radiofree.asia

Category: Opinion

  • Who is killing off top Pacific journalism – and why?

    By Michael Field in Auckland

    Without much in the way of a credible explanation about why, Aotearoa New Zealand education authorities are killing off one of the Pacific’s leading journalism programmes.

    The fate of the Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre (PMC) coincides with the Fiji government assault of the University of the South Pacific, raising serious questions about the future of academic freedom and excellence.

    The Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAPMI) has appealed for action to save PMC, saying closure comes “at a time when Pacific journalism is under existential threat and Pacific journalism programmes suffer from underfunding”.

    The centre, founded in 2007 and described by AAPMI as a “jewel in the AUT crown”, had worked in its current Communication Studies office in the Sir Paul Reeves Building at the AUT’s city campus since it opened eight years ago.

    It was abruptly emptied last month of more than a decade of awards, books, files, publications, picture frames and treasures, including a traditional carved Papua New Guinean storyboard marking the opening of the centre by then Pacific Affairs Minister Luamanuvau Winnie Laban in October 2007.

    AUT claims the centre is going to new accommodation, but they had not said where or even shown it to those asking.

    Professor David Robie at PMC
    Professor David Robie at the “future of PMC” seminar at AUT in December 2020. Image: APR

    Founding director Professor David Robie, whose retirement at the end of last year seemed to signal AUT’s action, was critical of the “unconscionable” closure/relocation.

    Lack of explanation
    What has been striking over the closure has been the lack of a coherent explanation from AUT.

    Empty PMC 1
    The Pacific Media Centre emptied out in three photos. Images: Facebook

    Empty PMC 2

    Empty PMC 3

    When Dr Robie came to retire on December 18, he found there was no one to hand over to.

    Two of the more likely colleagues were sidelined as word came down that the School of Communication Studies management at AUT were planning on taking the “Asia-Pacific” out of PMC and creating a new focus on Māori issues instead.

    This is despite AUT already having a Māori studies department, Te Ara Poutama, which has a Māori Media Development programme.

    AAPMI last month wrote to AUT’s vice-chancellor, Derek McCormack, urging they “continue to play the globally pre-eminent role in supporting media, communication and journalism education, research and collaboration.

    Calling it the jewel in AUT’s crown, the letter said “the PMC is the world’s leading Pacific journalism programme and is looked to by media professionals and academics from around the world, including in the Pacific and here in Australia.

    “The centre’s research publications and staff and postgraduate student journalism websites (such as PMC Online www.pmc.aut.ac.nz) are valued highly by Australian media professionals and they are frequent contributors.”

    The full letter is published below.

    ‘Outsized’ share of awards
    AAPMI said AUT had a reputation for taking an “outsized” share of the Student Journalism Awards – the Ozzies.”

    “The valuable supportive role the PMC and its staff have played for the leading Pacific journalism programmes – especially for the University of the South Pacific programme led by formidable thought-leader Dr Shailendra Singh – is also acknowledged.”

    AAPMI said PMC’s role in providing skills, research, support and collaboration on practical projects and a pipeline of qualified professionals was now more vital to the future of media in the region than ever.

    “It is not going too far to say that the PMC has a key role to play in the survival of public interest journalism and media in the region. It will only be able to do this if the PMC is supported and expanded.”

    Last month, Dr Robie posted an item on the office closure on Facebook. It drew 150 responses and more than 80 negative comments, most of them from Pacific journalists, media personalities and current or former project students, some describing it as “academic vandalism”.

    Relocated to ‘new space’
    Particularly concerning was the taking of PMC materials which drew a response from AUT that they had been relocated to a “new space”.

    Television New Zealand Pacific affairs correspondent Barbara Dreaver responded by asking: “Do you want to show us all a photo of this new space you speak of?”

    Tongan’s journalist Kalafi Moala said:“That’s unbelievable … We are still trying to get over the Gestapo-style deportation of the USP vice-chancellor from Fiji, and now this? How shameful!”

    Leading Vanuatu-based photojournalist Ben Bohane said: “Outrageous example of a disposable mentality, but your legacy will remain …”

    Director of the Toda Peace Institute in Tokyo Professor Kevin Clements said:“This is terrible … but typical of NZ universities at the moment.”

    Australian columnist Keith Jackson, a retired academic, journalist and former administrator in Papua New Guinea, said: “That’s the kind of behaviour that happens in the worst organisations … Damn shame … But you and I and hundreds of others know you are a consummate pro who built a terrific organisation that affected and informed thousands of people. Sori tru.”

    Dr Jason MacLeod, an academic affiliated with the West Papua Project of the University of Sydney, said: “So sad. Another uni with no soul or sense of purpose beyond bottom lines.”

    Seini Taumoepeau, an Oceanic creative consultant and former presenter at ABC Australia, said: “Oh, so sorry for the loss – this is heartbreaking.”

    Ena Manureva, a Tahitian doctoral candidate, said: “This is shameful given the recommendations of the [recent harassment policies] “review” and AUT promising to do better and this is what you get – an utter failure and shame!

    Ami Dhabuwala, a onetime Gujarat Guardian reporter and former PMC Bearing Witness climate project student, said: “This is heartbreaking! PMC was the only thing that got me through my time in AUT! PMC was the best thing that happened to me. Thank you so much for all the support and the work you do.”

    Republished with permission from The Pacific Newsroom.

    The full AAPMI letter

    AAPMI letter to AUT
    The AAPMI letter.

    Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAPMI)

    16 February 2021

    Mr Derek McCormack
    Vice Chancellor
    Auckland University of Technology

    Dear Mr McCormack,

    We are writing to you to congratulate the Auckland University of Technology on its contribution to Pacific media and journalism and – at a time when Pacific journalism is under existential threat and Pacific journalism programmes suffer from underfunding – to urge you to ensure your university continues to play the globally pre-eminent role in supporting media, communication and journalism education, research and collaboration.

    AUT’s Pacific Media Centre (including its associated projects in audio, video and online production and its engagement with Asia and Pacific academic institutions and communities within New Zealand) is the jewel in AUT’s crown. As you know, the PMC is the world’s leading Pacific journalism programme is looked to by media professionals and academics from around the world, including in the Pacific and here in Australia. The centre’s research publications and staff and postgraduate student journalism websites (such as PMC Online www.pmc.aut.ac.nz) are valued highly by Australian media professionals and they are frequent contributors.

    The Pacific monograph series is an exciting development that could play a constructive role as the environment for media and journalism in the region deteriorates. We note that AUT has a reputation for taking an outsized share of the Student Journalism Awards – the Ozzies. We would also like to congratulate AUT for the work of senior lecturer Khairiah Rahman in cross-cultural work with the Muslim community in New Zealand and PMC colleagues, Jim Marbrook and his sister Anna, for winning the Grand Prix at the weekend’s Oceania International Film Festival (FIFO) in Tahiti for their film Loimata. The calibre of both people has contributed enormously to the success of AUT students. The valuable supportive role the PMC and its staff have played for the leading Pacific journalism programmes – especially for the University of the South Pacific programme led by formidable thought-leader Dr Shailendra Singh – is also acknowledged.

    Last year was a watershed year for Pacific media. At the beginning of 2020, most media houses were only in the early or middle stages of their transition to digital, a transition which around the world has left organisations with fewer resources to produce original and investigative reports that are a crucial part of the media’s remit as a vital accountability institution in our democracies. Even before the digital transition Pacific media houses were struggling to obtain the skills and financial resources needed to adequately fulfil their role as the Fourth Estate. This has only been made worse by the loss of revenue, skills and staff as a result of the economic impact of COVID on the Pacific. The PMC’s role in providing skills, research, support and collaboration on practical projects and a pipeline of qualified professionals is now more vital to the future of media in the region than ever. It is not going too far to say that the PMC has a key role to play in the survival of public interest journalism and media in the region. It will only be able to do this if the PMC is supported and expanded.

    We understand universities are under pressure but were sorry to see the demise of AUT’s postgraduate Asia-Pacific Journalism course in 2019. We congratulate and thank Professor David Robie, the multicultural and cross-disciplinary PMC Advisory Board, and volunteers for their pioneering work in developing the Pacific Media Centre. Since Professor Robie’s long-expected retirement (at age 75) we are concerned to see the Centre without a director and its office relocated without adequate consultation with its stakeholders. To continue to play its cutting-edge role we believe the Pacific Media Centre needs a world-class director and urge you to advertise the role globally.

    We also ask that you ensure the PMC and its associated activities and connections with the Pasifika and Māori communities in New Zealand as well as its connections with the Asia-Pacific global journalism research community and profession continue to be developed. Given that the PMC began as an autonomous media umbrella and outlet for Pacific students to carry out journalism, documentary, social justice and development communication projects it is essential that the centre continues to have an office where these students can be supported by staff for their media initiatives. Perhaps the best way to ensure the PMC’s future would be to establish it as an independent centre since its work involves multidisciplinary media and communication areas.

    We would appreciate your letting us know your plans to fill the role of PMC director and for the PMC itself, including its valuable archive and taonga. If materials collected by the PMC are not to be easily accessible, perhaps they should be donated to the University of the South Pacific Journalism Programme or other stakeholders who have played a close partnership role with PMC over many years.

    The Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative is a voluntary group of current and former journalists, media executives and technologists with wide experience across the Pacific and Asia. Our number also includes Pacific and Asia experts and members of Asia and Pacific diaspora communities in Australia. We came together in 2018 in response to a number of Australian enquiries. We advocate for more Australian media engagement in the region, for support for quality public interest media and for Pacific voices to be heard in media in the Pacific, Australia and globally. We have members in most Australian states and territories and supporters in 10 countries in our region. Our members established the Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism in association with the Walkley Foundation and the The Pacific Newsroom on Facebook.

    We stand ready to be of assistance to AUT.

    Warm regards,

    Signed on behalf of AAPMI:
    Jemima Garrett, Co-convenor of AAPMI, journalism training/media and development consultant, former ABC Pacific Correspondent, foundation member of the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum

    Sue Ahearn, Co-convenor of AAPMI, Journalist and international media and development consultant, former Editor ABC International, Editor of The Pacific Newsroom

    Sean Dorney, AO, former ABC PNG and Pacific Correspondent, non-resident fellow Lowy Institute for International Policy

    Annmaree O’Keefe, AM, non-resident fellow, Lowy Institute for International Policy and chair of the Foundation for Development Cooperation. Formerly, Ambassador to Nepal, Deputy-Director General of AusAID, chair of Australia’s national commission for UNESCO

    Dr Jane Munro, AM, Adjunct Professor, Griffith University, Queensland, Honorary Principal Fellow, Asia Instiute, Melbourne University, former Chair ABC Advisory Council

    Bruce Dover, International media consultant, formerly a senior executive with News Corp (Australia and China), CNN (Asia) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

    Kalafi Moala, journalist/media consultant, founder and former owner Times of Tonga

    Kevin McQuillan, journalist, media consultant and founder of RNZ International news service

    Kean Wong, Editor and journalist, ex-BBC, the Economist, AFR, co-founder, Malaysia’s Centre of Independent Journalism

    Graeme Dobell, Journalist Fellow with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, former ABC foreign, defence and foreign affairs correspondent

    Emelda Davis, President, Australian South Sea Islanders (Port Jackson), Producer (film, television and audio)

    Geoff Heriot, consultant and PhD candidate (UTas), former ABC editorial and corporate governance executive and foreign correspondent

    Vivien Altman, freelance journalist, television producer/writer, formerly executive producer SBS and producer, ABC Foreign Correspondent

    Richard Dinnen, freelance journalist, including former ABC PNG and Pacific correspondent

    Jan Forrester, former journalist and international media consultant

    Nigel Holmes, former technology manager ABC International AAPMI

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Who is killing off top Pacific journalism – and why?

    By Michael Field in Auckland

    Without much in the way of a credible explanation about why, Aotearoa New Zealand education authorities are killing off one of the Pacific’s leading journalism programmes.

    The fate of the Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre (PMC) coincides with the Fiji government assault of the University of the South Pacific, raising serious questions about the future of academic freedom and excellence.

    The Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAPMI) has appealed for action to save PMC, saying closure comes “at a time when Pacific journalism is under existential threat and Pacific journalism programmes suffer from underfunding”.

    The centre, founded in 2007 and described by AAPMI as a “jewel in the AUT crown”, had worked in its current Communication Studies office in the Sir Paul Reeves Building at the AUT’s city campus since it opened eight years ago.

    It was abruptly emptied last month of more than a decade of awards, books, files, publications, picture frames and treasures, including a traditional carved Papua New Guinean storyboard marking the opening of the centre by then Pacific Affairs Minister Luamanuvau Winnie Laban in October 2007.

    AUT claims the centre is going to new accommodation, but they had not said where or even shown it to those asking.

    Professor David Robie at PMCProfessor David Robie at the “future of PMC” seminar at AUT in December 2020. Image: APR

    Founding director Professor David Robie, whose retirement at the end of last year seemed to signal AUT’s action, was critical of the “unconscionable” closure/relocation.

    Lack of explanation
    What has been striking over the closure has been the lack of a coherent explanation from AUT.

    The Pacific Media Centre emptied out in three photos. Images: Facebook

    Empty PMC 2

    Empty PMC 3

    When Dr Robie came to retire on December 18, he found there was no one to hand over to.

    Two of the more likely colleagues were sidelined as word came down that the School of Communication Studies management at AUT were planning on taking the “Asia-Pacific” out of PMC and creating a new focus on Māori issues instead.

    This is despite AUT already having a Māori studies department, Te Ara Poutama, which has a Māori Media Development programme.

    AAPMI last month wrote to AUT’s vice-chancellor, Derek McCormack, urging they “continue to play the globally pre-eminent role in supporting media, communication and journalism education, research and collaboration.

    Calling it the jewel in AUT’s crown, the letter said “the PMC is the world’s leading Pacific journalism programme and is looked to by media professionals and academics from around the world, including in the Pacific and here in Australia.

    “The centre’s research publications and staff and postgraduate student journalism websites (such as PMC Online www.pmc.aut.ac.nz) are valued highly by Australian media professionals and they are frequent contributors.”

    The full letter is published below.

    ‘Outsized’ share of awards
    AAPMI said AUT had a reputation for taking an “outsized” share of the Student Journalism Awards – the Ozzies.”

    “The valuable supportive role the PMC and its staff have played for the leading Pacific journalism programmes – especially for the University of the South Pacific programme led by formidable thought-leader Dr Shailendra Singh – is also acknowledged.”

    AAPMI said PMC’s role in providing skills, research, support and collaboration on practical projects and a pipeline of qualified professionals was now more vital to the future of media in the region than ever.

    “It is not going too far to say that the PMC has a key role to play in the survival of public interest journalism and media in the region. It will only be able to do this if the PMC is supported and expanded.”

    Last month, Dr Robie posted an item on the office closure on Facebook. It drew 150 responses and more than 80 negative comments, most of them from Pacific journalists, media personalities and current or former project students, some describing it as “academic vandalism”.

    Relocated to ‘new space’
    Particularly concerning was the taking of PMC materials which drew a response from AUT that they had been relocated to a “new space”.

    Television New Zealand Pacific affairs correspondent Barbara Dreaver responded by asking: “Do you want to show us all a photo of this new space you speak of?”

    Tongan’s journalist Kalafi Moala said:“That’s unbelievable … We are still trying to get over the Gestapo-style deportation of the USP vice-chancellor from Fiji, and now this? How shameful!”

    Leading Vanuatu-based photojournalist Ben Bohane said: “Outrageous example of a disposable mentality, but your legacy will remain …”

    Director of the Toda Peace Institute in Tokyo Professor Kevin Clements said:“This is terrible … but typical of NZ universities at the moment.”

    Australian columnist Keith Jackson, a retired academic, journalist and former administrator in Papua New Guinea, said: “That’s the kind of behaviour that happens in the worst organisations … Damn shame … But you and I and hundreds of others know you are a consummate pro who built a terrific organisation that affected and informed thousands of people. Sori tru.”

    Dr Jason MacLeod, an academic affiliated with the West Papua Project of the University of Sydney, said: “So sad. Another uni with no soul or sense of purpose beyond bottom lines.”

    Seini Taumoepeau, an Oceanic creative consultant and former presenter at ABC Australia, said: “Oh, so sorry for the loss – this is heartbreaking.”

    Ena Manureva, a Tahitian doctoral candidate, said: “This is shameful given the recommendations of the [recent harassment policies] “review” and AUT promising to do better and this is what you get – an utter failure and shame!

    Ami Dhabuwala, a onetime Gujarat Guardian reporter and former PMC Bearing Witness climate project student, said: “This is heartbreaking! PMC was the only thing that got me through my time in AUT! PMC was the best thing that happened to me. Thank you so much for all the support and the work you do.”

    Republished with permission from The Pacific Newsroom.

    The full AAPMI letter

    AAPMI letter to AUTThe AAPMI letter.

    Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAPMI)

    16 February 2021

    Mr Derek McCormack
    Vice Chancellor
    Auckland University of Technology

    Dear Mr McCormack,

    We are writing to you to congratulate the Auckland University of Technology on its contribution to Pacific media and journalism and – at a time when Pacific journalism is under existential threat and Pacific journalism programmes suffer from underfunding – to urge you to ensure your university continues to play the globally pre-eminent role in supporting media, communication and journalism education, research and collaboration.

    AUT’s Pacific Media Centre (including its associated projects in audio, video and online production and its engagement with Asia and Pacific academic institutions and communities within New Zealand) is the jewel in AUT’s crown. As you know, the PMC is the world’s leading Pacific journalism programme is looked to by media professionals and academics from around the world, including in the Pacific and here in Australia. The centre’s research publications and staff and postgraduate student journalism websites (such as PMC Online www.pmc.aut.ac.nz) are valued highly by Australian media professionals and they are frequent contributors.

    The Pacific monograph series is an exciting development that could play a constructive role as the environment for media and journalism in the region deteriorates. We note that AUT has a reputation for taking an outsized share of the Student Journalism Awards – the Ozzies. We would also like to congratulate AUT for the work of senior lecturer Khairiah Rahman in cross-cultural work with the Muslim community in New Zealand and PMC colleagues, Jim Marbrook and his sister Anna, for winning the Grand Prix at the weekend’s Oceania International Film Festival (FIFO) in Tahiti for their film Loimata. The calibre of both people has contributed enormously to the success of AUT students. The valuable supportive role the PMC and its staff have played for the leading Pacific journalism programmes – especially for the University of the South Pacific programme led by formidable thought-leader Dr Shailendra Singh – is also acknowledged.

    Last year was a watershed year for Pacific media. At the beginning of 2020, most media houses were only in the early or middle stages of their transition to digital, a transition which around the world has left organisations with fewer resources to produce original and investigative reports that are a crucial part of the media’s remit as a vital accountability institution in our democracies. Even before the digital transition Pacific media houses were struggling to obtain the skills and financial resources needed to adequately fulfil their role as the Fourth Estate. This has only been made worse by the loss of revenue, skills and staff as a result of the economic impact of COVID on the Pacific. The PMC’s role in providing skills, research, support and collaboration on practical projects and a pipeline of qualified professionals is now more vital to the future of media in the region than ever. It is not going too far to say that the PMC has a key role to play in the survival of public interest journalism and media in the region. It will only be able to do this if the PMC is supported and expanded.

    We understand universities are under pressure but were sorry to see the demise of AUT’s postgraduate Asia-Pacific Journalism course in 2019. We congratulate and thank Professor David Robie, the multicultural and cross-disciplinary PMC Advisory Board, and volunteers for their pioneering work in developing the Pacific Media Centre. Since Professor Robie’s long-expected retirement (at age 75) we are concerned to see the Centre without a director and its office relocated without adequate consultation with its stakeholders. To continue to play its cutting-edge role we believe the Pacific Media Centre needs a world-class director and urge you to advertise the role globally.

    We also ask that you ensure the PMC and its associated activities and connections with the Pasifika and Māori communities in New Zealand as well as its connections with the Asia-Pacific global journalism research community and profession continue to be developed. Given that the PMC began as an autonomous media umbrella and outlet for Pacific students to carry out journalism, documentary, social justice and development communication projects it is essential that the centre continues to have an office where these students can be supported by staff for their media initiatives. Perhaps the best way to ensure the PMC’s future would be to establish it as an independent centre since its work involves multidisciplinary media and communication areas.

    We would appreciate your letting us know your plans to fill the role of PMC director and for the PMC itself, including its valuable archive and taonga. If materials collected by the PMC are not to be easily accessible, perhaps they should be donated to the University of the South Pacific Journalism Programme or other stakeholders who have played a close partnership role with PMC over many years.

    The Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative is a voluntary group of current and former journalists, media executives and technologists with wide experience across the Pacific and Asia. Our number also includes Pacific and Asia experts and members of Asia and Pacific diaspora communities in Australia. We came together in 2018 in response to a number of Australian enquiries. We advocate for more Australian media engagement in the region, for support for quality public interest media and for Pacific voices to be heard in media in the Pacific, Australia and globally. We have members in most Australian states and territories and supporters in 10 countries in our region. Our members established the Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism in association with the Walkley Foundation and the The Pacific Newsroom on Facebook.

    We stand ready to be of assistance to AUT.

    Warm regards,

    Signed on behalf of AAPMI:
    Jemima Garrett, Co-convenor of AAPMI, journalism training/media and development consultant, former ABC Pacific Correspondent, foundation member of the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum

    Sue Ahearn, Co-convenor of AAPMI, Journalist and international media and development consultant, former Editor ABC International, Editor of The Pacific Newsroom

    Sean Dorney, AO, former ABC PNG and Pacific Correspondent, non-resident fellow Lowy Institute for International Policy

    Annmaree O’Keefe, AM, non-resident fellow, Lowy Institute for International Policy and chair of the Foundation for Development Cooperation. Formerly, Ambassador to Nepal, Deputy-Director General of AusAID, chair of Australia’s national commission for UNESCO

    Dr Jane Munro, AM, Adjunct Professor, Griffith University, Queensland, Honorary Principal Fellow, Asia Instiute, Melbourne University, former Chair ABC Advisory Council

    Bruce Dover, International media consultant, formerly a senior executive with News Corp (Australia and China), CNN (Asia) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

    Kalafi Moala, journalist/media consultant, founder and former owner Times of Tonga

    Kevin McQuillan, journalist, media consultant and founder of RNZ International news service

    Kean Wong, Editor and journalist, ex-BBC, the Economist, AFR, co-founder, Malaysia’s Centre of Independent Journalism

    Graeme Dobell, Journalist Fellow with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, former ABC foreign, defence and foreign affairs correspondent

    Emelda Davis, President, Australian South Sea Islanders (Port Jackson), Producer (film, television and audio)

    Geoff Heriot, consultant and PhD candidate (UTas), former ABC editorial and corporate governance executive and foreign correspondent

    Vivien Altman, freelance journalist, television producer/writer, formerly executive producer SBS and producer, ABC Foreign Correspondent

    Richard Dinnen, freelance journalist, including former ABC PNG and Pacific correspondent

    Jan Forrester, former journalist and international media consultant

    Nigel Holmes, former technology manager ABC International AAPMI

    Print Friendly, PDF & Email

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Frank Senge Kolma: Somare could lose his temper – trust me, I know

    TRIBUTE: By Frank Senge Kolma in Port Moresby

    Many will now try to recollect some experience, some exchange or brush with the Grand Chief Sir Michael Thomas Somare who fell to pancreatic cancer on February 26 after a long checkered career in politics as our founding Prime Minister.

    That he was an engaging conservationist is true. He was captivating, sincere and focused.

    His humour was infectious and he used it often. He was kind and fair. He could be firm and tough when the situation demanded it.

    And he could lose his temper. Trust me, I know.

    I felt his temper flare once in March 1987 and although I maintain my innocence in that little exchange, the memory is now something I shall hold special as the great man, whom I too call Papa, lies in State.

    He had returned from Taiwan via Singapore to Port Moresby and had called a media conference upon landing. He had read a story on the plane flying in that ran in the Post-Courier under my byline.

    It said a building was going to be built in Waigani and that it was going to be called the Somare Foundation House. Funding was to come from Taiwan which was what the Grand Chief had secured on his most recent trip abroad.

    No particular investigation
    I did no particular investigation for this piece. Somebody sent me a page of a newspaper cutting that had a picture of the Grand Chief shaking hands with an important personality in Taiwan. Nothing else was discernable to me as the newspaper was written in Chinese characterS.

    I had it translated by the Singapore consul and the Chinese Embassy separately and the translated story matched.

    The Chief was incensed which surprised me at the press conference in Parliament because I thought he would announce further details of the deal. Instead, he was guarded and angry.

    Frank Senge Kolma with Somare
    Frank Senge Kolma interviewing Sir Michael Somare. Image: PNG Post-Courier

    I worked out later that the publication would place our country at odds with the Chinese Embassy which had always maintained a One China policy since it first recognised PNG’s Independence and entered into bilateral relations with the new nation in 1976.

    Papua New Guinea respected that stance and had always maintained a Taiwanese Trade Mission but never elevated that to any higher recognition.

    To have our own Grand Chief now appear to have received some assistance to build a building named after himself would create all manner of diplomatic tensions. And so the Chief lost it and my cheek, on the day, was in the way of a swinging open slap. It stung.

    I remember saying: “Why are you attacking me? I did nothing wrong,” but he did not hear me in the commotion as other journalists scurried out of the way fearing they too might receive similar treatment.

    First direct contact
    “And there it was, my first direct contact with the hand that had signed so many things into existence, including my country’s nationhood.

    A week later, in Parliament and witnessed by Ted Diro, Lady Veronica Somare and a few others we made our peace in Parliament.

    He was good like that: a sudden storm and immediate calm weather. I look back now and consider that encounter a rare sort and I cherish the memory.

    Frank Senge Kolma is one of Papua New Guinea’s leading journalists, commentators and newspaper editors. This commentary was first published in the PNG Post-Courier.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Secret Teacher | Teachers want to teach. But not vaccinating us is a recipe for disaster.

    Monday 8 March. The big return. According to some mainstream media outlets, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the entire teaching profession is desperate for this stay away to continue. Let me tell you, they are plain wrong. Teachers, in my school at least, are itching to get back in.

    We are not admin assistants, ICT experts, secretaries, or call centre workers. As important as all of those jobs are, they are not what we signed up for.

    We want to teach

    We are teachers. We want to teach. We don’t want to be stuck on a computer for 10+ hours a day running glitchy teaching sessions on clunky equipment while answering emails all day from confused children and stressed-out parents. We want to make a difference to children’s lives: supporting their well-being, increasing their life opportunities, and helping them on their way into this often trying and difficult modern world. We can only truly do that with kids in the classroom, delivering lessons.

    Going back doesn’t seem like such a leap. As readers of my previous piece will know, in my school we have been teaching around 50% of our normal intake every couple of days due to the government’s lax key worker guidelines. Most teachers understand that filling classrooms to capacity is a vital step in getting this country back open.

    Teachers need vaccinations

    At what price, only time will tell. Why on earth we have not been vaccinated is beyond me. Not a single teacher in my school has even been offered the first vaccine. It all spells a recipe for closures to come. Leaving us unvaccinated has meant that we can easily transmit across the community. In each classroom, that’s thirty children that have been in contact with me (and other support staff around the school) going home to thirty different households. In secondary schools, the bubbles are even bigger. I’m sure you don’t need a teacher to do the maths on the potential numbers that could rise once more. This, in turn, will mean more possible lockdowns and result in an even longer delay in getting our lives and freedoms back to normal.

    This really isn’t difficult. In New York, restaurant workers are now eligible for the vaccine. This has allowed their eateries to reopen for indoor dining: a small freedom. Why can’t we have a similar operational attitude to our reopening? If we did, we might just be having a summer this year.

    You may read this and think I’m just another moany teacher wanting to jump to the front of the jab queue. That is simply not the case. What I do want is for us all to be able to do the things we love and see the people we love once more. To get society back up and running. Without vaccinating teachers, that reality is even further away.

    Featured image via Wikimedia/LabPluto 123 and Unsplash/National Cancer Institute

    By The Secret Teacher

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Remembering Nelson Anjain: A champion for nuclear justice in the Pacific

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Talei Luscia Mangioni

    “I realise now that your entire career is based on our illness. We are far more valuable to you than you are to us. You have never really cared about us as people — only as a group of guinea pigs for your government’s bomb research effort. For me and for the other people on Rongelap, it is life which matters most. For you it is facts and figures. There is no question about your technical competence, but we often wonder about your humanity. We don’t need you and your technological machinery. We want our life and our health. We want to be free.” – Nelson Anjain to Dr Robert Conard in 1975.

    On Marshall Islands Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day this week, we acknowledge the historical contribution of late Nelson Anjain, a nuclear survivor and champion for nuclear justice in the Pacific.

    On this date, 1 March 1954 – 67 years ago, his home of Rongelap Atoll was brutally exposed to radioactive fallout from the hydrogen bomb codenamed Bravo, conducted by the United States government on the nearby Bikini Atoll.

    His family had first-hand experience of the bomb. His relative John Anjain recalled the day of the blast:

    “…[S]omething very strange happened. It looked like a second sun was rising in the west. We heard a noise like thunder.

    “We saw some strange clouds over the horizon … In the afternoon, something began falling from the sky upon our island. It looked like ash from a fire. It fell on me, it fell on my wife, it fell on our infant son.”

    The Rongelapese were only evacuated three days after the explosion by American officials. However, three years later in 1957, the people of Rongelap were returned. The United States government falsely assured them of its safety.

    Many years later, the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s “expert” on Rongelap and Utirik, an American named Dr Robert Conard had callously stated that the unexposed Rongelapese returning with exposed Rongelapese to fallout in 1957, made an “ideal comparison population” for studying the effects of radiation.

    The Rongelapese were considered “convenient guinea pigs” as “the only population to have been exposed to high-level, whole-body radiation without also suffering physical and psychological trauma from the nuclear blast itself, as had been the case in Nagasaki” (Gale, 1973).

    Nelson Anjain letter
    Archival excerpt of Nelson Anjain’s full letter written after the first Conference for a Nuclear Free Pacific in Suva, 1975. Image: The New Outrigger

    In May 1975, as the newly appointed Magistrate of Rongelap, Anjain sent this powerful letter to the American Dr Robert Conard. Anjain had been motivated to write the letter after the tragic passing of his nephew, Lekoj Anjain from leukaemia and witnessing many others in his community suffer from a devastating array of cancers, thyroid, and reproductive health issues.

    The original letter was written after Anjain gained regional support for his cause as an activist who travelled (without travel documentation) to Japan and Fiji upon the New Zealand peace yacht Fri in 1975.

    Call for victims assistance
    Alongside a cadre of Marshallese politicians and activists at the time, he spread the call for victims assistance for the impacted communities, who desperately needed improved financial compensation and medical care for the harms knowingly committed by the US government.

    It was a critical time when the Marshall Islands and the rest of the states composing the United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) were negotiating their pathways towards political self-determination.

    Nelson Anjain attended the Nuclear Free Pacific Conference in Fiji in 1975 alongside a vocal delegation of Micronesian activists: Dino Jones of Guam, Martin San Nicolas of the Northern Marianas, Moses Uludong of Palau, and Carl Young of Guam.

    The conference was important in introducing the South Pacific to the North Pacific’s previously unheard of sovereignty struggles.

    Nelson Anjain and the American scholar Roger Gale alerted peoples of the South Pacific to the Marshallese’s struggles and recent resistance to American medical racism. In 1971, a team of doctors from the Japan Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs attempted to examine them on the invitation of representatives like Ataji Balos for the Congress of Micronesia.

    In 1972, the Rongelap people had firmly refused medical examinations by the United States unless independent doctors would do so.

    After hearing Anjain’s story and needs, the Conference for a Nuclear Free Pacific with 93 representatives of 22 Pacific and Pacific-rim countries strongly endorsed the Rongelap people’s attempt to gain independent medical aid.

    Nelson Anjain in Hawai'i, 1980
    Nelson Anjain sits in the middle of the table. Photograph from the Conference for a Nuclear Free Pacific in Camp Kailua in Honolulu, Hawai’i , 1980. Image: Ed Greevy/The New Outrigger

    Environmental remediation
    Anjain continued to be associated with the regional Nuclear Free Pacific (later renamed to the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific – NFIP) movement and regularly participated in regional conferences and nurtured connections with Pacific kinfolk within the group. At the significant conference in Hawai’i in 1980, Anjain raised the need for environmental remediation of the oceans and lands. He stated:

    “You know, in our islands, everything is contaminated, we just know. But 20 something years ago, doctors told us that everything is all right except coconut crab, but that’s not true. We just found out this year that that’s not true. Many people I know have stomach cancer, thyroid and leukemia, and also when we walk around the island, my feet burn all over.”

    This time, he travelled with fellow Marshallese, including Lijon Eknilang and Almira Matayoshi from Rongelap, Norman Matthew from Utirik, and Alvin Jacklick from Kwajalein. Darlene Keju Johnson, who would later become another champion for Marshallese health rights, was also in attendance.

    Memorably, this was a transformative experience for all participants. Again, the conference reaffirmed proposals for supporting and carrying out a medical survey independent of the Brookhaven program.

    Anjain persists in the regional memory as a fighter for nuclear justice for the Marshallese and the greater Pacific. Through initiating meaningful grassroots connections via kinship gatherings across Asia and the Pacific, Anjain, as global hibakusha, brought the Marshallese plea for justice to international audiences.

    Marshallese truth-telling and courage in speaking back to the empire paved the way for vital articulations of the urgent need for victim assistance and environmental remediation.

    As we remember the victims of nuclear weapons and acknowledge that further work to repair the harm is still required, we also remember the historical resistance the Marshallese waged and their exceptional offerings to the regional movements for nuclear justice, independence, and demilitarisation in the Pacific.

    Talei Luscia Mangioni is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. She was born and raised on Gadigal land of the Eora Nation and is of Fijian and Italian descent. Her current scholarship aims to chart the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement across Oceania through historical ethnography, weaving archival records and material objects with oral histories of activists and artists. This article, first published by The New Outrigger, has been republished here with permission of the author.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The key to making sound climate policy? Rein in (or win over) utilities monopolies.

    Joshua A. Basseches is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the politics of state-level climate and renewable energy policy design. Previously, he worked in the Massachusetts state legislature.

    Now that we’ve had a couple weeks to process all that went wrong in Texas, people are paying more attention to the national electricity landscape, how it functions, and who’s in charge. And with Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress in power, there is a real possibility of establishing long-lasting legislative climate and energy policy. But as someone who has spent the last several years researching how climate legislation gets designed in blue states where governors are among its biggest proponents and Democratic legislative majorities are much wider than they are in D.C., I have three words of warning: investor-owned utilities.

    Thanks to an early-20th-century deal between private utility executives (most infamously, Samuel Insull) and state legislators, utility companies hold enormous structural power over policymaking — they are allowed to operate as private monopolies providing a public service. That means climate-policy advocates essentially have two options: Win them over, or reduce their power.

    Nationwide, 72 percent of us receive electricity from these corporations. We cannot shop around: With electricity, there’s only one game in town. If you live in Detroit, it’s DTE. In San Francisco, it’s Pacific Gas & Electric. In New York City, it’s Con Edison. There are more than 160 of these companies across the U.S., but most are owned by a handful of larger “holding companies,” such as Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Exelon, Duke, Southern Company, and American Electric Power. Together, these five own more than 30 utilities in 31 states; in 2019, according to Fortune, they earned combined revenues in excess of $347 billion and held combined assets worth more than $1.1 trillion.

    Research increasingly shows how effective investor-owned utilities, or IOUs as they’re often called (fitting, perhaps, given how they’ve used our money to finance their remarkable growth), have been getting what they want, primarily through lobbying, making enormous campaign contributions, and controlling access to the data that state regulatory commissions rely on to approve rates. It’s a perfect example of what watchdogs call “regulatory capture.” A recent ProPublica investigation illuminated some of their sneaky tactics, like saddling electricity customers — you and me — with extra costs to increase profits.

    Don’t be fooled by the fact that some IOUs set lofty, voluntary climate goals; they often demonstrate little to no intention of meeting them. They enjoy an unmatched track record getting climate and renewable energy policies designed to benefit them financially, sometimes at the expense of any effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or promoting renewable energy.

    The good news is that about one-third of states have adopted policies that take IOUs out of the business of generating energy. These utilities still own the wires and transmission systems that keep the lights on. But give them reliable, renewable electricity at the right price, and they are more than happy to go green. Under the right conditions, IOUs have proven their willingness to go from being the most powerful opponents of climate and renewable energy policy to being among its most forceful cheerleaders.

    My research shows that this is exactly what happened in California, widely considered the nation’s leading climate-policy state. IOUs there divested from fossil-fuel generation years ago, then policymakers enabled them to profit through energy-efficiency incentives. The state’s biggest utilities — PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric — supported the landmark climate law, AB 32, adopted in 2006. The story in other leading climate-policy states, like Massachusetts and Oregon, is similar: Ambitious climate and renewable energy policies passed with IOUs’ support.

    These private utilities are extremely powerful political actors. They largely designed the electricity system as we know it, and they have made it work very well for themselves. Typically, they favor market-based approaches, like cap-and-trade programs, that tend to draw the ire of environmental justice advocates and that some have argued should be abandoned.

    But policymakers are not powerless. They can, for example, make rate-structure adjustments that incentivize IOUs to ditch coal and gas plants more quickly and invest in renewables. They could even get more creative by, for example, imposing progressive rates that require the rich to pay more than people struggling to pay their bills. One way or another, these companies will need to recover costs in order to support strong climate policy. Essentially, they are going to want us to bail them out, not unlike the big banks in the financial crisis of 2008.

    There is another option: We can push our federal representatives, who are likely just months away from considering major climate and energy legislation, to begin reining in the political power of IOUs so we no longer have to negotiate on their terms. Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could take back some of the power they delegated to states in the early 1900s, possibly by taking steps to nationalize the grid. Given the deep, structural sources of these companies’ political power, this will not be easy or quick. These massive structural changes will likely require more than a Democratic president and a 50-50 Senate.

    Ideally, though, we would not battle these companies on a city-by-city or state-by-state basis. Many of them are larger than state boundaries; no single state has the power to reform them. And returning utilities to public control has been an often fruitless endeavor in cities that have tried, like Chicago and San Diego; likewise for attempts to pass measures to increase transparency and accountability, as in Illinois recently.

    Reducing the power of investor-owned utilities will require our federal representatives to become the experts in energy policy that the IOUs currently are. They’ll need help from climate and consumer activists to master these issues. We must become fluent in the technicalities of how the electric grid works, and how state regulators calculate rates and make determinations about cost recovery. We need to rethink not only our climate policies, but the political economy of energy provision.

    IOUs will not be silent bystanders to the legislative work that lies ahead; they will be right in the middle of it. We need to make sure they aren’t the smartest people in the room.

    The views expressed here reflect those of the author. Fix is committed to publishing a diversity of voices. Got a bold idea or fresh news analysis? Submit your op-ed draft, along with a note about who you are, to fix@grist.org.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The key to making sound climate policy? Rein in (or win over) utilities monopolies.

    Now that we’ve had a couple weeks to process all that went wrong in Texas, people are paying more attention to the national electricity landscape, how it functions, and who’s in charge. And with Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress in power, there is a real possibility of establishing long-lasting legislative climate and energy policy. But as someone who has spent the last several years researching how climate legislation gets designed in blue states where governors are among its biggest proponents and Democratic legislative majorities are much wider than they are in D.C., I have three words of warning: investor-owned utilities.

    Thanks to an early-20th-century deal between private utility executives (most infamously, Samuel Insull) and state legislators, utility companies hold enormous structural power over policymaking — they are allowed to operate as private monopolies providing a public service. That means climate-policy advocates essentially have two options: Win them over, or reduce their power.

    Nationwide, 72 percent of us receive electricity from these corporations. We cannot shop around: With electricity, there’s only one game in town. If you live in Detroit, it’s DTE. In San Francisco, it’s Pacific Gas & Electric. In New York City, it’s Con Edison. There are more than 160 of these companies across the U.S., but most are owned by a handful of larger “holding companies,” such as Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Exelon, Duke, Southern Company, and American Electric Power. Together, these five own more than 30 utilities in 31 states; in 2019, according to Fortune, they earned combined revenues in excess of $347 billion and held combined assets worth more than $1.1 trillion.

    Research increasingly shows how effective investor-owned utilities, or IOUs as they’re often called (fitting, perhaps, given how they’ve used our money to finance their remarkable growth), have been getting what they want, primarily through lobbying, making enormous campaign contributions, and controlling access to the data that state regulatory commissions rely on to approve rates. It’s a perfect example of what watchdogs call “regulatory capture.” A recent ProPublica investigation illuminated some of their sneaky tactics, like saddling electricity customers — you and me — with extra costs to increase profits.

    Don’t be fooled by the fact that some IOUs set lofty, voluntary climate goals; they often demonstrate little to no intention of meeting them. They enjoy an unmatched track record getting climate and renewable energy policies designed to benefit them financially, sometimes at the expense of any effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or promoting renewable energy.

    The good news is that about one-third of states have adopted policies that take IOUs out of the business of generating energy. These utilities still own the wires and transmission systems that keep the lights on. But give them reliable, renewable electricity at the right price, and they are more than happy to go green. Under the right conditions, IOUs have proven their willingness to go from being the most powerful opponents of climate and renewable energy policy to being among its most forceful cheerleaders.

    My research shows that this is exactly what happened in California, widely considered the nation’s leading climate-policy state. IOUs there divested from fossil-fuel generation years ago, then policymakers enabled them to profit through energy-efficiency incentives. The state’s biggest utilities — PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric — supported the landmark climate law, AB 32, adopted in 2006. The story in other leading climate-policy states, like Massachusetts and Oregon, is similar: Ambitious climate and renewable energy policies passed with IOUs’ support.

    These private utilities are extremely powerful political actors. They largely designed the electricity system as we know it, and they have made it work very well for themselves. Typically, they favor market-based approaches, like cap-and-trade programs, that tend to draw the ire of environmental justice advocates and that some have argued should be abandoned.

    But policymakers are not powerless. They can, for example, make rate-structure adjustments that incentivize IOUs to ditch coal and gas plants more quickly and invest in renewables. They could even get more creative by, for example, imposing progressive rates that require the rich to pay more than people struggling to pay their bills. One way or another, these companies will need to recover costs in order to support strong climate policy. Essentially, they are going to want us to bail them out, not unlike the big banks in the financial crisis of 2008.

    There is another option: We can push our federal representatives, who are likely just months away from considering major climate and energy legislation, to begin reining in the political power of IOUs so we no longer have to negotiate on their terms. Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could take back some of the power they delegated to states in the early 1900s, possibly by taking steps to nationalize the grid. Given the deep, structural sources of these companies’ political power, this will not be easy or quick. These massive structural changes will likely require more than a Democratic president and a 50-50 Senate.

    Ideally, though, we would not battle these companies on a city-by-city or state-by-state basis. Many of them are larger than state boundaries; no single state has the power to reform them. And returning utilities to public control has been an often fruitless endeavor in cities that have tried, like Chicago and San Diego; likewise for attempts to pass measures to increase transparency and accountability, as in Illinois recently.

    Reducing the power of investor-owned utilities will require our federal representatives to become the experts in energy policy that the IOUs currently are. They’ll need help from climate and consumer activists to master these issues. We must become fluent in the technicalities of how the electric grid works, and how state regulators calculate rates and make determinations about cost recovery. We need to rethink not only our climate policies, but the political economy of energy provision.

    IOUs will not be silent bystanders to the legislative work that lies ahead; they will be right in the middle of it. We need to make sure they aren’t the smartest people in the room.

    The views expressed here reflect those of the author. Fix is committed to publishing a diversity of voices. Got a bold idea or fresh news analysis? Submit your op-ed draft, along with a note about who you are, to fix@grist.org.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The key to making sound climate policy? Rein in (or win over) utilities monopolies. on Mar 2, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Jury takes under an hour to acquit Kurdish solidarity campaigner after watching damning police bodycam footage

    A protester arrested for assaulting a police officer was found not guilty last week. A jury at Southwark Crown Court reached their verdict after watching damning police bodycam footage.

    Simon Walker (not his real name) was arrested for assaulting a police officer at a Kurdistan solidarity protest at the Turkish Embassy in Belgravia in June 2019. Walker faced up to a year in prison for the offence.

    I was part of the protest, along with fellow Canary journalist Emily Apple. We both attended the three day long trial to support Walker, and to report for The Canary.

    Campaigners accused the police at the protest of using “disproportionate and aggressive” tactics to crack down on protesters.

    The protest was against the construction of the Ilisu Dam by the Turkish state in Northern Kurdistan. The Canary spoke to Ercan Ayboga, who is a longterm Kurdish organiser against the dam. Ayboga told The Canary that the dam, which is now complete, has directly affected the livelihoods of 100,000 people, 25,000 people have so far been displaced.

    The construction of the dam has tragically submerged the beautiful 12,000-year-old town of Hasankeyf.

    “I’ll do what I want”

    The jury in Walker’s trial heard from only one prosecution witness who had been present at the demonstration, PC Nicholas Swift. Swift said that he had arrested Walker after Walker had given him a shove while he was dealing with another protester.

    The court heard how Walker had sustained a head injury and bruising to his wrists and chest area during his arrest.

    However, when footage from Swift’s bodycam was shown to the court, it showed that the officer had waded into the protest in a heavy-handed manner, pushing Walker and several other protesters.

    At one point a protester who Swift had grabbed hold of says “Don’t hurt my arm”. Swift replied “I’ll do what I want”, and then continued, “I can use force”.

    It was at this point that Walker gave Swift a small push. In evidence, Walker said that he was concerned for the other protester and that the push was intended to separate them. Walker told the court:

    If you see someone in front of you and one of them is being violent – or at least you anticipate violence – the instinct is to separate them.

    The defence argued that Swift had “unlawfully manhandled” the other protester and that Walker had acted lawfully to defend him. The jury agreed, taking less than an hour to acquit Walker of the charges.

    Police officer admits acting unreasonably

    Under cross-examination by the defence, Swift admitted that he had felt “frustrated” at Walker and the other protesters’ failure to move.

    When confronted with the bodycam footage, Swift agreed that his actions had not been reasonable, and that if he had seen another officer acting in that way he would have “had words” with them.

    After Walker’s arrest, police violence against the protesters escalated, leading to Apple being hospitalised. According to Apple:

    Protesters blocked the road outside the embassy. One person was violently arrested. In the process, I was threatened with CS gas and thrown on the ground, sustaining ligament damage to my knee. I am still waiting for surgery on my knee. This was a disproportionate and aggressive response from police officers, who seemed intent on aggravating the situation.

    Dragged through a pointless trial during a pandemic

    After his arrest Walker was put on bail for almost two years, facing an imprisonable charge of ‘battery’ against Swift. Walker told us that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had repeatedly refused to drop the case, despite applications that it was not in the public interest to continue with the prosecution.

    Walker lives in Wales and was forced to travel to London to attend court in spite of the lockdown. Apple travelled from Cornwall as a witness. I counted 25 people in the court room at one point in the proceedings. The risk of spreading coronavirus was very real.

    You would be forgiven for thinking that Walker had been accused of something serious in order to be treated like this. However, the evidence in the case amounted to giving Swift “a little push”.

    Edward Hollingsworth, the prosecutor in the case, admitted the alleged ‘assault’ was:

    fairly small fry, it’s not serious violence but we would say it’s unlawful.

    One might ask, why was a case like this ever brought to court in the midst of a pandemic?

    Disrupting international solidarity

    The reason the CPS refused to drop this ridiculous prosecution may well be because the protest was in solidarity with the Kurdish freedom movement. A movement that has been increasingly criminalised since several Kurdish organisations were proscribed under the Terrorism Act in 2000.

    The move to criminalise the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) and other Kurdish organisations is in line with the UK’s close ties with Turkey. Turkey is seen as a key trading partner and NATO ally. And yet European courts have insisted on numerous occasions that the PKK is simply a party to an ongoing conflict, not a terrorist organisation.

    Several British citizens who have fought against Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) in Syria as part of the Peoples’ Protection Units, or YPG, have been unsuccessfully prosecuted in recent years. The state tried but failed to argue that those fighting for these largely Kurdish forces are guilty of terrorism.

    Kevin Blowe, campaigns coordinator of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) agrees that protesters are often prosecuted because of the cause they support. He made the following statement:

    All too often we have seen wholly disproportionate charges used as a deliberate attempt to disrupt protests involving international solidarity. This isn’t the first time that campaigners appear to have been treated more harshly because of the cause they support. It is intended to wear people down, alienate potential public sympathies and restrict campaigners’ ability to exercise their rights to freedom of assembly and association.

    “Aggressive and unacceptable” response to protest

    The Boycott Turkey campaign made a statement in solidarity with Walker saying:

    The violent arrest of Simon as part of attempts to break up a protest against the Ilisu dam and the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to force Simon to attend trial during a global pandemic represent an aggressive and unacceptable response to the protest. The Boycott Turkey campaign stands in solidarity with Simon and everyone struggling against state violence. The use of aggressive policing against protesters is completely disproportionate and we condemn such state violence unreservedly.The Boycott Turkey campaign stands in solidarity with everyone facing state violence and police brutality.

    The campaign statement went on to point out the irony of the British state prosecuting Walker over a little push, while at the same time propping up the violence of Turkish president Erdoğan’s regime through its close ties:

    Whilst the British state talks of justice, it continues to prop up the unjust regime in Turkey by suppressing attempts to build solidarity with those struggling against the regime’s brutality. The Ilisu dam project has displaced tens of thousands of people, caused untold ecological destruction, destroyed a world heritage site and threatens to restrict access to water for millions of people down-river from the dam.”

    “Repression of protest”

    The UK Kurdish People’s Assembly gave the following statement upon hearing the verdict:

    The fact that this case was ever taken to trial speaks volumes about how those who stand in solidarity with the Kurdish people are mistreated and persecuted by the British state. This is a repeating pattern in the treatment of political protestors in the UK, and a worrying sign of continuing repression of protest and solidarity that specifically targets the Kurdish cause.

    The defendant is an anti-imperialist, an environmental activist and friend of the Kurdish freedom movement, and we are relieved to see a just verdict in his case. We extend our enduring solidarity to people fighting criminalisation and unjust prosecution across the world.

    A ‘circus’

    Outside court, Walker said that the 18-month prosecution had been “extremely stressful”. He continued:

    It’s absolutely outrageous that they would drag not only myself and the defence witness halfway across the country during a pandemic, but also 12 jurors … to oversee a trial this minor.

    The whole case has been a circus intended to intimidate protesters and those who defend themselves against police acting violently.

    Walker’s case shows that the state’s political prosecutions of protesters are continuing, despite the ongoing lockdown. We need to make it clear that if the CPS persist in bringing our comrades to court during this health crisis, then we will be with them in solidarity.

    Featured image by Emily Apple

    Tom Anderson is part of the Shoal Collective, a cooperative producing writing for social justice and a world beyond capitalism. 

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Graham Davis: Fat-cat leaders laughing in the face of Fiji’s suffering

    COMMENTARY: By Graham Davis

    Last month, I wrote on Facebook that the resumption of my blog Grubsheet for 2021 was being postponed out of consideration for the national effort to assist the victims of tropical cyclones Yasa and Ana.

    I made the observation that it was not the time for politics but for supporting the authorities to get help to those who needed it most. The inspiring sight of the estimable Inia Seruiratu leading the cyclone relief effort in the north with the help of the equally inspiring Australian servicemen and women from HMAS Adelaide was regrettably short lived.

    Because it didn’t take long in the public consciousness for politics as usual to rear its ugly head. So much so that I no longer feel bound by my earlier decision.

    I apologise that this article is so political and – at more than 6000 words – is so long, indeed the longest I have ever written in these columns. But it is my last one for some time and I have a lot to say. I also apologise that it is so personal, some might say self-indulgently so. But I have a lot to get off my chest.

    We have just had a parliamentary session dominated by almost everything other than the needs of cyclone victims or the hundreds of thousands of people suffering because of the covid-induced economic crisis. It was a spectacle that has triggered widespread community dismay and resentment at the apparent lack of empathy of fat-cat MPs and especially those on the FijiFirst government benches.

    Much of the nation that isn’t on the public teat is in deep distress. Yet as they struggle to find shelter, put food on the table, worry about disease outbreaks, cope with chronic interruptions to their power and water and make their way through Mumbai-style traffic jams over canyon-sized potholes, they find the public discourse dominated not by their concerns and challenges but the same old political valavala (fighting) and point scoring.

    Despite the unprecedented national crisis, it was business as usual in the Parliament, led by the ever-preening Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum. Fresh from his “Gestapo-like” deportation of the USP vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia, the AG was more than usually testy and belligerent.

    Economic crash
    Perhaps he has given up even trying to manage the economic crash that has engulfed the nation. He is routinely seen signing fresh documents committing Fiji to further borrowing and portraying them as “strategic partnerships” rather than the loans and indebtedness that they are.

    One might reasonably have imagined the AG to be focussed exclusively on managing the economic firestorm and the challenges raging on every front. Yet there he was at a USP Council meeting helping his “Uncle Mahmood” resolve a crisis that he alone created and has done unprecedented damage to Fiji’s relations with the region.

    How does it all “put food on the table?”, as the Prime Minister used to ask about every diversion before he too lost the plot. It doesn’t. But for the AG, winning at all costs is what matters.

    Fiji leaders
    Fiji’s Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum and Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama … a reckoning looms at the ballot box come election time. Image: Grubsheet

    The articulate guy in the turban demanding accountability at USP got in his way and had to go, whatever the political fallout.

    As I’ve noted before, crash through or crash is the customary approach. Except that it’s much more likely to be crash on Wonder Boy’s horizon when the voting public finally get their say.

    What did a weary nation make of the sight of impeccably-dressed MPs trading barbs and insults, the Speaker boasting about his unique ability to do his job and their elected representatives leaving the chamber laughing and joking with each other in the face of their collective suffering?

    No-one ever asks them, of course. Yet one thing is certain. A reckoning looms at the ballot box come election time. There’s an ever-yawning gulf between the haves and have-nots in Fiji – those living on government borrowings and those with no means of support.

    ‘Assisting’ Fijians
    The government policy of “assisting” Fijians by allowing them to draw on their retirement savings – one of the most cynical exercises in spin I have ever witnessed – means that some 60,000 Fijians and counting now have zero balances in their Fiji National Provident Fund (FNPF) accounts. Another crisis is already in the making – vast numbers of retirees with no means of support.

    Yet there’s something just as disheartening that poses an equally serious threat to social cohesion and national unity. In my many years observing Fijian politics, I have never witnessed such a disconnect between the political elite and their struggling constituents.

    There has been no concession at all to appearances, let alone the substance of relative privilege. The political elite continue to speed around in their blacked-out Prados, trailed by their attendants and security guards, attending all manner of functions at which the food and drink is plentiful and fawning is invariably the currency of maintaining favour and influence.

    While outside on the streets, the burgeoning ranks of prostitutes and beggars – including children pleading for food – bears testament to the other face of Fiji. Unadulterated, pitiful despair. Away from the capital, increasing destitution, hunger and homelessness reflect a society that no longer seems to care or certainly doesn’t care enough.

    The only genuine Bula Bubble in Fiji is the one inhabited by the political and social elite. For much of the rest of the population, the bubble burst a long time ago.

    It could and should have been a time when the government forged a national programme of collective resilience – a back-to-basics grassroots movement led by the state in which shelter, food production and public health became the sole priorities. Instead, the government can’t even keep the power and water on, is consumed by hubris, obsesses about the unimportant and those charged with enforcing the law engage in all manner of criminal activity.

    The list of police offences detailed recently – everything from theft and assault to perverting the course of justice – is a sure sign of a nation in big trouble. The AG admitted as the cyclone crisis unfolded that he had only $3.5 million dollars on hand for the relief effort until the foreign cavalry arrived.

    Astonishingly, while $38 million a month is being allocated for aircraft leases and loans, there’s barely enough in the government’s contingent emergency funds to buy a couple of prestige houses in Suva.

    FijiFirst lost the plot
    With its obsession with seemingly everything but the immediate needs of ordinary Fijians, the FijiFirst government appears to have almost totally lost the plot. It isn’t just the chronic spin, media manipulation and continual protestations of “no crisis! Nothing to see here!” We now see normally straight-shooting ministers like Jone Usamate obliged to give misleading answers in the Parliament.

    Usamate said Fiji had withdrawn Ratu Inoke Kubuabola as its candidate to lead the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) out of deference to its Pacific neighbours when the truth is that it was to save the Prime Minister’s face when his handpicked candidate got little or no support.

    Once again last week, Voreqe Bainimarama read out a speech written for him by Qorvis and the AG praising the AG and expressing his full support for him. Yes, Prime Minister, we know. You will both go down together, maybe not at the same election but sometime. And it has already happened in the estimation of those who once had high expectations of you but whose confidence you have since lost.

    For its part, a cowering media – aside, of course, from the oleaginous flatterers at the CJ Patel Fiji Sun and the AG’s brother’s FBC – is starting to get creative. Creatively subversive.

    Did you notice that almost every photograph of the Prime Minister in The Fiji Times during the parliamentary sitting had him laughing uproariously with ministers like Faiyaz Koya and others around him?

    Yes, it’s the image of the local Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Laughing in the face of a nation’s suffering. A big joke.

    All up, I can’t recall a more depressing parliamentary week. And if it is to be business as usual in the bear pit of Fijian politics, I certainly no longer feel constrained by sensitivity to resume some serious mauling of my own. So here goes.

    Read the full Graham Davis article on his blog Grubsheet under the title “Kangaroo court and off I hop”. This shortened commentary is republished with permission. Fiji-born Davis is an award-winning journalist turned communications consultant. He was the Fiji government’s principal communications advisor for six years from 2012 to 2018 and continued to work on Fiji’s global climate and oceans campaign up until the end of the decade.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Graham Davis: Fat-cat leaders laughing in the face of Fiji’s suffering

    COMMENTARY: By Graham Davis

    Last month, I wrote on Facebook that the resumption of my blog Grubsheet for 2021 was being postponed out of consideration for the national effort to assist the victims of tropical cyclones Yasa and Ana.

    I made the observation that it was not the time for politics but for supporting the authorities to get help to those who needed it most. The inspiring sight of the estimable Inia Seruiratu leading the cyclone relief effort in the north with the help of the equally inspiring Australian servicemen and women from HMAS Adelaide was regrettably short lived.

    Because it didn’t take long in the public consciousness for politics as usual to rear its ugly head. So much so that I no longer feel bound by my earlier decision.

    I apologise that this article is so political and – at more than 6000 words – is so long, indeed the longest I have ever written in these columns. But it is my last one for some time and I have a lot to say. I also apologise that it is so personal, some might say self-indulgently so. But I have a lot to get off my chest.

    We have just had a parliamentary session dominated by almost everything other than the needs of cyclone victims or the hundreds of thousands of people suffering because of the covid-induced economic crisis. It was a spectacle that has triggered widespread community dismay and resentment at the apparent lack of empathy of fat-cat MPs and especially those on the FijiFirst government benches.

    Much of the nation that isn’t on the public teat is in deep distress. Yet as they struggle to find shelter, put food on the table, worry about disease outbreaks, cope with chronic interruptions to their power and water and make their way through Mumbai-style traffic jams over canyon-sized potholes, they find the public discourse dominated not by their concerns and challenges but the same old political valavala (fighting) and point scoring.

    Despite the unprecedented national crisis, it was business as usual in the Parliament, led by the ever-preening Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum. Fresh from his “Gestapo-like” deportation of the USP vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia, the AG was more than usually testy and belligerent.

    Economic crash
    Perhaps he has given up even trying to manage the economic crash that has engulfed the nation. He is routinely seen signing fresh documents committing Fiji to further borrowing and portraying them as “strategic partnerships” rather than the loans and indebtedness that they are.

    One might reasonably have imagined the AG to be focussed exclusively on managing the economic firestorm and the challenges raging on every front. Yet there he was at a USP Council meeting helping his “Uncle Mahmood” resolve a crisis that he alone created and has done unprecedented damage to Fiji’s relations with the region.

    How does it all “put food on the table?”, as the Prime Minister used to ask about every diversion before he too lost the plot. It doesn’t. But for the AG, winning at all costs is what matters.

    Fiji leadersFiji’s Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum and Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama … a reckoning looms at the ballot box come election time. Image: Grubsheet

    The articulate guy in the turban demanding accountability at USP got in his way and had to go, whatever the political fallout.

    As I’ve noted before, crash through or crash is the customary approach. Except that it’s much more likely to be crash on Wonder Boy’s horizon when the voting public finally get their say.

    What did a weary nation make of the sight of impeccably-dressed MPs trading barbs and insults, the Speaker boasting about his unique ability to do his job and their elected representatives leaving the chamber laughing and joking with each other in the face of their collective suffering?

    No-one ever asks them, of course. Yet one thing is certain. A reckoning looms at the ballot box come election time. There’s an ever-yawning gulf between the haves and have-nots in Fiji – those living on government borrowings and those with no means of support.

    ‘Assisting’ Fijians
    The government policy of “assisting” Fijians by allowing them to draw on their retirement savings – one of the most cynical exercises in spin I have ever witnessed – means that some 60,000 Fijians and counting now have zero balances in their Fiji National Provident Fund (FNPF) accounts. Another crisis is already in the making – vast numbers of retirees with no means of support.

    Yet there’s something just as disheartening that poses an equally serious threat to social cohesion and national unity. In my many years observing Fijian politics, I have never witnessed such a disconnect between the political elite and their struggling constituents.

    There has been no concession at all to appearances, let alone the substance of relative privilege. The political elite continue to speed around in their blacked-out Prados, trailed by their attendants and security guards, attending all manner of functions at which the food and drink is plentiful and fawning is invariably the currency of maintaining favour and influence.

    While outside on the streets, the burgeoning ranks of prostitutes and beggars – including children pleading for food – bears testament to the other face of Fiji. Unadulterated, pitiful despair. Away from the capital, increasing destitution, hunger and homelessness reflect a society that no longer seems to care or certainly doesn’t care enough.

    The only genuine Bula Bubble in Fiji is the one inhabited by the political and social elite. For much of the rest of the population, the bubble burst a long time ago.

    It could and should have been a time when the government forged a national programme of collective resilience – a back-to-basics grassroots movement led by the state in which shelter, food production and public health became the sole priorities. Instead, the government can’t even keep the power and water on, is consumed by hubris, obsesses about the unimportant and those charged with enforcing the law engage in all manner of criminal activity.

    The list of police offences detailed recently – everything from theft and assault to perverting the course of justice – is a sure sign of a nation in big trouble. The AG admitted as the cyclone crisis unfolded that he had only $3.5 million dollars on hand for the relief effort until the foreign cavalry arrived.

    Astonishingly, while $38 million a month is being allocated for aircraft leases and loans, there’s barely enough in the government’s contingent emergency funds to buy a couple of prestige houses in Suva.

    FijiFirst lost the plot
    With its obsession with seemingly everything but the immediate needs of ordinary Fijians, the FijiFirst government appears to have almost totally lost the plot. It isn’t just the chronic spin, media manipulation and continual protestations of “no crisis! Nothing to see here!” We now see normally straight-shooting ministers like Jone Usamate obliged to give misleading answers in the Parliament.

    Usamate said Fiji had withdrawn Ratu Inoke Kubuabola as its candidate to lead the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) out of deference to its Pacific neighbours when the truth is that it was to save the Prime Minister’s face when his handpicked candidate got little or no support.

    Once again last week, Voreqe Bainimarama read out a speech written for him by Qorvis and the AG praising the AG and expressing his full support for him. Yes, Prime Minister, we know. You will both go down together, maybe not at the same election but sometime. And it has already happened in the estimation of those who once had high expectations of you but whose confidence you have since lost.

    For its part, a cowering media – aside, of course, from the oleaginous flatterers at the CJ Patel Fiji Sun and the AG’s brother’s FBC – is starting to get creative. Creatively subversive.

    Did you notice that almost every photograph of the Prime Minister in The Fiji Times during the parliamentary sitting had him laughing uproariously with ministers like Faiyaz Koya and others around him?

    Yes, it’s the image of the local Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Laughing in the face of a nation’s suffering. A big joke.

    All up, I can’t recall a more depressing parliamentary week. And if it is to be business as usual in the bear pit of Fijian politics, I certainly no longer feel constrained by sensitivity to resume some serious mauling of my own. So here goes.

    Read the full Graham Davis article on his blog Grubsheet under the title “Kangaroo court and off I hop”. This shortened commentary is republished with permission. Fiji-born Davis is an award-winning journalist turned communications consultant. He was the Fiji government’s principal communications advisor for six years from 2012 to 2018 and continued to work on Fiji’s global climate and oceans campaign up until the end of the decade.

    Print Friendly, PDF & Email

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Forty feet high and under attack: the peaceful protestors facing the reality of a private security force above the law

    Screams, panic, alarm, and finally blood make this footage a scary glimpse into the reality of the anti-HS2 camp evictions. In this incident, protestors were 40ft high in a makeshift treehouse. They suffered repeated blows from a member of the National Eviction Team (NET) as he violently kicked and lashed out at the protestors at Poors Piece, Wendover.

    The activists were there with one clear purpose: to protect the surrounding woodland from the relentless path of the HS2 train line. When completed, it will destroy 108 ancient and well-loved woodlands. So why did this situation escalate, turning a peaceful occupation of a tree violent?  

    Protesters punched, kicked and put in choke holds

    This overt and physical aggression is more alarming when considered in the context of the situation. Activists are living up to 40ft in the air in tree houses for days at a time. They have limited food and water and are staying in freezing and wet conditions. This means that they’re exhausted and physically weak. Meanwhile, they’re at risk of being assaulted by physically strong men assisted by heavy and dangerous machinery. This underlying fear of violence is also, of course, having a damaging effect on the mental health of those in the camps who are always on high alert. They’re paranoid and have difficulty sleeping with concerns for themselves and their companions. 

    This violent behaviour towards protestors is nothing new and has been witnessed repeatedly throughout the year. Committed rebel Ricky, who often visits camps, reports that:

    I’ve seen protestors punched, kicked, pushed, fingers bent and choke holds and I have also been threatened by a member of the NET (National Eviction Team) that he was going to ‘spark me out’

    Potentially life-changing injuries

    The violence seen last week demonstrates a worrying trend as it becomes more frequent and injuries become more severe. In another incident at Poor’s Piece, one activist was attacked and stamped on repeatedly by a bailiff. He was left overnight, unseen by paramedics, in a treehouse with severe damage to his spine and neck. This activist remains in hospital with potentially life-changing injuries. This situation, in which his safety and physical health was severely compromised, first by the violence of the NET and then by the police and emergency services, reveals the issue at the core of this increasing violence.

    HS2 Limited and the NET believe that they can behave above the law. Whether their actions are violence, the unlawful destruction of a woodland yet compensated for, or the eradication of wildlife before a survey has been completed, they’ve repeatedly seen how their actions go unchallenged by law and order. 

    Police just watch the attacks

    Evictions themselves are facilitated by the seemingly unconditional support of the police. As rebel Ricky saw himself:

    The police are always in the area of the attacks and most of the time watch it happening, yet when protestors report it to the police on site they refuse to act and tell protestors to call 101 to report the assault even though officers are there watching it.

    Even a local landowner appears in shock when he reflects on the eviction at Poor’s Piece, stating:

    The last 24 hours have been revealing. What we’ve seen is the reality of what’s being perpetrated by HS2, with the help of the local police force. At the grand age of 71, I’ve now been radicalised.

    Clearly, alternative pressure must be made to protect those onsite. As one activist states:

    I honestly believe that the police are facilitating the violence as not once have they stopped HS2 security and NET from attacking the protesters and very often the police are seeing protesters being assaulted yet stand by and allow it.

    How do we protect activists from harm?

    On 25 February, an action called No More Close Shaves outside HS2 offices was raising awareness of exactly this. Protesters highlighted the imminent need to prevent any further injuries or potentially even the loss of life. 

    On top of this, even when such extreme violence is taking place and caught on camera, the BBC is still failing to mention it in its reports. This is increasing the concern for protestors’ welfare, because so many incidents go undocumented. So it prompts the question: if HS2 Limited, the police, and the media are all turning a blind eye to such overt uses of violence, how do we protect these activists from harm? And how do we hold HS2 Limited and the NET to account?

    Featured image via screengrab and Gareth Morris with permission

    By Kirsty Mackenzie

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The Working Class Backbone of Hi Tech

    In his comprehensive and educational book, Coders (2019 Penguin Press), tech writer Clive Thompson tells the story of computer programmers, a workforce that is undoubtedly one of the “most quietly influential on the planet.” Thompson writes:

    You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car manages the braking system; ‘machine-learning’ algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity.

    While the field isn’t something I plan to pursue (I’m too much of a wannabe Luddite for that to happen), it was fascinating to learn more about what programming actually is; its language; how the work combines engineering and art, logic and puzzle-solving, passion and patience. I also learned more about the people that do the work; how they think and why; the heady impact of being able to literally change the world overnight, particularly when an app or program generates millions of global users. Of special interest was the history, beginning with the first coders: “Brilliant and pioneering women, who, despite crafting some of the earliest personal computers and programming language, were later written out of history.”

    Coders affirmed two things for me. One is that in the struggle for social justice and human liberation, coders are a decisive force for success—arguably the decisive force, particularly in any pursuit of a People’s Internet, or at the very least a People’s Media. Indeed, the digital battlefield is paramount.

    My second affirmation was being reminded, yet again, about the power of the working class. The Internet, embedded in the lives of billions around the globe, is routinely compared to a cloud, a place without place, without distance. But that’s an illusion. All it takes is for service to go down for us to realize that someone has to fix it, be it a broken fiber optic cable, a damaged router, or a down electrical line.

    When we rely on the Internet, we rely on workers, from mainframe engineers to computer programmers to office workers to maintenance personnel. In his 2012 book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Wired correspondent Andrew Blum describes how the Internet is “as fixed in real physical places any railroad or telephone ever was. It fills enormous buildings, converges in some places and avoids others, and it flows through tubes underground, up in the air and over the oceans all over the world. You can map it, can smell it, and you can even visit it.”

    There is a human, geographic side to the worldwide web, intricate and utterly interdependent on the other: Those who keep the power going and the work stations clean; the workers who mine and extract the silicon, the silver, copper, mercury, aluminum, tin, lead, and all the rare earth elements; the vast and global workforce that assembles the computers, smart phones and tablets. Then there are those who do the shipping and delivery, who dispose the toxic and radioactive electronic waste.

    I think of tech’s working class whenever I feel I’m too becoming user-centric, and forgetting about the human beings whose labor makes it all run, with the awesome power to make it not run as well.

    The post The Working Class Backbone of Hi Tech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Working Class Backbone of Hi Tech

    In his comprehensive and educational book, Coders (2019 Penguin Press), tech writer Clive Thompson tells the story of computer programmers, a workforce that is undoubtedly one of the “most quietly influential on the planet.” Thompson writes:

    You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car manages the braking system; ‘machine-learning’ algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity.

    While the field isn’t something I plan to pursue (I’m too much of a wannabe Luddite for that to happen), it was fascinating to learn more about what programming actually is; its language; how the work combines engineering and art, logic and puzzle-solving, passion and patience. I also learned more about the people that do the work; how they think and why; the heady impact of being able to literally change the world overnight, particularly when an app or program generates millions of global users. Of special interest was the history, beginning with the first coders: “Brilliant and pioneering women, who, despite crafting some of the earliest personal computers and programming language, were later written out of history.”

    Coders affirmed two things for me. One is that in the struggle for social justice and human liberation, coders are a decisive force for success—arguably the decisive force, particularly in any pursuit of a People’s Internet, or at the very least a People’s Media. Indeed, the digital battlefield is paramount.

    My second affirmation was being reminded, yet again, about the power of the working class. The Internet, embedded in the lives of billions around the globe, is routinely compared to a cloud, a place without place, without distance. But that’s an illusion. All it takes is for service to go down for us to realize that someone has to fix it, be it a broken fiber optic cable, a damaged router, or a down electrical line.

    When we rely on the Internet, we rely on workers, from mainframe engineers to computer programmers to office workers to maintenance personnel. In his 2012 book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Wired correspondent Andrew Blum describes how the Internet is “as fixed in real physical places any railroad or telephone ever was. It fills enormous buildings, converges in some places and avoids others, and it flows through tubes underground, up in the air and over the oceans all over the world. You can map it, can smell it, and you can even visit it.”

    There is a human, geographic side to the worldwide web, intricate and utterly interdependent on the other: Those who keep the power going and the work stations clean; the workers who mine and extract the silicon, the silver, copper, mercury, aluminum, tin, lead, and all the rare earth elements; the vast and global workforce that assembles the computers, smart phones and tablets. Then there are those who do the shipping and delivery, who dispose the toxic and radioactive electronic waste.

    I think of tech’s working class whenever I feel I’m too becoming user-centric, and forgetting about the human beings whose labor makes it all run, with the awesome power to make it not run as well.

    David Perez is a writer, journalist, activist, and actor, born in the South Bronx in New York City and currently living in Taos, New Mexico. Read other articles by David.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2021 at 10:06am and is filed under Opinion, Technology, Working Class.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Timor-Leste: Political leadership, patriarchal relationships, and the paedophile ex-priest

    ANALYSIS: By Sara Niner

    Xanana Gusmao’s recent contrived jovial participation in the birthday celebrations of “self-professed” paedophile and defrocked foreign priest Richard Daschbach has shocked many of his supporters, not least his Australian former wife and three Timorese-Australian sons who have publicly condemned the visit and written apologetic letters to the young women who were due to give evidence against Daschbach in court this week.

    At the very well-publicised “birthday party” held in the home of a diehard Catholic supporter, Gusmao embraced and hand-fed Daschbach birthday cake, and tipped champagne into his mouth.

    The visit has been interpreted as a heavy-handed attempt to whitewash Daschbach’s ruined reputation just before the court case commenced, and intimidate the prosecution, and the young witnesses who are in hiding due to just this sort of pressure.

    In blatantly favouring the reputation of an ex-priest over the safety and wellbeing of his alleged victims, these male elites demonstrate a fundamental element of patriarchy defined as: “… a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, through hierarchy, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women”. (Hartmann, 1979, p11).

    Why would Gusmao bother?
    It can be explained by long-term patriarchal relationships between particular conservative priests and resistance leaders such as Gusmao, and the almighty political, social and spiritual power of the Catholic Church in Timor-Leste to co-opt political leaders.

    Gusmao’s visit is said to have been to honour the ex-priest’s role in the struggle for independence. Yet it also has to do with the low status and lack of power of poor young females, orphans with no one to protect them, and the phenomenal combined power of the clergy and the heroes of the resistance – when these patriarchal forces come together in Timor, very few can contest their will.

    Xanana Gusmao
    Xanana Gusmao has come under fire for visiting self-confessed paedophile priest Richard Daschbach. Image: Lens.Monash.edu

    Yet some are speaking – and have spoken out – including Gusmao’s Australian sons; more progressive clergy; journalists and their professional association; lawyers representing the victims and others from the legal community; the women’s organisations protecting the alleged victims; and ordinary citizens expressing horror on social media, where the topic has been discussed.

    This list will continue to grow. These are the new progressive forces in Timor-Leste contesting the power of the old patriarchal forces.

    Daschbach has openly confessed more than once to the crimes, and was expelled from the priesthood and Catholic Church after an investigation in 2018. Since then, the justice system in Timor has struggled with prosecuting the case due to the interference of local religious supporters of the ex-priest, and a lack of appetite for arresting and imprisoning a priest.

    While the problem is a global one and not well dealt with anywhere, to understand why this has happened in Timor, some appreciation for the particularities of the Catholic Church there is required.

    Portuguese Christian catholic church landmark in central Dili, Timor-Leste.
    As a Catholic country, with more than 90 percent adherence, the church wields enormous social, political and spiritual power in Timor-Leste. Image: Lens.Monash.edu

    As a Catholic country, with more than 90 percent adherence, the church wields enormous social, political and spiritual power, and priests are revered as God on earth. Daschbach was treated as a “demigod” with “magical abilities” and a “direct line to Christ”.

    People still bow down or kneel and kiss the ring of priests to greet them. Others are simply too afraid to speak out for fear of excommunication, and the social, political and spiritual implications of this for themselves and their families.

    Due to the Indonesian occupation, the Catholic Church in Timor-Leste remains “wedded to ideas of hierarchy and obedience” largely unaffected by liberal changes introduced by the second Vatican Council.

    The deeply conservative church provides the moral and spiritual underpinning of an unequal gender regime. This leads to the significant conservative impact of religious discourses on gender roles and relationships, sex, reproduction, and homosexuality.

    A woman activist explains that Catholic priests will not accept “modern” ideas about gender equality, or address sexual abuse and violence: “… they are more inclined to men’s perspectives and […] the patriarchal mentality“.

    The church’s religious doctrines heavily influence government policy, leading to a lack of sex education in schools and reproductive healthcare, including the use of condoms as a protective measure to avoid pregnancy and disease, resulting in many avoidable deaths.

    The inner circle: The Catholic Justice and Peace Commission
    While the Bishop of Dili has urged all Catholics to respect the Vatican’s decision to expel Daschbach, there’s a hardcore group within the church, led by lawyers from the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, who have led his campaign of support.

    Commission members even visited the orphanage where the abuse is alleged to have occurred, and spoke to potential victims and witnesses, as well as parents, police, and lawyers.

    In a report, they accuse the Timorese judicial and police authorities and organisations that have supported victims of being a “justice-mafia” and, perversely, of “collective sexual abuse” (for conducting medical examinations), “exploitation of underage girls”, and “human trafficking” (for moving them to a safe house).

    By disclosing the names of alleged victims, witnesses, and the suspect himself, one local lawyer says they have broken the law. The Archbishop swiftly sacked the president of the commission.

    The gender challenge
    Gender relations apparent in contemporary Timorese society are the result of complex political and historical circumstances.

    The dominance of men in Timorese history and politics, and the legacy of militarisation and conflict with neighbouring Indonesia during the national struggle for independence (1974-1999) are significant issues in contemporary Timorese society that pose enormous challenges for the nation.

    As in most post-conflict societies, the effects of militarisation on society have not been adequately dealt with. I have argued that it was this that led to internal violence among the male political leadership resulting in a national crisis in 2006, and shattering of national reconstruction and development.

    A tough and brutalised masculinity has significant damaging effects for the young men who try to live up to it, but also others such as the LGBTI community who face persecution and discrimination.

    The negative influence of the Catholic Church on attitudes to homosexuality highlights the crucial work needed to combat the solid wall of intolerance built by conservative forces.

    A recent secret research report found that young women have a lack of knowledge, choice, and agency in first sexual experiences leading to sexual abuse. Young women were often unaware that their consent was even required for sex.

    In another study, between 20 to 30 percent of men admitted to rape, and in another acceptance of public sexual harassment and forced sex was clear. This may be linked to even higher levels of sexual abuse experienced by men. A shocking 42 percent of the men surveyed in 2016 reported being sexually abused before the age 18.

    More powerful men
    While research data does not yet exist on perpetrators of male victims, it seems likely that more powerful boys or men from within their own families, communities, clubs, schools and churches were the perpetrators.

    The patriarchal hierarchies of power within institutional settings must be challenged if vulnerable people, including women and children, are to be protected – and not just in Timorese society.

    There is no disputing that Gusmao completed a Herculean task in leading the East Timorese people to independence, and his resolute leadership and bravery will never – nor should ever – be forgotten.

    Yet his reputation is being tarnished by such allegiances to the old authoritarian patriarchal order that he once fought against as a young man. Culture is dynamic, and both internal and external progressive forces signal change in Timor-Leste.

    Newer progressive forces in Timor contesting older hierarchies of power are in need of support and international solidarity, and supporters of Timor-Leste, and Gusmao in particular, in Australia and other places need to take note.

    There are Timorese men working and advocating for an end to violence against women, alongside Timor’s tenacious women’s movement that has worked so hard in this space, but more political leadership on gendered violence is required by the state.

    Timor Leste’s extremely youthful population represents a great opportunity for positive change and renewal.

    Dr Sara Niner is a lecturer in anthropology, School of Social Sciences, Monash University. This article is republished from Lens Monash under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Timor-Leste: Political leadership, patriarchal relationships, and the paedophile priest

    ANALYSIS: By Sara Niner

    Xanana Gusmao’s recent contrived jovial participation in the birthday celebrations of “self-professed” paedophile and defrocked foreign priest Richard Daschbach has shocked many of his supporters, not least his Australian former wife and three Timorese-Australian sons who have publicly condemned the visit and written apologetic letters to the young women who were due to give evidence against Daschbach in court this week.

    At the very well-publicised “birthday party” held in the home of a diehard Catholic supporter, Gusmao embraced and hand-fed Daschbach birthday cake, and tipped champagne into his mouth.

    The visit has been interpreted as a heavy-handed attempt to whitewash Daschbach’s ruined reputation just before the court case commenced, and intimidate the prosecution, and the young witnesses who are in hiding due to just this sort of pressure.

    In blatantly favouring the reputation of an ex-priest over the safety and wellbeing of his alleged victims, these male elites demonstrate a fundamental element of patriarchy defined as: “… a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, through hierarchy, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women”. (Hartmann, 1979, p11).

    Why would Gusmao bother?
    It can be explained by long-term patriarchal relationships between particular conservative priests and resistance leaders such as Gusmao, and the almighty political, social and spiritual power of the Catholic Church in Timor-Leste to co-opt political leaders.

    Gusmao’s visit is said to have been to honour the ex-priest’s role in the struggle for independence. Yet it also has to do with the low status and lack of power of poor young females, orphans with no one to protect them, and the phenomenal combined power of the clergy and the heroes of the resistance – when these patriarchal forces come together in Timor, very few can contest their will.

    Xanana Gusmao has come under fire for visiting self-confessed paedophile priest Richard Daschbach. Image: Lens.Monash.edu

    Yet some are speaking – and have spoken out – including Gusmao’s Australian sons; more progressive clergy; journalists and their professional association; lawyers representing the victims and others from the legal community; the women’s organisations protecting the alleged victims; and ordinary citizens expressing horror on social media, where the topic has been discussed.

    This list will continue to grow. These are the new progressive forces in Timor-Leste contesting the power of the old patriarchal forces.

    Daschbach has openly confessed more than once to the crimes, and was expelled from the priesthood and Catholic Church after an investigation in 2018. Since then, the justice system in Timor has struggled with prosecuting the case due to the interference of local religious supporters of the ex-priest, and a lack of appetite for arresting and imprisoning a priest.

    While the problem is a global one and not well dealt with anywhere, to understand why this has happened in Timor, some appreciation for the particularities of the Catholic Church there is required.

    Portuguese Christian catholic church landmark in central Dili, Timor-Leste.As a Catholic country, with more than 90 percent adherence, the church wields enormous social, political and spiritual power in Timor-Leste. Image: Lens.Monash.edu

    As a Catholic country, with more than 90 percent adherence, the church wields enormous social, political and spiritual power, and priests are revered as God on earth. Daschbach was treated as a “demigod” with “magical abilities” and a “direct line to Christ”.

    People still bow down or kneel and kiss the ring of priests to greet them. Others are simply too afraid to speak out for fear of excommunication, and the social, political and spiritual implications of this for themselves and their families.

    Due to the Indonesian occupation, the Catholic Church in Timor-Leste remains “wedded to ideas of hierarchy and obedience” largely unaffected by liberal changes introduced by the second Vatican Council.

    The deeply conservative church provides the moral and spiritual underpinning of an unequal gender regime. This leads to the significant conservative impact of religious discourses on gender roles and relationships, sex, reproduction, and homosexuality.

    A woman activist explains that Catholic priests will not accept “modern” ideas about gender equality, or address sexual abuse and violence: “… they are more inclined to men’s perspectives and […] the patriarchal mentality“.

    The church’s religious doctrines heavily influence government policy, leading to a lack of sex education in schools and reproductive healthcare, including the use of condoms as a protective measure to avoid pregnancy and disease, resulting in many avoidable deaths.

    The inner circle: The Catholic Justice and Peace Commission
    While the Bishop of Dili has urged all Catholics to respect the Vatican’s decision to expel Daschbach, there’s a hardcore group within the church, led by lawyers from the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, who have led his campaign of support.

    Commission members even visited the orphanage where the abuse is alleged to have occurred, and spoke to potential victims and witnesses, as well as parents, police, and lawyers.

    In a report, they accuse the Timorese judicial and police authorities and organisations that have supported victims of being a “justice-mafia” and, perversely, of “collective sexual abuse” (for conducting medical examinations), “exploitation of underage girls”, and “human trafficking” (for moving them to a safe house).

    By disclosing the names of alleged victims, witnesses, and the suspect himself, one local lawyer says they have broken the law. The Archbishop swiftly sacked the president of the commission.

    The gender challenge
    Gender relations apparent in contemporary Timorese society are the result of complex political and historical circumstances.

    The dominance of men in Timorese history and politics, and the legacy of militarisation and conflict with neighbouring Indonesia during the national struggle for independence (1974-1999) are significant issues in contemporary Timorese society that pose enormous challenges for the nation.

    As in most post-conflict societies, the effects of militarisation on society have not been adequately dealt with. I have argued that it was this that led to internal violence among the male political leadership resulting in a national crisis in 2006, and shattering of national reconstruction and development.

    A tough and brutalised masculinity has significant damaging effects for the young men who try to live up to it, but also others such as the LGBTI community who face persecution and discrimination.

    The negative influence of the Catholic Church on attitudes to homosexuality highlights the crucial work needed to combat the solid wall of intolerance built by conservative forces.

    A recent secret research report found that young women have a lack of knowledge, choice, and agency in first sexual experiences leading to sexual abuse. Young women were often unaware that their consent was even required for sex.

    In another study, between 20 to 30 percent of men admitted to rape, and in another acceptance of public sexual harassment and forced sex was clear. This may be linked to even higher levels of sexual abuse experienced by men. A shocking 42 percent of the men surveyed in 2016 reported being sexually abused before the age 18.

    More powerful men
    While research data does not yet exist on perpetrators of male victims, it seems likely that more powerful boys or men from within their own families, communities, clubs, schools and churches were the perpetrators.

    The patriarchal hierarchies of power within institutional settings must be challenged if vulnerable people, including women and children, are to be protected – and not just in Timorese society.

    There is no disputing that Gusmao completed a Herculean task in leading the East Timorese people to independence, and his resolute leadership and bravery will never – nor should ever – be forgotten.

    Yet his reputation is being tarnished by such allegiances to the old authoritarian patriarchal order that he once fought against as a young man. Culture is dynamic, and both internal and external progressive forces signal change in Timor-Leste.

    Newer progressive forces in Timor contesting older hierarchies of power are in need of support and international solidarity, and supporters of Timor-Leste, and Gusmao in particular, in Australia and other places need to take note.

    There are Timorese men working and advocating for an end to violence against women, alongside Timor’s tenacious women’s movement that has worked so hard in this space, but more political leadership on gendered violence is required by the state.

    Timor Leste’s extremely youthful population represents a great opportunity for positive change and renewal.

    Dr Sara Niner is a lecturer in anthropology, School of Social Sciences, Monash University. This article is republished from Lens Monash under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    Print Friendly, PDF & Email

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The extent of the attacks on the left is now horrifying

    It looks like if you’re left-wing, you’d best prepare yourself for a dunk or a burning at the stake. Because the witch hunt against us all has stepped up a gear. 

    Tribune Magazine is “fighting a legal case” which ‘threatens its future’. The Labour Party has banned socialist candidates from the Liverpool Mayor election. And Twitter has suspended left-wing accounts left, right, and centre. But all this is the thin end of the wedge. Because we’re under the greatest attack since the days of McCarthyism. 

    The Tories recently appointed former Labour MP John Woodcock to head up a review into “countering violent extremism”. A preserve of the far right, you may think. Wrong. Because witchfinder general Woodcock will also be looking into the so-called far left. But his review comes at a time when the left wing in the UK is under attack from all sides.

    Social media companies are deliberately censoring our news and views – while jumping into financial bed with the likes of Rupert Murdoch. Meanwhile, him and the rest of the establishment corporate media are tightening their grip on the narrative – being aided and abetted by the Tories parachuting their mates into top jobs. And if you want to protest about all this – tough luck.

    The government brands groups like Extinction Rebellion “criminals”. Our right to protest is being lost as an increasingly authoritarian police force uses coronavirus rules to its advantage. Oh, and if you think lawyers will help you when you’re nicked – think again. Legal aid has gone, and those “lefty lawyers” are under attack themselves – simply for doing their jobs. But it’s OK! Because Generation Z will save us! Sorry. Wrong again.

    Anti-capitalist teaching is not allowed in schools. The Tories are cancelling university ‘cancel culture’ by making sure free speech matters. But only if it’s their mates, of course. And if you think those slave trader statues will continue to topple – think again. Because the Tories are trying to stop that, too.

    Journalist Tim Fenton called all this a “new McCarthyism”. But are we all now witches, being tried in a modern-day Salem? The truth is, the reality is probably far, far worse. And if we’re not careful, we’ll all soon be metaphorically burned at the stake. We have got a lot to fight – and to succeed, we need to ensure unity is the strongest weapon in our armoury. 

    Read Steve Topple’s full article here.

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Switzerland Sliding into Dictatorship

    The first human right is the right to life.
    — Wang Yi, Minister of Foreign Affairs and State Counselor of the People’s Republic of China

    A secret paper from the Swiss Federal Council (Swiss Executive) was leaked to the Swiss Newspaper Der Blick divulging that the Federal Council is considering granting owners of restaurants, theatres, cinemas, and more, as well as private event organizers, the right to allow access to those people only, who have had their corona virus shots.

    In addition to the Blick, Swiss Radio and Television (SRG) repeated this news item in the morning of 23 February. SRG, the Swiss fear-inducing propaganda broadcasting system, also linked so-called “corona deniers” to anti-Semitism, referring to an article in Swissinfo, “Covid Pandemic Fans Flames of anti-Semitism in Switzerland.”  Anti-Semitism has often been used to intimidate free opinions that run counter the official narrative.

    If this dictatorial and discriminatory idea is passed as a law, Switzerland would be one of the first countries to grant special privileges to those who have accepted being vaccinated against a virus that DOES NOT REQUIRE ANY VACCINATION to be defeated, as there are many excellent cheap and decades-old remedies that, for example, have helped China to master the corona virus without a vaccine.

    Such coercion runs totally against an individual’s universal right to decide on his/her own, over his or her body and on how to manage his or her health. Nobody has the right to infringe on an individual’s choice and even less so, to link societal privileges to such bodily intrusions.

    Mind you, this “secret document” may have been “leaked” on purpose, as a trial balloon to test the people’s reactions. Unfortunately, the Swiss are so tremendously indoctrinated by 24/7 of fear-invoking covid-propaganda that the majority may say – YES, let’s go for the vaccination privilege. In other words, another break in societal solidarity – divide to conquer.

    It would be coercion, indirectly forcing the population to accept a “vaccine” that is not really a vaccine, but an inoculation, also called “gene therapy”. Switzerland offers so far only the Moderna and Pfizer-Pfizer-BioNTech injections, and AstraZeneca is under consideration. These are mRNA-type remedies that may affect the human genome. Any distortion of human DNA may be passed on to future generations. The effects of such DNA distortions may be life-hindrances and cannot be “healed” or corrected.

    Long-term effects of these mRNA-type injections may only be known in one to several years. Short term “side-effects” have already shown death rates, way above those considered “normal” with traditional vaccines.

    Strangely, none of the traditional vaccines from Russia – Sputnik V – and China – Sinopharm – are available in Switzerland, or in most European countries.  Why?

    The traditional vaccines are simply based on the injection of a weakened virus that will trigger the human immune system and create antibodies as soon as the individual comes in contact with the virus, in this case, the covid-virus. This method has been known and experienced for decades and it is successful.

    More important, a vaccine is really not needed to combat the corona virus. There are several traditional medications that have worked wonders in patients. For some obscure reasons they are outlawed, ordered by higher authorities way above us, the common humanity, those self-declared “authorities” – call them the Deep Dark State, or the Globalist Cabal. These “authorities” have placed themselves, at once, above the governments of the 193 UN member countries, who all were brought under the spell of this SARS-CoV-2, alias Covid-19 man-invented virus.

    For more details and a full spectrum of references, see here.

    There are, of course, hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars involved in the worldwide vaccination programs. But that cannot be the only reason for this worldwide plandemic tyranny.

    What could be other reasons why everybody; i.e., the entire world population, about 7 billion people, according to Bill Gates, has to be vaccinated, “before the world can go back to normal”? Vaccinated against a virus that is not more harmful than the common flu.1

    Could this vaccination-drive be linked to the objectives of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset? – Linked to the Great Reset’s objectives that run in parallel with the UN Agenda 2030 – a ten-year period in which humanity should be totally reformed, with a new ultra-neoliberal economic model, where only a few mega-wealthy elitist oligarchs, including those that control the all-powerful media domineering social platforms, have control over a vastly reduced world population?

    Could it be the beginning of an all-digitized Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932), under a One World Order (OWO) which would be fully in control of each individual, including control of each human’s resources, incomes, whether he or she behaves according to the OWO’s rules, deciding whether he or she eats? – Even electromagnetic brain control – making “transhumans” out of humans – which may be the purpose of installing hurriedly, by night and fog, 5G antennas?

    *****

    Back to the Swiss Federal Council’s weighing in on giving preference treatment for vaccinated people – this would not only be a discriminatory decision; it would clearly be a coercion for “vaccination”. Such acts are against Human Rights and against the Swiss Constitution.

    *****

    The Blick newspaper referred to the “leaked” document as a “confidential debate paper” from the Federal Department of Home Affairs (Ministry of Interior), under which falls the Department of Health – created “to give the population an incentive to be vaccinated”.

    Incentive or coercion?

    “The government has decided to allow special treatment according to vaccination status, without any additional legal basis,” Blick reports.

    The document reportedly states that while public institutions such as public transportation and hospitals wouldn’t be able to treat those who have been vaccinated differently from people who haven’t had their shots, private establishments “should be able to give preferential treatment to vaccinated people,” according to Blick.

    If proof of vaccination is shown, immunized people can eat in restaurants, attend concerts and other events that would be closed to others. Vaccinated people would still need to wear masks in shops and on public transport, the Blick reports.

    For more details on this horrendous step towards tyranny, see this.

    Swiss President, Guy Parmelin, already said that “in the future, anyone who wishes to travel will need to be vaccinated.”

    In order for the Swiss Federal Council to take such drastic decisions, the Parliament has to be deactivated, which is only the case in a state of emergency, akin to Martial Law. This would be health-induced Martial Law.

    And mind you, it would likely be just a first step to more – much more – oppressive, coercive and dictatorial actions.

    Think about it! What is behind such radical actions – for a virus that has a mortality rate of between 0.03 and 0.08%, very similar to the annually appearing common flu?1

    However, the “leaked” document states that a system of privileges would not be implemented immediately, and “can only be applied if the majority of the adult population has the opportunity to be vaccinated. This should be the case from May or June [2021] at the latest.”

    At which point there is hope that the (i) Swiss population has attained herd immunity, (ii) Swiss Parliament revokes its “deactivation” – and stands up for the old values of democracy that gave Switzerland for many decades a stellar reputation, and / or (iii) a majority of Swiss rejects this tyranny, protests and resists by any means they find – peacefully. As aggression inspires aggression and Peace inspires Peace.

    1. See Anthony S. Fauci, et al., “Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted,” NIAID/NIH 28 February 2020, NEJM.
    The post Switzerland Sliding into Dictatorship first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Switzerland Sliding into Dictatorship

    The first human right is the right to life.
    — Wang Yi, Minister of Foreign Affairs and State Counselor of the People’s Republic of China

    A secret paper from the Swiss Federal Council (Swiss Executive) was leaked to the Swiss Newspaper Der Blick divulging that the Federal Council is considering granting owners of restaurants, theatres, cinemas, and more, as well as private event organizers, the right to allow access to those people only, who have had their corona virus shots.

    In addition to the Blick, Swiss Radio and Television (SRG) repeated this news item in the morning of 23 February. SRG, the Swiss fear-inducing propaganda broadcasting system, also linked so-called “corona deniers” to anti-Semitism, referring to an article in Swissinfo, “Covid Pandemic Fans Flames of anti-Semitism in Switzerland.”  Anti-Semitism has often been used to intimidate free opinions that run counter the official narrative.

    If this dictatorial and discriminatory idea is passed as a law, Switzerland would be one of the first countries to grant special privileges to those who have accepted being vaccinated against a virus that DOES NOT REQUIRE ANY VACCINATION to be defeated, as there are many excellent cheap and decades-old remedies that, for example, have helped China to master the corona virus without a vaccine.

    Such coercion runs totally against an individual’s universal right to decide on his/her own, over his or her body and on how to manage his or her health. Nobody has the right to infringe on an individual’s choice and even less so, to link societal privileges to such bodily intrusions.

    Mind you, this “secret document” may have been “leaked” on purpose, as a trial balloon to test the people’s reactions. Unfortunately, the Swiss are so tremendously indoctrinated by 24/7 of fear-invoking covid-propaganda that the majority may say – YES, let’s go for the vaccination privilege. In other words, another break in societal solidarity – divide to conquer.

    It would be coercion, indirectly forcing the population to accept a “vaccine” that is not really a vaccine, but an inoculation, also called “gene therapy”. Switzerland offers so far only the Moderna and Pfizer-Pfizer-BioNTech injections, and AstraZeneca is under consideration. These are mRNA-type remedies that may affect the human genome. Any distortion of human DNA may be passed on to future generations. The effects of such DNA distortions may be life-hindrances and cannot be “healed” or corrected.

    Long-term effects of these mRNA-type injections may only be known in one to several years. Short term “side-effects” have already shown death rates, way above those considered “normal” with traditional vaccines.

    Strangely, none of the traditional vaccines from Russia – Sputnik V – and China – Sinopharm – are available in Switzerland, or in most European countries.  Why?

    The traditional vaccines are simply based on the injection of a weakened virus that will trigger the human immune system and create antibodies as soon as the individual comes in contact with the virus, in this case, the covid-virus. This method has been known and experienced for decades and it is successful.

    More important, a vaccine is really not needed to combat the corona virus. There are several traditional medications that have worked wonders in patients. For some obscure reasons they are outlawed, ordered by higher authorities way above us, the common humanity, those self-declared “authorities” – call them the Deep Dark State, or the Globalist Cabal. These “authorities” have placed themselves, at once, above the governments of the 193 UN member countries, who all were brought under the spell of this SARS-CoV-2, alias Covid-19 man-invented virus.

    For more details and a full spectrum of references, see here.

    There are, of course, hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars involved in the worldwide vaccination programs. But that cannot be the only reason for this worldwide plandemic tyranny.

    What could be other reasons why everybody; i.e., the entire world population, about 7 billion people, according to Bill Gates, has to be vaccinated, “before the world can go back to normal”? Vaccinated against a virus that is not more harmful than the common flu.

    Could this vaccination-drive be linked to the objectives of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset? – Linked to the Great Reset’s objectives that run in parallel with the UN Agenda 2030 – a ten-year period in which humanity should be totally reformed, with a new ultra-neoliberal economic model, where only a few mega-wealthy elitist oligarchs, including those that control the all-powerful media domineering social platforms, have control over a vastly reduced world population?

    Could it be the beginning of an all-digitized Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932), under a One World Order (OWO) which would be fully in control of each individual, including control of each human’s resources, incomes, whether he or she behaves according to the OWO’s rules, deciding whether he or she eats? – Even electromagnetic brain control – making “transhumans” out of humans – which may be the purpose of installing hurriedly, by night and fog, 5G antennas?

    *****

    Back to the Swiss Federal Council’s weighing in on giving preference treatment for vaccinated people – this would not only be a discriminatory decision; it would clearly be a coercion for “vaccination”. Such acts are against Human Rights and against the Swiss Constitution.

    *****

    The Blick newspaper referred to the “leaked” document as a “confidential debate paper” from the Federal Department of Home Affairs (Ministry of Interior), under which falls the Department of Health – created “to give the population an incentive to be vaccinated”.

    Incentive or coercion?

    “The government has decided to allow special treatment according to vaccination status, without any additional legal basis,” Blick reports.

    The document reportedly states that while public institutions such as public transportation and hospitals wouldn’t be able to treat those who have been vaccinated differently from people who haven’t had their shots, private establishments “should be able to give preferential treatment to vaccinated people,” according to Blick.

    If proof of vaccination is shown, immunized people can eat in restaurants, attend concerts and other events that would be closed to others. Vaccinated people would still need to wear masks in shops and on public transport, the Blick reports.

    For more details on this horrendous step towards tyranny, see this.

    Swiss President, Guy Parmelin, already said that “in the future, anyone who wishes to travel will need to be vaccinated.”

    In order for the Swiss Federal Council to take such drastic decisions, the Parliament has to be deactivated, which is only the case in a state of emergency, akin to Martial Law. This would be health-induced Martial Law.

    And mind you, it would likely be just a first step to more – much more – oppressive, coercive and dictatorial actions.

    Think about it! What is behind such radical actions – for a virus that has a mortality rate of between 0.03 and 0.08%, very similar to the annually appearing common flu?

    However, the “leaked” document states that a system of privileges would not be implemented immediately, and “can only be applied if the majority of the adult population has the opportunity to be vaccinated. This should be the case from May or June [2021] at the latest.”

    At which point there is hope that the (i) Swiss population has attained herd immunity, (ii) Swiss Parliament revokes its “deactivation” – and stands up for the old values of democracy that gave Switzerland for many decades a stellar reputation, and / or (iii) a majority of Swiss rejects this tyranny, protests and resists by any means they find – peacefully. As aggression inspires aggression and Peace inspires Peace.

    Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Read other articles by Peter.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2021 at 8:49pm and is filed under COVID-19, Democracy, Health/Medical, Human Rights, Opinion, Propaganda, Switzerland.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Air pollution kills. Naming that problem can help us tackle it.

    In December, a British coroner ruled that the cause of 9-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s death in 2013 was “toxic air pollution.” On its face this may not seem all that important, given that an estimated 7 million people die annually from air pollution and more than 90 percent of the world’s population breathes in hazardous air every day. And yet Ella’s certificate of death is the first to formally list toxic air pollution as the cause of death.

    Ella’s case is part of a growing recognition that human-produced toxic pollution is causing a substantial global health crisis, and it has substantial implications for environmental policymaking and for the legal liabilities that pollution producers may face in the future.

    If the recent cases surrounding glyphosate — the herbicide pioneered by Monsanto in its infamous Roundup weedkiller — are any guide, Ella’s case could trigger a potential windfall of cases. After a California court awarded $289 million in damages to Dewayne Johnson, a groundskeeper who used glyphosate for decades, civil cases mounted by the thousands. As a result, Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, agreed to a $10 billion settlement for all other cases in the U.S..

    In the U.K., Ella’s case has already sparked local action. The British government recently stated that in response to the verdict it would allocate $5.2 billion towards cleaning up vehicle transport emissions in cities and reducing urban nitrogen dioxide levels — the pollutant named as partially responsible for Ella’s death in the coroner’s report. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said, “Ministers and the previous mayor have acted too slowly in the past, but they must now learn the lessons from the coroner’s ruling and do much more to tackle the deadly scourge of air pollution in London and across the country.”

    Living in London, Ella was like many urban-dwelling children who are more likely to develop asthma or other respiratory illnesses due to early and chronic exposure to air pollution from cars, buses, and industry. The coroner concluded that a complex of different noxious gases and particles in the air she breathed daily caused the asthma attack that led to her death.

    While children’s respiratory systems are more vulnerable, adults do not escape the reach of air pollution in cities, where higher rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s are linked to exposure to particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less in size. It’s also one of the strongest correlates of death or hospitalization due to COVID-19. Spikes in particulate matter, along with other air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, are associated with higher death rates in general in the days following exposure.

    Here in the United States, there’s been relatively little attention paid to Ella’s case. Given the pandemic, domestic political struggles, and the transition to a new presidential administration, there is certainly an overload of news competing for attention. But with the renewed focus on climate change and environmental justice signaled by the Biden administration and among U.S. policymakers, Ella’s case could be the perfect catalyst for environmental justice, in which poverty, race, and environmental risk exposure intersect. Ella’s case sets a legal precedent to do something about it.

    Death certificates fall under the purview of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thanks to guidance issued by the Obama administration, environmental exposure may be listed as a contributing factor to a death, but there is currently no code to attribute the immediate cause of death to a toxic pollution exposure. The Biden administration could issue guidance to the CDC to change that, which could shift the way people think about pollution.

    There are more than 450,000 toxic sites across the U.S. and more than 20,000 active permitted polluters. We need to amend and bolster current domestic environmental legislation to hold polluters accountable and to make the changes permanent, rather than executive orders and programs that can be rolled back by a future administration.

    Biden’s order to build a White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy and an environmental justice interagency council is a formidable start to mitigating and remediating toxic pollution and its unequal distribution. Additionally, the Biden administration needs to put toxic air pollution on the international environmental agenda, for example leading the charge in creating a corollary international agreement to the Paris Climate Agreement.

    Doing so would signal a shift from treating the outcomes of climate change to treating the causes. For example, in early 2016, the Department of Housing and Urban Development deemed the Isle de Jean Charles along the Louisiana Gulf Coast too risky to live on and granted $48 million to the community to relocate, for the first time codifying the term “climate refugee.” But what could have been the start to a long process of redistributive environmental justice to communities threatened by climate change was quickly doused by the incoming Trump team.

    In that case and in the case of glyphosate, it is the outcomes of pollution that were addressed — either by restitution or relocation — rather than the root cause.

    Ella’s tragic death puts a face to a problem that will be responsible for many more deaths in the future if we don’t change our current policies. Let’s not let this opportunity for systemic change pass us by.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Air pollution kills. Naming that problem can help us tackle it. on Feb 24, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Centrists promised Forensic Keir, but delivered Flaccid Keith

    When centrists foisted Keir Starmer on a demoralised and defeated Labour Party membership, they promised he would be ‘forensic‘. But the only word that captures the limp futility of his first year is ‘flaccid’.

    Forensic Keir?

    Originally, the Left rebranded Keir as ‘Keith’ to dissociate him from the Labour legend he’s named after. Keir Hardie, the Scottish trade unionist who founded the Labour Party, began working the mines at the ripe age of seven. Hardie channelled a life of classist exploitation into a politics to end it. And that was the mission of the Labour Party. So Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions prosecuted people he had previously defended. Not to mention the question marks over his role in covering up the undercover policing scandal.

    However, almost a year of impotence later, ‘Keith’ has come to epitomise Starmer’s beige banality. A man with all the charm of the pub bore, who’d find himself outperformed by a talking potato sack. His nasal delivery gives him the sound of a Poundland Ed Miliband, who was himself a Poundland Gordon Brown.

    Flaccid Keith has so far failed to land a single punch against the criminally incompetent, corrupt Johnson government.

    He’s had a honeymoon with the press, and the centrist Parliamentary Labour Party gave him their full backing. Yet he’s turned it into absolutely nothing. In fact, opposition has been led by unions and working people. Despite pleas for his support, Flaccid Keith either abstained, or sided with government.

    The middle of the road to nowhere

    Centrism isn’t about finding an objective middle ground. It is based on the assumption that there is no alternative to capitalism. But more than that, it’s based on a belief that capitalism is good, in and of itself. There might be a few rotten apples to deal with, but no major systemic issues. All capitalism needs, centrists argue, is a better manager. They are technocrats, suspicious of democracy. If only they were in charge, all would be well. Or at least, as well as anyone deserves. Because that’s the other thing about centrists, they fully buy into basing a person’s value on their contribution to capitalism.

    They’re likely to say things like: “Socially, I’m a liberal. But economically, I’m conservative”. They believe this compromise makes them grown ups. But this is a nonsense, because the two cannot be separated. Economic policy that privileges the already-wealthy over everyone else has social consequences. Those consequences are all around us. Homelessness, poor mental and physical health, addiction, suicide – all derive from this inequality.

    And the truth is, centrists aren’t even particularly socially liberal. If they were, they’d be confronting Apartheid in Israel rather than enabling it. They would be backing trans people in their civil rights struggle, not condemning them. They would have backed Corbyn, not assassinated him.

    Centrism is a vacuous ideology borne of privilege. It’s what happens when you spend too much time in the company of affluent sameness. A certain type of person starts to believe they’re better than those without, and that sense of superiority turns to contempt. So when the ‘contemptible’ working class found political expression through Jeremy Corbyn, centrists flipped their wigs.

    There was no political vision or values behind the centrist coup. It was a tantrum thrown by bourgeois prefects for the capitalist class. Now they have the Labour party, they have literally no idea what to do with it other than nod and curtsy.

    The empty vessel

    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.

    And yet at the same time, Flaccid Keith couldn’t bend over fast enough for the Tories. Watching his earnest defence of the indefensible, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a government minister. He’s meant to be the leader of the opposition.

    Keith has ordered his MPs to back (or abstain on) every mistake the Johnson government has made. When school staff and pupils fought the government for a safe learning environment during the pandemic, Keith sided with government. When Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s corruption was exposed in court, Keith refused to call for his resignation. Keith has done nothing but fight the left while assisting the right.

    And the results is complete irrelevance. Labour now trails in every poll, and is losing ground in many. Flaccid Keith is a subject of derision and mockery. The empty vessel is sinking.

    Flaccid Keith

    When Jeremy Corbyn was holding mass rallies across the country and eight points up in the polls, centrists told us he was underperforming. Tony Blair himself stated that Corbyn should have been 20 points ahead. This became the battle cry of centrists in and out of parliament. Any other leader would be 20 points ahead, they said.

    So how do they account for Flaccid Keith falling further behind Boris Johnson?

    In the 2017 election, Corbyn won the greatest swing to Labour since the post-war government of Clement Attlee. The swing to Labour was greater in 2017 than in 1997. And centrists repaid the achievement by destroying the party. Corbyn’s leadership breathed life into a dead party. Haemorrhaging votes throughout the Blair era, centrist Labour was a busted flush.

    Source: The Independent

     

    Centrists are now trying to memory hole 2008-2017. In their world, Blair left, Corbyn took over, Labour lost, and now they’re back to win again. But this wasn’t what happened. Corbyn and socialism proved popular. So centrists joined forces with Conservatives in a five year assault on the Left to halt a popular movement. Now the Left is gone, centrists are superfluous. They’re too left for the right and too far right for the left. No one wants what their selling except themselves. And so they continue to stumble about, high on their own supply.

    Centrists have achieved nothing but civil war internally, and irrelevance externally. And Flaccid Keith seems stuck in a groundhog day, constantly rebranding the party via mostly-ignored presentations against a purple backdrop. He’s not waving, he’s drowning.

    Featured image via YouTube

    By Kerry-anne Mendoza

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The key to beating fossil fuel corps? Global collaboration.

    Last summer, Delaware, Connecticut, and other states joined cities like Hoboken, New Jersey, and Charleston, South Carolina, in suing fossil fuel corporations including Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell for misleading the public about the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels. That now makes 16 U.S. cities, counties, states, and the District of Columbia with active litigation.

    For justice to be truly served in U.S. courts, however, policymakers and communities trying to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable must do everything in their power to secure justice and restitution for those most impacted around the globe. A critical first step is teaming up and aligning strategies to end the legal loopholes corporations use to escape liability.

    To achieve this, a global coalition of liability experts, social justice activists, and NGOs — including one of ours, Corporate Accountability — teamed up to create a tool for governments and civil society movements. Called the Liability Roadmap, it pulls together the expertise of Indigenous and frontline communities that are fighting the worst polluters and setting global legal precedents. A key element for success is collaboration.

    While U.S.-based fossil fuel corporations have run roughshod over human rights, democracy, and the environment around the world in pursuit of profit, frontline communities have been waging legal battles for decades. They’ve won many favorable rulings. For example, in 2019, a Dutch court ruled in favor of four Nigerian women in a decades-long suit against Royal Dutch Shell for its complicity in the 1995 deaths of their husbands, allowing the suit to proceed. In Chad in 2016, a court fined Exxon $74 billion in back taxes and royalties. And in Ecuador, Indigenous communities won a judgment ordering Chevron to pay $9.5 billion for the corporation’s extraction, damages, and pollution in the Amazon.

    Yet in many of these cases, the defendants have yet to pay a dime. In Ecuador, for example, Chevron countersued the country, leveraging a bilateral investment treaty to avoid paying. In isolation, these cases face long odds against the financial, legal, and political might of Big Polluters, which threaten endless counter-litigation and legal intimidation to escape accountability. Land and environmental defenders are also at high risk of violence. According to Global Witness, 2019 was the deadliest year on record. In Colombia and elsewhere, fossil fuel, mining, and agribusiness corporations have been accused of complicity.

    To succeed against these odds, litigants and civil society must join together to share resources and strategy, just as the world did against another deadly industry, tobacco. One of the inspirations for the Liability Roadmap is found in a little-known public health treaty of the World Health Organization called the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Among other critical measures, it details how governments could recoup immense tobacco-related health care costs. Included in the framework is a civil liability toolkit to help countries use their laws and international agreements to the greatest effect, along with suggestions for changing laws and pursuing precedents that prevent corporations from exploiting trade agreements to avoid liability.

    Collaboration can take a multitude of forms. In many cases, it’s as simple as sharing intelligence on industry operations and legal strategy. But it can also mean international collaboration between countries. Legal cases seek justice in the form of criminal and civil liability for abuses, but their purpose is often broader: ending the fossil fuel industry’s long record of political manipulation. The first step for those taking on Big Polluters in the U.S. is to reach out to those around the globe who have been doing the same.

    The success of U.S.-based fossil fuel corporations like Chevron has depended upon the exploitation and abuse of resources and people in the Global South. So it is also imperative legal victories benefit those communities that have endured the greatest impacts of corporate abuse. Justice in the U.S. must be restorative beyond its borders.

    There’s a growing call for such equity at negotiating meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the global climate treaty that the Paris Agreement is part of. Climate-justice and environmental groups are calling for governments negotiating the implementation of the treaty to establish a fund that would support nations hit hard by climate impacts. As part of that process, governments could require that wealthy nations allocate a percentage of fossil fuel litigation proceeds to such a fund. This would be groundbreaking and provide a path toward repairing the deliberate harm caused by polluting corporations.

    We know going it alone doesn’t work. It’s time to work together to catalyze a just and equitable transition from fossil fuels. It’s time to make Big Polluters pay.

    The views expressed here reflect those of the authors. Fix is committed to publishing a diversity of voices. Got a bold idea or fresh news analysis? Submit your op-ed draft, along with a note about who you are, to fix@grist.org.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The key to beating fossil fuel corps? Global collaboration. on Feb 22, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The Global Cry for Change

    Change is in the air, it’s been hovering for some time, but thanks to Covid-19 festering social issues and inequalities have been highlighted, intensifying the need for a new approach. Talk of environmental action and reimagining how we live and work fills the airwaves; catchphrases abound, spilling from the lips of duplicitous politicians who claim they want to ‘build back better’, create a ‘new normal’, and invest in a ‘green recovery’.

    Repeated often enough, and the men and women in suits are nothing if not repetitive, such slogans become totally devoid of meaning. The word becomes the thing to which it refers, without ‘the thing’ – ‘peace’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘equality’ – ever being realized, or any meaningful action undertaken to bring it about.

    A cluster of interconnected crises confronts humanity, the most urgent of which is the environmental emergency. The natural world with its sublime beauty and intricate systems, has been vandalized, mutilated, poisoned. Hunger and malnourishment soil the lives of almost a billion people, billions more are economically insecure. Societies are fractured, divided, some more some less; there’s armed conflict, modern-day slavery, displacement of persons; anxiety, stress and depression are everywhere. It’s a mess, but it’s a mess from which a small number of very rich and politically powerful people benefit enormously. A tiny coterie of humanity, complacent and greedy, who are quite happy with the current order and do not want things to change, certainly not in any radical substantive way.

    But billions of people throughout the world are desperate for change, for freedom, social justice, greater democracy and environmental action. And in the last forty years or so virtually every country in the world has witnessed expressions of popular outrage (including the more repressive states) as a global protest movement, unprecedented in scale, has emerged.

    Social change has forever been slow in coming; fought for by the masses and resisted, often violently, by those in power. There is nothing unusual there, what is new is the weight and scale of the calls for change, the range of issues, interconnected, but diverse, and the urgency of the crises. The internet, social media and mass communication means the world is connected like never before. It’s easier to organize happenings, news is accessible almost everywhere all the time, speeding everything up.

    Underlying this universal wave of discontent is a collective awakening, a unifying attitude of strength in the face of political arrogance, corporate exploitation and social division: Enough is enough; hear us and respond, seem to be the mantras of the masses. Fear of reprisals has lost its restraining hold (as seen in the recent protests in; e.g., Belarus, Russia and Myanmar) in light of the power of unified creative actions brought together under the banner of love.

    ‘People power’ is the label commonly applied to this uncoordinated diverse movement by the mass media – and they love a label. A reductive, somewhat divisive term; the explosion in political, social and environmental engagement is not rooted in opposition, though this certainly exists, but flows from a growing sense of social and environmental responsibility and an evolving unity; a recognition that we are all responsible for one another and the planet.

    Responsibility is a key component of a democratic society, as is participation, and, of course, the two are closely linked. Society is not separate from those who live, work and study within its boundaries; we are society, collectively we create the atmosphere, and we allow and perpetuate the structures and dominant modes of living through our actions and attitudes. Consciousness sits behind behavior, attitudes, values, and consciousness (at least as far as we know it) is its content. Such content is predominantly the accumulated ideas and beliefs that have been poured into the mind from birth; conditioned content then is the fabric of our consciousness. We are, for example, conditioned into competition from childhood, and believing it to be natural and beneficial, we live within its divisive pattern and pass it on to others, our peers and children, say; we thereby add to the collective conditioning which shapes society.

    Changes in consciousness and therefore behavior come about quite naturally when conditioning is absent; remove conformity and fear from a classroom, for example, and see children relax, play and freely express themselves.

    We are all responsible, not just for ourselves but for others, family, friends, our community, nation, region, world; the more we act, the more the ripples of responsibility expand. Recognition and awareness of this inherent responsibility leads quite naturally to participation and action, as the many and varied protest movements and community groups demonstrate.

    Expressions of social and environmental responsibility reflect and strengthen an evolving realization that humanity is one, that we are all essentially the same: Individuals with particular qualities and gifts sharing a common nature and universal constitution, the beauty and depth of which we sense but do not understand; its quality is love, that much we do know; and it is love in action that needs to permeate any ‘new normal’.

    The post The Global Cry for Change first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Global Cry for Change

    Change is in the air, it’s been hovering for some time, but thanks to Covid-19 festering social issues and inequalities have been highlighted, intensifying the need for a new approach. Talk of environmental action and reimagining how we live and work fills the airwaves; catchphrases abound, spilling from the lips of duplicitous politicians who claim they want to ‘build back better’, create a ‘new normal’, and invest in a ‘green recovery’.

    Repeated often enough, and the men and women in suits are nothing if not repetitive, such slogans become totally devoid of meaning. The word becomes the thing to which it refers, without ‘the thing’ – ‘peace’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘equality’ – ever being realized, or any meaningful action undertaken to bring it about.

    A cluster of interconnected crises confronts humanity, the most urgent of which is the environmental emergency. The natural world with its sublime beauty and intricate systems, has been vandalized, mutilated, poisoned. Hunger and malnourishment soil the lives of almost a billion people, billions more are economically insecure. Societies are fractured, divided, some more some less; there’s armed conflict, modern-day slavery, displacement of persons; anxiety, stress and depression are everywhere. It’s a mess, but it’s a mess from which a small number of very rich and politically powerful people benefit enormously. A tiny coterie of humanity, complacent and greedy, who are quite happy with the current order and do not want things to change, certainly not in any radical substantive way.

    But billions of people throughout the world are desperate for change, for freedom, social justice, greater democracy and environmental action. And in the last forty years or so virtually every country in the world has witnessed expressions of popular outrage (including the more repressive states) as a global protest movement, unprecedented in scale, has emerged.

    Social change has forever been slow in coming; fought for by the masses and resisted, often violently, by those in power. There is nothing unusual there, what is new is the weight and scale of the calls for change, the range of issues, interconnected, but diverse, and the urgency of the crises. The internet, social media and mass communication means the world is connected like never before. It’s easier to organize happenings, news is accessible almost everywhere all the time, speeding everything up.

    Underlying this universal wave of discontent is a collective awakening, a unifying attitude of strength in the face of political arrogance, corporate exploitation and social division: Enough is enough; hear us and respond, seem to be the mantras of the masses. Fear of reprisals has lost its restraining hold (as seen in the recent protests in; e.g., Belarus, Russia and Myanmar) in light of the power of unified creative actions brought together under the banner of love.

    ‘People power’ is the label commonly applied to this uncoordinated diverse movement by the mass media – and they love a label. A reductive, somewhat divisive term; the explosion in political, social and environmental engagement is not rooted in opposition, though this certainly exists, but flows from a growing sense of social and environmental responsibility and an evolving unity; a recognition that we are all responsible for one another and the planet.

    Responsibility is a key component of a democratic society, as is participation, and, of course, the two are closely linked. Society is not separate from those who live, work and study within its boundaries; we are society, collectively we create the atmosphere, and we allow and perpetuate the structures and dominant modes of living through our actions and attitudes. Consciousness sits behind behavior, attitudes, values, and consciousness (at least as far as we know it) is its content. Such content is predominantly the accumulated ideas and beliefs that have been poured into the mind from birth; conditioned content then is the fabric of our consciousness. We are, for example, conditioned into competition from childhood, and believing it to be natural and beneficial, we live within its divisive pattern and pass it on to others, our peers and children, say; we thereby add to the collective conditioning which shapes society.

    Changes in consciousness and therefore behavior come about quite naturally when conditioning is absent; remove conformity and fear from a classroom, for example, and see children relax, play and freely express themselves.

    We are all responsible, not just for ourselves but for others, family, friends, our community, nation, region, world; the more we act, the more the ripples of responsibility expand. Recognition and awareness of this inherent responsibility leads quite naturally to participation and action, as the many and varied protest movements and community groups demonstrate.

    Expressions of social and environmental responsibility reflect and strengthen an evolving realization that humanity is one, that we are all essentially the same: Individuals with particular qualities and gifts sharing a common nature and universal constitution, the beauty and depth of which we sense but do not understand; its quality is love, that much we do know; and it is love in action that needs to permeate any ‘new normal’.

    Graham Peebles is an independent writer and charity worker. He set up The Create Trust in 2005 and has run education projects in India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Ethiopia where he lived for two years working with street children, under 18 commercial sex workers, and conducting teacher training programmes. He lives and works in London. Read other articles by Graham, or visit Graham’s website.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 at 10:37pm and is filed under Activism, Civil Unrest, COVID-19, Environment, Media, Neoliberalism, Opinion, Peace, Propaganda, Social Justice, Social Movements.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Kasun Ubayasiri: How will ruthless billionaire posturing by Rupert and Zuckerberg help robust journalism?

    COMMENT: By Kasun Ubayasiri in Brisbane

    It has indeed been a few strange days for Australian news media. Apparently, monopolies are bad if they are not NewsCorp.

    This week, Facebook came through on its threat to ban all news from its service, in retaliation against the Australian Federal government’s proposed new media code, that could see the tech giant paying news producers for content they willingly share on the Facebook platform.

    Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp rather predictably ran a story accusing Facebooks’ messenger platform of aiding and abetting paedophiles. A remarkable display of mutual chestbeating.

    But it is news media diversity and independent journalism routinely pillaged by Murdoch that will be the real victims of ScoMo trying to extort one billionaire at the behest of another.

    Queensland’s independent press, for example, is just beginning to lift its head after Rupert ruthlessly destroyed a whole swathe of rural and regional newspapers of record. I wonder how this posturing between two billionaires will affect those independent newspapers that are slowly beginning to show promise in that desolate landscape.

    Sure, there needs to be funding for good journalism, and the tech-giants should pitch in, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, of a rather long “to do list” to ensure a robust and independent news media that includes ensuring media diversity and the public’s access to fact-verified public interest journalism irrespective of petty party politics.

    In this respect it’s hard to see this whole fiasco as anything but a half-baked idea built on a NewsCorp orchestrated lie.

    Holding readers hostage
    News organisations could have easily blocked Google searches listing their content. They could also have stopped putting their content on Facebook pages, explored micro-payments or some such innovative solution, instead of holding readers hostage with archaic subscription models.

    Is Australian journalism suffering because of Google and Facebook? What of the media monopolies that have systematically destroyed diversity and independence of the press through concentration of ownership unparalleled in the Western world?

    What of the three-decade long devaluing of journalism, and training an entire generation to get free news on vanity websites while simultaneously selling the same content in printed papers, only to then retreat behind paywalls?

    What about forcing journalists to pimp their stories by linking KPIs to journalists’ capacity to secure subscriptions and assessing the value of stories on the basis of clicks?

    What of the ruthless stripping of journalists’ rights that has created a precariat work force?

    And what of the armies of media pundits who jumped on the Dan Gillmor bandwagon and vigorously claimed we didn’t need professional journalists because we were now all citizen journalists?

    What of the media educators who have conflated journalism with media, normalised native advertising and created a grey slurry of content where fact and fiction is indistinguishable and ethics non-existent?

    Championed social media
    And then there are the media theorists who have championed social media as a great equaliser.

    A “town square” where ideas flow freely, or as Mark Zuckerberg calls it a “digital living room” instead of seeing it for what it really is – a privately owned advertising platform hell bent on creating a global monopoly.

    Let’s say we manage to force Facebook to pay for content. I wonder exactly how the dollars Zuckerberg doles out to Newscorp will flow onto the journalists and the gutted newsrooms who everyone is suddenly concerned for.

    Shouldn’t the money be directly invested in public interest journalism instead of becoming just another version of that wonderfully Liberal idea of trickle-down economics filtered through Rupert’s pockets.

    Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is a senior lecturer and journalism programme director at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. An earlier version of this piece was originally a Facebook posting and this been revised and contributed to Asia Pacific Report as a column.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Kasun Ubayasiri: How will ruthless billionaire posturing by Rupert and Zuckerberg help robust journalism?

    It is news media diversity and independent journalism routinely pillaged by Murdoch that will be the real victims of ScoMo trying to extort one billionaire at the behest of another. Image: MediaNews4U

    COMMENT: By Kasun Ubayasiri in Brisbane

    It has indeed been a few strange days for Australian news media. Apparently, monopolies are bad if they are not NewsCorp.

    This week, Facebook came through on its threat to ban all news from its service, in retaliation against the Australian Federal government’s proposed new media code, that could see the tech giant paying news producers for content they willingly share on the Facebook platform.

    Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp rather predictably ran a story accusing Facebooks’ messenger platform of aiding and abetting paedophiles. A remarkable display of mutual chestbeating.

    But it is news media diversity and independent journalism routinely pillaged by Murdoch that will be the real victims of ScoMo trying to extort one billionaire at the behest of another.

    Queensland’s independent press, for example, is just beginning to lift its head after Rupert ruthlessly destroyed a whole swathe of rural and regional newspapers of record. I wonder how this posturing between two billionaires will affect those independent newspapers that are slowly beginning to show promise in that desolate landscape.

    Sure, there needs to be funding for good journalism, and the tech-giants should pitch in, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, of a rather long “to do list” to ensure a robust and independent news media that includes ensuring media diversity and the public’s access to fact-verified public interest journalism irrespective of petty party politics.

    In this respect it’s hard to see this whole fiasco as anything but a half-baked idea built on a NewsCorp orchestrated lie.

    Holding readers hostage
    News organisations could have easily blocked Google searches listing their content. They could also have stopped putting their content on Facebook pages, explored micro-payments or some such innovative solution, instead of holding readers hostage with archaic subscription models.

    Is Australian journalism suffering because of Google and Facebook? What of the media monopolies that have systematically destroyed diversity and independence of the press through concentration of ownership unparalleled in the Western world?

    What of the three-decade long devaluing of journalism, and training an entire generation to get free news on vanity websites while simultaneously selling the same content in printed papers, only to then retreat behind paywalls?

    What about forcing journalists to pimp their stories by linking KPIs to journalists’ capacity to secure subscriptions and assessing the value of stories on the basis of clicks?

    What of the ruthless stripping of journalists’ rights that has created a precariat work force?

    And what of the armies of media pundits who jumped on the Dan Gillmor bandwagon and vigorously claimed we didn’t need professional journalists because we were now all citizen journalists?

    What of the media educators who have conflated journalism with media, normalised native advertising and created a grey slurry of content where fact and fiction is indistinguishable and ethics non-existent?

    Championed social media
    And then there are the media theorists who have championed social media as a great equaliser.

    A “town square” where ideas flow freely, or as Mark Zuckerberg calls it a “digital living room” instead of seeing it for what it really is – a privately owned advertising platform hell bent on creating a global monopoly.

    Let’s say we manage to force Facebook to pay for content. I wonder exactly how the dollars Zuckerberg doles out to Newscorp will flow onto the journalists and the gutted newsrooms who everyone is suddenly concerned for.

    Shouldn’t the money be directly invested in public interest journalism instead of becoming just another version of that wonderfully Liberal idea of trickle-down economics filtered through Rupert’s pockets.

    Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is a senior lecturer and journalism programme director at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. An earlier version of this piece was originally a Facebook posting and this been revised and contributed to Asia Pacific Report as a column.

    Print Friendly, PDF & Email

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The left is under the most extensive attack since the 1950s

    A former Labour MP has been tasked with examining left wing groups as part of a government review into UK ‘extremism’. But this move is just the thin end of the wedge. It is one part of a much wider assault on left-wing views and activity.

    Taken as a whole, we are witnessing perhaps the system’s greatest attack on us since the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

    John Woodcock: witchfinder general

    As The Canary‘s Tom Coburg recently wrote:

    In November 2019, home secretary Priti Patel appointed lord Walney (former Labour MP John Woodcock) as the government’s envoy on countering violent extremism. According to the Telegraph, Woodcock will be looking at “progressive extremism” in Britain. That includes how ‘far-left’ groups could infiltrate or hijack environmental movements and anti-racism campaigns.

    To be clear, ‘extremism’ is a nonsense term. As police monitoring group Netpol’s Kevin Blowe wrote for The Canary, it can mean a number of things: from being a member of a civil disobedience group to being part of a campaign that challenges corporate power. Moreover, the government hasn’t even defined the term extremism or extremist in law. So it allows the state, and its agents, to decide who gets labelled as one.

    The thin end of the wedge

    Already, the right wing in the UK is cheering Woodcock on. The Telegraph wrote with glee that he’d be looking at “anti-capitalist” groups. Woodcock himself stated that:

    I want to look at the way anti-democracy, anti-capitalist far-Left fringe groups in Britain like the Socialist Workers Party tend to have much more success hijacking important causes… than the far-Right, and the harm that may do.

    Woodcock’s review is the thin end of the wedge. Because it sums up what’s happening across society. He’s implying there is no alternative to corporatism (or “capitalism” as he incorrectly refers to it). Anything “anti” that is wrong and must be stopped. And in the wider world, this is already happening. It can be broken down into several areas.

    Un-social media: controlling the narrative

    Facebook and Twitter have been actively silencing dissent. This has now been happening for a while. In 2017, Facebook changed its algorithm to intentionally remove smaller, left-wing news outlets from people’s feeds. The Intercept reported last year that as Facebook was banning far-right, QAnon-related groups, it was doing the same to antifacist ones, too. It consistently shuts down pro-Kurdish accounts. Also, UK Twitter has repeatedly banned left-wing voices. And now, Facebook will be “depoliticising” its platform. In short, it’s looking to reduce the amount of news in people’s feeds. But campaigners say this will hit small, grassroots groups the hardest.

    Now, you could argue ‘it’s the algorithms what did it’. But someone designed those algorithms. And according to reports, CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened to make sure left-wing sites were hardest hit. Why? It’s about control of the narrative. And it’s also about protecting powerful people and companies’ interests.

    Losing the internet

    The internet nearly caused control of the narrative to be lost. In the early days, it was a fairly open platform. But then, the dot com crash of 2000 came. The demise of countless new, smaller tech start-ups was a disaster capitalist’s dream. It paved the way for the domination of the internet by a few companies. And in turn, these companies have ended up being some of the biggest in the world.

    At first, this was about concentrating ownership. But after events like the Arab Spring, the system realised the power the internet could yield for the people. So, the shutting down began. But just recently, we’ve seen some tech giants openly go to war with governments. Most pointed in this is Australia. Its government is making companies like Facebook pay the media for its content. Facebook isn’t happy. In response, it has blocked all news content from its Australian site. Google, meanwhile, is so far going along with the Australian government’s plans.

    The situation in Australia sums up another problem. Namely the establishment corporate media. Because it too has massive control over the public narrative.

    Manufacturing consent, 21st century-style

    The Canary‘s Tom Coburg recently summed up the problem with the establishment corporate media. He wrote that:

    Professor Noam Chomsky co-wrote Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which famously argued that the mainstream media’s role was all about suppressing criticism of the powerful. Now recent moves by media in the UK are about to see that ‘manufactured consent’ taken to a whole new level.

    Coburg argued that UK media is already dominated by a few players. People like right-wing Rupert Murdoch control huge sections of it. But Coburg wrote about how it’s about to get worse. He said that:

    in February 2021, Ofcom was reported to have given its approval for Murdoch and Brooks to launch News UK TV, an outlet that will undoubtedly reflect the political leanings of its owner.

    Meanwhile, it’s understood that former editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, is rumoured to become the next chair of Ofcom [the broadcast media regulator].

    Dominating the narrative

    And then:

    In January, it was reported that Richard Sharp, a former Goldman Sachs banker who donated an estimated £416,189 to the Conservative Party, is to be chair of the BBC’s board of directors.

    In short, the corporate media was already run by a few, right-wing people. Now, it’s about to get worse. The new Australian rules are all the more concerning, too. Because with Google and Murdoch now in financial cahoots, power over the narrative is even more concentrated.

    Overall, the left wing is being shut down on social media. It’s actively deplatforming our news sites. The establishment corporate media is more and more dominant. So, we all better get back to protesting on the streets, yes? Well, we are facing a clampdown there as well.

    Co-opting climate chaos

    Whatever you think of Extinction Rebellion (XR), it’s gotten a name for itself. Its protests in London and around the world have been high-profile. But the system is determined to shut the group down. UK home secretary Priti Patel called its members “criminals”. She said its methods were a:

    shameful attack on our way of life, our economy and the livelihoods of the hard-working majority.

    Billionaire tech mogul Bill Gates said XR was not “constructive”. And Woodcock will be including the group in his review. So, why are the establishment attacking XR? It’s about control of the climate change narrative.

    In short, we’re seeing corporations and those in power co-opting the green movement for their own benefit. Gates is one example. Elon Musk is another. Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies, is another; rolling out low carbon fuels. The system and its proponents know that we’ve screwed the planet. They know it needs fixing. But in the process, these disaster capitalists also see a money-making opportunity. Plus, if the system fails, so do they. So, XR and its people-led approach needs stopping. And the UK’s increasingly authoritarian police are central to this.

    Increasing authoritarianism

    Police monitoring group Netpol recently wrote that the UK government:

    is planning to introduce major changes to public order legislation to crack down on protests, under a new “Protection of the Police and Public Bill” planned for 2021.

    It’s looking to increase police powers over protest. These include police being able to control where they happen and using stop and search powers on protesters. Netpol says it comes in the wake of not only XR but also Black Lives Matter (BLM). Patel accused the latter of “hooliganism and thuggery”. Little wonder, when its call for defunding of the police is, like XR, a threat to the system. BLM’s drive for equality and social justice is the same. Corporate capitalism needs inequality to function. Any true levelling of the playing field would be too damaging for it.

    So, what if the police do arrest and charge you over a demo? At least lawyers will be able to help you. Or so you’d think.

    Battering the law

    The government is also attacking the legal profession. As former Green Party leader Natalie Bennett recently wrote for Bright Green:

    It’s not just that the government has drained away the resources of legal aid: the annual legal aid budget is now £1.6bn a year, £950m less in real terms than it was in 2010, or removed all support for large areas of work under the 2013 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO).

    It’s also that the government has actively attacked the role of lawyers in upholding the rule of law: Priti Patel attacked “do-gooders” and “lefty lawyers”, her Home Office tweeted (although after an outcry deleted) an attack on “activist lawyers” and even produced a video with the same theme (also eventually deleted).  Marina Sergides, a barrister at Garden Court, testified to the APPG: “We are public servants but we are not treated as public servants… we are actively attacked by the government”.

    That attitude permeates throughout government action. Just this weekend, Paul Powlesland tweeted that while assisting, pro bono, anti-HS2 protesters at Euston, he was slapped with a £200 Covid regulation fine. He said he’s confident of being able to fight it in court – but what a pass we’ve come to when police are acting against legal protection.

    So, the left is becoming increasingly squeezed. We’re unable to operate effectively online. Our media outlets are impaired. The corporate news is all the more dominant. Physical protest is becoming more and more restricted. And our right to legal recourse is also under threat. So, we’d best hope that Generation Z is going to save us then?

    Indoctrinating the youth

    In 2020, the UK government issued new education guidance. Vice reported that it:

    told leaders and teachers involved in setting the RSE curriculum that anti-capitalism is categorised as an “extreme political stance”, comparable to the opposition to freedom of speech, antisemitism and the endorsement of illegal activity.

    Of course, this would mean students would not hear any opposing views on capitalism. But it could also mean erasing huge parts of history. As George Monbiot said in a Twitter thread:

    Behind these histories lies an even bigger and more sacrilegious truth. It’s that the system we call capitalism… is really a system of global theft… Let’s imagine there’d been no theft. No gold, silver and land stolen from Native Americans, no people stolen from Africa, no wealth stolen from India and the other colonies, no ransacking of our life support systems. How successful would this system we call capitalism have been? How rich and powerful would nations like ours have been? I would guess: not very. Capitalism is not what it claims to be. It is not the great success story its beneficiaries proclaim. It is the ideological structure we use to shield ourselves from brutal truths.

    So, the system has to erase valid criticism of it for it to continue to evolve. And it’s embedding this further, too.

    Cancelling cancel culture

    We’re also seeing a “twin” attack on so-called “cancel culture”. The UK government has just said it’s ‘strengthening’ free speech at universities. Education secretary Gavin Williamson said:

    I am deeply worried about the chilling effect on campuses of unacceptable silencing and censoring. That is why we must strengthen free speech in higher education, by bolstering the existing legal duties and ensuring strong, robust action is taken if these are breached.

    In short, the UK Tories are targeting students trying to shut down transphobes, racists, and misogynists.

    Also with this comes a government focus on ‘heritage’.

    The “war on woke”

    The government is bringing together 25 of the UK’s biggest heritage bodies and charities in an attempt to whitewash British history. Third Sector said that the government has “summoned” them:

    to a summit where Oliver Dowden [the culture secretary] is expected to tell them “to defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down”.

    It is being seen as an escalation of the government’s “war on woke” against so-called “cancel culture”, amid concern at senior levels in the government over what it sees as attempts to rewrite Britain’s past.

    It’s an obvious attack on BLM and the removing of slave trader statues. But moreover, it’s an attempt to shore up the false nationalist history peddled by the establishment that has led the system to the point it’s at today.

    So, you’d be hard-pushed to find somewhere the system wasn’t attacking the left. These individual cases are nothing new. But what seems new this time is the sheer scale of it. And a freelance journalist has compared this to another time in history.

    A new McCarthyism?

    Tim Fenton said that much of this is a new form of McCarthyism. Historically, it’s not far off in terms of the current system’s MO. Woodcock’s review is the same as a ‘Salem Witch Trial’. That is, in the context made famous by Arthur Miller in his play The Crucible. Miller’s Salem witch trials were a metaphor for the clamp-down on communists during the 1950s in the US. But Fenton’s point is also useful in seeing why this is going on.

    In the 1950s, two forces were pulling the world apart: communism and capitalism. Human society was at a crossroads of ideologies. It could have gone either way. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and we are in a similar position. Except this time, the forces are not communism and capitalism. They are corporatism on one side and humanity on the other. This isn’t just a UK phenomenon, either. It’s been the same in the US. And it’s the same in France. It’s the same in Australia. Power is now highly concentrated. And those with it want to make sure it stays that way.

    But in the UK, Woodcock’s review isn’t the end of the story.

    The left wing: being dunked, Tory style

    The government will soon be introducing the Online Safety Bill. As I previously wrote for The Canary, this proposed legislation is peak Tory government. It’s dressing up an overarching attack on freedom and democracy as something that’s good and protective for us. Put this authoritarian piece of law in tandem with Woodcock’s review. Then, tie in all the other crackdowns mentioned above. And what you have is perhaps the greatest attack on the left since McCarthyism in the 1950s. In fact, it may end up being even worse.

    With the advances in technology have come more and more ways for activists to organise. But consequently, traditional methods have been lost. Our lives and our human interactions are now dominated by tech. This leaves us exposed to governments and corporations exerting more power than ever before over them. My late father was a prominent member of the communist party in the 1950s/60s. He used to have a favourite story to tell. When they held meetings, the chair would always end his opening speech by saying:

    And finally, a very special welcome to our friends at the back of the room.

    He was referring to undercover police. But the meeting would still go ahead. Now, we live in the age of virtual organising. And our right to even discuss having a meeting may end up being curtailed. Our freedom to object to, and protest against, what the system is meting out has never been under such a threat. It’s up to all of us to push back – before it’s too late.

    Featured image via Rupert Colley – Flickr and Sky News – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Post-Pandemic American Society Must Not Return to its Industrial Capitalist Roots

    Our mace shaped COVID-19 enemy and its mutations merrily popping up around the United States, ironically has opened up new possibilities for inching beyond the grimy confines of industrial capitalism to new modes of work, learning and being that were initially promised by technocrats at the dawn of the Internet/World Wide Web. Indeed, the Pandemic of 2020-21 (Pandemic) revealed that remote education and work was feasible easing; for example, the pollution that filled the air with the exhaust from automobiles, buses, aircraft and idle factories.

    Further, telemedicine was catapulted from mere novelty to reality as the medical community realized that simple follow-up appointments did not require brick and mortar (B&M) office visits. Corporations like Amazon saved billions, according to CNBC, on travel expenses by halting the practice of needlessly sending employees to conferences and trade shows that could just as easily be conducted online. Families were forced to spend time together maybe getting to know one another better.  Businesses that survived during the Pandemic were forced to make hybrid arrangements for employees so they could care for their children while staying physically distanced from the workplace. Americans had time to think in isolation and perhaps, for a moment, they became bored with all the technological gadgets and networks that blur, rather than educate.

    Was it really all that bad? Can’t the nation wean itself off of industrial capitalism? Do we have to go back?

    Yes, no doubt, suffering was real. Millions went unemployed and the destruction wrought by the Pandemic was revealed in the numbers filing for unemployment claims, food assistance, rent/mortgage and student loan forbearance. Homelessness increased. Surplus labor skyrocketed. Indeed, according to the human resources consultancy Adeccogroup.com, the top five jobs set for the post-Pandemic chopping block are in higher education, sales, administration and office support, construction, air travel and the hospitality industry. What now?

    Never Forget

    It was in this that the Pandemic exposed the sheer ruthlessness of American industrial capitalist governance and its homicidal policies. Even as 500,000 Americans died from complications of COVID-19, Americans would watch as the US government—through its elected representatives, simply told the people to go pound sand. Watching the mostly wealthy entrenched ideologues in the US Congress bicker, or vacation, while COVID-19 was causing America to eat itself has to stand as one of the more sickening events in American history. Indeed, stock prices soared at many points during the Pandemic even as a modern day plague ravaged the land.

    No one should ever forget it.

    The Pandemic caused American government to buckle on its knees. It was a horrific structural failure and the wreckage is there for all Americans, and the world, to see. It is there in the COVID-19 KIA body counts, a flimsy healthcare system ravaged by privatization, logistical impasses in transporting vaccines and, in the midst of it all, the US Congress—while in session affirming the electoral vote count for president Joe Biden—was overrun by an ignorant mob. And now those at the apex of industrial capitalism, here in the United States, and those at the bottom of it, want to move back to the standard industrial model that has left a path of death, suffering and waste in its wake. “Build Back Better,” US president Joe Biden says. Back to what?

    Yes, our deadly friend COVID-19 showed that Americans are made of the stuff of ignorance, fear, complaint and irresponsibility. The Pandemic caused Americans not to adapt and put on a brave face, but rather exposed the flimsy myth of America as exceptional. Oh, first responders and frontline medical workers have great courage, of course, and so do many US soldiers that experience combat, but those individuals are small in number in a nation of 335 million people.

    It is strange that the Pandemic pushed the Internet/WWW to be used for what it was initially meant for: research, learning, work, and video/voice communication in a time of isolation. It was a far better use of the medium as opposed to  24 hours news casts, Tik-Tok videos and perpetual head-down positions required by the handhelds; all accompanied, of course, by loud, tractor-pull mutilated language or techno pop. With 100 places to turn for electronic stimulation— and the fear of missing a call, video or text—it’s no wonder attention spans for the young and old have become so irreparably damaged that recalling sentence number one at the end of a four sentence paragraph is a challenge of the highest order.

    Lobotomy Please, Not Reality

    But perhaps there is a ghost in the machine type of logic to it all. The network connected American has come to forget in the evening what was purchased in the morning. It is certainly good for business. History is what happens in the future, not the past. The past needs to be wiped away so the future can appear. The unintended use of the Internet/WWW and communications technologies/gadgets, have caused in-depth, critical thinking to be wiped away in the United States. The Pandemic has shown that Americans do not want to slow down or spend time apart from their handheld which is, of course, connected to the Internet/WWW.

    With the Internet—the cables, links, routers, switches and other machinery upon which content (voice, images, video, text, software) travels the World Wide Web, Americans became easily blinded into thinking that they were living out some novel, fantastical existence in a technologically sophisticated, forward thinking society. It was all cosmetic gloss, a techno-veil, one which we all donned because we really believed that by doing so we were moving in some direction to a sort of new American Nirvana.

    It is tempting to refer to the artsy-tech movie The Matrix and the scene where Morpheus shows Neo that the world he thought he knew has been destroyed. “Welcome to the world of the real,” Morpheus says as Neo looks on and goes into shock, vomiting.

    But the world of 2021 is no special effects movie.

    Americans are eager to get back to the way things were, in their world of the real. To get back on the road to commute to work/school; that is, increase pollution, vehicle accidents. To be relieved of parenting, that is, using schools/teachers as a babysitting service and prisons for prepubescent adolescents and/or maturing teenagers. Why does the United States want to rush back into the B&M model? Consider building construction, or, better still, phrase it as building empty, wasteful spaces. Elementary and high school buildings remain largely empty during a 24/7, 12 month cycle (after hours they remain largely vacant). The sports fields, running tracks and basketball courts that accompany each structure are only partially used. The same can be said for sky-scraping office buildings that, over the same 24/7 hour, 12 month cycles, remain empty. Meanwhile, taxpayer funded sports stadiums are never fully used. It is reminiscent of cathedrals and mosques built at great expense on the backs of the poor that become tourist attractions more than places of worship. Or think about military bases, factories and housing projects abandoned, rotting away. These are the wasteful byproducts of industrial capitalism still existing and perpetually constructed in what is wistfully called “The Information Age.”

    The Human Condition has hardly changed at all.

    Warehouses for the Young

    The Pandemic showed that the Internet—those land, seafloor and space-based communications networks, combined with the content and software of the World Wide Web (WWW), could be effectively used to teach students online, at home, and in virtual classrooms. As it is, America warehouses K-20 students; separating, or rather protecting them, from the messy society adults have created. Students are taught — what exactly? How to master a college entrance exam? To memorize Algebraic equations they will forget in a year?

    The Pandemic of 2020-21, showed just how archaic B&M education is. Let’s face it, isn’t distance learning/work the way the United States was supposed to evolve even minus COVID-19?

    Prognosticators claimed the greatest technological powerhouse on the planet was going to push ahead building pipelines to carry and host vast stores of knowledge content via the Internet and WWW for learning. No more bulky, out of date textbooks. Students, parents, teachers and local-state-federal government officials (in that order) would work together to develop an educational plan based on the student’s primary interests which would likely be demonstrated by 12th grade, perhaps, with second and third interests in the pipeline if the student’s subject matter area changed.

    Course tracks would be customized by downloading, largely free, content from the WWW. The teacher would become more like a tutor and the student would have many of them with perhaps a learning coordinator/advocate constantly tweaking the course menu. Since performance data on students in K-12 in the USA is tracked anyway; for example—including absent/sick days, suspensions and legal problems— career path/trend analyses based on grades and other statistics could be implemented to assist the student in selecting a field of study-employment.

    Chained to the Bicycle Rack

    “It’s nice to know things. I like to know things. You like to know things,” said Professor David Perkins of Harvard University in the 2015 issue of Harvard Ed Magazine. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips…Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack…It sits solidly in the minds of parents: I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it? The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out…the life worthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty, it seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

    It is often necessary to visit the past for a solution to the present. Consider the following from 1971. It is excerpted from Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era, by Zbigniew Brzeziński.

    The following would be a good start for Americans to set about changing their views of learning, working and being.

    In America higher education is carried on within a relatively self-­contained organizational and even social framework, making for a protracted period of semi­-isolation from problems of social reality. As a result, both organizationally and in terms of content, a divorce between education and social existence has tended to develop…extending education on an intermittent basis throughout the lifetime of the citizen, society would go a long way toward meeting this problem. The duration of the self­-contained and relatively isolated phase of initial education could then be shortened. Taking into account the earlier physical and sexual maturation of young people today, it could be more generally pursued within a work ­study framework, and it should be supplemented by periodic additional training throughout most of one’s active life.

    A good case can be made for ending initial education—more of which could be obtained in the home through electronic devices, somewhere around the age of eighteen. This formal initial period could be followed by two years of service in a socially desirable cause; then by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area; and finally by regular periods of one and eventually even  two years of broadening, integrative study at the beginning of every decade of one’s life, somewhere up to the age of sixty. For example, medical or legal training could begin after only two years of college, thus both shortening the time needed to complete the training and probably also increasing the number attracted into these professions. Regular and formally required retraining—as well as broadening—could ensue at regular intervals throughout most of one’s professional career.

    By now you are wondering: So what is my solution? I don’t have an adequate response to that question, but I do know that national and transnational cultural education has to be connected to any answer or plan that sets America—and the world, for that matter, on a path to a post-industrial capitalist society. The country isn’t even close to it now. The Pandemic has shown that. It just does not seem likely that returning to the industrial capitalist, B&M norm—or the model of governance as it is run by officials now in power—will move the country any closer to change. The wars go on, weapons are more lethal and will soon be operated by AI programs, racism still exists, ignorance is bliss, corporations are people, pollution continues, wasted spaces are good for business, and education is awash in a mishmash of learning methodologies, software applications and a war between parents, teachers and administrators.

    Perhaps—like the US military as it seeks to stand down to contemplate the problem of extremism in its ranks—American civil society needs to stand down for some period of time to reassess learning, work and being.

    The post Post-Pandemic American Society Must Not Return to its Industrial Capitalist Roots first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Post-Pandemic American Society Must Not Return to its Industrial Capitalist Roots

    Our mace shaped COVID-19 enemy and its mutations merrily popping up around the United States, ironically has opened up new possibilities for inching beyond the grimy confines of industrial capitalism to new modes of work, learning and being that were initially promised by technocrats at the dawn of the Internet/World Wide Web. Indeed, the Pandemic of 2020-21 (Pandemic) revealed that remote education and work was feasible easing; for example, the pollution that filled the air with the exhaust from automobiles, buses, aircraft and idle factories.

    Further, telemedicine was catapulted from mere novelty to reality as the medical community realized that simple follow-up appointments did not require brick and mortar (B&M) office visits. Corporations like Amazon saved billions, according to CNBC, on travel expenses by halting the practice of needlessly sending employees to conferences and trade shows that could just as easily be conducted online. Families were forced to spend time together maybe getting to know one another better.  Businesses that survived during the Pandemic were forced to make hybrid arrangements for employees so they could care for their children while staying physically distanced from the workplace. Americans had time to think in isolation and perhaps, for a moment, they became bored with all the technological gadgets and networks that blur, rather than educate.

    Was it really all that bad? Can’t the nation wean itself off of industrial capitalism? Do we have to go back?

    Yes, no doubt, suffering was real. Millions went unemployed and the destruction wrought by the Pandemic was revealed in the numbers filing for unemployment claims, food assistance, rent/mortgage and student loan forbearance. Homelessness increased. Surplus labor skyrocketed. Indeed, according to the human resources consultancy Adeccogroup.com, the top five jobs set for the post-Pandemic chopping block are in higher education, sales, administration and office support, construction, air travel and the hospitality industry. What now?

    Never Forget

    It was in this that the Pandemic exposed the sheer ruthlessness of American industrial capitalist governance and its homicidal policies. Even as 500,000 Americans died from complications of COVID-19, Americans would watch as the US government—through its elected representatives, simply told the people to go pound sand. Watching the mostly wealthy entrenched ideologues in the US Congress bicker, or vacation, while COVID-19 was causing America to eat itself has to stand as one of the more sickening events in American history. Indeed, stock prices soared at many points during the Pandemic even as a modern day plague ravaged the land.

    No one should ever forget it.

    The Pandemic caused American government to buckle on its knees. It was a horrific structural failure and the wreckage is there for all Americans, and the world, to see. It is there in the COVID-19 KIA body counts, a flimsy healthcare system ravaged by privatization, logistical impasses in transporting vaccines and, in the midst of it all, the US Congress—while in session affirming the electoral vote count for president Joe Biden—was overrun by an ignorant mob. And now those at the apex of industrial capitalism, here in the United States, and those at the bottom of it, want to move back to the standard industrial model that has left a path of death, suffering and waste in its wake. “Build Back Better,” US president Joe Biden says. Back to what?

    Yes, our deadly friend COVID-19 showed that Americans are made of the stuff of ignorance, fear, complaint and irresponsibility. The Pandemic caused Americans not to adapt and put on a brave face, but rather exposed the flimsy myth of America as exceptional. Oh, first responders and frontline medical workers have great courage, of course, and so do many US soldiers that experience combat, but those individuals are small in number in a nation of 335 million people.

    It is strange that the Pandemic pushed the Internet/WWW to be used for what it was initially meant for: research, learning, work, and video/voice communication in a time of isolation. It was a far better use of the medium as opposed to  24 hours news casts, Tik-Tok videos and perpetual head-down positions required by the handhelds; all accompanied, of course, by loud, tractor-pull mutilated language or techno pop. With 100 places to turn for electronic stimulation— and the fear of missing a call, video or text—it’s no wonder attention spans for the young and old have become so irreparably damaged that recalling sentence number one at the end of a four sentence paragraph is a challenge of the highest order.

    Lobotomy Please, Not Reality

    But perhaps there is a ghost in the machine type of logic to it all. The network connected American has come to forget in the evening what was purchased in the morning. It is certainly good for business. History is what happens in the future, not the past. The past needs to be wiped away so the future can appear. The unintended use of the Internet/WWW and communications technologies/gadgets, have caused in-depth, critical thinking to be wiped away in the United States. The Pandemic has shown that Americans do not want to slow down or spend time apart from their handheld which is, of course, connected to the Internet/WWW.

    With the Internet—the cables, links, routers, switches and other machinery upon which content (voice, images, video, text, software) travels the World Wide Web, Americans became easily blinded into thinking that they were living out some novel, fantastical existence in a technologically sophisticated, forward thinking society. It was all cosmetic gloss, a techno-veil, one which we all donned because we really believed that by doing so we were moving in some direction to a sort of new American Nirvana.

    It is tempting to refer to the artsy-tech movie The Matrix and the scene where Morpheus shows Neo that the world he thought he knew has been destroyed. “Welcome to the world of the real,” Morpheus says as Neo looks on and goes into shock, vomiting.

    But the world of 2021 is no special effects movie.

    Americans are eager to get back to the way things were, in their world of the real. To get back on the road to commute to work/school; that is, increase pollution, vehicle accidents. To be relieved of parenting, that is, using schools/teachers as a babysitting service and prisons for prepubescent adolescents and/or maturing teenagers. Why does the United States want to rush back into the B&M model? Consider building construction, or, better still, phrase it as building empty, wasteful spaces. Elementary and high school buildings remain largely empty during a 24/7, 12 month cycle (after hours they remain largely vacant). The sports fields, running tracks and basketball courts that accompany each structure are only partially used. The same can be said for sky-scraping office buildings that, over the same 24/7 hour, 12 month cycles, remain empty. Meanwhile, taxpayer funded sports stadiums are never fully used. It is reminiscent of cathedrals and mosques built at great expense on the backs of the poor that become tourist attractions more than places of worship. Or think about military bases, factories and housing projects abandoned, rotting away. These are the wasteful byproducts of industrial capitalism still existing and perpetually constructed in what is wistfully called “The Information Age.”

    The Human Condition has hardly changed at all.

    Warehouses for the Young

    The Pandemic showed that the Internet—those land, seafloor and space-based communications networks, combined with the content and software of the World Wide Web (WWW), could be effectively used to teach students online, at home, and in virtual classrooms. As it is, America warehouses K-20 students; separating, or rather protecting them, from the messy society adults have created. Students are taught — what exactly? How to master a college entrance exam? To memorize Algebraic equations they will forget in a year?

    The Pandemic of 2020-21, showed just how archaic B&M education is. Let’s face it, isn’t distance learning/work the way the United States was supposed to evolve even minus COVID-19?

    Prognosticators claimed the greatest technological powerhouse on the planet was going to push ahead building pipelines to carry and host vast stores of knowledge content via the Internet and WWW for learning. No more bulky, out of date textbooks. Students, parents, teachers and local-state-federal government officials (in that order) would work together to develop an educational plan based on the student’s primary interests which would likely be demonstrated by 12th grade, perhaps, with second and third interests in the pipeline if the student’s subject matter area changed.

    Course tracks would be customized by downloading, largely free, content from the WWW. The teacher would become more like a tutor and the student would have many of them with perhaps a learning coordinator/advocate constantly tweaking the course menu. Since performance data on students in K-12 in the USA is tracked anyway; for example—including absent/sick days, suspensions and legal problems— career path/trend analyses based on grades and other statistics could be implemented to assist the student in selecting a field of study-employment.

    Chained to the Bicycle Rack

    “It’s nice to know things. I like to know things. You like to know things,” said Professor David Perkins of Harvard University in the 2015 issue of Harvard Ed Magazine. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips…Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack…It sits solidly in the minds of parents: I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it? The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out…the life worthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty, it seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

    It is often necessary to visit the past for a solution to the present. Consider the following from 1971. It is excerpted from Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era, by Zbigniew Brzeziński.

    The following would be a good start for Americans to set about changing their views of learning, working and being.

    In America higher education is carried on within a relatively self-­contained organizational and even social framework, making for a protracted period of semi­-isolation from problems of social reality. As a result, both organizationally and in terms of content, a divorce between education and social existence has tended to develop…extending education on an intermittent basis throughout the lifetime of the citizen, society would go a long way toward meeting this problem. The duration of the self­-contained and relatively isolated phase of initial education could then be shortened. Taking into account the earlier physical and sexual maturation of young people today, it could be more generally pursued within a work ­study framework, and it should be supplemented by periodic additional training throughout most of one’s active life.

    A good case can be made for ending initial education—more of which could be obtained in the home through electronic devices, somewhere around the age of eighteen. This formal initial period could be followed by two years of service in a socially desirable cause; then by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area; and finally by regular periods of one and eventually even  two years of broadening, integrative study at the beginning of every decade of one’s life, somewhere up to the age of sixty. For example, medical or legal training could begin after only two years of college, thus both shortening the time needed to complete the training and probably also increasing the number attracted into these professions. Regular and formally required retraining—as well as broadening—could ensue at regular intervals throughout most of one’s professional career.

    By now you are wondering: So what is my solution? I don’t have an adequate response to that question, but I do know that national and transnational cultural education has to be connected to any answer or plan that sets America—and the world, for that matter, on a path to a post-industrial capitalist society. The country isn’t even close to it now. The Pandemic has shown that. It just does not seem likely that returning to the industrial capitalist, B&M norm—or the model of governance as it is run by officials now in power—will move the country any closer to change. The wars go on, weapons are more lethal and will soon be operated by AI programs, racism still exists, ignorance is bliss, corporations are people, pollution continues, wasted spaces are good for business, and education is awash in a mishmash of learning methodologies, software applications and a war between parents, teachers and administrators.

    Perhaps—like the US military as it seeks to stand down to contemplate the problem of extremism in its ranks—American civil society needs to stand down for some period of time to reassess learning, work and being.

    This article was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2021 at 6:35pm and is filed under COVID-19, Education, Industsrial Capitalism, Internet, Lockdown, Opinion, Pandemics, Society, Technology.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why more contagious variants are emerging now, more than a year into the covid-19 pandemic

    ANALYSIS: By David Welch, University of Auckland; Jemma Geoghegan, University of Otago; Joep de Ligt, ESR, and Nigel French, Massey University

    New variants of SARS-CoV-2 have now evaded New Zealand’s border protections twice to spread into the community.

    In the most recent outbreak on Sunday, which placed Auckland into an alert level 3 lockdown, there are three active community cases of the more infectious B.1.1.7 lineage.

    While we have seen the virus mutate over the entire course of the pandemic, it was not until mid-December 2020 that variants with measurably different behaviour emerged.

    There are several reasons for this, including the continued exponential rise in cases globally. Every covid-19 case gives the virus a chance to mutate, and if the number of infections continues to rise, more new variants are likely to emerge.

    Pressure to mutate
    The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 is a string of RNA of about 30,000 bases, or letters. When the virus enters our cells, it hijacks them to make thousands of copies of itself, but the copying process is not perfect.

    Mistakes, or mutations, happen on average once every couple of weeks in any chain of transmission. Most are changes in a single letter and don’t result in a notable difference, but some will change the physical form of the virus, with possible knock-on effects to how the new variant behaves.

    We know about these variants thanks to the sequencing efforts from different countries and their open sharing of this knowledge. The variants that have arisen recently — known as B.1.1.7 (first identified in the UK), B.1.351 (identified in South Africa) and P.1 (identified in Brazil) — all have a large number of mutations that have physically altered the virus.

    Graph showing the rise in new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19
    This graph shows the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 sequences deposited on the global database GISAID (visualised by Nextstrain). The three ribbons at the bottom right correspond to variants P.1 (red, also known as 501Y.V1), B.1.1.7 (orange, also known as 501Y.V2), and B.1.351 (yellowy-orange, also known as 501Y.V1). Graphic: Nextstrain, CC BY-SA

    A number of these changes are on the outside of the virus, in the spike proteins it uses to infect cells. Such changes can also undermine our immune system’s ability to detect these new versions of the virus when it has only seen the old version.

    The most obvious reason why new variants have been emerging recently is that the number of global cases increased massively in the last quarter of 2020. There were about 35 million cases recorded worldwide in the first nine months of 2020, but it took just two months to double that number. We are well on the way to doubling that number again soon.

    Evading rising levels of immunity
    A second reason is that the virus is responding to immunity that has started to build up in the population. Our immune system plays an important role in driving which mutations survive and are transmitted.

    The immune system is constantly trying to identify and kill the virus, which can only infect new people if it escapes detection. While mutations occur randomly, ones that lead to a more transmissible variant or those that escape our immune system are preferentially selected and more likely to persist.

    The mutations that characterise B.1.1.7, B.1.351 and P.1 have been shown to spread faster (especially B.1.1.7) and initial evidence points to a difference in the immune response (though not in B.1.1.7).

    Another indication that immunity plays a big role is that the B.1.351 and P.1 variants came to prominence in areas with large first waves of COVID-19 where the population developed higher levels of immunity.

    Lights as a tribute to victioms of COVID-19 in Brazil
    Special lighting will honour victims of covid-19 during the cancelled carnival period in Rio de Janeiro. Image: Wagner Meier/Getty Images

    P.1 was identified in Brazil where up to 70 percent of the population were infected during the first wave. B.1.351 quickly became the dominant strain in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa which was similarly hard hit.

    The new variants could infect a greater number of people than the original wild type of the virus, which might infect only people who had never been infected before.

    This is one of the reasons why historically herd immunity for a new virus has not occurred through “natural disease progression” but only through vaccination.

    The final part of the story is the fact that two of these variants (B.1.1.7 and P.1) differ by as many as 25 mutations from the closest known SARS-CoV-2 sequences. This is very unusual given that most viral sequences we see are within just a few mutations of others.

    Such a rapid increase in diversity has been observed in chronic covid-19 infections in immunocompromised hosts. Most people are ill for a week or two, but a few have to fight the disease for months. During that time, the virus continues to evolve, sometimes very quickly as a weakened immune system presents all sorts of challenges to the virus but fails to kill it off.

    This kind of infection presents a “training ground” for the virus, as it continually adapts.

    Will we see more new variants?
    As long as the virus is around, it will continue to mutate. With vaccine protection and natural immunity in a growing number of people, there is greater pressure on virus variants that evade our immune defences.

    The rate of new mutations varies greatly between viruses. The overall mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 is about half that of the influenza virus and much slower than HIV. But the overall mutation rate doesn’t tell us everything. What really matters is the rate of mutations that physically alter the virus.

    There is some early evidence this rate is about the same in SARS-CoV-2 as in influenza viruses. One reason for this is that SARS-CoV-2 has only recently jumped to people and is not yet “optimised” to spread in humans.

    Essentially the original virus was only a few mutations away from better fitness, and there may be further easy changes that could make it even better adapted to humans. Once the virus is through this initial adaptation phase, there will be fewer opportunities for easy, fitness-improving changes and new variants may appear less frequently.

    The variants that have been characterised so far are likely only a small subset of those in circulation. It is no coincidence they are known from countries with comprehensive sequencing programmes (notably the UK).

    But the new variants are not the main driver of transmission globally. Most of the world is still susceptible to any variant of SARS-CoV-2, including the original version. The protective measures we have used successfully in Aotearoa to control the virus continue to work for any variant.

    The best way to protect against all current variants and to prevent the emergence of further variants is to drive down the number of cases through ongoing control measures and vaccination.The Conversation

    Dr David Welch, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland; Dr Jemma Geoghegan, Senior Lecturer and Associate Scientist at ESR, University of Otago; Dr Joep de Ligt, Science Lead Genomics & Bioinformatics, ESR, and Dr Nigel French, Professor of Food Safety and Veterinary Public Health, Massey University. 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.

  • Why more contagious variants are emerging now, more than a year into the covid-19 pandemic

    ANALYSIS: By David Welch, University of Auckland; Jemma Geoghegan, University of Otago; Joep de Ligt, ESR, and Nigel French, Massey University

    New variants of SARS-CoV-2 have now evaded New Zealand’s border protections twice to spread into the community.

    In the most recent outbreak on Sunday, which placed Auckland into an alert level 3 lockdown, there are three active community cases of the more infectious B.1.1.7 lineage.

    While we have seen the virus mutate over the entire course of the pandemic, it was not until mid-December 2020 that variants with measurably different behaviour emerged.

    There are several reasons for this, including the continued exponential rise in cases globally. Every covid-19 case gives the virus a chance to mutate, and if the number of infections continues to rise, more new variants are likely to emerge.

    Pressure to mutate
    The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 is a string of RNA of about 30,000 bases, or letters. When the virus enters our cells, it hijacks them to make thousands of copies of itself, but the copying process is not perfect.

    Mistakes, or mutations, happen on average once every couple of weeks in any chain of transmission. Most are changes in a single letter and don’t result in a notable difference, but some will change the physical form of the virus, with possible knock-on effects to how the new variant behaves.

    We know about these variants thanks to the sequencing efforts from different countries and their open sharing of this knowledge. The variants that have arisen recently — known as B.1.1.7 (first identified in the UK), B.1.351 (identified in South Africa) and P.1 (identified in Brazil) — all have a large number of mutations that have physically altered the virus.

    Graph showing the rise in new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19This graph shows the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 sequences deposited on the global database GISAID (visualised by Nextstrain). The three ribbons at the bottom right correspond to variants P.1 (red, also known as 501Y.V1), B.1.1.7 (orange, also known as 501Y.V2), and B.1.351 (yellowy-orange, also known as 501Y.V1). Graphic: Nextstrain, CC BY-SA

    A number of these changes are on the outside of the virus, in the spike proteins it uses to infect cells. Such changes can also undermine our immune system’s ability to detect these new versions of the virus when it has only seen the old version.

    The most obvious reason why new variants have been emerging recently is that the number of global cases increased massively in the last quarter of 2020. There were about 35 million cases recorded worldwide in the first nine months of 2020, but it took just two months to double that number. We are well on the way to doubling that number again soon.

    Evading rising levels of immunity
    A second reason is that the virus is responding to immunity that has started to build up in the population. Our immune system plays an important role in driving which mutations survive and are transmitted.

    The immune system is constantly trying to identify and kill the virus, which can only infect new people if it escapes detection. While mutations occur randomly, ones that lead to a more transmissible variant or those that escape our immune system are preferentially selected and more likely to persist.

    The mutations that characterise B.1.1.7, B.1.351 and P.1 have been shown to spread faster (especially B.1.1.7) and initial evidence points to a difference in the immune response (though not in B.1.1.7).

    Another indication that immunity plays a big role is that the B.1.351 and P.1 variants came to prominence in areas with large first waves of COVID-19 where the population developed higher levels of immunity.

    Special lighting will honour victims of covid-19 during the cancelled carnival period in Rio de Janeiro. Image: Wagner Meier/Getty Images

    P.1 was identified in Brazil where up to 70 percent of the population were infected during the first wave. B.1.351 quickly became the dominant strain in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa which was similarly hard hit.

    The new variants could infect a greater number of people than the original wild type of the virus, which might infect only people who had never been infected before.

    This is one of the reasons why historically herd immunity for a new virus has not occurred through “natural disease progression” but only through vaccination.

    The final part of the story is the fact that two of these variants (B.1.1.7 and P.1) differ by as many as 25 mutations from the closest known SARS-CoV-2 sequences. This is very unusual given that most viral sequences we see are within just a few mutations of others.

    Such a rapid increase in diversity has been observed in chronic covid-19 infections in immunocompromised hosts. Most people are ill for a week or two, but a few have to fight the disease for months. During that time, the virus continues to evolve, sometimes very quickly as a weakened immune system presents all sorts of challenges to the virus but fails to kill it off.

    This kind of infection presents a “training ground” for the virus, as it continually adapts.

    Will we see more new variants?
    As long as the virus is around, it will continue to mutate. With vaccine protection and natural immunity in a growing number of people, there is greater pressure on virus variants that evade our immune defences.

    The rate of new mutations varies greatly between viruses. The overall mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 is about half that of the influenza virus and much slower than HIV. But the overall mutation rate doesn’t tell us everything. What really matters is the rate of mutations that physically alter the virus.

    There is some early evidence this rate is about the same in SARS-CoV-2 as in influenza viruses. One reason for this is that SARS-CoV-2 has only recently jumped to people and is not yet “optimised” to spread in humans.

    Essentially the original virus was only a few mutations away from better fitness, and there may be further easy changes that could make it even better adapted to humans. Once the virus is through this initial adaptation phase, there will be fewer opportunities for easy, fitness-improving changes and new variants may appear less frequently.

    The variants that have been characterised so far are likely only a small subset of those in circulation. It is no coincidence they are known from countries with comprehensive sequencing programmes (notably the UK).

    But the new variants are not the main driver of transmission globally. Most of the world is still susceptible to any variant of SARS-CoV-2, including the original version. The protective measures we have used successfully in Aotearoa to control the virus continue to work for any variant.

    The best way to protect against all current variants and to prevent the emergence of further variants is to drive down the number of cases through ongoing control measures and vaccination.The Conversation

    Dr David Welch, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland; Dr Jemma Geoghegan, Senior Lecturer and Associate Scientist at ESR, University of Otago; Dr Joep de Ligt, Science Lead Genomics & Bioinformatics, ESR, and Dr Nigel French, Professor of Food Safety and Veterinary Public Health, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    Print Friendly, PDF & Email

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.