTube user created a “mashup”of that year’s six biggest country hits. They overlapped perfectly, proving that they had the same rhythm pattern, the same structure, and similar melodies. Boredom, redundancy, frivolity, and transformation of musician into pitchman are predictable travesties of unbridled consumerism and endless corporate consolidation. Warren Haynes wasn’t off the mark when he likened Gov’t Mule’s longevity in the contemporary music climate to “getting away with murder.”

And who knew murder could sound so good?

Albert Camus wrote in The Rebel that every act of rebellion is not only in opposition to something, but also affirmative of countervalues. A phrase that doesn’t appear much anymore in arts criticism or newspapers is “counterculture.” When Gov’t Mule performed in Fishers, Indiana, they were committing an act of artistic violence against the emptyheaded avarice and vapid priorities of the mainline music industry and broader entertainment world. As Camus would appreciate, they too were advancing their own vision of a counterculture.

The Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band established a jam band tradition of playing two sets – the second much more experimental and improvisational than the first. Haynes has explained that this is not merely a creative choice, but a method of necessity. For a band to explore its musical limits, seek new territory without a map, and engage in spontaneous composition, it must reach a level of a comfort that allows for loose interplay. The first set works the musical muscles, taking the instrumentalist from the quiet of the last pre-show moments to the adrenaline rush of live performance. Gov’t Mule opened its August 19^th show with two of its more straightforward rock and roll protest songs. “Mr. Man” shot the band out of a cannon with Haynes shouting, “Better get ready!” Its raucous and angry energy, bringing the crowd to its feet, originated as defiant condemnation of the Iraq War and President George W. Bush. The same imperious president was the partial inspiration for the night’s second song, “Mr. High and Mighty,” a Free-like rocker with a power chord riff about how the arrogance of wealth and power so often manifests in cruelty toward everyday people. Mule closed the first set with “Stone Cold Rage,” an intense and equally aggressive hard rock song from 2016, lamenting the danger of the far right movement coalescing around Donald Trump.

In between the opening numbers and “Stone Cold Rage,” Gov’t Mule lit the crowd afire, seemingly aiming to prove why Metallica’s rhythm guitarist and lead singer, James Hetfield, along with Metallica alum, bassist Jason Newsted, have often cited Mule as their favorite band.

 They even played “Drivin’ Rain,” a hard pounding original that in its recorded version features shared vocals from Hetfield. Haynes might sing like BB King, but the band backing him plays with a weight uncommon in the jam world. Abts’ ballistic drumming and Carlsson’s bottom end lower such a crush, particularly when paired with Paige-like riffs from Haynes, that it is an astonishing trip to follow Haynes’ voice as he screams and snarls through each song. Danny Louis’ keyboard injects a psychedelic effect, almost as if he is trying to pull all the weight of Mule’s heavy cargo into outer space. Mule’s unique proximity to early heavy metal once led Haynes to deem his band the “black sheep of jam.”

The spacey odyssey commenced in the first set with “Thorns of Life,” a song from Mule’s 2016 record, Revolution Come…Revolution Go. Carlsson, Louis, and Haynes’ exchange sounded like something Miles Davis would have orchestrated, and whenever the song would seem to reach a crescendo in its 11 minute journey, with Haynes shouting to an unnamed object of affection, “Dying inside ‘til I feel you / Burning on my skin…”, it would suddenly land again, deconstructing into a crawl through an emotional mystery. Preceding “Thorns of Life” was the set’s only cover – a soulful version of “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City,” which appears on the newest Mule record, Heavy Load Blues. Offering a glimpse into the playful fury of the second set was “Broke Down on the Brazos,” a Texas-blues rock and roll song that with a turn of Haynes’ conductor hand morphed into “Tributary Jam,” an organ-led, jazzy vamp. The pairing sounded like what ZZ Top and Jimmy Smith might conceive if they spent all night together in a smoky club outside of Houston.

With the second set of Mule’s performance, Fishers, the mid-sized town outside of Indianapolis, could have been Houston. It could have been New Orleans or New York or Chicago or some city still undiscovered. There was no musical or aesthetic border that Mule would honor in their exploratory and imaginative trek through various iterations of timeless music. Creative writing professors are fond of telling their students, “You have to understand the rules to know when and why you should break them.” The freewheeling nature of Mule’s music bears resemblance to the poetry of Walt Whitman, the painting of Jackson Pollock, and the fusion of Miles Davis. It is only through a mastery of craft and appreciation of tradition that the artist can flirt with the avant garde. The free verse of Whitman, and later Ginsburg, disguises a sophisticated comprehension of meter, structure, and rhythm. The abstract quality of a Pollock painting derived only from painstaking knowledge of design principles. True invention and genuine stylistic singularity often comes from the moment when the intellectual is made instinctual. Gov’t Mule’s best moments, like those of other great jazz and jam bands, occur when the audience realizes that they are witnessing not merely the playing, but making of music. There is a sweet spot between intention, which demands technical excellence, and improvisation, which demands the imaginative boldness to push beyond the conventions of the form, but also the culture, especially its commercial restraints.

Gov’t Mule opened their second set with one of their concert staples, “Larger Than Life.” Chronicling how “death is larger than life,” the song explodes into Zeppelin-informed animation with Haynes shredding on his guitar and Abts breathlessly beating his small drum kit. The rendition seemed typical until without a moment’s notice, Haynes’ guitar solo shifted into the opening riff of Jimi Hendrix’s classic, “If 6 Was 9.” As the band powered through the Hendrix cover, it seemed as if Haynes and company were channeling the best of dark and psychedelic rock and roll. The intensity steadily escalated, but not without control. One never suspects that the band is showing off. Haynes takes merciful breaths in his guitar playing, enabling him to draw out phrases and maintain soulful humanity in the presentation. The human touch was palpable when “If 6 Was 9” collapsed into an ominous drum beat with Haynes and Carlsson trading riffs and licks, and Louis adding an eerie background ambience. Then it built back into “Larger Than Life,” culminating in Haynes shouting the title phrase. Length plays a pivotal role in the artistry of the jam band. Ted Gioia has discovered through his research that ten minutes is necessary to induce a “trance effect” in the music listener. A three or four minute song fails to dramatically alter the mood in the same way of an extended performance. Skill is essential for the creation of variety over a ten minute period. In the “Larger Than Life”—”If 6 Was 9” medley, they told a story with the aid of words, but the drama and emotive concentration of the music became even more revelatory. It acted as a heart threatening thesis on mortality.

After a run through their moving ballad, “No Need to Suffer,” erupting into simultaneous solos from Haynes and Carlsson, the dark but trippy energy returned with “Trane,” an instrumental rock jam from Mule’s debut record. Paying tribute to John Coltrane, the song uses speed and solo variety to stretch the limits of chordal and modal structure, while transporting the listener’s mind to dimensions both odd and exciting. If Metallica somehow smashed into “My Favorite Things,” the dynamic entity would resemble Mule’s “Trane.” Not content to leave the audience with their own original composition on the fly, Mule blended “Trane” into a muscular rendition of Sly and the Family Stone’s instrumental jam, “Sex Machine.” The segue way happened in an instant – almost as quickly and smoothly as Mule transformed “Sex Machine” into “St. Stephen Jam.” The crowd cheered at the first recognizable notes of the Grateful Dead number. As Mule quickened the tempo on “St. Stephen,” the roars grew louder. The “Trane—Sex Machine—St. Stephen Jam” trio met the classic standard of a suite. The three songs enjoyed tonal links, but retained their distinct characteristics. Unlike the typical suite, Mule’s navigated the proximity between hard rock and jazz, giving aural survey of an unpredictable musical geography.

Later in the set a cover of Savoy Brown’s blues exercise in pavement poetry, “Street Corner Talking,” had Mule giving twelve-minute testimony to blue collar hardship. While bending distorted notes in the style of Hendrix, Haynes shouted out Kim Simmonds’ lyrics like a man pleading for his life: “It’s the same / What a shame / No matter where you go…” He and Abts teased Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” and confronted the audience with a question: “Street corner talkin’ / Tell me what you’re gonna do…”

It sounded like a challenge, especially with the American flag flying off the stage directly in front of a library. Inside that library there were books on advertising, mass media, and algorithms, but there were also books by Albert Murray, Ellen Willis, and Dave Hickey. The final song of the second set acted as an arrow, pointing the audience in the right direction. A bona fide Mule classic, “Thorazine Shuffle,” is a song that Haynes often says is about “being uninhibited.” Beginning with a hypnotic bassline, the song immediately moves the feet according to its title’s inspiration. It has an odd time signature groove, equal parts “Whipping Post” and “Take Five,” funky solos from Haynes, psychedelic keyboard vamps, and multiple key changes.

One of the most pervasive consequences of allowing marketing calculations and social media algorithms to dictate art and entertainment is mediocrity. A bland, flat affect soon comes to dominate whatever derivative songs, films, and novels begin to triumph on the charts. Gov’t Mule delivers the satisfaction and hope that an alternative is possible.

Before Matt Abts closed “Thorazine Shuffle” with a drum solo slicing through each vamp, Haynes repeated the lyric, “Stand right back and watch me now / I’ll show you how it’s done..”

It was a promise they already kept.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Masciotra.

Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.”

— Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” 1968

The United States, leading a coalition of its allies, is fighting a proxy war with Russia over its invasion of beleaguered Ukraine battling for its survival as a democracy. Thousands have died.

Yet extremists of the Republican Party, or what’s left of a onetime respected political institution (it should change its name to something more accurate) invited a virtual dictator to deliver the keynote address at its popular right-wing get-together, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In some of his more belligerent remarks at the conference at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas last week, the creeping authoritarian focused on a theme of uniting Hungary and the United States by coordinating their militaries and by Americans electing conservatives in the midterm elections in November and Europeans doing the same in the European Union election in 2024.

Beware: It seems as if the Hungarian leader is anxious to save conservatives from a hostile liberal world. With all of the restrictions far-right politicians impose on everyday people, maybe it’s the conservatives who need to be monitored.

“We must take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels . . . we must coordinate the movements of our troops because we face the same challenges” against liberals among Democrats and in the media, he said in his speech in heavily accented English.

“These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization. Today, we hold neither of them. Yet we need both,” Orbán said.

I didn’t know Washington and Budapest share an axis.

Unite American and Hungarian armed forces? Orbán must be dreaming aloud. It’ll never happen so long as a Democrat is in the White House, if he or she can keep it. Putting Donald Trump or his clone would be something else again.

Trump referred to the prime minister as his “friend” when they were together at the former president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., before the CPAC conference. He also endorsed Orbán for his fourth consecutive term, which he won in April.

“The globalists (read liberals) can go to hell,” the Hungarian strongman blasted. “I have come to Texas.” He tagged Hungary “the Lone Star State of Europe,” obviously meaning his country is different from others on the continent. Just about.

Texas is home to a far-right governor, Greg Abbott, and a senator with similar political views, Rick Scott, a former governor. It has some of the toughest restrictions against abortion and voting rights in the country.

“They hate me and slander me and my country as they hate you and slander you,” Orbán said of liberals’ views of right-wing conservatives.  That’s probably true, not hyperbole.

Orbán is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has been criticized for Hungary being one of the few countries among its neighbors that doesn’t support Ukraine, with which it shares an 85-mile border along a river. It is among the 30 NATO members. Hungary’s population is 9.6 million.

The European Union has had problems with Orbán’s curtailing of democracy in Hungary and has withheld money until it abides by the rules of the 27-member group. Hungary has been a parliamentary republic since 1989. But the Economist Intelligence Unit, an analysis and research division of The Economist magazine, labeled it a “flawed democracy” in 2020.

Hungary was part of the Soviet bloc and its Warsaw Pact military alliance to counter NATO before Moscow’s empire collapsed in 1991. It sided with Nazi Germany during World War II, when 565,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

Orbán is perhaps best known for blocking refugees from Hungary as they fled to Europe seeking asylum from their war-ravaged homelands in Syria and Afghanistan during the 2015 migrant crisis. He erected fences to keep them out, even if their intent merely was to pass through Hungary to reach other countries. He rejected 16 pleas for asylum, according to The Guardian.

He recently warned European countries against “race mixing,” a racist slur targeting people of color. He sounds like American white supremacists and nationalists who could fit right in. It did not deter CPAC from inviting Orbán. But Hungary accepted “with open arms” more than 180,000 Ukrainian war refugees, Human Rights Watch reported. Ukrainians are white.

The prime minister and his allies also have suppressed the media, campaigned against gay and transgender rights, Jewish Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros and emphasized law and order. Trump often has been compared to Orbán.

Right-wingers, including Fox “News” host Tucker Carlson, more than once has pointed to Orbán as a model leader for America, an image Jennifer Dresden, a policy advocate for democracy, finds “concerning.”

“The academic and think tank research has been really clear: Hungary has been on this incremental path (toward authoritarianism) for over a decade at this point, and Orbán has followed the playbook very, very closely in ways that everybody should be worried about,” CNN business analyst David Zurawik quoted her as saying.

And this is what right-wingers see as their model for running a government? Are they Americans?

Maybe Orbán is merely the conservative flavor of the year, harmless. CPAC, Carlson and other right-wing admirers of Orbán would be wise to look long and hard at the Hungarian leader before continuing to woo him as a far-flung panacea for solving their own problems.

Otherwise, they may be stepping into political quicksand without an exit strategy, like what our military experienced in getting out of Afghanistan. We have enough problems on our crowded plate, Trump and his die-hard allies to start with.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard C. Gross.

As Russia's invasion of Ukraine revives the terrifying specter of thermonuclear annihilation, a scientific study published Thursday revealed that a nuclear exchange involving as few as hundreds of warheads would likely cause a "little ice age" lasting centuries or even millennia.

"It doesn't matter who is bombing whom... Once the smoke is released into the upper atmosphere, it spreads globally and affects everyone."

Scientists have long known that even a "limited" thermonuclear war could result in a so-called nuclear winter, or prolonged global cooling resulting from atmospheric soot blocking life-sustaining sunlight. However, the new study examines the effects of such warfare on the Earth's oceans and marine ecosystems.

Researchers simulated two hypothetical nuclear wars: a U.S.-Russia thermonuclear exchange in which 4,400 100-kiloton warheads were launched against cities and industrial targets, sparking conflagrations that spewed more than 330 billion pounds of smoke and sunlight-absorbing black carbon into the Earth's upper atmosphere, and an India-Pakistan conflict involving 500 100-kiloton bombs that produced up to 103 billion pounds of smoke.

In all of the researchers' simulations, nuclear firestorms spewed soot and smoke into the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun and resulting in global crop failure. In the first month after the war, average global temperatures plunged by about 13°F, a larger temperature change than during the last ice age.

"It doesn't matter who is bombing whom. It can be India and Pakistan or NATO and Russia. Once the smoke is released into the upper atmosphere, it spreads globally and affects everyone," Louisiana State University professor Cheryl Harrison, the study's lead author, explained.

The researchers found that ocean temperatures would quickly and irreversibly plummet, with spreading sea ice causing catastrophic coastal blockages that would render shipping impossible in much of the world.

In an even more ominous development, "the sudden drop in light and ocean temperatures, especially from the Arctic to the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans, would kill the marine algae, which is the foundation of the marine food web, essentially creating a famine in the ocean," a summary of the report published in Science Daily stated. "This would halt most fishing and aquaculture."

Study co-author Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that "nuclear warfare results in dire consequences for everyone."

"World leaders have used our studies previously as an impetus to end the nuclear arms race in the 1980s, and five years ago to pass a treaty in the United Nations to ban nuclear weapons," he added. "We hope that this new study will encourage more nations to ratify the ban treaty."

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) has been ratified by 65 nations—but none of the world's nine nuclear powers. Commenting after last month's first meeting of state parties to the TPNW in Vienna, disarmament campaigner Alice Slater told InDepthNews that "the dark clouds of war and strife continue to plague the world."

"We are enduring continued violence in Ukraine, new nuclear threats issued by Russia including a possibility of sharing nuclear weapons with Belarus, in the context of tens of billions of dollars in armaments being poured into Ukraine by the U.S., and a brutal and careless rush to expand the boundaries of NATO to include Finland and Sweden," she added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Image by Ömer Yıldız.

What took place between May 2021 and May 2022 is nothing less than a paradigm shift in Palestinian resistance. Thanks to the popular and inclusive nature of Palestinian mobilization against the Israeli occupation, resistance in Palestine is no longer an ideological, political or regional preference.

In the period between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and only a few years ago, Palestinian muqawama – or resistance –  was constantly put in the dock, often criticized and condemned, as if an oppressed nation had a moral responsibility in selecting the type of resistance to suit the needs and interests of its oppressors.

As such, Palestinian resistance became a political and ideological litmus test. The Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas, called for ‘popular resistance’, but it seems that it neither understood what the strategy actually meant, and certainly was not prepared to act upon such a call.

Palestinian armed resistance was removed entirely from its own historical context; in fact, the context of all liberation movements throughout history, and was turned into a straw man, set up by Israel and its western allies to condemn Palestinian ‘terrorism’ and to present Israel as a victim facing an existential threat.

With the lack of a centralized Palestinian definition of resistance, even pro-Palestine civil society groups and organizations demarcated their relationship to the Palestinian struggle based on embracing certain forms of Palestinian resistance and condemning others.

The argument that only oppressed nations should have the right to choose the type of resistance that could speed up their salvation and freedom fell on deaf ears.

The truth is that Palestinian resistance preceded the official establishment of Israel in 1948. Palestinians and Arabs who resisted British and Zionist colonialism used many methods of resistance that they perceived to be strategic and sustainable. There was no relationship whatsoever between the type of resistance and the religious, political or ideological identity of those who resisted.

This paradigm prevailed for many years, starting with the Fidayeen Movement following the Nakba, the popular resistance to the brief Israeli occupation of Gaza in 1956, and the decades-long occupation and siege starting in 1967. The same reality was expressed in Palestinian resistance in historic Palestine throughout the decades; armed resistance ebbed and flowed, but popular resistance remained intact. The two phenomena were always intrinsically linked, as the former was also sustained by the latter.

The Fatah Movement, which dominates today’s Palestinian Authority, was formed in 1959 to model liberation movements in Vietnam and Algeria. Regarding its connection to the Algerian struggle, the Fatah manifesto read: “The guerrilla war in Algeria, launched five years before the creation of Fatah, has a profound influence on us. […] They symbolize the success we dreamed of.”

This sentiment was championed by most modern Palestinian movements as it proved to be a successful strategy for most southern liberation movements. In the case of Vietnam, the resistance to US occupation carried out even during political talks in Paris. The underground resistance in South Africa remained vigilant until it became clear that the country’s apartheid regime was in the process of being dismantled.

Palestinian disunity, however, which was a direct result of the Oslo Accords, made a unified Palestinian position on resistance untenable. The very idea of resistance itself became subject to the political whims and interests of factions. When, in July 2013, PA President Abbas condemned armed resistance, he was trying to score political points with his western supporters, and further sow the seeds of division among his people.

The truth is that Hamas neither invented, nor has ownership of, armed resistance. In June 2021, a poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), revealed that 60% of Palestinians support “a return to armed confrontations and Intifada”. By stating so, Palestinians were not necessarily declaring allegiance to Hamas. Armed resistance, though in a different style and capacity also exists in the West Bank, and is largely championed by Fatah’s own Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The recent Israeli attacks on the town of Jenin, in the northern West Bank, were not aimed at eliminating Hamas, Islamic Jihad or socialist fighters, but Fatah’s own.

Skewed media coverage and misrepresentation of the resistance, often by Palestinian factions themselves, turned the very idea of resistance into a political and factional scuffle, forcing everyone involved to take a position on the issue. The discourse on the resistance, however,  began changing in the last year.

The May 2021 rebellion and the Israeli war on Gaza – known among Palestinians as the Unity Intifada – served as a paradigm shift. The language became unified; self-serving political references quickly dissipated; collective frames of reference began replacing provisional, regional and factional ones; occupied Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque emerged as the unifying symbols of resistance; a new generation began to emerge and quickly began to develop new platforms.

On May 29, the Israeli government insisted on allowing the so-called ‘Flag March’ – a mass rally by Israeli Jewish extremists that celebrate the capture of the Palestinian city of al-Quds – to once more pass through Palestinian neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem. This was the very occasion that instigated the violence of the previous year. Aware of the impending violence which often results from such provocations, Israel wanted to impose the timing and determine the nature of the violence. It failed. Gaza didn’t fire rockets. Instead, tens of thousands of Palestinians mobilized throughout occupied Palestine, thus allowing popular mobilization and coordination between numerous communities to grow. Palestinians proved able to coordinate their responsibility, despite the numerous obstacles, hardships and logistical difficulties.

The events of the last year are a testament that Palestinians are finally freeing their resistance from factional interests. The most recent confrontations show that Palestinians are even harnessing resistance as a  strategic objective. Muqawama in Palestine is no longer ‘symbolic’ or supposedly ‘random’ violence that reflects ‘desperation’ and lack of political horizon. It is becoming more defined, mature and well-coordinated.

This phenomenon must be extremely worrying to Israel, as the coming months and years could prove critical in changing the nature of the confrontation between Palestinians and their occupiers. Considering that the new resistance is centered around homegrown, grassroots, community-oriented movements, it has far greater chances of success than previous attempts. It is much easier for Israel to assassinate a fighter than to uproot the values of resistance from the heart of a community.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

In the period between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and only a few years ago, Palestinian muqawama – or resistance –  was constantly put in the dock, often criticized and condemned, as if an oppressed nation had a moral responsibility in selecting the type of resistance to suit the needs and interests of its oppressors.

As such, Palestinian resistance became a political and ideological litmus test. The Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas, called for ‘popular resistance’, but it seems that it neither understood what the strategy actually meant, and certainly was not prepared to act upon such a call.

Palestinian armed resistance was removed entirely from its own historical context; in fact, the context of all liberation movements throughout history, and was turned into a straw man, set up by Israel and its western allies to condemn Palestinian ‘terrorism’ and to present Israel as a victim facing an existential threat.

With the lack of a centralized Palestinian definition of resistance, even pro-Palestine civil society groups and organizations demarcated their relationship to the Palestinian struggle based on embracing certain forms of Palestinian resistance and condemning others.

The argument that only oppressed nations should have the right to choose the type of resistance that could speed up their salvation and freedom fell on deaf ears.

The truth is that Palestinian resistance preceded the official establishment of Israel in 1948. Palestinians and Arabs who resisted British and Zionist colonialism used many methods of resistance that they perceived to be strategic and sustainable. There was no relationship whatsoever between the type of resistance and the religious, political or ideological identity of those who resisted.

This paradigm prevailed for many years, starting with the Fidayeen Movement following the Nakba, the popular resistance to the brief Israeli occupation of Gaza in 1956, and the decades-long occupation and siege starting in 1967. The same reality was expressed in Palestinian resistance in historic Palestine throughout the decades; armed resistance ebbed and flowed, but popular resistance remained intact. The two phenomena were always intrinsically linked, as the former was also sustained by the latter.

The Fatah Movement, which dominates today’s Palestinian Authority, was formed in 1959 to model liberation movements in Vietnam and Algeria. Regarding its connection to the Algerian struggle, the Fatah manifesto read: “The guerrilla war in Algeria, launched five years before the creation of Fatah, has a profound influence on us. […] They symbolize the success we dreamed of.”

This sentiment was championed by most modern Palestinian movements as it proved to be a successful strategy for most southern liberation movements. In the case of Vietnam, the resistance to US occupations was carried out even during political talks in Paris. The underground resistance in South Africa remained vigilant until it became clear that the country’s apartheid regime was in the process of being dismantled.

Palestinian disunity, however, which was a direct result of the Oslo Accords, made a unified Palestinian position on resistance untenable. The very idea of resistance itself became subject to the political whims and interests of factions. When, in July 2013, PA President Abbas condemned armed resistance, he was trying to score political points with his western supporters, and further sow the seeds of division among his people.

The truth is that Hamas neither invented, nor has ownership of, armed resistance. In June 2021, a poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), revealed that 60% of Palestinians support “a return to armed confrontations and Intifada”. By stating so, Palestinians were not necessarily declaring allegiance to Hamas. Armed resistance, though in a different style and capacity also exists in the West Bank, and is largely championed by Fatah’s own Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The recent Israeli attacks on the town of Jenin, in the northern West Bank, were not aimed at eliminating Hamas, Islamic Jihad or socialist fighters, but Fatah’s own.

Skewed media coverage and misrepresentation of the resistance, often by Palestinian factions themselves, turned the very idea of resistance into a political and factional scuffle, forcing everyone involved to take a position on the issue. The discourse on the resistance, however,  began changing in the last year.

The May 2021 rebellion and the Israeli war on Gaza – known among Palestinians as the Unity Intifada – served as a paradigm shift. The language became unified; self-serving political references quickly dissipated; collective frames of reference began replacing provisional, regional and factional ones; occupied Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque emerged as the unifying symbols of resistance; a new generation began to emerge and quickly began to develop new platforms.

On May 29, the Israeli government insisted on allowing the so-called ‘Flag March’ – a mass rally by Israeli Jewish extremists that celebrate the capture of the Palestinian city of al-Quds – to once more pass through Palestinian neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem. This was the very occasion that instigated the violence of the previous year. Aware of the impending violence which often results from such provocations, Israel wanted to impose the timing and determine the nature of the violence. It failed. Gaza didn’t fire rockets. Instead, tens of thousands of Palestinians mobilized throughout occupied Palestine, thus allowing popular mobilization and coordination between numerous communities to grow. Palestinians proved able to coordinate their responsibility, despite the numerous obstacles, hardships and logistical difficulties.

The events of the last year are a testament that Palestinians are finally freeing their resistance from factional interests. The most recent confrontations show that Palestinians are even harnessing resistance as a strategic objective. Muqawama in Palestine is no longer ‘symbolic’ or supposedly ‘random’ violence that reflects ‘desperation’ and lack of political horizon. It is becoming more defined, mature and well-coordinated.

This phenomenon must be extremely worrying to Israel, as the coming months and years could prove critical in changing the nature of the confrontation between Palestinians and their occupiers. Considering that the new resistance is centered around homegrown, grassroots, community-oriented movements, it has far greater chances of success than previous attempts. It is much easier for Israel to assassinate a fighter than to uproot the values of resistance from the heart of a community.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

While it has long been blatantly obvious that the global economic model is not working for all, the rate of accumulation of wealth by a small minority is now breathtaking – if not totally obscene.

With the situation only being worsened by the economic impact of the Ukraine War – which has come on top of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic – could we be headed for mass revolts sparked by a desperate need for change?

Could we be headed for mass revolts sparked by a desperate need for change?

The war is causing food shortages, with the world’s poorest the most affected. Though the full impact is yet to be felt, the number of severely food insecure people has already “doubled from 135 million to 276 million” in just two years, leaving “almost 50 million on the edge of famine.”

Though the Global South is the worst hit, poorer communities in richer states are also affected. Here in the UK, where millions of people already live close to the edge, there has been a surge in the need for food banks as many are pushed into critical need. Many schools in more deprived areas are forced to provide breakfasts every morning, not least to avoid having to teach hungry children who cannot concentrate.

Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer. In one three-month period in 2020 – which coincided with the start of the pandemic – the world’s then 2,189 billionaires increased their wealth by 27.5% to $10.2trn, according to Swiss private bank UBS. This represented a 70% increase in their wealth in just three years.

Two years on, there are now 2,668 billionaires. Just last week, Britain’s Sunday Times published its annual ‘rich list’ of the country’s most wealthy – reporting the richest ten individuals and families have a combined £182bn.

In this context, two questions arise. Why has the global rich-poor divide grown so wide? And why has there not been a bigger uprising against it?

The latter is particularly confusing, given our global system has seen such a vast increase in overall wealth in the past 75 years. After all, following the end of World War Two, many countries in the West put considerable effort into public services, developing much-improved health systems, public education, housing, and basic social assistance support for the most marginalized.

What has happened since? The answer is widely recognized to be ‘neoliberalism’, an approach whose essence is that the true foundation of economic success is strong and determined competition, which a political system must work towards to have any chance of success.

This approach was developed in the 1950s, with the work of economists including Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and has since been shaped by a network of more than 450 right-wing think tanks and campaign groups.

Neoliberalism is aided by taxation designed to benefit the more successful; the firm control of organized labor to minimize opposition; and the maximum privatizations of transport, utilities such as energy, water and communications, housing, health, education and even security.

There are obviously losers from this system, but typically enough wealth will ‘trickle down’ to prevent serious opposition. It is a line of thinking that can reach the fervor of a religious belief and is certainly best seen as an ideology.

More than three decades on, neoliberalism does much to explain the obscene levels of wealth for the few, not the many.

The switch to neoliberalism was boosted by the huge economic upheavals that followed the 1973-74 oil price hikes (over 400% in eight months). Stagflation became the order of the day and, in the UK and the US, key elections at the end of the decade brought in the Thatcher and Reagan administrations.

Both newly elected leaders were convinced of the need to embrace the new thinking. Throughout the 1980s, the US pursued a firm belief in the need to accelerate tax changes and financial deregulation, while Britain sought to control the trade unions and oversee the large-scale privatizations of state assets – Thatcher’s mantra being “there is no alternative”.

Two global processes also did much to speed up the transition towards neoliberalism. The first was the ‘Washington Consensus’, introduced in 1989, which set out free-market economic policies for ‘developing countries’. The World Bank and IMF led the way in ensuring the Global South followed the new model.

The second was the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Russia’s immediate embrace of hyper-capitalism was surely the proof, if any was needed, of the value of the neoliberal approach and the obsolescence of a centrally planned system. Even China was moving towards hybrid authoritarian capitalism.

But now, more than three decades on, neoliberalism does much to explain the obscene levels of wealth for the few, not the many. So, why has it had so little resistance? Part of the answer is the residue of the experience of pre-neoliberal economics, a sense that things were worse before the likes of Thatcher and Reagan came on the scene. That view persists but is rapidly losing its potency in the face of the widening divide.

A more realistic explanation lies in so much of the West’s mainstream mass media being controlled by singularly wealthy individuals, families, and corporations. In the UK, the print media is dominated by just three billionaire families, who set much of the news agenda. They are hardly likely to focus too much on deep inequalities that, if addressed, would strike at their own power.

That doesn’t rule out radical responses, though. ISIS and other Islamist paramilitary movements have benefited enormously from their ability to recruit marginalized and angry young men with very limited life prospects, offering a cult-like alternative to their deep frustrations.

There are, of course, current instances of revolt elsewhere, such as in Sri Lanka, which have specific causes, invariably in a much wider context. But we have not yet seen any truly transnational movement, though it is worth remembering the coincidence of many revolts in a few months during the latter part of 2019.

In October of that year, thousands took to the streets in Iraq to rebel against levels of unemployment and low wages, which came amid rampant corruption in a country basically rich in fossil fuels. At the same time, Lebanon witnessed repeated street demonstrations against inequality and corruption, and Chile experienced protests that were framed “as a response to both the failed promises of neoliberalism and the inequality that neoliberal policies have arguably created in the country.” Elsewhere France had the Yellow Vests protests, and Ecuador, Bolivia, Haiti, Albania, Ukraine, Serbia, and even Russia saw civil unrest.

As an Oxford Research Group analysis put it at the time: “In most cases there are specific factors which push unease and resentment over into demonstrations often followed by repression and violence.

“A few may have little to do with rising inequality and diminishing life prospects, but for the majority, these are very much part of the wider social and political context.”

Those revolts did not spill over into a transnational anger, though, let alone violence. The individual protests have not been seen as part of a more global process and there is little sense of a worldwide movement of revolt. But now, the economic effects of the pandemic and the Ukraine war, combined with the growing impact of climate breakdown, suggest that it is only a matter of time. If that is the case, then we really are moving into uncertain times.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Paul Rogers.

A global press freedom watchdog group warned Tuesday in its annual report that media polarization within and between countries—driven by the rapid spread of right-wing disinformation on social media and the proliferation of pro-authoritarian propaganda—is "fueling increased tension" and escalating the likelihood of violence.

"The trio of Nordic countries at the top of the Index—Norway, Denmark, and Sweden—continues to serve as a democratic model where freedom of expression flourishes."

The 20th World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) assesses the state of journalism around the globe. The 2022 edition details the "disastrous effects of news and information chaos"—the product of "a globalized and unregulated online information space that encourages fake news and propaganda."

Within nominally democratic societies, "divisions are growing as a result of the spread of opinion media following the 'Fox News model' and the spread of disinformation circuits that are amplified by the way social media functions," RSF noted.

"At the international level," wrote RSF, "democracies are being weakened by the asymmetry between open societies and despotic regimes that control their media and online platforms while waging propaganda wars against democracies."

According to RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire, "Margarita Simonyan, the Editor in Chief of RT (the former Russia Today), revealed what she really thinks in a Russia One TV broadcast when she said, 'no great nation can exist without control over information.'"

In addition to suppressing their citizens' right to information, "the creation of media weaponry in authoritarian countries... is also linked to the rise in international tension," said Deloire, "which can lead to the worst kind of wars."

RSF argued that Russia's (ranked 155th out of 180) late-February invasion of Ukraine (106th) exemplifies this process, as the ongoing military assault "was preceded by a propaganda war."

"China (175th), one of the world's most repressive autocratic regimes, uses its legislative arsenal to confine its population and cut it off from the rest of the world, especially the population of Hong Kong (148th), which has plummeted in the Index," RSF continued. Pointing to India (150th), led by right-wing Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, and neighboring Pakistan (157th), the group added that "confrontation between 'blocs' is growing."

Within countries, meanwhile, Deloire said that "the 'Fox News-ization' of the media poses a fatal danger for democracies because it undermines the basis of civil harmony and tolerant public debate."

The United States (42nd) moved up two spots in the 2022 Index "thanks to improvements made by the Biden administration, such as reinstating regular White House and federal agency press briefings," wrote RSF. "Nevertheless, chronic issues impacting journalists remain unaddressed. These include the disappearance of local newspapers, the systematic polarization of the media, and the erosion of journalism by digital platforms amid a climate of animosity and aggression towards journalists, among others."

Highly polarizing "new opinion media" and social media are "feeding and reinforcing" internal social and political divisions well beyond the U.S. RSF singled out France (26th) as a place where the spread of right-wing disinformation is exacerbating tensions.

Moreover, RSF pointed out, the crackdown on independent media is "contributing to a sharp polarization in 'illiberal democracies' such as Poland (66th), where the authorities have consolidated their control over public broadcasting and their strategy of 're-Polonizing' the privately-owned media."

RSF classified press freedom as "very bad" in a record 28 nations in this year's Index. The five worst countries for journalism are Myanmar (176th), where the February 2021 coup d’état "set press freedom back by 10 years," as well as Turkmenistan (177th), Iran (178th), Eritrea (179th), and North Korea (180th).

But human rights advocates have consistently highlighted how ostensibly "open societies" have also facilitated attacks on whistleblowers and the free press.

When Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last July that the U.S. "will always support the indispensable work of independent journalists around the world," critics were quick to point out that Washington's purported commitment to press freedom doesn't apply to WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange.

The CIA, under the leadership of then-Director Mike Pompeo, reportedly plotted to kidnap—and discussed plans to assassinate—Assange in 2017.

Last month, a British judge officially approved the U.S. government's request to extradite Assange, who has been imprisoned for more than 1,100 days. He faces espionage charges for publishing classified information that exposed war crimes committed by American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

According to RSF, "The trio of Nordic countries at the top of the Index—Norway, Denmark, and Sweden—continues to serve as a democratic model where freedom of expression flourishes, while Moldova (40th) and Bulgaria (91st) stand out this year thanks to a government change and the hope it has brought for improvement in the situation for journalists even if oligarchs still own or control the media."

Deloire, for his part, stressed that "urgent decisions are needed in response to these issues," including "promoting a New Deal for Journalism, as proposed by the Forum on Information and Democracy, and adopting an appropriate legal framework, with a system to protect democratic online information spaces."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

The post Habermas on the Three-Tiered Model of Global Governance Without World Government appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Why the U.S. Postal Service Offers a Great Model for Other Government Services appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.