The Australian Research Council has banned grant assessors from using generative AI tools following claims that ChatGPT had been used to produce assessor reports. All peer reviewers are now prohibited from using the technology “as part of their assessment activities” because of breach of confidentiality concerns and the potential to “compromise the integrity of the…
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Neoliberal capitalism comes under scathing and thought-provoking artistic critique by renowned Spanish artist Isaac Cordal in his politically engaged new exhibition, “Smoke Signals,” which includes miniature sculptures, photography and diverse installations. Cordal uses his miniature statuettes to refigure space, fragment time, point to larger social issues and stand as imperfect constructions of…
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Fiji’s government is reviewing a police cooperation agreement with China, the Pacific island country’s prime minister said Wednesday, underlining the balancing act between economic reliance on the Asian superpower and security ties to the United States.
Sitiveni Rabuka, who became Fiji’s prime minister after an election in December broke strongman Frank Bainimarama’s 16 year hold on power, has emphasized shared values with democracies such as U.S. ally Australia and New Zealand. His government also has accorded a higher status to Taiwan’s representative office in Fiji, but has not fundamentally altered relations with Beijing.
“When we came in [as the government] we needed to look at what they were doing [in the area of police cooperation],” Rabuka told a press conference during an official visit to New Zealand’s capital Wellington. “If our values and our systems differ, what cooperation can we get from that?”
The agreement signed in 2011 has resulted in Fijian police officers undertaking training in China and short-term Chinese police deployments to Fiji. Plans for a permanent Chinese police liaison officer in Fiji were announced in September 2021, according to Fijian media.
“We need to look at that [agreement] again before we decide on whether we go back to it or we continue the way we have in the past – cooperating with those who have similar democratic values and systems, legislation, law enforcement and so on,” Rabuka said.
China, over several decades, has become a substantial source of trade, infrastructure and aid for developing Pacific island countries as it seeks to isolate Taiwan diplomatically and build its own set of global institutions.
Beijing’s relations with Fiji particularly burgeoned after Australia, New Zealand and other countries sought to punish it for Bainimarama’s 2006 coup that ousted the elected government. It was Fiji’s fourth coup in three decades. Rabuka orchestrated two coups in the late 1980s.
Last year, China signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands, alarming the U.S. and its allies such as Australia. The Solomons and Kiribati switched their diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taiwan in 2019.
The Chinese embassy in Fiji has said that China has military and police cooperation with many developing nations that have different political systems from China.
“The law enforcement and police cooperation between China and Fiji is professional, open and transparent,” it said in May.
“We hope relevant parties can abandon ideological prejudice, and view the law enforcement and police cooperation between China and Fiji objectively and rationally.”
China also provides extensive training for Solomon Islands police and equipment such as vehicles and water cannons.
Solomon Islands deputy police commissioner Ian Vaevaso said in a May 31 statement that 30 Solomon Islands police officers were in China for training on top of more than 30 that were sent to the Fujian Police College last year.
Rabuka has expressed concerns about police cooperation with Beijing since being elected prime minister.
“There’s no need for us to continue, our systems are different,” Rabuka said in January, according to a Fiji Times report.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stephen Wright for BenarNews.
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Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers. “You think you mad,” Damian Anderson snarls at Adonis Creed. “Try living half your life in a cell, watching someone else live your life.” He tugs at the gun in his belt. “I’m coming for everything.” Two Black men stare across explosive silence. In Creed III, Adonis Creed (played by Michael B. Jordan, who also directs the film) and Damian “Dame”…
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The rivalry between the U.S. and China has hit fever pitch. Whatever rapprochement seemed in the offing with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s scheduled summit with Xi Jinping in February was blown sky high when Washington’s fighter jets shot down Beijing’s balloon over the Atlantic Ocean. With each accusing the other of illegal surveillance and imposing sanctions, the much-anticipated summit…
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Let’s start with my admission that I do not read horror. While I loved all of the Alien films and I was enthralled by the Blade trilogy, it is typically not a genre I seek out. Nicholas Powers changed all that with his new novel, Thirst. What attracted me at first was not the content but the author. Nicholas Powers is an exceptionally good writer whose political and cultural commentaries on the…
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Two movies screened at the most recent the Other Israel Film Festival examined the theft of collective and personal histories from Palestinians and Israelis by the Israeli government and its military machine. The documentaries by these two filmmakers have the explicit goal of questioning the legacy histories put into play by the Israeli government and hasbara proponents. Following in the footsteps…
After three years, the Privacy Act Review commissioned under the Coalition government has been completed and the final report handed to Attorney General Mark Dreyfus. The Attorney General will now consider the review over the summer and is expected to release it publicly alongside the government’s response in the first half of 2023. The completion…
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Joshua Frank’s brilliant Atomic Days, from Haymarket Books, takes us deep into the horrific clogged bowels of the failed technology that is nuclear power.
Frank’s excursion into the radioactive wasteland of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, in eastern Washington State’s Columbia River Valley, is the ultimate real-world nightmare.
Unfortunately, it serves as a wailing siren for what faces us with the atomic wastes from our commercial reactors, now joined at the toxic hip to the global weapons industry.
“Like a ceaseless conveyer belt,” Frank writes, “Hanford generated plutonium for nearly four long decades, reaching maximum production during the height of the Cold War.”
It is now, he says “a sprawling wasteland of radioactive and chemic sewage … the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet.”
Current cost estimates to clean up the place, says Frank, “could run anywhere between $316 and $662 billion.”
But that depends on a few definitions, including the most critical: What does it mean to “clean up” a hellhole like Hanford? If you want to remove plutonium from a radioactive wasteland, what do you do so that it doesn’t create another radioactive wasteland? And what does that say about the 90,000 tons of high-level waste sitting at more than 50 U.S. commercial reactor sites?
To put it in perspective, we spend $2.6 billion each year just to preserve Hanford as it is. The clean-up estimate, according to Frank, has roughly tripled in the past six years, leaving us to believe that in another six years it could easily be over $6 trillion.
The environmental consequences are colossal. As Frank abundantly documents, Hanford is an unfathomable mess. Giant tanks are leaking. Plutonium and other apocalyptic substances are rapidly migrating toward the Columbia River, which could be permanently poisoned, along with much more. Local residents have been poisoned with “permissible permanent concentration” of lethal isotopes on vegetables, livestock, and in the air and drinking water.
Such exposures have even included a deliberate experiment known as the “Green Run” in which Hanford operatives “purposely released dangerous amounts of radioactive iodine.”
Such emissions are especially damaging to embryos, fetuses and small children, whose thyroids can be easily destroyed (as we are now seeing at Fukushima). But back then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to know how fallout would flow in wind currents.
The product was a “death mile” stretching from the Columbia River basin to the ocean, filled with casualties of radioactive poisoning.
After decades of devastating leaks from defective storage tanks, the Los Angeles Times reported that more radioactivity was stored at Hanford “than would be released during an entire nuclear war.”
Thousands of such tanks at Fukushima may soon be given a governmental green light to dump their poisons in the Pacific, with potentially apocalyptic results.
At Hanford, “the waste was so hot it would boil … for decades to come,” i.e., right up to the present day, writes Frank.
Despite official denials, Frank documents a terrifying range of catastrophic leaks into the soil, water tables and streams throughout the reservation. By 1985, he writes, “despite $7 billion spent over the previous ten years, no progress had been made in ridding the aging tanks” of their deadly offal.
To this day “Hanford remains the most complex environmental mess in the United States,” riddled with problems that provide huge profits for corporations that land clean-up contracts and then fail to deliver, exceeding the complexity even of the infamous waste dump at West Valley, New York, and the highly radioactive fallout zone at Santa Susana, California, just north of Los Angeles.
But Hanford’s not alone. Frank also takes us to Chelyabinsk, the site of a Soviet era disaster, and to another wasteland around Kyshtym. Like the 1000-square-mile “dead zone” around Chernobyl, Hanford is full of areas where human life is perilous at best.
To put the nuclear power industry in a larger context, Frank guides us through the “permanent war economy” birthed during WWII, and discusses Franklin Roosevelt’s ambivalent relations with the “Malefactors of Great Wealth” who often stood in the way of making the U.S. the “Arsenal of Democracy,” and who once even plotted to kill him.
With the decision to build an A-Bomb, the giant Bechtel Corporation used the 120-square-mile reservation at Hanford to produce 103.5 metric tons of plutonium, perhaps the deadliest substance known to humanity.
But there was no effective solution for what might happen to the place in the aftermath. The Waste Treatment Plant meant to “vitrify” rad wastes into glass began construction in 2002, with plans to open in 2011. It has become, in both cost and area, “the largest single construction operation taking place anywhere in the United States,” now with an estimated price tag of $41 billion and a projected opening in 2036.
With “a string of bungled jobs under its belt,” Bechtel’s failed “Big Dig” in Boston — a much-vaunted tunnel from Logan Airport to downtown — reflected its work at Hanford when a collapse killed a 39-year-old woman and resulted in $357.1 million settlement exempting management from criminal prosecution.
As the U.S.’s fourth-largest privately held company, Bechtel spending $1.8 million on D.C. lobbying in 2019-20 was par for the course. The payback, Frank writes, comes in the tragic diseases suffered by Hanford workers like Abe Garza and Lawrence Rouse, usually amid terse, well-funded official denials. Researchers like Karen Wetterhahn and veterans like Victor Skaar have joined Vietnam victims of Agent Orange in being victimized by exposures they were repeatedly assured were “safe.” Whistleblowers like Ed Bricker were even subjected to intense spying and sabotage by close associates he was deceived into accepting as friends.
Meanwhile activists like Russell Jim of the Yakama Tribe began to force “an immeasurable amount of transparency” around the Hanford disaster. Their decades of hardcore community organizing came with a growing demand for accountability that has changed the political atmosphere surrounding the cleanup.
The debate has carried into the use of commercial atomic power.
Because of Hanford’s nuclear presence, five atomic reactors were constructed in Washington State, promising electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.”
But like the soaring costs of plutonium production and clean-up, the Washington Public Power System plunged into the biggest public bankruptcy in U.S. history, due to massive delays and cost overruns. Only one of the nukes now operates.
Sadly, some self-proclaimed climate activists have fallen into the atomic pit, arguing that in the face of the acute threat of climate change, nuclear power should be pursued as a way to lower emissions.
But they all ignore the big lesson Joshua Frank teaches us about Hanford: All the rhetoric in the world can’t cover for the physical realities of dealing with atomic radiation. And atomic fires burning at 571 degrees Fahrenheit will never cool the planet. The mines, the mills, the fuel fabrication, the reactors themselves, the waste dumps, all that horrendous multitrillion-dollar paraphernalia — they together comprise the most lethal and expensive technological failure in human history.
Many reactor promoters have long vehemently denied any connection between their “peaceful atom” and the scourge of war, but anti-nuclear activists have exposed the falsity of those claims. For example, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British advocacy organization that opposes both nuclear weapons and the building of new nuclear power facilities, writes:
The civil nuclear power industry grew out of the atomic bomb programme in the 1940s and the 1950s. In Britain, the civil nuclear power programme was deliberately used as a cover for military activities…. The development of both the nuclear weapons and nuclear power industries is mutually beneficial. Scientists from Sussex University confirmed this once again in 2017, stating that the government is using the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to subsidise Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system.
As the atomic energy business is increasingly priced out of the electricity market by wind, solar, batteries, and increased efficiency and conservation, we will likely see the nuclear power industry increasingly admitting to what it always was — a necessary servant of the nuclear weapons industry.
Fittingly, the only future for atomic reactors will be as a bottomless pit for ecological suicide and massive public subsidies — exactly like Hanford.
Indeed, for readers truly interested in the future of atomic energy, take a good look at how it plays in Joshua Frank’s Atomic Days. Then ask how soon we can cover the whole damn place with solar panels.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A review of Australia’s national science and research priorities has been announced by Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic to ensure they are “fit for purpose”. Australia’s chief scientist Dr Cathy Foley will lead the 12-month review, which will also renew the 2017 National Science Statement. Dr Foley will be supported by a taskforce…
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has launched a Defence Strategic Review to examine investment priorities to ensure sufficient capabilities are maintained, among other priorities. According to the terms of reference of the review, the purpose of the review is to consider the priority of “investment in Defence capabilities and assess the Australian Defence Force’s structure, posture…
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Three days after the twin towers fell, then-President George W. Bush called for Americans to “unite.” What followed was the decades-long United States military-led campaign — the “war on terror” — which has resulted in the death of over 2 million Muslims; the expansion of a network of over 800 global U.S. military bases; and the creation of codified Islamophobia, the violence of which knows no bounds. The rhetoric framing and otherizing of Muslims as people inherently prone to terrorism has been embedded in the design of post-9/11 policies “overtly and covertly, domestic and external,” Maha Hilal recounts in her new book, Innocent Until Proven Muslim.
From the get-go, the Bush administration swiftly deployed a version of public morality upholding dichotomous ideological values between the West and Islam — painting any response by the U.S. as “acceptable and even necessary.” As reported in the book, the five dimensions of the war on terror are: militarism and warfare, draconian immigration policy, surveillance, federal terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture.
The root of the war on terror — institutionalized Islamophobia laced with white supremacy — has allowed the U.S. government to carry out state-sanctioned violence without an ounce of accountability. Two decades later, Muslims abroad and in the U.S. are facing the repercussions of a plethora of xenophobic programs like the National Security Entry-Exit Registration system, the use of Guantánamo Bay prison to house and torture Muslim men, and surveillance initiatives like Countering Violent Extremism. Muslims in the U.S. are forced to reconcile with their identities, whether they’re making a trip to the mosque for Jummah prayer or calling out the U.S. government for the destruction of their homelands.
Innocent Until Proven Muslim is an accumulation of Hilal’s ongoing research and efforts to organize to dismantle the war on terror by highlighting the most devastating impacts of U.S. empire. Analyzing everything from the panoptic violence of surveillance to the ongoing violations of fundamental rights, Hilal envisions a world in which Muslims no longer live under a cloud of suspicion.
The U.S.’s narrow framing of moral culpability under the guise of national security has persisted under three successive presidencies, broadening the scope of state violence at every turn. Hilal describes the extent to which Muslim lives have been dehumanized.
Consider the pattern of performative accountability: Americans were shocked when photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal emerged, documenting extensive torture of Muslim prisoners who were punched, slapped, kicked, doused with hot water, forced into stress positions for hours, threatened with dogs, etc. In response, former President Bush stated, “The prison does not represent the America that I know,” evading any critique of the government while intentionally disregarding the livelihood of the Iraqis who were tortured.
Hilal writes, “The extent to which this has been allowed is a testament to the power of narrative to create real-world systems and the resilience that same narrative power displays to evade responsibility for the human cost of the systems it supports.”
During Barack Obama’s administration, a U.S. soldier massacred 16 villagers in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The immediate administrative focus, as Obama put it, was the “sacrifices that our men and women have made in Afghanistan” — sacrifices for whom? These examples illustrate how both Bush and Obama were experts at erasing the victimization of Muslims to justify the war on terror by any means. An entire infrastructure of systematic Islamophobia was designed in the early days after 9/11, and these attitudes toward counterterrorism have since been codified in law and policy. The true reach of the war on terror is difficult to imagine.
Openly glorifying in brutality, former President Donald Trump has expressed pride in state violence carried out during his presidency and laid the groundwork to leverage support for extreme policies like the Muslim ban. In 2015, Trump said the U.S. needs to “watch and study the mosques.” Four days later, he indicated that he would “certainly implement” a database to track Muslims in the U.S. Two days after that, he falsely claimed that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheered in New Jersey when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11.
Trump’s efforts to further perpetuate harmful tropes about Muslims make their deaths seem unimportant. Hilal reminds us that, in turn, “The dominant narrative becomes more difficult to dislodge from the imagination of a public who accepts this political landscape as matter of course.”
Innocent Until Proven Muslim is not limited to describing the pattern of physical abuse against Muslim bodies. Woven together with Hilal’s critical analysis of the human cost of post-9/11 wars are countless examples of sinister surveillance methods used to racially and religiously profile whole communities. Take for example, the creation of The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which required immigrant men from Muslim-majority countries over the age of 16 to register with the government. Although this program ended in 2011, 80,000 men were subject to intensive interrogations and not a single one was charged with a crime.
Considering the superficial construction of the war on terror, Hilal reminds us that the government was able to “establish a differential system of justice,” paving the way for the normalization of entrapment, informants and so-called “fishing expeditions” — used to create conditions that lead to an actionable offense. The Holy Land Five case is perhaps one of the most prominent examples of arbitrary domestic trial cases.
A charitable organization created to support displaced Palestinians across the Middle East, the Holy Land Five were accused of diverting donations to Hamas. Although no direct connection between them was found, all five men were sentenced to 15 to 65 years in prison, and many American Muslims are still grappling with the criminalization of Muslim charities.
During the Obama administration, the authority of the U.S. government to surveil its citizens was expanded both in intent and practice — Hilal explains how these programs “disrupted community bonds” and “the confidence that stems from a reasonable expectation of freedom.” Mere months before the government launched the Countering Violent Extremism Program, Obama declared in his state of the union address that, “Muslims Americans are part of our American family.” A quick look at what this program entailed, however, was the pairing of vulnerable Muslim youth — disproportionately Black — with police officers who were trained to pathologize mental health issues. The psychological impact on Muslim Americans since 9/11 is insurmountable.
To answer the question, “is the war on terror over?” Hilal closes with 11 interviews that feature Muslims from a variety of different backgrounds. The unmistakable message in these conversations is that collective liberation means justice for all and in that, abolishing oppressive institutions that continue to otherize Muslims. In the words of Zahra, a Somali chaplain whom Hilal quotes in the book:
Islam has always been a theology and political tool that liberates people, even when they’re caged, even when they’re enslaved, even when they’re imprisoned. Even when our bodies are caged, even when we are under apartheid and in the borders of Gaza, or in the prisons in Philadelphia, or in the cages at Gitmo, Islam allows us to survive the unsurvivable. And that inherently makes you a threat to an empire whose only function has been to dominate, oppress, pillage, and kill.
For many Muslims, it is difficult not to internalize and absorb anti-Muslim rhetoric in a climate that seeks to normalize it. Islamophobia in the U.S is baked into laws, institutions and policies. From being treated as a suspect community when going through airport security to global militarism that continues to yield unrestricted violence in countless Muslim-majority countries — imagining a better future requires rising up together. Zahra, along with the ten other interviewees, speak of the importance of unifying to dismantle anti-Muslim bigotry. Although individual Muslim communities face different degrees of state-sanctioned violence, collective liberation would ultimately free us all.
The war on terror is and always will be rooted in racism. Although Trump was able to expand its executive reach, the pathway was paved by both Bush and Obama. What has differed across administrations is not the gravity of violence or the human toll, but the preference for one form of violence over another. It was Bush who created a xenophobic immigration system with the creation of ICE, it was Obama who earned his place in history as “deporter in chief,” and it was Trump who reigned terror with a series of executive orders banning Muslims from entering the country. There’s no singular definition of justice for Muslims in the U.S and abroad, but perhaps demanding accountability from the war criminals who’ve once occupied the oval office is a start.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Capitalism eventually ruins all good things.
Corporate CEOs override COVID safety measures with demands to “reopen the economy,” a sanitized term for “keep our profits flowing.” Wall Street’s next quarterly earnings trump measures to address the climate crisis. Even social housing, food and medical programs originally intended to uplift humanity are disciplined to monetize everything and embrace business models that differentiate the “deserving” from the “undeserving.”
Higher education, too, has been a central arena of struggle between profit motive and social good. As Joe Berry and Helena Worthen note in their book, Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education (Pluto Press, 2021), in the last 40 years, “we have seen higher education transformed into a profit-seeking industry.… The flow of money through the whole project of academic research has distorted what is studied, what is judged, what is published and who has access to it.” And with soaring tuition, endless fees and hidden add-on costs, along with privatized student loans and soaring student debt, “The higher ed industry, like the real estate industry and its sibling, the finance industry, has found a way to suck down the wealth accumulated by the previous generation during the 1950s and 1960s.”
Look beyond higher ed’s Latinate mottos and lofty paeans to truth and knowledge to see what’s steering the ship of higher education: Just survey the building names at your local university. In my hometown of Seattle, you can stroll to the University of Washington’s Bank of America Executive Education Center (with its Boeing Auditorium), adjacent to the business school housed in PACCAR Hall, “named for the Bellevue truck manufacturer, PACCAR Inc., in recognition of its $16 million gift to the UW.” (Apparently with an eight-figure gift you get ALL CAPS naming rights.) Walk south and on your right, you’ll see the William H. Gates Law School, named after corporate lawyer and father of Microsoft founder and centibillionaire Bill Gates. Then go past the former Physics Building now christened after the elder Gates’s wife, Mary Gates, between the two computer science buildings bearing the names of Bill Gates and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and across the pedestrian overpass to catch a basketball game at the Alaska Airlines Arena, or perhaps a tennis match at the adjacent Nordstrom Tennis Center.
Mind you, this is supposed to be a public institution.
The ego-boosting naming rights and the tax deductions that these elites reap, along with the governing board positions that their generosity purchases, are accessory benefits to their real objective: The creation and maintenance of a publicly funded assembly line producing the intellectual capital necessary to feed their voracious private profit machines.
Fortunately, this dystopian vision is not without organized resistance. It’s centered in the growing army of precarious university workers, who together perform most of the teaching and research in higher ed.
Fifty years ago, more than three-quarters of university faculty were tenure or tenure-track, and only one quarter were temporary teachers, or adjuncts. Today, those numbers have flipped, with 75 percent of college classroom teachers being precariously employed, as “adjuncts,” lecturers or doctoral candidate teaching assistants. They have no long-term job security. They must stay keenly on the lookout every year — or even every academic term — to secure their next teaching or research gig. It’s not that different from Uber drivers hustling for the next ride.
These are the frontline workers of the academy, and they see and experience firsthand the damage that corporatization inflicts: For students, the stress of deep debts, high rents and a lack of proper supports; for the teachers, poverty pay, housing insecurity, deferred medical care and the mental burdens that every precarious worker bears in the capitalist economy.
As administrations downsized tenure and conjured up a mass workforce of precariously employed teachers and researchers, the new proletariat organized. Today a significant percentage of the teachers, from community colleges to major public and private research institutions, have formed unions to battle for better job security, higher pay, decent benefits and reasonable workloads.
Power Despite Precarity takes a deep dive into one front in this global battlefield. Authors Berry and Worthen, who combined have decades of teaching and academic organizing experience, offer the reader an extended, classroom-level case study of how educators in the California State University system organized and built power: First, by taking on and overcoming institutional inertia and elitism within their own union ranks, and then, by challenging the university administration.
The authors describe how in 1960, California established a plan that intended to open up higher education broadly by making it free at all levels — community colleges, Cal State universities and the University of California system. This notion of education as a social good, as opposed to a commodity to be purchased, has been at the center of the struggle not just in California but nationwide over the last 60 years.
In California, the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 defunded education and other social services, triggering a seismic shift amplified by the subsequent budget choices of both Democratic and Republican state lawmakers. In the late 1970s, California legislators budgeted three times as much state funding for the University of California and Cal State systems as they did for state prisons. Forty years later, those state aid percentages are practically reversed. Thus, “state support was channeled away from public welfare to punitive functions that target marginalized populations,” note Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen in Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities, another excellent book dissecting the corporate heist of the academy.
But defunding higher ed wasn’t enough to tilt the balance sufficiently toward corporate power. Worker power also had to be held in check through divide-and-conquer employment schemes. Berry and Worthen note that the same decade of the 1970s also saw a pronounced university tilt toward hiring contingent faculty, fostering divisions in the ranks of educators. “The creation of a permanent two-tier system within the faculty was a powerful weapon against the emerging faculty unionization movement,” they write.
At Cal State, it took a while for educators to fight back. Berry and Worthen trace the history of lecturers organizing and struggling to build unity with tenured faculty at Cal State’s 23 campuses. Poorly negotiated union contracts in 1995 and again four years later drove the educators — led by younger, more militant lecturers — to win a contested leadership election and begin to steer the union in a progressive direction.
The book describes a number of steps the new leadership took, each one an important element to rebuilding a union in any industry: The creation of organizing structures on each campus, one-on-one conversations to build membership and identify leaders, strategic planning to develop the union’s own vision for the future of the university, and contract campaigns that built toward strike readiness. Notably, the authors describe how the new leadership brought in Ruckus Society activists to teach the teachers how to carry out direct actions. It’s a good example of the sort of cross-fertilization that needs to be done more frequently in the labor movement.
As grassroots activists, Berry and Worthen do a thorough job of detailing — occasionally at a very granular level — the formative steps that activists took to reclaim and rebuild their union. Their paragraph-long quotations of union members properly lift up the voices and vital experiences of rank-and-file activists — all too often overlooked in union histories. They devote several chapters at the end of the book to important questions for any union organizer seeking to build power, including, “What gets people moving?” “Who is the enemy?” “Who are our allies?”
Berry and Worthen also dedicate two chapters to what they call “Blue Sky proposals,” in which they lay out a set of ambitious goals largely framed around union contract battles. All good ideas, to be sure, but contract bargaining over wages and working conditions is only an entryway into the larger fight for the soul of higher education. From the chapter titles, I was hoping for deep azure vistas but got only robin’s egg blue. I finished the book still hungry to learn more about how Berry and Worthen, as longtime socialists, would circle back to their opening critique of the capitalist hijacking of higher ed and apply their considerable experiences to articulate a social movement vision for higher education unions. Perhaps this will be their follow-up book.
That bigger vision is, indeed, urgently required today. The billionaires whose names adorn campus buildings across the country can correctly boast that they’ve made substantial progress in capturing control over higher education. The organized resistance of the academy’s workers and students is the only thing that stands in the way of a full takeover.
Fighting for good wages and benefits and greater job security in the manner that Berry and Worthen detail is an essential step in that resistance. But it is not sufficient. For instance, unions — whether in higher ed, transportation, warehousing or food delivery — must not limit their efforts to managing precarity in the near term, but rather should build fights demanding an end to job insecurity, period.
Contract bargaining in particular is a time for workers to issue these bold challenges. It’s also the right time to raise basic questions around power, control and the mission of the university, counterposing our vision of social good with their vision of private profit. And we should measure our progress, fight by fight, strike by strike, not just by the quality of contracts won, but also by the degree to which we succeed in loosening the profiteers’ grip and steering the academy back toward a place of learning that serves everyone and society at large.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A lot’s been made of Mighty Drinks’ new series of dairy-free milk. Touted as the first in the UK to employ biomass fermentation technology, the brand has doubled down on its promise that the new line tastes just like conventional dairy. As an avid dairy drinker in my pre-vegan days, I just had to know. So I tested Mighty’s M.LKology products to see how they held up.
Known for its foremost pea protein milk, Mighty’s new range opts for a mix of pea protein, grape juice concentrate and oats. The Whole, Semi and Barista milk are made using precise or biomass fermentation — or, as Mighty calls it, Plantech. The oats are the fermented ingredient here, which helps modify the flavour without using GMOs. The range is now available in all major UK supermarkets and online.
We tested the Whole and Barista milk for this review in five applications.
We wanted to first test drinking the whole milk as is, straight from a glass. It’s strikingly similar in colour, which was a good sign. But it smells quite fruity off the bat, probably due to a combination of the grape juice and fermentation.
So I took a sip. And oh no, that is not milk. You could taste the oat if you’re a regular oat milk drinker. The pea protein isn’t noticeable but the grape juice certainly is. The M.LKology Whole is slightly sweeter than you’d expect. While it does have the consistency of whole milk, this feels more like drinking juice — and I hate using that phrase when it comes to plant-based milk.
When you heat it up, that funky, fruity flavour is very muted, with the fermented oats taking centre stage, albeit subtly. There’s a slight chemically off note, but altogether it’s bordering on a neutral flavour. It has a mellower aftertaste, but there is no way this can disguise itself as milk. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t taste bad at all, just not like milk. If you drink dairy straight from a glass, this wouldn’t cut it for you.
Result: It gets a 6/10 in my book.
I find it very hard not to like Oreo O’s. So it was only fitting to see whether the M.LKology whole milk would test my resolve. Plus, it’s a chocolate cereal, so the other important factor was to see if this would take in the chocolatey flavour as it sits.
And I’ve got to say: this is a lot better in cereal than it is plain. That chemical flavour is just slightly more pronounced here. Combined with the fruity, ferment-y notes, it’s quite a wild ride.
The milk holds the cereal well and has a perfect consistency. And it gets infinitely better as it sits, letting the chocolate infuse and seep into the whole milk’s own flavour.
Result: This is a 7/10 for me.
Time for the big guns. The Mighty M.LKology Barista is aided by more oats (non-fermented) and some coconut cream to round out the flavour and fat. Just for the sake of clarity, I tasted this plain before testing it in coffee and tea. While it doesn’t exactly taste like milk, it does have similarities in terms of the mild natural sweetness and overall neutral flavour. A lot better, then, than its Whole counterpart.
The M.LKology Barista smells incredibly dairy-like when heated up, frothing quickly and really well. Unlike some barista milk that can be overly thick, this has just the right texture when frothing. A good marker of plant-based barista milk is how well the foam holds up after being added to espresso. Here, even after more than five minutes, there’s a thick head of froth at the top. A massive plus.
While the foam itself is quite fruity — and not sweet — the flavour of the milk in the cappuccino is, for the most part, incredible. Mighty’s new Barista milk is very neutral and a great carrier for the coffee. It is wildly similar to dairy in espresso-based drinks and brings out the flavour of the coffee.
However, it is just the tiniest bit watery in both the mouthfeel and aftertaste, with a hint of that fruity flavour, too. Overall, it matches dairy functionally and just about flavour-wise too, especially with that hint of natural sweetness — so much so that my lactose-intolerant flatmate immediately winced and semi-gagged. That’s a win for what the milk is trying to do.
Result: This one’s an easy 9/10.
Getting a milk — plant-based or otherwise — right for cold brew is a tough gig. There’s a lot going on in the slow brewing process, when the coffee develops very subtle and complex flavours. Keeping those intact while elevating the overall flavour and mouthfeel is no mean feat.
The Mighty M.LKology Barista has a slightly thicker consistency when it’s cold, which means it does need a proper stir when poured into an ice-cold glass of cold brew. While still neutral and very dairy-like — with no notes of pea or that fruity fermented background whatsoever — this tastes like advanced oat milk. Which, I guess, it is?
It blends really well with the milk and amplifies the flavour of the coffee instead of overtaking it all together. And as you drink it, your palate gets familiar with the oat and it isn’t discernible. There is the slightest hit of sweetness here, which is a plus. It’s very close to dairy, but easily more oat-forward than in espresso.
Result: A solid 8/10.
I’m Indian, so tea for me is chai. There are no suffixes to that word, by the way. Maybe a prefix: instead of just dunking it cold in a mug of black tea, I took this to the holy grail of tea tests, the masala chai.
This was important both for flavour and functionality. Milk, owing to its fat content, acts as a vessel for spices to dissolve in and release their flavour molecules. Many plant-based milk options miss that mark in something like chai, where they need to both release the tea’s compounds as well as facilitate the spices. Sometimes, they’re also too watery.
This chai had cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, ginger, and cardamom, but I didn’t sweeten it because I wanted to judge the milk for itself. And to better understand it, I compared it side-by-side with full-fat oat milk.
The flavour of the M.LKology Barista does stand out. Again, it is very, very akin to dairy, but it takes over the flavour of the tea. The spices mostly get lost and muted, instead of masking any residual oat, pea or fruity flavours the milk may have.
Initially, the tea is also not as thick as it can be. That’s a shame, even if the M.LKology Barista has marginally less fat (3.2%) than its 3.4% Whole counterpart. This means that minute watery consistency is still there at the beginning. However, as it sits and cools down, the milk thickens up and makes for a better chai. And it doesn’t form a skin.
The oat milk carries the spices much better, but its flavour is too sharp and the consistency slightly thinner. It makes for an even more watery tea, which means M.LKology triumphs in the textural end. It’s mellower and easier to drink, but there’s a lot left wanting in the way of flavour.
Result: A respectable 7/10.
I’m not too sure about all the “revolutionary” talk that this range was released with — I’ve tasted better plant-based whole milk — but it is quite a stride in plant-based milk technology. The Plantech, which Mighty holds exclusive rights to, is indeed a breakthrough in the industry and a sure sign of progress.
The M.LKology Barista is particularly striking in its similarity with dairy, and it has the potential of outperforming most (not all) barista milk. That said, the M.LKology Whole won’t fool you even if you haven’t had dairy in a decade — but I know many people who won’t mind that.
The Mighty M.LKology Barista, Whole and Semi plant-based milk are available across UK supermarkets and online, retailing at £2.10.
All photos Anay Mridul for Green Queen.
The post Mighty M.LKology Review: Does The New Dairy-Free Milk Range Live Up To It’s ‘Just Like Dairy’ Promise? appeared first on Green Queen.
This post was originally published on Green Queen.
If you’re after escapist TV this summer you won’t find it in the Sex and the City reboot …And Just Like That.
Each week I tune in hoping for a glamourous date with Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte but leave deflated and increasingly cross.
I can’t help but wonder … have they changed, or have I? The miserable trio on my television have very little in common with the exuberant older women I know in my own life.
The writers of And Just Like That… have plonked our protagonists into a world they struggle to navigate, as if they’ve been cryogenically frozen in the 11 intervening years since the critically-panned film Sex and the City 2. This gap in their narrative development has also deprived them of the intellectual and emotional development they should have gained during this time.
Carrie doesn’t appear to have written any new books and now pays for her Manolo’s as a participant on a dating podcast. Far from the woman who posed scantily-clad on the side of a bus and wrote confidently about sex, she’s now a meek shell of her former self. Her famously cutting one-liners to her friends seem more bitter than sarcastic.
Miranda has quit her job as a corporate lawyer, again, and enrolled at university. We find out she hates her life, can’t get her head around race politics, and has a drinking problem.
Charlotte has not returned to work as an art dealer and is somehow more insecure than ever as a wealthy stay-at-home mother to two teenagers.
It’s clear that the writers haven’t wanted to shy away from the trials of mid-life. Illness, death, addiction, parenting horrors and career cul-de-sacs are all part of the rich tapestry of middle age. Indeed, there is Australian research indicating that just prior to menopause, women’s negative mood scores and depressive symptoms are at their highest. The good news is, that post 50, negative mood scores start to reduce for each year of increasing age. Our happiness increases to such a level as we age that some researchers have described it as a ‘superpower.’
By focusing on the hard parts of mid-life, the show has destroyed what made the original series special in the first place – the glamour and excitement of four independent women, looking for love or just a good time in the Big Apple. As I said to a friend of mine – if I wanted gritty, I’d watch a Mike Leigh documentary.
Of course, the absence of Kim Cattrall’s Samantha (who always had the best lines and the most fun) doesn’t help. Her role has been replaced in part by a supporting chorus of actresses of colour.
Nicole Ari Parker brings us Lisa Todd Wexley, a documentary maker. We also meet law professor Dr Nya Wallace and real estate broker Seema Patel. All of these characters are worldly and interesting and glamourous, in contrast to Carrie and Co. They have fantastic wardrobes, are in charge of their own careers and aren’t afraid to tell it like it is.
I see this in my own circle of friends. The forty and fifty-something women I know are heading up businesses and charities – and loving it. They’re climbing mountains and taking up mountain biking or ocean swimming. They’re enjoying relationships that have hit new strides now their children are older or moving on to new partners and experiencing deeper connections than they’d ever thought possible.
This is consistent with new research on the impact online dating apps have had on the sex lives of older women, who are having more casual sex than they’ve ‘probably ever had’. Technology allows women to feel safer when searching for potential partners, and enables them to ‘take the reins’ and control the speed of the relationship. Even more curious then, that Miranda has apparently never listened to a podcast and Carrie has to have a friend set up an online dating profile for her.
Amber believes “And Just Like That” focuses on the hard parts of mid-life and ignores the fun and exciting parts. Picture: HBO
Some of my mid-life friends have mostly eschewed dating all together and are single by choice, happy in their own spaces. They’ve grown up and discovered who they are and what they want. And they certainly aren’t wearing heel-breaking stilettos like Carrie Bradshaw. Us older women save our good heels for a big night out but get around during the day – just as Sarah Jessica Parker does when not filming – in comfortable kicks.
A better portrayal of a woman in her prime was brought to us in season two of Emily in Paris. Sylvie Grateau, former head of the Paris marketing agency Savoir (played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) was season one’s villain, but is fleshed out further in the second season. Blunt, intelligent and drop-dead gorgeous, she has a refreshing intolerance for Emily’s selfish antics and is more emotionally vulnerable than we first thought. Here’s a show that marries the glamour of one of the world’s most beautiful cities with high fashion and escapist, high-saccharine drama. A little bit like Sex and the City used to.
As a budding journalist, I once wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw when I grew up. But then I grew up, and realized I feel a bit sorry for who Carrie has become. It’s only halfway through the season, so I hope things soon look up for our protagonists. Mid-life isn’t a bed of roses, but it’s not a misery-fest either. And in the meantime, we still have Paris.
The post Why ‘And Just Like That’ fails older women appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
Labour published a dossier on Tory defence spending this week. It shows the Tories have wasted billions of pounds on military projects over the last ten years. But the report isn’t quite the ‘gotcha’ Labour thinks it is, because the party isn’t much better itself. This is especially true when it comes to its own military plans.
There’s no doubt Labour’s Dossier of Waste makes some good points. It lists multiple, terrible examples of massive sums being wasted on defence projects. Some of the most ridiculous include:
Clearly, Labour has a point. There does look like massive waste. And according to the report:
None of its [the MOD’s] 36 major projects are rated ‘green’ – meaning that the project is on time and in budget – which makes it the worst performing department in Whitehall, with the lowest proportion of projects rated green.
But there’s more to this debate than Labour = good and Tories = bad. Labour’s alternative vision also has shortcomings. For a start, it leaves out the massive cost of the wars which Labour started in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) general secretary Kate Hudson levelled her own criticisms too, telling the Morning Star:
Labour calling for ‘better management’ of vast and wasteful spending on increasing militarisation is just completely missing the point.
Britain needs to spend on health, on climate change, on infrastructure – meeting the needs of the people, not ratcheting up global tensions and pouring money into military hardware.
Stop the War Coalition convenor Lindsey German also weighed in:
It is a travesty for Labour politicians to complain that we need nuclear warheads developed more quickly and more tanks aimed at killing working people in other countries.
They should be arguing for less money on militarism and weapons, and more on housing, education and healthcare.
She added that it was time to learn the lesson of recent wars:
That would both improve the security of millions of people and show recognition that the 21st-century wars have only made the world much more dangerous.
Clearly, Tory overspending on military equipment is a real problem. Yet, according to some, Labour is hardly likely to be better. What’s needed is an entirely different approach to accountability. We also need an entirely new set of spending priorities. Priorities which move away from massive military projects and towards real-life, bread-and-butter security issues like health, transport, and education.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Cpl Holt, cropped to 770 x 403.
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
“There is no them, there is only us,” says filmmaker Alex Gibney reflecting on the story of Abu Zubaydah, a torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner who is the focus of his HBO documentary, The Forever Prisoner. Expanding on this, he poses a challenge: “If we believe in that idea, how can we imprison a man without charge for the remainder of his life — not for what he did to us, but for what we did to him?” In this statement made at the conclusion of the documentary, Gibney explicitly notes that the empirical measure of which values the United States truly upholds is its own behavior, alone — without justifications rooted in the concept of a real or imagined “them.” This truth is powerfully evident when we look at the U.S.’s use of torture. However, The Forever Prisoner deeply buries this powerful and necessary point. The film, ostensibly focused on Zubaydah, ultimately seems to use him as a narrative tool, while ignoring the ongoing brutal harms against him and all victims of the “war on terror.”
As a longtime researcher, writer and organizer focused on closing Guantánamo Bay and ending torture, I was anticipating a film that would provide new insight and perspectives on Zubaydah’s case in the context of the 20-year anniversary of 9/11 and the resulting war on terror. While The Forever Prisoner did reveal some new and lesser-known details surrounding the case, nothing in it fundamentally altered the known contours of Zubaydah’s story. Similarly, the film’s details offered no truly new perspectives on the “enhanced interrogation program,” in premise or implementation, nor the underlying fact that there has not been (nor is there ever likely to be, without a truly dramatic shift) genuine accountability for its abuses.
Zubaydah himself is absent from the film — as the title suggests, he remains in custody and incommunicado — and little new information is provided about his case. Instead, the film’s main emphasis is Gibney’s reflection on how the United States could have engaged in this conduct, a reflection that has been aired many times over the years. Even before the war on terror and its particular abuses, the United States has consistently retreated to empty assertions of its unique values in order to whitewash state violence, and documentary explorations of the tension between how the U.S. sees itself and its actual actions abound. Instead of exceptionalizing Zubaydah’s case in order to retread this well-worn path, Gibney might have done better exploring the trajectory of the violence Zubaydah and other war on terror prisoners have experienced in the context of how, if it is even possible, to chart a way forward. Instead, he remains fixated on who the U.S. is, its identity and values, rather than reckoning with what it does, the costs of its actions and the possibility of a different future. For viewers like me, this documentary offered little hope of that possibility.
In fact, it is unclear who constitutes Gibney’s intended audience. For those with a prior interest in and engagement with these issues, the information it provides will be mostly basic and familiar; for the uninitiated, it will be chock-full of complex and confusing details. More fundamentally, given the public’s highly polarized opinions about the U.S.’s conduct in the war on terror and detention and torture, this documentary faced a high bar if it aims to disrupt existing perceptions held by militaristic conservatives. Unfortunately, nothing in The Forever Prisoner feels urgent enough to pose a real challenge to the viewer’s existing moral compass, even in the unlikely event that those who firmly believe the U.S. is justified in taking any extreme measures in fighting terrorism, end up somehow watching it.
Abu Zubaydah was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. At the time, the U.S. claimed he was the number three person in al-Qaeda, but the government has since acknowledged that he was not in fact part of the organization at all, but instead operated independently. After his capture, Zubaydah was flown to a series of CIA “black sites” around the world and subjected to a systematic program of brutal torture, which would come to be euphemized as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The documentary focuses on the time Zubaydah spent at the site where he was initially taken into CIA custody, in Thailand.
The beginning of the documentary is structured around interagency tensions as the FBI and the CIA wrangled over who would conduct the interrogation of Zubaydah and the parameters of allowable techniques. Much of the testimony offered comes from former FBI agent Ali Soufan, whose experience interrogating Zubaydah is presented as a humane contrast to the CIA’s tactics and the recommendations of two privately contracted psychologists. By giving Soufan such a large platform, the film contributes to the bizarre construction of the FBI as the moral force in the war on terror, but this is far from the only pitfall.
While the documentary centers the wonky details of FBI-CIA power struggles, the specific abuses that Zubaydah endured — which included being chained to a chair naked, subjected to loud music, denied clothing while in his freezing old cell, long periods of sleep deprivation followed by long interrogations, and confinement within a small enclosed box — form a visual backdrop. Because Zubaydah cannot speak for himself, we hear from him via excerpts from his journal and drawings he has done documenting his suffering. While the visuals are striking, the film rarely pauses to allow the viewer to absorb the sheer inhumanity of the torture Zubaydah endured. Instead, these visuals often seem to be used merely to highlight points of conflict between the various government actors who appear in person. In this way, his suffering is reduced to a narrative tool, his physical being more an exhibit than a human body.
Despite the title, The Forever Prisoner, the film rarely calls attention to Zubaydah’s continuing plight, focusing heavily on his first few years in U.S. custody and not on the horrible limbo of indefinite detention in which he remains. This, too, seems to be a symptom of Gibney’s centering of the intelligence community and its internal conflicts. The bigger question of just how deeply the U.S. could dehumanize and brutalize the “other,” including through the use of Zubaydah’s torture as a blueprint for the abuse of other war on terror prisoners, plays a much smaller role in a film that views these issues primarily through the lens of legality, politics, and, ultimately what all of this says about “American values.” Gibney appears to be exploring Zubaydah’s story as a way of workshopping the conceptual discrepancy between U.S. conduct and U.S. values — specifically in service of restoring the identity claimed by the U.S.
In contrasting the early behavior of FBI interrogators with the CIA-promoted tactics that were eventually adopted, Gibney returns often to the question of whether the enhanced interrogation techniques actually yielded valuable intelligence. The answer, of course, is that torture rarely results in anything other than the victim saying whatever the interrogator wants them to say. It is striking, however, that in all of the discussion about the relative worth of the intelligence gathered versus the human cost, the film glosses almost completely over the fact this particular “high-value detainee” was not remotely a top-connected terrorist mastermind. Somewhat shockingly, the fact that Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all, much less in the top three of its leadership, is not even mentioned until minute 1:26 of the two-hour film.
Another major voice in the documentary is CIA-contracted psychologist James Mitchell, who is largely considered the primary scapegoat offered by the government in the fallout when the torture program became public knowledge. The portrait offered of Mitchell, while not especially sympathetic, is that of a fully fleshed-out human being, who tears up at one point when reflecting on how his work has been used to systematize and normalize torture — which from his perspective is treatment that is far worse than the tactics he designed. Here again, the viewer is struck by the dissonance between the absent or essentialized Zubaydah, and the platform provided for someone who played such an instrumental role in his torture, and, despite the tears, fails to demonstrate true remorse. Not only is he unapologetic, he also outright refuses to call the tactics utilized in enhanced interrogation program “torture,” after more than a decade and an entire report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA torture in 2014. This reflects a fundamental way in which The Forever Prisoner falls short — the lack of genuine compassion directed toward Zubaydah, and the complete erasure of the way in which his ordeal set the framework for the torture of countless Muslims stands in stark contrast to the nuanced exploration of the interactions between and feelings of government actors.
At the end of the film, Gibney reflects, “Twenty years after 9/11, I’m stirred to remember the innocents that died on that day. But I’m also stirred to remember the purpose of that vicious attack. It wasn’t to win a war. It was to provoke us to abandon the principles of democracy we claim to live by. The Forever Prisoner is a living reminder of one of the ideals we abandoned: equal justice under the law.” This statement circles back to Gibney’s central goal — using Abu Zubaydah’s story to illustrate the disparity between the U.S.’s purported values and its lived ones. After everything we have seen about Zubaydah’s torture, however, equal justice under the law hardly seems to be an appropriate starting point for analysis. Differential treatment under the law is an entirely different category — Zubaydah’s story is not about unequal justice, but the absence of justice altogether. What happened to Zubaydah is what happens when the naive belief that the U.S. operates with any integrity persists in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
As Zubaydah continues to be detained at Guantánamo with no progress whatsoever toward the resolution of his case, the shortcomings of the documentary The Forever Prisoner stand as a reminder that justice delayed is justice denied. After 20 years of the war on terror, there is little reason to believe that the U.S. can be redeemed, but honestly acknowledging harm should be a goal worth pursuing in and of itself. Unfortunately, Gibney’s film falls far short of this goal, by ignoring the tangible harms of the war on terror in favor of repairing the identity of the state.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Strong Female Lead is a very powerful documentary, depicting the highs and lows of Julia Gillard’s life as our first female Prime Minister.
Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female Prime Minister in 2010, many years after numerous other countries had a female Prime Minister. The first was in 1960 – Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and she was re-elected three times.
For many, Julia Gillard’s elevation to PM was a time to celebrate that finally Australia had a woman as Prime Minister, and in the words of Anne Summers ‘there was palpable joy,’ she was very popular, and seeing our first female Governor General, Quentin Bryce, swear in Julia Gillard as Prime Minister was a potent image for little girls – Women can lead!
I have to ask: “Was Australia really ready, were we as a country sophisticated enough to deserve a female Prime Minister?”
We know that in Australia, women politicians are hyper-scrutinised on their appearance, on what they wear, whether they have or plan to have children in comparison to male politicians. Australian women politicians have recently shared their views of the sexism, harassment and misogynistic behaviour that reigns in parts of Australian Parliaments.
Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, left, with Australia’s twenty-fifth Governor-General, Quentin Bryce. Picture: Supplied/SBS
As Prime Minister, the sexist, often misogynistic media abuse that Julia Gillard experienced was on another level. As shown in this documentary series, this was often rank abuse, disrespect and rudeness which was evidenced everywhere – online, on the radio, television, in comedy sketches and at public rallies. While the media have a lot to answer for, so too had Tony Abbott with his behaviour, continual references to Lady MacBeth and condoning his Party’s gross dinner references to Julia Gillard with his silence. As noted on the video “no one in the party room has taken Tony Abbott to task”.
As stated by Blair Williams (2017):
Gillard was punished for the way she became the Prime Minister … seen to have “stabbed” Rudd, despite him standing down when she openly and legitimately… challenged him. It is important to remember that political coups are quite common and have happened many times in the recent past…However, no previous politician who committed similar acts has faced such public scrutiny and gendered criticism as Gillard.
Remember that Turnbull was seen to have taken the reins in deposing Abbott, but Julia Gillard was disloyal and backstabbing.
When Julia Gillard finally responded to Tony Abbott’s continued disrespectful behaviour and gave what has become known as her ‘misogyny speech’, this was swiftly picked up internationally as inspiring and barnstorming, scoring millions of hits on Youtube, sparking a global feminist response, while being largely ignored by Australian media.. Julia Gillard concluded “This Parliament today should think seriously about the role of women in public life and in Australian society, because we are entitled to a better standard than this”.
I concur that she was right: Australian women did and still do deserve a better standard.
Prior to calling the ballot which led to Kevin Rudd’s return, it was reported that some men were upset by the re-emergence of the gender debate, and Julia Gillard’s support was greatly diminishing. History will undoubtedly recognise Julia Gillard’s extraordinary legislative productiveness of 580 pieces of legislation being passed.
Some in the media admitted that Julia Gillard was treated very differently, and she noted “bemusement about admissions from some media colleagues that she had suffered more pressure as a result of her gender, than other PMs in the past, but then concluded that it had zero effect on her political position…”
It should be noted that it was the Independent, Rob Oakeshott who congratulated Julia for her time as Prime Minister, not Abbott, commenting on the disgusting words and ugly behaviour. He expressed belief in Australia’s future being better, also stating: “But we’ve got to deal with ugly Australia.”
In answer to my earlier question: were we ready or sophisticated enough? – No, but I do hope that we might be more prepared next time.
Combining two of her quotes I conclude:
“Smashing through a glass ceiling is a dangerous pursuit; it is hard not to get lacerated on the way through … [though] what I am absolutely confident of is it will be easier for the next woman and the woman after that and the woman after that. And I’m proud of that.”
She also added that for any woman who wishes to follow her into politics she urges them to jump right in!
Thank you to Julia Gillard and to SBS for this powerful, engaging and at times enraging documentary. Watch it on SBS on Demand here.
Feature image: Picture supplied by SBS.
The post Review: Strong Female Lead on SBS appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
I was looking forward to 7:30’s Why Women are Angry, hosted by Leigh Sales (pictured), because there is some morbid comfort in having my rage diagnosed back to me. But while watching, I realized the simple answer to the question “why women are angry” is because we ARE STILL HAVING THIS DISCUSSION.
I watched in foot stomping frustration as women I know and respect articulately, and with so much evidence, laid out all the disadvantage and obstruction faced by diverse women. They laid out the exact same things I have heard them put forward before. They pointed out the same things I and countless others have pointed out time and again. They drew from the same pile of evidence we all draw from in our desperation for anyone to believe us.
And as the episode unfolded, we fell into our standard formation, noting the good bits and the fresh takes. Squirreling away links to use later, sharing resources to back up key points or arm ourselves against the inevitable backlash. Thinking, maybe this time there will be cut through. Maybe this time, with these facts.
I won’t repeat the facts here – 7:30, which produced the series, is doing an excellent job. But also, I’m kind of sick of repeating those facts – how much evidence must women produce to have their basic humanity recognized? To have their need for safety, voice and participation taken seriously?
Women are angry because we are stuck in a Cassandra-esque nightmare in which we cannot convince policy makers and the not-all-men brigade to acknowledge our present dire situation, let alone convince anyone to plan for a better future for women.
The title Why Women are Angry doesn’t even get close, really. It could be more accurately titled Why Women are Seething Infernos of Incandescent Rage. Or Why Women Aren’t Shoving Those Who Don’t Believe Them Down a Well – this would at least recognize the restraint we are collectively showing.
But anger is not a bad thing. People sometimes ask me what gives me hope that we can make better progress on gender equality. I usually reference the way my daughter and her friends unapologetically embrace their rage. They have watched us closely as we put forward the evidence, patiently articulated the issues, navigated the systems and structures that weren’t built for or by us. They have seen that this has been too slow, with too little impact. And they are calling bullsh*t. Not in an embarrassed way, but in way that says ‘anger is the natural consequence of my oppression, deal with it’.
This gives me hope because anger can be a powerfully clarifying sweet spot between frustration and despair. In frustration we ask WHY are things are like this? If we flip too far into despair, we feel powerless to do anything. But if we hover around in anger, the space emerges to realize things MUST change, that we can take action, and that there may be a future in which people regret making us this cranky.
I find hope in anger because anger makes people uncomfortable – this is one of the reasons we’re told as women to control or hide our anger. I want people to be uncomfortable because discomfort is necessary for change.
Most of all, anger is energizing. My anger is what stops the bone crunching fatigue of this fight flattening me forever. I hold on my anger it because it is useful. Women are told that anger is bad; that our selfcare and resilience relies on us letting go of anger. I disagree. I have a daily act of rejuvenation to keep me going – every morning, before my feet hit the floor, I whisper to myself ‘Remember that you are angry’.
Watch ABC TV’s ‘Why Women are Angry’ on iview.
Feature image: ABC TV’s Leigh Sales. Picture: Supplied
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This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
If you enjoy bursting into rage induced flame, but in pocket sized installments and with a glimmer of hope at the end, you can’t go past Kate Fitz-Gibbon’s Our National Shame: Violence Against Women; Jill Hennessy’s Respect; Fiona McLeod’s Easy Lies and Influence and Enough is Enough by Kate Thwaites and Jenny Macklin. Part of Monash University’s In The National Interest series, these four volumes by seriously credible women hit the spot in providing an accessible unpacking of major challenges facing Australia.
I reviewed these books with the help of my daughter, third year university student Bridie. She read each one in a single sitting, while I read them in snatched moments between meetings or at night – and unusually for me, I managed to read these in bed without falling asleep.
Each volume explores distinct issues of men’s violence against women, slow (but better than appreciated) progress on gender equality, the erosion of respect and empathy in public discourse, and the dangerous normalization of lies and corruption. While not intended as a set per se, they loosely converge on the intersecting issues of misogyny, violence, disrespect and corruption that undermine democracy and trust, and erode the human right to reach our full potential in a life free from violence, governed by those with our best interests at heart. It’s worth reading them together, as I found they spoke to each other in unexpected ways.
Fitz-Gibbon, pictured above. critiques ‘compassion fatigue’ in the face of seemingly endless violence against women while McLeod observes we are ‘paralyzed by the inability of institutions and government to self-regulate’ as we sleepwalk into normalized corruption. Thwaites and Macklin critique the myth of merit from the point of view of women’s representation, while McLeod suggests that corruption frequently overtakes merit in political and other appointments.
Hennessy, Fitz-Gibbon, and Thwaites and Macklin all speak to way gender inequality undermines respect, potential and safety – recalling Rosie and Luke Batty, Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame, the March for Justice and Gillard’s Misogyny speech – familiar signposts in our recent history. At their core, all four books have a narrative thread related to decency and respect – for women, for each other, for democracy.
And while all four are steeped in head-shaking despair, they also point to solutions or ways out.
At 85 pages or less, Bride and I both felt that the books jumped around a bit – but in fairness, if you are going to cover the horrors of humanity in under 100 pages, you need to be nimble. But these books definitely deliver. While Bridie felt these books fit into a library of information she already has, and so wouldn’t recommend them to those who are already well informed, she would certainly give them to anyone who was unclear or hesitant about the significance of these issues, including men.
Conversely, as someone who thinks about these issues for a job, I liked the way these books easily consolidated the swirling thoughts and anger I have about these topics.
And these books show the receipts, presenting excellent references as protection against any attempt to minimize or mansplain away the issues.
As smaller books, they are less intimidating. As Bridie observed, “Books this serious should be this size because it makes them less threatening. Imagine if that was an A5 or bigger book – it would just stress you out.” And with a foldable front and back jacket to use as a bookmark, you can mark your place and put the books down any time it’s just too much.
Worthy of discussion, read these with a friend or book club, or buy copies for the doubters in your life. They are an excellent contribution and well worth the read.
In the National Interest is a new book series Monash University Publishing list that focuses on the challenges confronting Australia.
With thanks to Bridie Milthorpe.
The post Review: Boil your blood, focus your mind appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
“100 years of ‘firsts’: The story of women in Australian parliaments started with a blunder from an inept man with a not-quite-so-ingenious plan.”
Ebenezer Ward, an anti-women’s rights politician thought he would ‘kill the bill’ by adding the right to stand for Parliament. How wrong he was – the Bill passed 31 to 14.
With the ABC’s Ms Represented, host Annabel Crabb presents us with a very powerful and important series about women in Australian politics, one hundred years after Australia elected its very first female parliamentarian. She takes us from Votes for Women, through the years in-between, to today’s Parliament and women politicians’ experiences now.
Ms Represented begins powerfully and refreshingly with our women politicians literally rejoicing in how the women in South Australia became the most enfranchised women anywhere in the world, being granted the rights to both vote and stand for Parliament on 18 December 1894. Although Aboriginal Women were also able to vote, it was not always made easy for them to do so. We hear later how Aboriginal women (and men), amongst others, were appallingly denied voting rights in Federal elections in the Franchise Act of 1902.
Annabel cleverly interviews these leading, prominent politicians through each episode, using an extraordinary collection of vignettes to depict significant issues that arose within our Parliament over the years and how our Parliamentary women had to deal with them. All the women express very similar experiences of their time in Parliament, despite their varied political alliances. One states that Parliament has ‘the most unsafe workplace culture in the country’ without any code of conduct. It has been hard for women politicians to take a stand on the abuse of power and misogyny in Parliament, as they are expected to publicly support and defend their party’s stance. However, when leading women stay silent, the message communicated to others who are similarly suffering is to do nothing.
From the beginning, there have been four hurdles for women entering Parliament:
Undoubtedly we need “the best person for the job”, and they insist it is decided on merit, but were all the male politicians really selected on merit? Amanda Vanstone expressed her strong opinion on this!
The question of gender quotas has been endlessly debated:
Different standards are applied when reporting on women in politics, especially when the woman in question is Julia Gillard. She was judged on appearance rather than policy or the economy and ‘one image brought the suggestion that she wasn’t fit to serve.’
Women as change agents is not seen as the norm however, as Annabel shows, Australia has had many such women.
Annabel, WOW and thank you, you’ve done it again, and this time with a real BOOM. The timing of this series is highly relevant and appropriate for all Australian women, in this year and even this month.
I say this because our Federal Parliament’s unregulated workplace culture has been exposed and shown to be dangerous; both older and current women politicians have spoken out; Brittany Higgins’ spoke of her experience; the Women of Australia (plus many men) Marched saying #Enough! But what has happened? – It appears to be very little or NOTHING. So, regretfully, Annabel’s message is indeed timely.
Watch the whole Ms Represented series on iview.
The post Review: ABC TV’s Ms Represented appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo memoir, Guantánamo Diary, is a book of remarkable power. Written during his incarceration and heavily redacted in its first editions, Slahi’s story speaks with first-hand authority of the horror, degradation and brutality of life inside Guantánamo. It has the gravity of a historically significant document of state torture and the rich, intimate texture of a profoundly personal story.
The same cannot really be said of Kevin MacDonald’s film adaptation of it, The Mauritanian, which was released earlier this year. Though culture site Tatler called the movie “excellent,” and French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim’s turn as Slahi has been roundly praised, the critical response has been fairly muted, certainly in comparison to the widespread acclaim that greeted Slahi’s book. The Guardian, for instance, said that the movie “is content with congratulating itself for being on the right side of history.” British right-of-center broadsheet The Telegraph called it “no-one’s idea of a thrill,” and film magazine Empire labelled it “well-intentioned but somewhat dull.” Despite the involvement of Hollywood heavy-hitters Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch in key roles, the film has failed to set the world on fire.
And yet, many of the reviews have so far failed to notice one particularly intriguing aspect of The Mauritanian. Like dour thrillers of the early years of the “war on terror” such as Gavin Hood’s Rendition, which raise complex problems only to defuse them when prisoners are rescued and the dastardly senators responsible for the torture program get what they deserve, The Mauritanian is an oddly unsatisfying exposé of the torture program. In fact, its limitations reveal very clearly the political limits of much liberal critique of Guantánamo. Bob Brecher, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Brighton, U.K., cautions against “the liberal conceit that there is a simple relationship between what torture is and how it is represented,” adding that “liberal good intentions and their ideological consequences” are often overlooked in the discussion of torture. The Mauritanian is a particularly good example of the lack of depth found in much liberal condemnation of Guantánamo.
Any filmic critique of Guantánamo is, of course, welcome and politically important. The 20-year history of the American island gulag, and the post-9/11 torture program of which it remains the most well-known manifestation, are some of the most important and enduring political scandals of the modern age. And yet they risk losing urgency for many people due to the labyrinthine complexity of the political issues at stake and, frankly, the boredom factor that results from the grinding slowness and obscurity of the legal process.
The Mauritanian, then, as a film that accessibly exposes the violence of the torture regime and the legal wrangling involved with defending people accused of terrorism — and that humanizes a detainee in the process! — does valuable and necessary work. But it is the parameters of what the film is and is not able to criticize that really makes it interesting.
One of The Mauritanian’s strongest scenes comes roughly two-thirds of the way into the story. Slahi’s ACLU lawyer, Nancy Hollander (Foster) and his military prosecutor-in-waiting, Stuart Couch (Cumberbatch), have both been running into insurmountable obstacles when investigating Slahi’s case. Finally, they each encounter authoritative unredacted documentation of the horrendous torture that was committed against Slahi. As we, the audience, see this degrading treatment from his perspective, the two other lead characters read about it and finally experience a powerful revelation about the shocking torture and routine cruelty that characterize life in Guantánamo. A later scene stages a similar revelation as Slahi gets his day in court and testifies via video link from Guantánamo. He is articulate, dignified, funny and humble; his humanity, as they say, shines through, and soon enough his case is dismissed and he is declared eligible for release. These scenes are interesting because they stage a certain idea about scandal. The truth is exposed, and then, as a direct and uncomplicated consequence, justice is done. Once Couch realizes that Slahi was tortured, he refuses to prosecute the case; once the court sees that Slahi is innocent, he is declared free to go.
Such an understanding of scandal is not only oversimplified, but misleading. Jamie Johnson, a scholar of militarization working in Leicester, U.K., writes that scandal is integral to the way that we understand modern war. This is because the gesture which marks some violent acts (i.e., war crimes, extraordinary rendition, torture) as excessive also marks others as acceptable. That is, when we “expose the truth,” we are not, of course, allowing the light of truth to directly shine through on its own: we are staging a very particular narrative aimed at specific people and for a specific audience, a narrative which draws boundaries around what we are and are not willing to criticize.
He continues:
This form of critique, in which ‘excesses’ are exposed and corrected through official channels of accountability, often works to limit how we understand and respond to certain events. Take, for example, the idea of the war crime. The category of the war crime asserts that there are certain ‘excessive’ acts of violence that are scandalous. However, if you can commit a ‘crime’ against war then presumably there are other forms of violence that are ‘on the right side of the line’. The function of this category is therefore to implicitly endorse and accept these other forms of ‘unremarkable’ state-sanctioned violence. We must therefore be careful not to approach practices of torture and rendition in the Global War on Terror as a scandalous ‘excess’. Doing so fails to do justice to the pervasive harms and injustices that have been done to people around the world in the name of fighting terror.
The Mauritanian is interesting because it highlights government-sanctioned atrocities but also simultaneously emphasizes their solution: Bush and Cheney are beaten in court because the justice system functions effectively enough to check executive power. The story is, therefore, misleadingly positive, ending on a high note in which American justice prevails. Anybody familiar with Guantánamo will tell you that this is emphatically not the message to take from Guantánamo.
What is more, by ending on Slahi’s triumph in court, The Mauritanian only tells the story of roughly half of Slahi’s time in Guantánamo. Slahi was detained for 15 years under Presidents Bush and Obama, but the movie ends eight years into his illegal detention after he wins a landmark legal case against the Bush administration in which he is granted the right of habeas corpus. His seven more years in Guantánamo, when this right was withheld at Obama’s express instruction, are reduced to three brief title cards at the end of the film.
This is especially ironic given that the film is centrally concerned with redaction. Whole pages of Slahi’s book were blacked out in its first edition, with the selective removal of crucial details and sentences throughout the book making many other parts of it incredibly difficult to follow (this is, of course, the point of redaction). Likewise, when Hollander finally gets access to the legal files that she needs to defend Slahi, it is box after box after box of redacted documentation.
Though it foregrounds government censorship, The Mauritanian, too, is a redacted version of Slahi’s story. Slahi himself is pleased with the adaptation, though he acknowledges that the prison environment and savage mistreatment depicted in the movie is “like the soft version of Guantánamo Bay.” But nobody would ask for the torture scenes to be any grimmer: most importantly, the film forces a generic and sentimental legal thriller happy ending, which is inappropriate given the horrendous and damning facts of Slahi’s case.
The final movement of the film is dedicated to Slahi’s triumphant courtroom speech and his subsequent joy at the judge’s decision in his favor. This framing of the story emphasizes Slahi’s victory against the evil Bush and Cheney at the expense of any examination of Obama or Biden’s complicity in the continuing scandal of Guantánamo. Slahi has become known for his extraordinary capacity for forgiveness — “I’ve wholeheartedly forgiven everyone,” he has said — and it is undoubtedly true that there is something powerful, and moving, about this. But for The Mauritanian to reproduce this forgiveness echoes Obama’s policy of “looking forward rather than backward” — that is, his policy of refusing to prosecute the perpetrators and architects of the torture program. Slahi’s personal, spiritual act of forgiveness, however inspirational, does not license a distorted or selective account of the political responsibility for Guantánamo, which is shared by both Republicans and Democrats.
Of course, no movie can get everything right. In a 2017 article on the 2014 Senate Torture Report, Lucia H. Seyfarth writes, quite reasonably, that “truth-telling is an area where the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.” But this omission of the more systematic complicity of U.S. policy, politics and society really matters. It exonerates Obama of his most important broken promise, and it makes Guantánamo seem a uniquely Republican atrocity, when in fact, Guantánamo and the torture program are emblematic of the overreach, impunity and atrocity of U.S. empire that is served by politicians on all sides of party politics.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the wrong hands, a comedic story about a white man defending his heritage and land against an ambitious Native community could have proven disastrous. In the beginning, I was skeptical of “Rutherford Falls,” the Peacock streaming network’s groundbreaking new Native sitcom, even though I saw cause for excitement. The show features a talented Lakota Sioux lead and a Navajo co-creator, and half of the show’s writers are Native, all of which sounded promising. But I had learned not to get my hopes up.
I love television, but as a Native person, I have come to expect the worst from Hollywood when it comes to representation. Native people in film and television often meet predictable fates. Natives suffer, die horribly, or simply serve to illustrate some sort of moral or spiritual lesson for the benefit of white characters and audiences. Native characters in TV and film are rarely layered or complex, and they almost never feel as though they are crafted for us. But even beyond these hesitations, I had concerns about the premise of “Rutherford Falls.” The idea of building a comedic conflict around the potential removal of a settler monument struck me as questionable after the events of the last year. After all, I live in Chicago, where an infamous statue of Columbus was removed in 2020, only after police brutalized hundreds of protesters in one of the city’s bloodiest protests within my lifetime.
As a Native person, I have a lot of baggage around monuments, and not simply because of the problematic historical figures they tend to commemorate. Monuments themselves play into the ongoing heartbreak around Native representation. Here in Chicago, Native people, and other city dwellers, regularly drive and walk past a sculpture that includes the likeness of a Native man’s corpse on one of our city’s most famous bridges — the DuSable Bridge, which is named after Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Black man who is widely regarded as the founder of our city. Du Sable was considered Potawatomi kin, due to his marriage to a Native woman named Kitihawa, and yet, a bridge bearing his name includes a commemoration of Native slaughter.
Whether in statues or in cinema or television, an emphasis is often placed on Native death, defeat or surrender.
But in “Rutherford Falls,” we see something different. The show’s delightful lead character, Reagan Wells, is played by Jana Schmieding, a Lakota Sioux comedian who is also a member of the show’s writing team. In a recent conversation, Schmieding told me, “A lot of the storytelling this season was about what happens when we’re not growing and letting our minds be changed” and about what can happen “when we dig our heels in.”
At first, Reagan’s best friend, Nathan Rutherford, played by Ed Helms, seems like a stand-in for Leslie Knope, in what could be a diversified reimagining of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.” From the show’s outset, Nathan champions the settler history of his town, and his family, by way of his museum, and by defending a statue of his ancestor, “Big Larry.” In a gentle, but not quite subtle nod to the controversies around settler monuments in the United States, cars keep crashing into “Big Larry,” because the statue is positioned in the middle of a street. The idea that the statue no longer make sense in the world that’s sprung up around it would, by itself, be a pretty hollow nod to the politics of the moment, but the story broadens over time, to reveal that the history behind “Big Larry” might be uglier than Nathan believes, and that, to the area’s Native inhabitants, the fictitious Minishonka tribe, the controversy is an opportunity, and a potential source of leverage in a fight to reclaim their land and history.
Reagan is a Northwestern-educated “city Indian” who runs a modest cultural center in the Minishonka casino, but she is determined to garner funding for a proper museum to document her people’s history. She also labors, over the course of the season, to hold her friendship with Nathan together, as his attachment to “Big Larry” and his family’s place in local history, puts him at odds with the ambitions of the Minishonka.
Some critics have found fault with the idea that Reagan would be close friends with a character like Nathan — an, at times, downright petulant white man, who takes an absurd level of pride in his family’s settler mythology — but such objections overlook a fundamental reality of the Native experience in the United States. If we didn’t learn to form social connections with people who idealized settler mythologies, we would have a hard time forming many relationships at all. The majority of Native people do not live on reservations. We live, work and go to school with people who pledge allegiance to the flag, and who are brought up on folktales about our “founding fathers” that conveniently omit the role such figures played in the genocide of our people. As Vincent Schilling, an associate editor at Indian Country Today, noted on NPR, “Like it or not, there are a lot of Nathan Rutherfords out there.”
But as Schmieding told me, the friendship between Nathan and Reagan represents a real tension that Native people navigate in the U.S. While few white people would admit seeing themselves in Nathan Rutherford, Schmieding points out that many white people venerate the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Native people as “merciless Indian savages.” Schmieding notes that the relationship between Nathan and Reagen illustrates that “there’s so much that we’re not saying” to the people in our lives about how their mythologies and nostalgia dehumanize us.
It would be convenient if Nathan represented conservatism, but his pompous devotion to settler mythology feels as compatible with liberalism as it does with conservatism — a persona Schilling characterized as a “goofy wannabe ally.” The character Josh Carter, an NPR podcaster who serves as Reagan’s love interest, also represents the limitations of white liberal solidarity. While Josh believes in Reagan and avidly supports her aspirations, he eventually uses a story on his podcast that he only has access to because of Reagan, even though she asks him not to air it. This adds an extractive element to their relationship. In spite of his caring intentions, Josh can’t resist the opportunity to advance his own agenda. This is a dynamic Native people know all too well.
Some of the show’s best moments showcase the acting chops of Michael Greyeyes, who plays Terry, the head of the Minishonka casino, and the mastermind of the tribe’s plan to disrupt the balance of power in Rutherford Falls. As a strategist and eventual mentor to Reagan, Terry is an avowed capitalist, but makes a distinction between corporate capitalism, where riches are hoarded at the top, and what he calls “tribal capitalism,” where casino revenue is more widely redistributed through community investment. Terry’s flashbacks of selling lemonade and brownies as a child, and learning painful lessons about economic exploitation, are deeply affecting. However, I found myself wishing they circled back to a more damning message about capitalism over all. Terry’s masterplan for the Minishonka rests on the hope that you can repossess the master’s house with the master’s tools. “Power is a zero-sum game,” Terry tells Josh during a tense interview. “If you have more of it, I have less, and then you can treat me however you want.”
The show offers some pushback on Terry’s capitalist philosophy, in the form of his teen daughter Maya’s unwillingness to commodify her elaborate beadwork, including pieces that resemble modern emojis. But that pushback is gentle, brief and mostly sentimental. However, even as I found myself wishing for more complexity, I was reminded that this is, in fact, a mainstream sitcom, and that I don’t generally expect the white-led shows I watch to forcefully problematize capitalism. Terry is a complex character who eviscerates white hypocrisy about what he has done to navigate a world with rules that are set against him. That, in itself, is refreshing.
The show’s imperfect characters engage with weighty ideas imperfectly, and beg questions that many of us are grappling with in the real world, while also prompting us to laugh at ourselves, each other and our politics. Representation is not revolutionary, but it can break open new possibilities. And while the show itself may not be radical, Jana Schmieding certainly brings a radical imagination to the project.
At a time when activists are campaigning to defund the police, Schmieding does not mince words about her position on the subject. “I consider myself an abolitionist,” Schmieding told me. “And I’m always learning, and I’m always reading and doing my best to expand that vision. And what that requires of us, I believe, is a great deal of imagination.”
Activists who believe in the abolition of police and prisons often frame their organizing as a creative process. Imagining a world without the carceral state, where Black people are not surveilled or imprisoned, and where Native people can experience sovereignty, is part of Schmieding’s creative journey. “A lot of the work around writing and television is world building,” she told me. The exploratory process of writing allows Schmieding to imagine “truly being free.”
Schmieding acknowledges she’s in a “in a place of privilege [to] not be encountering daily violence, and to not be a person who is behind bars, to have my daily needs met, and to be able to have the freedom to think creatively about these things.” When discussing abolition, Schmieding says, “I try very hard to apply it to my life as a Native woman, and how that manifests is talking about sovereignty of the body and looking at my own oppressions and how to liberate myself from them, and how to liberate my family and my loved ones from the traumas that we’ve experienced, and also how am I advocating for others, and how am I using my positionality to reflect these viewpoints.” That advocacy includes recognizing the connections between the Native struggle in the U.S. and international anti-colonial movements. “Now, I’m learning more about the ongoing struggle for freedom in Palestine and I’m seeing a lot of the links there as well,” she told me.
Schmieding emphasizes the role of creativity in all of this — both imagining and creating a different world.
As a political comedy, “Rutherford Falls” is a tender, but ambitious world-building effort. Reagan’s effort to turn her sparse cultural center into a world-class museum for her people reflects the show’s effort to represent the complexities and richness of Native life and humor that are rarely captured in television or film. In my favorite episode of the show, “Negotiations,” two casino employees decide to help Reagan fill out her cultural center by collecting donations from local residents. The result is a pile of household items that Reagan initially regards as junk in need of disposal, but she ultimately decides to investigate why the items were donated, and in doing so, unearths local histories worth cherishing. As Native people, we are so accustomed to having our history erased and our artifacts stolen that we sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of our history as existing in a fixed, distant past.
In the book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, Jean O’Brien explains how colonial histories are written in ways that depict white people as forging modernity, while Native people fade into finality. In her fight to preserve her people’s heritage, Reagan, like many Native people, had begun to adopt this mindset, but in “Negotiations,” she realizes, as we all should, that Native people are creating histories worth preserving all of the time. One of the donated items that Reagan initially throws away, and later digs out of a dumpster, is a blender used in a community kitchen at Standing Rock.
“The reality is, we are history makers, and we have to update the narrative,” Schmieding told me.
The episode moved me to ask Schmieding what her contribution to a similar exhibit might look like. She informed me that the beaded emojis that Terry’s daughter Maya creates, and refuses to sell, were actually Schmieding’s contribution to the exhibit on the show. “I am a person who likes to give my beadwork away,” she told me.
But Schmieding also recalled a time when she was out of work and selling her beadwork to get by, and she noted that showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas’s mother was a world-famous Navajo weaver who sold her work to those who could afford it, which often meant her work was owned by white people.
“We’re pulling from our own experiences,” Schmieding told me. “As writers who support the artistic endeavors of our loved ones and our friends in the Native community … and we pulled a lot of those designers into the process, so we made sure that we were filling this world with the richness that we live in, in our everyday lives. We pulled in designers, we pulled in musicians, we pulled in beaders.” Just as Reagan enlivened her cultural center by welcoming the eclectic contributions of her community, “Rutherford Falls” is uplifting Native artists and creators, to cultivate something rich and unique. “We made it part of our mission to show how we would do this if we had the museum but also doing it as part of the show,” Schmieding said.
The truth is, we, as Native people, deserve that museum, and we deserve this experiment in television. “Rutherford Falls” is full of heart and potential, and it just might break something open, allowing for a new era of Native representation in television and film. As Schmieding told me, “I cannot imagine what our world would look like if all Native people had the same access to storytelling that I do, and I want that world for us, so badly.”
I want that world for us too.
“Rutherford Falls” has not yet been renewed for a second season, despite having a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Personally, I hope we get to see what Reagan’s new museum looks like, and that we all get a chance to spend more time in Rutherford Falls, because there is nothing else quite like it on television.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Department of Industry is weighing a 2020 review of its Industry Growth Centres to determine their future, but the program looks set to continue until at least 2024.
An “initial impact evaluation” of the government funded industry led centres was conducted last year and is currently under consideration by the Department. A full review is scheduled for 2023/24.
The Industry Growth Centres Initiative was launched in 2013 by the Coalition Government and now includes six centres tasked with leading “cultural change” in their sectors and improving things like collaboration, commercialisation, skills and regulatory reform.
Originally, the growth centres aimed to be self-funded within four years but have relied on several extensions of government funding.
Currently the program is budgeted at more than 200 million for the next four years, including continued funding in the latest federal budget.
The last independent review of the centres in 2018 found they were “generally on track” but the government will struggle to measure their overall effectiveness.
A spokesperson for the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources confirmed the latest independent review of the sectors was done last year by an Australian consultancy specialising in program evaluation and cost benefit analysis.
“An initial impact evaluation of the Industry Growth Centres Initiative was carried out in 2020 by consultancy ACIL Allen,” a spokesperson for the Industry Department said.
“The findings are currently under consideration by the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources (DISER) and will contribute to consideration of the future of the Initiative.
“In line with the evaluation planning of DISER, the Industry Growth Centres Initiative is scheduled for a full impact evaluation in 2023-24.”
ACIL Allen won an open tender $379,000 contract from the Department in March last year to conduct the review. The contract was amended several times, finishing at more than $435,000 for ACIL Allen.
There are currently growth centres for Advanced Manufacturing, Cyber Security, Food and Agribusiness, Medtech and Pharmaceuticals, Mining Equipment, Technology and Services, and Oil, Gas and Energy Resources.
They are monitored for performance through annual reporting against key performance indicators, industry knowledge priorities and with Business Longitudinal Analysis Data Environment (BLADE), the statistical resource used by the government to track business and program performance.
A 2018 review of the growth centres by research firm Nous Group found they were at “different stages of evolution” but are “generally on track to meet the objectives” included in their business plans and from the government.
But the review also uncovered poor data collection by the centres, which did not have effective performance measurements in place.
In February, the cyber security growth centre AustCyber was acquired by tech incubator Stone and Chalk in a deal both parties said was effectively a merger.
The post Industry Department mulls Growth Centres’ future appeared first on InnovationAus.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.
After many decades of organizing, the resurgence of Black-led uprisings have brought abolitionist demands to “defund, disarm and abolish” into the mainstream. These struggles largely center on local police department budgets and prison expansion projects in major cities and jurisdictions across the continental United States. But abolitionist struggles are also matters of global justice, and interconnected to the movements to abolish the military-industrial complex, colonization and imperialism. The connections between decolonial and abolitionist struggles are deep and full of coalitional possibilities.
Building global justice movements are what Angela Davis calls intersectional solidarity — bringing struggles together to end systems of oppression and exploitation across national borders. Julian Aguon’s new book, The Properties of Perpetual Light, speaks the language of intersectional solidarity; while it is geographically specific to Guam and the Pacific, it is also all about the world.
Aguon is a CHamoru writer from Guam — a territory of the United States located in Micronesia. Aguon illuminates a decolonial vision grounded in Indigenous struggle for self-determination, and one that overlaps with the fight against militarization, colonization, climate destruction and the ravages of predatory global capitalism. The Properties of Perpetual Light draws on Aguon’s life work as an Indigenous human rights lawyer and his personal history. Aguon’s essays are a reminder that Indigenous struggles are a shared struggle.
As the poet Audre Lorde once said, “There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives,” and this is embodied in The Properties of Perpetual Light. Through an alchemy of poetry, critical essays, memoir and manifesto, Aguon’s voice seamlessly and unapologetically blends the personal with the political, and the universal with the particular.
The militarization of Guam is tied to five centuries of colonization and the destruction of the natural world. The U.S. Department of Defense is the biggest polluter in the world, and Aguon captures how devastating the environmental harm is for the planet, and specifically the Indigenous people of Guam. Aguon writes about the U.S. militarization of Guam, including the development of a massive firing range complex which will destroy more than 1,000 acres of native lime-stone forest — home to many endangered endemic species.
Aguon laments, “If only superpowers were concerned with the stuff of lower-case earth — like forest and fresh water. If only they were curious about the whisper and scurry of small lives. If only they were moved by beauty.” He recognizes that the destruction of the natural environment is tied to and is part of “the latest course in a long and steady diet of dispossession.” But Aguon refuses to accept dispossession — not as a human rights lawyer, and not as a writer.
Aguon writes about radical reimagining of our world: “Growing up in Guam, we constantly hear the word ‘can’t.’ We are always hearing about what we don’t have, what is not possible, what can’t change. We become fluent in the language of limitation.” He goes on, “So many of us so early on in life give up on our dreams. We place our dreams in boxes, seal them shut, and shelve them somewhere just out of sight. Maybe that’s what colonialism looks like: Dreams Under Duct Tape.” Aguon urges the Indigenous people of Guam, and all of us, to keep imagining and dreaming, and not to give in to fatalism.
In a book reading in March, I had the opportunity to ask the author about the connections between his work and abolition. Aguon said that he has been deeply influenced by Black feminists and abolitionists and hopes his book brings new life into the conversation around demilitarization, and how the demands to defund the police are intricately connected to the demand to defund the Pentagon. Both are shared demands to reprioritize and reallocate funds in order to sustain life-affirming services and institutions, instead of life-destroying systems. Recent reports indicate the Biden administration plans to increase the defense budget to $753 billion.
With respect to intersectional solidarity, Aguon elaborated: “If the U.S. colonies could better link our struggles, if we can have more of that intersectional solidarity so that Black Lives Matter movements can connect with the call for demilitarization in the Pacific, it would be so powerful.” Indeed, “intersectionality is not an option — it is the option. It is the only way forward.” His words remind us that if we are to survive, we must build interconnected mass movements.
Aguon’s analysis builds on critical race theory to elaborate on the meaning of self-determination, beyond the limits of law. Aguon recognizes “the law, especially American law, is limited in its power because harms like colonization, land dispossession, and racial subordination are woven into the very fabric of this country’s being. As close to this country as a jugular vein.” He brilliantly draws on a depth of experience, perspective and passion as an Indigenous human rights lawyer whose references to the law are followed by sharp critiques of the law and legal institutions.
To be clear, The Properties of Perpetual Light is not limited to political commentary or legal analysis. Weaved together with Aguon’s critical analyses of colonization and the military buildup in the Pacific are personal stories of his relationship with family, loved ones and home. He gives us a glimpse into the vulnerabilities underneath the armor of activist-lawyer. At the crux of his personal narrative are stories of loss, grief and coming of age. He writes of his father’s death from pancreatic cancer. He writes about reconnecting with his grandmother who had dementia and singing to her before she passes. He writes about his mentor “Uncle” Tony de Brum, who spent his whole life fighting for nuclear disarmament and on behalf of the Marshallese people in the face of climate destruction; and he writes about other forms of loss, like for Auntie Frances, a healer whose life’s work comes from plant medicine, now endangered by the military’s destruction of the natural world.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Aguon finished writing The Properties of Perpetual Light. At a time when we have all suffered so much collective loss, reading Aguon’s words are a comfort. By writing in such personal terms, he tries to make sense of his grief while sharing with the world his struggles and his spirit, and for all of us to bear witness. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker describes The Properties of Perpetual Light as “A powerful, beautiful book. Its fierce love — of the land, the ocean, the elders, and the ancestors — warms the heart and moves the spirit.”
Aguon’s writing is not prescriptive, so much as it is a call to action to reimagine, to reclaim language and to inspire young people to “do battle,” as he says. His vulnerability and the intimacy of the text draws the reader in from wherever you may be reading. Ultimately, if colonization fails the imagination, and it kills dreams and self-realization, then self-determination is the cure and Aguon inspires a future of connection and liberatory possibilities.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“Wanjiku Gatheru, who goes by the name ‘Wawa’, is an environmental justice trailblazer. After founding the grassroots platform Black Girl Environmentalist, an intergenerational community of Black girls, women and non-binary environmentalists, she aims to use climate activism to help pave the way for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities in the environmental movement.
Gatheru is making space for underrepresented voices in climate conversations but also campaigns for BIPOC to be included in the environmental decision-making process.
Growing up in the US, she took environmental studies at the University of Connecticut before becoming a prestigious Rhodes Scholar, and student at Oxford University, UK.
Now Gatheru’s started a new initiative called Reclaiming Our Time to “promote and solidify visibility for Black climate activists”. In collaboration with Pass the Mic Climate and Generation Green, the campaign matches 30+ activists worldwide with organisations like Greenpeace UK, Sierra Club, and Earthrise. In a series of Instagram live takeovers, activists educate followers about the intersections between social justice, environmentalism, and groundwork. Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway are among those involved.
As part of the #ReclaimingOurTime campaign, tomorrow I’ll be going Live on Instagram with @wawagatheru starting at 4:30 EST/1:30 PST to talk about her work and her experiences as a Black activist working in the environmental space. Join us! https://t.co/N6QXoQt5tm pic.twitter.com/TFFVE9ReG0
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) February 9, 2021
Running throughout February and March, founders hope to continue the discussions in the lead up to International Mother Earth Day on 22 April.
Gatheru spoke to The Canary’s Aaliyah Harris about all things climate, race and politics.
A lot of my interest has come from understanding my family’s history, as well as the experiences of Black communities in the US. My parents are both immigrants from Kenya which is a frontline country experiencing climate change. The environmental movement is overwhelmingly white-led and as an organiser at university, I have been the only person of colour, not just the only Black person, in most environmental spaces.
#Climate / #Environmental twitter, I have a bone to pick with y’all. Frankly, I’m tired of the way y’all erase/ignore/sideline Black youth in this movement. The campaign I’ve been working on for the past month is experiencing this now and it’s shitty.
— Wanjiku "Wawa" Gatheru (@wawagatheru) February 13, 2021
Our communities bear a disproportionate burden from the impacts of climate change because of the historic and continuing impacts of colonialism, racism, and inequality. It’s disappointing that the movement tasked with solving this crisis continues to ignore/sideline our voices.
— Wanjiku "Wawa" Gatheru (@wawagatheru) February 13, 2021
It’s an issue with the environmental movement at large and the media. The environmental movement has been historically white-led and has a very troubled racist history, which led to the intentional exclusion of poor people and people of colour. Especially people who live at the intersection of both of those demographics. A lot of the founding fathers of the environmental movement were racist. They conceptualised definitions to accommodate racialised environments that essentially crafted environments worth protecting, and those that weren’t. Those racialised conceptions of nature and wilderness were used to accommodate the white elite, at the very intentional exclusion of poor people and people of colour. This past year, with the world’s reckoning with anti-black racism, [we’ve seen] the environmental movement at large, non-profits, the private sector and academia begin to reckon with this racist history. But [they’re doing it] without exploring the way that history continues to inform the present: from who’s represented in the green workforce to which voices are understood and articulated as those capable of being leaders, particularly when it comes to youth climate activism.
Youth climate activism hit the mainstream around 2019 with Greta Thunberg gaining international attention. However, something we’ve seen since and before, is that many youths of colour who also participated in doing great organising work in their communities don’t get the same airtime or credibility. We often aren’t distinguished as being leaders within the environmental movement and sometimes in response it’s, ‘Oh, well, that’s all ego why should you get recognition?’. But it’s much bigger than that because particularly for youth of colour, black youth and indigenous youth, our communities are already experiencing climate change first and worse. A huge concern is, if the media and environmental movement are ignoring our voices now on how climate change is impacting our lives, then what does that mean when it gets worse? Our narratives need to be incorporated within climate policies.
Understanding the intersectionality of environmentalism, and the social dimensions that take a central role in the way that people experience environmental harm and climate change. This will allow us as a global community to be better equipped to deal with the climate crisis and environmental degradation. COP 2021 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference) need to integrate youth voices at the decision-making table, have more women, indigenous and Black participation. COP set a huge precedent for how the folks that do gather engage with environmental decision-making in countries. If a top environmental body doesn’t articulate indigenous or Black women’s voices to be important, what’s there to say about the rest of the world does.
Black Girl Environmentalists has exciting mentorship opportunities, book clubs and video calls to discuss environmental hazards that exist such as those in skin lightening creams. Studies show that lighter skin tones are considered to be more desirable which has led to disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards through skin lightening creams detrimental to overall health. Yet, online there aren’t many resources for information, nor has the environmental movement ever really centred on those things which are part of the lived experiences for many people of colour. Particularly in Nigeria, India and China. We deliberately create space to discuss hazards and we’ll be providing educational resources filling the gaps in the mainstream environmental movement.
Check out Black Girl Environmentalists next live panel and IG takeover here.
Featured image via Wikimedia and Kevin Gill
This post was originally published on The Canary.
Confer Books publishes material that’s “designed to deepen our understanding of psychological, relational and emotional processes”. And on 4 March, it released a new title named, The Race Conversation: An essential guide to creating life-changing dialogue.
This fascinating read dives into a world of new vocabulary coined to initiate conversations around race. And it seeks to discuss “the race construct” which keeps “the discomfort of race oppression out of white people’s minds and bodies”.
Author Eugene Ellis is the director and founder of the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network (BAATN). It’s the UK’s largest independent organisation of its kind. Trained as a psychotherapist, Ellis focuses on “body-orientated therapies” such as body awareness, mindfulness, and healing. Narratives in the book explore “race and mental wellbeing” through an alternative non-verbal lens which doesn’t always involve speaking.
Ellis told The Canary:
Since George Floyd’s killing, people with mixed families have been pressured to have [race] conversations they might not necessarily have had as a family before. A lot of people feel an ethical pull towards dismantling racism in their workplaces or institutions.
Just last week, the reaction to Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle showed how rife racism is in Britain.
Opening the discussion with everyday racism, Ellis shows how today’s political and social climate has forced race conversations to the forefront. Whether we like it not, topics of race have become unavoidable as the media has suddenly taken an interest in pursuing race-related coverage.
Ellis wrote:
Talking about race had always been hard work, but, after George Floyd’s killing, it had somehow become hard work not to.
Black Lives Matter protests took place across the world in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. Millions gathered to protest for justice, with 15-26 million people in the US alone according to the New York Times.
On 13 March, CNN reported that Floyd’s family accepted $27m after Minneapolis city council voted to settle the lawsuit.
BREAKING: Family of George Floyd settles for $27 million in a wrongful death civil lawsuit with the City of Minneapolis and the officers involved in his death, @AttorneyCrump announces. Note, this is SEPARATE from the criminal trials for the officers involved.
— Omar Jimenez (@OmarJimenez) March 12, 2021
The report also said:
Chauvin has pleaded not guilty to second-degree unintentional murder and second-degree manslaughter charges. He has also pleaded not guilty to third-degree murder, which was reinstated in the case on Thursday.
For many People of Colour (POC), the global shift to support anti-racism has been a confusing time of feeling both liberated and overwhelmed. Ellis wrote:
I went through a phase of dislocation and mourning, even paranoia as these narratives played out on the world stage
Examining the impacts of racism, the book talks about how trauma can occur “on a mental and physical level due to just existing in a racialised society”.
Mindfulness is a technique that involves a “body-mind” connection. Ellis said it can be used as a way to “almost retune your body” to lessen the fear that arises when speaking in race conversations.
And in this race conversation, he wants to include everyone’s experiences. He wrote:
I also experienced first-hand that, even though white people embody conscious and unconscious race privileges, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are free from pain and suffering.
White guilt and suffering from racism are often shunned, but Ellis said:
That’s a taboo area you can’t talk about but why? I genuinely believe that suffering is across the board. You can’t talk about it because the race construct says you can’t. For it [the race conversation] to move [forward] that aspect needs to come in.
Another concept deployed in the book is how “the race construct” influences individuals to “attend to white people’s hurt and pain before the hurt and pain in people of colour”.
It’s natural that frustration weaves its way into these conversations. In comparing ‘black rage’ and ‘white rage’, Ellis wrote:
White rage steps forward when people of colour step forward to take control of their lives and their financial circumstances. It is predictable, brutal and unforgiving.
People of colour understand that if they put their foot on the accelerator of their lives, they can only get so far before they run the risk of losing their reputation, their possessions or even their lives.
Today is the book launch. You can book up until 4pm, kick-off is 6:30pm and ending at 8pm. https://t.co/zAaVKY5g2X pic.twitter.com/VJVSnoUmWy
— Eugene Ellis (@baatnman) March 5, 2021
The recent increase in news outlets covering topics of race has put a spotlight on racism in the US. This has also sparked people in Britain to dig deeper into racism here.
Ellis said:
The storming of the Capitol and the US elections… I was absolutely gripped by the whole thing. It was whiteness on display. It’s easy for us in the UK to say, ‘oh it’s not like that over here’. In the US racism is brash, big, bold and the UK is a little more subdued. There’s more of a conscious effort in the UK to keep it hidden.
Some institutions have put in place initiatives at certain times to speak about race. In the book, Ellis refers to the “dreaded race day”. He said:
For race or any oppression there should be conversations around that all the time. It shouldn’t be for one day; you need to reflect about it and that’s not enough time.
Mental health services that work with Black, Asian, Ethnic Minority and POC also have a responsibility to actively engage in race conversations.
An article written for the Guardian addresses the problem that Black and Ethnic Minority communities “are more likely to develop mental health conditions but less likely to access counselling – or find it fit for purpose”.
Ellis wrote about his thoughts on the problem which is “the internal discomfort of mental health professionals, and their profound feelings of not feeling safe during the race conversation”.
In the book he mentions that POC who then seek mental health services notice this discomfort. He said:
For a lot of people of colour, a big part of their mental health experiences are not necessarily [impacted by] their families but in society by political structures and systems of oppression. This needs to be included as a part of psychotherapy, training and counselling.
Then if their client wants to talk about race, they will feel that the therapist is available for it and most of the time, that’s not how it feels.
If creative language, thought-provoking theories, and an honest breakdown of how we can all participate in race conversations is what you’re after, then this is the read for you. Its forward-thinking narrative aims to normalise conversations about race, highlights the significance of historical oppression, and proposes different solutions to healing from race-related trauma.
“PAUSE … and breathe” is noted throughout the chapters and is a respectful reminder to all that taking a break from race conversations is ok; in fact it’s healthy.
Confer UK and Ellis are holding a live webinar specifically for psychotherapists to talk about “racial divides in our society” on 20 March, and they’ll be running another event in June as a part of their Summer Programme 2021.
You can find other publications from this author here.
Featured image Confer Books / Thomas Allsop via Unsplash
This post was originally published on The Canary.
By RNZ News
An independent panel says Chinese officials could have applied public health measures more forcefully in January to curb the initial covid-19 outbreak, and criticised the World Health Organisation (WHO) for not declaring an international emergency until 30 January.
The experts reviewing the global handling of the pandemic, led by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, called for reforms to the Geneva-based United Nations agency.
Their interim report was published hours after the WHO’s top emergency expert, Dr Mike Ryan, said global deaths from covid-19 were expected to top 100,000 per week “very soon”.
“What is clear to the Panel is that public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January,” the report said, referring to the initial outbreak of the new disease in the central city of Wuhan, in Hubei province.
As evidence emerged of human-to-human transmission, “in far too many countries, this signal was ignored”, it added.
Specifically, it questioned why the WHO’s Emergency Committee did not meet until the third week of January and did not declare an international emergency until its second meeting on 30 January.
“Although the term pandemic is neither used nor defined in the International Health Regulations (2005), its use does serve to focus attention on the gravity of a health event. It was not until 11 March that WHO used the term,” the report said.
‘Not fit for purpose’
“The global pandemic alert system is not fit for purpose”, it said. “The World Health Organisation has been underpowered to do the job.”
Under President Donald Trump, the United States has accused the WHO of being “China-centric”, which the agency denies.
European countries led by France and Germany have pushed for addressing the WHO’s shortcomings on funding, governance and legal powers.
The panel called for a “global reset” and said that it would make recommendations in a final report to health ministers from the 194 member states of WHO in May.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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