There is something about the egg that is so rich and evocative to the human psyche. With its graceful, efficient, rounded compactness, and the subtle tapering of its form, eggs are so universally iconic that the word “oval” stems from the Latin ovum, or the product of an ovary. But for all its natural elegance and millions of years of slow evolution, today, the egg is at the center of a brutal, fast-moving, mechanized industry that’s anything but beautiful.
While you’re thinking about eggs, please consider Bean, a one-time prolific producer of them. Now living her best life in Thornton, CO, Bean is a rescued laying hen who was born for the express purpose of producing for the egg industry. But, lucky for her, she is now spending her days in view of the mountains at Broken Shovels Animal Sanctuary. Bean is four years old. She may live for another few months, perhaps a year at most. Bean’s food, medical needs, and quality of life are carefully attended to, but she is living with an early expiration date hardwired through intense genetic engineering and a rough start in life. In other words, Bean is like all other layer hens, except she has found sanctuary to live out the rest of her days.
Her short lifespan is something Andrea Davis, founder of Broken Shovels, is mentally prepared for, despite her affection for the hen. “We find that their bodies succumb to a variety of cancers despite reproductive interventions like implants and surgeries like hysterectomies,” Davis says of rescued layer hens like Bean. “They are bred to be frail, and many experience bones that break easily due to having calcium and mineral deficiencies before they were rescued.”
George Edward Lodge/Wikimedia Commons
Where did chickens originate?
Next, consider the red junglefowl. It is likely that when you hear the word “egg,” the red junglefowl is central to what pops into mind next, whether or not you realize it. This bird is a direct ancestor of today’s layer hens.
A small, forest-dwelling bird of South and Southwest Asia, the red junglefowl was venerated for centuries for their vibrant plumage and unique vocalizations, including the distinctive, confident crowing of the males. The birds, which evolved from the pheasant about 6 million years ago, spread from Asia to Africa, the Mediterranean, and Europe along Silk Road trade routes—and excavated burial sites have unearthed junglefowl cockerels and hens alongside their human companions.
How did these jungle-dwelling ancestors become the virtual egg-laying machines that are so ubiquitous in the human diet today? Where there is a demand, there is a way. People have been eating the eggs of various species since recorded history, especially those of birds. Beginning in the 19th century, people started becoming very skillful at forcing as many eggs as possible from a laying animal’s body through selective breeding, manipulation, and scientific and technical innovations so that by the time the hen is slaughtered, her depleted body is considered “spent,” an apt phrase for what has been done to her by an industry focused on razor-thin profit margins and productivity. She has been spent and her body is often riddled with chronic, excruciating conditions as a result.
“Because of selection for increased egg production, these birds often develop problems of the reproductive tract and skeletal system, which are worsened by their living conditions. They most commonly die of a painful condition called yolk peritonitis, when a portion of the egg escapes the reproductive tract and ends up in the abdominal cavity, which is somewhat similar to ectopic pregnancy,” says Dr. Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, veterinary advisor of the Animal Welfare Institute. “They may also suffer from prolapse of part of their reproductive tract, which can lead to cannibalism by other hens, especially in crowded conditions.”
Djordje Vezilic/Pexels
The truth about chickens in factory farms
Red junglefowl are about one-third the size of the hens like Bean who are used in the egg industry today. Unlike their wild forebears, who produce at most 30 eggs per year in the spring and summer months, the domestic layer hen may lay nearly 300 eggs annually, according to United Egg Producers, contributing to the almost 97 billion eggs produced each year in this country. Half of those eggs contain male chicks and, being worthless to the egg industry, they are killed as soon as their sex is roughly determined shortly after hatching. Any method of killing the male chicks—from being ground alive, incinerated, crushed, drowned, or gassed—is legally acceptable.
The first commercial incubators in the United States were developed in the middle of the 19th century, and these early machines, which allowed for hundreds of eggs to hatch at a time, were further developed into industrial incubators by the end of the century. With that, the backyard chicken scratching in the dirt who laid eggs for a family was already beginning to seem like a relic of the past: incubators that were capable of hatching 20,000 eggs in one setting were part of what paved the path to the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) of today.
Starting at a hatchery, where the collected eggs are taken after their mothers lay them, they roll onto conveyor belts, and are then stored in an environment controlled for temperature and humidity for up to seven days before being transferred to an incubator with hundreds or thousands of other eggs. Around the 21st day after incubation, the birds hatch, surrounded by hundreds of newborns, and not a mother hen in sight.
If allowed to protect the eggs in her nest, a hen’s dedication to her job is the stuff of legend. The expression “mother hen” is construed today as someone who is overly worried and controlling, but it is borne of the bird’s deep, unwavering protection of her progeny, whether in egg or chick form, against even the most fearsome of predators. The eggs that hatch in incubators never receive this loving protection. This is true of birds who are raised in CAFO settings as well as backyard birds and so-called free range chicks: the vast majority begin their lives in industrial incubators like Bean, not in a nest looked over by a watchful mother hen.
When she was just within her first week of life outside of the protection of her shell, Bean would have had her beak cut, which the industry euphemistically refers to as “trimming,” but is actually an amputation of the end of the beak with a hot blade or infrared light. She would have not received numbing agents or follow-up care. At about 18 weeks of age, these birds will be considered mature, and sent to produce eggs for the remainder of their lives, their beaks mutilated.
Thành Đỗ/Pexels
“Chicken beaks are complex, highly innervated organs that can sense touch, pain, temperature, and even magnetic fields. Birds use them for manipulating food, exploring, interacting with other birds, and preening,” says Reyes-Illg. “In addition to causing pain, beak trimming is suspected to result in a loss of sensory ability and ability to orient in the environment, since this relies on sensing the earth’s magnetic field. Beak-trimmed birds can’t preen as well, so they develop more problems with ectoparasites.”
This practice is done routinely by egg and bird-meat industries to reduce the likelihood of aggression and cannibalization between the stressed, crowded chickens. Even when beaks are not cut, Reyes-Illg notes that cannibalism and injurious pecking still happens due to the systemic conditions of the industry, like overcrowding and their inability to express natural habits.
Despite her early start, Bean is extremely lucky. She was rescued as part of a coordinated effort that took place in May of 2020, when a single egg facility housing 100,000 hens in Iowa “de-populated,” or culled, the birds earlier than expected due to a worker shortage in the early days of the pandemic. Nearly all the hens were killed at the facility, but Bean and 34 other birds were rescued and taken in by Broken Shovels, where they were able to live somewhat of a natural life and express innate habits for the first time.
“It felt both tragic and beautiful seeing the first time they could dust bathe, perch, scratch at dirt, peck grass, or eat fruit and vegetables,” Davis of Broken Shovels says. “I can’t count how many times I broke down sobbing while watching these girls experiencing the real world outside of a cage for the first time, and to see their instincts and natural joy pour out of them.”
Peter Werkman/Unsplash
Cracking the egg
According to the USDA, more than 81 percent of all US layer hens today live in environments with more than 30,000 other birds, and many of these operations hold hundreds of thousands of hens in one football field-sized structure. In Iowa, where Bean lived, the human population is just over 3 million. There are over 45 million hens in Iowa alone, and about 390 million layer hens in the United States at any time.
In order to coax more product out of the hens, the industry uses a practice called forced molting, in which food and water are withheld and access to light is diminished for a period of one to two weeks, after which time egg production is accelerated briefly. The hens will go through this experience up to three times before they are considered more valuable dead than alive, and are consequently slaughtered.
After about 18 months, a hen is generally considered spent, as she is no longer producing a high volume of eggs. At this point, she and others like her will be collected for transport and slaughter, first by a “catcher,” who grabs up to four hens at a time and carries them upside-down by their fragile legs to be tossed or dropped into transport crates. Speed and efficiency are what matter here, and according to one study, nearly 30 percent of hens had broken bones after transport. Exposed to extreme temperatures of heat and cold on their way to the slaughterhouse, the hens continue to endure the stress of being crowded as well as noise and motion, not to mention aggression from other agitated birds. The small slats of the transport truck are likely to provide the first and last time most will breathe fresh air or feel the sun. Only a small number of slaughterhouses in the country accept spent laying hens, so the birds may be transported many hours, deprived of food and water.
Birds, which make up more than 98 percent of the animals killed each year for food, are not covered by even the exceedingly low standards of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. Most commonly, though, at the slaughterhouse, workers will unload the crates of hens, then they will be quickly hung upside-down in metal shackles and moved by conveyor through an electrical water-bath designed to stun them. Still upside-down on the line, an automated knife will cut their throats. They will bleed out, until they are dragged through the scalding tank, after which their lifeless bodies are plucked. Even though they were not raised as broiler hens, their bruised and damaged flesh still has some value to the industry, so it is often shredded or diced for the companion animal food industry or used in cheap canned products. The red junglefowl may live to 20 years of age. A rescued bird like Bean may live up to four or five at a sanctuary.
Yo! Egg
What are vegan eggs?
Does all this suffering and destruction have to be the way to an egg, though? As interest in plant-based foods has grown steadily, so too have innovations to meet that demand. While vegans have replaced eggs in cooking and baking with everything from tofu to applesauce, now there are easy one-for-one replacements on the market that take the guesswork out of cooking and baking without eggs. Ener-G Egg Replacer has been on the scene for decades, but consumers today have more options, like the mung bean-based JUST Egg in liquid and prepared forms as well as powdered VeganEgg by Follow Your Heart for baking or savory applications. This year, Israel-based Yo! Egg wowed the crowd at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago with its sunny-side-up and Hollandaise vegan eggs, complete with gently crisped edges and an actual yolk that runs when pierced. Just as the plant-based dairy and protein categories are bursting at the seams with innovative, delicious options, the egg sector is just beginning to take off, and not a moment too soon.
These days, with the loud, crowded facility in Iowa long behind her, Bean has distinguished herself as a self-appointed seeing-eye hen at Broken Shovels. She is wary of people but loves being helpful with her sister hens who have lost some or all of their eyesight and are grouped together. Blindness and vision loss are common with these birds who were once trapped in enclosures with high levels of ammonia. Bean is the only fully-sighted bird with that flock at the sanctuary. She has found her place.
“Her pecking noises let them know where to go to eat, and she guides them into their coop at night,” says Davis. “Bean is a very special hen.”
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
The Owen Wilkes book Peacemonger, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby, was due to be launched in Wellington today after earlier launches in Auckland and Christchurch. Here Buller conservationist Peter Lusk reflects on his mahi with Owen.
COMMENTARY:By Peter Lusk
I worked closely with peace researcher Owen Wilkes in 1973 and 1974, writing stories for the student newspaper Canta from files of newspaper clippings and hand written jottings that Owen had collected over a period of years.
These stories covered quite a range of subjects. For example, an American millionaire named Stockton Rush who purchased a beautiful valley near Te Anau from the Crown and built a luxury lodge. There was controversy over this. I can’t remember exactly why, probably the Crown selling the land when it shouldn’t.
Then a file on Ivan Watkins Dow who were making Agent Orange or similar at their plant in New Plymouth. They were releasing gases at night and the gases would drift over the city wiping out home vegetable gardens.
The company’s CEO described objectors as “eco-nuts”.
Owen’s biggest file was on Comalco. I went to the Bluff smelter and Manapouri power station and met activists in the area. Also interviewed Stockton Rush while in the area, namely Southland.
Peacemonger . . . the first full-length account of peace researcher Owen Wilkes’ life and work. Image: Raekaihau Press
Another file was on a self proclaimed millionaire who had been in the media over his proposed housing development in Governors Bay on Lyttelton Harbour, with a new tunnel to be built through Port Hills. This guy turned out to be a conman and we were able to expose him.
I wrote up the story, we printed it as a centrefold in Canta, then used the centrefold as a leaflet to assist the action group in Governors Bay. This was very successful at exposing the conman whose name I cannot recall.
There were a few other files of Owen’s that I turned into stories, and the sum of the stories were the basis of a 4 page leaflet we printed off for the South Island Resistance Ride held at end of 1974.
I never got to write up the files on Stockton Rush and Ivan Watkins Dow which was a personal disappointment. From memory it was due to Owen suddenly getting the peace research job in Norway [at SIPRI – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute].
“The only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy.”
I found Owen very good to work with. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy. Far more than me, and I was a full-on activist along with others in our little group like Canta editor Murray Horton and graphics/layout man Ron Currie.
I worked alongside Owen at Boons bakery for a single night. It came about when one of my flatmates, who regularly worked there, needed a night off and convinced me to cover his shift.
So I turned up at Boons at 8pm or whenever it was. The foreman was none too pleased, but he showed me the ropes. I was taking cooked bread out of one oven, while Owen was doing the same from a bigger oven beside me.
The bread was coming out fast, in hot tins, and it was very easy to get burned on the tins, specially for a novice. I got several burns in the course of the shift. Looking over at Owen, I couldn’t help notice how he revelled in the job, he was like a well-oiled machine, banging the bread out of the tins, and oiling them up.
Very competent, no burns for him because he was a regular at Boons and had everything well worked out.
Something else. Owen was living at a commune at Oxford at the time. They had two pigs needing to be slaughtered. I’d killed and dressed a few sheep in my farm worker days, so offered to help.
Owen had never done such “home-kills”, but in typical Owen fashion had got hold of a book on butchering and he took it with him to the pig sty. He’d previously read-up on how to “stick” a pig, stabbing it between the ribs and slicing its heart, all in one motion.
He accomplished this very successfully. One pig, then two pigs, then haul them over to a bath full of hot water to scald, then scrape. After that we gutted them and hung up the tidy carcasses to cool.
Yes, I had great admiration for Owen.
Photo of Owen Wilkes
About the picture at the start of this article: This photo is from the 1974 Long March across Australia against US imperialism and the Vietnam War.
We overnighted in all sorts of places and this was the campground at Mildura in Victoria.
I like the photo because it typifies Owen with his steel box of files — so heavy and awkward to handle. But it was strong and, from memory, lockable.
Having the files with him, meant Owen could immediately provide evidence for media if they asked for verification on something he said. Even though the Long March was organised from Australia, Owen was still the onboard authority on what the US was doing over there.
The Wellington launch scheduled for today, 14 February 2023, at Minerva Handcraft Bookshop has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled. Guest speaker: Nicky Hager
“Phil Mehrtens is the nicest guy, he genuinely is — no one ever had anything bad to say about him,” says a colleague of the New Zealand pilot taken hostage last week by members of the West Papuan National Liberation Army (TPN-PB) in the mountainous Nduga Regency.
How such a nice guy became a pawn in the decades-long conflict between West Papua and the Indonesian government is a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But it is also a symbolic and desperate attempt to attract international attention towards the West Papuan crisis.
A joint military and police mission has so far failed to find or rescue Mehrtens, and forcing negotiations with Jakarta is a prime strategy of TPN-PB.
As spokesperson Sebby Sambom told Australian media this week:
“The military and police have killed too many Papuans. From our end, we also killed [people]. So it is better that we sit at the negotiation table […] Our new target are all foreigners: the US, EU, Australians and New Zealanders because they supported Indonesia to kill Papuans for 60 years.
“Colonialism in Papua must be abolished.”
Sambom is referring to the international complicity and silence since Indonesia annexed the former Dutch colony as it prepared for political independence in the 1960s.
Mehrtens has become the latest foreign victim of the resulting protracted and violent struggle by West Papuans for independence.
Authorities have deployed a joint team to evacuate a foreign pilot after they were allegedly taken hostage by separatist fighters in the Papuan highlands on Tuesday. #jakposthttps://t.co/nqyXZc082D
Violence and betrayal The history of the conflict can be traced back to 1962, when the US facilitated what became known as the New York Agreement, which handed West Papua over to the United Nations and then to Indonesia.
In 1969, the UN oversaw a farcical independence referendum that effectively allowed the permanent annexation of West Papua by Indonesia. Since that time, West Papuans have been subjected to violent human rights abuses, environmental and cultural dispossession, and mass killings under Indonesian rule and mass immigration policies.
New Zealand and Australia continue to support Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua, and maintain defence and other diplomatic ties with Jakarta. Australia has been involved in training Indonesian army and police, and is a major aid donor to Indonesia.
Phil Mehrtens is far from the first hostage to be taken in this unequal power struggle. Nearly three decades ago, in the neighbouring district of Mapenduma, TPN-PB members kidnapped a group of environmental researchers from Europe for five months.
Like now, the demand was that Indonesia recognise West Papuan independence. Two Indonesians with the group were killed.
The English and Dutch hostages were ultimately rescued, but not before further tragedy occurred.
At one point, negotiations seemed to have stalled between the West Papuan captors and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was delivering food and supplies to the hostages and working for their release.
Taking matters into their own hands, members of the Indonesian military commandeered a white civilian helicopter that had been used (or was similar to one used) by the ICRC. Witnesses recall seeing the ICRC emblem on the aircraft.
When the helicopter lowered towards waiting crowds of civilians, the military opened fire.
The ICRC denied any involvement in the resulting massacre, but the entire incident was emblematic of the times. It took place several years before the fall of former Indonesian president Suharto, when there was little hope of West Papua gaining independence from Indonesia through peaceful negotiations.
Then, as now, the TPN-PB was searching for a way to capture the world’s attention.
Losing hope Since the early 2000s, with Suharto gone and fresh hope inspired by East Timor’s independence, Papuans — including members of the West Papuan Liberation Army — have largely been committed to fighting for independence through peaceful means.
After several decades of wilful non-intervention by Australia and New Zealand in what they consider to be Jakarta’s affairs, that hope is flagging. It appears elements of the independence movement are again turning to desperate measures.
In 2019, the TPN-PB killed 24 Indonesians working on a highway to connect the coast with the interior, claiming their victims were spies for the Indonesian army. They have become increasingly outspoken about their intentions to stop further Indonesian expansion in Papua at any cost.
In turn, this triggered a hugely disproportionate counter-insurgency operation in the highlands where Phil Mehrtens was captured. It has been reported at least 60,000 people have been displaced in the Nduga Regency over the past four years as a result, and it is still not safe for them to return home.
International engagement It is important to remember that the latest hostage taking, and the 1996 events, are the actions of a few. They do not reflect the commitment of the vast majority of Indigenous West Papuans to work peacefully for independence through demonstrations, social media activism, civil disobedience, diplomacy and dialogue.
Looking forward, New Zealand, Australia and other governments close to Indonesia need to commit to serious discussions about human rights in West Papua — not only because there is a hostage involved, but because it is the right thing to do.
This may not be enough to resolve the current crisis, but it would be a long overdue and critical step in the right direction.
Negotiations for the release of Philip Mehrtens must be handled carefully to avoid further disproportionate responses by the Indonesian military.
The kidnapping is not justified, but neither is Indonesia’s violence against West Papuans — or the international community’s refusal to address the violence.
On Friday 10 February 2023, it will be one month since the Papua Governor Lukas Enembe was “kidnapped” at a local restaurant during his lunch hour by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and security forces.
The crisis began in September 2022, when Governor Enembe was named a suspect by the KPK and summoned by Indonesia’s Mobile Brigade Corps, known as BRIMOB, after being accused of receiving bribes worth one million rupiah (NZ$112,000).
Since the governor’s kidnapping, Indonesian media have been flooded with images and videos of his arrest, his deportation, being handcuffed in Jakarta while in an orange KPK (prisoner) uniform, and his admission to a heavily armed military hospital.
Besides the public display of power, imagery, morality and criminality with politically loaded messages, the governor, his family, and his lawyers are still enmeshed in Jakarta’s health and legal system, while his health continues to steadily deteriorate.
His first KPK investigation on January 12 failed because of his declining health, among other factors such as insufficient or no concrete evidence to be found to date.
During the first examination, the governor’s attorney, Petrus Bala Pattyona, stated his client was asked eight questions by the KPK investigators. However, all eight questions, Petrus stressed, had no substance to relevant matters involved — the alegations against the governor.
None of the questions from the KPK were included in the investigation material, according to the attorney. Enembe’s health condition was the first question asked by the investigator, Petrus told Kompas TV.
“First, he was asked if Mr Lukas was in good enough health to be examined? His answer was that he was unwell and that he had had a stroke,” Petrus said.
But the examination continued, and he was asked about the history of his education, work, and family. According to the governor’s attorney, during the lengthy examination no questions were asked about the examination material.
To date, authorities in Jakarta continue to question the governor and others suspected of involvement in the alleged corruption case, including his wife and son.
Meanwhile, the governor’s health crisis is causing a massive rift between the governor’s side, civil society groups and government authority.
Governor Lukas Enembe pictured with two Indonesian presidents – with current President Joko Widodo (top left) and with previous President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (top right). Bottom left the Governor is quoted saying: “I will plant a tree of new life and new civilisation”. Image” Montage: YK/APR
Fresh update
“The governor of Papua is critically ill today but earlier the KPK still forced an examination and wanted to take him to the Gatot Subroto Hospital, owned by the Indonesian Army; the governor refused and requested treatment in Singapore instead” said the governor’s family last Thursday (February 2), after trying to report the mistreatment case to the country’s Human Rights Commission, who have been dispersed by the Indonesian military and police.
It appears, they continued, that the Indonesian Medical Association (IDI) and Gatot Subroto Hospital did not transparently disclose the real results of the Papua governor’s medical examination.
Instead, they hid and kept the governor’s illness quiet. As a result, Lukas Enembe was forced to undergo an investigation by the KPK.
Angered by this treatment, the governor’s team said, “only those who are unconscious and dead to humanity can insist that the governor is well.”
They said that IDI, Gatot Subroto Hospital and KPK had “played with the pain and the life” of Papua’s Governor Lukas Enembe.
“Still, the condition hurts. The governor complained that in KPK custody, there was no appropriate bedding for sick people. Earlier today, the governor’s family complained about the situation to the country’s human rights commission, but they refused to accept it.
“That’s where the governor is, and that’s where we are now. They even call for security forces to be deployed at the human rights office as if we were committing crimes there,” the governor’s family stated.
“Save Lukas Enembe and save Papua. Papuans must wake up and not be caught off guard. They keep the governor in KPK’s facilities even though he is very ill,” the statement continued.
Grave concerns
In his statement, Gabriel Goa, board chair at the Indonesian Law and Human Rights Institute, criticised the Human Rights Commission. He said he questioned the integrity of the chair of the National Human Rights Commission, Atnike Nova Sigiro, for not independently investigating the violations of the rights of the governor by the KPK.
Goa stated that he had “never seen anything like this” in his 20 years of handling cases related to violations of human rights.
This was the first he had seen the office of Human Rights Commission involving security forces attending victims seeking help. The kind of treatment that is being perpetrated against Indigenous Papuans is indeed of a particular nature.
Goa warned: “If this is ignored, and something bad happens to Governor Lukas Enembe, the Human Rights Commission and KPK Indonesia will be held responsible, since victims, their families, and their legal companions have made efforts as stipulated by law.”
Despite these grave concerns for the Governor’s health and rights violations, the deputy chair of the KPK, Alexander Marwata, stated: “Governor Enembe is well enough to undergo the KPK’s investigation and doesn’t need to go to Singapore.
“The Indonesian authority says Gatot Subroto Hospital and IDI can handle his health needs, institutions the governor and his family refused to use because of the psychological trauma of the whole situation.”
Images of the harsh treatment of Governor Lukas Enembe after the KPK “kidnapped” him on 10 January 2023. Image: Montage 2/YK/APR
‘Inhumane’ treatment of Enembe condemned
In response to Jakarta’s mistreatment of Governor Enembe, Papua New Guinea’s Vanimo-Green MP Belden Namah condemned Jakarta’s “cruel behaviour”.
Namah, whose electorate borders Papua province, said it was very difficult to ignore this issue because of Namah’s people’s traditional and family ties that extend beyond Vanimo into West Papua.
According to the PNG Post-Courier, he urged the United Nations to investigate the issue, particularly the manner in which Governor Enembe was being treated by the Indonesian government.
The way PNG’s Namah asked to be investigated is the way in which Jakarta treats the leaders of West Papua — cunning deceptions that undermine their efforts to deliver their own legal and moral goods and services for Papuans.
This manner of conduct was criticised even last September when the drama began.
Responding to the way KPK conducted itself, Dr Roy Rening, a member of the governor’s legal team, stated the governor’s designation as a suspect had been prematurely determined.
This was due to the lack of two crucial pieces of evidence necessary to establish the legitimacy of the charge within the existing framework of Indonesia’s legal procedural code.
Dr Rening also argued that the KPK’s behaviour in executing their warrant, turned on a dime. The governor was unaware that he was a suspect, and that he was already under investigation by the KPK when he was summoned to appear.
In his letter, Dr Rening explained that Governor Enembe had never been invited to clarify and/or appear as a witness pursuant to the Criminal Procedure Code. The KPK instead declared the governor as a suspect based on the warrant letters, which had also changed dates and intent.
Jakarta’s deceptive strategies targeting Papuan leaders
There appears to be a consistent pattern of Indonesia’s behaviour behind the scenes as well — setting traps and plotting that ultimately led to the kidnapping of the governor, the same manner as when West Papua’s sovereignty was kidnapped 61 years ago by using and manipulating the UN mechanism on decolonisation.
As thousands of Papuans guarded the governor’s residence, Jakarta employed two cunning ruses to kidnap the governor, the humanist approach and what the Jakarta elites now proudly refer to as “nasi bungkus” (“pack of rice strategy”).
A visit by Firli Bahuri, chair of KPK, to the governor in Koya Jayapura, Papua, on 3 November 2022, was perceived as being “humane”, but it was a false approach intended to gain trust, thereby weakening the Papuan support for their final attack on the governor.
Recently leaked information from the governor’s side alleged that the chair had advised the Governor to put his health first, allowing him to travel to Singapore for routine medical check-ups as he had in the past.
KPK, however, stated that it had never said such things to Governor Enembe during that meeting.
With hindsight, what seemed to have resulted from the KPK chief’s visit to the Governor’s house had “loosened” the governor’s defence.
This then, processed by Indonesian intelligence began keeping a daily count of the number of Papuan civilians guarding the governor’s house by calculating the number of “nasi bungkus” purchased to feed the hungry guardians of the Governor.
Moreover, critics say information was fabricated regarding an alleged plan for the ill Governor to flee overseas through his highland village in Mamit a few days prior to the kidnapping which would justify this act.
Kidnapping, sending into exile, imprisoning, and psychologically torturing of Papuan leaders within the Indonesia’s legal system may be part of Indonesia’s overall strategy in maintaining its control over West Papua as its frontier settler colony.
In order to achieve Jakarta’s objectives, eliminating the power and hope emerging from West Papuan leaders appears to have been the key strategy.
Victor Yeimo’s fate in Indonesia
Victory Yeimo, a Papuan independence figure facing similar health problems, has also been placed under the Indonesian judiciary with no clear outcome to date.
He faces charges of treason and incitement for his alleged role in anti-racial protests that turned into riots in 2019, following the attack on Papuan students in Surabaya by Indonesian militia.
Yeimo provided a key insight into how this colonial justice system operated in a short video that recently appeared on Twitter. He explained:
“Although I have not been charged, but I have already been charged with the law, as if I wanted to be punished, so I have been sentenced. It appears as if the decision has already been made. Ah, this seems unfair to me and is a lesson to the Papuan people. You [Indonesia] decide whether or not there is legal justice in this country?
“Does the law in this country provide any guarantees to Papuans so that we feel we are proud to live in the Republic of Indonesia? If the situation is like this, I am confused.”
Tragically, choices and decisions of existence for Papuan leaders like Governor Enembe and Victor Yeimo are made by a shadowy figure, camouflaged in a human costume, incapable of feeling the pain of another.
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic/activist who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
There was definitely a bump in the road when the military openly expressed concern about the speed of change.
But that was navigated smoothly.
One other thing stood on a razor-thin margin.
Nobody in Fiji should forget it.
‘Rule of law’
A little thing called “rule of law”.
In a Fiji Times column last week, I tried to capture the idea of this.
First, the idea that the law is more important than everyone, including the government.
But second, the idea that the law is more than just rules and regulations which restrict us.
Rule of law means also that the government is bound to respect ordinary people’s rights and freedoms.
That rule of law was seriously at risk under the FijiFirst government.
Things had gotten to the point where, using bullying and fear, unafraid of the courts or any other institution which might restrain it, the FijiFirst government just did what it wanted.
In its last year of power, the only restraint on FijiFirst was the fact that an election was coming.
Turned on opponents
Had it won that election, FijiFirst would have turned its guns on the only opponents it had left — the opposition political parties, the independent news media and the few non-government organisations that continued to criticise it.
Fiji would have fallen firmly into that growing group of countries now called “democratic dictatorships” — places which have elections and the other trappings of democracy, but which in truth severely restrict the democratic rights and freedoms of their people.
Four key officials holding important constitutional positions — the Chief Justice, the Commissioner of Police, the Commissioner of Corrections and the Supervisor of Elections — have been suspended inside of four weeks.
That tells us one of two things.
Either the new government is particularly vengeful.
Or there are complaints against these officials that date back to the FijiFirst party’s time in power and which are only now coming to light.
After all, they’ve hardly had time to offend us under the new government.
And if these are in fact complaints about things which happened long ago, we must ask — why were they not actioned under the FijiFirst government?
No one dared complain
Or was fear of the government so pervasive that no one dared to complain against these officials — and the complaints are only being made now?
We need to know about these complaints.
Yes, each of these officials is innocent until proven otherwise.
But they are public officials, occupying some of the most powerful and critical positions in the country.
The decisions they make concern our most basic rights and freedoms — whether or not we spend a night in a cell, whether (and when) we will get a ruling on our employment dispute, or whether we are able to vote.
So we, the public, have a right to know what they are accused of.
What has changed?
The overwhelming sentiment for most of us — at least those around me — is a new sense of freedom.
Doesn’t change things
For many of us, that does not really change things from day to day.
Not everyone has the compelling urge to air their opinions on everything (in newspaper columns or elsewhere).
But it is simply the fact that if you want to rant about something on Facebook, you’re not worrying about what the government will think.
Most of us, day to day, are not worrying about whether we will be unfairly held for 48 hours in a jail cell.
Yet only two years ago in the covid crisis, the police were doing that to hundreds of people.
We are not worrying about whether we will be arrested for saying something which will “cause public alarm”.
Yet, every time an NGO or opposition political party leader issued a public statement in the last 10 years, this was a constant worry.
But much of the real damage done was at the next level down — the level where ordinary people like us want to get things done.
This week I met a small group of distinguished doctors.
Climate of fear
I heard with some amazement about the climate of fear which predominated in the Ministry of Health.
Criticism was not permitted.
In November last year, the permanent Secretary for Health publicly told politicians to “leave the Health Ministry alone”.
Nobody, he said, should talk about it.
Nobody should “undermine” it — because it was on the cusp of great things.
One senior medical specialist who famously criticised the state of our hospitals in The Fiji Times was immediately banned from entering them.
This was hardly a hardship — he was only volunteering his skills for free.
But what about all the patients who he was looking after?
He recounted to me, with some wonder the bureaucratic memo-writing process that is now being followed to bring him back.
Cash and volunteers
The International Women’s Association has cash and volunteers ready to improve women’s and children’s health at CWM Hospital.
We are talking about basic things, like hot water and decrepit bathrooms.
How do you run hospital wards without hot water?
IWA’s mistake was to make these deficiencies public on social media.
So the Health Ministry stopped talking to IWA.
Only with the change of government is IWA allowed to openly communicate with the Ministry of Health about what it wants to do — instead of whispers to officials on their gmail accounts.
For years, I have marvelled at the stupidity of the edicts issued from Ministry of Education headquarters.
Schools may not fund-raise without permission.
Schools may not invite speakers to their school assemblies without permission.
Schools may not run extracurricular classes for students without their permission.
‘In name of equality’
The policy seems to be “in the name of equality, we must all be equally dumbed down”.
As the Education Ministry pursued the government’s mad obsession with our “secular state”, schools owned by religious bodies cannot choose their own school heads, even if they pay for them and save the government money.
Education and health are critical issues for all of us.
The government can’t deliver everything.
Governments by nature are unwieldy, bureaucratic and slow (sometimes for good reason, because they have to carefully manage public funds and follow other laws).
So people have to get involved.
Get involved
We also have to get involved on a wide swathe of other issues such as poverty, domestic violence, drug abuse, crime and economic opportunities.
Criticism not welcome
These are all things which, for the past 15 years, we were told, the government had under control — like “never before”.
Our input — and certainly our criticism — were not welcome.
Let’s be clear about our new government.
We might be glad that it’s there.
And we should never take for granted the rights and freedoms it has restored to us and the refreshing new attitude it brings after 15 years.
But soon the honeymoon will end, the shine will come off and we will all have to get down to the work (which never ends) of solving our deep social and economic problems.
The expectations on the new government are huge.
Everybody wants every problem to be solved and every complaint to be answered.
We want every crook who has received an unfair benefit to be (as we now always seem to say) “taken to task”.
Same huge debt
The new government has the same huge debt, the same shortage of cash and the same lack of resources the old government did.
It can move some money around and change some priorities — but it can never solve every problem.
But a government that is prepared to tolerate criticism has at least one advantage over one that is not.
It can hear from real people about where the real problems are.
That’s why freedom of expression is not just a nice thing to have.
It’s actually important to tell us what is going on.
This government, like the old one, will gradually become more complacent and unresponsive as it becomes burdened with the ordinary business of administration.
And that is why every democracy — at least every real one — prizes freedom.
Freedom to march
Freedom for people to criticise, to march in the street, to take the government to court, without being punished for it.
These are some of the tools we use to hold the government to account, to remind the politicians that it is about us, not them, and to embarrass the politicians into action.
But just as important is the responsibility on us not just to talk — but also to act.
Our new freedom also means freedom to get involved.
What are the things that are important to us?
Is it health?
Education?
Child poverty?
Prison reform?
Our local environment?
So what will we do?
Don’t take it for granted
We don’t need to be part of some official committee or NGO to fight for the things that are important to us.
We don’t need the government’s permission to hold a public forum to talk about problems and solutions.
After 15 years we need to be able to say to our leaders: “We’re in charge here. This is what we want. You work for us.”
They won’t always listen — but that’s what freedom is.
It was a close-run thing on Christmas Eve — but freedom is what we got.
So let’s not take it for granted.
Let’s use it.
Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer who is fairly free with his opinions. The views in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times. Republished with permission.
Only by means of intense deceit does the U.S. Government allege that it and its allies are ‘democratic’ and that the countries that they impose sanctions against and overthrow (or try to overthrow) in coups and invasions are not. Irrespective of whether some of the countries that the U.S. Government targets for overthrow are or are not dictatorships, America itself certainly is, and it has the world’s highest percentage of its population living in prison — which might suffice alone to qualify America as being a police-state — and perhaps the worst one.
Some of America’s allies are among the world’s best-known dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; and such cases as those, alone, demonstrate without any doubt, that America’s many sanctions and coups and invasions have nothing to do with democracy versus dictatorship, but are pure PR in order to fool the gullible throughout the world to believe the U.S. Government’s lies to the effect that these aggressions against so many countries (such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Guatemala, Chile, Iran, Libya, Indonesia and so many others) are decent or even nobly intentioned, when the fact is that America is simply the world’s worst police-state, and is lying in order to deceive the global public to believe that it’s instead the global champion of democracy and of freedom. All of America’s foreign policies are justified wholly or partly on the basis of lies. Is it not by now clear that the time is long-since past when anyone should continue to accept that intensely deceitful regime’s lies and its constant aggressions?
What kind of international leadership is it that the world’s most powerful country — a country such as this — is any longer allowed to lie and claim that it represents democracy and freedom while the countries that it sanctions and coups and invades represent the opposite? When will a profoundly corrupt Government such as this, become condemned by a majority of the nations in the U.N. General Assembly — instead of for the UNGA members to continue to cower in fear of it and so to refrain from saying what is by now manifestly the case: that “This Emperor has no clothes”?
If hypocrisy is the worst sin, then can there any longer remain doubt as to which of the world’s Governments is the the world’s worst sinner? Would the world be better off to continue allowing such a Government to continue touting itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’ which is actually leading the world into what keeps getting closer to a World War Three against Russia and against China and against Iran; or, instead, for the countries of the world to state clearly and openly, that this fraud must now end, and that all of the global bully’s honors and privileges are founded on fraud, and must now cease?
After World War II ended, the U.S. regime slaughtered or assisted in slaughtering, between 1945 and 2007 (and not even counting more recently, such as in Syria and Yemen), “between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world”. (This count also doesn’t include the numbers, such as in Iraq after the 1990 war, which died as a result of U.S.-initiated sanctions against countries that America’s billionaires wanted to bring under their control that weren’t yet under their control.)
As a consequence of the reality of post-1944 America’s being fascist-imperialist (and its consequent record of doing far more invasions and coups, and sanctions, than any other country does), overwhelmingly the highest percentage of people polled throughout the world on questions of which country poses the greatest or biggest threat to peace in the world say that that country is the United States. No other country comes even close.
When will the world speak out against the global bully? Has not the time yet come to do so?
A New Zealand-based professor in comparative politics says the Fiji constitution needs to clear up the role of the military.
Dr Jon Fraenkel of Victoria University, formerly of the University of the South Pacific, says the 2013 constitution revived the provision that existed in the 1990 constitution which gave the military responsibility for looking after the well-being of the Fiji people.
“Of course, when that was first introduced in 1990, it was as part of an ethno-nationalist constitution that was seeking to codify indigenous paramountcy in the states. At that point, I think the Fiji military [Republic of Fiji Military Forces] contemplated briefly assuming power in an unconstitutional way for 16 years.
“But it didn’t do that. And by the early 1990s, things had calmed down there was a desire to read for civilian government, for the military to keep out of politics. It’s only really in the wake of the [George] Speight coup that Mohammed Aziz rehabilitated this provision in the 1990 constitution, and suggested that it was still applied under the ’97 constitution, and then they put it in the 2013 constitution.
“And what does this mean? Well, it could mean just about anything. What does it mean to look after the welfare of the Fiji people? You could interpret that to mean anything at all?
“I noticed that before the final result, when [Sitiveni] Rabuka, perhaps misguidedly, complained to the military commander about the glitch about the counting of the election ballots, the military commander said that that wasn’t within his remit.
Protecting ‘well-being’
“In other words, he thought that it didn’t fall under section 131 of the Constitution that gives the military right to intervene to protect the well-being of the Fiji people.
“But after the formation of the new government in early January, the military commander, Major-General Jone Kalouniwai did make a peculiar statement where he expressed concern about the ambition of the government and about the speed at which things were moving.
“And he also suggested that the military might have some responsibility for making sure that the separation of powers is guaranteed.
“Now, that’s usually a role for the courts, not for the military. So one has to be careful about this kind of expansive understanding of the role of the military and the new Fiji. I think there needs to be further discussions about what that actually means.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Party leaders of Fiji’s new coalition government . . . Deputy Prime Minister Biman Prasad, National Federation Party (NFP) (from left); Deputy PM Viliame Gavoka (Sodelpa); and Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, People’s Alliance(PA). Image: RNZ Pacific
Online dating apps have become an integral part of human connection in the digital age. For many it’s a convenient way to connect, have fun and fall in love. Like traditional dating you have bad dates, mortifying message exchanges after refreshing yourself at the local with your friends. It seems easy and a good way to find you person.
In response to the rise of sexual violence, and concerns from the eSafety commission, Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland MP set up a National Round table bringing together; government, civil society and tech to talk about the current issues in Australia and understand what solutions and opportunities for change exist in an Australian legal and cultural context.
There will be no singular linear solution, violence against women is a wicked social policy issue and dating apps are one niche aspect makes up a broader communications eco system.
The intersection between different communities and people’s perceptions of personal safety also needs to be taken into consideration.
The usability of these applications can make it easier to find matches on other platforms; Tinder offers a Facebook login which can lead to your facebook profile showing up as a suggested friend option to people who you’ve matched with on Tinder (who also use facebook as a sign in option). There’s certainly a safety concern there.
Similarly, other app engagement strategies encourage and incentivise linking to personal social media accounts, as access to that data set is incredibly valuable for further marketing purpose. For this reason we need big tech to join the discussion.
Addressing the problem at one point won’t necessarily address the problem elsewhere, but designing a best practice national standard for dating apps hopefully will lead to transforming the overall communications safety standard.
Kat Berney, Director of the National Women’s Safety Alliance, did numerous media interviews last week explaining that online dating and safety was more complex that just ID verification. Picture: Supplied
There are a wide net of opportunities for perpetrators, so it can look different depending on the complainant’s experience.
Addressing dating app safety is multi-faceted, especially as it’s common for people to move off the dating app itself quickly.
We need to explore opportunities to bridge the gap between different platforms – for example, consider a couple moving their initial match and conversation from Tinder onto WhatsApp. How will they stay safe? It would help understand common behaviours when moving between platforms and risks that are then introduced along with potentially mapping perpetrator behaviour.
Identity verification also isn’t a compulsory feature of dating apps. The domestic, family and sexual violence sector is calling for mandatory ID checks, but this needs to be a collaborative piece of work examining impacts on varying communities.
Viewers are able to write in their suspicions and get help in confronting their “catfish”. This is a double edged situation has the acceptance of this behaviour as a cultural norm in this kind of communication, meant that we have lowered our tolerance threshold towards the damaging behaviour experienced online?
Pages like Bye Felipe, Tinder translators and Beam Me up Softboi invite followers to send in Direct Message exchanges, dating profiles highlighting unacceptable online behaviour. The submissions range from ridiculous to terrifying. All submissions are deidentified and one assumes that formal outcomes haven’t been sought.
These peer supports need to be taken into consideration when designing policy solution. The role they play in people unpacking negative experience and behaviours they have been exposed to.
It is unlikely that the Mayor of Auckland, Wayne Brown, took any lessons from the city’s devastating floods but the rest of us — and journalists in particular — could learn a thing or two.
Brown’s demeanour will not be improved by a petition calling for his resignation or media columnists effectively seeking the same. He will certainly not be moved by New Zealand Herald columnist Simon Wilson, now a predictable and trenchant critic of the mayor, who correctly observed in the Heraldon Sunday: “In a crisis, political leaders are supposed to soak up people’s fears…to help us believe that empathy and compassion and hope will continue to bind us together.”
Wilson’s lofty words may be wasted on the mayor, but they point to another factor that binds us together in times of crisis. It is communication, and it was as wanting as civic leadership on Friday night and into the weekend.
Media coverage on Friday night was limited to local evacuation events, grabs from smartphone videos and interviews with officials that were light on detail. The on-the-scene news crews performed well in worsening conditions, particularly in West Auckland.
However, there was a dearth of official information and, crucially, no report that drew together the disparate parts to give us an over-arching picture of what was happening across the city.
I waited for someone to appear, pointing to a map of greater Auckland and saying: “These areas are experiencing heavy flooding . . . State Highway 1 is closed here, here and here as are these arterial routes here, here, and here across the city . . . cliff faces have collapsed in these suburbs . . . power is out in these suburbs . . . evacuation centres have been set up here, here, and here . . . :
That way I would have been in a better position to understand my situation compared to other Aucklanders, and to assess how my family and friends would be faring. I wanted to know how badly my city as a whole was affected.
Hampered by deadlines
I didn’t get it from television on Friday night nor did I see it in my newspaper on Saturday. My edition of the Weekend Herald, devoting only its picture-dominated front page and some of page 2 to the flooding, was clearly hampered by early deadlines. The Dominion Post devoted half its front page to the storm and, with a later deadline, scooped Auckland’s hometown paper by announcing Brown had declared a state of emergency.
So, too, did the Otago Daily Times on an inside page. The page 2 story in The Press confirmed the first death in the floods.
I turned to television on Saturday morning expecting special news programmes from both free-to-air networks. Zilch . . . nothing. Later in the day TV1 and Newshub did rise to the occasion with specials on the prime minister’s press conference, but it seems a small concession for such a major event.
Radio fared better but only because regular hosts such as NewstalkZB’s All Sport Breakfast host D’Arcy Waldegrave and Today FM sports journalist Nigel Yalden rejigged their Saturday morning shows to also cover the floods.
RNZ National’s Kim Hill was on familiar ground and her interview with Wayne Brown was more than a little challenging for the mayor. RNZ mounted a “Midday Report Special” with Corin Dann that also tried to break through the murk, but I was left wondering why it had not been a Morning Report Special starting at 6 am.
Over the course of the weekend the amount of information provided by news media slowly built up. Both Sundays devoted six or seven pages to the floods but it was remiss of the Herald on Sunday not to carry an editorial, as did the Sunday Star Times.
It was also good to see Newsroom and The Spinoff — digital services not usually tied to breaking news of this kind — providing coverage.
“Live” updates on websites and news apps added local detail but there was no coherence, just a string of isolated events stretching back in time.
Inadequate information
Overall, the amount of information I received as a citizen of the City of Sails was inadequate. Why?
Herein lie the lessons.
News media under-estimated the impact of the event. Although there were fewer deaths than in the Christchurch earthquake or the Whakaari White Island eruption, the scale of damage in economic and social terms will be considerable. The natural disaster warranted news media pulling out all the stops and, as they did on those occasions, move into schedule-changing mode (and that includes newspaper press deadlines).
Lesson #1: Do not allow natural disasters to occur on the eve of a long holiday weekend.
Media were, however, hampered by a lack of coherent information from official sources and emergency services. Brown’s visceral dislike of journalists was part of the problem but that was not the root cause. That fell into two parts.
The first was institutional disconnects in an overly complex emergency response structure which is undertaken locally, coordinated regionally and supported from the national level. This complexity was highlighted after another Auckland weather event in 2018 that saw widespread power outages.
The report on the response was resurrected in front page leads in the Dominion Post and The Press yesterday. It found uncoordinated efforts that did not use the models that had been developed for such eventualities, disagreements over what information should be included in situation reports, and under-estimation of effects.
Massey University director of disaster management Professor David Johnston told Stuff he believed the report would be exactly the same if it was recommissioned now because Auckland’s emergency management system was not fit for purpose — rather it was proving to be a good example of what not to do
Lesson #2: Learn the lessons of the past.
The 2018 report did, however, give a pass mark to the communication effort and noted that those involved thought they worked well with media and in communicating with the public through social media.
Can the same be said of the current disaster response when there “wasn’t time” to inform a number of news organisations (including Stuff) about Wayne Brown’s late Friday media conference, and when Whaka Kotahi staff responsible for providing updates clocked-off at 7.30 pm on Friday?
Is it timely for Auckland Transport to still display an 11.45 am Sunday “latest update” on its website 24 hours later? Is it relevant for a list of road closures accessed at noon yesterday to have actually been compiled at 7.35 pm the previous night? Why should a decision to keep Auckland schools closed until February 7 cause confusion in the sector simply because it was “last minute”?
Lesson #3: Ensure communications staff know the definition of emergency: A serious, unexpected, and potentially dangerous situation requiring immediate action.
There certainly was confusion over the failure to transmit a flood warning to all mobile phones in the city on Friday. The system worked perfectly on Sunday when MetService issued an orange Heavy Rain Warning.
It appears that emergency personnel believed posts on Facebook on Friday afternoon and evening were an effective way of communicating directly with the public. That is alarming because social media use is so fragmented that it is dangerous to make assumptions on how many people are being reached.
A study in 2020 of United States local authority communication about the covid pandemic showed a wide range of platforms being used and the recipients were far from attentive. The author of the study, Eric Zeemering, found not only were city communications fragmented across departments, but the public audience selectively fragmented itself through individual choices to follow some city social media accounts but not others.
In fact, more people were passing information about the flood to each other via Twitter than on Facebook and young people in particular were using TikTok for that purpose. Media organisations were reusing these posts almost as much as the official information that from some quarters was in short supply.
Lesson #4: When you need to communicate with the masses, use mass communication (otherwise known as news media).
Mistakes will always be made in fast changing emergencies but, having made a mistake, it is usual to go the extra yards to make amends. It beggars belief that Whaka Kotahi staff would fail to keep their website up to date on the Auckland situation when it is quite clear they received an enormous kick up the rear end from Transport Minister Michael Wood for clocking off when the heavens opened.
Or that Auckland Transport could be far behind the eight ball after turning travel arrangements for the (cancelled) Elton John concert into a fiasco.
After spending Friday evening holed up in his high-rise office away from nuisances like reporters attempting to inform the public, Mayor Brown justified his position with a strange definition of leadership then blamed others.
Sideswipe’s Anna Samways collected a number of tweets for her Monday Herald column. Among them was this: “Just saw one of the Wayne Brown press conferences. He sounded like a man coming home 4 hours late from the pub and trying to bull**** his Mrs about where he’d been.”
Lesson #5: When you’re in a hole, stop digging.
Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
First came the devastating flash floods in Auckland on Friday night. Then came the huge effort to help families evacuate to community shelters. And finally the ongoing clean-up operation.
We’re saddened by this unprecedented extreme weather that has impacted on some of our communities in Aotearoa. It was great to see the community come out to support and help evacuate flooded-out people to the community shelters. We were going door-to-door to help families as the flood waters were rising.
Special thanks to the volunteers who came out yesterday to help clean up at the NZ Ethnic Women’s Trust in Mt Roskill which was impacted by the flooding. Volunteers at the Wesley Primary School helped families with food, clothes and hot meals.
Thanks to the school leaders who opened the space to give shelter to families.
A massive thanks to the volunteers that worked alongside me to distribute food today in Albert-Eden and Puketāpapa. We distributed food and needed information door to door on O’Donnell Avenue in Mt Roskill to families and the church affected by the flood.
We also reached out to affected families in Fowlds Avenue, Kitchener Street and Lambeth Avenue.
About 80 meals delivered to 30 families — thanks to Humanity First International for the meals and to the Whānau Community Centre and Hub’s Nik Naidu.
All over Auckland, volunteers were doing a great job.
Need help, please contact these numbers:
Accommodation support: 0800 222 200
Clothes, bed, and blankets etc: 0800 400 100
Auckland’s flash floods
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Floods 1: A flooded Sandringham street. Image: APR
Floods 2: Community advocate Red Tsounga amid a Mt Roskill “lake”. Image: APR
Floods 3: Helping families evacuate. Image: APR
Floods 4: A floating car in the red.
Floods 5: NZ Ethnic Women’s Trust whānau and helpers.
Floods 6: Helping the NZ Ethnic Women’s Trust. Image: APR
Floods 7: The “Niu FM” touch at the NZ Ethnic Women’s Trust. Image: APR
Floods 8: Toys . . . but the floods are no fun. Image: APR
Floods 9: Kai from Humanity First International. Image: APR
The extraordinary flood event Auckland experienced on the night of January 27, the eve of the city’s anniversary weekend, was caused by rainfall that was literally off the chart.
Over 24 hours, 249mm of rain fell — well above the previous record of 161.8mm. A state of emergency was declared late in the evening.
It has taken a terrible toll on Aucklanders, with four people reported dead. Damage to houses, cars, roads and infrastructure will run into many millions of dollars.
Watching the images roll into social media on Friday evening, I thought to myself that I have seen these kinds of pictures before. But usually they’re from North America or Asia, or maybe Europe.
However, this was New Zealand’s largest city, with a population of 1.7 million.
Nowhere is safe from extreme weather these days.
Radar time lapse of the Auckland rain since yesterday morning
Look closely at the north-to-south line of torrential rain between 5-9pm directly over the city
Normally features like this move on relatively quickly, but not in this case, which was what made it so extreme pic.twitter.com/cv3jJaKr8R
How it happened The torrential rain came from a storm in the north Tasman Sea linked to a source of moisture from the tropics. This is what meteorologists call an “atmospheric river”.
The storm was quite slow-moving because it was cradled to the south by a huge anticyclone (a high) that stopped it moving quickly across the country.
Embedded in the main band of rain, severe thunderstorms developed in the unstable air over the Auckland region. These delivered the heaviest rain falls, with MetService figures showing Auckland Airport received its average monthly rain for January in less than hour.
Record breaking rain in Auckland. Although the heavy band of rain has moved off to the east there is still a change of showers so the total for rainfall could climb even higher. The impacts of the last 24 hours will be felt by many in Auckland for a long time. Take care out there pic.twitter.com/kiIm6Tsrro
The type of storm which brought the mayhem was not especially remarkable, however. Plenty of similar storms have passed through Auckland. But, as the climate continues to warm, the amount of water vapour in the air increases.
I am confident climate change contributed significantly to the incredible volume of rain that fell so quickly in Auckland this time.
Warmer air means more water There will be careful analysis of historical records and many simulations with climate models to nail down the return period of this flood (surely in the hundreds of years at least, in terms of our past climate).
How much climate change contributed to the rainfall total will be part of those calculations. But it is obvious to me this event is exactly what we expect as a result of climate change.
One degree of warming in the air translates, on average, to about 7 percent more water vapour in that air. The globe and New Zealand have experienced a bit over a degree of warming in the past century, and we have measured the increasing water vapour content.
But when a storm comes along, it can translate to much more than a 7 percent increase in rainfall. Air “converges” (is drawn in) near the Earth’s surface into a storm system. So all that moister air is brought together, then “wrung out” to deliver the rain.
A severe thunderstorm is the same thing on a smaller scale. Air is sucked in at ground level, lofted up and cooled quickly, losing much of its moisture in the process.
While the atmosphere now holds 7 percent more water vapour, this convergence of air masses means the rain bursts can be 10 percent or even 20 percent heavier.
Beyond the capacity of stormwater systems The National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) estimates that over Auckland, one degree of warming translates to about a 20 percent increase in the one-hour rainfall, for a one-in-50-year event.
The longer we continue to warm the climate, the heavier the storm rainfalls will get.
Given what we have already seen, how do we adapt? Flooding happens when stormwater cannot drain away fast enough.
So what we need are bigger drains, larger stormwater pipes and stormwater systems that can deal with such extremes.
The country’s stormwater drain system was designed for the climate we used to have — 50 or more years ago. What we need is a stormwater system designed for the climate we have now, and the one we’ll have in 50 years from now.
Another part of the response can be a “softening” of the urban environment. Tar-seal and concrete surfaces force water to stay at the surface, to pool and flow.
If we can re-expose some of the streams that have been diverted into culverts, re-establish a few wetlands among the built areas, we can create a more spongy surface environment more naturally able to cope with heavy rainfall.
These are the responses we need to be thinking about and taking action on now.
We also need to stop burning fossil fuels and get global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases down as fast as we can. New Zealand has an emissions reduction plan — we need to see it having an effect from this year.
And every country must follow suit.
As I said at the start, no community is immune from these extremes and we must all work together.
Breakfast they say, is the most important meal of the day.
But last Wednesday it was possibly also the most dangerous. Because that’s when many people were likely to be reading The Fiji Times and choking over their corn flakes.
They could have been reading more pontification from the former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum about “constitutionalism” and “rule of law” and “the embodiment of the values and principles surrounding constitutions” . . . etc.
I am not often at a loss for words. But the sheer brazenness of someone who, in the course of nearly 16 years in government, paid little regard to any of these things, brought me pretty close.
Last weekend Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum gave a rambling press conference complaining about all manner of things the new coalition government was doing. I was so irritated I put out a long statement debunking the so-called “breaches of the Constitution” he was alleging.
But the man doesn’t give up.
He is clearly unmoved by any embarrassment he may feel about having first accepted a Constitutional Offices Commission appointment that got him kicked out of Parliament under the Constitution he drafted; and then resigning the COC position when he realised he could not do that job and also be the FijiFirst party general secretary.
All in the space of three days. That’s the legal equivalent of shooting yourself in both feet.
So let’s begin by talking about “rule of law”, because I am beginning to wonder if anyone in the FijiFirst party even understands what it means.
Rule of law Let’s begin with what it does not mean. Rule of law does not mean “I made the laws, so I rule”. Rule of law is a much more complicated idea than that. Many people have tried to define it, in many different ways.
For those of us who are interested in it, it’s one of those things you sort of know when you see. But a central point of it, I think, is the idea that the law is more important than the people who make it or exercise power under it.
So that means that our rulers — like the people they make the rules for — must respect it in the same way that we have to. Lord Denning, a famous British judge (millennials — look up his role in Fiji’s history) repeated (and made famous) the words of the 18th century scholar, Thomas Fuller: “Be you ever so high, the law is above you.”
For more than a decade, the government of which Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was part of, paid little heed to this idea. It followed the law when it suited them, but ignored it when it didn’t suit them.
Let’s assume, for the moment, that he believed that the 2006 military coup (which the grovelling Fiji Sun once memorably described as “a change in direction of the government”) was lawful, together with the military government which followed.
That government continued to tell us it would follow the 1997 Constitution. But in April 2009 Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum could no longer believe that the military government was lawful. Because, in a case brought by deposed by deposed Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase, the Fiji Court of Appeal clearly told him that it wasn’t.
If you believed in rule of law, you would accept what the court had told you, quit your post and allow the lawful government to return, as the court required. He did not. Instead, he and his government decided that the 1997 Constitution had become inconvenient.
So they just trashed it. This was not rule of law. Aiyaz and the then government had instead decided that they were above the law.
The new constitution Fast forward to 2012 and the process of a new constitution. We were told (in a pompous government media statement on 12 March 2012) that the then government was “looking to the future of Fiji and all Fijians”.
“During the process of formulating a genuine Fijian constitution,” we were told, “every Fijian will have the right to put their ideas before the constitutional commission and have the draft constitution debated and discussed by the Constituent Assembl . . .
“As the process continues with the Constitution Commission and the Constituent Assembly all Fijians will have a voice.”
What actually happened?
The well-known constitutional scholar Professor Yash Ghai was flown in to chair a new constitutional commission. His commission travelled around the country, gathering the views of the people on what a new constitution should say.
Hardly a perfectly democratic process, but better than nothing. The Ghai Commission drafted a new constitution. But the government didn’t like it. So much for the “voices” of Fijians. Out it went — constitution, commission and all. Six hundred printed copies of the draft constitution were dumped into a fire.
Professor Ghai was sent packing. Instead we were handed the 2013 Constitution, pretty much from nowhere. No “Constituent Assembly”. Nobody “had a voice”. So, was that all a process Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum might call (his word) “constitutionalism”?
Did things get any better?
So, at least the new Constitution, and the elections of 2014, were a new start. Maybe we could expect the new elected government, of which Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was chief legal adviser, to begin thinking about “rule of law” and “constitutionalism” and “embodying values and principles surrounding constitutions”?
Here’s one more important point about rule of law. It’s not just about the laws which tell you what to do and what not to do. It’s also about the law protecting your rights and freedoms — and protecting what you are allowed to do.
Your rights and freedoms under the 2013 Constitution include your rights of free expression, your rights to assemble and protest, your right to personal liberty — yes, the right not to be locked up at whim — among many others.
They even include the right to “executive and administrative justice” — that is, to be treated fairly by the government and its institutions. So a government that is applying the laws of the land ought to, while applying them (in the words of Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum) “embody the values and principles” of that Constitution.
How, then, were the “values and principles” of our Constitution being embodied when unions were repeatedly being denied the right to assemble and protest? How were they being embodied when under our media laws, journalists were threatened with jail for writing stories which were “against the national interest” (whatever that meant)?
How were the “values and principles” of our Constitution being embodied when public servants lived in permanent fear of arbitrary dismissal?
How were the “values and principles” of our democratic Constitution being embodied when the government passed important laws in Parliament, affecting things like our voting rights, citizenship, our rights to a fair trial and the regulation of political parties, all by surprise, on two days’ notice?
No cell time There was an outcry earlier this week when police, over two days of questioning our former attorney-general, did not put him in a cell overnight. After all, former opposition politicians such as Sitiveni Rabuka, Biman Prasad and Pio Tikoduadua, when taken in for questioning for objecting to bad laws, were not so fortunate.
They got to spend a night in police custody. Why, people asked, was Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum getting special treatment? The answer? He was not getting special treatment. What was actually happening was that — for the first time in many years — the police were applying the law correctly.
If the person you are questioning is not a flight risk, there’s no need to lock him up. He is innocent until proven guilty. His personal freedom is more important than the convenience of the police.
He can sleep in his own bed and come back for more questioning tomorrow.
That would be, in Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s words, “embodying the values and principles of the Constitution”. But that is not something his government appeared to extend to its opponents when the police came calling. So I think we all deserve to be spared his lectures on “constitutionalism” for a little while.
Perhaps instead our former attorney-general might find it more valuable to take some time to quietly reflect on how well the governments of which he was part “embodied constitutional values and principles”. He has a total of nearly 16 years to reflect on — and not all of us have forgotten.
That ought to take a little while. And a few of us might then be able to enjoy more peaceful breakfasts.
Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer and former journalist (although, to be honest, not a big breakfaster). The views in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times. Republished with permission.
The weather is all over the show, the storm water system clearly hopelessly inadequate, the house prices are insane, the public transport is crap — and I bloody love the place.
It’s Auckland Anniversary weekend. Tomorrow is the actual day of the anniversary and it is recognised with a public holiday on the closest Monday.
A Google search finds it described thus: “Residents don’t just celebrate the origins of Auckland but the diverse culture of the region by celebrating with warm days, clear skies, carnivals, concerts, and more.”
Seems like a bad joke really, right at the moment, doesn’t it? Still at least Auckland mayor Wayne Brown is on the job.
“My role isn’t to rush out with buckets.” – Wayne Brown
Oh.
Well, that is an interesting response from the mayor, still let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
To be fair I’d rather he was ensuring people got the information, and the support they needed, than have him rocking up to where people are being rescued using things like jet skis with a mop and bucket.
At 9.30pm last night, councillor Josephine Bartley tweeted: “You just have to look online to see the chaos out there. No need to wait. Declare state of emergency.”
“I couldn’t act sooner” . . . Auckland mayor Wayne Brown. Image: Screenshot NR
Let’s leave the timing of the state of emergency declaration, you can find an excellent summary of events and communications at the Spinoff here: Where’s mayor Wayne Brown?
Floodwaters sweep away a building on Candia Road in Henderson Valley. Image: Felicity Reid/RNZ/Nick’s Kōrero
Let’s also park that the primary concern from Wayne Brown seemed to be defending himself. I’m quite interested in the last line, no doubt clearly crafted by Mayor Hooton. Sorry, I mean Mayor Brown.
“This is not something that you just respond to because of a clamour from the public.”
That is an interesting point of view to take in an emergency. Apparently Mayor Brown does not see it as his role, even in an emergency, to respond to the clamour from the public.
The public, aka voters, are important — at election time. But let’s be honest once Hooton and Brown have flogged off the assets for short term gain, and cut services creating long term pain, I imagine Mayor Brown will disappear never to be heard from again.
For now the public clamour is no doubt an irritation.
News of January 26, 2023, from InfoDefenseEspañol channel:
Bundestag deputy Petr Bistron to Olaf Scholz about the transfer of tanks to Ukraine:
You have just said goodbye to the fundamental provisions of Germany’s post-war foreign policy, Germany’s special responsibility towards the world. The slogan ‘Never again’ meant the refusal to supply weapons to conflict zones. This has always been the core of German foreign policy. You will go down in history as the chancellor who trampled on this legacy.
It is exactly as Petr Bistron tells Olaf Scholz: he has thrown away the fundamental German international policy adopted after the horrible and shameful crimes of fascism. A decision that Scholz takes on purpose, forgetting or trivializing the millions of dead in World War II, between 50,000,000 and 60,000,000 of which a third, between 20,000,000 and 25,000,000 were Russians. The most horrific war ever fought on earth 80 years ago, is about to be surpassed by the one being waged between the United States and NATO against Russia, with the participation of a nominally democratic Germany, but really as Nazi as that under Hitler in the first half of the 20th century.
Once again, the imperialism of the 21st century illegally and illegitimately attacks the rest of the world, starting with Russia, the first obstacle to be eliminated in order to continue razing less powerful countries. Nazism began under disguise in Germany in the 1930s until the Nazis soon took off their masks and continued with sabotage, arson, attacks, arrests… war and occupation in Europe and the Jewish holocaust. Today Germany, one of the richest countries, with a high standard of living, including education, is run on a whim by the most Nazi country of all: the United States. This ‘democracy’ has become the highest form of Nazism, it is a crude deception for conquest: ‘By deception and intrigue, so shall you make war’.
In the name of the Western democracy, the United States and NATO have killed, wounded and driven millions of people from their homes since the Second World War with the UN as an abulic and consenting witness. Only the immoral or the foolish do not know this; the rest of the world knows it and will suffer to their regret, albeit too late. Their passivity will not help them. It is not neutral. They will pay for it and will not be able to accuse Russia because they did not even want to ask their own governments: why did you help the Ukrainian Nazis in their government and their battalions in the genocide of the Donbas populations? Why did not you protect the victims as Russia did? Why didn’t you ask your governments NOT to send weapons for the benefit of the most deadly killing machine in the world, the United States?
We are not just dealing with one more war, this may be the end of Humanity or huge parts of it. It could end in one more extinction on earth, just one more species, with the difference that ours is caused by our own actions.
At the end of last year, Palestinians showed strength and power as they mourned Nasser Abu Hmeid. People came out to stand with his family as they demanded that occupation forces return his body.
Nasser had been held inside Israel’s colonial prison system for a total of more than 30 years, convicted for his key role in the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade – an armed group struggling against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. He passed away after a long struggle with cancer.
Palestinian political prisoner Nasser Abu Hamid passed away at age 50 from advanced lung cancer while held captive in Ramleh Prison Clinic— a carceral clinic known for its systemic human rights abuses enacted toward sick and ill Palestinian prisoners. Abu Hamid’s passing is thus a direct consequence of the Israeli Prison Service’s ongoing and deliberate practice of medical negligence.
The Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network called Nasser’s death:
an assassination caused by the policy of slow killing.
And the Palestinian prisoners’ movement issued this statement:
We bid farewell to the beloved Nasser, known on the streets of the homeland as a fighter and a struggler, who rose as a martyr as a result of medical negligence and his continued imprisonment without liberation. The time has come now to liberate our children from captivity at the hands of a criminal enemy practicing all kinds of torture and medical neglect for our children….This policy of systematic killing has not and will not weaken our resolve for one day, and we will not stop our resistance inside and outside the prison but instead this increases our certainty of the correctness of the method and our goal.
Continuing collective punishment
Since then, the Israeli state has refused to return Nasser’s body, an act of collective punishment. The state is claiming that it will use the body as a bargaining tool in negotiations with Hamas. This is not the first time the Abu Hmeid family has been subjected to acts of collective punishment by the Israeli state. In fact, their family home has been demolished five times by Israeli forces.
The struggle of Nasser’s family mirrors the anguish endured by hundreds of families across Palestine. Families whose loved ones’ bodies have never been returned by the occupying forces. However, the collective will to remember Nasser as a martyr was striking.
General strike
Some comrades and I were visiting the West Bank last December as part of the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement (ISM). All of us have been involved in supporting prisoners in the UK, and have lost friends along the way as part of our struggles. We were staying not far away from Ramallah’s Al-Amari refugee camp, where the Hmeid family live. Early on the morning of 20 December we were woken by a prayer broadcast from a nearby mosque. We were told by Palestinian friends that Nasser had died early in the morning. And that what we heard was most likely a lament for him. Later that morning, we heard shots from the direction of the camp. They were fired as salutes for Nasser.
A general strike and demonstrations across Palestine were held in honour of Nasser. We were invited to a demonstration in the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem outside the local headquarters of the Red Cross. The protest at the Red Cross is a regular vigil held by the families of Palestinian prisoners, but this week it was attended by thousands of people. As we arrived at the demonstration, more and more people were arriving. The schools had been closed for the day, and students – some of them under ten years old – were marching to the square as we arrived. The demonstration was also joined by university students, and even a group of uniformed boy scouts. The crowd was made up of men and women, young and old.
A culture of respect for martyrs
As we walked to Thabet Thabet square – itself named after another martyr of the Palestinian struggle – we passed a group of young boys who cracked a joke. Our comrade – an older Palestinian man – told them to show respect, as “today there is a shahid” (or martyr).
That night we returned to Ramallah, and were struck by the strength of the strike in that city. Restaurants, tea shops, and general stores were shuttered closed. This was doubly striking as Ramallah can feel like a more capitalist place than other cities of Palestine. The city is the seat of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority – money has been sloshing in from the European Union, and from non-governmental organisations, since 2006. This money has many strings attached, but the biggest one is that the recipients of aid should not support armed resistance. To see that a strike in honour of a martyr of that resistance can still take hold here is a testimony to the enduring spirit of the Palestinian rebellion.
Beyond Israel’s apartheid wall – and across another – Palestinians in Gaza held three days of mourning to remember Nasser.
Bodies held by the occupation
Nasser’s body is not the only body of a Palestinian martyr held by the occupation. According to Addameer:
Compounding their crimes of medical neglect, Israeli occupation forces continue to withhold the bodies of the now-eleven Palestinian prisoners who have been martyred. By withholding bodies, Israel inflicts severe psychological pain on the deceased person’s family. As such Nasser’s family does not know when his body will be released for proper burial—if at all.
Return our loved ones from “the freezers of the occupation”
My comrades and I attended a demonstration for the return of the bodies. The protest was held in a freezing cold Al-Menara square as temperatures dropped just before Christmas:
Protesters gather in Ramallah and march for the return of martyrs' bodies, demanding that the IOF give back their loved ones from "out of the freezers of the occupation" pic.twitter.com/OkgrhlnOz2
A week later, we watched as Israeli forces fire tear gas at demonstrators. They were taking part in what was dubbed a ‘March of Immortality’, demanding the return of the martyrs’ bodies:
The 'March of Immortality' took place in #Ramallah to demand the return of the bodies of the martyrs withheld by the Israeli occupation. The IOF fired teargas, rubber coated bullets, explosive round shots and stun grenades injuring 11 according to the Red Crescent #FreePalestinepic.twitter.com/TEIrRg4g6c
The system that is enabling these deaths to carry needs us not to remember. It needs us to close our eyes and to forget. That is why the act of remembering martyrs is so revolutionary.
The anger and rage across Palestine at the death of Nasser Abu Hmeid was a heartbreaking reminder of a lifetime of anti-colonial struggle. A lifetime that undoubtedly entailed much suffering. However, the collective act of remembering Nasser’s life brought with it a renewed sense of solidarity, strength, and resilience.
We must hang on fiercely to the memory of those killed by the state, and as a result of state policies. It is their memory that will help us to refuse the attempts to silence, co-opt, or assimilate us. It is their memory that reminds us that we will always carry with us the seeds of rebellion and revolution.
Featured image is of Palestinian demonstrators carrying a photo of Nasser Abu Hmeid, by the author
On 14 December 2022 German police arrested 25 people over what was called the “Reichsburger plot”. Two days later The Observer published an article by Philip Oltermann posing the question of whether this was a far-right “…sinister plan to overthrow the German state or just a rag-tag revolution?”
Although a long way away from our shores, this bizarre event has implications for New Zealand which should not be ignored. It got me to thinking about the attempted coups by electorally defeated presidents in the United States and Brazil.
This then led on to considering the occupation of Parliament grounds in early 2022 and a recent sighting in a tiny community about seven km away from my home on the Kāpiti Coast.
In the midst of writing this all up, came the unexpected resignation of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern last week. Then union leader Robert Reid popped up with a pertinent observation. But first, Germany.
German coup-plotters Along with25 other German co-conspirators, one Maximilian Eder was arrested. They were accused of planning to overthrow the state by violent means and install a shadow government headed by a minor German aristocrat.
Few of these coup plotters were well-known public figures. But they included some with a military background, doctors, judges, gourmet chefs and opera singers, a Lower Saxony civil servant at the criminal police office, and “…several of the ragtag bunch of wannabe revolutionaries seemed to have been radicalised in the comfortably well-off, respectable centre of society.”
Maximilian Eder, a leading German far-right coup plotter. . . . genuine commander of one of Germany’s armoured infantry battalions between 1998 and 2000. Image: Political Bytes
Eder was a genuine commander of one of Germany’s armoured infantry battalions between 1998 and 2000. He had served in Kosovo and Afghanistan and was a founding member of Germany’s special forces command.
What further rattled Germany’s cage was the inclusion of a former member of the federal parliament from the far-right AfD party. She had knowledge of security arrangements and special access privileges to the complex of parliamentary buildings in the heart of Berlin.
Eccentrics or serious threat? The plotters’ potential targets included seven members of Germany’s Parliament, including the Foreign Minister, conservative opposition, and two leaders of the governing Social Democrat party.
German police found weapons in 50 of the 150 properties linked to the co-conspirators (there may have been other weapons stashed away elsewhere). This was an insufficient arsenal to overthrow the government of a country with a population of 83 million. However, it was enough to carry out a targeted terror attack killing and maiming many.
The question remains unanswered as to whether these conspirators really did seriously threaten German democracy as it presently exists or were they “…just a bunch of eccentrics with a hyperactive imagination…”
Coup conspirators plotted to take over Germany’s Parliament, the Reichstag. Image: Political Bytes
One of the difficulties in making this call is that previously the growth of the German far-right had been under-estimated. The relatively recent electoral success of the AfD party was unexpected. Oltermann concluded his interesting article by citing a German terrorism expert who noted that while he didn’t believe the coup-plotters would have overthrown the government, the question that remained was how much damage they would have caused in trying to.
Washington DC and Brasilia While we await a fuller analysis of the extent to which these coup-plotters were a threat to German democracy, we know enough to make some conclusions, especially in an international context.
The German coup-plotters may have included eccentrics. But their defining characteristic was that they were from that part of the extreme far-right of politics which was prepared to use violence to achieve their objectives.
There are similarities with two actual attempted coups seeking to overturn election results and putting back into power two far-right presidents who were defeated at the polls. These occurred in the respective capitals of the United States (Washington) in January 2001 and Brazil (Brasilia) two years later.
These attempts to put Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro back in power were both far-right led and involved short violent destructive occupations of their parliaments. The major difference was significant high-level military involvement in the attempted Brazilian coup.
Far-right levering off anti-vaccination protests In February-March 2022 there was an anti-vaccination occupation of New Zealand’s Parliament Grounds. Last February I published a Political Bytes blog on the far-right agenda in this occupation.
My essential point was that the susceptibility, to say the least, of many of these protesters was fertile territory for far-right leaders to exploit, influence and shape its more violent direction. This was well-highlighted in the excellent Fire & Fury podcast documentary published by Stuff.
Fire & Fury: Who’s driving a violent, misinformed New Zealand – and why? Video: Stuff
The documentary has come under some peculiar criticism from those who believe it should have given similar or greater blame for the actions of Parliament’s Speaker in trying to dissuade the occupiers from continuing the protest.
However, aside from overstating his impact, this criticism misses the whole point of the documentary. Its focus was on what was behind the occupation and related protests, including the significant far-right influence and support.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of these protests was the far-right Counterspin Media online outlet. It reported the occupation virtually non-stop, quickly becoming the main source of news for the occupiers and their supporters.
Run by local far-right leaders, Counterspin Media relies on a far-right media outlet in the United States for support (Trump confidant Steve Bannon is in its central leadership). From a very small base its viewing numbers have rocketed upwards.
The occupation also accelerated the use of two new terms to designate some people within the far-right – “sovereign citizens” and “sheriffs”. The former believe they are not bound by laws unless they personally consent to them. They carry out violence although this is largely verbal.
The latter, sheriffs, believe they can take the law into their own hands, including apprehending, violence and even execution. In other words, those holding either designation are vigilantes.
Now to Peka Peka This leads on to the peacefully seaside locality Peka Peka on the Kāpiti Coast of the lower North Island with a population of around 700. As it happens, it is seven km from where I live. I frequently cycle through it and walk dogs on its beautiful beach.
Its name is derived from a native New Zealand bat, the Pekapeka, which represents the interwoven nature of the spirit world and the world of the living — the seen and the unseen.
But following the end of the occupation of Parliament Grounds a small group of occupiers moved on to the land of a supportive local farmer. While numbers have diminished there are still there.
While driving past earlier this month I noticed a conspicuous vehicle parked outside on the road as photographs I took show. The vehicle belongs to Counterspin Media.
The issue at hand was the far-right’s support for the parents of a critically ill baby who tried to deny him access to a life-saving blood transfusion because overwhelmingly donors are vaccinated. They and Counterspin Media have also denied the right of their baby to privacy by breaching a court order for name suppression. [The matter was resolved by the court overruling the parents which enabled a successful transfusion that saved the baby’s life.]
The “sheriff” is in Peka Peka. Image: Political Bytes
What was particularly relevant to this blog, however, was the fact that the far-right Counterspin Media was present visiting the small group who among them are believed to include sovereign citizens and a sheriff or two.
It is a very long bow to suggest that the occupation of Parliament Grounds was responsible for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s dramatic resignation last week. Nevertheless its ferocity (including intimidation and threats of execution) and duration rattled her government’s cage and confidence.
Outgoing NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern . . . many commentators are attributing her resignation to the volume and viciousness of the personal attacks on her, much of which was misogynous. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation
Many are attributing Arden’s resignation to the volume and viciousness of the personal attacks on her, much of which was misogynous. They are right to make this conclusion but it is much deeper than this. To begin with, had her government been more successful in policy development and implementation or been doing better in the polls, she was less likely to have resigned.
Former Prime Minister Helen Clark (1999-2008) also came under vicious misogynous attacks but, as she has acknowledged, the attacks on Ardern far exceed those on her. What is the difference? First, social media’s influence in Clark’s time was much less than Ardern’s.
Second, the far-right was politically much less influential than now. We now have far-right governments in countries such as Italy, Poland, Hungary and India. There are strong far-right movements threatening countries like France and Spain. Both the United States and Brazil have had single term far-right presidents.
Germany had a follow-up from the December coup-plotters this week with five more far-right activists arrested for a second alleged coup plot, including kidnapping the health minister, to overthrow the government which The Guardian reported on January 23.
In New Zealand, the far-right’s levering off the anti-vaccination protests has led to an environment of threats through a sense of deluded entitlement, as Stuff reported on January 20, of a magnitude far greater than Clark and her government ever experienced.
Union leader Robert Reid was as close to getting it right as one can get in a Facebook post on January 20. He observed that, on the one hand, unlike the United States and Brazil, New Zealand was able to keep right-wing and fascist mobs from storming their parliaments.
However, on the other hand, in New Zealand they “…scored their first victory of bringing down the political leader of the country. Not a good feeling.”
I agree with Reid but would make the qualification that these far-right influenced and led “mobs” significantly contributed to bringing down a political leader.
Sociopaths and psychopaths Soon after commencing working for the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists over three decades ago, I asked a leading psychiatrist, Dr Allen Fraser, what was the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths (Dr Fraser was the union’s first elected vice-president and second president).
His response, which I have never forgotten, was to repeat what he advised medical students and doctors-in-training: Sociopaths believe in castles in the sky; psychopaths live in castles in the sky
In other words, while Helen Clark was threatened by sociopaths, Jacinda Ardern was threatened by psychopaths. The transition from the former to the latter was the increasing influence of the far-right.
Robert Reid is right; it is not a good feeling. He is a master of the understatement.
Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.
You didn’t need to hear it from me that the USA is subjected to some of the most insane and inhumane policies tied to the criminal injustice system; tied to mass public K12 education; and corporate overlording; or anti-union activities; also to taxation; or finance; and health care; tied to infrastructure care; or tied to retirement protection. I’ve written about social work and social services many times, and the terrible outcomes of those I have served: just released from prison; pregnant teenagers; foster youth, 16 to 21 years old; veterans and their families deemed homeless and medically fragile; folks with substance abuse issues as well as living homeless; gang-influenced youth; inmates in a federal correctional institution; community college students; active duty military; lifelong learning senior citizens; adults with intellectual, developmental and psychological disabilities.1
Enough, already. Plenty more where those stories came from!
Moving on: Here, the latest mainstream media-press account, again, a day late, a few hundred million dollars short: Oregon is facing a drastic shortage of mental health care workers. The state needs as many as 35,000 new workers by some estimates to fill the mental health care needs in the state. But people interested and willing to go into the field are facing high barriers to doing the work. What can be done to change the system, and open up the pipeline of behavioral health care workers?
It’s way beyond the crappy pay, the student loans, the overloads, the lack of respect, poor management, lack of trauma informed managers, and so much more. The value in this society is big time sports, big time corporate jobs, big time doctors and CEOs and administrators and, well, you get the picture: if I am paid $17 an hour to be a case manager, and then a toilet and bedroom cleaner with an Air B & B gets $21 an hour, and if a bus driver for schools gets $19 an hour, and if some of us volunteer and get diddly squat from tax write offs for all that work, and, you get the idea: money for nothing, and the Value of Nothing.
Until we have 250 elementary students to one counselor, when we have rotating visiting nurses, when we have K12 teachers swamped with the stupidity of curriculum and the stupidity of the local community hobbling teaching; when we have the hands on stuff cut — auto mechanics, construction, floral arranging, orthotics, pet techs, even beauty classes, all of that, including leather working, ceramics, graphic arts, film making, radio broadcasting, gardening, husbandry, basket weaving, well, we are in this mess of digital gulags and the deadening of the Homo sapiens into Homo erectus algorith consumo retailopethicus.
I’ve seen the blasphemy daily, as foster and group homes are going by the wayside for troubled youth and youth and adults living with DD-ID-PD. We have care homes going by the wayside, and we have retirement and terminal medical care facilities costing someone $6,000 a month for one room and pretty basic food. More and more people are paid this $15 an hour shit wage for a vital job, and additionally, they have to drive drive drive to work, and then, put in incredible stressful hours up to sometimes 10 or 12 hour work days. With some of the most despicable bosses around. Pressure pressure pressure. Forget about the fact that non-profits are for-profits, and those retirement-care facilities are monopolized by a few dozen across the land. Speaking of bullshit jobs:
We are at that crossroads of wondering just how far the human brain and spirit can take now, 2023, with the cascading of big-time issues penetrating the souls of people, stripping us bare, stripping our immune systems, and culling our brains. Good people. Vulnerable people. We are trapped in a world of complexities and counter-intuitive thinking and rationalizations, but those complexities are nothing compared to C-PTSD: complex post traumatic stress disorder. More than just a label. The foisting of so much media madness, too, on top of our personal hells, and then add to that, the reality of capitalism as a “search and destroy the competition/ mom and pop/ bricks and mortar/ people-centered businesses” sort of law of the “jungle,” Lord of the Flies style.
We have trauma deeply repressed, unprocessed, hidden, sort of hanging there, in the psyche, and alas, a trigger will pull the anxiety into the bloodstream until a whole lot of mental and shaking comes along.
It is not just a dog eat dog adventure into chaos, and more than bizarre allusion of the law of the jungle crap. Capitalism is scorched earth devaluation of humans policies. The economies of scale is for the shareholders and top brass, not for some nirvana of great benefit to the rank and file. There is so much ugliness and cut-throat shit that the world today serves up, on top of atomized families, communities, friendships; on top of the sink or swim nature of things in AmeriKa. Imagine, facing all of that PLUS the traumatic disorders.
Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear. Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.
— Gabor Mate, Oct 14, 2019
Inside, hidden, pushed down, recriminated, hated, laughed at, and as the Anglo Saxon credo says, “Keepa stiff upper lip, bloke.” It’s bad enough that the systems — education, politics, local governance, media, Press, family, government business, bureaucracies — are against the 80 Percent: those that do not have political, real estate, employment, financial, familial, networking clout. But the so-called representatives we “vote” in and who are picked by those we vote in are working for THEM, the point zero-zero-zero One Percent; the One Percent; the Five Percent and possibly the rest of the 15 percent. Representation and clout and power for the 20 percent, more or less. Of course, there is the Faustian Bargain for the 15 Percenters. There is the Eichmann Syndrome. There is the lock-step belief in the hope that providing support for the elite and their legions of manipulators will get you away from decay: neighborhood, school system, environmental, familial, fraternal, transactional decay.
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
— Michael Parenti)
A decaying society pays off (benefits handsomely) for the 19 or 20 Percent. And the cognitive dissonance and the collective Stockholm Syndrome mixed witht he GAD — general anxiety disorder — weathers the shit out of us, the 80 Percent. Until we have a shortage of mental health/social services heroes (oh, shortages left and right, and everywhere one cares to look). We need navigators for almost everything in this legalistic, contractualized, atomized, disassociative society, since everything in the pipeline we need to survive, i.e. safety nets, is almost impossible to interpret and understand. People need help with bills, debts, loans, health care, insurance, housing, medical needs, and mental health. The house we live in may have some fancy furniture and amazing kitchen and bathroom redos, but if the roof leaks (and it’s leaking like a sieve), then the entire half a million dollar home is a goner, sooner than later. Flooded, soaked, warped, moldy and a tear down soon.
Think of the mental health of a child as the roof for that child’s psychic and humanistic house, world, well being. Think of the totality of those in and around that child suffering from the leaky roof. Think of the collective community in and around the youth with the leaky mental health roof gushing water onto them. No amount of Advance Placement classes and super duper athletic training will help build a child into a teen and then into an adult with some normalcy and balance and internal strength without the leaky roof being fixed, maybe R & R-ed, but absolutely not full of holes.
Lifeblood and gut-brain connections are connected to the holism of grand positive mental and spiritual health. The gut-brain-hormone-immune system is all predicated on sound mental health, and learning what trauma is, then stopping it, preventing it, and, of course, patching it up, i.e. treating it. Therapies are the construction processes for that leaky psychic roof.
And so, depression, general anxiety disorder, the new ailments of social media and Facebook shaming, and the disassociative links to all that time on tablets and surfing the internet, and hooking into a Zoom Doom room for every class, every human (sic) interaction. Think of the shame of people in the USA for being so, well, collectively stupid, impotent, flagging, when it comes to the reality that celebrities, the rich, the famous, the leadership, the administrations, the governors’ offices, the entire shit show is worthy of complete deconstruction and dismantling or imploding, yet, we are still in this continuum of never pushing the edge of the envelope and standing down those systems of exploitation, abuse, scamming and general anxiety setting progroms.
This is normal, but today, a diatribe like this would get you Tazed, hog-tied, thrown in jail, and put into a mental ward:
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’
So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’
I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell –
‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’
Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis.
But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
It’s normal, that reaction, no, and we should embrace the roots of any sort of explosion of emotion that fits this “Anger moment.” But beware: I have been a social services practitioner, and the people in it and at the managerial level are not the right folk for the job in so many cases. And, while I always connect these diatribes to my own journey, AKA struggle, this is more than about the stupidity of people in my neck of the woods — Lincoln County — who have passed me over on more than a dozen or so attempts to get employed here in this rural county as a social services practitioner. That is the way of the middling, the milquetoast, and I have to say the attitude of ignorant and destructive human beings in social services. There is no way in hell it seems that any of these middle brow folk can see me as a co-worker at the county, state or city or nonprofit level to be a case manager or social services navigator.
Here we are, then, stuck in the dead pan of AmeriKa, where conformity is the way of the sheeple, the lemming. Following the crowd or buying into the good old broken system, this is the way of the Yanqui. Oh, they say over and over — “You can’t fight City Hall. I’m just one person. They are too powerful and we are too weak.” AmeriKans have caved!
Until, well, sorry to say, the 80 Percent are begging for life support. Begging for basics. In this upside down world of an earth moving closer and closer to nuclear hell, all because of a few elites, a few money changers in Jesus Christ’s story, people are hobbled and strangled by the oppressiveness of elites running the show and ruling the roost. Money changers a la War Mongers, a la Big Pharma, a la Larry Fink and Blackrock, so many tens of thousands of top dog criminals. Can you imagine those Pseudos buying that old time religion story, Matthew 21:12!?
The crowds replied, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.” Then Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves. And He declared to them, “It is written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer.’ But you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’
Imagine that sanity, daily: distrupting the disruptors? Well, try this out for size: This is 2022 IRS 1040 filing time, but maybe also a time for 100 million USA households to declare Zelensky and his sidekick wife as OUR dependents, our WRITE-OFFS, our DEDUCTIONS. That’s $2,000 each, at $4,000 total, and with 100,000,000 filing that way, as the dirty Ukrainian couple as our “children,” hell, we’ll get back some of the drug-gun-offshore money of the Ukrainian Nazis the USA Criminal Enterprise has stolen from our taxpayer coffers to throw at Zelensky’s war — count that $400,000,000,000 total for 100 million 1040s filed with the ugly couple as our dual deduction of $4,000. That’s four hundred billion $$.
In our pockets. And then, hmm, how about massive rolling strikes. IN concert with Mutal Aid. Can you imagine all the people suffering mental illness, all the hardships of children in today’s day and age, and especially now, when there are still putrid sorts yelling at the youth that they have it easy. “Try growing up in the Great Depression. Or during World War Two.” We have to take things back or all hell will break loose. Mental Hell, that is.
Here’s one version of trauma —
And, another version:
‘Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice’ by Raj Patel and Rupa Marya takes the reader on a medical tour of the human body and reveals the relationship between our biology and the injustices of our political and economic system such as racism, poverty and colonialism. Patel and Marya ultimately offer a cure of “deep medicine” to heal our bodies and the world by reconnecting to the earth and each other.
We come down to this, uh? Canada, USA, Africa, South America, Mexico, anywhere we find the clergy! I have a friend in Australia, part of the victim class of native Australians who were despoiled and abused by clergy, in this case the robed and frocked monsters of the Catholic Church. This is one trauma piled onto another, until a victim is powerful but still at age 60, say, waylaid by the news of yet another blasphemy of humanity getting prime time news coverage recently: Do these people have no dignity, no access to a bottle of barbituates and fifth of vodka? More lies, convicted but found not-guilty? Blasphemy. There are Nine Circles of Hell. Welcome to one of them, Cardinal, where there will undoubtedly be a few hundreds of millions of others awaiting you there.
Cardinal George Pell, 81, died in Rome on Jan. 10, the Vatican has confirmed. A leading Australian Catholic and close advisor to Pope Francis, the cardinal had participated in the funeral of his friend, Pope Benedict XVI, just last week.
Pell, the former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, became the third-highest ranked official in the Vatican after Pope Francis tapped him in 2014 to reform the Vatican’s notoriously opaque finances as the Holy See’s first-ever finance czar. He spent three years as prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy, where he tried to impose international budgeting, accounting and transparency standards.
He has been living in Rome since his release from an Australian maximum security prison in 2020 after spending 404 days in solitary confinement after being wrongfully convicted in December 2018 on charges of the abuse of two altar boys in Melbourne in 1996.
His conviction was upheld by an appeals court in March 2019, but he always protested his innocence and was the first cardinal to be imprisoned on such charges. The full bench of Australia’s High Court unanimously squashed his conviction in 2020, and he decided to return to Rome, where he had previously served in various positions under Pope Francis. (Source)
There are thousands of priests who have never been excommunicated or jailed for their rape crimes. I recall when I was in El Paso, and there were some priests from Spokane Diocese in El Paso. I never inquired there, but until later. Then, just by chance, I ended up in Spokane years later, and ahh, there was the answer to El Paso and Spokane priest connection: the ones charged up in Washington, in Spokane, got sent to the border, where the “little brown ones and the brown people would just be happy to have some wise, white priest from the sophisticated Northwest tending the flock.” That’s what one Jesuit said to me, quoting one of his bosses. Send away the rapists to the other outposts, in this case, La Frontera, the border.
There are so many multiple trauma’s just in the ether, such as the head Federal Reserve Mafiosa — how does his continence settle with you?
Ahh, the fed chief, or this cabal? Vice President Joe Biden, flanked by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, sits with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on February 7, 2015, before a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany.
Yep, that’s $17 or $20 an hour with clients suffering under a massive overload of trauma, both physical and mental. Those leaky roofs, the spiritual and psychological shelters and protective covers that need attending to before almost anything else, they are gaping, and yet ‘this country tis of thee’ throws trillions away, burns it up, memory holes it, until we have all of us on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Again, I am a communist, so these two blokes below are not my normal everyday peeps I’d be hanging with, but I am certainly around so many people who are bought, sold and delivered in this exceptionalist wasteland, that I learn how to converse and have open dialogue and debates. But listen to Scott Ritter here. Have you ever seen this guy on Amy Soros Goodman’s Democracidocy Now? On any of the mainstream media? But listen to him, man. This is serious stuff, and he tells it like it is that Blinken should be immediately sacked, and that there is no one sane person in the Biden Administration, and that there are no nuclear arms control panels.
And we wonder why so so many people are on the verge of a complete melt down:
The trail of tears throughout the old colonies and the neo-colonies is epigenic trauma of the generations. The collateral damage. The Madeleine Albright murders by 1,000 economic sanctions cuts, it never just ends with her or that generation or time frame. Over 500,000 dead was-is-will forever be worth it in her psychopath’s mind. How many generations are lost and affected?
Fight until the last Ukrainian. Worth it! Yeah, death by 10,000 cuts.
•U.S. EPA fish testing in 2013–2015 had a median PFAS concentration of 11,800 ng/kg.
•Even infrequent freshwater fish consumption can increase serum PFOS levels.
•One fish serving can be equivalent to drinking water for a month at 48 ppt PFOS.
•Fish consumption advice regarding PFAS is inconsistent or absent in the U.S. states.
This is just one insult to humanity, one multiple aspects of how rotten the world is, and so, how are those children supposed to process this? Forever chemicals, all those hormone-disrupting, diabetes-creating, immune system-depleting, cancer-causing, brain fog-inducing shit chemicals/poisons/toxins that the great CEOs and the “follow the science Über Alles” or else bullshit people have put upon humanity and ecosystems?
And how do we get powerful, self-actualized, community-driven, socialist-minded, anti-authority youth activated when they have mental health disturbances via a thousand injustices?
Remember it seems so long ago, 1988? That other criminal, Ronald Reagan, and the 1988 campaign for POTUS, surely a position only megalomaniacs, narcissists and sociopaths can find themselves happy in their own element?
Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis knows about the damage that disability can cause–even its mere mention. In this keynote address given to the symposium on Presidential Disability and Succession held at Northeastern University in Boston last spring (2014), Dukakis reflected on his famous 1988 presidential campaign that, largely at his expense, redefined negativity in presidential politics, in particular the fictitious allegation that he had a history of mental illness. A distinguished professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University, Dukakis also spends each winter quarter at UCLA as a visiting professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs. He remains active in both politics and public policy, canvassing for Democratic candidates such as Elizabeth Warren during her 2012 Senate campaign and promoting policy initiatives through the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, which he affectionately calls a “think and do tank.” The three-term governor (1975-1979 and 1983-1991) was voted Most Effective Governor by the National Governor’s Association in 1986. After his first term in the late 1970s he lost a nasty primary election to Ed King, whom he would later defeat to reclaim office. Though it wasn’t apparent at the time, for Dukakis, that 1978 campaign would serve as a precursor for the attack politics that were unloosed during the 1988 presidential campaign. In the remarks that follow, he offers a candid assessment of how not going negative may have cost him the presidency, and how an offhand remark by President Reagan (quickly retracted) caused the press to obsess over Dukakis’ health record for the better part of a week–enough to slow his momentum during a crucial stage of campaigning. (Campaigns and disability: When an incumbent president questions his potential successor’s mental health status during the campaign)
I was struck by an article in Counterpunch late last year: Scott Tucker wrote a piece centred around war and peace and to further enlighten his readers he provided links to two other articles: “I am including links to two articles readers may find useful. The first article was just published at World Socialist Website (WSWS). They are Trotskyists and I am not, but in this case I pretty much agree with their views.”
Oh dear! A man failing to dismiss a political group on the basis of their description or political leaning! Where will it all end?
I am a communist in the traditional sense that I aligned myself to the Communist Party of Ireland for many, many years only to discover that either most of them – or me – are not the type of ‘communists’ that should keep each other company. Eventually, I was expelled for – to keep a long story very short – disobedience!
Now, how many of you readers are still with me? How many of you have now instantly made one decision or another based on what you have read so far or are you prepared to read on?
First, I will contend that in the ‘west’, liberals, progressives, left, socialists, communists, etc are so far away from achieving any political power that many of the differences between them, the historical animosities, the petty squabbles, the inflated egos, the personal disputes, are completely and utterly ridiculous. And, that many people see us that way and is why so many people will not touch us.
By all means indulge ourselves in establishing or maintaining historical or current differences. But, as is frequently the case, our fractious nonsense is only a thin veil that covers our organisational and political failures within our ever-decreasing circle. It does nothing to create any possibility for progress whatsoever. Mostly, it provides a cheap, ignorant platform to help us escape having to answer so many awkward or pertinent questions. And it certainly contributes nothing to resolving deeper fundamental issues that will inevitably arise at a later level of organisational development.
Frankly, an objective look at many organisations, including communist parties, must conclude we that have long since descended into pathetic cultish outfits. There are plenty of individuals and organisations in most ‘western’ countries that could form the basis of a united Left challenge to the prevailing and very successful ruling bodies. Many, especially in the Americas, have been successful or have made considerable progress despite overwhelming odds.
Now, look at the comfortable ‘western’ record. Take Europe. There is barely a handful of relatively successful organisations and even fewer successful communist parties. The left, the progressive forces have been chewed up and spat out for the most part, though many ‘survive’ in insular and constant states of delusion.
Discussion of revolution and communism in the English-speaking world is just fantasy role playing unless it begins and ends with the cold hard reality that the left has been completely neutralized and marginalized here and the numbers are nowhere close to what they need to be. Moving revolutionary leftism out of the farthest margins and closer to the mainstream should be your first and foremost objective before you talk about anything else, because otherwise you’re just LARPing. You’re arguing about a political movement that has no actual movement.
You can do this by outreach and activism. You can also do this by finding ways to make socialism and communism look so fucking cool that people start knocking each other over to be a part of it. Finding clever ways to make it shiny and attractive in a very indoctrinated society.
— Caitlin Johnstone, Australian journalist
Where to start? At least, acknowledge that the capitalistic and imperialistic forces, organisations and political parties have excelled themselves compared to the Left despite their differences. Acknowledge that they have utilised every means available to them — especially the media — in spectacular fashion particularly in relation to their struggle with the Left. The enormous imbalance in our access to the broad media does not absolve us of the requirement to at least try to counter or circumvent that imbalance.
Nothing does more to fracture the Left than the Left itself. The establishment, along with the media (and frequently with the media and their armies) plant the seeds of division and the Left grows those seeds to maturity with unrelenting eagerness and astonishing success.
I am sorry that this little peep into the Left is largely concentrated on Europe. Despite decades of engagement in solidarity with Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela (chiefly), my practical political experience is in Europe.
I have watched (and marched with) people being led to the top of the hill so many times in my lifetime on so many issues only to find that everyone had to find their own way home with nothing more than either the satisfaction that they had done ‘something’ about something or the feeling that they had been led astray – completely astray by leaders who had no sense of direction.
For now, in the ‘west’, we have lost the battle with the capitalists and our prospects of changing that trajectory are slim. However, to improve those odds, to prepare for the coming confrontations we have to be better organised than in the past. That is self-evident:
Stop living in the past
Stop accepting mediocre leadership
Stop listening to ‘leaders’ whose only response to any issue is to ‘organise’ a picket or a march
Stop relying on so-called liberals whose only purpose in life is to let you down when you need them the most
Stop believing that governments who do not respond to any democratic demands will be intimidated into accepting the demands of some pathetic picket outside (always outside) some government department or other
Stop everything and reassess and learn from our past failures
Stop responding to each and every provocation thrown at us by our governments, or blocs or employers – they are laughing out loud at us. It is so hilarious for them that they feed us on a constant drip diet of provocation and watch as hundreds of separate organisations respond in hundreds of separate ways – none of which threatens them in the slightest
Stop and try to work out how and why we have lost the argument when our message could be and should be so attractive – how can this be?
Stop believing that when a government retreats on some particular issue that that has been a victory for the opposition. At best, it may be a tactical retreat. If only the Left would engage in a tactical retreat from failed tactics, we might make some progress on some front
Stop accepting any financing from your government or local authority to ‘assist’ in running some social organisation or other, some quasi-educational project, some ‘human-rights’ outfit, there are literally hundreds of examples. The state funding organisations that often engage in campaigns against the government! Do you think that the governments are stupid?
Stop accepting leadership from rogues and charlatans – if you take the time to look, they will expose themselves, and usually the only cover they have is a compliant membership
Stop evading our responsibility for ensuring the effectiveness of our organisation
Stop embracing all sorts of side-issues – race, religion, gender, etc and stick to the only thing that can resolve these issues – class unity and class victory
Stop strangling discussion: at the same time stop analysing issues to death at the expense of any form of organised response
Stop showing how small we are, how little support we have. The governments, the capitalists and unfortunately the people already know this, mostly because in case they missed it, we insist on reminding them at every opportunity!
Stop thinking that every defeat is somehow a victory – skip the self-delusion and start to learn the real difference between the two concepts
Stop and accept that especially in the English-speaking world and in Europe generally we lost and are continuing to lose more every day and try to figure out why that is the case and try to figure out what to do about it
Stop and consider why there are so many separate groups with separate approaches on issues that most other organisations would hold some degree of sympathy with. There is no question that many of the leaders of these, let’s call them specialised or sectional groups, have been driven out of other groups or had failed to make any progress or even see any prospect for progress on some issue within some larger group. There is a lot of talent out there, a great number of people with specialist knowledge yet all, including the larger groups, are running round like headless chickens and failing to recognise the basic principle that unity, or even co-operation, is strength
Stop and consider the issue of unity being strength (for the most part): If unity is strength, then disunity is weakness. Weakness inevitably leads to failure. Who is responsible for the disunity of forces on the Left?
Stop and consider how we are rated, not necessarily in terms of success or failure, as these concepts are subject to wild variations according to our environment, but in terms of how we are perceived: how does our government rate us in terms of being a threat, how do other organisations rate us (for all manner of reasons), how do the people we appeal to rate us?
“Street activism reinforces the negative public perception”
“Street activism is more about cops, “symbolic” arrests, and social media”
“Street activism gives us the illusion of being a threat”
— Mickey Z
Stop behaving as if we just represent ourselves. By our own declarations we take on to represent the working class. Yet, carrying that responsibility we expose ourselves variously as disorganised, violent (sometimes), incompetent, tiny, fractious, vulgar, arrogant or cult-like outfits presenting ourselves as glorious defeated heroes and/or marked with an obvious outcast mentality. If you don’t recognise yourself then ask anyone in the street and they will set you straight. Even if you are not one of the above, even if you are one of the few stalwarts, you will be lumped in with the above either because people are not able to distinguish one from the other, or you will be deliberately so labelled by the media, etc
Stop and look to see if there is one thing we do well: any one thing that we do well that makes us indispensable in the wider or narrower scheme of the political reality you inhabit
Just Stop. Consider for one moment what would be the consequence if your particular organisation ceased to exist. Would such a disappearance even be noted within the great scheme of things? Be honest with ourselves. The fact is that most left political organisations would not be missed. That does not mean that they should go away. Indeed, they are needed more than ever. However, it does mean that most of them do have to completely reassess their situation. Instead of wasting time doing the same futile things time after time, take a look at ourselves and develop some self-respect for our image.
Considering that the capitalists have outgunned the Left — in every sense of the word — how can it be possible that we continue to use every method that we know does not work. What is the matter with us?
The Left has no credibility, for the most part and in most instances. It is not only the governments and the capitalists that ignore us but also the very people we try to appeal to. They deserted us in droves and continue to do so.
“But that’s the magic of ‘activism,’ isn’t it? We rebels loyally follow the time-worn script and then pat ourselves on the back for being so badass that the ‘pigs’ have no choice but to come after us.”
“Imagine if those who are passionate about living in a more sane, equitable, and compassionate society, took steps that actually contributed to that noble goal.”
What is to be done? There is no alternative to good organisation — it is the key to everything. Solid political and organisational structures will transform any group no matter what it is. Rejecting all the previous methods that did not work — and will not work — is the first step to being forced to consider alternative approaches. That can only happen when the organisation itself is nourished with clear plans and strategies. When we skip that step, we are doomed and so is anything we touch. Building the organisation and promoting policies are distinct activities which, although related, require separate attentions and expertise.
Look at the real world, the world of capitalist successes and outright victories in pursuing and achieving their goals for themselves. Capitalism itself is a disaster but the people who oversee that disaster are first-class organisers and strategists. They have not secured and cemented their grip on most of the world on a wing and a prayer.
We cannot lead others until you know where we are going ourselves. We have to recognise that too many people have been led up blind alleys and are no longer willing to be fooled again. We have to take responsibility for having been the cause of that disastrous outcome and take steps to make sure there is no continuation or re-occurrence of that disaster. Think quality, not quantity. Just like the 1% does. Think organisation. Just like the 1% does. Think strategy. Just like the 1% does. Or, do we consider ourselves (from a broad organisation and strategic perspective) to be better at the job than they are?
“Using no way as way. Having no limitation as your only limitation.”
— Bruce Lee
Leaving the futility behind will be no loss but seriously reassessing our internal situation just might sow a seed of our choice that we could learn to nourish and develop. Is that proposition so hard to understand? After we have achieved some organisational and leadership capacities, we might just be able to look at the next step: how to cooperate with others and then achieve unity. We have nothing to lose but our own self-imposed chains!
It is likely that I may be wrong on some of the points I have raised. It is just as likely that I have missed many other important points. In any event, can you correct me or enlighten me without attacking me? At least, try.
How the RNZ/TVNZ merger went from its first reading in Parliament to the legislative extinction list is an example of why New Zealand actually needs more public media and not less. Let me explain.
It has been labelled a grenade, a dog and a monolithic, monopolistic monster. Yet it is actually a reasonable policy that would bring New Zealand public media in line with most other developed countries.
No other developed country has separate national television and radio networks. They have seen how it fails us and said, “no thanks”.
Most other developed countries spend quite a bit more on their public media platforms too. Brits pay $81 each, Norwegians $110, Germans $142, but Kiwis just $27 each year to fund RNZ, TVNZ and NZ On Air.
Even with the government’s funding increase over the next three years, we’ll still be spending less per person than Australia, Ireland or any other country we like to compare ourselves to.
A big part of our public media underspend is successive governments’ policy that TVNZ pay its own way and rely on advertising dollars.
Other countries subsidise their public media because they realise that a reliable source of news and information is too important to be left in the hands of marketers and advertising departments.
Other end of the spectrum
At the other end of the spectrum is the US spending just $3 per person on public media. You have to wonder how different US politics might be if it had fully-funded public media.
It is true that TVNZ does receive funding for programmes through NZ On Air but those shows still have to be simple and entertaining because TVNZ sells adverts around them. Only Sunday mornings have programmes for minorities or long-form political interviews, and of course, that is when there is no advertising.
That is the big difference between public media and commercial media. Public media doesn’t rely on advertising so it isn’t so desperate to get your attention and blast adverts at you.
Public media has time to examine public issues in-depth.
Commercial media needs to make money and with advertising dollars drifting to Google and Facebook, they work even harder to make content as eye-catching, entertaining and easy to understand as possible.
You may have noticed it on TVNZ, Newshub, Stuff or at the New Zealand Herald. These days there are more articles about crime, car crashes and weather bombs because they catch people’s attention.
Political reporting also wants to catch your attention. While public media can spend half an hour discussing a policy in-depth, commercial media want eyeballs so they go for the fun stuff — who’s up and who’s down in the pugilistic soap opera of daily politics. It is entertaining and it’s quick and easy to explain.
Complicated issues
Unlike this opinion piece I’m writing for you now — I’m already halfway through my allotted word count, yet I’ve spent all of them just explaining the background. Complicated issues take more time to explain. I had better get on with it.
It was in this commercial political reporting soap opera that the media merger lost its way. Like many politicians, opposition broadcasting spokesperson Melissa Lee exploited commercial media’s focus on simplification and pugilism to attack the government. She repeatedly claimed the government could not explain why we need the merger, but the government had tried to explain it, only the public hadn’t heard because it is too complicated to explain quickly and simply on commercial media (as I’m trying to do here).
Political reporting fixated on Willie Jackson’s various stumbles as though this reflected the policy, rather than analysing the policy itself.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon also exploited commercial media’s lack of examination. He criticised the merger for being “ideological”, claiming it would destroy TVNZ’s business model, and saying he would demerge it if National win the election.
But none of the interviewers asked Luxon to explain his figures or why the destruction of TVNZ’s business model would be a bad thing. None asked him if demerging would also be “ideological” and none asked if he would get a cost-benefit analysis done before demerging.
Lee and Luxon’s criticism worked. A Taxpayers Union poll in November claimed 54 percent opposed the merger and 22 percent supported it.
Different polling outcome
My organisation, Better Public Media Trust, also polled on the subject but we added some information about the merger, its costs and benefits. We got quite different results with just 29 percent opposing and 44 percent supporting the merger.
That shows what a little bit of information can do to public opinion. It also shows that reliance on commercial media for political discussion is prone to being style over substance, posturing over policy, soap operas over documentaries.
That is why the merger should go ahead. People would see it’s not a dog, grenade or monster, but intelligent, diverse and informative public media. Just in time for the election.
Myles Thomas is chair of the Better Public Media Trust (BPM). He is a television producer and director of various forms of “factual” programming, and in 2012 he established established the Save TVNZ 7 campaign. This article was first published in the New Zealand Herald and is republished here with the author’s permission.
More than 3,000 people marched on Dartmoor on Saturday 21 January in a show of defiance against a high court ruling which ended the right to wild camp on the moor. People travelled from all over the country to join one of the largest land rights protests in recent history.
Dartmoor had been the only location where wild camping was still legal in England. A case brought by hedge fund manager Alexander Darwall, who owns land on Dartmoor, overturned this right. Darwall deployed private security guards to surround the entrances of his home as protesters marched past. The crowd continued up onto Stall Moor, an area of Dartmoor owned by Darwall himself.
Igniting a spark
The ruling has done exactly what Darwall won’t have wanted it to do: it has sparked outrage across the country over land rights, and is likely to be a catalyst for an even bigger movement to come.
Kim Turner travelled all the way from Brighton to join the march. She is part of Landscapes of Freedom, a group which takes action to fight for our right to roam. She told The Canary:
Dartmoor called and we answered. This was the physical embodiment of our collective love for Dartmoor, for hiking, for being in nature & of course, for our right to wild camp. Contrary to the age-worn, neo-feudal arguments of wealthy landowners, we are the folk who love the land. We respect it. We marvel at it, in it. Nature nurtures.
And continued:
Our shared response to this modern enclosure flowed up onto Stall Moor, where our hearts beat as one in the biggest land rights protest most of us have witnessed.
Adding insult to injury
After the high court ruling, a ‘compromise’ was reached between Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) and the moor’s landowners. Under the new agreement, the DNPA will pay the landowners to open up parts of their estates for wild camping, transferring funds needed elsewhere into the hands of millionaires. Landowners can take away their permission at any time, and the amount of land we will have access to will be much smaller.
For those of us who believe it is a most basic right to be able to roam freely and wild camp, this new deal adds insult to injury. The entitlement of Darwall and his cronies is breathtaking; they think nothing of forcing us to seek their permission to camp on the land, and they expect us to bow to their demands.
The Canary spoke to Sam, a local from Exeter, who joined the protest. Sam regularly wild camps on Dartmoor. He said:
For me, to be able to camp in the wild, in nothing but nature only a short distance from where I live, is priceless. And I’ll continue to do so because I won’t let greed try and take this right away from me, us.
Indeed, the day after the protest, Sam took his tent and wild camped on the moor:
Many of us will continue to wild camp on Dartmoor, despite the ruling. Photo courtesy of Sam.
A class issue
The Dartmoor ruling is, of course, an attack on those of us who are working class, who are looked upon with disgust if we have the audacity to leave our urban areas and enjoy time in nature. We saw this contempt for us during the Covid lockdowns of 2020, when travel was restricted and we came to Dartmoor to wild camp. Instead of being made to feel welcome, we were demonised by those with more money, as well as by the mainstream media. News about tents being left on the moor made national headlines. DNPA itself contributed to this demonisation by temporarily banning wild camping.
Instead of appreciating that the pandemic was an exceptional period in history, and instead of posing the obvious question as to why there aren’t more spots where we can freely camp to take pressure off Dartmoor, the DNPA began a consultation on new by-laws that would restrict public camping for good.
This nationwide demonisation of outsiders littering our beautiful moorland does, of course, play right into the land-owning elite’s hands. It suits them to portray us as incapable of looking after nature. If enough people believe that, then they won’t have to truly consider giving us the right to roam our countryside.
Jo, a local from Torbay, also argued that this is very much a class issue. She joined the 3,000-strong march, and told the Canary:
At a time when everything is being privatised, people in working class towns are unable to access good mental health support or care. Access to nature is, then, vital for good mental health. We have been forced out of not just the housing market, but also our home towns because of second homes and richer people moving into the area. We’re not going to be forced off our land as well.
The start of a greater movement
Despite its terrible implications for our access to land in England, the Dartmoor ruling is the wake-up call that many people needed. Jo said:
This case has brought the unfairness of land ownership to the attention of a wider range of people. More and more people are becoming aware of how little we’re able to access the countryside, and we’re not just going to stop at getting the right to camp on Dartmoor back.
A series of mass–trespasses in 2021 and 2022, organised by both the Right to Roam campaign and Landscapes of Freedom, previously contributed to a growing collective consciousness. The trespasses drew attention to the fact that we only have the right to roam on 8% of England’s land. 92% is out-of-bounds to the public, and you’ll be trespassing if you even set foot on it.
These trespasses mobilised roughly 300 people at a time, and the Dartmoor ruling has enraged thousands more, spurring them to make their voices heard. Indeed, the numbers marching on Dartmoor at the weekend were more than that of the famous 1932 mass-trespass on Kinder Scout.
Sam said:
This is just the start of a bigger movement. I’m seeing people getting involved, not just marching, but talking about Dartmoor, sharing posts about it on social media. Before this I wouldn’t have known that they had any interest. This shows just how much people care.
Kim said:
This has become a catalyst for the flourishing Right to Roam movement. This is just the beginning and we will not stop til our rights are reclaimed.
So, in his contempt for the masses, Darwall might have unwittingly unleashed the biggest land rights movement this generation has ever seen.
He pontificated at length while his party’s MPs stood silently behind him.
From what I could tell, Sayed-Khaiyum’s speech was a mixture of political criticism and claims about the law. The politicians can respond to the political rhetoric. But claims that the government has broken the law are a more serious matter.
Sayed-Khaiyum has raised a number of complaints suggesting that the new government has broken the law. He has not been very clear about why this is so. However, for the record, let’s go over these complaints (or at least what he seems to be suggesting):
that former Constitutional Offices Commission members were unlawfully removed from office
Wrong. The Commissioners were asked to resign. They did so. No law prevents them from resigning. If they had refused to resign, they would have remained in place (as others have done).
Sayed-Khaiyum says that the PM had “no authority” to ask them to resign. Wrong. Nobody needs “authority” to ask anyone else to commit a voluntary act. The former Constitutional Offices Commissioners are not the property of the FijiFirst party. No law has been broken.
that the Minister for Home Affairs should not have asked the Commissioner of Police to resign
Wrong. It is a free country. The minister may make any request he wants — and the commissioner may accept or refuse that request.
The commissioner refused the minister’s request, saying he wanted the Constitutional Office Commission process be followed. The commissioner remains in place.
No law has been broken.
that prayers at government functions breach the Constitution
The Fiji Times front page today . . . featuring lawyer Richard Naidu’s reply on constitutional matters. Image: Screenshot APR
Sayed-Khaiyum read out s.4 of the Constitution (“Secular state”) and claimed that at government functions prayers were now only offered in one religion (presumably the Christian one).
To suggest that this is something new — that this did not happen under the FijiFirst party government — is fantasy. And I too wish that those who offer prayers were sometimes a little more sensitive to other religions.
But that is not the point. The Constitution does not tell any of us how to pray.
No law has been broken.
“not referring to all citizens as Fijians”
The Constitution may refer to all citizens as “Fijians”. But the Constitution also guarantees freedom of speech. There is no law that says we must all call each other “Fijians”. We may call each other what we want.
No law has been broken.
replacing boards of statutory authorities before expiry of their terms
Sayed-Khaiyum should be specific. Which boards is he referring to? If board members have resigned and been replaced, then what I have already said about resignations also applies.
For a number of statutory bodies the minister has, under the relevant law, the power to appoint board members. This power generally includes the power to dismiss them.
Replacing boards or board members mid-term is certainly nothing new. Sayed-Khaiyum may recall a recent example while he was Minister for Housing. He requested the entire Housing Authority board to resign before the expiry of their terms (and they complied).
No law has been broken.
taking back ATS [Air Terminal Services] workers. Sayed-Khaiyum seems to think that because a court decided that ATS is not required to take the workers back, ATS cannot do so.
Wrong. Any parties to litigation — including employers and employees — can decide to settle their differences at any time — including after a court ruling. The new government has requested ATS to take its former employees back. If ATS has a legal problem with this, no doubt it will tell government.
No law has been broken.
that using vernacular languages in Parliament breaches Standing Orders
Other than for the formal process of electing the Speaker and the Prime Minister, Parliament has not yet even sat yet.
The new government wants to allow the use of vernacular languages in Parliament. The current Standing Orders do not permit this.
So, to allow the use of vernacular languages in Parliament, the government will have to propose changes to the Standing Orders and parliamentarians will have to vote for them. That is normal procedure (Standing Order 128).
No law has been broken.
“separation of powers”
Former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum during his attack on Fiji’s new coalition government claiming breaches of the law and Constitution. Image: The Fiji Times
Under the FijiFirst party government, this phrase seemed to be thrown around to justify anything. For example, the Parliament Secretariat would frequently refuse to allow opposition MPs to ask questions of government ministers because of “the separation of powers”.
This justification made no sense. Section 91 of the Constitution requires ministers to be accountable to Parliament.
In layman’s terms, “the separation of powers” means only that the legislature (Parliament), the executive (Cabinet and civil servants) and the judiciary (judges and magistrates) should each “stay in their lanes”.
They should not interfere in each other’s functions. Sayed-Khaiyum has made no specific allegations that the new government has breached this concept. What law does he say has been broken?
FijiFirst and the Constitution
Sayed-Khaiyum’s FijiFirst party government applied the Constitution as it suited them.
It never set up the Accountability and Transparency Commission that the Constitution required (s.121) It never set up a Ministerial Code of Conduct as the Constitution required (s.149).
It never set up a Freedom of Information Act as the Constitution required (s.150). This was, after all, his own government’s constitution.
His government treated Parliament — the elected representatives of Fiji’s people — with contempt. Almost all of its laws were passed under urgency (Standing Order 51).
Typically, parliamentarians got two days’ notice of what new laws the government was proposing, sometimes less. That meant no one had time to review the laws
or consult the people on them.
The FFP government treated the people’s laws as its own property. Sayed-Khaiyum complains about board members being removed and public service appointment rules not being followed. He says nothing about the numerous arbitrary terminations of many public servants under the FijiFirst party government, including the Solicitor-General and the Government Statistician.
It was no less than the Fiji Law Society president who this week described rule of law under the FijiFirst government as “sometimes hanging by a thread”.
Against this background, not many lawyers are prepared to listen to Sayed-Khaiyum lecture us on the law.
#LOCALNEWS Who’s broken the law? “Separation of powers” and all that stuff. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s hour-long news conference on Saturday, January 21, seems mostly to have followed the usual FijiFirst party format. #TimesNews#FijiNews#FijiPolhttps://t.co/sblh8koJBs
The “separation of powers” doctrine is also clear that if you have a problem with the lawfulness of any government action, the courts are there to solve that problem. It is the
courts who decide if anyone has breached the Constitution. It is not the secretary of the opposition political party.
So, if Sayed-Khaiyum has a complaint that the law has been broken, he should do what the rest of us do — take it to court. That is what he frequently told the Opposition to do when it complained about what his government did.
Sayed-Khaiyum has a little more time on his hands now. He is a qualified lawyer with a practising certificate. So — get on with it. Bring your complaints to court, because
that is where they belong. Should Sayed-Khaiyum really be lecturing us about the law?
Finally, Sayed-Khaiyum has still not explained to anyone how, in the space of three days in January, he got himself kicked out of Parliament by accepting a position on the Constitutional Offices Commission — and then had to resign from the Constitutional Offices Commission when asked how he could continue as general secretary of the Fiji First Party.
Should we really be taking legal advice from him?
Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer and a columnist. The views in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times. Republished with permission.
As Julian Assange awaits the final appeal of his looming extradition to the United States while languishing behind bars in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, leading left luminaries and free press advocates gathered in Washington, DC, on Friday for the fourth sitting of the Belmarsh Tribunal, where they called on US President Joe Biden to drop all charges against the WikiLeaks publisher.
“From Ankara to Manila to Budapest to right here in the United States, state actors are cracking down on journalists, their sources, and their publishers in a globally coordinated campaign to disrupt the public’s access to information,” co-chair and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman said during her opening remarks at the National Press Club.
“The Belmarsh Tribunal… pursues justice for journalists who are imprisoned or persecuted [and] publishers and whistleblowers who dare to reveal the crimes of our governments,” she said.
“Assange’s case is the first time in history that a publisher has been indicted under the Espionage Act,” Goodman added.
“Recently, it was revealed that the CIA had been spying illegally on Julian, his lawyers, and some members of this very tribunal. The CIA even plotted his assassination at the Ecuadorean Embassy under [former US President Donald] Trump.”
Assange — who suffers from physical and mental health problems, including heart and respiratory issues — could be imprisoned for 175 years if fully convicted of Espionage Act violations.
Among the classified materials published by WikiLeaks — many provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning — are the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing a US Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs, which revealed American and allied war crimes.
Arbitrary detention According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested on December 7, 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in Belmarsh Prison, for which the tribunal is named.
Human rights, journalism, peace, and other groups have condemned Assange’s impending extradition and the US government’s targeting of an Australian journalist who exposed American war crimes.
“That the extradition proceedings against Assange are an unexpected legal outcome — is a lie. Based on my experience as Ecuador’s foreign minister…the British government wanted to extradite him all along.” — @GuillaumeLong
In a statement ahead of Friday’s tribunal, co-chair and Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat said:
The First Amendment, freedom of the press, and the life of Julian Assange are at stake. That’s why the Belmarsh Tribunal is landing literally just two blocks away from the White House.
As long as the Biden administration continues to deploy tools like the Espionage Act to imprison those who dare to expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe.
Our tribunal is gathering courageous voices of dissent to demand justice for those crimes and to demand President Biden to drop the charges against Assange immediately.
Belmarsh Tribunal participants include Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, US academic Noam Chomsky, British parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn, former Assange lawyer Renata Ávila, human rights attorney Steven Donziger, and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson.
The Belmarsh Tribunal hearing in Washington DC on January 20, 2023. Video: Democracy Now!
Assange’s father, John Shipton, and the whistleblower’s wife and lawyer Stella Assange, are also members, as are Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola, Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights, Selay Ghaffar of the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan, investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, and ACLU attorney Ben Wizner.
Former U.K. Labour Party leader @jeremycorbyn is in Washington for the Belmarsh Tribunal to advocate for Julian Assange’s freedom as he fights extradition from Britain to the United States.
“We’re standing up for the right to know. We’re standing up for journalism,” Corbyn says. pic.twitter.com/A4v6QbNSN0
First Amendment foundation
“One of the foundation stones of our form of government here in the United States . . . is our First Amendment to the Constitution,” Ellsberg — whom the Richard Nixon administration tried to jail for up to 115 years under the Espionage Act, but due to government misconduct was never imprisoned — said in a recorded message played at the tribunal.
“Up until Assange’s indictment, the act had never been used… against a journalist like Assange,” Ellsberg added. “If you’re going to use the act against a journalist in a blatant violation of the First Amendment… the First Amendment is essentially gone.”
Ávila said before Thursday’s event that “the Espionage Act is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation in the world: an existential threat against international investigative journalism.”
“If applied, it will deprive us of one of our must powerful tools towards de-escalation of conflicts, diplomacy, and peace,” she added.
“The Belmarsh Tribunal convened in Washington to present evidence of this chilling threat, and to unite lawmakers next door to dismantle the legal architecture that undermines the basic right of all peoples to know what their governments do in their name.”
The Belmarsh Tribunal, first convened in London in 2021, is inspired by the Russell Tribunal, a 1966 event organised by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to hold the US accountable for its escalating war crimes in Vietnam.
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished under a Creative Commons licence.
I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don’t even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
You don’t need a thousand hours studying what trauma is, what forms it might take, delving into wars and conflicts, from the great war, when the psychologists in Europe attempted to study (sic; sick) shell shocked veterans, and, of course, how many civilians are there in that process of witnessing the most horrific treatment of humans and animals at the hands of, well, the soldiers, sure, and the definition of soldier is:
1. a person who serves in an army; a person engaged in military service.
2. an enlisted person, as distinguished from a commissioned officer: the soldiers’ mess and the officers’ mess.
a person of military skill or experience: George Washington was a great soldier.
verb (used without object): to act or serve as a soldier.
Informal. to loaf while pretending to work; malinger:
3. a wingless caste of ant or termite with a large specially modified head and jaws, involved chiefly in defense.
Soldiers? Mindless individuals? Bizarrely propagandized patriotic fools? Blood lust wannabes? Mercenaries in the employ of dirty, grotesque nations? Those who would rather wrap themselves in flags, swastikas, Ukrainian blue and yellow ribbons, and then, shoot to kill, shoot anything that moves, Murder All Military Aged Men? But they are being pushed around territories and lands by the War is a Racket Money Kings and Queens (do you want to see if your school, business, your own measely money investments are into one of these Top 100 War Profiteers? How about My Lai?
Hit men, one and all, whether from one of the Military Academies, or just from the dungeons of mercenary hell; hired on, persuaded by incompetents — generals and chiefs of staff and politicians and heads of the war profiteers and the civil servants in the revolving door scam. Teary eyed songs on Veterans Day/Armistice Day. Pathetic selling war, more war, and ZERO negotiations — many of them do not care about civilians, fighters, museums, churches, land, et al. Truly ruthless, in that they dehumanize their own babies, daughters, wheelchair-bound grandfathers, their own pets, all of it, it is open season. Sure, not THEIRS directly, but those children, babies, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, old and young, moms and pops on the OTHER side. Oh, that’s right, only kill those deemed the enemy? Nakba anyone?
Barbaric, brutal, and, if they went into uniformed, armed “service” with any humanity in their bones, any guts that states war is evil, well, well, well, they come out natural-born killers, warped, broken, disassociated from people, angry, psychotic, psychologically wounded, and, then, that shell shock we talked about early in the days of nascent psychology. Do not judge too harshly those youth that get caught up in gangs, who have nothing of a family unit, who have nothing to live for but guns, macho, abuse, drug running, following a leader, and murder. Which Faustian Gamble is the Best Faustian Bargain?
Beware, though, as you watch Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro in Sicario I, II, or III, because that macho shit — and it includes brutality, murdering, execution, rape, pedophilia, torturing, soldiering on, i.e., looking up to a male or male-like leader — might make the viewer forget the ones in suits and with briefcases and Harvard MBA’s and JD’s and political positions that they are the killers. Desensitized? Habituated? Normalized? Shows with action and no discussion board? Yeah, that’s Entertainment. I’ve met Perkins, and he too is not anything more than a hit man in mea culpa profit-making land mode. Can you really fix the sins of your own life, and the sins of your father? This fellow, again, gets on Democracy Now and into Green Festivals, vaunted as some hero (NOT).
You know, so many of us did not sign up to be murderers, never joined the economic draft, never bought into fraternities and macho Friday Night Football horror; or lusted after CIA, Criminal Injustice Outfits. Many of us never sought to work for any of those alphabet agencies of despair/disgust/ disasters/death: DoD, FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, HHS, and on and on, including DOJ. The Faustian Bargain has been signed, sealed and delivered daily by the tens of thousands for those people who want to gain, abuse, get one over on “them,” and who want to be part of the disaster capitalism shock troops of whichever form of abuse and trauma deliver one might find herself or himself in.
Oh Faustus!
Sure, Chuck Bowden was amazing, died semi-young (in his sixty-ninth year) and was a true hero of the journalistic kind.
I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one’s head, from dreaming in the fort of one’s home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over.
I’ve been to a couple of Bowden’s talks, and spoke with him in El Paso a very long time ago, it seems, when I was a journalist and teacher and, well, we will not get into THAT other thing. He’s not my guru, but he held some gravitas for me in the world of writing and journalism and speaking out against the crimes of the many set upon us all by the criminals in high office, the lobbies, the corporate boards, even the local and state agencies populated by big and small Eichmann’s, you know, little Eichmann’s. The drug gangs, lords, thugs, and politicians in Mexico are facilitated by, well, you guessed it, Military!
Let’s look at maltreatment of our children. Here and everywhere. Yes, the dirty dealings we set out for our own children and the collective children.
So, the pop-psychology headline, “Childhood Maltreatment Linked With Multiple Mental Health Problems” Jan. 10, 2023 just illustrates how slow witted, how dum downed and how flippant the entire show is, and when I mean show, I mean mainstream and internet feeds/news/games/ propaganda/marketing/ PR/advertising/yellow journalism.
The findings suggest that preventing eight cases of child maltreatment would prevent one person from developing mental health problems.
Corresponding author, Dr Jessie Baldwin (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences), said:
“It is well known that child maltreatment is associated with mental health problems, but it was unclear whether this relationship is causal, or is better explained by other risk factors.
“This study provides rigorous evidence to suggest that childhood maltreatment has small causal effects on mental health problems. Although small, these effects of maltreatment could have far-reaching consequences, given that mental health problems predict a range of poor outcomes, such as unemployment, physical health problems and early mortality.
“Interventions that prevent maltreatment are therefore not only essential for child welfare, but could also prevent long-term suffering and financial costs due to mental illness.”
Think hard Americanos, pro-Capitalists, pro-war drumming fools the absolute trauma of any conflict, that is, armed including those of the suited economic hit men as well as those tatooed hitmen children of the Pablo Escobar-El Chapo variety. Think of the Holly-Dirt images and storylines that show those folk, and it is Mario Puzo on steroids, because there is true admiration of the Mafia and the Sin City Juarez sicarios. Really, when it comes to Holly-Dirt. What about guys like Cormac McCarthy and his “No Country for Old Men” novel-turned-into-hit-movie?
What is trauma, then, those childhood maltreatments? Researchers define childhood maltreatment as any physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect before the age of 18. Imagine the life and times of a Palestinian, or a Yemeni? Imagine the life and times of those children in Donbass after the Chosen People’s Maiden coup under the auspices of the religious zealots of the Zionist variety — Nuland, Kagan, Blinken, et al?
Imagine what maltreatment is when in that Juarez neighborhood where familes are broke by booze, bounty, poverty, machoism, the unholy trinity of materialism, war, and greed? Think about how difficult it is to be a hero in your own family, neighborhood, school, job, state, country.
Thnks of all that trauma the USA inflicts on children before age 18. School lunches are not being cut, and school districts across the land are holding the proverbial hundreds of millions of dollars owed bag. Think hard how a Republican cuts the school lunches, and how dysfunctional schools are with a counselor for every 250 or more elementary students. Think of your community and try and find one qualified child psychologist with real work under her belt.
Student meal debt is rising rapidly in many school districts across the country.
The reason: now that federal funding that made school meals free for all students during the pandemic has ended, families are either struggling to pay for school meals or aren’t even aware that the program ended and they are now obligated to pay.
The end of universal free school meals comes as inflation and rising labor costs are driving up food prices for both schools and families.
No anger yet, over this messed up reality while the multimillionaire Nazified War Thug Zelenskyy gets billions and billions from U$A?
Maltreatment! Think of all the news, all the parents’ fears coming home to the child. Think of yelling, cursing, whipping, swatting, all of that, including how little attention and interaction adults have with those developing spirits-bodies-brains. So many adults are checked out, infantilized, Disneyfied and vapid and vacant. Fear and anger, the ugly mix with greed, that pretty much do it.
Think think think how corrupted adults are, and how foolish even people who want to do good are when they spend time worrying or reading about body shaming at the Golden Globes when their own communities lack childcare, day care, domestic abuse care, health care, mental care, activities care.
Who are the monsters? The kiddos surviving the hell on the streets? Dodging the violent adults? Hiding from the murdering cops? Are they kings of their own world?
Kings of the World? How does this film about teenagers in Columbia questing for the land one lad’s grandmother once owned but who had the land taken away? Of course, at the end of the flick, they make it to the land, and find gold miners polluting it, and, then, bam, all the kids get murdered. That is not a spoiler alert, my fine socialist readers, I hope!
Before “The Kings of the World,” the latest feature from Colombian writer-director Laura Mora, inserts us in the bustling streets of Medellín, where teenagers wield machetes to protect themselves, a shot of a fairy-tale-appropriate white horse introduces the dreamlike atmosphere of this ferocious fable about five adolescent street boys denied basic humanity.
Homeless and with no blood family to guard them, the young souls at the forefront of this electrifying social drama fend for themselves in a gritty urban environment. Their only comfort comes from the brotherly affection they display for one another. That state, caught between tenderness and violence as they navigate an inhospitable reality, defines the visceral energy of “The Kings of the World,” Colombia’s most recent Oscar entry.
The leader of the group, 19-year-old Rá (Carlos Andrés Castañeda), has just learned that the land his grandmother was forcefully evicted from many years in the past has finally been returned to him, the sole heir, as part of the government’s land restitution policies. As Rá, Castañeda exudes an air of innocence wrapped in determination. Heroically not bitter despite the harshness he’s faced, his large, expressive eyes illuminate a path forward.
The reality is that these boys are abused, man, and they drink and smoke, and get their asses kicked and beat up and knifed. The reality is they are the street urchins of Dickens or Bowden, the victims of maltreatment after maltreatment. The movie might have that Lord of the Flies undertone, but the reality is we the view should be steaming under the collar looking at how messed up Latin American countries are with the rich and oligarchs and the Americanos messing with the majority of the good people . . . . Until, generations of young men end up anchorless, stuck in the cycle of guns, drugs, knives, duking it out, dog-eat-dog, ugliness of one and then another and then a thousand maltreatments foisted upon them by parents, family, town, state, country, the world.
Think hard now how deeply that shell shocking does, and how wide it is cast, with the elites, the ones in suits and with suites, determining the extent of history and the future. This is this horror machine, this murderer in a suit, telling the world, telling unborn generations, or young generations, what shall be: No more Russia, no more diplomacy. Imagine that maltreatment having an even deeper affect on each new cycle of Harvard bound sad sake, taught by the Georgetown University Chosen People that history is determined by money, murder, war and elites gaming the systems, full stop.
If you do not wake up angry every day, then your are living in your organic (sic) granola world of inhuman existence. I’m not saying to go around with that anger as your operating position, but it should be there, somewhere, when intercoursing with the humanity and systems around you. This picture is worth a thousand words, and I can’t keep barraging the reader with more and more words, since I am not hearing the readers deploying those words to describe these felons for who they are — murderers, perversions of humanity, the maltreatment engines of today’s generation and generations to come (Stoltenberg and Biden):
Yeah, yeah, you gotta be laughing, for sure, at these Anglo Saxons of the highest degenerate order. But you ain’t pissed yet? Come on. See the memorial for children murdered in Donbass from 2014 to 2021?
No? Ahh, shucks, another Slav Chosen Person, Madeline, uh? Remember those cold eyes, those cold hands, wrapped on the money bags, as people, children, THOSE kiddos, are destroyed by more economic hit men and West Point brass?
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.
—60 Minutes (5/12/96)
Or, this absurdity?
“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.”
Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history.
“It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview.
The lack of curiosity in the monopoly media is far from a lack of thinking: It is a full-fledged attack on people, on history, on truth, on the Fourth Estate’s ability (once) to affect change, to get people motivated to throw the buggers out.
A Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources since September 11 turns up only one reference to the Albright quote–in an op-ed in the Orange Country Register (9/16/01). This omission is striking, given the major role that Iraq sanctions play in the ideology of archenemy Osama bin Laden; his recruitment video features pictures of Iraqi babies wasting away from malnutrition and lack of medicine (New York Daily News, 9/28/01). The inference that Albright and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale–a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one’s political ends–does not seem to be one that can be made in U.S. mass media. (Source)
Ahh, read an old piece on how massively corrupt the media are then, when USA military and planners attacked water treatment plants and restricted chlorine for keeping water safe. Read about the effects of sanctions, the very price was worth it on those children. Do you not believe that Albright, like an ocean liner’s worth of others just like her, is not a criminal of the very worst Dante’s Circles of Hell kind?
Yes, maltreatment, in early childhood?
Thomas Nagy of Georgetown University unearthed a Defense Intelligence Agency document entitled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” which was circulated to all major allied commands one day after the Gulf War started. It analyzed the weaknesses of the Iraqi water treatment system, the effects of sanctions on a damaged system and the health effects of untreated water on the Iraqi populace. Mentioning that chlorine is embargoed under the sanctions, it speculates that “Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons,” something that the United States disallowed for many years.
Combined with the fact that nearly every large water treatment plant in the country was attacked during the Gulf War, and seven out of eight dams destroyed, this suggests a deliberate targeting of the Iraqi water supply for “postwar leverage,” a concept U.S. government officials admitted was part of military planning in the Gulf War (Washington Post, 6/23/91).
A Dow Jones search for 2000 finds only one mention of this evidence in an American paper–and that in a letter to the editor (Austin American-Statesman, 10/01/00). Subsequent documents unearthed by Nagy (The Progressive, 8/10/01) suggest that the plan to destroy water treatment, then to restrict chlorine and other necessary water treatment supplies, was done with full knowledge of the explosion of water-borne disease that would result. “There are no operational water and sewage treatment plants and the reported incidence of diarrhea is four times above normal levels,” one post-war assessment reported; “further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation,” another predicted.
Combine this with harsh and arbitrary restrictions on medicines, the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities, and the fact that, until this summer, vaccines for common infectious diseases were on the so-called “1051 list” of substances in practice banned from entering Iraq. Deliberately creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment is little different morally from deliberately introducing a disease-causing organism like anthrax, but no major U.S. paper seems to have editorialized against the U.S. engaging in biological warfare–or even run a news article reporting Nagy’s evidence that it had done so. (The Madison Capitol Times–8/14/01–and the Idaho Statesman–10/2/01–ran op-eds that cited Nagy’s work.)
— Source, Nov.1, 2001, “We Think the Price Is Worth It — Media uncurious about Iraq policy’s effects–there or here” by Rahul Mahajan.
Who makes money off of all the pain, the disease, all the epigenetic harm, all the chronic illnesses, all the psychotic breaks, all the PTSD a la Shell Shock? Who makes money or hay from meth or coke addiction? Crime pays, right, for the criminal justice systems of oppression, suppression, plea agreements, revolving door private prison complex.
Read all about it, that Sophisticated, High Brow, Articulate, Shakespeare-Producing Anglo Saxon Murder Incorporated, with the King and Queen and Lords looking over them. Makes those street kids I used to talk with in El Paso and Juarez, you know, spooks or huffers, using glue and even gasoline to get high:
Caroline Elkins’ accounts of British soldiers ramming broken bottles into the vaginas of female Kenyan prisoners during the Kikuyus’ Mau Mau revolt is not, by any stretch, the worst example of Albion’s imperial violence she recounts. Because this 870 page book is awash with similar instances of systematic war crimes by the British administration in Kenya, in Nigeria, Jamaica, South Africa, Malaya, Palestine, Cyprus, Nyasaland, India and countless other outposts of empire, justifiable comparisons between the British and the Nazis arise time and again.
And, although many Nazis were brought to book for their crimes, no British were, even though General Sir Frank Kitson, one of the most notorious of these Grade A war criminals, who hopscotched about from one colonial killing field to the next, is still alive and, no doubt, still plotting the murder of others. The book makes it plain that the British had a bunch of such military and civil service troubleshooters, psychopathic thugs like Kitson and Bomber Harris they were prepared to send, almost at a moment’s notice, to any part of their rotten empire where the “natives” had to be duffed up, a euphemism for barbaric tortures derived from Douglas Duff, one of their Satanic number.
Many of these savages, such as Percival and Montgomery, served alongside the Black and Tan terrorist group in Ireland, before moving on to Palestine, India and Malaya where they honed their torture techniques, which resembled those devils use in medieval paintings.
Or do these fellows really scare the shit out of you?
Ahh, there are so many houses of horrors, in the millions, man, that would scare the pants off of any sicario:
Sacred Yet? And I am big on NOT letting a teachable moment pass, a bit of Jewish Zeaotry tied to the origins of the word, “sicario,” which Jewish Holly-Dirt writers and producers and directors might never let the Netflix public see. (Curious, no, why you see no movies, dramas or otherwise, on the Top platforms or from movie studies on the murdering of families and youth and pets by the Jewish Occupiers? )
The Sicarii (Modern Hebrew: סיקריים siqariyim) were a splinter group of the JewishZealots who, in the decades preceding Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 CE, strongly opposed the Roman occupation of Judea and attempted to expel them and their sympathizers from the area. The Sicarii carried sicae, or small daggers, concealed in their cloaks. At public gatherings, they pulled out these daggers to attack Romans and alleged Roman sympathizers alike, blending into the crowd after the deed to escape detection.
It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 31 March 1968 . . . . Born in 1929, King’s actual birthday is January 15 (which in 1929 fell on a Tuesday).
The super successful mega-investor, Warren Buffett, CEO of the giant conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, was heard to say: There are only 535 members of Congress, why can’t 300 million Americans control them? That’s a pretty fundamental question since our senators and representatives are given their sovereign power by the people. Remember the preamble to our Constitution?
Buffett is a generous philanthropist. Among his contributions, he has given the Gates Foundation (public health projects) about $3 billion each year for over a decade. That’s over $30 billion dollars! Just one $3 billion contribution, devoted to establishing systemic-focused Congress Watchdog locals in every congressional district, would fund such groups for more than thirty years. Their objective would be to organize up to one-half of one percent of adults to volunteer in each congressional district to make sure our elected officials do the general public’s bidding under honest election procedures. The American people and their children have far more commonly desired necessities and wants than the hyped divide-and-rule tactics imposed by the present ruling powers imply. (See, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State by Ralph Nader, April 2014).
Answer: I did once, broadly, in a written letter. No connection was made. In 2011, I wrote a fictional book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” about a Warren Buffett recoiling from the immediate neglectful aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. In the book, he launched, with 16 other enlightened individuals, a just, step-by-step democratic overhauling of American politics top-down and then bottom-up.
This realistic work of fiction caught his attention. He invited me to showcase the book at his massive annual shareholder’s meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. I went.
At an earlier breakfast, I mused about the story becoming a Hollywood movie. He amusingly asked who would play his character. I mentioned actors like Warren Beatty or Alan Alda.
In any event, nothing came of these interactions. My guess is that having to closely supervise over 70 managers of the sizable corporate subsidiaries of Berkshire requires an intensity of focus and time that is incompatible with the additional project of changing Congress to get good things done – popular as that would be in today’s America.
Some knowing readers might ask why Buffett doesn’t ask his network of some 236 multi-billionaires, who have signed on to his Giving Pledge, to donate half of their wealth to “good works.”
Answer: A condition for the Giving Pledge is that these philanthropists would not urge or ask each other to support their favored causes.
The obvious rejoinder to that impediment might be, “Surely this reflective man, who gets his calls returned, can create the necessary institutional network and public investments to make these long-overdue changes” – again top-down then bottom-up. Probably, yes. But the problem is, neither he nor his collaborators want to be the recipients of daily vitriol and smears so easily conveyed to the world through the Internet. They want to be left to concentrate on their own business or other pursuits in retirement.
So, what it comes down to is the perceived sense of great urgency, coupled with a belief that a group, such as described, is unique to being able to make a significant, lasting difference for the present and for posterity. That is what a civic sense of legacy, demonstrated already by the Pledgors, is – but multiplied many times over by institutional and structural reforms, backed by a critical mass of an alert citizenry, and nurtured by regular civic education for all ages.
There are, predictably, many readers who will scoff and stereotype all very rich people with a totally dismissive brush. There are, however, enough examples in American history that expose this wave-of-the-hand as an excessive generalization. Some are not like the rest. Even some of the rest should be given the opportunity to make amends.
You’ve stood by me through everything. You didn’t flinch when I grabbed them by the pussy. When I revealed that Obama was born in an African shithole country, you nodded approvingly. When I pointed out that rapists, child-molesters, and drug smugglers were sneaking into Texas, you had my back. When I told my people to unmask, and urged their sluggish doctors to slice them open, slosh their insides with bleach, and stick them in tanning beds, you were right there with me. Even back in 2017, when I signed the God-given right of crazy people to express themselves with guns, you knowingly smiled from above. And you were okay with me when I promised little Zelenski that I would give him the money if he just gave me the goods on that crack-head Hunter Biden. Look, you’ve never wavered through anything I’ve done for you. When I implored the faithful to retake the Capital, it was with your blessing. I mean, give me a break; you were even with me when I approved the itinerary for Mike Pence’s visit to your kingdom. So, why now; why after all we’ve done together are you now forsaking me?
Why shouldn’t he feel like a pitiful, discarded lover? Why shouldn’t he be skulking through the gloomy corridors of Mara Lago at three in the morning, howling at his abandonment? Really, there he stood, hardly more than a few months ago, not merely elected by a record-breaking crowd of patriots to be president of the United States, but anointed by God to be his chosen emissary! If maybe a bit too modest to have actually claimed the mantle himself, he wasn’t so faithless as to have denied its possibility. “I hope it’s true,” was his almost reluctant conveyance. While Trump was humbly disinclined to assertively claim deification himself, there were plenty of staunch and influential devotees willing to do it for him: Sarah Sanders, Rick Perry, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, Mike Lindell, Paula White, and Stephan Strang were only some of the visionary dignitaries who declared its obvious truth. Big name luminaries weren’t alone in seeing the hand of God in Trump’s election; millions of unheralded followers knew beyond doubt that Trump was on a divine mission.
But where are they now, in his hour of need? Why does it all seem to be slipping away from him? One by one, so many of the devoted are turning their backs. Even worse, some appear to be openly conspiring against him. And it’s not just the salt of the earth; God himself seems to be sidling away. How can that be? Really, if jilted like that, who wouldn’t be howling? It’s like one day you’re manna from heaven, and the next day you’re yesterday’s milk toast. Why now? Why the slip-sliding away at this particular time? He’s the same as he ever was, perhaps even more so. Shouldn’t that be considered a good thing? So, what in heaven’s name is going on with the faithful? What in heaven’s name is going on in heaven?
As it so often happens, the Evangelicals were the first to get the message. Admittedly, they are pious and have the world’s best antennas for receiving transmissions from God. They often hear and act on God’s word before many of us even realize there’s been a message. The word apparently came down to the attentive while some of us were still transfixed on the image of Trump’s anatomical power grab. The most faithful of the faithful were not so luridly preoccupied; many Evangelicals (and perhaps a few Catholics) got it immediately: Donald Trump was chosen by God. From that very first moment, as Donald and Melania floated down the silvery staircase, the faithful knew Donald was the man picked by God to do what needed to be done. And that’s the way it was; for more than four years, all was well in the kingdom. God smiled down upon him and the truly faithful applauded as Trump plied the endorsement that he humbly hoped was true; knowingly (or perhaps unknowingly) doing whatever it was that God wanted done.
But now, some of the faithful are drifting away. Many appear to be gravitating towards someone in Florida who doesn’t reside at Mara Lago. The exodus begs asking: Was Trump really chosen by God? If he was God’s chosen facilitator, shouldn’t God and the faithful still be hanging in there with him? If, on the other hand, he never was really chosen by God, why would so many of the Lord’s faithful have claimed to know that he was? Were they pompously talking through their halos? Or, could they have gotten it all wrong in some guileless way? Could it have been a fake message from an imposter (like maybe from the guy down under)? Or, could it have been a message from God that was innocently misinterpreted? Could there have been a communication in the message that was somehow garbled – perhaps by a host of 5G towers or maybe a dense swarm of locusts? Or, could it possibly be that he had been chosen for a little while, but was now officially and divinely unchosen? Might it be that his multi-year stint was really just “The Ultimate Job Interview,” and God was now stepping in to say, “You’re fired?”
Be that as it may, some of the big luminaries who absolutely knew and proclaimed that Trump was chosen by God to do what needed to be done, are now trying to position themselves to take over whatever it is that still needs to be done. Does God know about this? If the ambitious upstarts were truly convinced in 2016 that Trump had been chosen by God, shouldn’t it be seen as somewhat ungodly for them to now conspire against him? Or, have Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and all of the other faithful challengers gotten a new message that releases them from the first? Were they told that each will now be a God-approved contestant on the next Apprentice Show, or do they just “hope that it’s true?” Being that no Democrat or demon from hell is allowed in its production, will the contestants who eventually become unchosen, graciously accept the “You’re fired!” at its end? Pray that it’s so; God forbid there be a siege upon the Pearly Gates.
It’s still far from over, but Ron DeSantis appears to have the inside track on getting the next backing from God. His campaign ad unabashedly claims that Ron was sent to Earth to be God’s fighter, to take upon himself the arrows of the evil doers as he bravely fights to protect the rights of the righteous. Not one to be outdone, Trump has put out his own amazing ad, depicting himself as a marvelous superhero that destroys the arrows of the evil doers rather than merely taking them on. But is he now just a superhero, or does he also fight evil with God still in his corner? If indeed Trump is still chosen by God, and has also been granted superpowers, it would surely give him an edge over DeSantis who appears to have the approval of God, but without anything like Trump’s laser-vision to aid in the fight. So, while seemingly with an advantage, how come Donald seems to be losing it? Why are so many of the faithful shuffling towards Ron? Is it too much of a stretch to suspect there might be more “image” and less “God” finding its way into the divine message than was previously thought?
It’s not slanderous to suggest that neither Ron nor Donald are nice guys. “Niceness” is not an image that either seeks to project. In fact, the opposite is true; both proudly flaunt their meanness as if it’s an asset. Of the two, Trump has the longer history of meanness, but DeSantis’s meanness might enjoy an advantage in being perceived as more authenticity. Sure, Trump has had years of displayed nastiness towards women, minorities, and captured soldiers, but his meanness sometimes appears unintentional, like it’s the means to an end, rather than an end in itself. It’s not like he fakes the nastiness; it’s really there, but if allowed to bypass it, and still express his narcissistic and selfish nature, it seems possible that he possibly could. DeSantis however, appears like the real deal with meanness; he goes out of his way to be mean, as if it gives him a warm and fuzzy feeling inside all by itself. Recall how he went all the way to Texas to herd a group of desperate, asylum-seeking refugee families onto a plane, and dumped them unannounced in a faraway northern village. Like, how mean, and out-of-the-way was that? He’s even okay with being mean to kids: Not long before his Texas jaunt, in front of TV cameras, DeSantis ridiculed a hapless group of school children, admonishing them for wearing their “useless” COVID/Flu masks. Meanwhile and elsewhere, still in mean-mode, the governor was demanding that LGBT children (and adults) put on their “useful” hetero masks to prevent the spread of their gay virus into the righteous (but perhaps immunocompromised?) straight community.
So, does his authenticity now get God’s stamp of approval? Is DeSantis mean and intolerant enough to be recognized as God’s chosen emissary by the Evangelical community? Is he adroit enough to avoid the heat-vision power of an angry and vengeful Donald Trump? Many of the faithful appear to think so as they edge ever closer to Ron. But stay tuned, it’s not over yet; anything can happen; the Lord works in mysterious ways, especially when choosing his politicians.
The Gender Recognition Reform Bill passed in the Scottish parliament last month by an incredible 86 votes to 39, with cross-party support. Now, however, the UK government is moving to use Section 35 powers to block the legislation, which would otherwise de-medicalise the process of changing the gender on one’s birth certificate.
During the debate, the Times was quick to point out that a majority of the Scottish public think that a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) should still require an official gender dysphoria diagnosis. It evidenced this claim using its own specially commissioned YouGov poll.
This is an issue for two reasons. First, a dysphoria diagnosis isn’t strictly required under the current UK system already, provided that one has had gender-affirming surgery and meets certain criteria.
Second, it’s easy for the 1000-or-so people surveyed to say that a dysphoria diagnosis should be required. However, they likely have absolutely no clue as to what that entails. I want to talk about what the diagnosis involved for me, because it shook my faith in a large swath of the medical profession.
In sharing my experience, I want to demonstrate why this regressive process should not be the main criterion in my government recognising my gender.
Spiralling wait times
I received my diagnosis two years ago, after having come out to the world at large around eight years ago, give or take. I was no more trans before or after the diagnosis. Nobody has any right or business telling me whether or not I’m trans. Dysphoria is not what makes me trans.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. I’d waited for my diagnosis until my dysphoria hit its most intense peak, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t want a diagnosis. The general public knew, my family and friends knew, and I knew that I was trans. I needed hormone replacement therapy (HRT), but we do not have informed consent in this country. So, I needed a diagnosis first.
The waiting times to be seen on by a gender specialist from the NHS have been spiralling out of control for a long time. They were in the 3-4 year ballpark back then, which I wouldn’t have gotten through, so I went private. That was around £1,500 I didn’t have, to be told something I already knew.
For the diagnosis, I saw a psychiatrist. He started off with some fairly innocuous questions. How long have I known I am trans? How have I been feeling? How have people reacted? Fine.
I went in prepared for it to be a miserable experience. I’d have to recount the increasing feeling of alienation from myself that I was experiencing to a stranger. Before the first appointment, I rehearsed the whole thing in my head; I cried because I’d never put it all in plain English to myself before.
Are you sure you aren’t a pervert?
Then, he said that he believed some trans people can just be afraid of growing up, that they want to remain like children. He asked me if I wanted to be a child forever. At the time, I was in my late 20s. I’d just completed my PhD. Why he would ask this is beyond me. And, I must admit, it was a piece of bigotry that I’d never even encountered before.
Next, he asked how old I was when I first wore a dress. He asked if wearing a dress aroused me, and whether I put on women’s underwear to masturbate. He told me to describe how I have sex, and if I perform anal sex. He asked if the thought of being a woman aroused me. We didn’t move on until I answered each question in detail.
These questions were intrusive and violating. What’s more, they’re based on the theory that trans women are autogynophilic fetishists:
Autogynephilia is a paraphilic model that states that all male-to-female (MtF) transsexuals who are not exclusively attracted toward men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as a woman. The assertion that transsexual women are sexually motivated in their transitions challenges the standard model of transsexualism – that is, that transsexuals have a gender identity that is distinct from their sexual orientation and incongruent with their physical sex.
However, my psychiatrist sat there asking question after question that was clearly rooted in this stigmatising model. I’ve rarely been more insulted in my life. I came seeking help and understanding. Instead, I was asked repeatedly if I was sure I wasn’t a pervert. Transness inflects my gender identity, but the majority of the questions focused on my sexuality and sexual practices.
Not alone
The thing is, I still desperately needed the diagnosis. Trans people are placed in positions of powerlessness by our healthcare systems, which we cannot fight back against without being denied care.
My experience here is not an outlier. Most of my friends have similar, if not identical, stories. Some of them have lasting trauma from their experiences of diagnosis. Others have been denied healthcare for questioning the way they are being spoken to.
Trans healthcare in the UK is deeply broken. It is broken because it has been broken on purpose. It was broken by people who have made it their business to place themselves in positions of power over a vulnerable minority.
The time that led up to me seeking HRT was, for so many reasons, the bleakest period of my life. It was made far, far worse by the process of dysphoria diagnosis. I know that this is true for others too, and often far worse.
A miniscule dignity
For the majority of trans people in the UK, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria like mine is a requirement to obtain a GRC. This is one of the criteria that the UK government is trying desperately to keep in place for the gender recognition process in Scotland.
A GRC doesn’t actually do much. However, I would need one in order to stand up in front of my family and friends on my wedding day, in a dress that my mother has sewn for me, and have the officiant call me anything other than a ‘husband’.
A GRC would do one thing for me. It would change the words, spoken and written, at my wedding and my funeral. This is a minuscule dignity, and still there are people fighting tooth and nail to deny it.
If, after reading this, you’ve learned something new about the process of dysphoria diagnosis, I wouldn’t blame you. These things are at best not exactly well published, and at worst deliberately obscured by those who would have you believe that the process is too easy.
On the other hand, if you still believe that a diagnosis of dysphoria should be a requirement of receiving a GRC, I don’t know what to say to you. However, I pray the politicians championing your cause are defeated as swiftly as possible.
On 13 January, the Guardian published a letter from a reader titled “Please don’t use the Q-word”. The “Q-word”, of course, is ‘queer’. The letter, and the Guardian’s choice to publish it, is part of an increasing volume of calls to leave the word behind. However, the motivations for doing so are not what they appear.
Census reaction
The letter itself was a reaction to an earlier Guardian article on the newly released data from the 2021 census. The last census was a landmark occurrence because of the fact that, for the first time, it collected accurate population data on the LGBTQ+ population of the entire UK.
Karl Lockwood, the letter’s author, took the opportunity to point out that:
Your report… tells us that of the 1.5 million people who declared themselves non-heterosexual, only 15,000 referred to themselves as “queer”.
This, in itself, somewhat misunderstands the data given by the census. In response to the question “Which of the following best describes your sexual orientation?”, the original article revealed that:
One hundred and twelve thousand people described themselves as pansexual, 28,000 as asexual, and 15,000 as queer.
Note that this is by no means a question about whether someone is comfortable referring to themselves as ‘queer’. Rather, it’s about what “best describes” the respondent’s sexuality. So, the 15,000 are not the only people who refer to themselves as queer. Instead, they’re the people who use “queer” because it captures their sexuality more accurately than ‘gay or lesbian’, ‘bisexual’, ‘pansexual’, or ‘asexual’.
‘Queer’ is generally used as an umbrella term for any identity that isn’t cisgender or heterosexual. This means that it includes gay, bi, and ace sexualities, as well as trans and non-binary identities. However, it also works brilliantly as a sexuality descriptor for people who aren’t heterosexual, but who aren’t better served by other, more specific labels. It is these people who were numbered amongst the 15,000 in the census data, not those who might describe themselves as queer because they are gay or bi.
Queer as folk
The letter published in the Guardian went on to say:
I suspect that many of the others, like me, consider the term to be insulting and derogatory, and certainly not “reclaimed”. I am a gay man of 66 years with many friends and acquaintances, and know no one who would refer to themselves as queer. It would seem a small minority of activists has encouraged the media to use the word without considering its offensiveness to many people.
Unfortunately, it seems that Mr Lockwood has spent a lot of his 66 years as a gay man with his head in the sand. ‘Queer’ is not a recent invention. Its use in the modern sense can be seen in a manifesto given out by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) members in the 1990 New York Pride parade. It read:
Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender-f— and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night. Being queer is “grass roots” because we know that everyone of us, every body, every c—, every heart and a– and d— is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility.
Queerness, here, was an act of reclamation from a world that hated and feared the LGBTQ+ community. It was anti-assimilationist, refusing the politics of trying to fade into and accommodate heterosexual and cisgender expectations. Moreover, it explicitly drew together marginalised sexualities and marginalised genders (“gender-f—“).
The G-word
It’s fair and true that ‘queer’ can leave a sour taste in some people’s mouths. It was (and sometimes still is) used as an insult with a great deal of venom behind it. I’d never want to use it in the specific context of someone who didn’t choose it, as with any other reclaimed slur. For example, I’d never refer to Mr Lockwood as queer.
However, ‘queer’ was never a slur for me, or most of my generation as far as I’ve heard. The go-to playground insult used on me was ‘gay’, by a wide margin. It was a refrain of edgy comedy shows like South Park. It was everywhere, and applied even outside of contexts relating to sexuality – ‘that’s gay’ was synonymous with ‘I don’t like it’.
However, I’m fully capable of recognising that it would be ridiculous of me to ask that people don’t say ‘gay’. It’s a liberatory word. People have found a home in it. ‘Gay’ is even becoming an umbrella term in the same manner as queer, spilling out beyond its narrow meaning to embrace more marginal definitions.
I’d expect that people who suffered the use of ‘queer’ as a pejorative would extend the same courtesy to people who exalt in it. Certainly, it’s use is ubiquitous in mainstream society – shows like Queer Eye have seen to that, without widespread revolt. Hell, even the Simpsons joked about successful the reclamation of ‘queer’ in 1997.
Dogwhistles blaring
I can’t speak to the motivations of Mr Lockwood when he asked that people don’t say ‘queer’. However, I can take a damn good guess as to why the Guardian chose to publish the letter. The recent backlash against ‘queer’ is form of dogwhistle transphobia – it sends its message to the right listener, but frames it in an innocuous way. The Guardian itself is well-known for its frequent and open transphobia, at least in the UK.
There is a growing reactionary movement within (or outside of, as the case may be) the gay community. Groups such as LGB Alliance are seeking to divorce non-hetero sexualities from non-cis genders as a campaign focus, to transphobic ends. Similar motivations lie behind the frequent trending of #LGBwithouttheT on Twitter.
This blatant transphobia, along with the sidelining of other marginalised queer identities such as asexuality, forgets two very important things. First, the fates of queer sexualities and genders are already one. They were entwined in the early days of queer liberation, and they remain so to this day.
Nobody who has shouted abuse at me on a street has ever stopped to check if my gender non-conforming presentation is because I’m gay or because I’m trans. I doubt severely that they’d care for the answer. In the immortal words of Laura Jane Grace, “They just see a faggot”. There isn’t a hair between homophobia and transphobia – it’s all the same recycled bigotry.
Second, and as ever, we are stronger when we stand united. ‘Queer’ is under attack precisely because it acknowledges that we are one community, with shared experiences and oppressions. We would all do well to remember that.
Yesterday, prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that he intended to add new amendments to the Public Order Bill, one of the government’s latest legislative affronts against the people.
The Bill is already a vicious attack on everyone’s freedom to take to the streets in protest. It targets several of the direct-action tactics used by UK social movements. These include laws against campaigners locking-on or going equipped to lock-on.
The new legislation also aims to criminalise tunelling, a tactic which has often been used effectively by ecological movements, and seeks to increase police stop and search powers. It also proposes new Serious Disruption Prevention Orders. These orders would include forcing people to wear electronic tags to stop them from protesting. Police can impose these orders even when the person concerned has not been convicted of a crime.
New amendments
Sunak proposed the following new additions to the Bill. His statement says:
police will not need to wait for disruption to take place and can shut protests down before chaos erupts
This amendment would further empower the police to preemptively shut down protests and arrest participants. In fact, the police already have plenty of powers to do this. For example, Section 14 of the existing Public Order Act allows cops to impose conditions and make arrests if they believe a protest “may result in serious public disorder”. But Sunak is hoping to give the police even more preemptive powers by broadening “the legal definition of ‘serious disruption’”.
Sunak also said that his amendments would mean that:
police will not need to treat a series of protests by the same group as standalone incidents but will be able to consider their total impact
police will be able to consider long-running campaigns designed to cause repeat disruption over a period of days or weeks
As someone who was part of a ten-year-long struggle – which involved weekly protests – to shut down my local weapons factory, I can tell you for a fact that the police already treat ongoing protest campaigns very differently to standalone protests. The police are there to back up the powerful. They will try to stamp out any sustained, effective resistance from below. During those ten years my comrades and I were beaten up repeatedly, arrested, imprisoned, dubbed ‘domestic extremists’. We were followed by uniformed officers when going about our daily business, slapped with civil injunctions, spied on by undercover cops, and repeatedly stopped under the Terrorism Act.
These police powers already exist, but Sunak wants to strengthen them. It’s up to us to resist.
Response
Emily Apple of the Network for Police Monitoring remarked that the government’s press release was vague, and didn’t contain the actual proposed legal amendments to the Bill:
This is government by press release. I know I’m not the only person who’s been looking for the actual amendment and refreshing pages all day to be able to provide analysis based on actual legislation rather than government propaganda on this nonsense. #DefendDissenthttps://t.co/o5IRcXo73i
Kevin Smith, head of media for the New Economy Organisers Network (NEON), noted that the Public Order Bill is being pushed through at the same time as the Tories are proposing anti-strike legislation:
The Anti-Strike Bill and the Public Order Bill both in parliament today – amazing how much damage an outgoing government can do to democracy by pushing through such structural changes to the means that people have to hold power accountable.
The right to protest is a fundamental principle of our democracy
The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service echoed his bullshit:
It is clearly understood that everybody has the right to protest
On top of this, chief constable Harrington said:
“Policing is not anti-protest, but there is a difference between protest and criminal activism
These kind of statements from the government and police are written from a familiar template. They affirm their supposed commitment to the ‘right to protest’ while bringing in more and more legislation to take away people’s freedoms.
In 2013, in an article for Corporate Watch analysing the legislative attacks on our freedoms by successive Labour and Tory governments, I wrote:
TheBritishgovernment,likeallliberal‘democracies’,frequently proclaims itself a defender of freedom of expression and assembly. However, this is usually accompanied by the words ‘rule of law’… this provides a get-out clause, enabling governments to justify the repression of the same political freedoms they claim to defend. Since this ‘rule of law’ is created and developed by governments and the judicial system, it ensures governments can devise new ways with which to repress those who threaten state and corporate interests in response to changing circumstances and changing patterns of dissent. In this way the ‘rule of law’ serves to protect capitalist interests, in the name of public order, security and democracy.
We need to remind them that the streets are ours
Sunak claims that the new amendments are aimed at preventing disruption to “the lives of the ordinary public”, but this is part of a tired old trope that we have been hearing all our lives. Don’t buy his bullshit. The Public Order Bill and its amendments are part of a state-orchestrated attack on people’s ability to act for change. They’re part of the same authoritarian strategy as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, and the recent legislative attacks on striking workers.
We need to reaffirm that it’s our communities who control the streets, not the government or the cops. Generations of struggling people before us have had to do the same, from the rebels of the Brixton uprising of 1981 who rose up against the police’s racist stop and search powers, to the striking miners, whose struggle unfolded against the backdrop of increasing anti-union legislation. To the coalition of radicals who reclaimed the streets in the 90s, in the face of an earlier Criminal Justice Bill.
Its 2023, and the state is busy mounting fresh attack on us. It’s up to us to remind them of our strength and our power, and that the streets are ours.
A Metropolitan Police officer has pleaded guilty to at least 29 sexual offences, including 14 rape charges. David Carrick was an armed police officer, serving in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command. He joined the Met in 2001 after leaving the army, and his attacks span a period of 18 years. The police force admitted that there are likely to be more victims who are too scared to come forward, and other women who couldn’t face the ordeal of a trial. Carrick used his position in the police to terrify women into staying silent.
Inaction by the Met over Carrick
The Met suspended Carrick in October 2021. However, Sky News has reported that:
the Met Police confirmed Carrick “had come to the attention of the Met and other forces on nine occasions prior to October 2021” but had not been charged over those allegations against him.
They included allegations of rape, domestic violence, and harassment between 2000 and 2021.
Barbara Gray, the Met’s assistant commissioner, said:
We should have spotted his pattern of abusive behaviour and because we didn’t, we missed opportunities to remove him from the organisation.
However, the force chose to ignore multiple complaints. It didn’t miss them, as Gray claimed. Not only did the police force do nothing about the allegations, it even armed Carrick, giving him a gun in 2009. He even passed another vetting procedure in 2017, despite the force knowing about the allegations.
This shows, once again, how disgustingly misogynist the Metropolitan Police is. It has such little regard for women’s safety that it ignored multiple complaints, and rewarded Carrick by promoting him up the ranks into an elite armed unit.
Rampant misogyny
It is hardly surprising that one of the worst sex offenders in Britain could be allowed to thrive in the Metropolitan Police. The Canary has extensively reported on the rampant misogyny in the Met. It took the brutal murder of Sarah Everard for the Met to announce that it would investigate all cases of sexual misconduct or domestic abuse allegations against its officers. Sarah was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by then-serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021. He even remained an officer after police arrested him that month, and was only sacked in July, over a month after he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping her.
Just months after Sarah’s murder, Cressida Dick – who was then the Metropolitan Police Commissioner – was accused of “presiding over a culture of incompetence and cover-up”. Dick resigned in April 2022 after she was criticised for her handling of racist, misogynist, and homophobic messages shared by a group of officers based at Charing Cross police station. The men sent WhatsApp and Facebook messages to each other, making multiple references to rape and violence against women. One officer was even referred to as “mcrapey raperson” because of rumours that he had brought a woman to a police station to have sex with her.
It’s also important not to forget the Met’s handling of the murders of sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, who were stabbed to death in a park in Wembley in June 2020. Their family had to search for the women themselves after the Met didn’t immediately respond to their calls for help. When the police did finally turn up, officers took selfies of themselves next to Bibaa and Nicole’s dead bodies. Their mother, Mina Smallman, said at the time:
If ever we needed an example of how toxic it has become, those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead black girls and send them on. It speaks volumes of the ethos that runs through the Metropolitan Police.
Thousands of women have been murdered or abused by the police
In 2021, a report found that at least 194 women have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales. In 2022, freedom of information requests from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 82% of police officers who were accused of domestic abuse kept their jobs. The Guardianreported that:
1,080 out of 1,319 police officers and staff who were reported for alleged domestic abuse during a three-year period were still working.
The Guardian continued:
The conviction rate of police officers and staff for domestic abuse is 3.4%, lower than the 6.3% in the general population.
Institutional violence
This being the case, it’s little consolation when the Met yet again sheds crocodile tears, apologising that one of its elite officers, Carrick, has been raping women for two decades. Gray said:
We are truly sorry that being able to continue to use his role as a police officer may have prolonged the suffering of his victims.
The Met will go on looking after their own, thriving on a culture of violence, racism, and misogyny. Its officers will, no doubt, continue to abuse and terrify women. These officers will be loose on the streets, arresting and traumatising women, children and Black communities with brutal and humilitatingstrip searches, while their undercover police officers will continue to invade women’s lives.
Meanwhile, the state will continue to play its part, having passed a succession of new laws giving some of the country’s most violent men – police officers – inexhaustible new powers.
The Met will start the process of sacking Carrick on Tuesday 17 January. Far too little, too late.
As the Sun itself reported, Reeves has ‘backed’ calls to freeze fuel duty for motorists. The tabloid marked the article as an ‘exclusive’. This means that the party has given the Sun first dibs on the story. It noted that:
Reeves is demanding Jeremy Hunt spares drivers from an increase at the pumps in his next Budget.
She points to official analysis showing motorists face a 12p per litre hike if Ministers raise the petrol levy by inflation and end the temporary 5p cut.
With so many families and businesses reliant on their cars, the government must rule out yet another fuel duty rise at the Budget to ease some of those pressures and prevent yet another shock to our economy.
owns a business that markets a fuel additive called Ultimum5, for which he owns the trademark.
Cross the floor, Starmer, and be done with it
So, Labour has not only happily given exclusives to the Sun but has also (maybe inadvertently) been backing a right-wing lobby group in the process. If you need reminding why the party should not be anywhere near this tabloid, the Canary‘s Joe Glenton wrote:
The Sun‘s reporting of the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster led to the newspaper being despised and boycotted in the city. Following the disaster, in which 96 people died, the Sun made false claims, including that fans pickpocketed the bodies of victims.
On top of all this, Labour has also shoved its climate crisis-fighting credentials up its own arse. This is because fuel duty is one way of limiting carbon emissions. As DeSmog wrote:
According to analysis by Carbon Brief, the [freezing of fuel duty] policy has led to road transport emissions being as much as 16 percent higher (or 5 percent across the whole economy) than they would have been, had the last Labour government’s fuel duty “escalator”, which upped the levy by slightly more than inflation each year, been maintained.
Lose-lose all round for the Labour Party, then. On top of this, as Glenton previously wrote, Starmer has already written for the Sun as Labour leader. Moreover, he allowed the shitrag to be at the party’s 2021 conference. There is nothing ‘Labour’ about endorsing a lying tabloid to win votes – but then, Starmer and his motley crew would be more at home in the Tory Party anyway.
George Edward Lodge/Wikimedia Commons
Djordje Vezilic/Pexels
Thành Đỗ/Pexels
Peter Werkman/Unsplash
Yo! Egg
More on this story: 
Radar time lapse of the Auckland rain since yesterday morning
Look closely at the north-to-south line of torrential rain between 5-9pm directly over the city
Normally features like this move on relatively quickly, but not in this case, which was what made it so extreme 
