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Category: Opinion

  • ‘Economic freedom’ rankings are contrived, meaningless nonsense

    Jacobin logo

    This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Oct. 31, 2021. It is shared here with permission.

    Last month, the Fraser Institute put out its annual Economic Freedom of the World report. As usual, it showed that “economic freedom” is positively correlated with many good things and negatively correlated with many bad ones.

    Defenders of capitalism love the Fraser Institute. Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan, for example, has made heavy use of the rankings in the context of criticizing the arguments of Marxist philosopher GA Cohen. Brennan argues that given all the positive things that come with greater economic freedom, the debate about whether capitalism is superior to socialism has a clear victor: the pro-capitalist side. The only remaining question is whether socialism would be better in a hypothetical world where humans were less selfish and lazy.

    Economist Peter Leeson has deployed the Fraser Institute’s reports to mount an even more strident defense of capitalism. Many commentators, Leeson writes, think that capitalism deserves “two cheers” for yielding many good outcomes while also thinking that “excessive” or “uncontrolled” capitalism can be bad. Leeson says this is wrong because the Fraser Institute’s numbers show that capitalism deserves three cheers.

    Although many relationships in the social sciences are unclear, capitalism’s relationship to development isn’t one of them. Unless one is ashamed of unprecedented increases in income, rising life expectancy, greater education, and more political freedom, there’s no reason to be a milquetoast defender of capitalism.

    Even a quick glance at the Fraser Institute’s report reveals that the numbers that emerge from their methodology are flatly irrelevant to anything in dispute between social democrats, socialists, and defenders of laissez-faire capitalism.

    These are bold claims. And if you just look at the Fraser Institute’s many graphs and assume that the x-axis really is about something called “economic freedom” (or, in Leeson’s language, countries becoming “more capitalist” and “less socialist”), the data does seem to prove that people live longer and are more prosperous, more educated, and more politically free in more capitalist countries. How, then, could anyone be a socialist? How could anyone even be a social democrat, aspiring to curb “excessive” or “uncontrolled” capitalism through expansive social programs and a regulatory state? The more capitalist a society is, the better the outcomes.

    There’s just one problem with all of this. The premise is nonsense. Even a quick glance at the Fraser Institute’s report reveals that the numbers that emerge from their methodology are flatly irrelevant to anything in dispute between social democrats, socialists, and defenders of laissez-faire capitalism.

    First, though, it’s worth pausing to talk about definitions. Many socialists think that a fully socialist society would be one where workers controlled the means of production. Since there’s never been a society where even a significant portion of the economy was put under workers’ control, the degree to which a society is socialist in this sense is hard to measure. Other socialists, though, have thought that state ownership of the bulk of the economy would be sufficient. That can be measured. There have been societies like the USSR where pretty much the entire economy was state-owned, countries like the United States with little state ownership, and countries like Norway (where almost a third of the workforce works in the public sector and the state holds shares in many companies) that are somewhere in between.

    Similarly, we can make a distinction between “socialism after capitalism” (i.e., socialism in the strict sense) and “socialism within capitalism” (i.e., the policies that socialists around the world have fought for to make life better for working-class people within basically capitalist structures). This, too, can be measured. We can compare societies based on how much the state intervenes to make it easier for workers to organize labor unions, or the difference between health care systems like the one in the United States (where only a minority of the population qualifies for public health insurance), Canada (where there’s universal public health insurance but the hospitals themselves are mostly private), and in countries like Britain, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (where most or all of the hospitals are publicly owned and the doctors and nurses are public employees).

    Rankings comparing societies by the degree of state ownership would be relevant to arguments about whether societies are better off with capitalism or with at least some forms of socialism. Similarly, ranking societies in terms of their health care system or the degree of friendliness toward union organizing would be relevant to arguments about reforms socialists support within capitalism.

    But all you need to do to confirm the Fraser Institute isn’t doing anything like this is to glance at the handy interactive map on their website. Play with the map for about five seconds, and you’ll discover that Norway and Sweden are both far more “economically free” than Haiti.

    You read that right. Norway and Sweden tie for 37th place. Haiti sits all the way down at 118th place. That means Haiti, according to the Fraser Institute, is less capitalist than Sweden or Norway.

    Pop quiz: Does Haiti have a more expansive welfare state than Sweden or Norway? Does it have a more favorable environment for labor unions? Does it have a larger public sector?

    These aren’t serious questions.

    So what’s going on here? The five categories the Fraser Institute uses to judge different countries are “size of government,” “legal system and property rights,” “sound money,” “freedom to trade internationally,” and “regulation.”

    Four of those categories at least sound like they have something to do with contested issues between social democrats, socialists, and defenders of “uncontrolled” capitalism, although “property rights” would be more obviously relevant than the oddly mashed together category “legal system and property rights.” Hold that thought.

    Meanwhile, what’s this about “sound money”? Here’s how the executive summary describes the category: “Inflation erodes the value of rightfully earned wages and savings. Sound money is thus essential to defend property rights.”

    That “thus” is a little odd, since the underlying thought seems to be not so much that low inflation is essential to “defending” property rights as that it’s essential for property owners to get the benefits they would otherwise receive from those property rights. More importantly, though, the order of explanation here is the opposite of what we usually get in (misleading) right-wing arguments that the economic woes of Venezuela, for example, show that socialism produces bad outcomes. Usually, libertarians and conservatives say that socialist policies are bad because they lead to inflation. They don’t define inflation itself as somehow intrinsically un-capitalist.

    How about “legal system and property rights”? The description in the executive summary is too vague to make clear what’s being measured, but the full report helpfully breaks this down into sub categories:

    A. Judicial independence
    B. Impartial courts
    C. Protection of property rights
    D. Military interference in rule of law and politics
    E. Integrity of the legal system
    F. Legal enforcement of contracts
    G. Regulatory costs of the sale of real property
    H. Reliability of police

    Of these eight categories, C is the only one that sounds remotely relevant to the capitalism-versus-socialism debate. And even there, it’s only relevant if what property is being protected from is nationalization (or expropriation by the workers themselves, as in Argentina’s recovered factories movement of the early 2000s). At a stretch, G might also be salient, although the “regulatory costs” socialists want to impose on businesses (like better workplace safety laws, a higher minimum wage, measures to make it harder to bust unions) rarely have much to do with the sale of businesses.

    The other six are just flagrantly irrelevant. What socialist’s complaint about the police is that they’re too reliable (H)? What socialist doesn’t want workers to be able to take their bosses to court for violating union contracts (F)? Have you met a socialist whose main complaint about US courts is that they’re too impartial (B) and independent of the government (A) or that the legal system has too much damn integrity (E)? (For a hint as to what the real complaints are, google “Steven Donziger.”) The high-water mark of absurdity, though, comes at D. Do socialists want the military to interfere more in legal and political systems? Ask Salvador Allende about that one.

    One could argue that even if none of this has to do with whether societies are “more capitalist” or “less capitalist,” it at least has to do with whether those societies are living up to the ideals of many advocates of capitalism. Fair enough.

    But that’s like saying the Soviet Union scored poorly on many standards near and dear to the heart of many socialists. There’s a long tradition of socialists advocating for free speech rights, for example. We’d look pretty silly if we ranked countries by how socialist they were using the degree of free speech protection as one of the metrics, thus giving the Soviet Union a lower “socialism” score than the United States . . . and thus triumphantly concluding that the degree of socialism was positively correlated with free speech protections.

    This is exactly what the Fraser Institute and libertarians who tout its findings are doing when they count societies as more “economically free” (or, in Brennan and Leeson’s hands, “more capitalist”) in part because they’re less corrupt and unstable—and then use this to assert that “economic freedom” or “capitalism” itself leads to more democracy and better political outcomes. Are there worse outcomes in societies with high inflation, high judicial corruption, and frequent military coups? No kidding. This is supposed to have what exactly to do with long-standing debates about capitalism and socialism?

    Does the history of the 20th century include plenty of fodder for intellectually honest criticisms of at least some forms of socialism? Of course. But the Fraser Institute is just cooking the books.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • We need to talk about Britain’s transphobia problem

    We have a transphobia problem, and it’s getting worse. Not just because of the frequency with which it’s happening, or the form it’s taking, but because of the legitimacy it’s being given by large scale bodies, including – most recently – by the BBC.

    As a trans person, I’ve experienced hate speech and threats of violence and I’ve feared for my safety. I have lived with the stares from strangers and the scary indecision of which public toilet I’m going to get the least harassment in. And as a trans man, I have it so much easier than my trans sisters who are so much more likely to experience violence and abuse.

    But even with all this that we face daily, I can see my community being scared and exhausted from a different kind of abuse. It’s one that’s much harder to pinpoint and has a much wider reach – the insidious propaganda that’s creating a hateful, false narrative about us.

    Twisted words and a tapestry of lies

    As someone who’s experienced emotional abuse, it feels like being gaslit but on a national scale. Just like being manipulated by someone in your life, you end up not knowing which way is up. It’s painful and disorientating when someone you think you can trust – in this case mainstream media – is telling you seemingly reasonable things that make it hard to speak your own truth without having the words twisted.

    The truthfulness of what’s being reported aside, the intent behind it is to build an untrue narrative. To make a story that uses small truths told in untrue quantities to make a large, terrifying lie in which you are the villain to their victim.

    Eventually the tapestry they weave is so complete and thorough that it hangs in between the truth and anyone seeking it. Any attempt at finding the real shape of things is obstructed by false narratives. This is doubly hard when the conversations are happening in bitesize tweets and sensational stories where nuance is lost and the most extreme views get re-shared.

    Baseless arguments

    This is what’s happening in the UK today with waves of transphobia coming from a small but vocal group of people. The truth is that trans people exist. We have existed forever and we are just as wonderful and diverse as the cisgender population. But what this group of people would have you believe is that trans people are a new phenomenon and that we are inherently predatory, perverted, and looking to recruit your innocent children.

    And so feeding into this narrative the BBC has published an article about trans women being rapists. Using a poll conducted by a known anti-trans organisation with a small sample of respondents from their echo-chamber of social media followers, the publicly-funded and supposedly neutral BBC has presented a flimsy argument that trans women are a threat to cisgender lesbians.

    I grew up with the BBC being seen as a trusted news source, so for me it feels like a friend siding with your abuser and giving legitimacy to their abuse. The truth feels even harder to explain when hateful sentiment is dressed as a reasonable narrative; when the framing of the hatred is that of false concern for another marginalised group.

    Grotesquely misshapen

    I once heard that being in a relationship with a narcissist is like being arrested – everything you say can be used against you. That’s what it feels like here. A subtle conversation about gender and sexuality has been taken and twisted to be a narrative that trans people are trying to force people to have sex with them. And this is one of many things that have been twisted, manipulated, and grotesquely misshapen.

    We assume that we are always moving forward and becoming more progressive, but that just isn’t the case at the moment especially when it comes to anti-trans sentiment. The language used is so reminiscent of how tabloids wrote about gay people in the 80s that once you see the similarity it’s almost laughable we’d be going through this again so soon, but here we are.

    A growing movement of hate

    What’s so scary about this new transphobic trend is just how much it’s growing. We, as trans people, have been fighting tooth and nail for basic rights. And with every tiny movement forward our efforts are met with such fury that we dared step out of line that we are pushed even further back. Each time it happens, this vocal group of transphobes gets new recruits who have heard their battle cry of how we’re harming women and children. And with the sensational stories they create, they get new places to publish their hateful narrative.

    While the transphobes get more powerful and gain bigger platforms, my community is getting more and more exhausted. This isn’t just an online moral panic for us; this is our everyday, and it’s everywhere we turn. Despite carefully curating my social media to be as positive as possible, their hatred still seeps through. I have anxiety at the thought of the comments section and of course I avoid the tabloids, but now I daren’t even read the BBC News.

    Featured image via Ted Eytan

    By Jacob Stokoe

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • COP26: Time for New Zealand to show regional leadership on climate change

    ANALYSIS: By Nathan Cooper, University of Waikato

    As the UN climate summit in Glasgow kicks off tomorrow, it marks the deadline for countries to make more ambitious pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    The meeting is the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and is being heralded as the last best chance to avoid devastating temperature rise that would endanger billions of people and disrupt the planet’s life-support systems.

    New Zealand will be represented by the Climate Minister and Green Party co-leader, James Shaw, along with a slimmed-down team of diplomats.

    COP26 GLASGOW 2021

    Shaw, who described climate change as the “most significant threat that we face for decades to come”, will take part in negotiations aimed at achieving global net zero, protecting communities and natural habitats and mobilising finance to adequately respond to the climate crisis.

    This is the time for New Zealand to commit to delivering on its fair share of what is necessary to avoid runaway global warming.

    To understand why COP26 is so important we need to look back to a previous summit, COP21 in 2015, which resulted in the Paris Agreement. Countries agreed to work together to keep global warming well below 2℃ and to aim for no more than 1.5℃.

    They also agreed to publish plans to show how much they would reduce emissions and to update these pledges every five years — which is what should be happening at the Glasgow summit. Collectively, current climate pledges (known as Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) continue to fall a long way short of limiting global warming to 1.5℃.

    Many countries have failed to keep pace with what their climate pledges promised. The window to limit temperature rise to 1.5℃ is closing fast.

    Time to raise climate ambition
    On our current trajectory, global temperature is likely to increase well above the 2℃ upper limit of the Paris Agreement, according to a UN report released last week.

    New Zealand has agreed to take ambitious action to meet the 1.5℃ target. But its current pledge (to bring emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030) will not achieve this.

    If all countries followed New Zealand’s present commitments, global warming would reach up to 3℃. The government has committed to increase New Zealand’s NDC — after receiving advice from the Climate Change Commission that its current pledge is not consistent with the 1.5℃ goal — but has not yet outlined a figure.

    The effects of the growing climate crisis are already present in our corner of the world. Aotearoa is becoming more familiar with weather extremes, flooding and prolonged drought.

    Many of our low-lying Pacific island neighbours are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Some are already looking to New Zealand to take stronger regional leadership on climate change.

    A perception of New Zealand as a potential safe haven and “Pacific lifeboat” reminds us of the coming challenge of climate refugees, should global warming exceed a safe upper limit.

    More work to do
    New Zealand’s emissions have continued to rise since the Paris summit but our record on climate action has some positives. The Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act, enacted in 2019, requires greenhouse gas emissions (other than biogenic methane) to reach net zero by 2050.

    Only a handful of other countries have enshrined such a goal in law.

    The act also established the Climate Change Commission, which has already provided independent advice to the government on emissions budgets and an emissions reduction plan for 2022-2025. But much more needs to be done, and quickly, if we are to meet our international commitments and fulfil our domestic targets.

    Climate Change Commission recommendations around the rapid adoption of electric vehicles, reduction in animal stocking rates and changing land use towards forestry and horticulture provide some key places to focus on.

    As COP26 begins, New Zealand should announce a more ambitious climate pledge, one stringent enough to meet the 1.5℃ target. Announcing a sufficiently bold NDC at COP26 will provide much-needed leadership and encouragement for other countries to follow suit.

    It will also act as a clear signpost for what our domestic emissions policies are aiming for, by when and why. But, no matter what New Zealand’s revised NDC says, much work will remain to ensure we make good on our commitments and give the climate crisis the attention it demands.The Conversation

    Dr Nathan Cooper is associate professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • No women involved? You can count me out.

    My great Auntie Rita grew up in an Australia where being Aboriginal, with dark features, saw her dismissed, degraded, and all but shut out of society.

    My beloved late Aunt told me that growing up in country Victoria in the 1940s and 50s, she had to learn to fight at school because of the level of bullying she faced. She ate her lunch in toilet cubicles by herself, to avoid the taunts from other students.

    Dan with his Aunt Rita

    Dan with his Aunted Rita circa 2008/09. Picture: Supplied

    Getting a job was just as hard. Auntie Rita was forced to say she was Indian, in order to be shown some respect, and get a job.

    On top of that, Auntie Rita told me being a woman made life even harder in the workplace, as it was trying to find somewhere to live. She told me of being turned away from rental properties she wanted to inspect, because she didn’t have a man to chaperone her.

    Given all of this – which is only a snapshot of some of what she faced – you could understand if Auntie Rita felt resentful to her country, and those who bullied, harassed, or dismissed her.

    But she wasn’t.

    In fact, she was positive, even optimistic, with a killer sense of humour. She told me that she was encouraged by the enormous change she had seen – in recognition and respect of First Nations Australians. But she added there was much more still to be done.

    And when I asked her about how she didn’t hold on to the anger about how she was treated – in her typically pragmatic way, she pointed to me. She told me that the fact I had the opportunity to share people’s stories and talk about big issues, spoke to the changes in Australia. She believed my generation was where there would be the greatest change.

    Auntie Rita faced the worst kind of exclusion throughout her life – it’s why she encouraged me to always think about inclusion.

    Inclusion is something I think about every day.

    Taking a stand

    As ABC Canberra’s 7pm Newsreader, a senior ABC presenter, and non-executive director on a number of boards, I am often asked to speak to groups, facilitate panels and discussions, and host events.

    I also regularly speak about my Indigenous heritage, and about being gay and part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Diversity and inclusion are topics I regularly speak to.

    These are fantastic opportunities – particularly when I am helping to navigate through tough or confronting issues or topics – with respect and care.

    When I’m asked to speak or host, I have Auntie Rita’s calls for inclusion ringing in my ears.

    That’s what drove me to take a stand.

    I won’t host any panel discussions or events that don’t include women. I just don’t agree with it and won’t be a part of it.

    (And I certainly won’t agree to sit on panels, as a guest or panelist, that don’t have women on them either.)

    Dan WIM event

    Dan, centre, at a Women in Media event on cultural diversity in the media at National Press Club earlier in 2021. Also pictured (left to right) are journalists Aarti Betigeri, Shalailah Medhora, Gabrielle Chan, Paula Kruger. Picture: Ginger Gorman

    Nor will I host events about groups of people, if they are not part of that conversation. Meaning, I won’t facilitate a panel about Indigenous Affairs, without other Indigenous people on the panel; I won’t facilitate a discussion about a group of people, without that group of people filling the panel.

    This may seem relatively simple. But it’s seen me walk away from leading high-profile discussions and events. It’s the first question my manager asks when approached for me to host or be involved in events.

    For me it’s simple – I have a public profile and have a platform when I speak. And to me, it’s important that I use that profile and platform to make a point about diversity and inclusion. And I call on anyone with some kind of platform to do the same.

    At the start, I didn’t know if it was having any impact, other than anecdotal comments from event organisers and those sitting on panels. But after a number of years of doing it, I know it makes event organisers stop and think, and it definitely cuts through with the audience.

    Ngunnawal Elder here in Canberra, Auntie Caroline Hughes wrote after one event I hosted: “What a wonderful ambassador for our people you are Dan! Well done,” Auntie Caroline wrote.

    This feedback is so heartening. It’s not what drives me – shifting the conversation is!

    Conversation is the change maker

    I was recently asked to host a panel about communicating with Indigenous Australians.

    Before my manager could ask his first question, he was told it was a panel of all women, and most of them Indigenous.

    Danika Davis is a writer and editor, and was part of that panel. She later wrote to me: “The audience came away feeling informed and empowered to improve their work with First Nations communications, which is the best result we could hope for.”

    I agree. It’s all about listning and changing our perspectives. Feedback from others in the crowd centred on the importance of the diverse lived experience and perspectives.

    The media

    There are significant challenges when it comes to the media, bore out in the 2020 Media Diversity Australia report: Who Gets To Tell Australian Stories.

    The report was confronting, but not surprising. It spoke to structural, systemic, and cultural issues.

    The report raised red-flags about the dramatic lack of culturally diverse women and men in the media as journalists and presenters – but also highlighted the lack of cultural diversity of commentators, case studies, and those highlighted in the media.

    I’ve recently been doing a lot of backfill hosting on ABC News Channel from my home in Canberra – to help ease the pressure on colleagues in Melbourne and Sydney, while we were all in lockdown.

    I’ve been fortunate to work with a fantastic team, who I work closely with to get a range of views and perspectives on air.

    In writing this article, I asked about the breakdown of talent – those that we picked to discuss specific topics – over September and October, while I’ve been backfilling the Afternoons show.

    I was thrilled to see women making up 58% of guests in September, and 52% in October.

    Indigenous guests made up 14% and 20% respectively across those months, while guests who were culturally and linguistically diverse were 17% and 16% across those months.

    I’m proud of the different perspectives that I’ve helped to bring to air – but know that I, and all media leaders, have much, much more work to do.

    There is also much to consider about building trust with communities that have lost trust in the media because of what’s happened in the past.

    The task for all media companies, is to look at their diversity on air, and ask themselves if it reflects the country they are communicating to.

    Language on air

    I’ve saved this for last, because I want to leave you with a sense the importance of language.

    In 2019, ABC Canberra colleagues and I embarked on a series of conversation with Canberra’s Ngunnawal Elders, through the United Ngunnawal Elders Council, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

    Dan with Canberra’s Ngunnawal Elders. Picture: Supplied.

    Dan with Canberra’s Ngunnawal Elders. Picture: Supplied.

    We wanted to explore options to build greater relationships with Elders and the Ngunnawal community, while seeing if there were appropriate acknowledgements to their heritage and story across ABC Canberra.

    It began with Ngunnawal Elders, welcoming listeners across ABC Radio Canberra programs, in their language and English.

    That grew to be an acknowledgement behind me as I read the 7pm News each night – where I begin and end the bulletin by using Ngunnawal language – ‘yuma’ means hello and ‘yarra’ means goodbye.

    For the first broadcast, we invited the United Ngunnawal Elders Council into the studio to see and hear it.

    There were tears from Elders, as they told me they never expected to see and hear their language on the news.

    And the Elders have told me they love hearing Canberrans using their language – and say it’s what will help to preserve and protect the language for future generations.

    Acknowledgements like this have now spread far and wide across the ABC – with different approaches in different cities after discussions with the local Elders.

    It’s now commonplace to hear ABC Canberra presenters use Ngunnawal language on air, to see presenters on News Channel acknowledge the Indigenous people of the land they are broadcasting from, while Landline includes the name of the Indigenous people next to the name of the town at the start of each report.

    I’m so proud to be part of the team to lead this work.

    Recently Channel 10 presenter, Narelda Jacobs began using her Noongar language from her country, on air, and pointed to our work as the inspiration to do this on her network.

    And the more it happens, the more we will see and hear of language and culture on air – that’s something I’m really proud of.

     

     

     

     

    The post No women involved? You can count me out. appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • As Asia ‘lives with covid-19’, media may need to be less adversarial

    ANALYSIS: By Kalinga Seneviratne in Sydney

    Indonesia’s popular tourism islands of Bali opened for tourism last week, while Thailand announced that from November 1 vaccinated travellers from 19 countries will be allowed to visit the kingdom including its tourism island of Phuket.

    Both those countries’ tourism industry, which is a major revenue earner, has been devastated by more than 18 months of inactivity that have impacted on the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people.

    India and Vietnam also announced plans to open the country to vaccinated foreign tourists in November, and Australia will be opening its borders for foreign travel from mid-November for the first time since March 2020.

    Countries in the Asia-Pacific region — except for China — are now beginning to grapple with balancing the damage to their economies from covid-19 pandemic by beginning to treat the virus as another flu.

    The media may have to play a less adversarial role if this gamble is going to succeed.

    October 11 was “Freedom Day” for Australia’s most populous city Sydney when it came out of almost four months of a tough lockdown.

    Ironically this is happening while the daily covid-19 infection rates are higher than the figure that triggered the lockdowns in June.

    ‘It’s not going away’
    Yet, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet told Sky News on October 11: “we’ve got to live alongside the virus, it’s not going away, the best thing that we can do is protect our people (by better health services)”.

    Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, addressing the nation on October 9, said: “Singapore cannot stay locked down and closed off indefinitely. It would not work, and it would be very costly”.

    He added, “each time we tighten up, businesses are further disrupted, workers lose jobs, children are deprived of a proper childhood and school life”.

    Singapore is coming out of lockdown when it is facing the highest rates of daily infections since the covid-19 outbreak.

    Both Singapore and Australia adopted a “zero-covid” policy when the first wave of the pandemic hit, quickly closing the borders, and going into lockdown.

    Both were exceptionally successful in controlling the virus and lifting the lockdowns late last year with almost zero covid-19 cases. But, when the more contagious delta virus hit both countries, fear came back forcing them back into lockdowns.

    However, PM Lee told Singaporeans that lockdowns had “caused psychological and emotional strain, and mental fatigue for Singaporeans and for everyone else. Therefore, we concluded a few months ago that a “Zero covid” strategy was no longer feasible”.

    ‘Living with covid-19’
    Thus, Singapore has changed its policy to “Living with covid-19”.

    In a Facebook posting on October 10, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said: “The phenomenal response from Australians to go and get vaccinated as we’ve seen those vaccination rates rise right across the country, means it’s now time that Australians are able to reclaim their lives. We’re beating covid, and we’re taking our lives back.”

    On October 8, Australia’s Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said that though infection rates might still be a bit high, yet less than 1 percent of those infected were in intensive care units (ICUs).

    Why didn’t political leaders take this attitude right from the beginning and continue with it? After all the fatality rate of covid-19 has not been that much higher than the seasonal flu in most countries.

    True, it was perhaps more contagious according to medical opinion, but fatality rates were not that large in percentage figures.

    According to the Worldometer of health statistics, there have been 237.5 million covid-19 infections up to October this year and 214.6 million have recovered fully (90.4 percent) while 4.8 million have died (just over 2 percent).

    According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, there have been between 39-56 million flu cases, about 700,000 flu hospitalisations recorded in the US during the 2019-2020 flu season up to April 2020.

    They also estimate between 24,000 to 62,000 flu deaths during the season. But did the media give these figures on a daily or even a weekly basis?

    New global influenza strategy
    In March 2019, WHO launched a new global influenza strategy pointing out that each year there is an estimated 1 billion flu cases of which 3-5 million are severe cases, resulting in 290,000 to 650,000 influenza-related respiratory deaths.

    This has been happening for many years, but, yet the global media did not create the panic scenario that accompanied covid-19.

    Unfortunately, the media’s adversarial reporting culture has helped to create a fear psychosis from the very beginning of the outbreak in early 2020, which may have contributed to millions of deaths by creating anxiety among those diagnosed with covid-19.

    During the peak of the delta pandemic in India, many patients died from heart attacks triggered by anxiety. Would they have died if covid-19 were treated as another flu?

    In the US out of the 44 million infected with covid-19 only 1.6 percent died. In Brazil from 21.5 million infected, 2.8 percent of them died, while in India out of 34 million infected only 1.3 percent died.

    But what did we see in media reports? Piles of dead bodies being burnt in India, from Brazil bodies buried in mass graves by health workers wrapped in safety gear and in the US, people being rushed into ICUs.

    They are just a small fraction of those infected.

    Bleak picture of sensationalism
    I was the co-editor of a book just released by a British publisher that looked at how the media across the world reported the covid-19 outbreak during 2020. It paints a bleak picture of sensationalism and adversarial reporting blended with racism and politicisation.

    It all started with the outbreak in Wuhan in January 2020 when the global media transmitted unverified video clips of people dropping dead in the streets and dead bodies lying in pavements. Along with the focus on “unhygienic” wet markets in China this helped to project an image of China as a threat to the world.

    It contributed to the fear psychosis that was built up by the media tinged with racism and politicisation.

    If we are to live with covid and other flu viruses, greater investments need to be made in public health.

    In Australia, health experts are talking about boosting hospital bed and ICU capacities to deal with the new policy of living with covid, and they have also warned of a shortage of health professionals, especially to staff ICUs.

    What about if the media focus on these as national security priorities? Rather than giving daily death rates and sensational stories of people dying from covid — do we give daily death rates from heart attacks or suicide?

    We should start discussing more about how to create sustainable safe communities as we recover from the pandemic, and that includes better investments in public health.

    We need a journalism culture that is less adversarial and more tuned into promoting cooperation and community harmony.

    Kalinga Seneviratne is co-editor of COVID-19, Racism and Politicization: Media in the Midst of a Pandemic published in August 2021 by Cambridge Scholars Publishers. IDN is the flagship agency of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate. This article is republished in partnership with IDN.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Opinion | Crime rates rise and fall. The police mostly have nothing to do with it.

    This story originally appeared in the Garrison Project on Oct. 26, 2021. It is shared here with permission.

    Murder rates go down; people exalt policing. Murder rates go up; people exalt policing. The defund movement advocates reducing and reallocating police funds; police budgets remain high. The backlash comes; police budgets get higher. The public becomes aware that policing is violent, racially biased, and counterproductive in marginalized neighborhoods; police get more resources to “improve.”

    Policing has an amazing ability to fail up. 

    Last week, sexual assault victims told New York City Council’s Women and Gender Equity and Public Safety committees about the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Division’s dreadful handling of their cases. One woman said that despite providing investigators with a “comprehensive 13-page document detailing the incident,” the detective didn’t interview witnesses and her case was closed twice without her knowledge. Another woman told the council that a sergeant dismissed her sexual assault claim because she was sleeping when it happened, explaining “he has sex with his wife while she’s asleep and she’s not reporting him for rape.” Despite such testimony revealing the NYPD’s profound misogyny and a deeply rooted disinterest in solving sexual assault cases, the problem is routinely framed as an issue of resources, staffing, and training. 

    While such scandals and high-profile cases of police brutality cause people to recognize the harms of policing, the public still views them as remediable failures of an institution designed to “serve and protect.” Perhaps it is time to view them not as failures of the system but as part of the system itself.

    Policing in the United States was never mainly about fighting crime: It was meant to manage people and communities to serve the interests of the powerful. Police forces did not originate to fight crime, they did not expand in response to crime spikes, and it remains contested whether they fight crime at all. 

    Police forces emerged in the early 19th century and became the norm by the Progressive Era.

    The development of police forces is not a unified story but hundreds of local stories. Nevertheless, there is a striking consistency—the stories have little to do with everyday crime interdiction.

    In the Reconstruction-era South, organized policing emerged as part of the effort to maintain postwar social and economic White supremacy. “Black Codes,” with their broad definitions of vagrancy, rendered freed people perpetually subject to state detention and forced labor.

    An 1865 column in the Lynchburg Virginian explained that these “stringent police regulations” were “necessary to keep [freedmen] from overburdening the towns and depleting the agricultural regions of labor.” The police forces created to enforce these regulations included former slave catchers and patrollers, and as historian Sally Hadden notes, they “kept blacks off city streets, just as patrollers had done in the colonial and antebellum eras.”

    In the North, wealthy industrialists organized police forces to control factory workers. In Buffalo, New York, industrialization exploded in the late 19th century, and along with it, the Polish migrant population. The Buffalo police force grew substantially from its inception in 1871 to 1900, but this growth, according to historians, “had no direct relationship to either the growth of the population or to an increase in crime.” Instead, the police department, whose commissioners were the manufacturing barons themselves, existed and expanded to thwart workers’ demands for decent labor conditions. As in the South, these police forces relied on vagrancy laws to prevent worker assembly and arrest labor organizers.

    Police departments expanded steadily throughout the 20th century. President Nixon’s 1968 campaign’s “Southern strategy” invoked narratives of Black criminals and society-saving police to court Southern Dixiecrats to the Republican party. The 1980s ushered in an era of precipitous government investment in—and expansion of—law enforcement. President Reagan condemned “welfare queens” and “privileged” street criminals. Even though the effect of President George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad is widely disputed, his landslide win in 1988 sparked Democratic fears that the entire party would be “Hortonized.” Then-Representative Chuck Schumer and then-Senator Joe Biden helped create the 1994 Crime Bill—today regarded as a primary driver of mass incarceration—to wrest pro-law enforcement politics away from Republicans. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops,” Biden boasted. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.”

    Policing expansions served political interests, but commentators often describe them as reactions to a crime wave. In the latter half of the 1980s, well after pro-policing politics had ascended, there was an increase in the violent crime rate due to a rise in homicides of and violence against young Black men, which researchers attribute to the urban crack cocaine trade. Media narratives of the crack epidemic incorporated longstanding tropes of Black criminality and whipped up fear, providing a boon to police departments, despite crack’s geographic specificity. But it appears there was no overall crime wave.

    A 1993 study sought to put numbers to the “widely held belief that the level of serious criminal activity increased during the 1980s, particularly among the urban underclass.” Examining crime data from 1979 to 1992, the researchers concluded that “statistics do not support the notion that there [was] any overall rise in the level of criminal activity.” Instead, “there was a large increase in the incarceration rate, primarily attributable to an increased probability of incarceration . . . and a sizable increase in the number of arrests and incarcerations for drug law violations.”

    A caveat on research is warranted here. For every study, one can likely find another with a different conclusion or spin on the data. I leave it to empiricists to battle over methodological and interpretive superiority. What is clear is that the data on crime in the ’80s paint a very different picture than one of an America under siege.

    In fact, when President Clinton signed the Crime Bill in 1994, crime rates were already in decline. They continued to decline for the next quarter century, while policing continued to expand. In 1990, there were, on average, 12 violent crimes per 1,000 people, and cities spent an average of $182 (in today’s dollars) per resident on the police. By 2017, the violent crime rate had decreased by 56 percent to five crimes per 1,000, and budgets for police increased by 59 percent to $292 per resident.

    Did the expansion in policing cause the crime decline? Probably not. A study on police deployment and crime rates from 1991 to 2000 found “increases in police strength during the 1990s [had] little to do with changes in all measures of the crime rate after controlling for other demographic factors.” A comprehensive 2014 study found “police manpower levels” had no effect on deterrence. The study’s authors concluded that policymakers should “reconsider whether increases in police manpower bring sufficient crime reduction benefits to justify their costs” and consider “alternative investments that are more likely to reduce crime.”

    The findings casting doubt on whether police expansions reduce crime should not be surprising.

    Flush with funds and officers, police departments have used their bounty in the traditional manner: to exercise strict and total control over Black urban areas, a process I call “bluelining.”

    The police deployment study also revealed that every one percent increase in Black population in a neighborhood correlated with an increase of 5.54 police officers per 100,000 residents.

    Contemporary research continues to challenge the presumption that policing is more about catching criminals than controlling communities of color. Policing experts report “a consensus that the standard model of policing, which focuses on random preventive patrols and rapid response time, does not significantly reduce crime or even fear of crime.” 

    Studies also undermine the claim that “proactive policing”—including racially biased broken windows and stop-and-frisk practices—decreases crime, leading criminologists to comment, “there is a substantial lack of evidence in favor of proactive policing having any substantial effect on crime.” New research questions the efficacy of so-called “hot spot” policing that uses data and technology to target certain geographic locations, and scientists warn that the tech often replicates the biases of human police decision making. All the while, cold homicide cases pile up and rape kits languish.

    After 150 years of policing being a daily fact of American life, we still cannot proclaim with certainty that it has ever actually fought crime. And yet the cop-as-crime fighter trope is intractable, drilled into the American consciousness by decades of sensationalist news, politics, and TV shows like Law & Order: SVU—what critics call “copaganda.” 

    Before we can achieve meaningful reform, Americans—especially liberals—need to sever their instinctive connection of policing and crime interdiction. If not, every case of horrific brutality or systemic failure will remain cause for more policing resources. Every decrease in crime will remain cause for doubling down on policing. Every uptick in crime, no matter how narrow or local, will remain cause for expanding policing. And even after millions of people took to the streets to plead for change last year, things will remain the same.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Bainimarama’s Fiji faces investigative PR crisis on eve of climate COP26

    COMMENT: By Grubsheet’s Graham Davis

    A public relations disaster for Fiji just as Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama and Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum head to Glasgow for COP26 as one of Britain’s leading media outlets — The Independent — carries out a detailed investigation into events at the University of the South Pacific.

    Fiji’s reputation in Britain and the academic community the world over has suffered a grievous blow.

    What emerges is a sordid tale of cronyism, bullying, repression and a frontal assault on regional cooperation by the FijiFirst government that has undermined Pacific solidarity and adversely affected the education of ordinary Pacific Islanders at USP, including Fijian young people.

    COP26 GLASGOW 2021

    The length and scope of this article and its impeccable pedigree guarantee that it will become the dominant global narrative about events at USP and have a far reaching impact on Fiji’s reputation, including its current role as Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum.

    And for what? For Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s ego.

    A festering wound that will cripple the FijiFirst government all the way to the 2022 election, when its prized “youth vote” will get to make its own pronouncement at the ballot box on events at USP.

    Be genuinely dismayed at the AG’s shortsightedness and Bainimarama’s stupidity for allowing his number 2 to embark on a battle he simply cannot win.

    This is what The Independent describes as a “long read”:

    “At first there is a woman’s voice coming from the back of the house in the dead of night. Then there is repeated ringing of the doorbell. Other voices, male ones, are coming through the front door now; the voices are authoritative and increasingly impatient. Instructions are barked, telling those inside to open up. Fists bang the door. Soon plainclothes police officers are inside and shortly afterwards 63-year-old Professor Pal Ahluwalia and his wife Sandy Price are forcibly escorted to the airport. The vice-chancellor of the most prestigious university in Fiji is being deported on the orders of the Fijian government.

    “The University of the South Pacific (USP) is pretty. Its main campus building in Fiji has a clean, modern design and is fronted by rows of palm trees. But behind the attractive facade and beneath a clear blue South Pacific sky, all hell is breaking loose. An internecine conflict has broken out. On one side stands the vice-chancellor, Professor Pal Ahluwalia, who claims to have blown the whistle on mismanagement and malpractice at the university; opposing him are pro-chancellor Winston Thompson and the Fijian government, who say Ahluwalia is guilty of both breaking USP hiring protocols and of unspecified immigration violations.”

    Read on at The Independent or if you want to dodge the paywall, read here.

    Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • 2,000 Canary articles later, I have a message for you all

    I’m overwhelmed and somewhat perplexed to say that this is my 2,000th article for The Canary. That works out at, after I factor in the year I stopped writing, over one article every day since April 2016. So, for this “accomplishment” (my editor’s wording) I want to tell you about mine and The Canary‘s journey to this point. But I also want to talk about the idea of ‘hope’ – and how, even when all seems lost, it’s the one thing that we have to hold on to with all our might.

    The Canary: what a ‘journey’

    I’m not a fan of insipid, X Factor-style ‘journeys’. But The Canary‘s flight from its humble beginnings to this point has been quite the voyage of discovery.

    We started off with £500 and a vision of a different kind of media. After launching, things quickly progressed. I joined in April 2016 and soon realised that we were rattling a few cages. I’ll never forget former Unite the Union boss Len McCluskey mentioning one of my stories on the Andrew Marr Show. Things blew up – and the rest is kind of history. We had over eight million readers in the run up to the 2017 general election; my partner always reminds me of the time she watched me ‘sleep-typing’ in bed. I’ve had articles that have caused questions to be asked in parliament. My welfare coverage was being read by hundreds of thousands of people a month.

    So, The Canary and my time with it has been unforgettable. I have to extend a huge thanks to the editorial team. Throughout my time here they’ve supported me 100%. This is despite countless errors of judgement on my part.

    Life’s peaks and troughs

    But alongside all this, The Canary has also been a central part of my life through what have perhaps been my defining years: a period that saw me finally finding my path in life after being on-and-off benefits since 2008; managing my alcoholism after a very public relapse in 2016; finding a partner accepting of my bisexuality; moving to London and gaining a stepson; coming to terms with my mother’s dementia diagnosis – and within all this, finding and developing my voice and guiding mantra in life.

    But it can be exhausting living, observing, and then writing about the chaos that constantly engulfs our society. I live in appalling social housing. My family is answerable to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) via our reliance on Universal Credit. My partner is chronically ill and disabled and I’m her full-time carer. Money is a constant struggle. Ill-health permeates our lives. So, I know the dread that you feel every single morning when you wake up: wondering what pain, stress, or trauma the system and life will inflict upon you that day.

    Hope springs from the darkest of places

    But I also know that in the bleakest of times there can often be the faintest glimmer of hope; a chink of light piercing through the seemingly impenetrable dark. Moreover, life is transient, fluid, and in a constant state of flux. Whatever pain you currently feel will eventually wane. Whichever disaster has landed at your feet today will eventually be in the past – whether that be tomorrow, next week or in a year. And none of us definitely know what the future holds.

    Yet the notion of hope is not an individualised phenomenon. We rely on other humans to ignite it and keep it burning in us. I see hope in my stepson’s eyes. I’ve seen it when disabled people blockaded Westminster bridge. I hear it when I listen to music. And I feel it when I embrace my partner. Hope also fills me when I look at The Canary and enter our newsroom. Because behind the garish, little yellow bird, the bold and brash headlines, and the smears that have been levelled at us throughout our short existence, there’s a team of people who really do care.

    Seeking emancipation

    You may not always like the way we do things. Sometimes, you might not feel we live up to the expectations placed upon us. And you might not always agree with what we have to say. But we are a group of people who passionately hold dear the wellbeing of every other person and creature on this planet. We try every day to bring you the stories and information to start enacting change. So, we’re trying. And I know that each and every one of our actions come from a place of good.

    The Canary is all about hope. It’s what started us in 2015. Kerry-Anne, Nancy Mendoza and Drew Rose hoped for something better for the media. Society’s hope is what drove us to the unexpected heights we reached during the 2017 general election. It’s what kept us going when financially we nearly sunk. And hope is what gets each and every one of us into the newsroom every day – despite the challenges many of us face. But hope is also what needs to form the next stage of The Canary‘s and, maybe, my own journey.

    The Canary: where next?

    We have reached a defining moment. Kerry-Anne has left. We have perhaps our most diverse team of talent to date. But what next?

    For me, The Canary (and independent media more broadly) needs to be reaching the people that need it. Social media is all well and good. But we’re often only talking to the same people. It’s a club which needs more members; those we’re currently not engaging with. So, The Canary has to work out how we reach out into the most marginalised and oppressed communities in the UK. They’re communities like my own. Here, poverty and inequality are rife – but hope is often sparse.

    Our failed systems of economics, government, and politics have shown that for things to change in this country and around the world we need to take things back to basics. We have to go back to planting the seeds of change in the smallest of communities. Then, we nurture them to grow from there. The Canary has to be central to this. But how we position ourselves there is an ongoing conversation we need to have, not just with ourselves but with our readers too.

    We have to decide

    I’m privately a bit of a Lord of the Rings geek. Of the many passages from J.R.R. Tolkien’s work that stand out, one always comes to the forefront of my mind:

    ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.

    ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us’.

    I believe this is fitting for the times we currently live in. Humanity is perhaps at its most monumental crossroads since the dawn of civilisation. The struggles most of us face have not changed, but the backdrop of the climate catastrophe has shone a glaring light on them. Saving our species and the planet is one challenge. But with that comes another: not allowing ourselves to continue in the way we have before. We have to find a new way of existing. It must be one where everyone is truly equal and power is no longer in the hands of a few. Because it’s this which has led us to this point in the first place.

    One person is enough

    So, we need hope. The Canary has been and always will be a part of that. You, our readers, are too. I often feel hope is far easier to lose than it is to keep. It is too often out of reach. But those of us who can hold on to it, even fleetingly, have a responsibility over it. We need to spread hope as far as our eyes can see. It’s not some specific idea of what the world could look like. It’s the idea that the world can look different to the one we inhabit now. That’s up to all of us to achieve.

    My work has always been driven by one underlying hope. If I can reach one person and change their life, then my job is done. If one person can give someone else the hope to begin to enact change in their own lives, then with perseverance it can spread like wildfire. So far as a species we have failed to do that. But I believe we can, if we worry less about ourselves and those in power and start thinking more about the people around us. For my next 2,000 articles I commit to doing that. And I think in your daily lives, you should commit to spreading hope too.

    We can be better and we must be. It’s up to all of us to make that happen.

    Featured image via The Canary 

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • They called her “Lucky”. But she wasn’t.

    Content notification: This story discusses family violence, coercive control, reproductive coercion and financial abuse

    I first heard Britney Spears when I was 16 in a changing room in Sydney – to the horror of all around me, I was obsessed, and I wasn’t alone. The world was fascinated and hungry for her.

    At 17 she was highly sexualised in the media, often with older men asking her questions about her virginity, breast implants, men she was dating. One Australian reporter declared to her: “To many you are a condtradiction On the one hand you’re a sweet, innocent virginal type. On the other hand, you’re a sexy vamp in underwear.”  This highlights the complicated relationship of sexuality, young women and the media. The obsession with purity, youth and “Good Girls”.

    She often appeared visually shocked by this line of questioning about her sex life, her body but persevered with her girl next door smile and an embarrassed laugh. As a young adult myself it felt gross and exploitative, but also normal she was in the public eye, right?

    When she came to tour Australia, I lined up to buy tickets. I was nearly 30 at this stage, I didn’t care; I just loved her music.

    What I didn’t know was the complicated and horrific life that she was trapped in.

    We all have seen or read about “Britney’s 2007 Breakdown”  hundreds of photographers carefully documented it; Britney shaving her head,  Britney attacking the paparazzi, Britney not wearing underwear, Britney in underwear in the ocean and tragically Britney being sectioned to a mental health facility.

    There was a visceral moral panic and outrage about Britney globally, she became an internet meme, a popular culture joke.

    Kat in her Britney gear during the 'Circus' tour in 2009. Not shown: Britney tour underwear. Picture: Supplied

    Kat in her Britney gear during the ‘Circus’ tour in 2009. Not shown: Britney tour underwear. Picture: Supplied

    The reality? At 25 she was already burnt out, recovering from a failed marriage and a very public battle for the custody of her two children. She was placed under the conservatorship of her father, Jamie Spears. This meant he was in full control of her estate and her person. In unsealed court documents, the reason for this was early onset dementia.

    Jamie Spears seemed an unusual choice – there were accusations of family abuse, alcoholism and gambling addiction when she was growing up and Mr Spears himself admitted he had no relationship with his eldest daughter prior to being placed in complete  authority over her life.

    Amid this chaos in her personal life, Britney recorded her most critically acclaimed album “Blackout” hailed as one of the best and most influential pop albums of the 21st Century . She went on to earn $113 million USD, record 3 additional albums, and give over 300 performances globally, all while she was deemed unfit to manage her finances and body.

    She had a contraceptive device implanted, she had no say over her medication, dcotors or legal representation. But she could earn money, and a lot of people got paid…just not Britney, who needed permission for any expenditure. Not sure the same conditions were in place for her court appointed lawyer who earned a lazy $3 million USD while representing her since 2008. He resigned this year and has refused to comment on the case.

    The constant threat to Britney was if she refused to comply, they would take her children away. The most damning words of all about this case are from Britney herself. She told her management she didn’t want to do another Vegas residency- which triggered a chain of events she had no say over including a stay in rehab she had no oversight on and was required to pay for that she didn’t want or understand its purpose.

    “I’m sorry, Britney, you have to listen to your doctors. They’re planning to send you to a small home in Beverly Hills to do a small rehab program that we’re going to make up for you. You’re going to pay $60,000 a month for this.” I cried on the phone for an hour, and he loved every minute of it. The control he had over someone as powerful as me — he loved the control to hurt his own daughter 100,000%. He Loved it.”

    The testimony was harrowing. It rang true for thousands of women around the world who have lived in family violence the fear the control using child access as a weapon. As we recently reported on BroadAgenda, the frustration felt by women with a disability who are ignored and infantilised, this is not a new discussion or fight for them.

    Conservatorships have come under scrutiny as an industry that people can profit from rather than being patient centric and about their needs. It is a legal arrangement that is clearly easy to exploit the people with severe cognitive impairment and abuse can occur ranging from imposition of restrictions to financial mismanagement, it’s a catch 22 nothing can be done if people don’t find out about the abuse.

    All eyes on me in the centre of the ring – Britney’s Circus tour. Picture: Shutterstock

    The darker side of the documentaries, interviews and hundreds of thousands of words written about Britney is the constant fascination with her pain and the need to capture it for discussion and dissection.  It has sparked a necessary discussion on how women were treated in the music industry in the 90s and the exploitation of her story in the media. Britney herself has been vocal on her embarrassment at how she has been portrayed and the emotional distress it has caused. Perhaps the duality of her story can’t be resolved – there is an inherent voyeuristic, uncomfortable feeling when participating and consuming the story.

    Britney has told her story in song lyrics interviews and social media; asking for help, feeling trapped, begging to be seen and having her pain and anger validated. Perhaps if people were more invested in the human being than the product of Britney, her story may have had some different chapters.

    The truth is: hers are the only words we should be reading and listening to from now on.

    I felt sad when I read on Instagram that she has spent so long waiting for this situation to end she now feels afraid to do anything in case she makes a mistake. That people will judge her, and she will continue to have her every move documented.

    I’m a year older than Britney, I think of all the rich and varied mistakes I’ve made in my life, relationships, as a parent and as a friend. None were ever captured or scrutinised; I got to crash, pick myself up and hopefully learn, without the judgement of the world on my shoulders.  Someone asked me recently what I would say to her if I met her, I thought about it a lot.

    “I’m so sorry that I participated in a system that kept you a prisoner in your own life, I hope you have a lot of peace from now on and ‘as for being the kind of girl who likes to put on a show’ me too Britney, me too”.

    The #freebritneymovement have been lobbying for legal services to review her conservatorship for the past decade. Picture: Shutterstock

    The #freebritneymovement have been lobbying for legal services to review her conservatorship for the past decade. Picture: Shutterstock

     

    • Feature image (at top): Britney Spears performing at her ‘Piece of Me’ residency in Las Vegas. Picture: Rhys Adams. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

     

     

     

     

     

    The post They called her “Lucky”. But she wasn’t. appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Generational, Historical, Familial, Capitalism Trauma

    Whew, the realities of so many people as part of the walking wounded in high and low places. The landscape in USA, now Canada, UK and parts of Europe, where the Capitalists buff their gold-plated toilets and polish their collection of cars, there are hundreds of millions of people, rudderless, broken, flayed, laid prostrate from the emptiness of the consumerism, the bright lights and the smoke and mirrors. Everywhere in these lands there are masses of people faking it, living in la-la land. So much mental illness. So many variations on a theme of poor spiritual and intellectual hygiene.

    The scriptwriters — the powerful who employ the torturers, the marketers, the legal vultures, all those barkers and salesmen, all those sociologists and psychiatrists, all of them, who are in the business of behavior modification — they too are broken, but in a criminal way. Thugs in Brooks Brothers suits. Hit men and hit women in the boardrooms of defense corporations, in mining corporations, in all the dirty corporations that make up the M.I.C. and the many headed poisons serpent of “contractors,” building roads, offices, runways, towers, systems of chaos as they help the Amerikkkan Empire extract, steal, rob, extort from those in the global south, in developing and under developed countries, from sea to naval cruising sea.

    I’m around a lot of trauma, as a teacher, journalist and social services professional. I am right there in the middle of trauma, seeing first hand generational and familial trauma after trauma. There in the middle of epigenetics, I see how civic and cultural trauma mixes with familial trauma; the fact is most people are in various layers of dysfunction. Forget about the self-esteem issue as anything serious, but we do have a deeper discussion around this country’s Collective Stockholm Syndrome, or the General Anxiety Disorders so many young citizens and immigrants have. Yes, there are dark forces here to facilitate the continuation of trauma upon trauma. That rolling trauma creates inflammatory diseases, and a sort of stasis and emotional septicemia.

    The warehousing of youth in public K12 gulags, oh, what a continuation of multiple traumas, including dumb-downing and highly sophisticated propaganda and agnotology. The commercialization (privatization) of everything in a child’s life has generated empty vassals for the junk of retail, buy-buy-buy and death of agency.  The pimping for companies to gain the attention and the heart and soul of children, that is the order of the day. All those endless vapid hours upon hours on social (unsocial) media, all the rot of Netflix-Amazon Prime-Hulu-Redbox, it facilitates the draining of creativity, chutzpah, and strength. All of the syphilitic “artists” who make noise with groins exposed and skin pummeled with absurd tattoos, they too are part of the soft trauma, but oh killing kids softly. Selling those kids to drive themselves to pot, now, THC, CBD’s, to lobotomize their ability to launch a fight. The kids are already in the loop of trauma after trauma before they punch their first digital time clock. Here, the short list of what is adverse childhood events — No ACES up our sleeves, but the rich and controllers love these traumas since they create broken, half-living, flagging people. These people the rich can make many trillions on:

    • parents divorcing
    • one or both parents addicted.
    • poverty
    • no real adults who are mentors, kind
    • criminality or incarceration of adults in their lives
    • bad food
    • bad role models
    • bad birth
    • bad diet
    • lack of inquiry or inquisitiveness of those around
    • a world/households that are addicted to TV, sports, the lizard brain mush of entertainment
    • physical and verbal abuse
    • low birth weight
    • crime in and around the neighborhoods
    • no public or safe public spaces
    • parents who are never there
    • parents who are products of abuse
    • parents who are children, chronologically or just intellectually
    • warring criminal elected officials, from the Five Star General all the way to the county commissioner
    • constant reminders of polluted neighborhoods and lack of investment in public-social spaces.

    Proof is in the lead pipes!

    “Racism Plays a Major Part”: Like in Flint, Lead Pipes Leave Benton Harbor, Michigan, with Toxic Water

    It is a laundry list, for sure. And, as a professional, working with these realities is part and parcel part of a day. When I clock out, though, I am challenged to meet the same level of trauma informed care and compassion when the criminality, the stupidity, the infantilization, the McDonaldization, the boorishness, the stupidity, criminality, addiction, all of it, hits me in my personal and neighborhood space.

    I’ve stated that I am not going to give a criminal Trump or Clinton or Obama or Biden a break just because we know for a fact there are any number of epigenetic defects and familial rot-gut backgrounds, and mental hygiene issues ramrodding these powerful leaders. Trump and his bad daddy and his narcissistic personality disorder or Clinton’s sex addiction or Biden’s dementia. All of that is a given when looking at powerful and rich leaders, from Oprah to Bezos, from Dick Cheney to his daughter, Liz. Those rich and famous and powerful are one hell of a lot of a few hundred million people who are messed up on many levels.

    Power, megalomania, egomania, lying, looting, lechery, sure, that is the result of throwing trillions at them, allowing them to break the law, allowing them to subjugate the 80 percent of the world, entire countries/continents with their filthy designs and projects of unlimited power, unlimited criminality.

    Sometimes I wake up to a few kudos in my email box after one of my pieces or articles ends up read and appreciated. Other times, I am called stupid, a fool, and depending on the topic, an idiot, as in Covidiot!

    Some bloke from Canada sent in to me a long email October 13. You know, inferring out right, stating, no one has a right to question the planned pandemic paradigm as seen by his medical officer in his province, or our grand wizard, Saint Fauci; or none of us at DV has the brains to call mandates criminal, nor to question this concept of lack of informed consent. You know, forced jabs for the greater good of all is what this bloke states. The Canadian is okay with losing your job, your housing, your freedom if you dare not get the jab. Everyone is stupid who might, for a thousand different reasons, question exactly what’s going down with lockdowns, quarantines, lock-ups, terminations, broken supply chains, unimaginable profits for the rich, the drug makers, military in a time of economic downturn. Anyone questioning the origins of the Franken-SARS, or the validity of the mRNA gene hack. God forbid anyone question why so many get put on ventilators, and why simple and inexpensive measures, like nasal sprays with nitric oxide or massive doses of Vitamin C and Zinc and steroids and anti-virials might knock down or knock out the so-called Covid-19.

    I can certainly reproduce the email in question, but it meanders, saying that some of what I have written is okay by him, but he’s mad that DV has spiraled down with these writers questioning lock-up/lock-down. But I like the response from another email person/friend, when I forwarded this Canadian’s ire against my rant to him— Back at Ground-Truthing Again and Again and Again

    Paul — This fellow’s reaction doesn’t surprise me. Today on the site he refers to as, “writers for the gross fool who runs Global Research out of Montreal” there is an essay about a commercial airline pilot dying in flight.  The video is a Stew Peter’s production that is definitely alternative production. The Doctor he interviews is a health economist of right wing persuasion. Stew Peters patterns his production similar to Alex Jones complete with selling products at the end of his videos. There is all kinds of stuff on Global Research that is on the fringe of loopy.

    The same can be said of numerous other sites. But because these are alternative sites (Mint Press, Consortium News, Grayzone, Dissident Voice) doesn’t mean that some of what they say might be true or at least something to think about. This fellow who attacks you obviously gets his information from mainstream corporate media which is equally suspect and won’t allow anyone on their broadcasts that question the vaccines. Corporate media has been in lockstep from word go with the emergency use mRNA vaccine manufactures.

    I’ve lived long enough to know that sometime the dissenting voices are the ones that turn out to be right. In the last week there has been three small aircraft that have crashed in California for no apparent reason. One was a doctor in southern California. As of yet I haven’t read anything as to the causes of these accidents. There was a military doctor several weeks ago calling for the grounding of military pilots after being vaccinated.

    We are starting to see corporate media reports of supply chain collapse. Docks are jammed up with cargo ships, return containers are not being returned to the ports, lack of truck drivers, etcetera. All this in a world of efficient computer programs designed to make everything run smoothly and all of a sudden it doesn’t work. Truckers can’t get their required certifications for drug tests thereby preventing them from driving. The same is happening for just about every industry that moves freight. But Amazon keeps going. The big shippers keep going. The small guys get sidelined.

    Doesn’t all this look suspicious to this complainer? Like maybe something else is happening here? Banks are getting free money pumped into the repo market daily from the Federal Reserve and still the supply lines are plugged up like a constipated buffalo. I wonder if Bruce links any of this with economics or is it all just COVID related because some people refuse to get vaccinated because they’ve been hit with a stupid stick as he pontificated?

    I noticed this critic started all of his rant with what a environmental warrior he was at a job  because he discontinued the use of herbicides to spay weeds around power poles and his sending of transformer to England to be incinerated thirty five years ago. I wonder if he ever thinks for a second that those chemicals he discontinued the use of were all approved by the EPA, FDA or the CDC or at least to be allowed to be used until there was such an outcry by the public that it was impossible for the power companies to continue there use. Or that the BLM and forest service still use some of those chemicals today.

    Do you think the Canadian ever wonders why some of those people that don’t want to get the jab might just not trust those agencies approval of these experimental vaccines based on the history of these agencies? I doubt he does.

    Arguing with self righteous people like him, Paul, is like wrestling with a pig in the mud. All of a sudden it dawns on you that the pig enjoys it.

    Pig Rassle generates minimal mudslinging

    There are many many self righteous people who believe only a select few have the right to discuss the prevailing issues around coronavirus, SARS-CoV2, Covid-19, etc. MDs can only discuss the human medical conditions, engineers can only discuss engineering, aerospace scientists have the floor on all things space, economists, all things monetary. This is the bloody collective delusions of the white race, truly, the colonizers, the race that came into these lands, Turtle Island, and raped, ravaged, roiled the land with fire and pesticides. The murdering savages, those Puritans, those Hudson Bay Company men, those Carnegies, those Rockefellers, Oppenheimers, the entire bastards in the 5 percent, they are the true lords of truth, lords of information. Anyone else stepping outside their wheelhouse, well, off with their heads.

    Off with their heads, I say: Scientists!

    The EU authorities’ assumption that glyphosate does not spread through the air has been disproven. The results of the German study “Pesticide pollution of the air” prove that glyphosate and dozens of other pesticides are traveling through the air for miles into national parks and cities. The analysis was initially published in 2019 and has now been peer-reviewed by independent scientists and published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe. It was commissioned by the Bündnis für eine enkeltaugliche Landwirtschaft and the Umweltinstitut München and is the most comprehensive data set on pesticide pollution in the air in Germany. However, the EU authorities responsible for the approval process concerning the use of glyphosate have so far excluded air transport.

    And, wise words from the email writer who contacted me,  again:

    “Paul:  It has been known for years that Roundup travels through the air. The ag agents in my county in California held seminars for the farmers forty years ago where they said farmers could face fines and have their beloved Roundup restricted if they sprayed it when it was windy, not that any farmer ever faced a fine or stopped doing so. There was spotting on leaves where Roundup droplets had landed that ag agents would point out the cause as being from airborne Roundup. Just more proof of Capitalism killing everything for the profits of a few. ”

    Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19)

    An immediate international moratorium on all dual-use gain-of-function research must be instated and all existing experimentation must be autoclaved, only greed and hubris have ever been served by attempting this type of genetic manipulation. Humanity does not need a vaccine against HIV derived from a coronavirus, nor do we need to be tinkering with genetic material that holds the potential to wipe a significant percentage of us off the face of the Earth.

    Failure to embrace such a ban may effectively become a death sentence for our species, assuming we aren’t already on our last mile. Reinstate the global moratorium on “gain-of-function” research. Sign the petition here!

    Do you want to know how many people in the Western world want to hear that the batty bioengineered SARS-CoV19 was manufactured at the University of North Carolina, and under the auspices of Fauci and His Gang? Read up, study, and learn how this virus was bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus.

    Oh, all the news unfit to print, that is the continuing criminal enterprise system of America, of USA Media, of the Disorientation of the Discourse, and with all those felons and futures thieves and tax evaders and country coup d’état lovers in office, in the senate, congress, executive branch, US military, state department, CIA, all the posts tied to US Patriot Act, and then all the military contractors outright lying and loving their bank accounts, in-house ones, and off-shore. Land, real estate, mutual funds, private stocks, under the table deals, this is the White Savior, man, so anything tied to Pfizer or to any of the scum, it should be a slam dunk to not only doubt their motives and word, but to outright demand their heads.

    I lose more people on this stuff, every day, just asking them to listen, read, consider!

    Why does Christina Parks, Ph.D., object to the idea that a “vaccine passport” will reduce COVID rates? And why don’t African Americans and Ph.D.’s want the vaccine?

    Parks, whose Ph.D. is in cellular and molecular biology, addressed those questions and more on the latest episode of “The Defender Show,” where she told the show’s host, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., that mandating something to be injected into somebody’s body is “just ridiculous,” and vaccine passports are “blatantly illegal.”

    Parks said there are two reasons she objects to vaccine mandates and passports: lack of informed consent and lack of science to support them.

    Parks explained how mRNA vaccines were never designed to prevent transmission of the pathogen, even though they were marketed that way. All you have to do, she said, is read and understand the clinical trials.

    Watch and learn, The Defender.

    The real agenda of those billionaires: first the forced jabs, the biometrics, the implants, transhumanism 5.0. 5 G and 6 G up your rectum.

    Image
    Billionaires Eye Robot Weapons to Protect Themselves From the Rest of Us

    From Caitlin Johnstone —**quoting her

    In 2018 the influential author and professor Douglas Rushkoff wrote an article titled “Survival of the Richest” in which he disclosed that a year earlier he had been paid an enormous fee to meet with five extremely wealthy hedge funders. Rushkoff says the unnamed billionaires sought out his advice for strategizing their survival after what they called “the event,” their term for the collapse of civilization via climate destruction, nuclear war or some other catastrophe which they apparently viewed as likely enough and close enough to start planning for.

    Rushkoff writes that eventually it became clear that the foremost concern of these plutocrats was maintaining control over a security force which would protect their estates from the rabble in a post-apocalyptic world where money might not mean anything. I encourage you to read the following paragraph from the article carefully, because it says so much about how these people see our future, our world, and their fellow human beings:

    ‘This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.’

    Something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself fervently hoping that the world will be saved by billionaires.

    LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has said that more than half of Silicon Valley’s billionaires have invested in some type of “apocalypse insurance” such as an underground bunker to ensure they survive whatever disasters ensue from the status quo they currently benefit so immensely from. ** end quote!

    Back to the top — generational trauma, structural violence, environmental racism, killing us all with the military industrial complex, with those neocons and neoliberals, both fucked up parties, Demons and Inquisition, democrats (sic) and republicans (sic). The amount of trauma upon trauma on people now, just a few dozen months after the March 2020 big triple lie of planned pandemic, to mask or not to mask, to quarantine, or not to quarantine. To social distance or not. All the while there were thousands of doctors and others with cures, with ways to weather the corona flu, without hospitalization, intubation, the rest of the sick sick Soylent Green scenario.

    Again, War is a Racket, Big Pharma is War, Capitalism is a Continuing Criminal Racket. War is Peace, and Up is Down. Here, Lowkey and Ho, talking about a very slim view of capitalism a la Iraq and Afghanistan. This is it, the big rip off. Oh, if they really wanted to save us from the virus, the pollutants, the antimicrobial resistance, all of it, now wouldn’t these narcissist criminals, Trump and Biden et al, go after all those people who have stolen trillions? Trillions for, hmm, clean water systems for USA and the globe. Clean farms? Great schools? Medical clinics EVERYWHERE? There are many many millions of heads that have to roll to start from scratch, to get the people’s and the planet’s revolution up and running. Could be your senator or your uncle, mom or banker. Many many murderers have to go, no?

    Listen/watch: Just one shitty exercise in theft and murder. Imagine all the other rackets!

    The post Generational, Historical, Familial, Capitalism Trauma first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 1960s women: beyond sex, drugs, rock n’ roll

    Female baby boomers came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and changed the world forever. It wasn’t just about hippies, flower power, anti-war demonstrations, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

    Even more fundamental changes were taking place.

    The sexual revolution, underpinned by widespread availability of the pill and a dramatic rise in women going to university, started a long-term decline in fertility rates that continues to this day.

    This is one of the things I discuss in my new book, Population Shock.

    Abul’s latest book, Population Shock, is out now.

    Abul’s latest book, Population Shock, is out now.

    My interest in this topic goes back to my time in the Department of Immigration where for over a decade I had responsibility for migration and temporary entry policy.

    While initially affecting developed nations, the long-term decline in fertility rates has extended to just about every nation on the planet.

    As a result, the global population growth rate peaked in the 1970s and has steadily declined since.

    In its 2019 revision of the world’s population prospects, the United Nations reduced its projected peak in the world’s population by 300 million.

    Its forthcoming 2021 revision, which has already been delayed over four months due to its contentious nature, may reduce that peak by another 300 to 500 million with the peak in human population being reached well before the end of this century.

    The 1960s and 1970s also started a boom in workforce growth, not just because male boomers started entering the work force in huge numbers, but career opportunities also opened up for female boomers.

    Double income families, which had been unusual through the 1950s, started to become the norm.

    They earned wages and started spending money like never before – unlike their parents who had been children of the depression and war years.

    Surging private consumption and rapidly growing wages due to the strength of a highly unionized workforce meant we faced the combined effect of rising unemployment and runaway inflation.

    Governments acted by ‘fighting inflation first’, ‘putting a lid on wages’ and ‘disempowering unions’.

    They also started flattening income tax scales, increasing consumption taxes and reducing company and inheritance taxes – thus setting in train a long-term rise in wealth and income inequality.

    But as the boomers begin to retire and die out, we enter a new era. The next step of course is for deaths to begin exceeding births.

    The world’s oldest population, Japan, reached that point a number of years ago. Its population is shrinking by around 500,000 per annum. This may rise to 1 million per annum by the end of this decade.

    Over the next 10 to 15 years, many other nations will join Japan with a shrinking population. These include China, Russia, Italy, Spain, the Ukraine, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Greece, Poland and many others.

    So many major nations with shrinking populations is unprecedented in human history.

    While shrinking populations may appear to be a positive for the environment, shrinking economies make it much more difficult to afford the cost of transition to a less emissions intensive economy.

    Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi are desperately trying to encourage families to have more children but with very little success.

    The pill may have started this trend, but we need to act now to prevent our fertility rate falling too much further and accelerating our rate of population ageing. Better childcare policies and publicly funded early childhood education may be not just good social policy but also good economic policy.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The post 1960s women: beyond sex, drugs, rock n’ roll appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Perceptions over NZ’s public interest journalism project – saint or sinner?

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Sri Krishnamurthi for Asia-Pacific Report

    “Public interest journalism plays a crucial role in promoting the quality of public life, protecting individuals from misconduct on the part of government and the private sector, and giving real content to the public’s ‘right to know’.” – The Crucial Role of Public Interest Journalism in Australia and the Economic Forces Affecting It, by Henry Ergas, Jonathan Pincus and Sabine Schnittger, 2017.

    No sooner had New Zealand’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) been announced back in February than the howls of prejudice from the privileged few bubbled to the surface.

    The notion that the PIJF was a political construct as the fund is overseen by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and administered by NZ On Air, whose board members are appointed by the Minister for Broadcasting, Kris Faafoi, found favour in the apprehension of the displeased.

    Accusations of media bias in favour of the incumbent government, instilling Article 2 of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi as well as the perception that Māori were being given preferential treatment in the PIJF have since been debated long and hard.

    Goal 3: The PIJF says: “Actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner.”

    Among those who questioned the media’s impartiality in the wake of the PIJF goals was opposition National Party leader Judith Collins.

    “You have to wonder, does that buy compliance or what? And if it doesn’t buy compliance then why is part of that, that says that you’ve got to be seen to be promoting the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, what the hell has this got to do with it,” Collins said with incredulity in an interview played on RNZ’s Mediawatch.

    “You are talking about free media, free speech and you’ve got a government going around telling people we’ll help you out in the media because we think its good for you to have a media but you have to say what we think, I don’t buy it and I don’t think media should be buying it, obviously some have completely drunk the kool-aid.”

    Then there was Dr Muriel Newman of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research who on Sky News Australia said:

    “We’re in a situation where the government has spent $55 million on a public interest broadcasting fund. [This] is something the media can apply for to get grants and one of the conditions of doing that is they have to, if you like, speak out in favour of this Treaty partnership agenda.”

    A grain of truth?
    Is there a grain of truth to some of the critique and to the accusations of the media selling out its independence?

    Former editor of The Dominion Post Karl du Fresne seems to think so as he has said in his blog:

    “The line that once separated journalism from activism is being erased, and it’s happening with the eager cooperation of the mainstream journalism organisations that are lining up to take the state’s tainted money. We are witnessing the slow death of neutral, independent and credible journalism.

    “Last month, The Dominion Post published a letter from me in which I challenged an article by Stuff editor-in-chief Patrick Crewdson headlined, ‘Why government money won’t corrupt our journalism’, in which Crewdson insisted Stuff’s editorial integrity wouldn’t be compromised by accepting government funding.

    “I wrote: “ … what he doesn’t mention is that before applying for money from the fund, media organisations must commit to a set of requirements that include, among other things, actively promoting the Māori language and ‘the principles of Partnership, Participation and Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi’.

    “In other words, media organisations that seek money from the fund are signing up to a politicised project whose rules are fundamentally incompatible with free and independent journalism.

    “The PIJF should be seen not as evidence of a principled, altruistic commitment to the survival of journalism, which is how it’s been framed, but as an opportunistic and cynical play by a left-wing government — financed by the taxpayer to the tune of $55 million — for control over the news media at a time when the industry is floundering and vulnerable.”

    ‘Politicised project’
    As Melissa Lee, National’s broadcast spokesperson, who is a former Asia Down Under broadcaster, said in the House during question time on August 4:

    “Any news outlet that seeks money from the fund is signing up to a politicised project whose rules are fundamentally incompatible with free and independent journalism.”


    Melissa Lee questions the Minister for Broadcasting and Media on August 4. Video: NZ Parliament on Vimeo.

    Media consultant and former New Zealand Herald editor-in-chief Gavin Ellis, who was one of a group of independent assessors who made initial assessments and had his Knightly Views column come under scrutiny from former North and South, Newsroom and Spinoff journalist Graham Adams, who wrote on the Democracy Project that:

    “Some of journalism’s grandees have derided critics of the fund who object to its Treaty directions as ‘embittered snipers’ and as members of the ‘army of the disaffected’.

    Dr Gavin Ellis
    Media analyst Dr Gavin Ellis … dismisses critical colleagues as ‘siding with conspiracy theorists who are convinced the nation’s mainstream media are in the government’s pocket’. Image: Knightly Views

    “In a column titled ‘Trashing journalists is not in the public interest’, Gavin Ellis, a former editor-in-chief of the NZ Herald, dismissed critical colleagues as ‘siding with conspiracy theorists who are convinced the nation’s mainstream media are in the government’s pocket’.

    “He also passed off criticisms of ‘the emphasis on the Treaty of Waitangi in the criteria’ with: ‘There is no doubt that part of the funding will redress imbalances in that area and some of the already-announced grants aim to do that.’

    “Given the fund’s criteria, redressing ‘imbalances’ can only mean amplifying the prescribed notion of the Treaty as a partnership — and certainly not questioning whether that interpretation is logically or constitutionally defensible.”

    ‘Sheer nonsense’
    However, Ellis wouldn’t have a bar of the insinuation that the media had sold out.

    “The suggestion the media have been bought off is sheer nonsense,” Ellis says.

    “Look at it rationally: This is a modest amount of money spread over a number of years and across all eligible media organisations.

    “If they were capable of being bought off – and I contend they are NOT – this would hardly be a winning formula for achieving it. Frankly, I think every working journalist in this country would be insulted by this suggestion.”

    Faafoi was adamant that the fund remained independent of political interference.

    “I am confident that any decision made around funding support announced recently is completely and utterly clear of any ministerial involvement, and quite rightly is undertaken by New Zealand on Air,” Faafoi said.

    To the widespread view pushed by those suspicious of the PIJF that it would impact on media freedom and create bias, Selwyn Manning, publisher of Evening Report, says nothing could be further from the truth.

    ‘Simply silly’ argument
    “The argument that the PIJF is an instrument of a Labour-led government is simply silly. The reality is, the lead appointment of the PIJF (NZ on Air Head of Journalism, Raewyn Rasch) is a former executive producer of TVNZ’s Seven Sharp.

    “She was the executive producer when right-wing shock-jock Mike Hosking was the lead-host of that show.

    “It beggars belief that some right-wing elements from within mainstream media are harping on that the PIJF will impact on media freedom,” Manning says.

    “Now, I don’t know the politics of this former executive producer, but if the Labour-led cabinet was truly controlling NZ on Air operations, I doubt it would appoint Mike Hosking’s former gatekeeper into the key role of overseeing who and what gets a slice of the millions being dished out of the PIJF.”

    The suggestion that the media had been ‘bought’ by the government earned a rebuke from Manning.

    Multimedia's Selwyn Manning
    Multimedia’s Selwyn Manning … “The PIJF is designed to serve the public interest — not entrap an independent Fourth Estate.” Image: Evening Report

    “The claim is absolute tripe. The same people who make the accusation are the very ones who have benefited from decades of corporate employment,” he says.

    “Their former employers failed to develop new-century business models, and, many who believed they had a job for life, found themselves having to share the experience of the unemployed.

    ‘Smug mainstream complacency’
    “Once cast into the wild, their lack of logic follows their years of smug mainstream complacency. The PIJF is designed to serve the public interest — not entrap an independent Fourth Estate. I’m not surprised that these practitioners of self-interest fail to understand the difference.”

    Meanwhile, MP Melissa Lee has been conducting her own review into the media.

    “Having met with dozens of broadcasting, media and content creators and industry leaders around New Zealand it is clear there needs to be a fundamental shift in the understanding of the future of media,” Lee says.

    “Not just in funding, but in regulation and creativity in New Zealand; in other parts of the world global content creation platforms are innovating and embracing local markets and this needs to be considered within the framework as to how we fund these directly from the Crown and taxpayer.

    MP Melissa Lee
    MP and former broadcaster Melissa Lee … “outside of directly non-commercial content there is a serious question as to some of the things we are seeing NZ on Air and other public-funded platforms supporting.” Image: FB

    “If there are commercial markets open to adapting Kiwi Stories that may have not had the same level of marketability before. We should be championing and discussing better partnerships on shore with all international and domestic content creators.

    “When I set out on my own review, it showed me the industry, not the government and actually, not the taxpayer either, should be front-footing the future of their sector.

    “Simply put, outside of directly non-commercial content there is a serious question as to some of the things we are seeing NZ on Air and other public-funded platforms supporting.”

    Google and Facebook issue
    As hinted by Minister Faafoi, the government may follow Australia’s lead, in seeking advertising revenue from Google and Facebook which was legislated for last year.

    “Media is changing, the way people are consuming media is changing. We do think we need to assist some of the changing business models in the media at the moment,” he said in a recent podcast with Spinoff’s ‘The Fold’.

    “At the time it was happening I said we wouldn’t take a similar approach and we haven’t.

    “They have got an outcome and we have had discussions at the start of the year.

    “If those (further) discussions happen it might go some way to replacing some of the revenue; we have put the PIJF to assist in the transition so we are keeping a very close eye on those discussions.

    “We’ve sent the message to both Google and Facebook, after the round of talks (with local media). I would like to see more momentum there having said that officials are giving us advice on what other options are available to us.”

    For once, Lee was in agreement with Faafoi as to the time limitation on the fund. Nor would she suggest a revenue gathering model for the industry to adopt.

    ‘Excessive level of funding’
    “The government considers the PIJF to be a short term measure so I’m hoping it won’t be there when National returns to the Treasury benches. I wouldn’t support the model and the excessive level of funding that has been given in its current format and heavy conversations need to actually be had with the people of New Zealand as to what they want in the future of publicly funded journalism,” she said.

    Ellis considers that some form of assistance will need to go to the industry after its three-year duration.

    “I sense that there will need to be ongoing support for initiatives like the Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) and the court reporting scheme, among others. However, we should not forget that among the grants are a number of (mainly TV and radio) programmes that have already been receiving long-term support from NZ on Air that have been moved into the PIJF.”

    He pointed to the Reporters Without Borders Media Freedom Index in Nordic countries where the PIJF has been trialled successfully for 40 years.

    “Look at the Freedom Index. New Zealand sits alongside those Nordic countries in terms of government attitudes to non-interference in media,” Ellis says.

    “There is a fundamental difference between trying to persuade — and all governments do that — and the type of coercion that ‘buying off the media’ suggests. There are legislative and constitutional safeguards against it.”

    Māori and iwi journalism
    One of the areas that has caused much consternation is under “Māori and iwi journalism in the general criteria is the section which says: “This spectrum of reporting is integral to the protection of te ao Māori under article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and includes (but is not limited to) focus areas such as:
    ● Te reo Māori and tikanga
    ● Political matters
    ● Historical accounts
    ● Profile-based reporting
    ● Tangihanga
    ● Māori interest
    ● Sports (Ki O Rahi, Waka Ama, Touch Nationals etc.)
    ● Civil Emergencies “

    Yet under the what PIJF is NOT section, is the offending topic “National Political coverage”.

    Although it has tried to justify this by comparing mainstream journalism with Māori journalism that is culturally specific.

    That has been troubling for Manning, who saw it as a deficiency of the PIJF.

    “A failure of this year’s PIJF remit was to exclude from consideration foreign affairs reporting and political reporting efforts,” he says.

    ‘Two vital elements’
    “To me, that decision stripped two vital elements of public interest journalism from securing access to sustainable funding.

    “It follows that communities, ethnicities that make up Aotearoa’s diverse multicultural experience, see politics and Pacific-wide affairs as essential components of their make-up.

    “It is in the public interest that their experience and intellectual interaction with politics, and the world, be encouraged, supported and funded. But this was excluded from even being considered.

    “That decision simply amplifies a Eurocentric bias. It was eyebrow-raising, to say the least, that New Zealand on Air stated to applicants that politics and foreign affairs reportage was excluded as it was already satisfactorily covered.”

    It was a foible that drew the attention of Lee who said the fund draws over the cracks when it came to pluralism.

    “I was deeply troubled and concerned at NZ on Air deciding to allow some forms of political journalism funding but not others and have yet to see a clear rationale for this from them or a clear answer from the Minister if he believes such funding plans were in scope for his policy proposals,” she says.

    “While more ethnic media may get a temporary uplift through the fund, the reality is an effort to ensure diversity in reporters should be industry-led and not something that needs to be prescribed.

    PIJF payout 2021
    The Public Interest Journalism Fund payout in rounds one and two. Graphic: NZ On Air

    ‘Other ethnicities is excluded’
    “One of the more discriminatory elements of the way the PIJF has been established is to pre-suppose Māori political reporting should be allowed but other ethnicities is excluded because for some reason the government believes Māori culture is innately political but other political reporting based on different ethnicities is barred; that is simply not right.”

    Manning has another view on why Māori media matters specifically to New Zealand.

    “Let’s seek some solutions. Ideally, the PIJF effort should be split into two camps; the first where Māori media develop an expression of public interest journalism that serves the needs of the Māori community; the second where all others express the development of public interest journalism through a multicultural frame.

    “If that was embarked upon, then the challenge of measuring reach and diversity would be resolved through meritocracy and need, as opposed to racial through Eurocentric considerations,” Manning said.

    He pulls no punches when he casts a caustic eye on media saying they are as much to blame for young talent not emerging from their own ranks as the Crawford Report in the Fund’s Stakeholder consultations and recommendations noted: “There was a consensus that the pipeline of talent into NZ journalism is broken. Newsrooms cannot find experienced journalists to fill vacancies and many in the industry believe the tertiary sector is not supplying sufficiently skilled graduates.”

    As Manning explains: “If I may, I’ll speak to the degrees of blame emitting from mainstream media outlets. I’ll try to explain… The fact is the business models of many mainstream media are beyond their golden years.

    “They cannot sustain the viability of their effort for much longer. They operate within a competitive paradigm where the value of an investigation is calculated by how popular it is; how it affects the time-on-site analytics; and how it may devalue an opponent’s brand (clickbait).

    Reasons for journalism
    “Public interest doesn’t come into it, that is unless it serves these elements. Nor does holding the powerful to account.

    “Or creating an understanding that promotes common ground or positive change. A Fourth Estate endeavour couldn’t be farthest from their managers’ minds.

    “Compare this to the reasons why young professionals study journalism and choose it as their preferred career path.

    “I’d suggest 90 percent of those graduating with tertiary degrees majoring in journalism have made the commitment due to a desire to make a difference; to hold the powerful to account; to serve the public interest, and are dedicated to the ethics and ideals of a real Fourth Estate.

    “The two cultures: the old corporate conservative dinosaur and the young idealistic professional, simply do not mix well. I fail to see any common ground between them.

    “The consequence is a well-healed blame-game where the former media elites complain about the quality of entry-level journalists, and the rarity of the experienced.

    “The reality is they want underpaid journalists, of all levels, that will serve them rather than public interest ideals”

    Fourth Estate recognition heartening
    Manning, in his final thoughts on the PIJF, said:

    “If New Zealand on Air is sincere in its resolve (i.e. to learn from the PIJF early rounds) then a solid sustainable funding framework will emerge. From a media point of view, it is heartening that our democracy’s executive government has recognised how important is to have a sustainable Fourth Estate.

    “It is disappointing in equal measure that the PIJF effort’s biggest critics come from mainstream media backgrounds.

    “I suggest this reveals a pathetic state of intellectual decay that sadly is rife among those who once were journalists but are now yesterday’s news.”

    That is the nature of the still-evolving media industry.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Discontent by Design: The Lost World of the West

    A cursory glance at the ‘State of the World’ reveals what a mess things are: from the environmental emergency and war to injustice and poverty, a tightly woven man-made mess of interconnected issues, unprecedented in scale.

    The greatest crisis of all, however, is humanity, and the culture that we, specifically ‘The West’, have built and are wedded to. The Culture of Pleasure sits tightly within and feeds the pervasive Ideology of Consumerism, a socio-economic model that has  poisoned the environment and led to the commodification of everything, and everyone.

    While there are counter trends with people living simpler, more responsible lives, broadly speaking humanity is immersed in the world of pleasure, and has lost its way. Our ancient connection to and respect for the planet has gone, as has relationship with others and with ourselves – with who and what we essentially are; the mystery and wonder of life has been trampled on in the race to consume, to achieve, to ‘succeed’.

    This fundamental estrangement and the resulting sense of isolation lies at the root of many of our problems, and is particularly potent in western societies. It’s here that disassociation, exploitation and separation were pioneered and championed, and, thanks to the power of cultural imperialism and the reach of money, such reductive, divisive ideas have been exported around the globe. Almost every country has been affected, or should we say infected – often on the back of aid (glorified loans in exchange for access, e.g.) – ancient cultures subverted, communities dismantled under the suffocating weight of homogenization and the divisive ‘values’ of the market.

    As the present civilization crumbles before our eyes, the levels of illness — physiological, psychological, sociological and ecological — expand and intensify, and humanity stumbles, bewildered and frightened from day to day; crashing from one crisis to another, applying outdated inadequate methods, which solve nothing and intensify much.

    Instead of acknowledging the fact and acting to bring about real change, meaning a shift in thinking, in attitudes and values, the widespread response to this collective chaos is, perhaps, understandably to seek immediate satiation, distraction and pleasure. To cling to anything that creates or has previously created a sense of stability or relief, no matter how fleeting. Sentimentality reigns in such a shallow, fearful world where meaning has evaporated, and short term, immediate satisfaction is all that matters.

    Empty and afraid, contemporary western societies, and regions infected by said nations’ ideals, have become more and more dependent upon pleasure as the ‘end’ for all ‘means’, the thing to work towards and for; the reason for living. And although it may provide a momentary escape from misery, pleasure and sensory gratification is devoid of substance and offers nothing of lasting value. In fact, far from creating happiness, it fuels frustration and discontent by design.

    Desolation and division

    An essential element in the consumerist drama of greed and ecological destruction, during The Covid pleasure’s hold on humanity has intensified, as has sentimentality: the pleasure and debilitating comfort of clawing sentimentality. In many societies the pursuit of pleasure has become an obsession. Sold as the elixir to internal emptiness and misery, pleasure has replaced essential happiness, which is a natural non-dependent state inherent within all people. As a result, our societies have become increasingly shallow and discontented, frightened, lacking meaning. Lost.

    An essential ingredient in both the Culture of Pleasure and consumerism is desire. Constantly agitated by the media in order to maintain discontent and the itch for experiences and stuff, desire can be seen masquerading as love – remember love? Frequently referred to in sermons, speeches, novels, songs and the like, and cherished as an ideal, love has become increasingly irrelevant. Relegated to the sidelines of society, remembered in a maudlin fashion, but in a world of instant gratification, greed and nationalism, love is not taken seriously as a living principle animating all aspects of society; a powerful force driving right action.

    Where is love within the socio-political constructs and the policies of governments, within which we are forced to live and function? There isn’t any, or none worth noting, and how can there be peace, social justice and equality without love? Acts of community kindness, which may well be prompted by love, still exist, of course. But displays of social responsibility and environmental action, positive and encouraging as these are, are a meagre measure of love as we allow the planet to burn, wars to rage, refugees to drown in the Mediterranean or some other Sea; children to die of starvation and covid vaccines to be hoarded in their millions by rich nations too mean to share.

    These and countless other unloving acts are perpetuated every day in our divided, cruel world. Actions, and in many cases inaction, sanctioned by a culture rooted in selfishness, division and the relentless pursuit of pleasure. It is within this facile destructive web that humanity finds itself; lost, and far from home, which is a frightening disorientating place to be. From this fragmented position decisions are made, actions undertaken, individually and collectively, the chaotic results of which are all around us.

    If the many external manifestations of this inner turmoil are to be overcome a fundamental reorientation is needed. A revolution of ideals, of values and behavior; a movement (the early signs of which can be sensed and, on a clear day, seen) away from lives governed by desire and the search for pleasure, to modes of living founded on simplicity, sufficiency and responsibility, enabling the creation of societies based on love, and the principles of goodness that flow from love to gradually emerge.

    The post Discontent by Design: The Lost World of the West first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Is the conviction a top fox hunter finally enough for UK landowners to ban hunting?

    15 October saw a rare, beautiful moment, when one of Britain’s elites had the book thrown at him. Mark Hankinson, one of Britain’s leading fox hunters, was found guilty of “encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence under the Hunting Act”. Animal rights activists cheered as Hankinson was forced to face the public when he left court.

    The case was brought against Hankinson after he was caught on film encouraging fellow hunters to break the law. In one video, Hankinson said that trail hunting was used as a smokescreen “to portray to the people watching that you’re going about legitimate business”.

    ‘Trail hunting’ is constantly used by hunting packs as a guise to go about real, illegal fox hunting. If they are trail hunting, packs lay an artificial trail for hounds to follow, instead of chasing a real fox. The webinars spelled out what activists have known all along: that since the hunting ban, packs have continued to hunt and murder foxes but have claimed they’re just trail hunting. Campaigners and hunt saboteurs have documented numerous acts of illegal fox hunting since the ban came into force.

    Judge Tan Ikram summed up the case, saying that Hankinson’s words during the webinar were:

    clearly advice and encouragement to commit the offence of hunting a wild mammal with a dog. I am sure he intended to encourage the commission of that offence.

    The Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA), which exposed the webinars to the public, celebrated the victory. It said:

    Judge Ikram saw through it all. In a withering assessment of Hankinson’s attempts to explain away his lies, Judge Ikram “simply did not find him credible in any of his explanations of the words he used”.

    It went on to say:

    As the HSA has been saying for sixteen years: trail hunting is a sham, a mirage and a smokescreen designed to disguise illegal hunting.

    Hankinson’s punishment was ridiculously lenient. He was fined £1,000, which is pocket money to the majority of fox hunting elites, as well as £2,500 towards legal costs.

    The Canary spoke to Rob Pownall, founder of anti-hunting organisation Keep The Ban. Pownall said:

    While the punishment was unduly lenient, this case well and truly puts to bed the charade that is trail hunting. The judge handing out the sentence couldn’t have summarised it any better, that trail hunting is a “sham and a fiction”.

    Britain’s landowners must ban hunting fullstop

    When the recordings of the webinars came to light, some of Britain’s biggest landowners – namely the National Trust, Forestry England and United Utilities – suspended trail hunting on their land. They said that they would review their decision after the court case had concluded.

    The Canary contacted both the National Trust and Forestry England to find out whether they will finally ban hunting on their land for good. The National Trust sent back their generic non-committal reply that they have released to all media outlets, saying:

    As the court case has now concluded and the defendant has been found guilty, we will digest all the information that has arisen as a result of this investigation before making a decision on whether to resume the trail hunting licence application process.

    Campaign group The National Dis-Trust made a public response, saying:

    What’s to digest National Trust? The hunters have been caught out by the very top in the hunting world?

    Don’t even bother meeting with the criminal organisation the (MFHA) Hunting Office, they have been proven to be liars. They even lied in a court of law. They can not be trusted.

    Ban hunting now, the court have stated quite clearly trail hunting is a sham. Like we have been telling you since 2014.

    The National Trust’s non-committal stance begs two questions: what more evidence can the National Trust possibly need in order to permanently ban trail hunting? And why didn’t it plan for the court’s outcome? The Canary has previously reported on various incidents of illegal fox hunting happening on its land. And as recently as 16 October, hunt saboteurs filmed a pack hunting a fox in the Lake District National Park, more than 20% of which is owned by the National Trust. On top of this, The Canary has reported how the National Trust continues to ignore the ‘sport’ of illegal stag hunting, despite being provided with ample evidence by animal rights campaigners.

    Pownall argued:

    Organisations such as the National Trust and Forestry England have been under pressure from Keep The Ban and anti-hunt campaigners for several years now…

    It is time that landowners stood up for wildlife by standing up to the hunts, and ban all hunting on their land with immediate effect.

    Forest England hasn’t yet replied to The Canary’s request for its stance on trail hunting.

    It is essential, as the landowners deliberate on what to do next, that the public makes their opinion clear. We have had enough of these giant landowners protecting the elite. Now is their chance to step up and ban the charade of trail hunting for good.

    Featured image via Hunt Saboteurs Association

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The Labour Party is dead. Long live the resistance.

    In Nottingham on 16 and 17 October, Resist held a festival to celebrate unity among the left. Former MP Chris Williamson formed Resist as:

    a grassroots movement with nationwide support, which aims to empower communities and workers through democratic, practical and political means.

    The festival brought together an impressive range of speakers to talk about their own story of resistance including activists and performers like Lowkey, Alexei Sayle, Jackie Walker, and Dr Bob Gill. Other speakers included historians and journalists such as Ilan Pappé, Abby Martin, and Max Blumenthal, professor Bill Mitchell, and many others.

    Having been there and met some of the most amazing and hard-working people I’ve ever met, I’ve come away truly inspired. Namely I’m inspired to work harder to bring down a rotten establishment that seeks to serve the rich and takes great pleasure in exploiting, and leaving for dead, poor and working-class people. An establishment that serves neo-liberalism and attempts to keep us in our place through divide and conquer.

    But the weekend of Resist did something else for me. It confirmed something that shouldn’t have needed confirmation: the Labour Party, as a party of working-class people, is dead. In fact, I don’t believe that kind of party ever existed. Now there’s a credible working-class movement emerging. One that could possibly affect the kind of change we need.

    Yet last weekend also left me with a question: Could such a grassroots movement, inside the confines of parliament, make a real difference for working-class people? That’s something I can’t answer. Time will tell. But whatever the outcome, this fearless, relentless bunch I met in Nottingham are about to give it a right go. And this group will face down any scandalous lies told about them or witchhunts launched to discredit them. The establishment better watch out!

    Entering parliament?

    On the second day, a panel of speakers and festival delegates debated the topic: Should The Resist Movement Register To Become A Political Party?

    Following a lively and, at times, contentious debate, the overall feeling was one of support. An indicative vote showed the vast majority of voting delegates support the move. Two weeks ago, this was also the general feeling of respondents to the same question on Resist’s social media page. Paid members of the movement will now vote on this in the coming week. This should give a definitive answer.

    What exactly comes after that – we’ll have to wait and see. But what was clear to me was the vast majority of people I spoke to believe the Labour Party, as a representative of the working-class, is dead and well beyond saving. It’s for the bin. And while not everybody there supported the formation of a new political party, there was palpable anger with the ruling elite. It’s an anger that’s more than justified.

    Among the delegates there was a very strong appetite for a fight back – a fight back against an anti-working class parliament, a corporate media that speaks for the elite, and against sexism, racism, imperialism, and neoliberalism. It’s also a fight to return the NHS into full public ownership.

    A party of disgrace

    There’s little need for me to list the many ways the Labour Party has consistently betrayed working-class people. Just put Keir Starmer’s name in the search option and you’ll find a lot of what you need to read. That party is an absolute disgusting and immoral charade. But despite not wanting to delve into that betrayal, the witchhunt against anti-racist campaigners and socialists within the party in recent years (that began under the Corbyn/McDonnell leadership) deserves special mention. Because it showed how cowardly that leadership was when its bravery was needed.

    A similar style witchhunt was used to sack professor David Miller from his role at the University of Bristol. Miller also addressed the festival and clearly explained his sacking came as a result of his speaking out against anti-Muslim racism in the UK. He said “Muslims are continually under attack” and the Zionist campaign against him is actually in part about eradicating “the possibility that Muslims can be active in public life”. Miller believes Zionism is a form of racism.

    But getting back to Labour’s witchhunt against socialism, former editor-at-large of The Canary Kerry-Anne Mendoza wrote in February this year:

    Centrists have spent the past year continuing the chicken coup. They’ve purged the party membership of socialists with mass suspensions. They even aimed to decapitate the movement by suspending Corbyn on bogus pretexts. They’ve buried the Forde Report, and any hope of holding to account the centrist staffers responsible for racist abuse against BAME MPs and members. In short, they’ve made the party a hostile environment for anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher.

    It’s firmly my belief that Starmer has, should he so chose, the know-how to stand up to the Tory austerity government. He’s the leader of the opposition and former director of public prosecutions (DPP). Surely during that time he’s learned a thing or two about defence and attack? So it’s my belief he’s simply choosing not to. And he’s choosing not to because his agenda and that of the Tories are aligned. They’re aligned in terms of creating a friendly environment for the elite that comes at the expense of working-class people. In fact, Starmer’s time as DPP outlines how close he is to that establishment.

    There’s nothing for working class people in the Labour Party. And given Labour’s history of supporting imperialism, there probably never was. And there’s certainly nothing in it for the delegates of Resist. Because, as the delegates at the festival know, simply attending Resist leaves them open to suspension from the Labour Party. I’ll put my neck on the chopping block here though and guess that’ll worry them not a jot!

    The next election?

    As I said at the workshops I attended, the bad news is that it’s a long road for working-class people to reclaim power from the elite. But one possible advantage is that this means we can take our time. The next general election will be held sometime in 2024 at the latest. That, in all reality, leaves fuck all time to organise for proper change. It’s not enough time to mount a credible challenge against the establishment. And we also need to be clear about what we’ve learned from the Corbyn project.

    So in that sense, the next election is already lost for working-class people. The 80-seat Tory majority may narrow, but then again it may widen. Starmer has made no impact. Those powers that be won’t be changing any time soon.

    But when they do come crashing down, as they have done before and inevitably will do again, we need to be ready. And part of getting ready means changing the mindset from How do we win the next election? to How to we build the society we want? There are already existing alternatives we could look at to see what suits our needs. That’s going to take some time. But there’s never been a better time than right now to begin that work and Resist the powers that be.

    Featured image via Resist and Wikimedia/Chris McAndrew

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • That time my pediatrician lied to “do no harm”

    Once upon a time, I had a pediatrician who made house calls — complete with a little black bag. Dr. Harris practically became part of the family after my older sister was born. This was an age when doctors really got to know their patients. They also weren’t in a hurry to prescribe meds or suggest surgeries. Sometimes, they’d even go out on a limb and make moves that would be unimaginable today. Here’s a story about one of those moments.

    *****

    After being told she’d never have a second child, my mother was bedridden for much of her pregnancy with me. But there I was, nine months later: a happy and healthy baby, already proving that the medical establishment was full of shit. However, what no one but Dr. Harris knew was that I was born with what they used to call a “heart murmur.” Today, it’s Mitral Valve Prolapse (MVP) — typically not a condition that warrants any attention.

    After being told she’d never have a second child, my mother was bedridden for much of her pregnancy with me. But there I was, nine months later: a happy and healthy baby, already proving that the medical establishment was full of shit. However, what no one but Dr. Harris knew was that I was born with what they used to call a “heart murmur.” Today, it’s Mitral Valve Prolapse (MVP) — typically not a condition that warrants any attention.

    Back in the day, however, a murmur could’ve caused my parents to baby me even more than they already did. Dr. Harris sagely recognized this likelihood and did something incredible. He didn’t tell anyone. He worried that if he reported the condition, my parents would be over-protective and prevent me from being an active boy. He simply monitored my heart during every visit to be on the safe side. Translation: If not for Dr. Harris, I never would’ve become an athlete which helped me become popular and confident (as described here). I also wouldn’t have gotten into martial arts and fitness and all the other activities that enriched my life and kept me youthful. Who knows what I’d look and feel like today if not for him? I owe that man, big time.

    To cover his tracks, Dr. Harris had a plan. When my parents eventually decided to stop bringing me to a pediatrician, he’d contact my new doctor to explain the situation. At that point, the new guy could just keep monitoring the MVP. However, my parents brought me to their doctor without telling Dr. Harris beforehand. During my first check-up, the new guy heard the tell-tale click. Confused, he explained what it meant to my parents — saying that most people are born with a heart murmur. He couldn’t understand how Dr. Harris could’ve possibly missed it. This caused my mother to panic. She called Dr. Harris and he promptly confessed. What happened next may also be impossible today.

    My parents were okay with it. My mother admitted that Dr. Harris saved me from being forbidden to play sports and hang out with my hooligan buddies. The new doctor ran me through a battery of tests to “play it safe.” I remember him having the gall to ask me if I could do a push-up. With my parents in the room, a very insulted 12-year-old me hopped off the doctor’s plinth and onto the floor. He stopped me at 20 but I did another 10 to make sure Mr. Expert got the message.

    As the years passed, I literally forgot I had MVP until a new primary care physician of mine heard the click and tried to lay down a restriction. When I went for dental work, he declared, I needed to be medicated before and after the procedure. It’s called antibiotic prophylaxis and here’s the “logic”: If my gums bleed and I swallow some of the blood, there’s a slight chance it could cause an infection in my heart (endocarditis) because of the MVP.

    By that point, my mother had also been diagnosed with MVP (I likely inherited it from her) and was doing antibiotic prophylaxis for her dental visits. She begged me to comply, too. Being a good Catholic son, I did… once. They had you take about eight antibiotic pills before treatment and then another four pills a few hours later. I don’t know if any of you has ever taken that many antibiotics in a 6-hour time period, but it makes you feel high, and then it makes you feel like shit. Not to mention, there’s all the damage the drugs can do to your intestinal flora. Still, the fear of endocarditis was being imposed upon me. Just look around right now if you wanna confirm what medical fear-programming looks and feels like.

    I asked my dentist why I needed to take these meds when I was fully healthy and never displayed any heart-related symptoms. He just chalked it up to “protocol.” Then I asked him why it was okay for my gums to bleed each night when I flossed. He did not have an answer. He just made a joke about me being the only patient to ever question this protocol. These being the pre-internet days, I found some books at the library. In no time, I learned it was just a legal thing. Dentists and doctors were covering their asses when, in reality, there was NO need for antibiotic prophylaxis. If anything, as I surmised, the potential negative impacts far outweighed any benefits.

    I photocopied some pages from a book and brought them to my dentist. He took one glance and sighed. “I know, but I have to follow the rules. It’s required that I prescribe you the pills and ask you if you took them.” We stared at each other for about 10 seconds and I think we both knew exactly what would happen next. From then on, every time I’d come in for a cleaning, he’d ask: “Did you medicate?” I would nod yes and everything moved forward. In addition, I told my Mom I was still taking the pills. I didn’t like lying to her but I did so for her own protection. It’s a little trick I learned from Dr. Harris.

    The post That time my pediatrician lied to “do no harm” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why we must not allow covid to become endemic in New Zealand

    ANALYSIS: By John Donne Potter, Massey University; Graham Le Gros, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington, and Rod Jackson, University of Auckland

    As New Zealand switches from elimination to suppression, those who argue that covid-19 will become endemic and part of our lives either do not understand or ignore what this would actually mean.

    Elimination has always been a tricky word because it implies eradication. But we have only ever eradicated one human disease — smallpox — and are close with several others.

    For some, the end of elimination now means we should let the virus spread. But semantics matter less than policy.

    If we don’t eliminate, we must still aim to contain, mop up, reduce close to zero and thwart this pandemic.

    Because we certainly cannot live with endemic SARS-CoV-2.

    The delta variant spreads ominously and without controls, every infected person, on average, would infect six more, then 36, 216, 1296, 7776, 46,656 — we would get to more than twice New Zealand’s five million with three more cycles.

    We must continue to either stamp out the virus or keep case numbers very low. To contain case numbers, we need to keep up border protection, mask wearing, distancing, bubbles, contact tracing, testing of people and waste water, and vaccination.

    In the current delta outbreak, more than 95 percent of those infected were either unvaccinated or had received only their first dose.

    Delta is nothing like the flu
    Our most common endemic infections include the common cold (caused by hundreds of different viruses that circulate freely) and the flu (caused by a group of influenza viruses).

    Those who dismiss a mild case of covid-19 as being “no worse than the flu” have forgotten how appalling a case of flu really is. They might also have forgotten that, even with effective vaccination, influenza has a case fatality risk of about 0.1 percent — it kills about 500 people in New Zealand each year.

    Yet some seem to expect that covid-19 will learn to behave and become endemic. Some even seem to welcome this, claiming a “disease becomes endemic when it is manageable”.

    This is not true. Being manageable is not part of the definition of endemic disease. A disease becomes endemic when it is more or less always present in a population. It does not care whether it is manageable.

    Seasonal influenza has a basic reproduction number (R0) of about 1.5, meaning one infected person spreads the disease to fewer than two other people, on average. This is why it takes very little to break the chain of transmission.

    The annual flu epidemic declines because we have effective vaccines and because seasonal conditions during summer are less favourable to the survival of the virus.

    However, as we already mentioned, the delta variant has an R0 of at least six. This will be as low as it gets from here onward. If a new variant supplants delta, it will do so because it is even more transmissible.

    There will be no season for covid-19, no breaks in transmission, no declines in infectiousness. We have been struggling worldwide with this virus for 18 months, with spikes everywhere in every season.

    School and business closures part of new normal
    If covid-19 becomes endemic, there will not be one or two people sick in a workplace or a home. We will have waves and clusters and multiple local outbreaks.

    Schools and businesses will close for days, even weeks, because too many people are sick. It will cost the world trillions — consider what it has already done to global supply chains.

    If covid-19 becomes endemic, the burden on our healthcare system will be immense. It will not involve a predictable, modest increase in hospital admissions. Waves and clusters will characterise endemic covid-19 in the same way they have characterised pandemic covid-19, overwhelming local healthcare without warning.

    If covid-19 becomes endemic, Merck’s new antiviral drug Molnupiravir will be an important addition to the toolkit because it will be much cheaper than monoclonal antibodies, easy to store, easy to transport and people can take it at home.

    The as yet unpublished trials suggest the treatment could cut hospitalisations in half, markedly improving outcomes for those already infected. But it will not reduce the number of cases by even one.

    Treatment never does — only prevention, public health measures and vaccination reduce case numbers. Those who are less sick and treated at home could spread the virus even more.

    If covid-19 becomes endemic, when the healthcare system fails to accommodate the latest wave, more people will die.

    Long-term costs to health and economy
    Even if we managed to get covid-19 down to the severity of influenza (for an individual), endemic delta — with an R0 about five times that of flu and the fully vaccinated still able to become infected and spread — would still mean thousands of hospitalisations and deaths each year.

    Just four cycles of delta infection could result in more than 250 times as many cases as four cycles of flu.

    If covid-19 becomes endemic, every year, many of us will know someone who dies.

    If covid-19 becomes endemic, more than a third of unvaccinated cases, even the asymptomatic, will have symptoms months later.

    Flu leaves little lasting damage. Long covid damages the lungs, heart, brain, hearing and vision as well as the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas, causing diabetes.

    The cost of covid-19 is so much higher than that of the flu, not just because of higher case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths, but more long-term damage and disability.

    If covid-19 becomes endemic, we will live with a stressed, often overwhelmed healthcare system, with schools subject to unpredictable closures, with unsafe workplaces, with a disrupted economy, with our children under threat, with death and disability at a persistently higher level than we have known — probably for decades.

    We do not care what the current strategy is called as long as we persist with border protection and public health measures until we achieve close to universal vaccination.

    Otherwise, many thousands of New Zealanders will be hospitalised, die or experience long COVID.

    Ultimately, we will need a sterilising vaccine (one that protects people from getting infected) because we cannot live with endemic covid-19.The Conversation

    Dr John Donne Potter, professor, Research Centre for Hauora and Health, Massey University; Dr Graham Le Gros, director and group leader Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington, and Dr Rod Jackson, professor of epidemiology, University of Auckland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • People are preparing for a final showdown to stop coal extraction in the German Rhineland

    A small earth wall separates the tiny village of Lützerath from the enormous diggers operating in Garzweiler II, one of three opencast lignite coal mines operated by energy company RWE in the German Rhineland. 

    The mine is 235 metres away, and coming closer every day. A number of houses in Lützerath have already been torn down, the area covered with gravel, grass, and some wildflowers. It’s hard to imagine that people lived here just a couple of years ago. Other houses are fenced off, with RWE security in front, twenty-four hours a day. Most people have resettled and have moved away.

    Challenging eviction

    But one farmer is holding out. Eckhard Heukamp is challenging the imminent eviction from his farm in the courts, arguing that the coal mining plans from the 90s should no longer allow for continued extraction in the light of climate change and coal phaseout. He was already displaced once, 15 years ago –when his farm in Borschemich was demolished, the land long dug up. Now he is fighting for his parents’ house and farm, which dates back to the 18th century.

    He is not alone – citizens initiatives and groups are organising regular demonstrations, events, and a permanent vigil at the edge of the village facing the mine. Activists have set up a permanent occupation on Heukamp’s land – the ZAD Rhineland. The term ZAD comes from the French Zone à défendre – a militant occupation to stop big development projects. The most well-known ZAD is probably the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes that stopped a new airport being built near Landes, France, and famously resisted militarised eviction by the French state.

    The ZAD Rhineland was set up to defend Lützerath against RWE and the police, and to stop coal extraction in the Rhineland. People are ready to put their bodies in the way in what might be the final showdown, the decisive battle. “If Lützerath stays, they won’t be able to get to the next five villages”, someone tells me. “But it will be hard”. 

    We spend all day building defence structures. Treehouses, barricades, lock-ons, and towers are popping up everywhere. People are giving climbing workshops and sharing blockading skills, discussing police repression and state violence, building up solidarity structures and a new kitchen, plotting and planning for day X – when RWE comes to cut trees or police show up to evict the camp. 

    Police violence and repression

    The last big eviction in the Rhineland – the eviction of Hambacher Forst, which was recently declared illegal – ended up lasting five weeks before it was stopped by the courts. Thousands of police officers were brought in, but many more people came to defend the forest. Police were heavily criticised for the brutality with which they treated activists and the little regard they showed for their safety. One journalist died during the police operation, many ended up in precarious and unsafe situations. 

    This is happening all over Germany – only last year, during the eviction of the Dannenröder forest in central Germany, a protester was seriously injured when he fell four meters from a tripod after police officers cut the safety rope which held the tripod in place. The occupation was set up to stop another ecologically destructive infrastructure project – the new A49 motorway. Another protester, Ella, was sentenced to over 2 years in prison for allegedly injuring a police officer during the eviction – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

    The collaboration between police and private security services in the Rhinish coal mining area has been well documented; repression, criminalisation, and violence go hand in hand. Few companies are as powerful as RWE. It’s structurally entrenched in the local political economy, and protected by German police forces who frequently act as private security. Many villages and towns are themselves RWE shareholders, and numerous politicians are on RWE’s payroll. In 1979, the German news magazine Spiegel warned:

    Unrivalled and barely manageable, RWE is ruling over one of the largest monopolies of the Western world. 

    Today, Europe’s largest emitter continues to lobby for continued lignite coal mining – the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. If successful – the German government’s coal phase-out is set for 2038, much too late. Meanwhile, RWE is suing the Netherlands for 1.4 billion Euro compensation for phasing out coal by 2030. 

    It’s up to all of us to stop climate catastrophe

    As politicians are getting ready for the next round of COP negotiations in Glasgow in November – where they’ll talk and achieve little to nothing – people in the ZAD Rhineland know that it’s up to them – to all of us – to stop climate catastrophe. 

    It might well be that this time, too, the courts will rule that the eviction of Luetzerath was illegal. But by then, the trees will have been cut, the land dug up, the village destroyed.

    It’s windy at the edge of the mine where I’m sitting. I’m told this has been the case ever since RWE cut down the trees that once protected the village. And yet, the windmills next to the mine are not moving – the powergrid is overloaded – there’s too much wind, and coal power stations take too long to switch on and off. 

    The digger keeps moving towards us, ruthlessly. The power stations in the background keep burning coal, generating electricity for a system that requires abundant cheap energy to power endless growth, to generate profit for those in power at enormous ecological and social costs. 

    Another world is possible

    The ZAD Rhineland shows that a different system is possible – a system that operates on the basis of solidarity, not competition; of degrowth, not growth; on climate justice, not green capitalism or ecological modernisation. True sustainability needs not just an end of coal, but the abolishing of those who protect coal interests – police, security, prisons – and of the economic and political system they are part of.

    Joining the ZAD Rhineland is a good place to start this fight. From 29 October, the ZAD invites all of us to come to the anti-eviction skill share and protest camp, and to stop RWE. Whether you want to sit in a treehouse, build barricades, or cut veggies – please join, if you can. Every body counts. 

    Featured image via Andrea Brock

    By Andrea Brock

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Damning footage shows fox hunters murdering their dogs

    Brutal footage appeared on ITV News on 8 October showing dogs being murdered by fox hunters. The hounds belonged to the Duke of Beaufort’s Hunt, and were shot dead in cold blood. The footage was filmed covertly over eight weeks by the Hunt Investigation Team (HIT), who had accessed the Beaufort Hunt’s kennels under the cover of darkness and installed a network of covert cameras.

    Keep The Ban, which supported the HIT in its investigation, said:

    Two of the hounds are shot twice after appearing to show signs of life. One can only imagine the pain and suffering endured by these poor dogs. The four hounds are then individually chucked onto a wheelbarrow before being carted away as if nothing more than rubbish.

    “She tried her hardest to get away from her executioner”

    The HIT described the murder of one of the dogs, who was just a youngster when she was murdered. The undercover investigators named her Scamp because of her playful nature. They said:

    Scamp was presumably drugged to keep her still and docile while they killed her, due to her habit of running off to play. Even while drugged she tried her hardest to get away from her executioner, before her legs gave out and she fell to the ground. She tried again, made her way to the gate, tried to get back to the safety of her pack. But there was no escape.

    They continued:

    Scamp just wanted to run and play. Her only crime was to be an exuberant young dog. She did not deserve the fate she got. She did not deserve to die. Her tail was still wagging for over a minute after she was shot.

    The Canary spoke to the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA). Saboteurs are activists on the ground, monitoring hunts and trying to stop illegal activity. They have known for a long time that hunts murder their hounds. Lee Moon told us:

    It’s great that this awful footage has received national media attention. Killing of hounds by hunts is commonplace and this is more proof, if any were needed, that hunts see animals as a cheap commodity, to be discarded when of no further use.

    Decades of proof that they abuse and murder hounds

    It’s not the first time that Hunts have been caught out, brutalising and murdering the very hounds they claim to love. Back in 1996, the League Against Cruel Sports filmed the devastating murder of a hound by a Cheshire Foxhounds kennelman. In 2000, the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance admitted that 3,000 hounds would be “removed” that season. But as Glen Back reported in the Citro, the actual number of dogs murdered each season is likely to be much higher.

    Keep The Ban explains that:

    Hounds are the other victims of fox hunting. They have been trained to hunt and kill foxes which is not their natural instinct. If a hound is not deemed savage enough the hunt will remove it from the pack and kill it. It is estimated that thousands of hounds are unnecessarily killed by hunts every year and very few make it past the age of five or six despite having a life expectancy of around fourteen. The Countryside Alliance admit that up to 3,000 hounds are killed each year, but we estimate the figure to be closer to 7,000.

    Meanwhile, Hunting Leaks, a website of leaked documents from various hunts, has published harrowing emails exposing Spooners Hunt staff abusing hounds. The emails accuse hunt master Andrew Smith of:

    repeatedly [beating] the hound on the head with the hard end of the whip in a frenzied manner.

    Smith allegedly went on to advise someone to hit hounds as hard as possible with a shovel.

    Yes, fox hunting is still illegal, but they get away with it anyway

    Hunting foxes with hounds is illegal in the UK. Instead, packs are supposed to ‘trail hunt’. Trail hunting involves laying an artificial trail for the hounds to chase rather than a real fox. But as The Canary has extensively reported, hunts across the country continue to get away with hunting and murdering foxes without being held accountable. Campaigners and hunt saboteurs have documented numerous acts of illegal fox hunting since the hunting ban came into force. The Duke of Beaufort Hunt – whose huntsmen were filmed murdering the hounds – is one of the worst culprits. Last year, the League Against Cruel Sports reported that the Duke of Beaufort Hunt:

    topped the hall of shame as the hunt across England and Wales with the highest number of suspected illegal hunting incidents with 21 cases.

    Court case

    Meanwhile, in November 2020, a series of leaked webinars allegedly exposed ways that hunts in the UK cover up illegal fox hunting. In one video, senior hunt official Mark Hankinson said that trail hunting is used as a smokescreen “to portray to the people watching that you’re going about legitimate business”.

    As a consequence, major landowners including the National Trust temporarily suspended trail hunting on their land.

    Hankinson is currently on trial, accused of “encouraging hunts to commit illegal hunting”. The verdict is due to be delivered on 15 October.

    “One more nail in the coffin”

    Moon told The Canary:

    Following the leaked webinars, the withdrawal of licenses by landowners, Mark Hankinson’s trial and the Quorn breaching lockdown [where Quorn hunt masters were suspended for allegedly hunting during lockdown], this is just one more nail in hunting’s coffin. Public opinion is ever more turning against them, as it becomes more and more transparent what cruel people they are.

    It remains to be seen whether hunts will continue to get away with murder, both of foxes and of hounds. As more and more damning evidence becomes public, it will become difficult for the Tory elite to continue to protect their own. Hankinson’s court verdict will be indicative of whether the tide is finally turning on the rich and their murderous hobby.

    Featured image via Jason Wolf / Unsplash

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • David Chappelle’s “Space Jews”

    Finally someone, male or female, white or whatever, str8 or lgbtq+, with the balls to give Israel the finger in the mainstream media. Chappelle is the American Hamas, lobbing his homemade rockets, flying his balloons out of besieged America at the dastardly foe, which relentless steals and then colonizes our minds, forcing us to our knees to atone for our inbred antisemitism.

    His Netflix special The Closer is 99% about the silliness of the trans hysteria and the self-importance of ‘pride parade gays’, but the real bombshell was his idea for a movie: that UFOs are really earthlings who had an ancient civilization (who built the pyramids?) but “things go terrible for them on the other planet so them come back to Earth and claim the Earth for their very own. I call it Space Jews.”

    The Detroit crowd loved it, clapping and chortling delight. One cat call. “All right. It’s gonna get worse than that. Hang in there.” It struck me how easily people cotton on to the Zionist ruse when they are given the chance. Biden could easily convince Americans to go after Israel as the last apartheid state if he had the courage. The Zionists would be left dumbstruck.

    Chappelle skewers one shibboleth after another. His first jab was at the pedophilia hysteria. He admitted he’d had covid and felt dirty. “The last time I felt that dirty was when I a little boy and was molested by a priest … Don’t feel bad for me. I liked it. I used to get a kick coming in that fella’s face.”

    It was after that, and some pointed words about black punching down on Asians as spillover from the ‘Chinese virus’ (his wife is Asian), that he got to his UFO bit. NPR’s (black) reviewer Eric Deggans was all in a tizzy over the special, not for the diddling priest or any of Chappelle’s other outrages, only the ‘antisemitism’.

    “I don’t really care what point he’s trying to make; a joke that sounds like antisemitism gets a hard pass from me,” harrumphs Deggans. “The message Chappelle has for those who have criticized him about transphobic, homophobic or any other phobic jokes seems to be: Race trumps all.” Well, yes, maybe it does.

    Truly fighting racism means fighting US-Israeli apartheid. It means dismantling gated communities, taking back our cities where money rules and acts as the barrier dumping 99% in one multicultural pot, and leaving the 1% in control. Yes, there is a sprinkling of nonwhites there, but if you are rich enough, the meaningless term ‘race’ truly becomes meaningless. Chappelle’s implicit corollary is: money trumps all.

    Poor Deggans, stuck in the kneeling position, not to honour blacks and protest (very real) anti-black racism, but to fawn over our ‘masters of discourse’ as Israel Shamir calls the Israel/Jewish lobby, which is probably more fully represented around the world than the UN.

    72% of Jews live ‘abroad’: United States (51%), France, Canada, Russia (3% each), the West Bank and Britain (2% each), Argentina, Germany, Ukraine, Brazil, Australia and Hungary (1% each), and the remaining 3% are spread around 98 other countries.

    Each time Netanyahu/ Bennett blow the clarion call to arms, every one of them in 111 countries hears it. 90% of Jews support Israel. You do the math. The UN, even the US, pales into flabby impotence in comparison.

    US blacks – US conscience

    Listen closely to Chappelle’s rant and it sounds more and more like a sermon about compassion, tolerance, self criticism. That’s no coincidence. His mother Yvonne Seon worked for Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, and is a Unitarian Universalist minister. Family visitors included Pete Seeger. Chappelle’s inspiration came from Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor.

    Wow. America is coming of age, with the black traditions, from slavery to ex-slavery, to third world liberation, to today’s revival of the radical traditions of the Democratic party. You can feel America’s backbone getting stronger, as it grapples to extricate itself from its US-Israeli dead end.

    Deggans’ pontificating about gays et al is more about silliness than racism. Chappelle lauds the old school gays who fought for freedom. “I’m a Stonewall nigger, a glory hole nigger.” Those gays were originally much more like blacks. He explained for the str8s in the audience that ‘glory hole’ was a kind of contract. “You had to hope for the best. It took a lot of courage on both sides of that contract.” Now the gay movement is too mainstream, too shallow, for his liking.

    “Gay people were a minority till they needed to be white again.” His personal anecdote is telling. A (white) gay interrupted him at a restaurant (be glad you’re not a celebrity), trying to provoke him as an accomplice took a video. Chappelle lost his cool, marched over and told the dinner party what he thought. As the argument got heated, the gay phoned the cops. Despicable, as the cop will automatically be white and take the white’s side. Where’s the minority solidarity?

    The trans highlight was when he went into a public washroom and a woman came in and pulled out her penis at the adjacent urinal. He was freaked out. “It would have been cool if a guy came in and turned away from the urinal to pee. I’d just figure this guy is peeing out of his butt. Must be a vet. Thank you for your service.”

    He sides with Rowlands (“She wrote all those Harry Potter books!”) on trans women. “Every one of us comes into this world from between the legs of a woman.” He was labelled a TERF, which he had to google (trans excluding radical feminist), and made the telling observation: “TERF look at trans the way we (blacks) look at black face.” He also looked up ‘feminist’ (equal rights for men and women) and realized: “I’m a feminist!” He had a close trans woman friend, and was devastated when she committed suicide, so he set up a trust fund for her daughter and planned to tell her when she came of age: “I knew your father. He was a wonderful woman.”

    Blacks get their own lecture. He recounted the case of an slave who was freed, given some land by his former owner, became rich … and bought slaves. And treated them badly. But that was really just an example of how perverse things were in 19th century America, newly capitalist, hypnotized by money. “He was just doing what was accepted.”

    Chappelle is all about empowering the victim. Space Jews were victims on their new planet so came back to Earth though that doesn’t give them the right to victimize others. Nothing antisemitic about that. Kids should not be intimidated by adults if the adults are stepping out of line. Women should stand up to the Weinsteins, fire their spineless agents and band together. We are all Asians, all Palestinians, in Chappelle’s worldview.

    The post David Chappelle’s “Space Jews” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Branch Covidians are Waging War on Humanity

    All embarked, the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes while the son of Atreus told his troops to wash, to purify themselves from the filth of the plague. They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.

    — Homer, The Iliad (1.365-370)

    The Biden administration’s announcement that Americans employed in companies with over 100 employees would be compelled to take an experimental gene therapy in explicit violation of the Nuremberg Code has opened a new front in the biofascist assault on democracy. Businesses and government agencies that fail to enforce this mandate will potentially face draconian fines. Should the oligarchy succeed in completely weaponizing health care, vaccine passports would undoubtedly become both pervasive and mandatory, but as Tucker Carlson pointed out during one of his recent monologues, it is also likely that dissidents would be handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry. This is not an uncommon practice in police states, and the pathologization of dissent has been ongoing in the West for quite some time now. Only through knowledge, compassion, and camaraderie can the forces of neo-Nazi medicine be outflanked. The days of medical Armageddon are upon us.

    As the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and its European counterpart unequivocally demonstrate, the Covid vaccine program is causing tremendous harm and should have been terminated many months ago. Even the efficacy of the vaccines is very much in doubt, as evidenced by soaring Covid case numbers in some of the most vaccinated places on earth, such as the Seychelles (see here and here), Israel (see here, here, here and here), Gibraltar and Iceland. As physician assistant Deborah Conrad pointed out in her interview with The HighWire, VAERS is so dysfunctional that many doctors and nurses are only vaguely aware of its existence.

    Addressing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Joseph Mercola, MD, writes on Mercola.com:

    In a June 29, 2021, interview, Fauci called the Delta variant ‘a game-changer’ for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the Covid jab.

    As Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and other experts without ties to industry have noted, coronavirus vaccines have long had a poor safety record. Indeed, when scientists attempted to create a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1 the laboratory animals all died due to pathogenic priming.

    The vaccine mandates are causing middle class professionals to quit their jobs in droves, from highly trained fighter pilots, to large numbers of nurses leading to maternity wards being shuttered. In what is reminiscent of the anthrax vaccine (administered to the military despite the lack of both informed consent and FDA approval), army doctors are now observing serious adverse events in formerly healthy soldiers. The Covid vaccine drive has surpassed even the psychopathy of the Nazi doctors, as it would have been inconceivable to senior physicians in the Third Reich to give all of German society an experimental vaccine.

    In an incident that underscores how delusional the mass media has become, WXYZ-TV in Detroit, an ABC affiliate, reached out to people on Facebook for stories of Americans who died of Covid because they delayed getting vaccinated, but were instead inundated with thousands of stories of people who were killed or seriously injured by the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) gene therapies.

    Not only has a two-tier society emerged where the unvaccinated are being denied the right to work, attend university, eat out, go to sporting events, and enjoy the performing and visual arts; but another two-tier society has also emerged, one which has been evolving for quite some time now: the mega rich – for whom none of these draconian rules will apply – and everyone else. Video from a Democratic Party fundraiser hosted by Nancy Pelosi in Napa Valley has emerged showing affluent liberals rubbing shoulders unmasked while their brown servants wear masks. Masks and social distancing were apparently not required at the recent Met Gala in New York, where celebrities get to hobnob, have shallow conversations, and show off their outlandish costumes while millions of their countrymen wallow in unemployment, hopelessness, and despair.

    And it would seem that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (whose real name incidentally is Warren Wilhelm Jr.) is not the only one who delights in imposing punitive measures on those who opt for the control group, with museums and concert halls enthusiastically embracing the heinous practice. The Guggenheim has even written on their website in conjunction with their vaccine requirement that “We focus on safety so you can immerse yourself in art.” (Thankfully, I have a lot of art books).

    What will transpire if the mandates remain in place? Will our leaders order their minions to shut off the water of the unvaccinated? Will workers and students be compelled to take an experimental AIDS vaccine or submit to weekly testing? These injunctions are unethical, discriminatory, and unconstitutional, as they transform inalienable rights into privileges which must be earned by participating in a dangerous medical experiment. Restaurants in Manhattan, which have some of the highest commercial rents in the world, are naturally reluctant to enforce these regulations, yet run the risk of being snitched on by Branch Covidian undercover operatives.

    Such an incestuous relationship has formed between the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry, that going to the websites for these agencies invariably yields information that mirrors what is posted on the drug company websites. There is robust science indicating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity. There is likewise compelling evidence that face masks do more harm than good, yet these facts continue to be ignored by the presstitutes – a gaggle of clowns also on industry payroll.

    When reporter Emerald Robinson asked White House principal deputy secretary Karine Jean-Pierre how doctors were testing for the Delta variant, Jean-Pierre became defensive, demanding that we stop asking questions and follow “the experts.” They know best after all, who when not registering vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated and artificially inflating the Covid death toll, are busy turning the country into a nation of opioid, heroin (the two are inextricably linked), fentanyl, barbiturate, benzodiazepine, and psychotropic drug addicts. (American doctors even once prescribed cocaine and heroin). Speaking at the Washington National Cathedral, our imaginary president, Dr. Fauci, said that he was sympathetic to Brits and Americans who are accustomed to certain post-Medieval rights and freedoms, “but now is the time to do what you’re told.”

    The FDA “approval” for the Pfizer Covid vaccine attempts to conflate EUA investigational agents with FDA-approved drugs, as FDA has not approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which is still in use, but the Pfizer Comirnaty Covid vaccine, which isn’t even available. The FDA has argued that the two vaccines are indistinguishable from one another and that they can be used interchangeably, which is absurd. Any drug under the auspices of an EUA is by law experimental and cannot be mandated. Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to FDA Acting Commissioner Woodcock requesting clarification on this preposterous state of affairs.

    It is curious that Hydroxychloroquine is somehow safe as a maintenance drug for lupus, yet suddenly becomes dangerous when used to treat SARS-CoV-2, even if only taken for a very short period of time. Here is the website lupus.org:

    Given the drug’s many and varied beneficial effects and its excellent long-standing safety profile, most rheumatologists believe that Hydroxychloroquine should be taken by people with lupus throughout their lifetime. [Italics added]

    The FDA temporarily authorized the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 in March of 2020, but only with hospitalized patients. The FDA notice read as follows:

    Hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more and are hospitalized with COVID-19, for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.

    As Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Peter McCullough, and others have noted, Covid protocols using Hydroxychloroquine and other zinc ionophores are most efficacious early in the disease process. In other words, the FDA denied permission for doctors to use a medication for outpatient care where it has been shown to significantly reduce hospitalization and death, but allowed the drug to be used for hospitalized patients where the disease has often spiraled out of control, thereby setting the drug up to fail. Dr. Simone Gold has argued that the prevalence of Hydroxychloroquine in Africa, where it is frequently obtainable as an over-the-counter drug for malaria treatment and prophylaxis, has played a significant role in protecting the continent from Covid.

    So eager were the Branch Covidians to torpedo Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2 that they conducted dangerous and unethical trials where patients were deliberately overdosed and given toxic quantities of the drug, likely causing some of the trial participants to die, and causing even far more deaths when public health agencies around the world advised (or in some instances, ordered) doctors to stop using a life-saving medication as a treatment for COVID-19.

    Writing for The Defender, the newsletter for Children’s Health Defense, Jeremy Loffredo points out that in addition to threatening the profits of the mRNA vaccines, Hydroxychloroquine posed a threat to the profits of Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir:

    Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, dozens of new studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and its first cousin, Chloroquine, against Covid. These studies occurred in China, France, Saudi Arabia, Italy, India, New York and Michigan. However, such proof of Hydroxychloroquine’s benefit to patients with Covid has posed an existential threat to Gilead sales throughout the Covid outbreak.

    Remdesivir costs over $3,000 per treatment and has been linked to serious and potentially life-threatening side effects. Nevertheless, if a drug is profitable safety, necessity, and efficacy are disregarded. It becomes “the standard of care.”

    Having had their fill of demonizing Hydroxychloroquine, the presstitutes and pharmaceutical sock puppets turned their vitriol on another unpatentable drug, Ivermectin. Described as “a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction” by the journal New Microbes and New Infections, Ivermectin has played a critical role in combating onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness. Writing for The Lancet, Michel Boussinesq, MD, PhD, points out that “Ivermectin has been widely used for 30 years to combat onchocerciasis and is rightly considered a wonder drug.” In African countries where Ivermectin is regularly taken as an anti-parasitic Covid deaths have been negligible. Elaborating on this point, Kenyan doctors Stephen Karanga and Wahome Ngare pointed out in a Klartext podcast that due to Ivermectin’s effectiveness in treating Covid they weren’t worried about SARS-CoV-2; their real concerns lay with car accidents, HIV, and malaria.

    Meanwhile, the FDA refuses to even acknowledge that Ivermectin can be used in humans, tweeting “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” (Yes, those are some of the smartest people in the world). This villainy is not without precedent, as millions of Americans were prescribed highly addictive opioids as opposed to safer and more inexpensive over-the-counter pain medications. The sacking of Canadian emergency physician Dr. Daniel Nagase, who was found guilty of saving the lives of his Covid patients with Ivermectin, underscores the fact that the elites will stop at nothing to prolong the pandemic.

    In addition to fomenting the cult-like notion that a vaccine is a magical elixir for which no risk-benefit analysis is needed, the media has played a critical role in deceiving hundreds of millions of people around the world into believing that Covid is equally dangerous to all patients irregardless of age and preexisting conditions. This, in turn, has led to Black Death levels of hysteria, as evidenced by unvaccinated locals in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh being forced to wear placards displaying the skull and crossbones.

    Physicians who attempt to treat Covid early using Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) protocols are being vilified as quacks and snake oil salesmen, while doctors who are killing staggering numbers of people through a combination of nontreatment and dangerous experimental drugs are hailed as heroes. In many ways, this is the essence of biofascism: care patients desperately need is denied them, while dangerous care is imposed through coercion – both monstrous violations of the oath to do no harm.

    It is not uncommon for physicians to prescribe FDA-approved drugs to treat conditions that are different from what the drug was initially intended for. This is referred to as “off-label use” or “off-label prescribing.” How will a high-risk patient who contracts Covid benefit from masks, social distancing, lockdowns and vaccines (even if they were safe and effective)? They need something that will ward off the inflammatory phase of the disease and keep the ventilator at bay. This suppression of early treatment options has failed to escape the attention of the Indian Bar Association, which has sought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for making fallacious claims about Ivermectin to protect the Church of Vaccinology.

    A passage from the Rome Declaration, established at the Rome Covid Summit, and signed by over 10,000 doctors and scientists, states the following:

    WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;

    WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.

    In the Age of Faucism, everyone who arrives at an American emergency room is being given a PCR test, and if it indicates that they have the virus (not unlikely considering the prevalence of false positives), their loved ones are summarily kicked out of the hospital, they are put into isolation, given drugs of dubious safety and efficacy, and even intubated. Dr. Jane Ruby has referred to these Covid obsessed hospitals as “the new ovens.” Furthermore, physicians are being threatened with revocation of their licenses should they be found guilty of “spreading misinformation” – a practice also commonly referred to as informed consent.

    Hitler’s physicians were fond of euthanizing the mentally ill, and it would appear that their heirs are equally enamored with the practice, as the mentally handicapped have been vaccinated by force and with armed police present in Los Angeles. Children in Toronto have been given the experimental jab, without parental permission, and in exchange for free ice cream, while irate parents were prevented from entering the grounds. Not to be outdone, whistleblowers from Aegis Living, an assisted living facility for the aged, have reported that residents have been “chemically restrained” and injected with the investigational mRNA biologicals without their knowledge. As Dr. Lee Merritt said in a talk with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, “We have a whole society doing what we tried the Nazi doctors for.”

    As evidenced by the CDC vaccine schedule (a growing list of mandates coupled with liability protection for the manufacturer), and the fact that parents can be charged with “medical neglect” should they object to their children being placed on psychotropic drugs, the American public school system has long been in the grip of late-stage biofascism. To add insult to injury, toddlers are now being forced to wear masks and the mRNA biologicals are being injected into minors. Children’s Health Defense has reported that “Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be rolled out to babies as young as 6 months in the U.S. this winter — under plans being drawn up by the pharmaceutical giant.”

    Australia offers another window into our future should we fail to save humanity from the hordes of Faucism. Indeed, this has become a country where farmers’ markets are shut down by riot police, senior health officials tell their countrymen not to talk to one another so as to prevent transmission of a virus, pregnant women are arrested in their pajamas for attempting to organize anti-lockdown rallies on the Internet, women are violently choked by sadistic goons for leaving their homes unmasked, young children are pepper sprayed and brutalized for committing the aforementioned sin, citizens are committed (or “sectioned” as they say in Britain) for questioning the official Covid narrative, rubber bullets are fired into crowds of informed consenters, and extreme forms of violence are unleashed against elderly protesters – acts of barbarity that have enraged the citizenry. Melbourne in particular has lost all semblance of checks and balances, with storm troopers being unleashed on the population, in harrowing scenes reminiscent of the Wehrmacht’s storming of Prague. (Granted, without the live rounds).

    Convinced that anyone who questions the veracity of the liberal media and the public health agencies is a “conspiracy theorist” (really a euphemism for “mentally ill”), neoliberals have already crossed the Rubicon and taken up the truncheon of authoritarianism. Undoubtedly, the official Covid narrative is deranged. Yet is it any more inane than “Trump’s white supremacist insurrection,” “Russia invaded Ukraine,” “the Russians hacked the election,” “Trump is Putin’s puppet,” and NATO was compelled to bomb Libya to smithereens “to save Benghazi?”

    Trapped in a vortex of amnesia and unreason, the neoliberal has been hoodwinked into believing that whatever the medical mullahs say is “the science;” and whatever the liberal media says is incontrovertible, irrefutable, and infallible; i.e., “reality.” Fauci’s contradictory statements, particularly with regard to the virulence of COVID-19 and his stance on masks, fail to diminish their fervor as they cannot even remember what they had for breakfast, let alone the tens of thousands of Americans killed by Vioxx or the over 400,000 Americans that lost their lives to the opioid epidemic.

    The liberals of the 1960s, who genuinely believed in the Nuremberg Code, would have regarded the Branch Covidians with contempt. What a pity that the ranks of these medical brownshirts are dominated largely by those who once idolized the likes of Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, yet now wallow in a pitiable state of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It is true that conservative publications, such as The Washington Post, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal are parroting similar propaganda with regard to Covid. However, as evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s show, the conservative media no longer speaks with one voice. Moreover, millions of conservatives no longer believe in the infallibility of the conservative media as liberals continue to believe in the infallibility of the liberal media.

    Ultimately, the Branch Covidians are the offspring of a union between a corporatized health care system that has grown increasingly hostile to informed consent, and a liberal class that stopped thinking when Bill Clinton was inaugurated and has come to regard senior officials in the liberal media and the public health agencies as gods. The mass psychosis of the Branch Covidians is inextricably linked with the mass psychosis of neoliberalism. Without the latter the former would have about as much societal impact as the Hare Krishnas.

    The Nazis divided humanity into the subhumans (Jews, Roma, political prisoners, and Slavs); the humans (allied European fascists and the Japanese); and the supermen (the Germans, or Aryans). For quite some time now, the American health care system has been mired in a multi-tier system which divides patients up into similar categories. In light of this boorishness, teaching hospitals have long been instructing trainees that care is to be doled out depending on what kind of insurance plan patients have. Privileged patients are granted the right to choose their own doctor while the less fortunate are confined to narrow networks. Humans are permitted to meet with an attending physician while the Untermenschen are sent to resident clinics. Unbeknownst to Nazi doctors, both past and present, there is no bioethics on-off switch. In what was foundational to the Blitzkrieg but could also explain their increasingly deranged decision making, much of the German military during World War II was regularly taking Pervitin, the predecessor to crystal meth, and doing so with the support of their own doctors.

    As the forces of darkness become increasingly desperate, liberals drown in an ocean of madness and sociopathy. Hypnotized by an oligarchy they have deified, while believing that they are still marching with Martin Luther King singing “Kumbaya My Lord” and “We Shall Overcome,” this faux-left movement bears a closer resemblance to the Democratic Party of the 1860s than the Democratic Party of the 1960s. Indeed, if the Branch Covidians succeed in destroying the citadel of informed consent, only one form of government will reign in the United States: slavery.

    The post The Branch Covidians are Waging War on Humanity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It’s never the generals on trial for wartime atrocities. That needs to change.

    The trial of former soldier Dennis Hutchings is underway in Belfast. And once again, the accused is from the lower ranks. Not one of the powerful commanders who gave the orders is facing trial.

    The former Household Cavalry trooper faces a charge of attempted murder. His alleged victim was John Pat Cunningham. Cunningham was 27 and had learning difficulties. He was shot in the back after fleeing an army patrol in 1974. Hutchings has pleaded not guilty to the offence.

    Hutchings has won the support of many in the military community. This includes former Tory veterans minister Johnny Mercer, who has been with him in Ireland. A DUP politician even joined the pair for a photo opportunity. Carla Lockhart claimed on Twitter that Hutchings was a victim of politicised courts:

    Familiar pattern

    Hutchings served in the Household Cavalry as a non-commissioned officer. That means he was part of the workforce not the boss class of officers. In fact, barring a few exceptions, most of the soldiers accused of war crimes from Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan served in ‘the ranks’. And here there is a question about accountability.

    What the average soldier does on the ground reflects how they are trained and led. Yet the burden of legal cases always seems to fall on low-ranking personnel and never on the generals and politicians in charge. So what’s the alternative?

    The poor bloody infantry

    Derry writer and politician Eamonn McCann captured this sentiment in a head-to-head debate with ex-general and peer Richard Dannatt in 2019.

    Speaking on the Bloody Sunday massacre, McCann said:

    What we’re seeing [is] what Kipling called the “poor blood infantry”. Your rank-and-file soldiers, they have to carry the can. Somebody organised it, somebody gave the Paras to understand that it would be okay if you go in there and shoot innocent people. Where are they?

    And he went on:

    And I agree with the person who said [gestures to the audience] where are the IRA leaders? Why are the foot soldiers being dragged up all the time? Where are the bosses? The bosses are sitting pretty, and none more so than the bosses of the British Army, now made Lords and the rest of it. And none of them were ever held to account.

    Real justice

    That’s not to say low-ranking soldiers who carry out atrocities should get away scot-free. However, the fact that courts only seem to look at working class squaddies, who have little say over the broader scope of operations, is intolerable.

    The senior officers with the actual power who give the orders should also be in the dock.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Kenneth Allen

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Scott Waide: Memo to our younger people – go out to rural PNG and tell their stories

    COMMENT: By Scott Waide

    Senior EMTV journalist and bureau chief Scott Waide in Papua New Guinea’s second city Lae this week called time on his inspirational 25-year relationship with the television channel. He is taking on other challenges, like Lekmak, and this was his social media message of thanks to supporters.

    I didn’t quite realise how many people I touched positively through this work. It has been an emotional week talking to and encouraging, especially younger staff in Lae, Port Moresby, and the outer bureaus.

    This transition has been harder on them. Personal messages have been overwhelming. They’ve come both from people I know and total strangers.

    It has been a 25-year association with EMTV. Even with short absences, the relationship has always been there.

    However, after two and a half decades and a third stint lasting almost 10 years, my contract has ended and I have decided to move on.

    There have been a lot of questions and suggestions that I will or should contest in 2022.

    The answer is NO. I have no interest in politics.

    One of my primary goals was to give young people the opportunity to excel and to guide them as much as possible so that a new generation of journalists take on the challenges.

    Creating opportunities
    I spent a lot of time between Unitech and Divine Word University (DWU) talking to as many students as possible and creating opportunities – opportunities many of us didn’t have back then.

    We live in two worlds – one, urban and convenient and the other rural and difficult where men women and children die every day.

    There’s still a lot of work to be done. My hope is to see younger people go out to rural PNG and tell our people’s stories. Because if we don’t, they will only see government presence during election time and continue to suffer.

    We must celebrate the good in our country. We must celebrate our people, culture and our way of life. We must appreciate our knowledge keepers, our elders and our children.

    Papua New Guinea is a great country with huge opportunities.

    For EMTV, it is a Papua New Guinean institution. It is a custodian of nearly 40 years of history. It is not just a cash cow for shareholders.

    My appeal to the government is to care for this institution by choosing good people for the board and good organisational heads that understand this country and care about it.

    Good leadership vital
    Without good leadership, staff will suffer, good people will leave and the institution will be destroyed.

    I want to thank my wife — Annette — and my children. They sacrificed and suffered a lot because I was absent when I was needed most.

    While the job, from the outside, looked glamorous. It wasn’t. It takes an incredibly strong woman to live through the challenges.

    I owe an enormous amount of gratitude to my brothers and sisters and my parents for their understanding.

    Thank you to John Eggins, Sincha Dimara, Titi Gabi, Father Zdzislaw Mlak, Father Jan Czuba, Tukaha Mua and Bhanu Sud who gave me the opportunities. If it weren’t for these seven people, a lot of us would not have come this far.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Racial Justice Vs. The Israel Lobby: When Being Pro-Palestine Becomes the New Normal  

    There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into tangibly diminishing Israel’s stronghold over the US Congress, it promises to be of great consequence in the coming years.

    Recent events at the US House of Representatives clearly demonstrate this unprecedented reality. On September 21, Democratic lawmakers successfully rejected a caveat that proposes to give Israel $1 billion in military funding as part of a broader spending bill, after objections from several progressive Congress members. The money was specifically destined to fund the purchase of new batteries and interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

    Two days later, the funding of the Iron Dome was reintroduced and, this time, it has successfully, and overwhelmingly, passed with a vote of 420 to 9, despite passionate pleas by Palestinian-American Representative, Rashida Tlaib.

    In the second vote, only eight Democrats opposed the measure. The ninth opposing vote was cast by a member of the Republican party, Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

    Though she was one of the voices that blocked the funding measure on September 21, Democratic Representative, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, switched her vote at the very last minute to “present”, creating confusion and generating anger among her supporters.

    As for Massie, his defiance of the Republican consensus generated him the title of “Antisemite of the Week” by a notorious pro-Israel organization called ‘Stop Antisemitism’.

    Despite the outcome of the tussle, the fact that such an episode has even taken place in Congress was a historic event requiring much reflection. It means that speaking out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine is no longer taboo among elected US politicians.

    Once upon a time, speaking out against Israel in Congress generated a massive and well-organized backlash from the pro-Israeli lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that, in the past, ended promising political careers, even those of veteran politicians. A combination of media smear tactics, support of rivals and outright threats often sealed the fate of the few dissenting Congress members.

    While AIPAC and its sister organizations continue to follow the same old tactic, the overall strategy is hardly as effective as it once was. Members of the Squad, young Representatives who often speak out against Israel and in support of Palestine, were introduced to the 2019 Congress. With a few exceptions, they remained largely consistent in their position in support of Palestinian rights and, despite intense efforts by the Israeli lobby, they were all reelected in 2020. The historic lesson here is that being critical of Israel in the US Congress is no longer a guarantor of a decisive electoral defeat; on the contrary, in some instances, it is quite the opposite.

    The fact that 420 members of the House voted to provide Israel with additional funds – to be added to the annual funds of $3.8 billion – reflects the same unfortunate reality of old, that, thanks to the relentless biased corporate media coverage, most American constituencies continue to support Israel.

    However, the loosening grip of the lobby over the US Congress offers unique opportunities for the pro-Palestinian constituencies to finally place pressure on their Representatives, demanding accountability and balance. These opportunities are not only created by new, youthful voices in America’s democratic institutions, but by the rapidly shifting public opinion, as well.

    For decades, the vast majority of Americans supported Israel. The reasons behind this support varied, depending on the political framing as communicated by US officials and media. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, Tel Aviv was viewed as a stalwart ally of Washington against Communism. In later years, new narratives were fabricated to maintain Israel’s positive image in the eyes of ordinary Americans. The US so-called ‘war on terror’, declared in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, for example, positioned Israel as an American ally against ‘Islamic extremism’, painting resisting Palestinians as ‘terrorists’, thus giving the Israeli occupation of Palestine a moral facade.

    However, new factors have destabilized this paradigm. One is the fact that support for Israel has become a divisive issue in the US’ increasingly tumultuous and combative politics, where most Republicans support Israel and most Democrats don’t.

    Moreover, as racial justice has grown to become one of the most defining and emotive subjects in American politics, many Americans began seeing the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation from the prism of millions of Americans’ own fight for racial equality. The fact that the social media hashtag #PalestinianLivesMatter continues to trend daily alongside the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter speaks of a success story where communal solidarity and intersectionality have prevailed over selfish politics, where only money matters.

    Millions of young Americans now see the struggle in Palestine as integral to the anti-racist fight in America; no amount of pro-Israeli lobbying in Congress can possibly shift this unmistakable trend. There are plenty of numbers that attest to these claims. One of many examples is the University of Maryland’s public opinion poll in July, which showed that more than half of polled Americans disapproved of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israeli war on Gaza in May 2021, believing that he could have done more to stop the Israeli aggression.

    Of course, courageous US politicians dared to speak out against Israel in the past. However, there is a marked difference between previous generations and the current one. In American politics today, there are politicians who are elected because of their strong stance for Palestine and, by deviating from their election promises, they risk the ire of the growing pro-Palestine constituency throughout the country. This changing reality is finally making it possible to nurture and sustain pro-Palestinian presence in US Congress.

    In other words, speaking out for Palestine in America is no longer a charitable and rare occurrence. As the future will surely reveal, it is the “politically correct” thing to do.

    The post Racial Justice Vs. The Israel Lobby: When Being Pro-Palestine Becomes the New Normal   first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Disabled women have it worse than Britney Spears

    Britney Spears. We’ve all heard bits and pieces about her fight to regain guardianship of herself from her father. In the US they call this conservatorship and according to the BBC, it is “…granted by a court for individuals who are unable to make their own decisions, like those with dementia or other mental illnesses.”

    I must admit I’m not an expert on the details, but I see control. Lack of autonomy. Lack of decision making power. Being infantilized. Having not only her sense of control taken from her, but also in practicality. And I see the outpouring of human concern for her. The empathy, the sympathy, the worry.

    And then I think of Ann Marie Smith, the disabled woman in South Australia who was totally reliant, through physical disability, on other people. And her final days, months reliant on a carer who didn’t care. But she had no voice, no court to go to, no legal service to access. She was totally at this woman’s mercy. And a benevolent mercy it was not. So she was left, left to die from something that should never happen to any human. And would not happen, to a human who could walk.

    That’s it, the ability to walk and communicate. She was considered rubbish, superfluous, because she couldn’t walk or talk. But I’m sure she felt. I’m sure she felt every last terrifying moment. That, my friends, is ableism, in its cruelest form, and its most fatal. This is one reason why, Women With Disabilities Australia submitted to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability that all restrictive practices “are violent and are in violation of human rights” and should be abolished. A ‘restrictive practice’ means any practice or intervention that has the effect of restricting the rights or freedom of movement of a person with disability. It includes confining someone to a chair, like Anne Marie or imposing a guardianship, like in Britney Spears’ case. It’s ableism.

    Britney Spears at a Montreal Concert. Picture: Anirudh Koul. Posted here under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC 2.0)

    I see ableism every day, in a more insidious, hidden form. But at its very core, its an assumption that you know better for this person, that you understand their situation. But you don’t.

    Personally, I’ve been not disabled and disabled. I feel it’s a gift. It’s a gift to see the different ways in which the world treats you. It has illuminated for me a whole other world that I didn’t know existed, as I spent the first 35 years of my life being conditioned only to privilege.  I call it the straight up benevolent assumption.

    When you interact with people and institutions, the assumption that you mean well is in-built. And it teaches you that the world will mostly deliver. And it did. And again, with privilege, it still does, but since becoming disabled, I have a new lens. The in built assumption from others and institutions is not a forgone conclusion for so, so many. Being given this lens and sense of perception part way through life has been for me, like a light shining on the inner workings of the human race.

    When I woke from my stroke, I couldn’t physically talk. I could understand, make language if someone passed me a letter board, but I had lost the nerve to make the mechanics. It has gone offline, care of brain haemorrhage. All of a sudden, I was an infant. I was talked over, I was talked about in my presence.  What I wanted or needed was assumed. Until I started doing things like yanking really hard at people’s beards with my good hand because I was so furious.  And until I could start slowly talking again. I noticed even the rehabilitation doctor make more eye contact with me once I had a few words. I was like, wow, even you. (If you read academic research around disability, you will find the word “infantilized” used over and over again.)

    And because I lived a life of privilege, I was confused. What is going on? It was so stark, from one day to the next. Any ordinary day indeed.

    My days and months of losing my sense of autonomy is nothing on the years and lifetimes that so many humans experience. Feeling. No one doesn’t feel. The physical stuff is our mortal shell. But the feeling is what hurts our heart and heads. Or make it happy. I’m sorry we failed you Anne Marie, but I’m not surprised. And embrace your freedom Britney.

    Feature image: Ann Marie Smith, provided by the South Australian Police. 

    The post Disabled women have it worse than Britney Spears appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • NZ’s covid-zero strategy may be past its use-by date, but it still has a vaccination advantage

    ANALYSIS: By Michael Plank, University of Canterbury

    The announcement this week that New Zealand will introduce a vaccination certificate by November is welcome news. Whether by “carrot” or “stick”, vaccination rates must keep climbing, as it is now likely case numbers will climb under alert level 3 conditions in Auckland.

    We’ve seen a growing number of mystery cases over the past couple of weeks – people testing positive after going to hospital for non-covid reasons, or from essential worker surveillance testing.

    These cases suggest there is a significant amount of undetected community transmission, and that makes it much harder to stamp out.

    While the slight easing of restrictions announced on Tuesday may or may not accelerate the growth in cases, it is unlikely to slow it.

    This has led to some debate about whether the government has abandoned its elimination strategy in favour of suppression of cases.

    To some extent this is a semantic argument. Elimination has been defined as “zero tolerance” for community transmission, as opposed to zero cases. The fact that New Zealand was able to get to zero cases for much of the past 18 months has inevitably come to define what elimination has meant in practice.

    Before vaccines were widely available, having zero cases was crucial in allowing us to enjoy level 1 freedoms.

    But New Zealand is now transitioning into a new phase of the pandemic, and this was always going to happen. Borders can’t remain closed forever and the virus was always going to arrive sooner or later.

    Return to tougher restrictions still a possibility
    In an ideal world, our border defences would have kept delta out and New Zealand would have been able to stay at alert level 1 until the vaccine rollout was complete.

    But the delta outbreak has forced our hand to some extent.

    Whether another week or two at level 4 would have been enough to eliminate this outbreak is impossible to know. Given the outbreak is spreading in very difficult-to-reach communities, stamping out every chain of transmission is extremely challenging.

    As we shift from an elimination to a suppression strategy, the country will have to tread a very narrow path to avoid overwhelming our hospitals and throwing our at-risk populations under the bus.

    This includes Māori and Pasifika, who were effectively put at the back of the vaccine queue by dint of their younger populations, despite being at higher risk of severe covid-19.

    We are now relying on a combination of restrictions and immunity through vaccination to prevent cases growing too rapidly. As vaccination rates increase, restrictions can be progressively eased.

    But if we relax too much, there is a risk the number of hospitalisations could start to spiral out of control. When the R number is above 1, cases will continue to grow relentlessly until either more immunity or tougher restrictions bring it back under 1.

    Getting vaccination rates up is crucial but will take time, so the government may yet be forced to tighten restrictions to protect our healthcare systems.

    The vaccination advantage
    New Zealand was always going to have to grapple with these really tough decisions, though delta has forced us to do this earlier than we would have liked.

    But our elimination strategy has given us has an important advantage – almost 70 percent of the total population has had at least one dose of the vaccine before experiencing any large-scale community transmission.

    We still have a lot of work ahead, but having access to the vaccine before being exposed to the virus is a luxury people in most countries didn’t have.

    There is a lot that could happen between now and Christmas. Currently, the Australian state of Victoria has more than 100 people in intensive care, which is equivalent to almost a third of New Zealand’s total ICU capacity.

    Those ICU beds are normally full with patients with conditions other than covid-19.

    The implications for the healthcare system are obvious. If New Zealand goes the way of Melbourne, harsher restrictions will probably be inevitable.

    Not a white flag
    The more optimistic scenario is that a combination of restrictions, vaccination and contact tracing is just enough to keep a lid on the case numbers. It’s almost inevitable cases will increase. But if it isn’t too rapid and hospitals can meet the demand, it could tide us over until we have the high vaccine coverage we need.

    And while vaccination rates are not yet high enough, they are still helping a lot, cutting the R number to around half what it would be with no vaccine.

    The country is in a far better position now than it would have been if the Auckland outbreak had happened in May or June.

    Everyone can do their bit by doing two things: help and encourage those around you to get vaccinated, and stick to the rules.

    We have to keep community transmission rates low to keep pressure off our hospitals and help us get to the next step of the road map. Moving away from a literal interpretation of elimination does not mean waving a white flag.The Conversation

    Dr Michael Plank, professor in applied mathematics, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Gavin Ellis: Lockdown musings over media lessons from a pandemic

    COMMENTARY: By Gavin Ellis of Knightly Views

    It appears we are a nation of selfish malcontents for whom enough is never enough.

    That is one of the conclusions I’ve been forced to draw after seven weeks of covid lockdown in Auckland. And, because my isolation has been broken only by a few medical appointments that are valid reasons for leaving my security-guarded community, I gain my impressions through our media and a diet containing a surfeit of opinion, some of it in the guise of news.

    I am confronted daily by examples of peevish bleating, whining, and complaining. I hear demands for certainty where there can be none.

    I hear commentators crying out for an end to level 4 then level 3 lockdown. They range from predictable nay-saying radio hosts like Mike Hosking, Heather du Plessis-Allan and Kerre McIvor to the unscientific Sir John Key, whose syndicated comments were the product of some yet-to-be-revealed stratagem by the former prime minister.

    I see New Zealanders demanding that their right to return to this country be met NOW when it is obvious that the number of intending returnees far exceeds the country’s capacity to safely manage them.

    I read of business demanding the ability to trade, and parents demanding to take their children to far-flung spots for the school holidays, when doing so risks undoing the constraint that has been put on the spread of the delta variant.

    I am told the government is incompetent or that it has gone too hard, and that the police haven’t gone hard enough on gangs and followers of Brian Tamaki.

    Nation of whingers?
    What else could I conclude but that we are a nation of whingers?

    But I have also concluded that some of our news media are exhibiting signs of split personality: While devoting an extraordinary amount of time and space to the malcontents, they are also pursuing positive campaigns to get the eligible population vaccinated.

    They also – thank goodness – show a willingness to accommodate the views of members of the medical and scientific community, whose opinions we so desperately need to hear.

    The two positions are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Media have a duty to report dissent as well as the positives. However, while front page lead stories supporting efforts to contain the delta variant have far outweighed those that argue against them, I have a sense that this Winter Of Our Discontent emphasis is compromising the vax campaign by legitimising self-entitlement.

    In my lockdown musings I have, however, reached one further conclusion that both saddens and frustrates me. It is the realisation that many of those who need to get the message to get vaccinated are beyond the reach of news media.

    These are people who do not read newspapers, watch television news programmes, listen to radio news bulletins or access the online services that each provides. They have no idea what a “1pm stand-up” means.

    They do not engage with news on any other basis than word-of-mouth or social media and the results are fragmented, selective, and often-as-not wrong. In other words, the commendable media campaigns to raise vaccination levels never reach them.

    Getting to the marginalised
    Ways need to be found to get to this marginalised part of our community. Perhaps the answer is for the media to go on the road. A media roadshow visiting suburbs with which they seldom positively identify might have benefits beyond helping us to get closer to that magic 90 per cent vaccination target.

    I was about to say I had reached another conclusion but that’s too strong a word for it. I have a suspicion that the Winter Of Our Discontent is not a reflection of widespread public opinion. I am led to that suspicion by two polls.

    The first was a Spinoff poll in August that showed 72 percent supported the move to Level 4, and the second was a Talbot Mills survey that showed strong support for keeping our border closed until 90 percent of the eligible population is vaccinated.

    These suggest to me a greater level of resilience (and common sense) than negative media stories might indicate. It’s also manifested in the (admittedly limited) interactions I have with people these days.

    That also might be reflected in a letter I read in The New Zealand Herald last week. It was in response to a story about a man who feared he would not be allowed to witness his wife giving birth to triplets in Auckland if he returned to Rotorua to work.

    M.A. Hume of Mt Roskill, who admitted to being “old enough to remember the Second World War”, recalled a friend whose husband died at El Alamein without ever seeing his daughter and others who had not seen their families for four years and had no certainty of returning to them. “In those days,” the letter writer said, “huge sacrifices were commonplace.”

    I would like to think that, today, most of us can muster that same sense of self-sacrifice and resolve. Given the announcements last weekend of rising cases in Auckland and a spread to the Waikato, we’ll need it.

    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 a blog called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

    • Read the full Gavin Ellis article here:

    Media lessons from a pandemic

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Lowering student loan payment thresholds only screws over young people

    Staring down thousands of pounds of debt you’re likely to never pay off has become the reality for many young people who go to university.

    With the interest those debts accumulate, a lot of us will never earn enough money to pay them off entirely. For some, earning below the repayment threshold forever seems the most likely option.

    However, ministers are now reportedly considering lowering the salary threshold at which student loans must start being repaid from £27,295 a year to £23,000.

    There was an immediate outcry when the news leaked.

    Impact on lowest earners

    Several finance experts immediately pointed out that lowering the threshold would have the largest impact on the lowest earners – those that originally would not have met the criteria for repayment.

    NUS vice president for higher education Hillary Gyebi-Ababio said the NUS was “totally opposed” to the idea:

    Like the Government’s decision to increase National Insurance contributions, this burden targets people earning lower incomes – after eighteen months of such hardship, and with the looming hike in energy prices set to hit millions of the most vulnerable this winter, the injustice is simply astounding.

    Huge loans

    Staring down a growing pile of thousands of pounds of loans feels insurmountable.

    My own student debt comes out somewhere around the £50,000 mark, and that was before any interest was added to it.

    I escaped the 2017 undergraduate fees cap rise to £9,250 a year by the skin of my teeth, meaning the years below me are facing at least £750 more in loans.

    That’s without considering the maintenance loans. These give more to those most in need at the time, but it totes their debt up even more for daring not to have parents who can help them out.

    Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but at 18 I had little concrete understanding of what taking on those loans would mean financially in the future – and I’m willing to bet a lot of other students didn’t either.

    The real issue

    But the real kicker at the heart of this is regardless of when you start paying it back, the psychological impact of loans looming over students in any capacity is massive.

    Studies have found that the idea of racking up so much debt to go to university deters the poorest students the most.

    After discovering working class students are much more likely to worry about student debt, professor Claire Callender said:

    The lower proportion of university students from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot be adequately explained simply by pointing to academic achievement at school. Student funding and fear of debt play a role.

    University enrolments may be increasing overall but policymakers must focus on ways to level the playing field for poorer students. Abolishing tuition fees or adopting a means-tested approach would be ways of addressing this inequality.

    Growing debt

    Now, if the scale of that loan doesn’t look scary enough, let’s think about interest rates.

    Interest rates for plan 2 (post 2012) student loans are set at up to 4.5%. Comparatively, the base rate of interest in England currently is just 0.1%. Even some Conservatives have called that level of disparity out as grossly unfair.

    Some quick maths – currently, you must repay 9% of everything you earn above £27,295. As Money Saving Expert tells us, for someone on £32,295, that’s £450 a year – 9% of the £5,000 above threshold.

    Interest does not impact the amount you pay per year.

    The eventual conclusion of any sort of student loan maths is that only a small minority of us will ever repay the whole thing within the 30-year limit, at which point it’s cancelled.

    Those on lower incomes will pay less a year and be even less likely to ever get anywhere near paying it off. This makes the whole thing feel fairly pointless.

    In this economy?

    While the annual repayment figure might not look huge in isolation, on a tight budget, it all adds up. Let’s also remember we’re over 18 months into a very difficult time for graduates to find jobs – many have been let go. The latest unemployment rate is at 4.6% – and this has hit young people aged 16-24 particularly hard.

    As Paul Johnson wrote for the IFS last year, it could take years before the job market truly recovers economically to how it was.

    Now, once graduates start to get back on their feet, they could be looking at worrying about paying off debt much earlier than previously expected.

    That’s on top of rising national insurance contributions, energy prices, rents and an ever-ongoing housing crisis where that extra debt to pay could be the difference between you and a mortgage, or even being able to pay the gas bill. With all this in mind, the people that will be hit by a lowered repayment threshold don’t need extra money going out right now.

    Even worse, imagine owing an interest gathering £9,250 a year that’s likely to never be repaid when you spent a significant portion of your degree sat on your laptop stuck in a questionable university flat. The last couple of years of students have more right than ever to be upset about student debt.

    Abolish fees

    For me at least, it feels like we’ve been calling to abolish tuition fees for so long it’s faded into the background among an increasing normalisation of huge student debt.

    But it is the only way to put higher education on truly equal ground.

    It’s best summed up by Gyabi-Ababo in the NUS statement:

    They should get their priorities right, end the marketisation of the higher education sector and scrap tuition fees. The Government must re-envision education, and begin to view it as a right for all, not a product that can be bought and sold for individual gain.

    Only then can we begin to build the student movement’s vision of a fully- funded, accessible, lifelong, and democratised higher education system.

    Featured image via Flickr/City Suites

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Yamin Kogoya: West Papua’s fate hangs in ‘30 seconds’ and only God knows the outcome

    ANALYSIS: By Yamin Kogoya

    Two Melanesian state leaders addressed the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on West Papua last week.

    During the 76th UNGA, both Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister, James Marape, and Vanuatu’s Prime Minister, Bob Loughman, expressed concern about human rights issues in West Papua.

    While Marape devoted only 30 seconds of his 41-and-a-half-minute address to making some indirect remarks on West Papua, Loughman spent several minutes taking a more assertive approach.

    Regardless, that 30 seconds was greatly appreciated by Papuans.

    Here is the transcript of Loughman’s speech at the UNGA on 27 September 2021:

    “In my region, New Caledonia, ‘French Polynesia’ and West Papua are still struggling for self-determination.

    “Drawing attention to the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples as stipulated in the UN Charter, it is important that the UN and the international community continue to support the relevant territories giving them an equal opportunity to determine their own statehood.

    “In my region, the indigenous people of West Papua continue to suffer from human rights violations.

    “The Pacific Form and ACP leaders, among other leaders, have called on the Indonesian government to allow the United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua Province and to provide an independent assessment of the human rights situation.

    “Today, there has been little progress on this plan. I hope the international community, through appropriate UN-led process, takes a serious look at this issue and addresses it fairly.”

    Human rights concerns
    The following is the transcript of the brief West Papua section in Marape’s address to the UNGA on 26 September 2021.

    “While commenting on the United Nations peace effort on the PNG, I would also like to recall on the Pacific islands Leaders Forum (PIF) in 2019 and the out-sitting visit by the United Nations human rights mechanisms to address the alleged human rights concern in our regional neighbourhood.

    “This visit is very important to ensure that the greater people have peace within their respective sovereignty and their rights and cultural dignity are fully preserved and maintained”.

    The two leaders of Melanesian states expressed concern over West Papua in accordance with resolutions adopted by regional bodies, such as the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and the African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (ACP) in 2019.

    One of the most important features of these resolutions was the call for the root causes of the West Papua problem to be addressed.

    These resolutions remain primarily concerned with human rights issues. In reality, these violations of human rights result from deeper problems that are often forgotten or ignored.

    For Papuans, this deeper problem relates to sovereignty: the Papuans contend that the means by which Indonesia has claimed sovereignty over West Papua was fraudulent and immoral.

    Tackling the root causes
    Unless the world’s leaders and international institutions — the United Nations, the ACP and/or the PIF — address these root causes, it is highly unlikely that human rights problems will be solved.

    In addition, continuing to acknowledge Indonesia’s sovereignty in these resolutions would legitimise human rights abuses, since these violations are a consequence of Indonesia’s breach of sovereignty.

    During the 2016 UNGA, leaders of seven Pacific nations (Vanuatu, Palau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, and the Solomon Islands) raised the issues of West Papua.

    Many of them agreed that the root causes should be addressed. To date, we are no closer to having a conversation about these issues than we were a few years ago.

    It appears that voices like those just heard from two leaders from Melanesia at the forum occur once in a blue moon and then vanish into a sea of deaf ears.

    A new lens on Indonesian colonialism
    The West Papua situation has since deteriorated. In West Papua, shootings continue unabated, and prominent leaders such as Victor Yeimo continue to be arrested and imprisoned.

    We continue to receive reports of Papuan bodies being found in the gutter, on the street, in the bush, in hospitals, houses, and hotels. The internal world is also bombarded by images and videos that depict Papuans who have been tortured, abused, burned or killed.

    Another young prominent Papuan leader, Abock Busup, died suddenly in a Jakarta hotel last Sunday.

    Abock was the former regent of the Yahukimo, the Star Mountains Highlands in Papua, and the chairman of the Papua National Mandate Party’s regional leadership council.

    In May, Papuans also lost the Vice-Governor of the Papuan Province, Klemen Tinal, at Abdi Waluyo Hospital in Jakarta.

    In September 2020, another prominent Papuan leader from the highlands region of Papua, Lanny Jaya, Bertus Kogoya, died in a hotel room in Jakarta.

    Kogoya was the chair of the Regional Leadership Council (DPW) of the Papua Provincial Working Party at the time of his death.

    Jakarta dangerous for Papuans
    Jakarta, the capital and most populous city of Indonesia, has been dangerous and unwelcoming for Papuans, who are punished with death upon arrival. The causes of their deaths are rarely determined by authorities.

    In response to these never-ending brutalities, the West Papuan National Liberation Army (TPNPB), the armed wing of the resistance movement, retaliated. A number of deaths of security personnel and immigrants have been attributed to them.

    The armed wing often claimed that their targeted victims are not ordinary immigrants, but people who have been either directly or indirectly implicated into the state’s security apparatus, which threaten Papuans throughout the land.

    A military post in Sorong, in the Mybrat region of West Papua, was attacked in early September 2021, resulting in the death of four Indonesian soldiers.

    Two years earlier, in December 2018, the TNPB killed at least 19 workers in the Nduga region, suspected to be members of security forces.

    In recent weeks, a 22-year-old health worker, Gabriella Maelani, was killed in the Kiwirok district of Star Highlands. This, coupled with the burning of public health buildings, are only a few of the heartbreaking atrocities perpetrated in West Papua against humanity.

    These shootings and killings have conflicting narratives wherein the West Papua liberation army accused their victims of being either directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of Papuans.

    Justifying ‘securitisation’
    In contrast, the government of Indonesia has attributed all forms of violence to the liberation armed wing, which conveniently justifies their securitisation of the entire region.

    A massive humanitarian crisis has resulted from these killings, displacing the residents of entire areas from their homes and forcing them into forests, causing further deaths of villagers, either through starvation, sickness, or reprisal attacks by the Indonesian military.

    Human tragedies never end in the land popularly known as “the little heaven that falls to earth.”

    As reported in Asia Pacific Report, lawyer and human rights activist Veronica Koman has called for an independent investigation into the death of the Kiwirok’s health workers.

    But even such requests are consistently denied by the authorities. Human rights organisations, NGOs, and rights activists have pressed Jakarta to investigate these atrocities for years with no result to date.

    In West Papua, people live in conditions of what French sociologist Émile Durkheim termed anomie, meaning the breakdown of the existential structure that holds human life, morality, ethics, norms, and values together.

    In this world, what is justice for one is a crime against another. It is a complete breakdown of the system; it is a war of freedom and survival in a tangled world – entanglements which make it virtually impossible to investigate and prosecute those responsible for these crimes when the very system necessary to deliver justice is inherently incongruent.

    That is what anomie is, in essence.

    An exotic dream
    West Papua may seem like an exotic dream world full of wealth and lush greenery to Indonesians and Western companies which thrive on its natural resources. These people have no concern for protecting this paradise world; instead, they go there to dig, cut, extract, and steal for their multimillion-dollar mansion in Jakarta, London, Washington, or Canberra.

    This is the only place that Papuans call home on this planet. Tragically, this home has been turned into a theatre of killings.

    The fate of their land and cultural identities are at stake as the colonial Indonesians and imperial West have thrust the Papuan people into a fierce struggle for survival in their ancestral homeland.

    The deaths of Papuans, immigrants, and security personnel are not isolated incidents. They are the victims of big wars for global control fought behind the scenes in Rome, Beijing, Jakarta, London, Canberra, Moscow, Auckland, Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra.

    The real perpetrators live in these imperial capital cities. The mourning relatives in West Papua or elsewhere in Indonesia will never meet these perpetrators nor see them brought to justice as they control the very system in which these crimes are perpetrated.

    According to a report from the Asian Human Rights Commission in 2013 entitled “Neglected Genocide”, Australia provided Iroquois helicopters to Indonesia in the 1970s along with Bell UH-1H Huey helicopters from the United States.

    These helicopters, among other aircraft and resources, were used by Indonesia to bomb Papua’s highland villages of Bolakme, Bokondini, Pyramid, Kelila, Tagime, and surrounding areas.

    Australian-trained terror squad
    Danny Kogoya, one of the key OPM commanders who died in hospital near the PNG-Indonesia border in 2013, was shot by an anti-terrorist squad trained by the Australian elites.

    Kogoya died as a result of an infection caused by the amputation of his right leg after having been shot in Entrop Jayapura, Jayapura, Indonesia on 2 September 2012.

    Maire Leadbeater, a New Zealand-based human rights activist, wrote an article published in Green-Left in May 2021 in which she stated: “Since 2008, New Zealand has exported military aircraft parts to the Indonesian Air Force.”

    In most years, including 2020, these parts are listed as “P3 Orion, C130 Hercules & CASA Military Aircraft: Engines, Propellers & Components including Casa Hubs and Actuators”.

    West Papua will see the use of this military hardware as Indonesia continues to increase its presence in the region in an attempt to crack down on the highlands, which have already suffered massive displacement in the Nduga region.

    It is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the immense volume of weaponry, skills, and training the Western governments supply to Indonesia.

    It is important to ask why Western governments aid Indonesia in eliminating indigenous Papuans. These questions can be answered by looking at what the Māori of New Zealand, the Aboriginals of Australia, and the Native Americans endured.

    Colonisation by settlement
    Colonisation through settlement has proven to be the most pernicious in human history. Tragically, this project is being undertaken by Indonesians in West Papua with the assistance of Western governments, based on the logic of exterminating one population in order to replace it with another.

    Europeans have done this in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States with great success.

    Currently, they are dispensing all of their knowledge, expertise, and weapons to Indonesians in order to eradicate the Papuans. They continue to supply arms to Indonesia, despite knowing the arms will be used against the Papuans.

    The Indonesian government’s execution of their plan to exterminate Papuans is neither secret nor new. In 1963, General Ali Moertopo declared that the Papuan people should be sent to the moon.

    Decades later, General Luhut Panjaitan said the Papuans should be sent to the Pacific.

    Recently, General Hendropriyono said the 2 million Papuans should be sent to Manado Island in Northern Sulawesi.

    Indonesian generals’ voices
    These words are coming from Indonesia’s military generals who undoubtedly have military affiliations with those Western countries that supply those munitions.

    International organisations such as the UN, the PIF, and the ACP fail to challenge Western-backed Indonesia’s pernicious logic of annihilating the Papuan people through the system of “settler colonialism”.

    Both West Papua and Papua are not simply provinces of Indonesia but Indonesian settler colonies.

    Viewing West Papua through the lens of a Settler Colony helps to understand all the activities conducted in region better, as Indonesia attempt to assimilate, reduce, remove, and eliminate the original inhabitants so that new settlers can occupy the vacated lands.

    Without real actions, written resolutions and human rights rhetoric at UN forums are nothing more than funeral letters or platitudes intended to comfort the dying and entertain the perpetrators.

    The ultimate betrayal
    Papuans’ stories are reminiscent of a Hollywood movie in which deserted civilians wait for a rescue train which never arrives. The sad truth is that Papuans die every day waiting for this train.

    A train did arrive on 1 December 1961, when the Dutch prepared and assisted the Papuans in joining the new global community of the independent state.

    Tragically, Papuans were thrown off the train when Indonesia invaded West Papua in 1963, after being permitted to invade by those imperial planners during the controversial New York Agreement a year earlier.

    A sham referendum that followed in 1969 irrevocably sealed the fate of the Papuan people, known to Papuans as the “Act of No Choice”. To date, Papuans are still awaiting another train that will bring them into the global nationhood of humanity. The question is, who controls this train?

    Despite all of these tragedies, the will to live continues to ignite the flames of hope and freedom in a world encircled by the clutches of despair.

    Often, that will to live is strengthened each time West Papua is mentioned at the United Nations, which motivates the Papuans to wait for the next long-awaited train, which never arrives. Rumours and news spread, and their social media accounts are filled with messages of hope, thanksgiving, and prayers.

    Appreciation messages
    Here are the comments of these varieties expressed in appreciation for the speeches delivered by two Melanesian state leaders recently at the UNGA.

    Free West Papua Camping Facebook Page wrote the following words:

    “Our Sincere Gratitude and a big thank you to Prime minister of PNG, Hon. MP. Mr James Marape, to recall the PIF Leaders’ Resolution on West Papua in 2019, on your speech (mins. 41.05-41.35) at UNGA, September 25 2021. (41.05:) (41.35). Only God knows that the 30 seconds part of your speech is highly appreciated, respected and valued by our people back home who are struggling under Indonesian atrocities and colonial system and all Papuans in exile including those that are residing in your beloved country, PNG. May God bless your leadership and your government and your people back home to become a blessing for other countries, especially, for the Melanesians and the Pacific Islanders in our region. Peace be with you and your entire country.
    Long live PNG🇵🇬
    Long live MSG countries!!
    Long God yumi trustem and stanap for our freedom, dignity, justice, sovereignty, peace and cultural identities.
    Freedom for West Papua, one pela day”

    The campaign page also posted the following message in appreciation of the Prime Minister of Vanuatu’s speech:

    “On behalf of the people of West Papua we thank you to Prime Minister of Vanuatu, Hon. MP Mr Bob Loughman, for Addresses [sic] Human Rights situations at United Nations today on his speech (at UNGA, September 25, 2021)
    Long live Vanuatu, God bless VANUATU”

    Papua’s fate hangs in “30 Seconds” and only God knows the outcome.

    In Marape’s 41-and-a-half-minute speech, only 30 seconds were devoted to West Papua. In addition to omitting the name of West Papua, the speech was carefully constructed, avoiding certain words that may reveal the identities of those who commit heinous crimes that go unpunished.

    Key message for families
    Nevertheless, that 30-second speech was highly appreciated by the families of the victims.
    The reality of the Papuans under Indonesian rule can be summarised in those 30 seconds.

    As Papuans wait in the emergency room of an Indonesian hospital, they feel as if they are on life support as Indonesia continues to fiddle with its oxygen life support system. In that situation, time and rescue is of the essence.

    Marape’s 30-second statement regarding West Papua prompted the Free West Papua Campaign to remind an unresponsive twin brother that time is running out.

    In spite of it seeming inconsequential to him and the rest of the world, the Free West Papua Campaign says that “those 30 seconds are highly valued, appreciated and respected because every second counts to prevent another Papuan death accompanied by another loss of land.”

    In the end, “only God knows the 30 seconds” declared the Free West Papua Campaign groups.

    Both God and 30 seconds symbolised impossibilities of great magnitude and triviality, and a courageous human agent like James Marape can turn these impossibilities into possibilities to determine the fate of dying humanity and biodiversity in the land of Papua.

    Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic 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.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Just when we thought the Police Bill couldn’t get any worse…

    On 3 October, the government announced that it would make the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill even worse. In a blustering attempt to show that they control the people, Patel and Johnson have said that they will seek to introduce a six-month custodial sentence, unlimited fines – or both – for obstructing a public highway. The current maximum punishment is a £1,000 fine.

    As more and more draconian laws are passed, and as more people are set to be imprisoned for dissent, it’s difficult to see how the government will uphold its façade to the rest of the world: that we are a country that values democracy.

    The announced amendment to the bill has come off the back of Insulate Britain’s motorway protests, which have been going on for weeks and have caused gridlock on the M25. And on 4 October, activists blocked three major routes in London.

    The government has already taken out an injunction on the activists, effectively making it an imprisonable offence to block the M25.

    The audacity of Johnson

    Johnson had the audacity to say that the right to protest is “sacrosanct”. He went on to say:

    This government will always stand on the side of the law-abiding majority, and ensure the toughest penalties possible for criminals who deliberately bring major roads to a standstill.

    Clearly, Johnson doesn’t grasp the point of protest. The whole reason we take to the streets (or motorways) is to try to bring about significant change. And yes, that will often mean that we’re not “law-abiding” when we’re protesting to change said-laws. It means that we might cause a “serious disruption“, something that the government is cracking down on in the new police bill. If we didn’t, what would be the point? But that’s exactly what Johnson and Patel want: a population too fearful to even sit in a road. To them, the extent of “sacrosanct” protest will be standing in a designated police pen, waving a pretty banner for a couple of hours, and then heading home.

    As Johnson announced that the government will crack down on “illegitimate” protesters, the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) pointed out that:

    Regimes deciding what is or isn’t “legitimate” protest is the kind of thing the Foreign Office has criticised when it involves repressive states the British government doesn’t like.

    Netpol told The Canary that the latest proposals are a continuing “vendetta against protest”. It went on to say:

    The poorly-conceived intention here is to make it easier for the police to hold detainees on remand until a trial, which they cannot do right now because blocking a road is not considered a serious enough offence.

    Imagine being held in prison until your trial because you joined a street protest. This is what could happen if Patel and Johnson have their way.

    Supreme Court ruling? Pah, we’ll just ignore it…

    The government’s announcement also completely ignores a recent Supreme Court ruling, which gives a “clear and unequivocal vindication of the right to obstructive protest”. In fact, the Supreme Court ruled that:

    Intentional actions by protesters to disrupt, by way of obstructing others, enjoys the guarantees of Articles 10 and 11 [of the Human Rights Act], and restriction on those rights will not necessarily be justified, even in a case such as this, where a road is blocked for 90 minutes.

    No wonder the government keeps threatening to strip us all of our pesky human rights

    Abusing stop and search powers

    The government has also promised to amend Section 60 powers to enable police to stop and search activists. Currently, Section 60 is only supposed to be an emergency measure for violent crime, and the police do not need ‘reasonable suspicion’ to search a person. In practice, however, the government abuses these powers – especially in Black communities.

    Netpol said of Johnson’s announcement:

    It will mean that anyone linked to a protest movement that has used civil disobedience tactics is liable to face targeting and harassment – for example, just for wearing a badge or carrying a protest banner that identifies them as a campaigner. This kind of criminalisation rarely succeeds but as these powers are used more often – and we suspect the police will embrace them eagerly – then it risks more people facing searches that have a chilling effect on their human rights.

    Slipping into totalitarianism

    The police bill, which is passing through the House of Lords, also strengthens the police’s ability to impose conditions on a protest, or arrest people if the noise from a protest causes people “serious unease“. According to Netpol, it also “introduces new offences for one person protests for breaching conditions based on noise and impact”. The bill will give the police far greater powers to look after corporate interests, effectively shutting down protest against companies and criminalising those who take part in a demonstration.

    On top of this, the bill will create a new statutory offence of public nuisance. In other words, actions that cause “serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity”. According to Netpol:

    Previously, charges for public nuisance during protests have been relatively rare. Anti-fracking campaigners jailed in 2018 for this offence were the first to face imprisonment since 1932. A new statutory offence would result in a maximum sentence if tried in a Magistrates Court of 12 months in prison and a fine (or both) and for more serious cases tried in a Crown Court, of up to 10 years in prison.

    Any kind of dissent can be deemed a “serious annoyance”, so all protesters will, in future, risk being imprisoned.

    The next sitting in the House of Lords for the Police Bill is on 20 October. The bill has seen massive protests all over the country so far. It’s important that we keep fighting it right through to the bitter end.

    Featured image via screengrab

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.