'Murdochgate' is caused by an underlying crisis in the media and the production of news

You can arrest Andy Coulson, you can sack two hundred journalists and take the News of the World off the face of the earth but the problem won’t go away. News is in crisis, but believing that it is a crisis stemming from the lies, deceitfulness and illegality of hacking is misplaced.

Understanding the roots of the crisis may need political analysis the kind Gerry Hassan provides; it may point to fascinating contradictions in conservatism itself as Will Davies argues; it may in part be due to the baleful responsibility of Rupert Murdoch and his son as Anthony Barnett asserts, but it also requires a critical interrogation of the terms on which newspapers in the UK operate.

In the last decade news media have seen many changes. There has been a tremendous growth in the number of news outlets available including the advent of, and rapid increase in, free papers, the emergence of 24 hour television news and the popularization of online and mobile platforms. Newspaper circulation and readership levels are at an all time low. News is produced and distributed at a faster rate than ever before and often takes place on several platforms at once. This has provided the newspaper industry with some real challenges. In a corporate news world it is now difficult to maintain profit margins and shareholder returns unless you employ fewer journalists. But fewer journalists with more space to fill means doing more work in less time often leading to a greater use of unattributed rewrites of press agency or public relations material and the cut and paste practice that Nick Davies famously called ‘churnalism’.

If you combine the faster and shallower corporate journalism of the digital age with the need to pull in readers for commercial rather than journalistic reasons it is not difficult to see how the values of professional journalism are quickly cast aside in order to indulge in sensationalism, trade in gratuitous spectacles and deal in dubious emotionalism. The culture of the corporate, tabloid newsroom embodies this practice to such an extent that Rebekah Brooks doesn’t need to give the green light to phone hacking, it’s just part and parcel of what is expected. The net result is denigration of the professional life and integrity of news journalists, leading to a detrimental impact on the quality of news journalism and a consequent damage to our democracy.

This latest scandal is shocking not because of the awfulness that the practice of phone hacking is and the lack of humanity it has revealed but because it has exposed the heart of a system that is deeply flawed. Giving more powers to the Press Complaints Commission would be a sticking plaster on a much deeper wound that will continue to fester until once more the smell becomes unbearable and another scandal erupts. In a climate where journalists jobs are ever more insecure it takes a very brave journalist to blow the whistle or even ‘self-regulate’. Self-regulation has become the sacred mantra associated with the freedom of the press - the only means to ensure governments can’t interfere in, dictate the terms and thwart the practice of journalism. But this denies the influence and power of a corporate culture that wreaks its own havoc and sets its own agenda often more blatantly than any democratic government would ever dare. If you are relatively powerless (say a journalist in relation to an editor) then self-regulation can be meaningless particularly when the person in power does not share your views. 

The question we really need to ask is what do we want news for and how can it be delivered in the future? This is what Jeremy Hunt should be concerned with in his deliberations over the future of BSkyB and this is what the forthcoming Communications Act in 2013 should be designed to address. How the production of news is changing, how it is funded, how it is received and how it can prosper— must be put at the centre of this debate.

So go ahead and have a public inquiry into phone hacking but let’s do the job properly and also have a Media Commission that asks the real questions:

1. What is in the public interest in relation to the provision of news for democracy to thrive?
2. How can we provide the environment that is required to enable journalists to do the job most of them want to do and to do it with integrity?
3. With the prospect of a new Communications Act on the horizon, can we regulate for the relationship between news and democracy while retaining independent journalism and freedom of the press and if so, how?

The news is no ordinary product, it is indelibly linked to the practice of democracy. When the product of news is broken the practice of democracy suffers. The relationship between news and democracy works best when journalists are given the freedom (and resources) to do the job most journalists want to do - to scrutinize, to monitor, hold to account, interrogate power, to facilitate and maintain deliberation. But freedom in this context does not simply mean freedom from censorship and interference from government so frequently associated with the term ‘freedom of the press’; it also means freedom from the constraints and limitations of a thoroughly corporate culture. In neo-liberal democracies the power of the market is just as significant as the power of government. In the UK, there is certainly no rush to regulate for a healthy relationship between news media and democracy yet there is plenty of urgency about the need to deregulate media for the benefit of the market.

The phone hacking saga shows that a marketized and corporatized media can not be relied upon to deliver the conditions for deliberative democracy to flourish. Markets do not have democratic intent at their core. When markets fail or come under threat or simply become too bullish, ethical journalistic practice is swept aside in pursuit of competitive and financial gain. Yes we need a public inquiry but what we really need is a whole new framework for news in the public interest.

Country or region:  UK Topics:  Democracy and government

The government's higher education proposals would see a fundamental reversal of the direction of reform embarked upon in the post-war period

The Government White Paper on Higher Education makes frequent reference to the excellence of UK Higher Education, but proposes measures that will dismantle it. These measures would bring about a fundamental reversal of the direction of higher education in the post-war period and do so with scant discussion and no mandate. They turn their back on the very significant social, political and cultural benefits that universities provide both nationally and to their localities in order to promote a narrow ideology of the market.

The issues that divide what is now being proposed and what went before go beyond the matter of student fees. They strike at the very heart of the meaning of higher education for individuals and for society. The value of public higher education was first articulated in the Robbins Report of 1963, which began a period of expansion that sought to extend the idea of free secondary education contained in the 1944 Education Act to Universities. Robbins recognised that individuals would be beneficiaries in terms of better prospects of employment, but rejected the idea that they should pay, because the public benefits – economic, social, cultural and political – outweighed the private benefit and, in any case, future private incomes were an uncertain basis on which to construct the financing of the system.

The next major report on higher education, the Dearing Report of 1997, introduced the idea that students might be asked to pay part of the costs of their degrees. This was not itself necessarily a reversal of earlier principles, because it was money invested into universities and treated all of them as equally deserving of support, including continued public funding for teaching in all subjects, including arts, humanities and social sciences from which funding has now been withdrawn.

At the same time, the Dearing Report also affirmed the wider purposes of education shared with Robbins. It should, “sustain a culture which demands disciplined thinking, encourages curiosity, challenges existing ideas and generates new ones; [and] be part of the conscience of a democratic society, founded on respect for the rights of the individual and the responsibilities of the individual to society as a whole.” In contrast, following the lead of the Browne Review, the White Paper affirms education only in its contribution to the economy and as a private investment in human capital, as set out in Freedman and Fenton’s analysis. It welcomes ‘for-profit’ providers, despite their negation of the wider values of a university education. Indeed, the removal of public funding for undergraduate degrees in arts, humanities and social sciences is done precisely to facilitate their entry into the system to draw students way from university courses in those areas toward more vocational subjects.

The Dearing Report also argued for a diverse system of institutions, each properly funded and encouraged to develop in relation to its own local context. This recognised the enormous benefit to local communities and economies that were provided by universities. It urged government “to ensure that support for regional and local communities is at least comparable to that provided by higher education in competitor nations.” Not only will public funding of higher education now be reduced when compared with other nations, whose expenditure is set to increase, but ministers are willing to contemplate that universities can close. If they do, it will not be because they are marginal, but because they have been driven to the wall by deliberate government policies of ‘market shock’. This will have serious consequences for the communities in which they are based.

But the Government’s intention is also to create a new status hierarchy of institutions, again in contrast to Dearing and the earlier Robbins Report. ‘Selective’ universities are encouraged to charge premium fees – their Vice-Chancellors have their eye on their ultimate prize of a lifting of the fee cap and are willing to turn their backs on the university system as a whole – and will be able to recruit unlimited numbers of ‘high achieving’ students (those getting AAB grades at A-level). This reveals the Government’s intention to reinforce the status of education as a ‘positional good’. It also has the purpose of reinforcing the alignment of such universities with private secondary education. This is despite the fact that research by the Sutton Group has shown that “comprehensive school pupils … performed better than their similarly qualified independent and grammar school counterparts in degrees from the most academically selective universities and across all degree classes, awarded to graduates in 2009.”

Nor would a status hierarchy of institutions reflect a hierarchy of quality in teaching – the National Student Survey shows high levels of satisfaction of students across institutions. The general principle of public funding was that it should support teaching for individuals of all ability, not facilitate the appropriation of privilege by the few. The White Paper wishes to reverse this fundamental principle.

Writing in 1931 in his book on Equality, R.H. Tawney observed that the English make a ‘religion of inequality’ and, further, that they seem to ‘like to be governed by Etonians’. Our new political governing caste has certainly made the market its article of faith, with the cynical consequence that only those able to attend ‘elite institutions’ will have the advantage of enjoying the wider purposes of education that have previously sustained our system of public universities.

If many academics have been slow to recognise what is in the process of being lost, it is because the expansion of higher education from the 1960s was begun with a different promise. Education was a means of securing social participation – participation in the wider culture and political debate – and the amelioration of class inequalities. For the great architects of reform, whether Clark Kerr in the USA or Lionel Robbins in the UK, mass higher education would benefit the wider public by its direct impact upon inequalities as well as being a mechanism of social mobility.

That promise is now being withdrawn. Universities are being asked to participate in the reproduction and reinforcement of inequality. It has been several decades since the secular decline in inequality anticipated by Kerr and Robbins came to an end in the late 1970s, and academics must now recognise of the complicity of universities in the reinstatement of a system of inequality deleterious to the health and wellbeing of our fellow citizens (as set out in Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level).

The Government claims to put students at the heart of the system. In truth, it puts the market at its heart. There will be beneficiaries among universities and their academic staff, but the social cost will be great. The Coalition is preparing to betray the egalitarian principles of the public university, first set forth in the post-war period.

John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology at Nottingham University and an active supporter of the Campaign for the Public University

Country or region:  UK Topics:  Democracy and government Equality

Malaysia is at the crossroads … again. The government is acting with great insecurity in the face of persistent demands for democratic reform. The history of Malaysia's post-colonial settlement continues to weigh

The political situation in Malaysia is currently receiving little attention in the western media, but events this weekend may dramatically change all that. Key political and civil society organisations are locked in an escalating, intractable conflict, and no-one can predict, in this most unpredictable of times, how the situation here will unfold. None of the steps in this latest dance involving ‘Bersih 2.0’, (the name given to the loose affiliation of NGOs and pressure groups also known as the Committee for Free and Fair Elections); the political parties of the opposition; and the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, are familiar. Until now, civil society and opposition groups in Malaysia have generated nothing like the sudden force of collective protest which has marked the ‘Arab Spring’, the scenes of violence and turmoil seen recently in Thailand or Burma are unknown in Malaysia’s recent past. Indeed, in 2007 and 2008, large scale protests (including the first ‘Bersih’ march) were largely peaceful, and the March 2008 election, which reduced the BN majority and installed opposition government in 5 of the 12 state assemblies, seemed to indicate that political reform and a peaceful, democratic transition of power after 50 years of BN rule might yet be possible.

All that may change this weekend.

Some time ago Bersih 2.0 (Bersih means ‘Clean’ in Bahasa Malaysia), called for a rally in Kuala Lumpur which would march to the King’s palace and deliver a petition in support of a programme of '8 points' for reform, a set of, one would think, uncontroversial demands concerning electoral transparency, reform of the electoral roll, better scrutiny of electoral processes, an end to gerrymandering and ‘money politics’, and review of the political parties’ unequal access to the media (the dominant print and TV media are owned by BN affiliates).  The authorities, however, have reacted with almost comical uncertainty and anxiety, strident rhetoric mingling with a series of contradictory and confusing official statements which have served to intensify public disquiet and concern. The government identifies Bersih 2.0 with the opposition, despite the organisation's deliberately non-aligned and eclectic composition, and it is on the government's terms which the situation is playing out. Bersih 2.0, however, has no political affiliation, and has retained a strict neutrality in issues of ideology and policy outside its core concern for electoral reform.

In the past two weeks, as the 9 July rally date has approached, we have witnessed a remarkable sequence of events. The Police made signal arrests of prominent MPs, activists, and even civilians wearing or owning the coalition’s trademark yellow t-shirts. The Home Office Minister declared Bersih 2.0 an illegal association. Most of those detained remain in custody, and today a further 91 individuals (of whom some 60 were associated with Bersih 2.0) were served with Restriction Orders, forbidding them from entering the area of the city in which the rally is to take place.  Bersih 2.0’s leader, respected former President of the Malaysian Bar Council Ambiga Sreenevasan, has been accused of being anti-Muslim and of insulting the King. The Chief Minister of Malacca (and member of the Supreme Council of UMNO, the dominant Malay party in the BN), demanded that her citizenship be revoked. Bersih’s organizing committee has been under investigation variously for plotting communist revolution, fomenting racial hatred, being in the pay of foreign governments (unnamed), attacking the Malay people, and for questioning the terms of the constitution (an act of treason). In the face of these accusations, Bersih 2.0 continued to promote its 8 points, and insisted that the rally – which was to involve a march through the capital, Kuala Lumpur, would take place.

Astonishingly, as the deadlock looked complete and the parties irreconcibable, the King of Malaysia himself intervened earlier this week. His action was unprecedented. He granted Bersih 2.0 an audience. At a stroke, it appeared that accusations of treason and insurrection would be dropped. Further, within the logic of Malaysian political discourse, it would surely no longer be appropriate to characterize Bersih 2.0 as illegal, as this would implicate the King in illegal activities. An agreement was struck that Bersih would hold the rally in a stadium in Kuala Lumpur (the suggestion, originally, of the Prime Minister), and it was widely assumed that face had been saved all round through the King's action. For western commentators, and many Malaysian liberals, it was a curious denouement - the constitutional monarch's authority augmented by his judicious handling of the situation - but faced with the alternative, it seemed the best option.

Subsequent events, however, have intensified rather than alleviated the tension. The Negri Sembilan state (which borders Kuala Lumpur) has insisted all schools in the state be opened on Saturday for extra classes, in order to prevent both pupils and teachers (and parents!) from attending the rally. All Police leave is cancelled and three of the halls of residence of the University of Malaysia, in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, have been occupied by Police brought in from outstation. Civil servants are forbidden from attending the rally. The Home Office continues to treat Bersih 2.0 as an illegal entity. Local police have refused a permit for the meeting in the Stadium Merdeka, citing security concerns. As the citizens of Kuala Lumpur drive home this evening they find road blocks, diversions and public transport restrictions already in place. News media are disseminating detailed information about the lockdown of the city tomorrow - a lockdown, the authorities maintain, in response to the irresponsible and illegal intentions of the Bersih 2.0 group. At the time of writing, no one knows how many people will march, or how the Police, and the Federal Reserve Unit (FRU), will react. Police insist that the gathering is illegal and participants will be arrested.

It is important to view the unfolding events not only in the context of the pressure for democratic reform associated with the Arab Spring, important as that example has been for many disenfranchised groups in Malaya, but also in relation to Malaysia's own difficult post-colonial settlement. The malaysian state comprises a delicate balance of ethnic, linguistic and religious groups, its existence secured in the complexity of a constitution which famously recognized and protected the interests of each of the predominant Malay, Chinese and Indian groups. Following the struggle against Japanese occupation, and the post-independence suppression of the communist insurgency in the 1950s and early 1960s, Malaysia experienced violent racial conflict in the 1960s. This period still marks the political psyche, with each group nursing grievances, but also anxious to avoid unleashing once more the destructive forces of racial hatred. The process of nation building in such a turbulent environment has been uneven and is incomplete, and there is considerable disagreement as to the strategy adopted by the BN regime, which has above all privileged the rights of the Malay majority, a community which is often perceived as embattled and underprivileged in relation, particularly, to the entrepreneurial chinese. An educated, anglophone, urban elite despairs of the slow pace of change, while the rural majority resents the experience of continuing poverty and lack of opportunity.

Western governments are monitoring the situation closely. The Malaysian regime has conventionally been viewed as a stable, democratic and moderate Muslim bulwark against both the more volatile nations in the region and the Chinese behemoth to the north. In recent years, however, a worsening record of corruption, widespread electoral fraud (verified by international observers), and routine practices of gerrymandering, along with the repression of opposition political groups and manipulation of the mainstream media, have been viewed with concern. Since independence, the unbroken rule of the Malay-dominated BN coalitions since independence has largely delivered peace, security, and economic development – at least, there have been none of the episodes of revolution, army dictatorship and civil chaos that have marked so many other South East Asian nation states - but there is much impatience in the country with the perceived lack of progress in the attainment of an equitable society with transparent electoral processes.

Journalists reporting the turbulent events of this Arab Spring have remarked how the political settlements which were apparently locked in a glacial status quo, slowly, almost imperceptibly began to thaw, then suddenly, transformed with surprising and unpredictable speed. It remains to be seen whether Malaysia is about to lurch into a still more uncertain and traumatic phase of history. I spent time in Romania and Bulgaria in the aftermath of the fall of the communist regimes, and people expressed astonishment at the suddenness of that transformation, having for so long accustomed themselves to the prevailing conditions. Tomorrow, in Kuala Lumpur, is not just another day.

Country or region:  Malaysia Topics:  Civil society Democracy and government

The Coalition plans to put "students at the heart of the system" with its higher education reforms. But the White Paper proposals would lead to the disempowerment of students, re-modeling them as consumers of education, no longer part of the learning process

There are some irritating things to be woken up by in the morning; dustbin men having a chinwag in the loudest possible voice, foxes tearing up bin liners. But David Willets declaring on national radio that universities should not be considered part of the public sector? That was definitely the worst wake up call ever.

So when the Coalition announces that “student power” is the hallmark of the new White Paper, this context should be kept in mind. The other context should be the previous six months of state repression meted out to the student movement: over 200 arrests (including dawn house raids), the vicious use of kettling of protestors, horse charges, and, in the case of student Alfie Meadows, beaten within an inch of his life by riot police on the day the fees were voted through.

So does the White Paper somehow constitute a sudden change of heart by the government? The answer is a big No. Under the misleading term of “student empowerment” the White Paper confirms the ideological attack on Higher Education which started under New Labour and has now been codified under the present government, who are determined to turn students into consumers. From being developed into critical, intellectual, independent-t­­hinking citizens, the role of students is to be transformed into passive receivers of information, and for a large price-tag as well. The concept of universities as autonomous centres of free thinking and critical research has been further eroded, and our institutions are every day looking more like hubs for apprentices, another strip of the conveyor belt for creating skilled workers for the economy.

The Coalition plans to put “students at the heart of the system” by loading them with tens of thousands of pounds of debt and limiting what they can study through cuts that are likely to see a large number of arts and humanities departments closing down. As much as recent British governments want to obsessively quantify learning so it can fit into neat statistics to constantly prove “success”, learning and education simply do not fit into this utilitarian agenda.

For example, one of the proposed student “empowerment” processes this White Paper will put in place is to force institutions to publish the amount of contact hours a student will get for a course. In and of itself this is not a problem, but since it is tied to the neo-liberal agenda of students as customers, it utterly skewers the meaning of education since the quality of learning cannot be quantified by how many contact hours a student receives.

So how best to make sure that students are “satisfied”? A start could be to listen to them when they march in their thousands, not set riot police on them. Or enact key manifesto pledges directed at students, not lie and do the complete opposite. I will never forget attending the 2010 National Union of Students conference, when leaders of the three main parties broadcast an election message to the delegates. When Nick Clegg announced that his party would fight any rise in fees, the eight hundred delegates erupted into applause and cheers. The fact that the Liberal Democrats were planning to drop this flagship policy before the election had even taken place is all the more astonishing.

We also need to democratise our institutions so that rather than seeing universities as providers of commodities, students feel part of an educational establishment that can be shaped as they learn. Paul Ramsden, founder of the Higher Education Academy, recently rejected the White Paper’s vision of students as “customers” but argued instead we should be seen as “partners”. Problems to do with courses or teaching can be resolved within the institution if the student is at the “heart of the system”. But the very fact that this White Paper proposes stronger auditing, and student “empowerment” through agencies such as HEFCE and the QAA, merely proves how disempowering the “consumer” model is to students. We will no longer be part of the learning process, just a receiver of it.

Hence also the dangers of the Key Information Sets (KIS) which will bombard prospective students with statistics, from contact hours to itemized National Student Survey results. This utilitarian approach to education is bizarre and dangerous. Students choose universities for a million and one different reasons: location, size, intellectual interests, course content, reputation, staff, alumni and many more. Influencing student choice to be based on a “comparethemarket.com” style approach could be devastating for academia. Students should choose universities and courses based on their intellectual and educational interests and motivations, not a “bang for your buck” judgment. Of course there should be quality standards and information available about the varying levels of this quality, but there is categorically no evidence, as the National Union of Students have pointed out, that this inter-competition of stats between institutions will improve teaching quality.

The broader theme of this legislation is to encourage an attitude among students of scepticism, hostility almost, towards the university. “Powers” to demand an inspection of “unsatisfactory” universities, ratings of individual lecturers, and HEFCE transformed from a funding body to a Higher Education Ofsted are all signs of this. Perhaps to attract customers and to keep them happy, universities will begin a "the customer is always right" policy – first class degrees guaranteed! It is hard to predict where this chasm could take us. Will students be suing universities for poor grades? Will campus unions be de-recognised since industrial action affects customer (student) satisfaction? The possibilities are indeed bleak if this process is allowed to go ahead unopposed.

At Goldsmiths we have proven how standards and quality at an institution can be improved. Through our Students’ Union campaigns, from protests to occupations to sitting on academic committees, we have won the opening of the library 24 hours a day, an enhanced feedback policy regarding student essays, a brand-new e-learning infrastructure and have reversed attempts to close down the on-campus nursery – and that is to name but a few from just last year. This was achieved by asserting that students are a part of the institution, and therefore senior management should address our concerns as equals – partners in the educational process. We also organised a teach-in with our academics: an entire day of lectures and seminars on the theme of “the alternative”. This was designed not just to consider the alternative to fees and cuts but to develop an alternative, democratic notion of higher education itself.

Far from delivering student power, what this legislation proves is how badly the student movement has lost the argument over higher education. After more than a decade of a New Labour-dominated NUS, we have seen the argument for free, public education dropped from the mainstream student movement in favour of a policy of a “graduate tax” which, to my mind, was inevitably going to end in the mess we are now in. Inevitable, since the minute we retreat into accepting the need for payment of public services (payment beyond tax that is), then we stand on a slippery slope which starts with £1000 per year and ends up less than 15 years later with £9000. And how long until the fees cap is finally wrenched off completely? I give it less than a decade.

Now more than ever we need to start from scratch and demand that higher education is recognised as a public good, as much as hospitals, schools and firefighters. Can you imagine “patient contributions” for users of the NHS? “Saved-from-a-burning-house contribution” for recipients of the fire service? We are already seeing this process in the NHS, and it was only thanks to the huge public outcry that the initial stages of this process have been put on hold – for now.

The real student power was seen in the school walkouts, the massive marches in London, and the campus occupations. We expected ten thousand on the 10th November, but got over fifty thousand marchers. Two weeks later, without any union backing, 130,000 students from across the country came out on the streets in protest.

There were dozens of campus occupations during this period, I lost count at forty. And the student organisations mobilising these students did so on an uncompromising stand for education as a right, not a privilege.

It was why student groups supported the 26th March protest against public sector cuts, even organising a student feeder march to the main demonstration. And why many students supported the picket lines in the mass strikes of public sector workers last week. At Goldsmiths we had a battlebus that drove to the picket lines in our area, dishing out food, coffee and solidarity.

The student movement last year was an example of real student power – not as customers, consuming information and causing a fuss if it wasn’t what it said on the tin. But students as part of the learning process that benefits all of society, being challenged intellectually, researching independently and all within the sphere of society as a whole, not the narrow interests of the economy or big business. The Coalition’s White Paper puts us in the opposite course: of disempowerment and disembodiment from education as a whole.

James Haywood is Student Union President at Goldsmiths University, London.

Country or region:  UK Topics:  Democracy and government

There is a vital need, for the sake of the future, for new forms of collective action to combine feeling with thought, neither denying the seriousness of the crisis nor closing our minds to a ‘radical hope’ that deep political change is possible. Empathetic imagination is as necessary as science.

I was aware of the danger of global warming from childhood. An inspiring geography teacher taught us about the dangers of the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest. I first experienced it for myself, in 1988, on a visit to the Central Bank’s national gallery in Quito, Ecuador. We had been walking in the Sierra and were looking at eighteenth century paintings of the Andean volcanoes. It was striking that the mantle of snow was deeper and more extensive in each of the paintings than on every peak we knew. The same experience reverberated, on a deeper level, twenty years later, climbing the Alps above Chamonix. Walking in the Aiguille du Midi, in the shadow of the glaciers on Mont Blanc, in June, the stillness of the mountain air was torn by the rumble of avalanches and the crash of rocks echoing around the valley. The mountains were quite literally crumbling. The fabric of the Alps is falling apart as the ice that has been the glue, cementing ridges together for thousands of years, begins to melt. 

Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1810): Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland at the foot of the volcano Chimborazo. Wikimedia commons.

During the negotiation of a climate treaty in Copenhagen, an important conversation about climate change briefly sputtered into flame and caught fire on a political level. The failure of those negotiations has led to fragmentation and fear within the environmental movement. There is a need, now, to find a common language to engage with the environmental crisis, a language that is truthful and acknowledges the possibility of political change. It is not a task for any one political party, newspaper or NGO. It is a task for everyone who cares. It is only with a shared language that we can grieve over past failures and then create the policies for future generations.   

Last chance saloon

At Copenhagen the message shouted from the roof tops was, this is ‘the last chance to save the planet.’ What now that this last chance has passed? The movement has been bitten by its own sound bite. Rather like a millenarian sect left behind when the last trumpet has failed to sound, there are no longer the resources to face the future. What remains is a Babel of voices lacking any coherent political grammar.

Industrialists like Ted Nordhaus put their faith in salvation by the ‘white heat’ of twenty-first century technology. He advocates agro-industrialism and ‘large central station power technologies that can meet the needs of billions of people increasingly living in the dense mega cities of the global south.’ For George Monbiot, the Japanese earthquake and the “the crisis at Fukushima has converted (him) to the cause of nuclear power.” Romantics, such as Paul Kingsnorth, oppose any engagement with a system in crisis and have retreated into the sanctuary of a ‘personal conviction,’ built on “feelings”, and “responses that go back to the moors of northern England.”  His is a conviction unsullied by the dark and messy compromises of politics. New puritans prioritise the power of personal example, believing in the capacity of individuals to inspire collective changes in behaviour. Old socialists favour regulation. But the need, surely, is to combine feeling with thought, neither denying the seriousness of the crisis nor closing our minds to a ‘radical hope’ that deep political change is possible. Imagination is as necessary as science.    

What we need today is to bring together, with a common purpose, people thinking about social justice, democracy and the environmental movement. If democracy is narrowed to a sense of winning elections, it is intrinsically short term and often antithetical to long term thinking about sustainability. On a deeper level democracy, equality and sustainability become part of a coherent vision of the public good. The word democracy needs to be reclaimed in its philosophical sense. It is, in essence, a capacity for collective self-criticism, in which society can learn from the past. It is also the practice of equality: representative elections are only its most ephemeral expression.

Equality between people, whether social or geographical, requires an exercise of empathy. When extended imaginatively into the future, it implies sustainability because it is requires the continuity of access to a vitality and variety of resources for future generations equivalent at least, to that which we have for our own. Democracy, in its deep sense, involves a political conversation and interaction between people, their contested ideas and interests, premised on respect for their right to live together. Human rights are the hallmark of democracy. But thinking about these foundational rights needs to be congruent with the environmental context, ‘the foundation’ of life itself. Sustainability however elusive implies, not mortgaging the present to the future. In the words of the Brundtland commission not, “compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”            

Rebalancing politics

Rebalancing politics to meet these challenges, will require the imagination to articulate a new generation of ecological rights. This would become a third generation of human rights that builds on the first generation of civil and political rights and the second of economic and social rights. Such rights would become a rational counterpart to the principle of equality extended to future generations. They would need to be entrenched in the constitution, not only of this country, but of all democratic nations. These rights cannot be allowed to extinguish the rights and liberties that give the environmental and democratic movement both its energy and legitimacy. But neither can they be ignored in the name of a laissez-faire liberalism.

The right of an individual to self-expression is the hallmark of John Stuart Mill’s Liberty. But neither human rights nor the rule of law imply the right to unfettered corporate advertising in determining the outcome of elections.  For Wendell Holmes in paraphrasing Mill, “the right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” In the twenty first century the right to melt the polar ice-caps ends where the Maldives drown.

Political literacy is harder than political correctness. It means learning to think. What is required is deep public support for a rational matrix of rights and responsibilities that can only be limited for a legitimate end. The concept of proportionality offers a key to this understanding. To limit a right, there needs to be a legitimate end, a rational connection with that end, and the means used needs to be both proportionate and the least restrictive alternative.   

New ways of collective action

If the environmental movement is to offer a vision of ‘radical hope’ it will need to engage with the democratic and human rights movements to find new ways of collective action so as to hold the irresponsible exercise of power to account. Redistribution and sustainability will need to go hand in hand. There will need to be a new alliance between those in the affluent north (and for this purpose north is a shorthand for all those with an abundance of wealth) who are prepared to prioritise respect for environmental limits over unlimited standards of living, in the developing world and in northern cities, and the poorest who will only respect the need for sustainability and the needs of future generations once their most basic needs are met.

The challenge is to protect and develop the rights and liberties available for citizens in affluent western democracies today and extend these entitlements to those in the developing world and to future generations. For Edmund Burke, ‘patron saint’ of the Conservative Party, society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. We are each of us in our personal relationships, our hopes and fears, a living bridge between the past and the future. We need to become more deeply aware of the ways in which our decisions today, our patterns of consumption, our needs and greeds, shape the kind of world in which our descendants live tomorrow.

To meet this challenge we will need the imagination to create a rational and optimistic narrative that is open to new forms of representative politics alongside the insights of classical democracy. The Equality Act and the Climate Change Bill are recent examples of where the UK government has used legislative processes to better  itself or create positive obligations to act. Finland already has a Parliamentary ‘Committee for the Future’. Hungary has an Ombudsman for future generations. Such action is not just the prerogative of the rich North. In Latin America, Ecuador, became, in 2008, the first country to recognise legally enforceable rights of nature or ecosystem rights.  Another concept would apply Plato’s idea of ‘Guardians’, above sectarian political divisions, to Burke’s cross-generational social partnership by appointing, ‘Guardians for the future’ - to guarantee inter-generational fairness and protect environmental rights.

Neither submission to the irresponsible demands of global finance nor retreat to the moors is possible. Personal experience and reason need to go hand in hand. We face a shared task of creating the political momentum for an international movement that is democratic, sustainable and just and that one that is based on a deep commitment to environmental rights. 

Frederic Edwin Church (1855): Cotopaxi. Wikimedia commons.

 

The author wishes to thank Tim Baster for his very helpful comments in developing his thinking on these issues.

Country or region:  Ecuador UK Finland Hungary Topics:  Civil society Conflict Culture Democracy and government Economics Equality Ideas International politics Science

The hacking scandal deepens an ongoing crisis of the British state and spells the end of the Prime Minister's attempt to mash one-nation conservatism and neo-liberalism.

This week has been a seismic moment in British politics and public life. Not just for Rupert Murdoch and News International, but for much deeper and serious issues about the condition of British democracy and about who has power and influence in contemporary society. In short, this goes to the heart of what the British state has become and to the role of our political classes in all of this.

This may seem like a schadenfreude moment for many who have despaired at the profound influence of the Murdoch empire across British life, and who are feeling a little spring in their step upon seeing Andy Coulson, former editor of the ‘News of the World’ and Downing Street Head of Communications charged by the police, while David Cameron and his Tory-led Government struggle to deal with events.

The Cameroon Conservative project is now in major crisis. It had a clear-cut logic and sensibility. After three election defeats the party could no longer go on with its own obsessions, comfort zones, talking to itself and lecturing us like a pub bore on tax, asylum and immigration, law and order and Europe.

This approach drew explicitly and openly from New Labour, realising that the Tory brand had become the problem and had to be detoxified and then, the whole edifice modernised, renewed and reconnected with voters. This is what led to Cameron’s famous opposition moments, ‘hug a hoodie’ and the husky photo shoot, along with his brandishing his green credentials.

The results of this have been mixed to say the least. They haven’t produced New Labour-like dividends with the voters. In 2010 with the wind and political mood (and Murdoch press) blowing in favour of the Tories, the party managed an uplift of a mere 3.7% of votes. That’s more Neil Kinnock in 1987 and 1992 than Tony Blair in 1997. And yet because the press and mood so much wanted Cameron to win this is seldom pointed out.

The Conservative failure in 2010 saw the Tories fail by 20 seats to win an overall majority, and only defeat Gordon Brown’s self-destructive, self-obsessed, divided, fag end administration by a mere 48 seats.

The Con-Lib Dem coalition initially played into the long-term strategic positioning of the Cameroon project and the detoxification approach, while also drawing on the wider Tory tradition of seeing the middle ground and claiming the mantle of ‘the national interest’. It also played into the Tory habit of eating up and devouring your centrist, liberal opponents and posing Labour as a party of sectional, narrow interests.

In office, the Cameron Government hasn’t developed a convincing way of doing or explaining what it is doing. Is it about the ‘Big Society’ or influenced by ‘Red Toryism’ or ‘progressive Conservatism’? All of these ideas have the echo and feel of the Blairite search for a credo: ‘the third way’ one week, ‘the progressive century’ the next, all of which got nowhere.

The narratives which have stuck with the Cameron Govermment have been the ones born of the crises it finds itself facing. Thus it has repeated ad nauseum until it has become cliché and sounded like dogma that ‘the money has run out’, ‘we have no option but to cut the deficit’, and that ‘we can’t live beyond our means’; as an alternative ‘we are all in it together’ is trundled out by Cameron and Osborne but already is met with incredulity.

This has exposed the ill-formed nature of the Cameroon Conservative project. Cameron hasn’t convinced a large part of his party of the need for change. Many of them think their problem is that he has not been conservative enough or is not even ‘one of us’. It is the same old zealotry which used to inhabit Labour with Bennism.

It is more serious with Cameron because Blair leaving aside all his faults took most of Labour with him. The Conservative journey post-Thatcherism is still trying to work out whether to appeal to the good old hymns the base and the committed love to hear. Or whether to try to flesh out a post-Thatcherite reforming Conservatism. They are caught between the ghosts of a myth of Margaret Thatcher and the shadow of Tony Blair and his bug eyed, delusional late phase of ‘public sector reform’ that he laid out in his memoirs.

That brings us to the state of Britain and the Murdoch News International scandal. It isn’t an accident that in the last three years there have been three seismic crises of the new forces of power and privilege in the new British establishment. In 2008, we had the crises of the banks, followed by the political classes and the expenses crisis, and now, the escalating revelations of the amoral, out of control nature of the Murdoch press.

All three crises are important because they are parts of the pillars of Britain’s neo-liberal state: the reconfiguration of the British political, public, economic, social and cultural life of the UK, and the collusion of our politicians and wider political classes with all of this.

David Cameron is but one person who has lost any sense of moral compass in this. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown bear a heavy responsibility. One unintended comic aspect of the last few days has been seeing Alistair Campbell and John Prescott touring the TV studios feigning their moral outrage at what has happened. The publication of Campbell’s recent unabridged diaries reveals dozens of entries for Rebekah Brooks (re Wade) when she was deputy editor of ‘The Sun’ and then editor of the ‘News of the World’: six in the most recently published volume covering 1999-2001 and eight in the period 1997-99 (Murdoch count 10 and 29 respectively).

Such people have got some soul searching to do. Campbell, Prescott, Blair, Brown, Cameron and numerous other Tories. And it is no use Labour people taking succour in the fact they never appointed someone like Andy Coulson to the heart of government; they have got enough explaining to do.

It may be heart-warming to see the attention of media, politicians and police investigation turn on the inner workings and abuses of the Murdoch empire, but we will need to ask much more penetrating, far-reaching questions if we are to take back British public life from the vulgarians, fellow-travellers and apologists for Murdoch’s empire, the marketisation of our society and development of Britain and the British state into an outlier for corporate power.

Two public inquiries into the phone hacking and media ethics are only the start. We need our politicians, media and wider political world to begin asking what kind of Britain have they colluded in creating? What kind of nomenklatura have they allowed to evolve and what have been its consequences? And given the forces of power, privilege and status which exist in the UK, and of which Murdoch is but one manifestation, how do we row back against the world they have created?

It isn’t an accident that London is the playground of the world’s rich and famous, the UK and its offshore arrangements the tax havens of choice for so many, or that the UK is the fourth most unequal country in the advanced capitalist world. But we can now at least begin to imagine that we might be able to challenge and change all of this. Such a turnaround marks this as a truly momentous week.

Topics:  Democracy and government

Portugal decriminalized all drugs 10 years ago and the results are in: decreased youth drug use, falling overdose and HIV/AIDS rates, less crime, reduced criminal justice expenditures, greater access to drug treatment, and safer and healthier communities ~ MW & CS

Portugal Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary of Decriminalizing Drugs 

Everyone knows that the war on drugs is a failure. Despite more than $40 billion spent every year on the U.S. drug war and 500,000 people behind bars on drug related offenses, drugs are as available as ever. But what is the alternative? What would happen if a society decided to treat drug use as a health issue instead of a criminal justice issue? What if we stopped the futile effort of using force to decrease drug consumption? What if we decriminalized drugs, not just marijuana, but all drugs like heroin, cocaine and meth? 

We've heard the horror scenarios that opponents of drug policy reform recite: more addiction, more broken families and a crazy escalation of crime and violence. On the other side, advocates for decriminalization or legal regulation say that we would be better off not criminalizing what's a health issue. They advocate for education, prevention and treatment instead of jail for drug abuse and leaving in peace those whose drug use does not cause harm to others.

So who's right? You might be surprised to hear that this isn't just about hypotheticals anymore. Portugal decriminalized all drugs 10 years ago and the results are in: decreased youth drug use, falling overdose and HIV/AIDS rates, less crime, reduced criminal justice expenditures, greater access to drug treatment, and safer and healthier communities. To learn more please follow this link

Source: Huffington Post

International Narcotics Control Board Regrets Bolivia’s Denunciation of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 

VIENNA, 5 July (UN Information Service) – The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) regrets the decision by the Government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to denounce the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,

1961, as amended by the 1972 Protocol. On 29 June 2011, in an unprecedented step, the Government of Bolivia denounced the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, as amended by the 1972 Protocol, to which the State of Bolivia had previously acceded. The Government also announced its intention to re-accede to this Convention but with a reservation regarding specific treaty provisions.

The Board is of the opinion that while this step by Bolivia may be in line with the letter of the Convention, such action is contrary to the Convention's spirit. The international community should not accept any approach whereby Governments use the mechanism of denunciation and re-accession with reservation, in order to free themselves from the obligation to implement certain treaty provisions. Such approach would undermine the integrity of the global drug control system, undoing the good work of Governments over many years to achieve the aims and objectives of the drug control conventions, including the prevention of drug abuse which is devastating the lives of millions of people. To learn more please follow this link

Source: INCB

Guatemala becomes killing field as drug wars spread through Central America 

It is called a war, but there is no frontline or thunder of battle in this scorched wilderness. There is only a no man's land where the dead pile up in silence and the living have nothing to say. Twenty-seven farm labourers were decapitated and had their heads strewn across a field one recent night, but ask neighbours and they reply with blank looks and apologetic shrugs, as if it happened in a distant land.

Two well-known peasant leaders were killed in separate incidents as if by phantoms. Broad daylight, but no witnesses. Months later, some in the community profess ignorance it even happened. "Ricardo Estrada and Jorge Gutiérrez are dead?"

Yes, they are dead. As are three Mexicans shot in a house last week, according to neighbourhood whispers. A pick-up spirited away the bodies and the home owner scrubbed the blood before police arrived. They decided nothing happened. 

Welcome to El Naranjo, a sun-blistered one-street town on Guatemala's northern frontier, once in the middle of nowhere, now in the middle of Latin America's drug war. Mexico's narco-fuelled bloodshed, with 36,000 dead in four years, is dripping here and across much of central America. To learn more please follow this link

Source: The Guardian

Alexei Intervenes at the UN

Here is the 2nd text from Alexei Kurmanaevskiisey, the 30 year old Russian user activist who recently spoke at the United Nations on behalf of people who use drugs in Russia and some of its surrounding regions/countries, where as much as 80% of new HIV infections are amongst people who inject drugs.

Yet OST (such as methadone or buprenorphine are illegal / imprisonable offenses), needle and syringe access programmes are virtually non existant, there is no access to Hep C meds at all, TB treatment is totally outdated – access to HIV meds if you use or have used drugs is very limited and the list goes on. This was Alexei’s ‘Intervention from the Floor, Panel 5, as he spoke about the realities of HIV and TB for people who use drugs, on the 10th June 2011, at the UN in New York.

Source: INPUD

Headless corpses? Acid baths? This is a distorted picture of Mexico's drug wars 

Ed Vulliamy, in his article on Mexico's drug wars, talks of flayed faces, headless corpses and acid baths (Juárez is all our futures. This is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad, 21 June). I study Mexico: a diverse and fascinating country which, when it makes the news, usually does so because of narco-violence – an important phenomenon, to be sure, but one that deserves sober reflection, not sensationalism.

Vulliamy focuses on Ciudad Juárez, "the most murderous city in the world". But Juárez is not typical of the country.

In fact, it is a grotesque aberration – seven times more homicidal than Mexico as a whole, 13 times more than Mexico City (the capital's homicide rate, by the way, is about one-third that of Washington DC). In other words, drug-related violence is highly variable within Mexico; Yucatán's homicide rate is less than Canada's. Juárez – where no cartel dominates, street gangs operate with relative impunity, and the murder of women is commonplace – is an extreme outlier, not a typical case. To learn more please follow this link

Source: The Guardian

The war on drugs Boxing cleverer 

THE war on drugs, like the war on terror, is proving a dear and dreary struggle against faceless enemies on shifting terrain. The latest report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), published on June 23rd, gives little reason to think it is being won.

In America, where cannabis consumption had been falling, the UNODC thinks it is staging a comeback, along with ecstasy. In western Europe use of cannabis is stable, but it has increased in eastern Europe and Latin America. In Asia synthetic stimulants are on the rise. 

More illegal substances are produced in the country in which they are consumed, whether cannabis in London or ecstasy and crystal meth in Indonesia. Fast-changing designer drugs are marketed before regulators have figured out whether to outlaw them, and the line between using drugs to combat medical conditions and taking them simply to improve performance—in exams, sports or sex—is increasingly blurred. Against a backdrop of violence in producer countries such as Mexico and Colombia, and mass incarceration in consumer countries including America and Britain, the argument over what to do about drugs is escalating. To learn more please follow this link

Source: The Economist 

Khat use in Europe: update and policy implications 

‘The number of khat users in Europe appears to be growing, yet the scale and nature of the problem is poorly understood’. This is according to a new publication on the subject released today by the EU drugs agency (EMCDDA). ‘Khat use in Europe: implications for European policy’ is published in the EMCDDA’s policy briefing series Drugs in focus (1).

Khat refers to the young leaves and shoots of the khat tree (Catha edulis), cultivated in the Horn of Africa, Southern Arabia and along the East African coast. The leaves have been chewed for centuries for their mildly stimulating properties and, for many, are part of their cultural legacy and social life. Migration from the Horn of Africa has been associated with the spread of khat use to neighbouring countries, Europe and the rest of the world. The  drug goes by many names: ‘qat’ (Yemen), ‘chad’ (Ethiopia, Somalia), ‘miraa’ (Kenya) or ‘marungi’ (Uganda, Rwanda).

Khat contains stimulant substances that have amphetamine-like properties (e.g. cathinone) which, in their pure forms, are internationally controlled substances. The leaves, however, are not controlled and no consistent approach exists to khat in the EU (it is treated as an illegal drug in 15 of the 27 EU Member States and in Norway). To learn more please follow this link

Source: EMCDDA 

The Great Billion Dollar Drug Scam 

Alongside pneumococcal diseases such as meningitis and pneumonia, rotavirus-related diarrhoea is a primary childhood killer in developing countries, thought to snuff out the lives of 500,000 children each and every year. An overwhelming 85 per cent of these children are African and Asian. The need for medical miracles is as great as ever, but corporate mispricing generates huge profits, while driving up the price of life saving medicines.

British-based drug corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) recently offered a five-year deal to supply poor nations with 125 million doses of the rotavirus vaccine - Rotarix - at $2.50 a dose, just five per cent of the current going price in Western markets. Through the GAVI group, the international vaccine agency financed by developed nations such as the UK, it is hoped that GSK and pharmaceutical multinational Merck - who, between them, dominate the rotavirus vaccine market - will provide a secure line of low-cost drugs for as many as forty countries in the near future. But is it really a discount, and if so, who is paying the cost? To learn more please follow this link

Source: Al Jazeera

Bill Maher and Drug Policy Alliance Ethan Nadelmann

Source: Youtube

UNODC Executive Director and President Martinelli discuss Panama's role in curbing corruption and trafficking

Vienna / Panama City. 30 June 2011. UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov today concluded a two-day visit to Panama, meeting with several high-level officials including President Ricardo Martinelli and Vice-President Juan Carlos Varela. The visit covered several issues ranging from anti-corruption, organized crime and criminal justice, to border control, illicit drugs and human trafficking. An agreement was also signed to support the establishment of a Regional Anti-Corruption Academy in Panama City. 

These topics were also discussed with a range of senior officials including Panama's Deputy Minister of Public Security, Alejandro Garúz; the Executive Secretary of the National Council for Transparency against Corruption, Abigail Benzadón; the Minister of Government, Roxana Méndez; the Director of Customs, Gloria Moreno de López; the Executive Vice President of Operations of the Authority of the Canal of Panama, Manuel Benitez; and the Manager of Canal Security, Antonio Michel. To learn more please follow this link

Source: UNODC

Colorado Alliance Files Ballot Initiative to Tax and Regulate Marijuana 

Denver-based activists have filed a ballot initiative with the Secretary of State that regulates marijuana in Colorado in a manner similar to alcohol. The proposal requires the Department of Revenue to tax and regulate marijuana and directs this new revenue source to the public school capital construction assistance fund. The campaign must now gather 86.105 signatures before August 6th, 2012 to qualify for the November general election ballot. The initiative's proponents are long-time Colorado marijuana policy reformers Brian Vicente and Mason Tvert of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol.

"Once again Colorado is at the forefront of the national movement to reform our ineffective marijuana laws," said Art Way, Colorado Drug Policy Manager of the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s leading organization advocating alternatives to the war on drugs. "The responsible regulation of marijuana is a crucial first step in undoing the harms associated with the failed drug war."

Recent ballot initiatives and legislative advocacy in Colorado have decriminalized marijuana and established one of the most expansive medical marijuana regulatory systems in the country.  Recent polling shows that more than half of the voters in Colorado support ending marijuana prohibition while 46% of Americans nationwide support making marijuana legal.  A decade ago, only a quarter of Americans supported legalization. To learn more please follow this link

Source: DPA

Death fears over Soviet street drug

FORENSIC experts in Scotland are warning about the increasing misuse of a legal drug five times the strength of Valium that is freely available to buy online. Phenazepam was developed in the Soviet Union to treat neurological disorders such as epilepsy and insomnia but has never been prescribed in western Europe. 

However, a forensic team at Dundee University has identified several cases of phenazepam misuse and has warned it could become used more widely as a substitute for controlled sedatives such as Valium (diazepam). To learn more please follow this link

Source: The Herald

Epilepsy drug misuse 'on the rise' 

A drug for epilepsy and anxiety is increasingly being misused by young people in the UK, researchers say. Phenazepam was developed in the 1970s for the treatment of epilepsy, alcohol withdrawal syndrome, insomnia and anxiety.

It is a prescription-only drug in several former Soviet Bloc countries, and is not controlled in the UK, most of Europe, or the US. As a result, people have been buying it legally over the internet, leading to reports of misuse in the UK, Sweden, Finland and the US.

In a letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), researchers from the University of Dundee said phenazepam was being used as a substitute for illegal drugs. To learn more please follow this link

Source: The Independent

Germany launch for cannabis drug Sativex 

The Aim-listed business already sells Sativex, which treats muscle stiffness associated with MS, in Britain and Spain. GW said in May that in the nine months since launching in the UK, sales had reached around £2m.

Sativex contains active ingredients called 'cannabinoids' that are extracted from cannabis plants. It took GW around 10 years to develop the medicine, using genetically unique cannabis plants that are grown at a top-secret farm. 

GW, with its marketing partner Almirall, is planning further European launches of Sativex and GW is also trialling the drug as a potential treatment in cancer pain. Last week, the company began a second Phase III trial of Sativex in cancer, in conjunction with Japan's Otsuka Pharmaceutical.

The company said today that muscle stiffness is a common symptom affecting around 80pc of the 130,000 MS patients in Germany.

Source: The Telegraph

DEA Denies Marijuana Rescheduling Petition 

The DEA Friday denied a petition asking the federal government to reschedule marijuana out of Schedule l of the Controlled Substances Act. The petition had languished within the bowels of federal bureaucracies for nine years, but the agency finally moved to deny it two months after medical marijuana advocates filed a lawsuit to compel the government to act.

The Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis had sought to reclassify marijuana on a lesser schedule, arguing that current science does not allow for it to be classified as a Schedule I drug. Such substances must have a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in the US, and a lack of accepted safety for use.

 While marijuana has abuse potential, a DEA judge in 1989 cited it as one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man, and it is currently being used as a legal medicine under the laws of 15 states and the District of Columbia. To learn more please follow this link

Source: Stop the Drug War

President Obama's Justice Department Issues Medical Marijuana Guidance to U.S. Attorneys 

The following is a statement from Bill Piper, director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance.

"The U.S. Justice Department's (DoJ) medical marijuana guidance to U.S. Attorneys, issued by Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole last week, raises more questions than it answers. The Department's 2009 Ogden memorandum established guidance that federal resources should not be employed to target medical marijuana patients and providers who are in "clear and unambiguous compliance" with state-based medical marijuana laws. Last week's so-called clarification is in fact open to many interpretations and falls far short of the explanation of policy that state lawmakers, members of Congress and advocates sought.

"The Cole memorandum reiterates much of the guidance provided in the Ogden memo, including that all medical marijuana offenses are illegal under federal law but that the Justice Department will prioritize enforcement so as not to waste resources. It clearly states that large-scale, commercial medical marijuana providers are proper targets for federal enforcement, even if they are in compliance with the state law.

The guidance does not address smaller medical marijuana providers widely believed to be protected by the Odgen memo. In fact, the Cole memo explicitly tells U.S. Attorneys to refer to the Odgen memo for guidance on enforcing federal marijuana laws, suggesting that the Department of Justice may likely only target large operations, leaving small operations to the states to regulate. The new memo, however, does not provide guidance on what the federal government considers to be the line between small and large-scale production. To learn more please follow this link

Source: DPA

Administration Medical Marijuana Memo Causes Dismay, Anger 

The medical marijuana movement is reeling after the Obama Justice Department released a memo last week declaring that it might prosecute large-scale medical marijuana cultivation operations and dispensaries even in states where they are operating in compliance with state laws. Advocates reacted with dismay and disappointment, even as they plotted strategies about what to do next.

The memo, written by US Deputy Attorney General James Cole, "clarifies" the October 2009 memo from then-Deputy Attorney General David Ogden that told federal prosecutors not to focus their resources on patients and providers in compliance with state laws. The earlier memo gave some substance to President Obama's campaign promise not to persecute medical marijuana patients and providers in states where it is legal.

But after the 2009 memo, federal officials watched aghast as a veritable medical marijuana cultivation and dispensary boom took off in places such as Colorado and Montana, where dispensaries went from near zero to hundreds of operations, and as localities in California began considering huge commercial grows. The Justice Department responded with increased federal raids -- now at twice the rate of the Bush administration, according to Americans for Safe Access, the nation's largest medical marijuana advocacy organization -- and earlier this year, sent threatening letters from US Attorneys to governors and legislators in states considering or implementing medical marijuana distribution programs. To learn more please follow this link

Source: Stop the Drug War

To live Outside the Law by Leaf Fielding – review 

This memoir begins in a cottage in mid-Wales on 26 March 1977. Leaf Fielding wakes with a jolt. Somebody is shining a torch in his eyes. There's lots of shouting and swearing. He's dragged out of bed, arrested, taken to the police station. He realises the game is up; for a while, he's been in charge of distribution for a drug gang. He's led a secretive life, passing on hundreds of thousands of tablets of LSD. The police have been watching him for months. This is Operation Julie, one of the biggest drug busts ever. Now Leaf is going to jail. For ages. 

As Leaf is processed through the criminal system, he casts his mind back. How did it all go so wrong? He hadn't meant any harm. In fact, he'd fervently believed that LSD would save the world. He tells us about his life. His father was an army officer. His mother died young. He was sent to an oppressive boarding school. He grew up hating the system, like so many people in the rigid, small-minded 1950s. He was in his early teens when the Beatles came on the scene; he was in his late teens during the Summer of Love in 1967. He was radicalised by the student riots in France in 1968. He was exactly the right age, class and temperament to become a hippie. 

I really enjoyed this book. Not so much in the early parts, which tell the story of a drug dealer being arrested. It takes a while to figure out why you should care. But after about 50 pages, something clicked. Fielding seems to sum up his era perfectly. He was idealistic. He was a vegetarian, a dope-smoker, a guy who wanted to turn the rest of the world on. He thought that if everybody dropped acid, all the bad stuff in the world would stop. But he wasn't just a soppy guy with long hair. For years, he was a small-time criminal, drifting around the world, on the run, doing this and that – in other words, the genuine hippie experience. To learn more please follow this link

Source: The Guardian

Following Mexico’s Drug Money Trail 

A rally and conference against Mexico's drug war poured fresh blood onto the streets of Ciudad Juárez over the weekend, when police shot a 19-year-old student in the back with a high-powered assault rifle. Laura Carlsen, who spoke at the anti-militarisation event which had been billed as a "march against death", said the shooting of the student on a university campus was "a game changer" in the country's spiralling violence.

"It was really the first time [during the latest violence] the police had targeted a peace protester and the cartels were not involved at all," said Carlsen, who directs the Americas programme of the International Relations Center from Mexico City. The wounded student, José Dario Álvarez Orrantia, is expected to recover, although his injuries will likely plague him for the rest of his life.

Activists say the shooting underscores their point that brute force is not the best way to tackle  violence that has claimed almost 30,000 lives since 2006. To learn more please follow this link 

Source: Al Jazeera 

Dying to Cover the Drug War 

Pedro Torres doesn't have the air of a man who stares down death on a daily basis. He is a mild mannered reporter during the day, and at night. But just showing up for work at El Diario newspaper in Juarez, one of the world's most dangerous journalism jobs, could be considered a heroic feat. 

"This is what I like to do, I have been here for 25 years," Torres says during an interview in his office. It's a standard answer for a newspaper man, except that two of his staff members have been gunned down in cold blooded shootings in the last few years, as drug violence rages in this border city. 

The desk where Armando "El Choco" Rodriguez once sat - writing tracks on crime and government corruption -has been left vacant as a shrine after he was murdered in a targeted killing in November, 2008. He was sitting in his white Nissan car, preparing to drive his daughter to school, when masked gunmen approached, opened fire with automatic weapons and then fled. No one has been prosecuted for the attack. 

"Journalists are being killed systematically and regularly," says Bruce Bagley, chairman of the international studies department at the University of Miami, who researches Mexico. "Narco groups have decided they don’t like bad publicity in the areas which they control; it has become incredibly dangerous to be an investigative reporter. Often, local and state police are complicit in these attacks." 

A few days before his murder, Rodriguez had written a story linking the state prosecutor's nephew to drug traffickers. Cartels earn as much as $39bn yearly from selling illicit narcotics, according to the US Justice Department, and serious journalism which exposes criminality is bad for business. To learn more please follow this link 

Source: Al Jazeera

 

   

 

 

WikiLeaks combats the hidden but constant brutality of institutionalized violence, not just by the news content it brings to light but by disturbing the formal functioning of power itself: it has the power to circumvent the oblique ways in which information flows and thereby rewrite the very rules which regulate how rules can be violated. The critical task is to keep this disruptive strength alive.

After firing off his rapid salvo of ideologico-critical nuggets on the 1st of July at Cadogan Hall in London, Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek revealed what he considers his favourite meeting between a famous thinker and a famous agent of change. The thinker in question was, of course, the great philosopher of freedom Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the protagonist Napoleon Bonaparte, the year 1806. Hegel, then on the cusp of completing his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, long enthused about Napoleon as the "world-spirit embodied." That is to say precisely as an agent (a capable one, to be sure) only contingently thrust into the world's limelight, pursuing his own aims - mostly oblivious to the true extent of the societal changes the processes he nominally leads are engendering - but nonetheless producing emancipation in his wake.

It is only all too tempting to link this anecdote to the proceedings on the very next day, when Žižek (who is himself on the verge of completing a book on Hegel) met with the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, for a two-hour conversation moderated by the award-winning journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! The flow of the relaxed event, held at the Troxy in Eastern London in front of over 9000 online viewers on top of the nearly 2000 present in the hall, was carefully balanced: Goodman set the scene clearly and posed questions about the past and present of WikiLeaks to Assange, Assange then gave measured and factual responses, after which Žižek was let loose to try and elucidate what he saw as the broader significance of WikiLeaks and the replies given.

Although the atmosphere at the Troxy was very genial, and Žižek generally enthusiastic about WikiLeaks (as he was in the London Review of Books article he published about it), there was a distinct tension between the rather standard Enlightenment rhetoric employed by Assange (more facts, a more complete historical record, better educated journalists)  and the significantly more radical conclusions the philosopher was drawing. This is why - whilst it should no doubt be read in a similar light as Žižek’s own remarks on his position during the conversation (I feel now like that Stalinist commentator: the leader has spoken, I provide the deeper meaning) - the ventured analogy nevertheless contains a kernel of truth beyond its bombast: defining the emancipatory significance of phenomena should not be left to the actors alone.

To illustrate: in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.

In this way, the reply was firmly anchored in the key trope Žižek has championed since his first major work in English: that ideology in today's "post-ideological" world is not dead, but rather more powerful than ever - alive not so much on the level of knowledge but in the ways it structures social reality itself. In other words, we can play a game of where I know that you know (about, say, the everyday violence that underpins our free society), and you know that I know, although only so far. Once confronted with information in a naked enough way, the we (the public) can no longer ignore its false cynical distance to it. Or so Žižek contended using as an example the difference between a husband knowing abstractly about his wife’s infidelity contrasted with the visceral reaction to seeing a picture of the act itself. WikiLeaks, he argues, does just this.

That Wikileaks is disruptive is amply shown by the vast reaction against it, whether through the calls (which Goodman listed) to label Assange a terrorist and assassinate him, in the financial blockade enacted by Mastercard and Visa (which, as Assange pointed out, have been deemed unlawful), or by the seemingly extralegal way his extradition is being handled. Here, Žižek points out, the innocence of the accusers is anything but innocent; they decry the violence of WikiLeaks revelations, themselves oblivious to the military, economic, political and social framework of everyday violence that goes unmentioned in public discourse. The violence of leaks is on a formal level, and precisely this is at the root of the Slovene’s exclamation to Assange: “Yes, you are a terrorist, but by God, then what are they?”

By casting WikiLeaks as a emancipatory, even heroic, phenomenon under constant threat we get to the true import of the initial analogy: just as the French armies did not fully bring the kind of lasting social liberation many expected from them, and just as Hegelian philosophy was grossly distorted and misappropriated after his death, the danger remains that whatever disruptive power WikiLeaks has will be defused, or even hijacked to work against its original liberating potential. If this is so then what, precisely, can be done to prevent this?

Sadly, sharp answers were lacking at the Troxy and time ran out before the audience could grill the all-too-friendly participants with questions. Žižek did voice his main concern, however: the risk of WikiLeaks being directly domesticated into the functioning of the official system via a rhetoric of accepting the project’s principle whilst only allowing the ‘right’ figures to run it.

This I would nonetheless take away as the key message: WikiLeaks should not be seen as merely another chapter in investigative journalism and free flow of information, but a positive, subversive emancipatory force by virtue of the way it operates outside the system of secrets and allowed revelations. What then remains ahead is the hard task of keeping this subversive strength alive. Remember, by 1814 Hegel had re-appraised the great emancipatory power he had once encountered, as a "genius destroyed by mediocrity."

Sideboxes Related stories:  Wikileaks: the truth is not treason Cupid's freedom: how the web sharpens the democratic revolution US power, wikileaks, student protest, Christopher Hitchens and openDemocracy under attack: moral authority, or authoritarianism? Country or region:  England City:  London Topics:  Culture Ideas Internet

The speech given to the House of Commons in the emergency debate on the hacking scandal by the Labour MP for West Bromwich East.

On Tuesday 5th July I set out why Rupert Murdoch and his son James should be seen as responsible for the phone hacking scandal and should be declared unfit to run a major media corporation in Britain. There was an emergency debate in the Commons the next day and Tom Watson MP made an exceptionally devestating case against Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the News of the World at the time who is now the Chief Executive of News International. He shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that her claims not to have know what was happening are false. He also shows how James Murdoch ran a cover-up. Comments on OurKingdom's open question on the fate of News of the World, show that the evidence set out by Tom Watson is still not widely known, perhaps because the other papers and certainly the BBC are hanging back from reporting something which shows that they too were asleep on the pavement. So here is Tom Watson's speech, slightly edited and without the parliamentary exchanges (see here for the Hansard version). Anthony Barnett.

News International... was systematically, ruthlessly, and without conscience or morality, interfering with the phones of victims of murder, cruelly deceiving their families and impeding the search for justice. Glenn Mulcaire [who hacked the phones] has accepted some share of responsibility for this moral sickness, but the editor in charge of him [Rebekah Brooks] refuses to take responsibility. Indeed, far from accepting blame, she has—amazingly—put herself in charge of the investigation into the wrongdoing; the chief suspect has become the chief investigator.

I believe that Rebekah Brooks was not only responsible for wrongdoing, but knew about it. The evidence in the paper that she edited contradicts her statements that she knew nothing about unlawful behaviour. Take the edition that she edited on 14 April 2002, which reveals that the News of the World had information from Milly Dowler’s phone. In other words, they knew about the messages on her phone. They wrote that there was

“left a message on her voicemail after the 13-year-old vanished at 4pm on March 21. On march 27th, six days after Milly went missing in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, the employment agency appears to have phoned her mobile".

It was a central part of the paper’s story that it had evidence from a telephone—evidence that it could get only from breaking into that phone at the time. The story that Rebekah Brooks was far from the Dowler events is simply not believable when her own newspaper wrote about the information that it had gained from that phone.

I want to inform the House of further evidence that suggests that Rebekah Brooks knew of the unlawful tactics of the News of the World as early as 2002, despite all her denials yesterday.

Rebekah Brooks was present at a meeting with Scotland Yard when police officers pursuing a murder investigation provided her with evidence that her newspaper was interfering with the pursuit of justice. They gave her the name of another senior executive at News International, Alex Marunchak. At the meeting, which included Dick Fedorcio of the Metropolitan police, she was told that News of the World staff were guilty of interference and party to using unlawful means to attempt to discredit a police officer and his wife.

Rebekah Brooks was told of actions by people whom she paid to expose and discredit David Cook and his wife Jackie Haines, so that Mr Cook would be prevented from completing an investigation into a murder. News International was paying people to interfere with police officers and was doing so on behalf of known criminals. We know now that News International had entered the criminal underworld.

Rebekah Brooks cannot deny being present at that meeting when the actions of people whom she paid were exposed. She cannot deny now being warned that, under her auspices, unlawful tactics were used for the purpose of interfering with the pursuit of justice. She cannot deny that one of her staff, Alex Marunchak, was named and involved. She cannot deny either that she was told by the police that her own paper was using unlawful tactics, in that case to help one of her lawbreaking investigators. This, in my view, shows that her culpability goes beyond taking the blame as head of the organisation; it is about direct knowledge of unlawful behaviour. Was Mr Marunchak dismissed? No. He was promoted...

Families who trusted Rebekah Brooks when she said she felt their pain, families who have been cruelly let down by the intrusion into private grief and the callous exploitation of their suffering—anguished families, indeed—are now being tortured yet again by the knowledge that in the world of Rebekah Brooks no one can grieve in private, no one can cry their tears without surveillance, no one can talk to their friends without their private feelings becoming public property.

The whole board of News International is responsible for the company. Mr James Murdoch should be suspended from office while the police investigate what I believe is his personal authorisation to plan a cover-up of this scandal. Mr James Murdoch is the Chairman. It is clear now that he personally, without board approval, authorised money to be paid by his company to silence people who had been hacked, and to cover up criminal behaviour within his organisation. That is nothing short of an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

There is now no escape for News International from the responsibility for systematically breaking the law, but there is also now no escape from the fact that it sought to pervert the course of justice.

I believe that the police should also ask Mr James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks whether they know of the attempted destruction of data at the HCL storage facility in Chennai, India. Mr James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks now have to accept their culpability, and they will have to face the full force of the law.

Country or region:  UK Topics:  Democracy and government

We want your answers to this Open Question: David Cameron has called for a public inquiry into the hacking scandal at the British tabloid News of the World, which has announced its closure. Is this an adequate response to a scandal that implicates the Murdochs, the British political class and the police?

This is the first of a planned series of Open Questions, which ask OurKingdom readers for their response to the pressing question of the time. Leave a comment, just as you would normally, and we will build these into an active forum for debate. 

The Prime Minister has called for a public inquiry into the ongoing hacking scandal that has led the News of the World to declare that it will close doors following one last issue this Sunday. But does the shutting of the tabloid and a judge-led independent enquiry adequately respond to the still unravelling scandal that has already implicated not only the Murdoch empire but the British political class and police?

Country or region:  UK Topics:  Democracy and government

From self-styled “great Russian poet” to conceptual performance artist, Dmitri Prigov (1940 – 2007) was a nonconformist Renaissance man who survived institutionalisation in a Soviet asylum and died on the day he was due to collaborate with the Voina collective, enfants terribles of the new generation. As an exhibition in Venice showcases his work this summer, Yelena Fedotova explores why Prigov is a rare Soviet-era artist whose reputation is continuing to grow.

On 1 June, a solo exhibition of Dmitri Prigov’s work, organised by the State Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, opened at the Venetian Ca’ Foscari Palazzo, the local university's current exhibition hall. Prigov was not only a visual artist but also a poet, a performance artist, and one of the key figures of the non-conformist and dissident generation of the 1970s forming part of the USSR’s artistic underground. The quirky interior of the Venetian palazzo has proved a surprisingly conducive setting for the Russian artist's work.

The exhibition is titled Dmitri Prigov: Dmitri Prigov, which may sound confusing, but captures the fact that the artist Dmitri Prigov devoted his entire life to “Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov”, the art project. In a concession to the Western audience, the difficult patronymic “Aleksandrovich” was removed from the title, somewhat distorting the essence of the character Prigov had invented – in the Russian language, using a poet's full name marks him out as a “classic”.

Prigov carefully cultivated the persona of "Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov". (Photo: prigov.com)

Prigov quite consciously worked for eternity, creating his CV in the image of a particular character – a great Russian poet. In one of his articles, which can also be regarded as being part of his performance art canon, he even demanded to be recognised as Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, since to Russians “Pushkin is our everything” and “Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov” also aspired to be “our everything.”

In Japan I would be Catullus
And in Rome I would be Hokusai
And in Russia I am the same guy
Who would have been
Catallus in Japan
And in Rome, Hokusai.

Dmitri Prigov, translation by Philip Metres

The act of including himself in the pantheon of the great was part of his pose. Many people disliked him on account of this, most were capable of appreciating his postmodern playing with the classics. The classics are also at the centre of an installation in one of the rooms at the Ca' Foscari. Above a set of black, hole-like doors are suspended black clouds featuring the names Malevich, Leonardo, and Rembrandt.  In front of each door is a chair.  The whole set-up seems like a tongue-in-cheek invitation to the viewer to enter into a dialogue with the geniuses, as if saying: take a seat, have a chat, but you won't understand anything anyway.

How can you distinguish a madman or a
dissident from an artist? One story has Prigov, on
his release from a mental asylum, replying that
the only difference is the artist is famous.
(Photo: prigov.com)

Prigov was someone whose energy radiated into many areas of art, drawing as many creative people as possible into its orbit. In terms of productivity, he was a true Renaissance man, setting himself the personal goal of a certain number of poems to be written and drawings to be made each day, or to be precise, each night. Prigov's legacy includes over 35,000 poems and a number of prints and installations. There's certainly enough material for several major exhibitions. A few years ago Prigov had a big retrospective exhibition in Moscow, which turned out to be very impressive. However, the exhibition at the Ca' Foscari is quite extraordinary, mainly because in Venice the theatrical element that is present in all of Prigov's work matches the theatricality of the exhibition site itself.

Immediately on entering, visitors find themselves in a dark palazzo gallery, divided by curtains on to which video films are projected. Passing through the curtains, you have the feeling that you are entering and becoming immersed in Prigov’s world, making you feel like Alice in the world behind the looking glass. The first video shows Prigov, dressed in a black monk's habit and mumbling “Once, once, once...”, while in the second Prigov's son Andrei, also an artist, addresses his father saying: “Father, take this cup away from me...” To the sound of this mumbling you enter the third room, where the actual installation begins with an enormous eye painted on the wall, and a glass filled with some red liquid standing next to it on the floor – apparently the same cup as the one the son was asking his father to take away. But while this glass may clearly be interpreted as a symbol of great significance, an uninitiated visitor may well “mistake” this mystical cup for an ordinary glass of wine. Prigov has an uncanny ability to turn a trivial profane object into something sacred.

Prigov's "Bulatov" from his "Bestiary" series
(1996), part of the exhibition in Venice.
© The State Hermitage Museum,
St. Petersburg / Yuri Molodkovets

Some might find this degree of intentional theatricality, staging an entire spectacle, rather anachronistic. They might have a point. But it does not fail to impress, especially if you understand the nature of this theatricality, whose roots go back to Prigov's early days in the 1970s.

Prigov's poetry and visual art was a spoof of Soviet power, revealing its ritualistic and religious nature. His plays depict life in the Soviet Union as something phantasmagorical, and much of this absurdity, combined with a sense of mystical horror, also apparent in his visual work, survived the collapse of the USSR.  His heroes – individuals doing the most banal jobs – possessed truly mystical strength.  For example sportsmen, who in the Soviet Union were seen as carrying out a special mission as conduits of the worldwide victory of socialism, are in Prigov’s work equated with angels. One of his most striking characters – the Policeman – a kind of ideal embodiment or avatar of the Soviet power structure, was possessed of truly god-given strength, in fact, he was probably a Soviet god, perhaps not the greatest but certainly a mighty one.

Женщина в метро меня лягнула
Ну, пихаться - там куда ни шло
Здесь же она явно перегнула
Палку, и все дело перешло
В ранг ненужно личных отношений
Я, естественно, в ответ лягнул
Но и тут же попросил прощенья -
Просто я как личность выше был

So a woman kicked me in the subway
Well, a little jostling's not so bad
This woman, though, did it six ways from Sunday
She went too far, and so the whole thing had
To sink to the level of the unnecessarily
Personal - of course I kicked her back
But right away I told her I was sorry -
You see, I as a person am above all that

Dmitri Prigov, translation by LanguageHat

The nature of power and personal responsibility, as well as the difficulty of choice, were key themes for Prigov and these did not lose their relevance after the fall of Soviet power. The enormous black eye on the wall is, of course, the eye of the “Big Brother”, who is constantly watching you. At the same time, it is a kind of celestial eye and a third eye, a symbol of the superego. In a word, Prigov's work inundates you with endless interpretations piled up on top of one another, creating a multi-storeyed sensual edifice. 

Dmitri Prigov, Korruptsia / Corruption, 1987,
Ink on newspaper. Private Collection
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008,
© Krings-Ernst Galerie

Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov cultivated the image of a madman – he would read his poetry in the manner of a shamanistic ritual, while in his most impressive performances he howled like a kikimora, a character from Russian folklore with a scary voice, deep in a bog. Unfortunately, in real life Prigov did not manage to escape the lunatic asylum. Under close surveillance by the Soviet law enforcement agencies throughout the 1970s, he ended up in a mental hospital in the mid-1980s, at a time when people were supposedly no longer put away for being freethinking. Yet Prigov ended up locked in a psikhushka as a result of a performance. He had posted on trees, lamp posts and bus stops quotations from the New Testament in the form of announcements. Legend has it that as Prigov was being released, he was asked how an artist could be distinguished from a madman or a dissident. He replied that an artist really was both a madman and a dissident and that the only way you could tell whether someone was an artist was that he was famous. And indeed, how could anyone have been a poet and conceptual artist in the USSR without being a madman?

Prigov inhabiting one of his most enduring
charactures, the Policeman - a kind of ideal
embodiment or avatar of the Soviet power
structure.

While maintaining familial ties with artists representing “SotsArt”, with their ironic commentary on the organization of the Soviet universe, Prigov in fact belonged to the Moscow conceptualist circle. As a member of this extremely closed society -- virtually a sect -- he would spend a lot of time in Ilya Kabakov's workshop and he attended meetings at the flat of Andrei Monastyrski, the other father of Russian conceptualism, a place where poets used to gather and where readings for the initiated were held. One of the exhibits at Ca' Foscari, the print series “Bestiary”, includes portraits of many of his personal friends as well as his “eternal interlocutors” – poets and artists of the past, every one of them a beast or perhaps even a demon as splendid as Prigov himself. 

In a remarkable twist, Prigov has become part of contemporary history, coming full circle in his career. On the day he died, 16 July 2007, he was due to take part in a performance by the Voina art collective, the most scandal-prone group of young Russian performance artists, who in 2010 organised the most notorious event of recent years: they had drawn a 62-metre-long penis on the Liteiny Bridge pointing directly at the FSB building in St. Petersburg.  Prigov, sitting in a wardrobe, was to be carried by members of Voina up to the 22nd floor of a high-rise building: the artist was to play the role of the “man-sitting-in-the-wardrobe”, an underground resident (incidentally, Ilya Kabakov also had a character like this), in order to receive his due reward and ascend to the “heights” for his suffering. And so it happened, that by descending to his grave, Prigov gave his blessing to the young action artists, thus remaining among us forever.

Sideboxes 'Read On' Sidebox: 

Further Reading

Dmitri Prigov: Dmitri Prigov Venice Exhibition website.

Dmitri Prigov Foundation. Official web site (in Russian)

"The End(s) of Russian Poetry: An Interview with Dmitri Prigov" by Philip Metres, Behind the lines: Poetry, War and Peacemaking, blog, July 18, 2007

Silliman's Blog on Dmitry Prigov, March 22, 2006

Dmitry Prigov’s poems “In Love Russian Style”, by Natasha Perova. Glass New Russian Writing, 2007, 240 pages

Prigov’s poems in “In the Grips of Strange Thoughts; Russian Poetry in New Era”,  ed. J. Kates, Zephyr Press, 1989, 440 pages

Dmitri Prigov’s exhibitions (list)

Sidebox: 

Info:

Dmitri Prigov: Dmitri Prigov__Ca' Foscari Esposizioni, Venice, Italy

Commissioner: The State Hermitage Museum

Curator: Dimitri Ozerkov

From 1 June to 15 October

Adress:: Dorsoduro 3246, Venezia

Web: www.hermitage-prigov.com

Opening Hours:  10:00 - 18:00
Closed:  Mondays
Public transport : Line 1, 2
Fermata :  Ca' Rezzonico, San Tomà

Related stories:  Voina: artists at war Forbidden Art verdict: they're in mourning for Soviet censorship Forbidden art: an oasis in the desert Country or region:  Russia Topics:  Culture

The current crisis presents the first post-election test for political actors in the country. At this critical juncture, with the Turkish populous ready for a new, liberal constitution, the choices the political parties make to resolve the current impasse will affect the future of democracy in Turkey.

As the struggle for democracy in the Arab world turns bloodier, and the outcome more precarious, Turkey’s free and fair parliamentary elections on June 12th provided a burst of optimism for the region. With the elections resulting in a more inclusive and balanced parliament just as this body was set to write a new constitution for the country, Turkey appeared one step closer to becoming a genuine model for the rest of the Middle East. But just two weeks after the election, a new crisis emerged in the form of a standoff between the country's judiciary and a leading Kurdish political figure that underscores how Turkey's path forward is still blocked by one of its oldest problems: the government's reluctance to accommodate the legitimate demands of its Kurdish minority.  Already the clash has sparked significant upheaval and threatens to undermine efforts at consolidating democracy in the country. At the same time, it highlights many of the hurdles Turkey’s leaders must overcome in the process of reforming the constitution.

On June 21, the Supreme Election Board (YSK) of Turkey voted unanimously to bar a renowned Kurdish activist and lawyer, Hatip Dicle, from assuming his parliamentary seat. Dicle had run as an independent backed by the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which won an unprecedented 36 seats in the parliament. Just days before the election, Dicle lost an appeal to overturn a conviction for spreading “terrorist propaganda” over remarks he made in 2007 supporting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK) right to defend itself against operations by the Turkish military. Under Turkish law, no one convicted of a terrorism-related charge can enter parliament. However, given the timing of the court decision, the latest YSK decision was marred in controversy.

The Kurdish population immediately responded with outrage and the BDP ultimately decided to boycott the parliament, which opened last Monday.  In an ominous indicator of the chaos that could ensue if political channels for addressing the grievances of Kurds are closed, the past two weeks have witnessed mass protests throughout the country and four PKK attacks, which killed four and injured six. 

The implications of the Dicle case go beyond the Kurdish issue. In fact, it gets to the heart of the challenges Turkey faces on its path to democratization.

Many Turkish liberals believe the YSK violated universal principles by denying the people of Diyarbakir the candidate that they elected to represent them-- particularly since this is the same institution that earlier ruled Dicle was eligible to run in the elections. Kurds and many human-rights lawyers also argue that Turkish terrorism laws are unduly broad and deny people their right to free speech. Why was Dicle persecuted for terrorism-related charges for his rhetoric in the first place? While supporting the PKK is anathema to the Turkish state, the harsh reality is that after years of being denied their identity and challenges to their political participation, many Kurds view the PKK as the only viable defender of their rights. Until Kurdish groups are able to speak freely and candidly about these issues, a resolution to one of Turkey’s most intractable problems will prove elusive.

Yet, there is also the challenge of expanding democracy into areas with armed actors. The political aspects of the Kurdish issue are inextricably linked to the terrorist issue. Most Turks view the PKK as a terrorist organization, responsible for the deaths of thousands, and the BDP, as its political arm. With Kurdish leaders warning of “chaos” and PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan of “civil war” in response to Dicle’s case, some politicians and analysts say the BDP's radical politics are to blame for Mr. Dicle's fate. As long as PKK violence continues, much of the Turkish population will be resistant to making too many concessions. And many will also continue to be sympathetic to decisions like the one handed down by the YSK.

Perhaps most importantly, the controversy over the decision highlights the lack of credibility in the judicial system. State institutions have often been inconsistent in their application and interpretation of the law, serving an ideological agenda and placing the rights of the state over those of the individual. Past YSK rulings are a case in point. In the lead-up to the elections, the body barred 12 independent candidates—7 of whom were supported by the BDP- from running in the elections, a decision that was largely seen to be a political not a legal one. The body then quickly reversed its ruling in response to major protestations about the case, proving the flimsiness of the law and the political nature of the YSK’s decision-making. The YSK also created controversy by barring Turkish citizens living abroad from voting in the elections, a move viewed as intentionally hurting the AKP since the majority of expatriates were expected to vote for them.

Given the enormous challenges Turkey’s political actors must tackle, it is crucial that the BDP and the ruling AKP find a resolution to the current impasse. While the BDP is justified in its outrage, the only way for Kurds to ensure that injustices like that suffered by Dicle are prevented in the future is to participate peacefully in parliament and revise the laws. After all, Kurds voted en masse for the BDP because they want a political solution to the Kurdish crisis. 

At the same time, it is incumbent on the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to create a cooperative rather than confrontational political environment so that Kurds are encouraged to participate. The party won a majority in the recent elections, but fell short of the super majority needed to pass legislation single-handedly, leading many to assume that the party would be forced to seek consensus with other political and civil society groups in its initiatives. Yet so far, the AKP has further inflamed the crisis by defending the YSK decision that awarded Dicle’s seat to AKP candidate Oya Eronat. In his first remarks on the issue, Prime Minister Erdogan accused the BDP of irresponsibility in nominating controversial candidates. For a politician who was also precluded from joining parliament in 2002 because of an unjust conviction, such statements are not only inflammatory but hypocritical. In Erdogan’s case the constitution was amended to allow him to join parliament after a by-election, and a similar legal change should be made in Dicle’s case to allow him to enter. 

The current crisis presents the first post-election test for political actors in the country—will they seek to move beyond zero-sum politics to tackle the country’s fundamental institutional and legal challenges? Or, will they become victims of the undemocratic system and harden their positions because of past injustices, ultimately undermining Turkey’s prospects for genuine progress? At this critical juncture, with the Turkish populous ready for a new, liberal constitution, the choices these political parties make to resolve the current impasse will affect the future of democracy in Turkey.

Sideboxes Related stories:  Turkey and Ergenekon: from farce to tragedy Parliamentary crisis: imprisoned politicians in Turkey Country or region:  Turkey Topics:  Civil society Democracy and government

The closure of the Murdoch-owned British tabloid News of the World amidst an escalating phone hacking scandal is just one aspect of a bigger crisis that is undermining the reality management system upon which the media, politicians and the financial sector rely

It is clear that what is going on now is not just about phone hacking and Britain's biggest-selling Sunday paper, News of the World. A whole ruling class, a whole mode of governance, stands accused. Often small incidents are as revealing of this as the larger confrontation. Readers outside the UK may not have heard about how the Independent columnist Johann Hari cut passages from the books of those he profiled, allowing his readers to conclude they were said directly to him. Practically every defence of Hari served to further underscore what a complacent self-serving Oxbridge club so much of the UK broadsheet commentariat is. 

For the Hari and the News of the World situations are part of a single crisis that also includes the Ed Miliband "these strikes are wrong" video and ongoing cyberwar (Wikileaks, Lulzsec, 4Chan). Perhaps the reason that the Frontline Club dialogue between Julian Assange and Slavoj Zizek last Saturday was so disappointing is that Zizek's basic point about the crisis of symbolic efficiency is now so clear that it doesn't require much elaboration. It is one thing our knowing about the corrupt practices that the power elite routinely engage in; it is another for that knowledge to be officially validated. The space that power needs to manage reality is disappearing.

With the 'Milibot' video, the offscreen manipulations of PR came off less like a dark art and more like surrealist comedy - Miliband for all the world resembling an ROM entity from Existenz, only capable of giving one pre-prepared response no matter what the question. The exposure of Hari's manipulations is significant, meanwhile, because (as Petra Davis argued on her Twitter feed) it showed how his construction of "commonsense reality" depended on techniques proper to fiction. Reading Hari's pieces back, it's quite astonishing how crass these techniques were - a "she drew on the omnipresent cigarette" here, and "he asked for more wine" there, inserted between screeds of pirated text. It's like Hari's "interviewing" career is one long postmodern prank, and, really, this episode ought to be liberal empiricism's equivalent of the Sokal scandal.

It was fitting that the DSG exposure of Hari started with Hari's hatchet job on Negri, a masterclass in liberal propaganda and kneejerk loathing of theory - Hari reassuring his readers that he couldn't understand Empire, therefore they shouldn't worry about reading it. The old we don't read it, so you don't have to.... routine. The Negri 'interview' crudely alternates between personal attacks on Negri and appeals to self-evidence (of course communism is evil, why won't this bad tempered old man admit it?) Yet Hari's conclusion - "this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics" - now itself reads like a relic of a bygone world. The "certainties" and self-evidences of the near-past are unravelling quicker than we can keep up.

As for the News of the World story, all the signs are that neoliberalism's standard tactics of containment - offering an individual as scapegoat-trophy in order to deflect from a structural tendency - are now starting to fail. News International are trying to re-sacrifice a scapegoat they've already served up (Coulson) but the process is out of their control and now has its own momentum (which is sure to drag other newspapers into its wake before very long). What was made to look like a series of disconnected incidents now appears as what it always was: a worldwide web of corruption whose murkiness resembles something out of The Wire or a David Peace novel. A dark network comprising private investigators, the criminal underworld, tabloid newspapers, multinational media conglomerates, the police, politicians, the banks, and the bodies supposed to regulate them (who are at best impotent, at worst part of the problem) cannot now be kept hidden from public scrutiny. This is less a conspiracy than a network of complicities: fear on all sides, nobody trusting anybody else, the whole thing depending on who's got the goods on whom ... Cops watching hacks watching cops; threatened politicans looking for favours ...

What characterises capitalist realism is fatalism at the level of politics (where nothing much can ever change, except to move further in the direction of neoliberalisation) and magical voluntarism at the level of the individual: you can achieve anything, if you only you do more training courses, listen to Mary Portas or Kirsty Alsop, try harder. Magical voluntarism, naturally, also drives the tabloid culture of individual blame (resign, resign!) in which the tabloids themselves are now caught up, although, as Zone Styx noted, News International clearly expects far more from public service managers like Sharon Shoemith than it does from its own executives.) Individualise, individualise, insists capitalist ideology. Note the way in which the media sought to reduce the Lulsec story to Ryan Cleary, or the way in which the clueless Peter Preston finds the idea of a collective entity such as DSG unfathomable.

A manageable level of cynicism about the media actually serves the capitalist realist media system well. Since the media stands in for the public sphere, if journalists and politicians are perceived to be "all liars", as they widely are, then there is no hope to be had in public life at all. Hack expulpations appeal to a market Hobbesianism: they are giving people what they want but what they won't admit to liking. When, pickled in the jouissance of self-loathing and their other stimulants of choice, the hacks style themselves as "princes of darkness", they see themselves as reflecting the public's own disavowed cynicism back to it. Nobody likes working in the sewers, but don't you all love the pretty little globules of sensation that we dredge up for you?.

Similarly, Glenn Mulcaire whines that the NOTW put him under pressure for results, this isn't only an excuse - what we're seeing here is in part the consequence of the intense competitive pressures at work in print media as its market share declines. Negative solidarity again: a race to depths so infernally pressurised that only alcohol-breathing subhuman crustaceans can survive there. (You only have to look at ex-NOTW hack Paul McMullan to see that.) As one by one those who played their part are dragged into the light, the old bullying sneers become familiar plaints: that's reality, we couldn't help it, that's how things are now ... But we must hear their excuses as indictments of a system: behold what a wretched state overwork and pitiless competition can reduce human beings to.

All of which means that a few sackings here and there will clearly not suffice. What is needed, as Dan Hind argues, is total media reform:

The current structure of power and decision-making in the media cannot now be allowed to remain unchanged. The employees of large media organizations have monopoly control of decisions about what is investigated and what prominence is given to the results of investigations. They have been unable or unwilling to use this monopoly power in the public interest. Accordingly it is time to assert our democratic right to communicate freely amongst ourselves. Each of us must take some some fraction of the commissioning power, the power to initiate and publish inquiries. If we do not our public life will remain a mess of officially sanctioned fairy tales, crocodilian excuses, and grotesque abuses of the innocent, in which market forces and elite prerogatives set the limits of our understanding and hence of our capacity for self-government.

In the House of Commons emergency debate on the New of the World on Wednesday, many MPs had the relieved and faintly bemused air of the henchmen and victims of a bully who can't quite believe that the tyranny might be nearing its end. As Assange said on Saturday- and as Dan Hind also argues in The Return of the Public - the function of corporate media has been to isolate people, to make them distrust their discontent with a world controlled by business interests. What has combated this is the production of new collectivities of dissent, both online and in the streets. What we're seeing in this extraordinary moment of transition is a reality management system imploding from within at the same time as it is being undermined from outside. And, this is only the beginning - you haven't seen anything yet. 

This is a slightly edited version of a piece originally posted on K-punk.

Country or region:  UK Topics:  Democracy and government Ideas Internet

We can no longer have a welfare system where recipients get something for nothing. So says the Labour leader, but before lecturing benefit claimants on their rights and responsibilities, he would do well to examine the root causes of wage inequality and unemployment in this country

In a recent speech on welfare and responsibility, Ed Miliband raised a number of ideas which sit uneasily with many in his own party. He put chief executives and benefits claimants in the same category: people who have “responsibilities” as well as rights, whether they are at the top or bottom of society economically. New Labour didn’t emphasise the responsibility of both groups enough and in so doing, he argued, lost touch with the public. Welfare came to be seen as getting something for nothing; the hardworking subsidising the feckless. What we now need, Miliband argued, is a system built on reciprocity and contribution – fairness. This narrative resonates with the public, and the left in the labour movement can’t afford to glibly dismiss such ideas as Blairite centrism. 

'More for Less', The High Pay Commission, May 2011

Much of what the Labour leader said was right in principle. With a few exceptions, such as severe disability, people just don’t accept individuals taking from the pot without first contributing. Entitlement cannot be entirely based on “need” alone. This has led to some blatant injustices, particularly in housing, which only undermine support for welfare. Obsessing over rights while sneering at responsibilities has become commonplace. But it’s an admission of democratic impotence to presume the ruled owe nothing to the rulers. It portrays the individual as a mere serf who, in return for his docility, demands his ‘red lines’ be respected - his “rights”. It’s the mindset of the subject, not the citizen. And even if public consent is based on resignation, we are all answerable for that resignation. Civic responsibility and reciprocity must be reclaimed if we are to progress to a more participative republicanism. 

Though right in principle, however, it was wrong in the context and realities of today’s Britain. The problem with Miliband’s rhetoric, and its one he shares with the Coalition, is that those at the bottom have effectively been cut adrift for the benefit of those at the top. It’s this division that must first be healed before lecturing the unemployed on their obligations.  

A common theme of the welfare debate is that benefits must simply be too high. If people can secure a comparable standard of living on welfare, why would they choose to work? Miliband spoke of a disabled man he’d met campaigning who, despite being apparently fit to work, chose not to:

“…it’s just not right for the country to be supporting him not to work, when other families on his street are working all hours just to get by.” [i]

But people “working all hours” shouldn’t be “just getting by”. Nor should they need propping up with endless tax credits and state assistance, all of which are effectively a vast subsidy to business. When the meagre living afforded by benefits is no worse, and in some cases better, than what a low-paid job can provide, it’s little wonder some choose to stay at home. This much is not in dispute. What is contested is the cause of this convergence. Are benefits too generous, or are wages are too low?

For 30 years the earning power of low to middle-income earners has been squeezed; wealth has been redistributed upwards. In the post-war period, much flatter wealth distributions accompanied booming growth: ‘the golden age of capitalism’. By contrast, the neoliberal decades have seen not only modest growth and frequent crises, but an explosion in inequality (the high pay commission has warned that wage inequality could soon return to Victorian levels [ii]). The poor have been increasingly excluded from productivity gains.

Earlier this year, the Resolution Trust published a report showing that between 2003-2008, despite growth of 11% in the UK, wages in the bottom half completely stagnated [iii]. Even by 2015, wages are expected to be no higher than in 2001. Finally severing the link between productivity gains and wages, this “decoupling” was no anomaly but the natural conclusion of our current economic orthodoxies. Far from being unique, a similar picture can be seen across a number of Western economies: 

“…an American worker on middle wages in 2009 earned no more than an equivalent worker in 1975, despite US GDP more than doubling over the period.”

Closer to home, in Germany, the median weekly wage fell by 9% in real terms in the period 2003-2008 despite the economy growing 11% in the same period. Clouded by the figures for mean wages is a splintering between those at the top and the bottom. Low to middle income earners are being increasingly shut out from the gains of the wider economy and it’s the state that is left to pick up the pieces. Where did the money go?

In abandoning the post-war consensus, the last thirty years have witnessed profound shifts in our economic structures and attitudes. A commitment to full employment, state industries and highly progressive tax systems has been replaced with the theology of the ‘free market’. The primary role of government is now to satiate the ‘wealth creators’. The state is remoulded into an overseer; rather than providing public services, it now creates and regulates a series of private oligopolies. Taxes should be largely optional, aided by a vast and unchallenged offshore web, and short term “shareholder value” must override all else. Where the state previously intervened to keep capital on a tight leash, it is now very much the other way around; ‘the markets’ now dictate to elected governments what is acceptable. Freed from any serious ideological counterbalance post-Cold War, the champions of the free-market have led a sustained attack on labour power. 

In a world of full employment, employers simply didn’t have the leverage to drive down wages. What was needed to keep labour in check was continuous, large scale unemployment – the waste fumes of the neoliberal model. Though ostensibly to combat inflation, it certainly had other benefits: 

“I was involved in making a number of proposals which [were] put in play by the government. Now, my worry is … that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions … who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, [an] extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes… [this] re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.” (Sir Alan Budd) [iv]

Accompanying the transition was a protracted assault on collective bargaining, driven through by aggressive anti-union legislation and cheered in the media. The ‘race to the bottom’ frenzy of globalisation saw low-end wages squeezed further still; intransigent workers faced the threat, often realised, that their jobs would simply be moved offshore. Workers not only had to compete with cheap labour abroad but, in the New Labour years, increasingly on their doorstep. The effect of this on low wages is typically negative – it makes the poor even poorer [v]. In this wider context, what is often described as a left-wing cultural project seems more a right-wing economic policy – the CBI, for instance, have always been outspoken supporters of Labour’s open border approach. When combined with technological advances that have displaced many manual workers, the overall impact of these factors on low-end wages has been substantial.

As the bottom of the labour market has been squeezed, increasingly bigger chunks of the nation’s wealth have been swallowed up by exorbitant executive salaries and share dividends. As a proportion of GDP, wages have fallen from 64.5 percent in the 70s to 53.2 percent in 2008 (ibid). The effect of this on the low-paid is exacerbated by the growing inequality within the wage distribution; not only is less money going to wages overall, it has also become increasingly concentrated at the top. 

“In 2010, the average annual salary of FTSE 100 chief executives was more than £3,747,000, 145 times greater than the national median full-time wage of £25,800… the report predicts that by 2020 the ratio will have spiralled up to 214:1.” [vi]

Within just the last ten years this ratio has more than doubled. The same report found the top 0.1 percent of earners currently account for 4.5 percent of national income, set to rise to 14 percent by 2030 on current trends. This is less “trickle down”, more cascade up. As the purchasing power of labour declined, and with it the cost of wages, supply would naturally begin to outstrip demand. This was the inherent instability of the system: it’s one thing to appropriate someone’s wages, but there comes a point where they can no longer afford your goods. The answer was debt.  

In the UK, household debt soared from 45 percent in 1980 to 157 percent in 2005 [vii]. Cheap credit flowed in all directions; 125% mortgages, equity release schemes, remortgages, second mortgages and credit cards given out like confetti. Yet by 2008, the fiction started to unravel. Poverty dressed up in debt and a triple A name badge is still poverty. When these premium assets turned out to be junk the whole system collapsed. At the root of the crisis is the reduced power of labour:

“… high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of the rich, a large increase in leverage for the remainder, and an eventual financial and real crisis… [potentially]as a result of a shift in bargaining powers over incomes.” (IMF) [viii]

The situation it has left us in is hardly suitable for lecturing the unemployed and disabled on their work ethic: 400 people are chasing every job. The Coalition is keen to focus on “structural deficit” but says little on the causes of our structural unemployment beyond attacking welfare and the disabled. Yet encouraging a fairer distribution of the national wealth would have substantial benefits. Aggregate demand, for instance, can be expanded by spreading resources to those with the highest propensity to consume – the poor. This has knock-on effects for the deficit: benefits are lowered and tax receipts grow (the poor seem to have a much higher propensity to pay their taxes too). Not only is this more sustainable and just than credit bubbles but it would reduce inequality and all its attendant ills – ills which are themselves serious burdens on the state finances [ix]. 

If Miliband wants to rebuild responsibility, he could start with a commitment to full employment and living wages; people are happy to work when they are given a fair share of the proceeds. The destabilising currents of the last thirty years need to be reversed; wealth needs to be shifted back from the top to the bottom.

 

Notes: 

[i] “Ed Miliband speech in full”, Politics.co.uk, 13th June 2011           

[ii] “More for Less: what has happened to pay at the top and does it matter?”, The High Pay Commission, May 2011

[iii] James Plunkett, “Growth without gain? The faltering living standards of people on low-to-middle incomes”, Resolution Foundation, May 2011

[iv] “Alan Budd on the Tories’ real motives”, The Other Taxpayers Alliance, July 7th 2011

[v] Dr Martin Ruhs, “The Labour Market effects of immigration”, The Migration Observatory, 21st March 2011

[vi] Deborah Hargreaves, “Pay gap widening to Victorian levels”, The Guardian, May 2011

[vii] Stewart Lansley, “Unfair to Middling”, TUC, 2009

[viii] Michael Kumhof & Romain Ranciere, “Inequality, leverage and crises”, The IMF, November 2010

[ix] “Why more equality?”, The Equality Trust, 2009

Country or region:  UK Topics:  Democracy and government Economics Equality

As new patterns of racial violence emerge throughout the UK, anti-racist campaigners need to forge new solidarities based on an understanding of local realities

The Institute of Race Relations has published the first of three investigations into areas of the country that have experienced increased numbers of racist attacks in recent years.  We focused on the city of Plymouth, which, according to the local Racial Equality Council, experiences 50 racist incidents every single day, a city which at one point was earmarked as a BNP stronghold, and which was once described as the ‘city of hate’ because of the sheer volume and ferocity of attacks on asylum seekers. Our report is part of a wider investigation into new geographies of racism, which are emerging in the UK and have become entrenched, in large part, with little or no political acknowledgment.

Plymouth waterside

What’s remarkable about these patterns of racial violence is that they have emerged in the aftermath of the Macpherson Report: a document which forced the issue of racial violence onto the public agenda like no other previously. Remember it? Published in 1999 following an investigation into the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence and the incompetent response by the police; the report’s findings confirmed what generations of anti-racist activists, campaigners and families such as the Lawrences, who had experienced the realities of policing in the UK, already knew: that there was overwhelming evidence of institutional racism in the criminal justice system.

In 2011, the murder of Stephen Lawrence is back in the media spotlight, with two of the suspects set to stand trial (in one case, re-trial) later in the year. Yet, despite this resurgence of interest in the outcome of this case, many of the messages of the Macpherson Report have been downplayed, waylaid and discarded. Jack Straw — who originally championed the report — has claimed that the Metropolitan Police are “on the whole” no longer institutionally racist. Commentators have questioned whether racism any longer has relevance. And of more interest to policy makers is the promotion of community cohesion and the creation of a set of binding values to cohere the nation and foster a British identity. 

Driving this move away from anti-racism is the ongoing attack —  instigated by Labour and continued with vigour by the Conservatives —  on multiculturalism. According to critics, multiculturalism represents a greater threat to contemporary Britain than racism. But despite — and in some contexts because of — this redefinition of policy practice and debate, the reality is that racist violence continues unabated. At least 89 people have lost their lives as a result of attacks with a racist element since Stephen Lawrence was brutally stabbed to death in April 1993. And whilst in 1993/4, there were 8,779 incidents recorded by the police as racist throughout the UK, in 2009/10 (the last year for which statistics are available), there were 43,426.

Close analysis of these statistics reveals that the nature of racial violence is changing. Historically within the UK, racist attacks have often (but not exclusively) been concentrated in inner-city areas. But what has emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century, and continued in the beginning of the twenty-first century, is a developing pattern of racial violence indicating increasing numbers of attacks in rural areas and smaller conurbations of which Plymouth is one.

In the 1990s Plymouth was a particularly homogenous city with well over 90 per cent of its population classed as white-British. Over the past decade the demography of the city has markedly changed. As well as ‘natural growth’ within existing black and minority ethnic communities, the university has actively sought to recruit more international students. The city became a dispersal area for asylum seekers in 1999. Migrant workers in the city and surrounding areas have become a more integral part of the labour force.

But it is not ‘diversity’ which has led to racist violence. Racial violence appears to be informed by local histories and contexts and the ways in which these interpret and reinterpret racism perpetuated by policies and practices on a national scale. Plymouth has a history bound up with naval conquest. It is a garrison city with a strong military presence and the war footing on which Britain has been over the last decade has particular resonance. It’s also a city which has been ravaged by economic restructuring. In the 1980s the dockyards – the city’s economic heart – were decimated. Unemployment has remained persistently high, exacerbated in recent years by the economic recession and austerity measures.

Inequality in the city is entrenched, with particular wards classed as some of the poorest in the country. An active pursuit of a more flexible economy means, in reality, an economy where employers’ burden of risk is transferred to employees who work in temporary, part-time positions. For many people from black and minority ethnic communities, this means work in jobs such as mini-cabbing or in the service sector where there are known risks of racist violence.

So why explore these new geographies of racism? Because doing so illuminates changes in the make-up and position of the labour force, patterns of migration and the impact of political interventions into the economic and social conditions of the UK’s communities. Because racial violence is one of the most extreme, brutal indicators of the wider racist climate, divisive policies and ruthless marginalisation engendered by successive governments. And because we hope that by uncovering the ‘new geographies of racism’ this, in turn, will pave the way for the forging of new solidarities necessary to inform anti-racist struggles.   

Jon Burnett is a researcher at the Institute of Race Relations. He can be contacted at jon@irr.org.uk

Country or region:  UK England Topics:  Culture Democracy and government Equality

South Sudan celebrates its independence this week, becoming the world's newest nation. But the festering divisions that are likely to haunt the north and South for the foreseeable future beg the question: will secession succeed in providing stability for the long-oppressed citizens of these two countries?

As South Sudan celebrates its independence on July 9th, becoming the newest African nation, feelings of jubilation are widespread among Southern Sudanese, and understandably so. Secession, which is the outcome of the referendum vote brokered as part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A – the ex-southern rebel movement) and the Khartoum government in 2005, represents a milestone in the country’s history. After decades of oppression and exploitation at the hands of the north, and a north-south civil war fought on southern territory that left millions dead, Southerners at last have the chance to escape the cycle of violence and injustice by taking control of their own destiny. Given the deplorable role that successive northern governments have played in thwarting that destiny, it is no surprise that Southerners have opted overwhelmingly for secession.

While South Sudan’s independence should be celebrated, however, the euphoria surrounding secession also risks overshadowing deeper, unaddressed divisions that may mar prospects for peace in both countries long after secession has been achieved.

These divisions are a consequence of a number of factors, among them Sudan’s history and its complex identity. The arbitrary colonial boundaries imposed by the British, which were inherited by the Sudanese governments that took over power after independence in 1956, created the largest country in Africa. In doing so these borders also lumped together vastly different groups of people, making Sudan one of the most culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse countries even in a continent where cultural heterogeneity is the norm rather than the exception. A further complicating factor was reflected in Sudan’s geographic location: poised between Africa and the Middle East, the country stood at the fault line between the Arab world and Africa, and this division was expressed internally in the split between a predominantly Muslim north and a largely Christian and animist south.

The country’s complex cultural and social identity posed a dilemma for the governments that came to power after independence. Dominated by northerners based in the capital, Khartoum, these governments failed miserably in responding to and addressing the needs and aspirations of different groups of people, particularly those, such as southerners, located far away from the centre of power. Within a few years of independence, southern Sudanese took up arms to protest their lack of representation and exclusion by northern governments. Civil war between the two regions continued on and off for more than forty years. In this regard the current Khartoum regime, which came to power in a military coup led by Omar al-Bashir in 1989, was no different from its predecessors in its marginalization of the south. What was different was the extent of its ideological and physical brutality. From the beginning, it attempted to impose cultural and religious uniformity on a heterogeneous population. Rather than protecting and nurturing the country’s diversity, the source of its greatest strength and richness, the regime systematically repressed it, forcibly imposing its brand of Islam and an Arabized identity on groups of people – both northerners and southerners – with a wide array of cultural and religious practices.

But the regime’s ideological oppression was only a mask for its true agenda: ruthless exploitation of marginalized regions and peoples for its own enrichment. When  southern Sudan's vast oil reserves began to be tapped in the late 1990s, the country’s economy boomed, and yet average citizens continued to find their livelihoods shrinking and even disappearing as more and more people slid into dire poverty. In this regard the underlying division that has been at the heart of the country since its independence from the British is not a north-south split but a centre-periphery split, one that pits a self-aggrandizing, corrupt, political elite based in Khartoum against the vast majority of a struggling population located in the resource-rich rural areas.

Within this context, South Sudan’s secession is a mixed blessing. While it gives Southerners their long overdue right to self-determination, in the north it leaves the centre-periphery dichotomy intact. This is indicated in the wars that have erupted or are threatening to erupt in that region. The unresolved conflict in Darfur gives the lie to the notion that the north constitutes a homogeneous, unified entity, one that will be at harmony after secession. Millions of Darfurians remain displaced in camps in Sudan and in Chad, fearful of returning to their homes amidst the genocidal violence that began in 2003. In eastern Sudan, rebel groups continue to mount opposition to the Khartoum government, demanding equal access to development and economic redistribution for their region. This year, one of the eastern rebel groups – the Federal Alliance of Eastern Sudan – joined forces with the Justice and Equality Movement, the largest rebel group in Darfur, to oppose the Khartoum government. Furthermore, the violent clashes that have erupted in recent days between the government and the Nuba people (many of whom sided with the SPLM during the north-south civil war but who, under the new borders, will fall under the jurisdiction of northern Sudan) also suggest that these divisions are set to intensify.

The government is not likely to respond kindly to continuing resistance from these northern groups, especially in the wake of Southern secession. Smarting from the loss of the oil-rich South, and fearful that other marginalized regions such as Darfur or the state of South Kordofan (the Nuba's homeland) will follow suit and demand secession, the regime is consolidating its oppressive hold over the north by violently quelling opposition and further curtailing democratic rights. The atrocities now being committed by the government in South Kordofan, not for the first time, are an ominous indication of the lengths to which it will go to quash resistance.

While the picture in South Sudan seems rosier at the moment, underlying divisions in that country are also likely to surface in the aftermath of secession. The SPLM has done its people a great and historic service in leading them to independence. But the movement is neither a fully democratic nor a representative one. There were reports of vote rigging and intimidation by the SPLM in the southern gubernatorial and parliamentary elections that took place in April of 2010. Allegations of financial corruption are also widespread. Dominated as it is by the Dinka ethnic group – one of the major groups in South Sudan – the SPLM has been accused of marginalizing the numerous other ethnic groups that exist in the South from key decision-making and leadership roles. This has stoked already existing tensions between the various groups in the region as they compete for resources and political power, tensions that have escalated in recent months and which have led to wide-scale violence and displacement. The movement has also been riven by conflict from within, with breakaway factions fighting the SPLM in confrontations that have resulted in deadly violence in the South in recent months. While these tensions have been suppressed amidst the exhilaration of independence, they remain unresolved and may re-emerge in the coming months and years, threatening the stability of a fragile new nation.

The festering divisions that are likely to haunt the north and South for the foreseeable future beg the question: will secession succeed in providing stability for the long-oppressed citizens of these two countries? It may provide a short-term resolution. But only robust democracy, representative government and equity in the distribution of wealth and resources – both in the north and in the newly independent South Sudan – can provide lasting peace.

 

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With the secession of South Sudan on July 9th, North Sudan returns to a familiar and depressing status quo - one party rule. With the elimination of southern constituency seats in Sudan’s National Assembly, only five women members of parliament remain in the opposition. Sara Abbas spoke to two of them

On July 9th the dream of many southern Sudanese will be realized, as their region breaks away to form the world’s youngest country. Secession brings with it an end to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that has governed the country since 2005. Most celebrated for ending Africa’s longest running civil war and for paving the way for South Sudan’s self-determination referendum, the CPA also sought to usher in a democratic phase in the country’s history, starting with multi-party elections that had eluded Sudan for nearly two decades.

Though by and large a male-driven affair, Sudanese women activists celebrated the CPA’s signing, which they saw as the first opening of the political space since the 1989 coup that had brought the National Islamic Front (NIF) to power. The reign of the NIF had been a particularly painful one for Sudanese women. It saw an intensification of the war in the South and the instigation of new conflicts in the North, leaving millions dead , displaced or vulnerable to sexual violence. The regime’s “civilization project”, which rested on the pillars of forced Arabization and forced Islamization, regarded women as prime targets for civilizing. Along with the banning of political parties came the suppression of women’s organizations and their replacement with new structures loyal to the regime. Laws, blind to gender concerns under previous administrations, became downright hostile to them under the NIF, with arrests, intimidation and flogging of women for everything from adultery to “immoral dress” becoming common place, and few avenues for redress available.

Although the CPA was silent on the issue of gender equity in government, women activists hoped that it would bring forth constitutional and political reform. Contending that a key reason underlying women’s marginalization in wider society was their distance from power, women began mobilizing, with demands coalescing around a quota for women in power structures. In 2008, the quota became law, with the Elections Act mandating 25% of seats for women at the National, South Sudan and state level assemblies.

When elections finally came in April 2010, they were a far cry from the hopes vested on them at the time of the CPA’s signature. Citing intimidation and fraud, northern opposition parties staged a last minute boycott. In the South, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the other party to the CPA, swept nearly every seat. In the North, the National Congress Party (NCP), the NIF’s political organ, dominated the polls. The 112 quota seats in the National Assembly fared no better, with every quota seat in the South going to the SPLM and every one in the North but six going to the NCP.

Following secession, this imbalance is set to become more acute. In anticipation of the split, all seats representing southern constituencies were recently eliminated, leaving the National Assembly firmly in the hands of the NCP. Only five opposition women MPs remain:  two from the SPLM representing Blue Nile and South Kordofan states and three from the Popular Congress Party (PCP) representing South Darfur. (A sixth represents North Darfur, but her party is allied with the regime.)

Troublingly, at no other time in the past year has there been a greater need for voices of dissent in parliament. The last few months have seen the NCP launch a deadly campaign in South Kordofan, a border state located between the North and South that is home to the Nuba people, who had largely sided with the SPLM during the war, but who were left without the right to self-determination. 

One of the few opposition MPs left, Mary James Kuku, herself a Nuba and an SPLM member, represents this constituency. Speaking on July 4th from Khartoum, she describes the new environment of the Assembly as isolating: “On an individual level, when you’re part of a handful as opposed to a large group, it makes you hold back… you can still speak out, but you don’t have the power you had before.” Recently, she’s felt tensions grow with her NCP colleagues as a result of the conflict in South Kordofan, which the NCP blames on the SPLM in the region. “I don’t want to get into a back and forth with them,” Mary says, “ so I try to stay quiet.”

Silencing at times takes more direct forms. Mary recalls the first session following the withdrawal of the southern MPs, when the Assembly speaker opened with a reading from the Koran, choosing not to read from the Bible as well, a practice that had become customary following the signature of the CPA. As the only Christian woman left in the National Assembly, Mary was pained by the gesture. “The implication is that Sudan is no longer a multi-religious society, when in fact it remains so,” she says. Mary does take comfort from her female NCP colleagues, who she points out do their best to make her feel included. She sees the women’s Parliamentary Caucus - a cross-party platform established in 2007 in the wake of the CPA for women members of parliament - as a less politicized space where she can feel relatively at home.

Aisha Abbakar Taha, an opposition MP from the PCP representing South Darfur, agrees: “In the caucus we can debate, be told we’re right or wrong, and even have some of our suggestions adopted, unlike the rest of the Assembly. It’s slightly lighter on the politics”.

Aisha, whose party leader, Sheikh Hassan Al-Turabi, was once a key figure in the NIF regime, ultimately sees the difference between herself and her female NCP peers as one of relationship to the party, whereby they feel compelled to present the situation of the country, and of the country’s women, in much rosier terms than she does.  “In general, we in the opposition speak out on everything. Our opinion is clear. But even if we’re right they’ll find a way to make us wrong.”

Both Mary and Aisha feel that in the present environment, they can do little but seize whatever openings exist, no matter how small, and work to expand them. For Aisha this rests in a desire by all women MPs, regardless of political affiliation, for more training. Women in the opposition and government, she contends, have suffered from a deficit of opportunity.

Mary agrees that the Caucus is a very worthwhile long-term investment, and in fact she is the one who oversees its training programme, but given the urgency of the situation in South Kordofan, she has more immediate concerns. She is joining efforts to form a cross- party coalition of South Kordofani MPs that hopes to lobby for, at the very least, humanitarian relief for the region. “We won’t necessarily agree on the politics,” she says, “but since these are our communities, we can agree on the need to provide basic help as the rainy season fast approaches.”

Otherwise, Mary worries about the impending constitutional-drafting process following secession. “On women’s issues, women MPs are together”, she insists.  “The only thing that can divide us is if they base the constitution on Islam.” She feels that enough of her female NCP colleagues support making the document inclusive to make a secular constitution possible, but realizes that she and they will need allies in civil society if they are to have a chance of influencing the process.

Aisha for her part is less optimistic, but remains a strong believer in the power of speaking out, regardless of immediate outcomes. “We are recording our opinion for history, so that people can judge for themselves later.”  It remains to be seen whether North Sudan has learnt from its history, but this new chapter has not had a promising start.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sideboxes Related stories:  Sudan secession: resolving divisions? Sudanese women demand justice Women's citizenship:implications of the Southern Sudan referendum Women in Sudan: beyond the war South Sudan: reflections on a fragile state Sudan and the International Criminal Court: a guide to the controversy Sudan: prospect and lesson Year of the boomerang? Frantz Fanon and the Arab uprisings Country or region:  Sudan Topics:  Conflict Democracy and government International politics

There are deep divisions between the political forces in the new parliament that are not being worked out through democratic parliamentary debate. All of a sudden, the parliament is in crisis

In our recent article on the June 2011 national elections in Turkey, we argued that the versatility and open-mindedness of many first time parliamentarians might lead to a strong and effective political opposition in the Turkish Parliament; something that every parliamentary democracy should cherish. Yet, barely a fortnight later, the new parliament is facing a major crisis surrounding nine newly-elected opposition MPs who are currently held in jail.

Specifically, two MPs of the social democratic CHP (Republican People’s Party) are imprisoned under the Ergenekon investigation into an alleged coup attempt; six MPs of the Kurdish BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) were arrested under the KCK operation for belonging to the urban wing of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, PKK; and finally, one MP from the right-wing MHP (Nationalist Action Party) is held under the Balyoz investigation, yet another investigation into an alleged coup. Of these nine MPs, only one has been convicted in a court of law: Hatip Dicle, elected to Parliament for the BDP, is serving a twenty-month sentence for ‘being a member of a terrorist organisation’. The verdict against him was based on his 2007 public statement, pronouncing that ‘if the Turkish military does not stop its operations against Kurds, the PKK could legitimately rely on its right to self-defence’ (source in Turkish).

Immediately after the votes were counted, the Turkish Board of Elections stripped Dicle of his parliamentary mandate due to his conviction. Because the BDP had fielded independent candidates rather than a national party list to circumvent the 10% electoral threshold, his vacated seat was allocated to the governing AKP (Justice and Development Party) rather than another BDP member. Turkish lower courts have so far prosecuted four of the remaining eight jailed MPs and refused to release any of them. The courts’ decisions on the remaining four MPs are still pending, but it appears highly unlikely that the verdicts will differ from those in the previous cases.

Following the court rulings the current crisis escalated when the remaining 30 BDP MPs decided to boycott all parliamentary activities – including the inaugural session – until measures are taken to allow their imprisoned MPs to assume their seats. MPs from the CHP, while being present in Parliament, refused to take their inaugural oaths. Under the Turkish Constitution, it is not certain whether this will prevent the CHP members from participating in parliamentary sessions, but it certainly illustrates the deep division between the political forces in the new parliament.

This is not the first time that the Turkish electorate has voted imprisoned or convicted candidates into office; nor is it the first time that the courts had to deal with such a situation. In 1998 the current prime minister, Mr Erdoğan, then mayor of Istanbul, was briefly imprisoned and barred from politics for five years after he had recited several verses from a nationalist poem that prosecutors deemed to be a call for sharia rule. When the AKP won power in 2002 it was only after the CHP agreed to aid the AKP to approve constitutional tweaks that Mr Erdoğan was permitted to stand in a by-election.  Erdoğan thus became an eligible candidate and won the Siirt rerun to become Turkish Prime Minister, an office that he has held ever since. In 2007, another such crisis was circumvented when lower courts released Sebahat Tuncel  (another BDP MP) who was imprisoned (but not convicted) for being a member of the PKK at the time of her election.

The deviation of lower courts in the present cases from previous legal practise calls for an explanation. This is especially so since the crimes the eight jailed MPs are accused of are not covered by parliamentary immunity – meaning that a release from prison, allowing them to fulfil their political mandate, would in no way circumvent any on-going or future investigation into their alleged terrorist activities. In addition, the credibility of the entire Ergenekon investigation has since come into question, due to various procedural inconsistencies. Moveover, in contrast to similar situations in the past, a political solution to the current problem, as was achieved for Erdoğan in 2002 seems unlikely. The AKP appears unwilling to cooperate with the other parliamentary groups on this issue. Specifically, Prime Minister Erdoğan publicly announced that the Turkish Parliament would continue its work with or without the opposition.

Fostered by its 1997 EU candidateship Turkey has come a long way in establishing a sustainable democracy based on majoritarian institutions. This progress is most visible in the shift of power from the military to political institutions. Nevertheless, the recent crisis implies that not all political forces benefited equally from this progress, and there are still significant barriers on the way to equal democratic representation for some parts of the society. Tellingly, Hatip Dicle himself was among the four first ‘openly’ Kurdish MPs of Turkey. Elected to parliament in 1991, he was arrested in 1994 and spent more than a decade in prison for treason because he attempted to take his inaugural oath in Kurdish. Dicle’s case resulted in Turkey's conviction before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Although existing ECHR case-law does not provide a perfect template, the Court’s doctrines of proportionality and legitimate expectations strongly suggest that Turkey may face further convictions over the current crisis. The fact that all parliamentary candidates (including Hatip Dicle) were pre-approved by the Turkish Board of Elections further indicates that the Turkish courts are currently navigating in precarious legal waters.

Still, this crisis poses an opportunity for Turkey to face her political past and tackle much needed reforms of democratic governance. The AKP government has won the election on the promise for substantial constitutional reforms. In principle, such a legal overhaul is to be applauded.

Turkey’s current constitution is a direct product of the 1980 military coup and, despite various amendments, there is general agreement that the country needs major reforms to acquire a new, contemporary constitution. However, fundamental constitutional changes should reflect a broad societal consensus rather than party politics. This is arguably the main reason why democracies with written constitutions usually require super-majorities in parliament for constitutional amendments. The fact that the AKP did not achieve an outright two-third majority in the recent elections should thus bode well for the anticipated reform process. Under the current distribution of seats, the AKP is short of three votes only to reach the required three-fifth majority to introduce a constitutional amendment through referendum. Nevertheless, it is crucial, in our opinion, that all political forces are party to finding a new constitutional basis upon which the Turkish Republic can build its future. The legitimacy of a constitution drafted without the contribution of two opposition parties will be severely questioned both inside and outside of Turkey. This will especially be so, since the issues related to the current crisis, such as the exceptionally high national electoral hurdle, lack of constitutional guarantees against trivial and excessive arrests as well as a strong commitment to freedom of expression, must rank on the top of the reform list.

But, of course, the burden to find a solution does not only lie with the governing party. The CHP has recently taken initiatives to create international pressure to resolve the situation that include a motion by the Socialist International Council stating that barring legally elected MPs from performing their parliamentary duties is a violation of international human rights law. Instead, the CHP and BDP should work on a more concrete plan to overcome the crisis. Their boycott of Parliament is not sustainable in the long-term; and it does not serve their, the electorate’s or the Turkish people’s interest. Rather the BDP and CHP should use the crisis as an opportunity for concrete agenda-setting, thus, forcing the government to implement the promised reforms through effective opposition in the Parliament. These reforms are much needed not only to resolve the on-going crisis but at the same time to provide a solid basis for the future of Turkish democracy.

Country or region:  Turkey Topics:  Civil society Culture Democracy and government International politics

Founder Nora Callahan and her husband, activist and former prisoner Chuck Armsbury, talk about a lifetime spent fighting for the rights of drug offenders everywhere.

The Land of the Free punishes or imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation. This collection of testimonials from criminal offenders, family members, and experts on America’s criminal justice system puts a human face on the millions of Americans subjugated by the US Government's 40 year, one trillion dollar social catastrophe: The War on Drugs; a failed policy underscored by fear, politics, racial prejudice and intolerance in a public atmosphere of "out of sight, out of mind."

This complete interview is #4 of 100 in The Exile Nation Project's archive, which can be found on ExileNation.org.

THE NOVEMBER COALITION

Founded in 1997, the November Coalition is a not for profit educational foundation whose membership represents citizens from all walks of life who find themselves questioning the motivation and ever increasing militarization and imprisonment behind the United States War on Drugs. Visit November.org.

In this 90 minute interview, Founder Nora Callahan and her husband, activist and former prisoner Chuck Armsbury, talk about a lifetime spent fighting for the rights of drug offenders everywhere.

 

In this clip, Founder Nora Callahan reads some of the letters the November Coalition receives from desperate inmates seeking re-entry assistance, and liken the experience of many offenders to the Salem Witch Trials.

In this clip, Founder Nora Callahan describes the "Glass Coffin" that prison becomes for so many offenders, and Chuck Armsbury explains the power of the November Coalition Prisoner Story Wall.

It has been relatively easy for NATO to violate UN Resolution 1973 in part because of the splits of the peace movement worldwide. The peace movement will have to work very hard to counter the other interests involved in the next stage. A few voices are warning against continuing intervention.

It has been relatively easy for NATO to violate UN Resolution 1973 in part because of the splits of the peace movement worldwide. While the resolution clearly calls for a no-fly zone to protect the Libyan opposition from air attacks from Gaddafi’s air force and has a vague provision to do whatever necessary to implement the no fly zone, there is nothing in the resolution that supports the bombing of Gaddafi forces positions, arming the opposition and providing military advisors, or, as it has evolved, calling for the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime itself.

This is a classic case of ‘mission creep’. NATO used the UN Security Council resolution to provide a pretext to open the door to Libya militarily and then has gone on its merry way in violation of much of its framework. They were able to do so in large measure, especially in Europe and North America, due to the manner in which the media pulled on the heartstrings of the public with respect to the fate of the Libyan rebels. Some of it was true: the rebels certainly looked about to be crushed. Some of it was embellished: true enough Gaddafi’s regime was repressive and tolerated no opposition, but the social and economic achievements Libyans have enjoyed over his forty-year rule are not insignificant. Some of it was fabricated: for example, that the wave of repression Gaddafi would have unleashed against his adversaries would have amounted to nothing short of genocide.

There were other issues too for which there was little or no time for reflection

-  that the rebels were poorly organized and had a weak social base (even if some of the issues fuelling their opposition were legitimate)

-  that the rebel weakness provided an opportunity for NATO powers to manipulate not only the Libyan opposition movement to their own ends, but also potentially the broader Arab Revolt in Tunisia and Egypt,

-  that countries which a half century or more ago led the colonial charge into Africa and the Maghreb, are now, under NATO’s banner under the heading of humanitarian intervention, portraying themselves as the champions of human rights concerns. This is particularly ironic for Italy which a century ago, fearing it might be left out of the African colonial frenzy gripping Europe, invaded Libya, killing more than a quarter of a million Libyans with napalm, poison gas and the like -  one of the less reported chapters of colonial savagery in the twentieth century

By the time peace movements began to think through these more cynical goals of the NATO intervention, NATO’s plans were well under way. Did NATO move as quickly as it did, with hardly any public discussion, virtually no involvement of parliaments or the US Congress, precisely to co-opt and divide possible opposition? The speed with which the Libyan operation was set in motion suggests an underlying nervousness to get on with it, as if presenting the case in a more orderly and open fashion could have undermined it from the beginning.

Peace movements divided almost immediately over the Libyan operation, with many of the human rights organizations supporting if not pushing for intervention on humanitarian grounds. The voices of the skeptics, often motivated by an anti-imperialist reflex suspicious of the NATO end-game in Libya, were drowned out, largely isolated. Such splits in the peace movement over western intervention in the Third World, especially here in the United States, are nothing new. They have characterized post-Cold War era military operations be it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen. The pretexts of either countering terrorism or support for `humanitarian intervention’, especially in regions of the world somewhat obscure to Americans (which unfortunately turns out to be most of the world) have worked well. The most radical of these interventions – the US-led 2oo3 invasion of Iraq – had as a goal nothing short of a complete restructuring of economic and political structures along neo-conservative lines. In all cases, pretexts for intervention covered up hidden goals. So it is shaping up with Libya.

Actually in the case of the 2003 Iraq invasion, opposition was considerable, but didn’t translate into an effective political movement for nearly four years when Cold War Democrats understanding that the winds of war had shifted, came out of the woodwork and joined the growing US anti-war movement. Whatever he has done since to renege on his commitment to ending Middle East wars, Barack Obama was very much the anti-war candidate in 2008.

With the Libyan intervention, US peace activists remain divided and probably will be for some time. No less an important figure than Juan Cole, University of Michigan professor and one of the few genuine experts on Middle East affairs strongly supports the NATO intervention. He is not alone. Key human rights organizations in the US – Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International are essentially on the same page. Despite Congressional annoyance at not being consulted beforehand about the Libyan intervention, at the present moment, Obama enjoys bipartisan support for his Libyan war policies.

But there are the beginnings of movement in the other direction. Republican opposition to the Libyan intervention might very well be yet another attempt to oppose Obama on whatever grounds. But on a deeper level, even the Republican constituency at a time of deepening economic crisis have deep reservations about the Libyan operation. On the left there are a few voices whose opposition to the Libyan operation are gaining a bit of traction

-  former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney just led a delegation of Americans to Libya. They have come back with a very different take on the war there, according to journalist Wayne Madsen

-  Dennis Kucinich, one of the most consistent, if not the most consistent, voices for peace in the US Congress has raised concerns (also about a possible intervention in Syria)

At the same time, old factional tendencies, vestiges of Cold War peace politics remain alive and well. The tendencies (liberal democratic vs. more left oriented voices) have yet to learn how to engage in ‘civil dialogue’ – not a particularly well developed tradition here in the United States. Add to this some other examples of social forces who could play a pivotal role in building a counterweight to Obama’s Libya policy either equivocating, or divided. The US labour movement, for all its weakness, still a force to contend with, has played virtually no positive role.  In part because important unions are concentrated in military industries, in part because of the old Cold War traditions of the AFL-CIO followed during the George Meany years. There have been some changes over the past 20 years, but overall, where it comes to foreign policy concerns and the creation of an independent labour voice on foreign policy issues, progress is slow. Minority communities – Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans – were important, if not decisive, elements in the anti-Vietnam War movement of a half a century ago. But with so many of them now in some branch of the volunteer armed forces, their ‘peace voice’ is softer today than it was earlier, their communities more divided than in the past.

Bombing Libya but this isn’t war

The US Congress’ informal protest over Obama’s sidestepping the War Powers Act with regard to US participation in the NATO bombing campaign in Libya included elements of the surreal. First, the president was charged with violating the law in what could be classified as an impeachable act; then in spite of this slap in the face, Congress, turned around and voted to approve the funding of the US military action in Libya for the next year, suggesting that when all is said and done, the protest vote didn’t amount to much.

The Obama Administration’s response to the criticism was pathetic. No, the Administration need not get congressional approval, the argument went, because the United States does not have troops ‘on the ground’ and without troops on the ground, the United States is not at war with Libya. It appears that Congress lamely accepted this logic. Actually do we know that the United States do not have troops on the ground? Are the Special Forces, whose mission is secret, involved? Are there US military advisors there? At any rate, the bombing missions are not considered war. But Al Qaeda did not have ‘troops on the ground’ when they sent hijacked civilian airliners careening into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which Congress did label an act of war. Using the cover of humanitarian intervention – it seems to play well in Peoria – the United States has launched deadly airstrikes against the Libyan military; provided military aid to the Libyan rebels; pressed sanctions against Libya and frozen its assets and called for the overthrow of Gaddafi. According to the Obama Administration and the president himself, these acts do not constitute ‘war’, thus the War Powers Act does not apply.

Looks like war. Smells like war, but if Obama says it’s not war, I guess it just can’t be war.

What about ground troops?

But what if the United States and/or its NATO allies bring the air war down to the ground, and introduce ground troops? If they are American, will Obama seek the authorization required under the War Powers Act, or when the time comes, seek another ‘out’ from Congressional scrutiny? Is sending US ground troops to Libya going beyond a line the Obama Administration will not cross?  Is it out of the question that what begins as humanitarian intervention will morph into permanent US/NATO military bases in Libya?

Voicing these suspicions is not necessarily to take sides with Gaddafi against the rebels. Many rebel grievances are legitimate. Gaddafi does have some genuine social achievements under his belt but democracy was not one of them. As in Iraq, there was a domestic crisis in Libya. But what is worth remarking on is the manner in which the United States and NATO have ‘embraced’ the Libyan rebellion against Gaddafi and done so in such a way as to control and manage the movement in virtually all its aspects. We can be sure that the rebels’ dependency on NATO will not come without conditions, the main outlines of which will become clearer in the days and months to come.

The United States and NATO understand that such crises can be easily manipulated to reshape North Africa according to their own strategic advantage. The political and organizational weaknesses of the rebel movement,  essentially a spontaneous eruption with little planning, is the perfect vehicle for US-NATO plans -  a horse they can ride to death.

Articles are beginning to appear in both the German and Russian press suggesting that there might be plans afoot for NATO, through various means, to introduce ground troops in the fall into both Libya and Syria, to accelerate the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya and to ‘support the process of reform’ in Syria. Both US and NATO spokespeople deny these claims as do a number of Middle East experts asked to comment. Given recent history (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia), such denials cannot be relied upon.

Arguments against a more direct US-led military intervention are weighty enough. The US is already overextended with its open military commitments in Afghanistan, Iraq; its less publicized activities in Yemen and Somalia. It cannot afford, either economically or politically, to open another military front at this time, especially with an upcoming presidential election. Recent surveys suggest that here in the United States, people are tiring of US foreign military intervention and their spiralling costs, rightly associating the money wasted on war with funds that could be better used here at home.

But there are counter arguments of what the United States could gain strategically from upping the ante and sending in ground troops to Libya, which cannot be easily written off. There are those within the Obama Administration arguing for a Shock Doctrine approach to the current Arab Revolt i.e. to use the current crisis in the Middle East and North Africa to ultimately reshape and strengthen the US position in the region. According to this argument, the United States might have been caught unprepared for the uprising, but it is still possible to manage it and even to come out ‘ahead’ strategically. The signs that more direct military intervention is at least on the drawing board are growing and with them, increased alarm in the international press.

Deutsche Welle ran a piece on June 27, 2011, ‘Rumors for US plans for Libya, Syria cause concern’ detailing the extent of the US naval build-up in the Eastern Mediterranean, and enhanced activity at Fort Hood, Texas where military preparations are allegedly gathering steam. The article also notes the changing nature of NATO involvement, more ‘mission leap’ than ‘mission creep.’  An article in the Russian press on June 29, 2011 entitled, ‘Democracy by order of Washington’ doesn’t give details but ends with a note of concern: “The next plan of the US is the redrawing of the maps of North Africa, the Middle and Near East. America is counting on the support of its most loyal allies.”

NATO’s role has already morphed from securing a no-fly zone over Libyan air space, a somewhat defensive step to defend civilians, to the more offensive operations of targeting Gaddafi’s forces, attempting to assassinate him by cruise missile attack and the introduction of French and British attack helicopters. The goal of the mission has also shifted from protecting civilians from attacks by pro-Gaddafi forces to regime change – a euphemism for overthrowing Gaddafi. But once wars start, they tend to have their own merciless logic, don’t they?

Not many more conceptual shifts are needed to defend the introduction of ground troops, especially if the military stalemate on the ground in Libya continues. The longer Gaddafi can hold out, the more sympathy he has been able to garner, especially in Africa and the Middle East, complicating the NATO mission and its humanitarian cover. At a certain point, NATO might feel mounting pressure to move towards sending in ground troops to break the stalemate.

Ground troops to what end?

The strategic implications of a ‘post Gaddafi’ Libya are beginning to come into focus. Should Gaddafi’s rule be overthrown one way or another, any rebel government would be exceedingly weak and could not rule without support and ‘supervision’ by its NATO ‘allies’. The end game could, in many ways, resemble what has been played out in Iraq.

• For a start, there will be a much tighter control of Libyan oil and the profits thereof by western oil companies. That has already started. In the areas it controls, the rebels are already selling oil to western companies at rock bottom prices to pay for arms and supplies. Western hold over Libyan oil will tighten. OPEC would be weaker, etc.
• A permanent NATO/US military presence in Libya is a more than likely, regardless of whether ground troops are introduced or not. If NATO ground troops are introduced, there will be some pretext for them to stay, in the name of supporting the rebel government. If NATO ground troops are not necessary to overthrow Gaddafi, the rebel government, almost certain to be shaky could invite them in anyway as advisors in one capacity or another.
• As the Russian press piece cited above suggests, a NATO permanent military presence in Libya could in many ways be the beginning of redrawing the map of North Africa. Such a presence would have a number of potentially profound consequences, among them:
• Within the Libyan context it would prevent any move to re-instate Gaddafi or those close to him to power. Such a presence would go far to ensuring a ‘US-friendly’ government would be ruling Libya and its sizeable amounts of low sulphur oil for a long time into the foreseeable future
• The US and NATO would be in a position to closely monitor, if not manage, the Arab Revolt in its strongest manifestations: in Tunisia and Egypt. Placed squarely between the two countries, a US military presence in Libya could be easily mobilized to counter political developments Washington finds objectionable.
• On a broader scale, a NATO military presence in Libya becomes an important springboard for the alliance in Africa, a continent whose strategic mineral resources, oil and gas cannot be underestimated. Competition for these resources between Europe and the US on the one hand, India and China on the other will only intensify in the years to come. It is noteworthy that Gaddafi’s Libya sells 60% of its oil to China, a situation certain to change should Gaddafi be removed
• There have been strong tensions inside NATO with the United States trying to internationalize security operations (under Washington’s direction), with Afghanistan being a kind of test case for taking the alliance outside Europe and making it into a worldwide police force. Although NATO spokespeople claim the contrary, within the coalition there have been strong reservations and opposition to being forced to fight in Afghanistan. A NATO military base in Libya (or military ‘presence’) would give the alliance another lease on life outside Europe and draw the Europeans into shouldering some of the costs of US security strategy in Europe.

A peace movement here in the United States split over the US/NATO intervention in Libya only makes it more likely for Washington to implement its programme.

Country or region:  Libya Topics:  Conflict International politics