Modern slavery is far from abolished

Despite international efforts to abolish slavery, it is well and truly alive in certain parts of the world. Global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic are not helping matters.

There are frequent anti-slavery protests but these do not always lead to change

Cheickna Diarra is from the village of Baramabougou in the region of Kayes in Mali, where what is known as "descent-based or hereditary slavery" is widespread.

Diarra was abused by people who saw themselves as his "masters" before he finally fled to the capital Bamako, where he now lives in a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs).

In 2019, he almost died after visiting a friend. "On my way home, about 20 young villagers barred my way without even asking where I was from, what I was doing there," he told DW. "They fell upon me and started hitting me with sticks until I fell down and lost consciousness."

He only survived because the cries of his relatives alerted the other villagers who came to his help.

"We stopped cultivating our fields in 2018," he explained. "Those claiming to be our masters banned us from going to the store and the fields, as well as from leaving the village."

He filed a complaint against unknown persons for maltreatment but to no avail. Many of the 130 others in his IDP camp have filed similar complaints in vain.

'Authorities always find a way out'

Temedt is an NGO that campaigns against slavery in Mali. Its vice-president Raichatou Walet Altanata told DW that progress is slow. "We have been denouncing the phenomenon since 2006. But none of our cases have gone to court on the grounds of slavery. The authorities always find a way out." She said that sometimes violence or crime is acknowledged but slavery, the real issue at stake, is never taken into account.

She pointed out that this goes against international conventions to abolish slavery that Mali has ratified, as well as the constitution, which also states that human dignity is sacred and inviolable.


Even those who manage to escape slavery are often doomed to a life of poverty

According to the human rights NGO Anti-Slavery International, descent-based slavery "can still be found across the Sahel belt of Africa, including Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan."

"People born into descent-based slavery face a lifetime of exploitation and are treated as property by their so-called 'masters.' They work without pay, herding animals, working in the fields or in their masters' homes. They can be inherited, sold or given away as gifts or wedding presents."

"Many other African societies also have a traditional hierarchy where people are known to be the descendants of slaves or slave-owners."

In 1981, Mauritania became one of the last countries in the world to ban slavery.

However, it has yet to be abolished in reality.

'Still a long way to go'

On December 2, 1949 the United Nations General Assembly approved the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. The date later became known as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

The convention has lost none of its relevance today. "While much progress has been made in terms of understanding modern slavery and the driving forces behind it, we still have a very long way to go if we are going to end it for good," Anti-Slavery International CEO Jasmine O'Connor told DW. "Millions of people around the world are living in slavery and increasing pressures are making many more vulnerable to the tricks of traffickers."

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), 40 million people were victims of modern slavery in 2016 and one in four were children.

People have been protesting against child labor for over a century. Today, children make up a quarter of those in forced labor.

Although modern slavery is not defined legally, it is often used as an umbrella term for practices such as forced labor, debt bondage, forced marriage, human trafficking and the forced recruitment of children in armed conflicts. Those who are most likely to be affected live in Africa, followed by the Asia-Pacific.

In 2016, 15.4 million people were in forced marriage and 24.9 million people were in forced labor, two thirds of whom were exploited in the private sector such as domestic work, construction or agriculture. 4.8 million were in forced sexual exploitation and 4 million were in forced labor imposed by state authorities.

Women are disproportionately affected by modern slavery, which sometimes involves sexual exploitation

More courageous action needed

Anti-Slavery International has called for more courageous and effective action and laws, as well as investigations and preventative measures to put an end to slavery across the world. CEO Jasmine O'Connor welcomed the fact that the G7 states have acknowledged the matter as one of great concern and said that there had been some legal and political successes with regard to hereditary slavery in west Africa. However, she feared that new statistics on slavery would show that numbers have gone up in the past five years.

"The past year has been marked by COVID-19 pandemic and climate change and we have seen how these factors are pushing more and more people into unplanned migration and precarious work, placing them at high risk of exploitation."

Children are often exploited in the gold mining industry

This article was translated from German.

Trump's coup was not defeated and America's democracy crisis is now worsening

Chauncey Devega, Salon
December 02, 2021

President of the United States Donald Trump (Shutterstock)

Each week brings us further confirmation that Donald Trump and members of his regime staged a coup attempt. It appears abundantly clear that they will face few if any consequences. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice give no impression that they are prepared to prosecute Trump personally, or any of the other major organizers of the Jan. 6 insurrection — and what little they are doing is moving very slowly.

Without significant intervention, the world's so-called "leading democracy" will go quietly to sleep.

The Guardian offers new details about Trump's leadership role in the January coup attempt, which was more extensive and serious than previously known. According to Hugo Lowell's reporting (drawing on multiple unnamed sources), Trump made several calls from the White House to his "top lieutenants" at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the afternoon of Jan. 5 and the morning of Jan. 6, all on the topic of "ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election win."

Trump told his team at the Willard that Vice President Mike Pence was reluctant to go along with a plan "to commandeer his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress" and try to engineer a second term for Trump. These conversations "reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard," Lowell writes, and "also shw Trump's thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack."

Trump was furious, as we already know, after Pence resisted his entreaties in an Oval Office meeting. But Trump wasn't done. He followed up with "several calls" to loyalists at the Willard, a group that included Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Steve Bannon:

On the calls, the former president first recounted what had transpired in the Oval Office meeting with Pence, informing Bannon and the lawyers at the Willard that his vice-president appeared ready to abandon him at the joint session in several hours' time.
"He's arrogant," Trump, for instance, told Bannon of Pence — his own way of communicating that Pence was unlikely to play ball — in an exchange reported in "Peril" [the book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa] and confirmed by the Guardian.

But on at least one of those calls, Trump also sought from the lawyers at the Willard ways to stop the joint session to ensure Biden would not be certified as president on 6 January, as part of a wider discussion about buying time to get states to send Trump electors.
The fallback that Trump and his lieutenants appeared to settle on was to cajole Republican members of Congress to raise enough objections so that even without Pence adjourning the joint session, the certification process would be delayed for states to send Trump slates.

Of course, this new reporting cannot be considered a "revelation." It simply adds more evidence to an already huge pile, making clear that the Trump cabal was vigorously engaged in a conspiracy to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election, with the goal of making Trump a de facto dictator.

Effectively, the coup was not defeated; and America's democracy crisis is worsening.

Our failing democracy is close to being fatally undermined by a rigged electoral system designed to ensure that it will be almost impossible for Republicans to lose an election.

Public opinion polls and other research has shown that those Americans who are deeply concerned for democracy and want to see Trump and his cabal punished for their obvious crimes are increasingly exhausted. Many have stopped believing that true justice will ever be done.

By comparison, most Republican voters have internalized the Big Lie that the 2020 election was "stolen," and are inclined to believe that Donald Trump is still the legitimate president. A large percentage of Republicans also believe that their "traditional" way of life is under threat, and are willing to endorse or condone violence to "defend" it.

In the end, a plurality of Americans, if not a majority, through tacit consent or just plain indifference, are surrendering to the neofascist tide and allowing themselves to be submerged in it. Trump's followers and other "conservatives" are energized by their belief that the rising fascist tide will carry them back to their imagined "greatness" as the "real Americans." They will be drowned too — that will just take longer.

America's supposed pro-democracy leaders should be rallying the people to resist the Republican fascist assault. Most are not. In the most high-profile example, President Joe Biden is choosing to publicly embrace "bipartisanship," in the empty hope that the Democratic Party's legislative successes will somehow blunt the power of the Republican-fascist movement.

Meanwhile, the mainstream news media remains trapped in obsolescent norms of "fairness," "balance" and "objectivity," rather than engaging in the type of pro-democracy advocacy journalism demanded by the country's escalating political crises.

The right-wing media and its larger echo chamber is a propaganda and disinformation machine. Its foremost role is to convince the right-wing public — and "low information" voters as a whole — that empirical truth and reality no longer exist, or are tools of a condescending "elite" and "deep state".

Many Americans are overwhelmed with a feeling of civic death, which is only compounded by the literal and unending plague of the coronavirus pandemic. These feelings of despair and doom are a further consequence of the Age of Trump, in which what was heretofore unimaginable becomes almost normal. This normalization process involves both large and small acts of surrender as a means of maintaining relative sanity in a deranged society. A country cannot easily purge itself of such a state of malignant normality.

America is not the first country to experience such a crisis. Lessons of the past are supposed to help us better understand the present as to avoid repeating those same mistakes. That becomes more difficult in a country afflicted with organized forgetting.

In his book "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45," Milton Mayer reflects on his experiences living under the Nazi regime in Germany. In one passage, he shares a friend's insights:

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted,'"that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice — "Resist the beginnings" and "Consider the end." But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

That remarkable passage serves as both testimony and warning. Many Americans, especially white people, lack a real understanding of the country's history: The price of admission into "whiteness" is a type of myopia and intentional forgetting. Black and brown Americans, Native Americans, Muslims, many recent immigrants and others who have suffered under power are not allowed such fantasies.

As such, many white Americans will soon be forced, against their collective will, to relearn these historical lessons about fascism and authoritarianism and how societies can be driven to madness. For those Americans who do understand the depth of the country's democracy crisis, important choices await. What does effective resistance look like? What can be salvaged from the country's democracy in the years ahead? Is it better to stay here and fight toward another day, or give up and leave?

In the most recent installment of her newsletter, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explores that final question, and her insights merit extensive quotation:

The hand of the US government and its enforcers will become heavier if the Republicans do well enough in the 2022 midterms to take control of the House and the Senate. Things could accelerate after that.

Anyone in public education, from kindergarten through advanced degree institutions, is fair game in red states. South Carolina is considering a bill to abolish tenure at public colleges and universities. It will also be increasingly dangerous, no matter where you live, to be a transgender person.

So, one answer would be: start exploring your options now if you are in a threatened category of people, as are many of those who write to me. "Better exile than prison," wrote former Italian Prime Minister Francesco Nitti to King Victor Emmanuel III in 1925, explaining why he'd left Italy when the Fascists took power. Nitti worked from abroad to counter authoritarian propaganda about what was happening in his native country, as exiles from Hong Kong, Myanmar, and other places do today.

It's unlikely that Republican rule would mean mass imprisonment for political opponents, the way there is in Erdogan's Turkey. Viktor Orbán, darling of the GOP, has not gone that route. And it's a shame to lose capable people when they are most needed at home — which would be the situation in the USA if Republicans gain more power and if they retake the White House in 2024.

Numbers matter for the success of nonviolent protests, for compensating at the ballot box for manipulated elections, and for constructing the kind of broad-based democracy movement America desperately needs, in which everyone finds their own way of working to protect our freedoms — or regain those we might lose.

Each person acts for their own reasons, and each situation is unique. But there is one constant in the history of exile. It means watching from afar the travails of your country, and, for those who desire to return, entering into a state of suspension: waiting for things to get better, waiting for the tyrant to die, waiting for freedoms to be restored.


If American democracy was a patient, it is self-medicating to numb the pain, but the fascist disease is almost fatal and time for effective treatment is rapidly running out.

What should a people do — individually, collectively or both — when there is so much more work to be done and they are already exhausted? Or when fatalism seems more rational than hope? The current crisis will put these questions to the American people, sooner rather than later. Tomorrow is not guaranteed — and we certainly cannot assume it will be better than today.

Self-declared ‘Queen of Canada’ detained by RCMP after alleged threats to health-care workers

By Andrew Russell & Stewart Bell Global News
Posted December 1, 2021 

A prominent Canadian QAnon figure based in Victoria says she's been arrested by the RCMP and detained under B.C.'s mental health act. Romana Didulo ,who often refers to herself as the "Queen of Canada," made the claim on a YouTube video.


Romana Didulo, a leading Canadian QAnon figure with an alleged history of encouraging her followers to shoot health-care workers, was taken into custody by the RCMP’s national security team in Victoria, B.C.

Didulo, who often refers to herself as the “Queen of Canada,” said in a YouTube video that the RCMP’s integrated national-security enforcement team (INSET) served her with a search warrant and told her she was being detained under B.C.’s mental health act.

A justice of the peace for the Victoria Court Registry confirmed that an RCMP search warrant was issued on Nov. 27 for an address linked to Didulo.

Based in B.C., Didulo has amassed a following of more than 73,000 people on the encrypted messaging app Telegram where she has allegedly called for health-care workers to be shot according to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. The Anti-Hate Network also alleges she’s encouraged her followers to target a wide range of people involved with the COVID-19 response including politicians, government workers, journalists and teachers.

Global News has not independently verified that Didulo made the alleged threats.

READ MORE: Canadians falling prey to conspiracy theories despite strong trust in institutions

According to Didulo, officers arrived at her home on Nov. 27, just days after she allegedly told her followers to “shoot to kill” all health-care workers involved with administering COVID-19 vaccines.

“They called out my name and said ‘open this door or we are going to break it in,’” she said in a YouTube video. “I was placed in handcuffs and escorted by multiple officers.”

Didulo said in the video the officers who arrested her were “very caring and polite” and that she was taken to the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria for a psychiatric assessment.

Under a section of B.C.’s mental health act, police can issue a warrant to arrest someone and detain them for up to 48-hours for a mental health assessment.

2:58 COVID-19: Conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancyCOVID-19: Conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy – Jun 24, 2021

At the hospital, she said she was seen by doctors who questioned her about her mental health and whether she was under the influence of any drugs or alcohol. She said a doctor told her that she was not “certifiable” and that she would be released.

“If ever I was to disappear next time, you know that I would be with the national integrated national-security enforcement team,” she said in the video holding up what appears to be a business card belonging to an RCMP officer.

B.C. RCMP spokesperson Staff Sgt. Janelle Shoihet said the Mounties could not confirm whether Didulo was arrested or any details of her account.

“Only in the event that an investigation results in the laying of criminal charges, would the RCMP confirm its investigation, the nature of any charges laid,” Shoihet said in an email. “Given the aforementioned, we are not in a position to confirm.”

Didulo could not be reached for comment.

View image in full screen
A screenshot of a message Romana Didulo sent to her followers on Telegram on Nov. 24, 2021. (Screenshot/Telegram)

The so-called “Queen of Canada” has spent months calling for the arrests and killings of anyone involved with Canada’s rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, according to the Anti-Hate Network, which has published post it says were posted by her.

Peter Smith, a journalist with the Anti-Hate Network, said Didulo didn’t have a large following until earlier this year when she received a massive boost from influential QAnon followers in the U.S. QAnon is a wide-ranging term for internet conspiracy theories that allege the world is run by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.

READ MORE: No Hoax — Fighting COVID-19 has meant tackling conspiracy theories, even within families

Smith said while some of the things Didulo says may seem farcical, the threat of violence from her and her followers needs to be taken seriously by police.

“Recently there have been very overt calls for violence or calls for paramilitary action,” Smith said. “I would caution people to take it quite seriously.”

In a recent Telegram message, Didulo allegedly instructed her “military” to “shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject children under the age of 19 years old with Coronavirus19 vaccines / bioweapons or any other vaccines.”

She has also called on her followers in the U.S. to enter Canada and arrest or kill people involved with vaccinating children against COVID-19, including doctors and teachers, according the Anti-Hate Network which has published messages it says were posted on Telegram.

The violent rhetoric allegedly posted online to her social media accounts has also led to real-world consequences, which have included her followers filing “cease and desist” notices demanding businesses and governments stop activities related to the COVID-19 response.

In a disturbing incident last June an elementary school in Alberta was targeted by her followers, who arrived while children were in class and began distributing anti-vaccine information. The incident was first reported by Vice news.

Didulo’s arrest also comes at a time as doctors, nurses and health-care workers across Canada have described how they have been targeted by online with antisemitic, racist and misogynistic comments for speaking out about the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines. Some have even said they have been threatened with physical violence or death.

© 2021 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Right-wing media and the pandemic: A toxic feedback loop that nurtured fascism

Chauncey Devega, Salon
November 01, 2021

Portland, Oregon/United States-August 22, 2020: Conservative people from the far right movement, Proud Boys, and Boogaloo join for a "Back the Blue" rally.

Years ago, when I was in high school, my friend's older brother purchased a copy of "The Anarchist Cookbook" from the local Army-Navy store. He told everyone he'd gotten the book from the owner in some type of illicit backroom deal. That book had totemic power: Supposedly it was illegal, and even possessing it was some type of crime. Of course that wasn't true. But for teenage boys who grew up during the 1980s, socialized into a fake military ideal of masculinity by movies like "Rambo," "Delta Force" and "Red Dawn," the facts didn't really matter.

My friend told me that his brother learned how to make napalm from "The Anarchist Cookbook." I and a small circle of friends were invited to a "secret" test after school on a Friday, near the running track of a local trade school that had been closed for renovations. Using the military language we were so obsessed with, my friend commanded me and the others to maintain "OPSEC" (for "operational security") telling us that all this was on a "need to know basis."

In the early evening, a dozen or more of us gathered to watch the detonation — OPSEC only goes so far in high school. My friend's brother had a small drum filled with a mixture of gasoline and other substances he refused to divulge. He told us to stand back and lit some type of fuse. Nothing happened. He was obviously frustrated as the crowd teetered on the verge of mockery and laughter. Regaining confidence, my friend's brother then threw a entire pack of matches into the drum.

I began to back away. I was the only Black person there and didn't want to end up being mentioned in the newspaper, burned alive or otherwise injured. What a joke I would have been among the Black folks in the community: "Damn fool got burned up hanging out with white people, doing stupid things. We thought he was smarter than that."

This time the drum full of "napalm" started to burn, producing acrid black smoke that stunk like rubber, plastic and petrol. The crowd scattered in terror, people screaming and convincing themselves that the toxic brew had exploded. The "explosion" was more smoke than fire. My friend's brother feigned pride that his test had gone so well. But his slumped shoulders revealed his true disappointment.

That next week my friend was absent from school. Rumors circulated about his brother, the authorities and another "napalm" test. That following Monday my friend was back, looking emotionally spent and physically exhausted. He told me in a low, flat voice that his brother had made more of his toxic concoction and started a terrible fire at their house. His brother's arms were badly burned. The fire department had to come put out the fire. My friend's brother was "sent away," he vaguely suggested, to some kind of reform school or youth bootcamp.

I don't know what really happened to my friend or his family. It was nearly the end of the school year, and not long after that they abruptly moved away. No one at our school talked about him or his brother anymore.

That homemade napalm, with its mixture of foul-smelling ingredients and its noxious smoke, is something like America in this moment of democracy crisis.

RELATED: Jen Senko on how Fox News brainwashed her dad — and is now prepping its audience for fascism

America's fascist brew contains many ingredients. There is the white supremacy, gangster capitalism, consumerism, extreme wealth and income inequality, anti-intellectualism, a news media that cares more about "balance" than the truth, a societal crisis of existential meaning and value, anti-rationality, collective narcissism, a culture that rewards and fetishizes violence and cruelty, sexism and misogyny, widespread corruption, a broken commons, a bloated and dying empire, a corporate oligarchy, paralyzed and dysfunctional political and social institutions, the surveillance society, general loneliness, nihilism and despair. Nearly everyone in American society knows that something is fundamentally wrong, even if we lack the language to explain it.

America's fascist brew was already highly unstable, and then even more dangerous accelerants were added to the drum of political napalm: Donald Trump and his movement, the right-wing propaganda machine, "Christian" nationalism and other right-wing religious extremism, a Republican death cult with its attack on reality and truth, white anxiety about "demographic change" and, not least of all, the coronavirus pandemic.

New research by Dan Romer and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, featured in the December 2021 edition of the journal Social Science & Medicine, offers further insights into the combustible relationship between the right-wing propaganda and the "news" media, the spread of conspiracy theories and the coronavirus pandemic. As the site PsyPost summarizes, the research found "that conservative media in the United States is particularly appealing to people who are prone to conspiratorial thinking. The use of conservative media, in turn, is associated with increasing belief in COVID-19 conspiracies and reduced willingness to engage in behaviors to prevent the spread of the virus."

Romer, who is research director at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, explained: "We have found that belief in conspiracies about the pandemic is related to lower levels of social distancing and personal hygiene behaviors recommended by the CDC, as well as mask wearing, and intentions to vaccinate. Given the importance of these behaviors to ending the pandemic, we are interested in understanding the factors that encourage these conspiracies."

PsyPost elaborates further:

Participants were asked to indicate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statements "The coronavirus was created by the Chinese government as a biological weapon" and "Some in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also known as CDC, are exaggerating the danger posed by the coronavirus to damage the Trump presidency."
Romer and his colleagues found that the use of conservative media (including Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Drudge Report) was related to increased belief in both pandemic-related conspiracy theories. Users of conservative media also exhibited greater conspiratorial thinking in general, agreeing more strongly with statements such as "Much of our lives is controlled by plots hatched in secret places."…

Some of the study's conclusions should come as no surprise. Romer told PsyPost that conservative media is "particularly engaged in entertaining and supporting conspiracies about the pandemic," and deliberately caters to "a segment of the population that is prone to accepting these conspiracies. ... We find that those followers increasingly accepted pandemic conspiracies over the course of 2020 and that the increase in those beliefs was associated with less reported mask wearing, lower intentions to vaccinate, and reduced confidence in the authority of the CDC."

This offers yet more evidence of how effective the right-wing propaganda machine has become in shaping public opinion, as well as the public mood at large and the personal identities of its most loyal audience.

What explains the right-wing propaganda machine's power? Various things: It is highly coordinated and self-contained. Its messages are repeated. It uses emotional appeals to target the fear center of the brain — there is considerable evidence that right-wing authoritarians and other conservatives are highly susceptible to such strategies.

Today's Republican Party and the larger fascist movement function as a type of political religion where faith and loyalty — and specifically belief in Donald Trump as a type of civic deity — takes the place of reason and empirical reality. In that sense, right-wing media functions as a type of a church chorus and community-building space for the faithful.

Instead of making reality more legible — the supposed responsibility of the free press in a healthy democracy — right-wing media deliberately circulates lies and disinformation that are understood by its target audience as gospel truth.

It's important to note that right-wing media would not be so nearly effective in confusing and misleading its audience if the latter were more informed to start with about real facts, real knowledge and real expertise. In that sense, this is about a much larger cultural problem in America. Conservative media has become highly adept at using the Dunning-Kruger effect to manipulate its public into believing they are better informed, and less purely ignorant, than they actually are.

One can crudely summarize the Dunning-Kruger effect, as I did not long ago, as the self-reinforcing process where "stupid people don't know that they are stupid."

In a 2017 essay for the Pacific Standard, psychologist David Dunning explained the concept:

In many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers — and we are all poor performers at some things — fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack. What's curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

Right-wing media also gains immense power — to the point where some in its audience will literally follow commands to hurt themselves and other people — because of the long-term educational crisis in the United States. More than 50% of Americans cannot read at a sixth-grade level. A public so intellectually hobbled can be easily compelled towards the simple solutions, promises and feelings of power offered by fascism, and by demagogues like our former president.

The American people feel understandably exhausted by the Age of Trump, when the many crises besieging the country have come to seem insurmountable. That outcome is at least partly by design: Right-wing elites and other anti-democratic forces — especially the gangster capitalists at the top of the economic pyramid — have spent decades destroying the commons and undermining social democracy. Widespread despair is an excellent way to weaken public resolve and grease the downward slope into dystopia.

America's failing democracy and the ascendant fascist movement are complex and interlinked problems that defy any simple solution. There is no one cure for what ails America because the problem is cultural and societal, not simply "political" in the narrow sense. Like the "napalm" fire I saw all those years ago, the United States is currently smoldering, and on the verge of exploding.

Saving American democracy will require hard work — and not just by political elites, activists and journalists, but also by ordinary people. Here is the paradox: Fatigue is understandable, but it also marks the moment when we must work hardest to push toward victory. The fascist onslaught is not over. It is only beginning.

Another terrifying case is before the Supreme Court -- and it has disturbing links to white supremacy

Mia Brett
December 01, 2021

US Supreme Court (supreme.justia.com)

Another week, another terrifying abortion case at the Supreme Court. Today, the Supreme Court will consider Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which concerns a Mississippi 15-week abortion ban. Since 15-week abortion bans, and all pre-viability abortion bans, are unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade, the only reason to even hear this case is for the Court to strongly consider upholding the ban and overturning Roe. While anti-abortion activists have been working toward this moment since the late 1970s, its no surprise they’re finding success in a moment of white backlash and growing white supremacy. The real history of abortion politics in this country should actually begin in 1662 with the first law codifying race and inheritable slavery.

The first 40 years of slavery in the North American British colonies treated slavery as it had been used previously in Europe. Slavery was mostly justified on the basis of religion or having conquered people and there were paths for slaves out of their enslavement. The slave system in Virginia completely changed with a 1662 law that made race and enslavement an inheritable condition through the mother. This law became the basis of the American racialized chattel system of slavery. It also clearly linked racial construction and the continuation of white supremacy to reproduction. Enslaved Black women would produce enslaved Black children while white women would produce free white children. The race of the fathers did not matter.

As a result of such a law, controlling the reproduction of women was vitally important both to produce more slave labor and to control white purity. White men had no downside to sexually abusing their slaves, as the resulting children would be considered Black. Alternatively, extreme social repercussions had to be placed on any white woman having sexual intercourse with a Black man, as the system could not tolerate Black kids being born free to white women.

Black women’s reproduction was a vital part of the American slave system, especially after the international slave trade was closed in 1808. Black women were forced to engage in sexual relationships with other slaves or were often sexually abused by their masters. Early gynecology was also created on the bodies of enslaved Black women, because their value was so tied to their reproduction. During slavery, abortion became a tool of agency for enslaved Black women to not only control their own reproduction, but also resist the slave system.

For most of common law history, abortion was either explicitly allowed until quickening (when the baby moves) or ignored. Abortion, and most gynecological concerns, were the purview of women. While the laws might have only condoned abortions until quickening, there were rarely prosecutions for later abortions unless the abortion was a result of a violent assault against the mother. Abortions were performed by both tribal communities and early British colonies in the 1600s and used mostly safe herbal abortifacients. Anti-abortion laws began in the 1820s but only criminalized post-quickening. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that there was a focused movement to outlaw abortion.

The timing of a movement to criminalize abortion after the Civil War is not a coincidence. While Black people were enslaved, the supposed superiority of white people was evident through the difference in the legal treatment of the two races. However after the Civil War, Black people were no longer enslaved and so white supremacy needed new tools to continue enforcing the racial hierarchy.

These efforts were dependent on a high white birth rate and strong prohibitions against interracial sex (for white women and Black men at least). The post-Civil War period also coincided with an increase of “less desirable” immigrants and concerns that ethnic minorities would take over cities if pure white women did not have enough children.

This period also saw changing gender roles with more women working outside the home and engaging in suffrage movements, thus threatening traditional households and lowering the white birth rate. Moreover, male gynecologists who had just built their field by experimenting on enslaved Black women also needed to discredit midwives and less medicalized avenues of healthcare.

Abortion was mostly ignored as it was the purview of women, but as male doctors took over gynecology, they encouraged legislative responses to abortion. These doctors also joined with eugenicist movements and warned that abortion could result in “race suicide.”

These efforts were successful. Abortion was criminalized in every state by 1910. This was the Jim Crow period in the South and the height of anti-immigrant fervor in the North. Not only was it important to ensure white women were having pure white babies to protect white supremacy, but white supremacist ideology was also dependent on there being a contrast to Blackness. More Black children not only meant more laborers but also were necessary to support the hierarchical view of the United States with white men on top. The threat of lynching was used to enforce strict racial boundaries between white women and Black men so white women’s reproduction could be controlled and the pure white bloodline could be continued.

The success of the pro-abortion movement with Roe v. Wade in 1973 came only five years after Loving v. Virginia, which ended all bans on interracial marriage. While de facto segregation continued, de jure segregation had been outlawed and public places and schools were all theoretically integrated, even if that didn’t play out in practice. Nixon’s Southern Strategy capitalized on the conservative Christian values. Anti-abortion politics served as a more palatable political cause than anti-integration motives. The movements became inextricably linked.

Today, Republican politicians and far-right personalities are openly embracing “white replacement theory,” which is the newest name for the fear that there aren’t enough pure white babies being born. This eugenicist fear has the twist that a secret Jewish cabal is conspiring to encourage the non-white birth rate in order to harm white people.

RELATED: 'White nationalism and white supremacy is now a key ideology of the Republican Party: MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan

While the anti-abortion and white supremacist movements are clearly intertwined, many anti-abortionists now claim abortion is really a Black genocide and it is racist to support it. Their narrative relies on misinformation and a racist paternalistic view of Black people.

In reality, white supremacy can’t survive without an alternative Blackness to condemn. They use fear-mongering about Black welfare queens to get elected. Taking reproductive control away from white men and putting it in the hands of women and pregnant people of all races is the biggest threat to white supremacist patriarchy. Anti-abortion sentiment is always just white supremacy in disguise.

Mia Brett, PhD, is a legal historian. She lives with her gorgeous dog, Tchotchke. You can find her @queenmab87.

What we talk about when we talk about white supremacy
Rod Graham
December 01, 2021

KENOSHA, WISCONSIN – NOVEMBER 05: Kyle Rittenhouse looks back as the late Anthony Huber's great aunt, Susan Hughes, enters the courtroom during his trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse on November 5, 2021 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse is accused of shooting three demonstrators, killing two of them, during a night of unrest that erupted in Kenosha after a police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back while being arrested in August 2020. Rittenhouse, from Antioch, Illinois, was 17 at the time of the shooting and armed with an assault rifle. He faces counts of felony homicide and felony attempted homicide. (Photo by Sean Krajacic-Pool/Getty Image

In a speech last month at Washington’s Martin Luther King Jr. monument, President Joe Biden described the January 6 insurrection as being about “white supremacy.” Later on, MSNBC did a segment on Thanksgiving in which guest commentator, Gyassi Ross, discussed its realities. Ross, who is Indigenous, sees it as the beginning of theft, genocide and “white supremacy.” After Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, Colin Kaepernick tweeted, “white supremacy cannot be reformed.”

It seemed like the term had come out of nowhere. I decided to check Google Trends. From 2004 to about 2016, there were relatively few searches for the word “white supremacy.” Then in 2016, there was an increase in the frequency of searches, with several sharp spikes. Two of those spikes were in August 2017 and June 2020. What happened?

Donald Trump. One cannot say with certainty, but his rise, replete with far-right dog whistles and bullhorns, was probably explained by many writers through a lens of white supremacy. The spikes in search frequency in 2017 was probably because of Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” rally. In June 2020, it was likely due to George Floyd protests.

The January 6 insurrection. Thanksgiving. Kyle Rittenhouse. Donald Trump. Unite The Right. George Floyd. All of these phenomena are linked to something called white supremacy. As I suspect this term will be a part of common parlance for some time, it’s worth explaining it.



The way we identify and discuss racism has changed quite a bit. That’s because the way racism is expressed has changed quite a bit.

Inquiries into racism were more straightforward 30 or 40 years ago. First, you ask: “Do you hate people of a different race than you, yes or no?” If no, they’re not a racist. Then you looked at laws and asked: “Are any laws on the books explicitly discriminating against a racial group?” If there are no laws like that on the books, then there is no racism.

Now consider how racism is discussed today. It’s rather complicated. For individuals, racism is no longer only about conscious hate and clear cases of discrimination. It’s about implicit biases and seemingly benign behaviors that have racist consequences. The focus has shifted from laws and policies that discriminate to laws and policies that may not appear at first to be discriminatory but turn out to have disproportionate effects. Scholars look at how interlocking institutions work to produce unequal outcomes, like the much-discussed “school to prison pipeline” populated by poor young Black and brown men.

All things considered, this is a net positive. Learning more about how something happens -- in this case, racial inequality -- should be seen as a good thing. Unfortunately, it is not. That, however, is primarily due to people rejecting the political consequences of this scholarship and then doubling back to question the merits of that scholarship.

How we understand white supremacy followed a similar trajectory.

Maintaining the racial hierarchy

White supremacy has in the past meant the maintenance of a racial hierarchy with white people at the top. In a white supremacist society, white people have the most power and privilege. White supremacists actively attempt to maintain and perpetuate this hierarchy.

Liberal media outlets have linked the events surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse to white supremacy. This may seem to be a stretch for many. Or, as Briahna Joy Gray titled an episode of her “Bad Faith” podcast, “Has White Supremacy Jumped the Shark?”

Rittenhouse is the teen who armed himself with a semi-automatic rifle and drove from Antioch, Illinois, to a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He said he was going to guard a car dealership. Rittenhouse got into an altercation with protestors, killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injuring a third, Gaige Grosskreutz. He faced several counts but was cleared of all of them.

Some say these events had nothing to do with race or white supremacy. Rittenhouse is white. He killed two white people. They will point out that in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Rittenhouse said, “I support the BLM movement.” You see, no white supremacy here.

They would be wrong.

White supremacy is about maintaining a racial hierarchy. How that is done changes over time. People may still imagine Klansmen must be present for there to be white supremacy. Again, that would be wrong.

The Rittenhouse saga reveals exactly how people attempt to maintain white supremacy. It is white supremacy without white supremacists.

A supportive right-wing media ecosphere

Let’s start with the night of the killings. The Kenosha Police seemed to ally themselves with the militia group Boogaloo Bois. According to a statement from Boogaloo Bois member Ryan Balch, the police told the militia group “that they were going to be pushing the protesters towards us because we could deal with them … KPD made a conscious decision to abandon the people of Kenosha to people they felt [were] justified in using machines and weapons of war against.”

Then in January, after pleading not guilty to all charges against him, Rittenhouse went to a bar and posed for photos with members of the Proud Boys, a group described as neo-fascist, and flashed what many people call a “white power” hand sign (the okay hand gesture).

In the months leading up to the trial over $600,00 was raised for Rittenhouse on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. This is not inherently problematic, as religious communities give all the time.

But the Blue Lives Matter flag on the page and the description “Kyle Rittenhouse just defended himself from a brutal attack by multiple members of the far-leftist group ANTIFA -- the experience was undoubtedly a brutal one” has a whiff of Christian nationalism.

During the trial, Judge Bruce Schroeder made several decisions that seemed to help Rittenhouse. He would not allow the two people killed, Rosenbaum and Huber, to be called victims. “Rioters. Arsonists. Looters. Refer to them that way,” he said. Despite visual evidence of a connection, he also would not allow the prosecution to connect Rittenhouse to the Proud Boys. He threw out two charges against the defendant, a curfew charge and a weapons possession charge.

And then there is the immediate aftermath. Far-right Congressmen Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar have offered Rittenhouse an internship. The Monday after the trial, Rittenhouse appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, pleading his case and innocence before a supportive right-wing media 

White supremacy without white supremacists

In the same way our understanding of racism has evolved, so has our understandings of white supremacy. How America’s racial hierarchy is maintained today is not the same as it was a century ago. In 2021, we don’t need white supremacists for there to be white supremacy.

Those Fox viewers tuning in to watch Rittenhouse’s interview with Carlson would say they were concerned with “upholding the right of self-defense.” The Proud Boys would say they are against “wokism.” People who contributed money to Rittenhouse’s crowdfund may say they are a “good Christian helping another good Christian.” The Kenosha police and Judge Schroeder may mutter something along the lines of “maintaining law and order.” The congressmen offering Rittenhouse an internship may say their concerns revolved around the “erosion of gun rights in this country” and so on.

That suggests an interest in maintaining the racial hierarchy.

It is a hierarchy where Black and brown people are at the bottom absorbing the lion’s share of the state-sanctioned violence meted out by hyper-aggressive police officers. Meanwhile, at the top of that hierarchy are white people who believe it’s their right to storm the Capitol to demand their chosen candidate be given the presidency.

Rod Graham is a sociologist. A professor at Virginia's Old Dominion University, he researches and teaches courses in the areas of cyber-crime and racial inequality. His work can be found at roderickgraham.com. Follow him @roderickgraham.

How a ‘twisted cult’ of fake ‘toughness’ has overtaken the American right: conservative

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
December 01, 2021

Donald Trump supporter -- CNN screenshot

When then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, he often described himself as a “compassionate conservative” — which was Bush’s way of trying to win over swing voters, moderates and suburban soccer moms and convince them to vote for him instead of then-Vice President Al Gore. But the MAGA movement has angrily rejected such messaging, opting instead to project a fake machismo. Never Trump conservative David French discusses that “toughness” in an article published by The Atlantic this week, explaining why he finds it so troubling.

French opens his article by citing attorney Josh Hammer as an example of someone who is promoting “toughness” and a “less libertarian American right.” At the recent National Conservatism conference, French notes, Hammer railed against “fusionism” as “inherently effete, limp” as well as “unmasculine.”

On the right, the term “fusionism” refers to President Ronald Reagan’s fragile coalition of the early 1980s, when a variety of right-wingers — including libertarians, fiscal conservatives, evangelical Christian fundamentalist social conservatives and neocons — rallied around Reagan. There was plenty of infighting within that coalition; although Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and the Moral Majority’s Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. were both Reagan supporters, they couldn’t stand one another. Goldwater, in fact, believed that Falwell and others of his ilk were terrible for the GOP and terrible for the conservative movement. But Goldwater and Falwell were both glad to see Reagan in the White House.

According to Hillsdale College’s David Azerrad, the MAGA right views Trump as “manly” because he forcefully speaks his mind — which French finds peculiar.

“This is a curious definition of manliness,” French writes. “Saying what you think or what others seem afraid to say isn’t inherently ‘manly.’ Speaking your mind isn’t even inherently virtuous, much less inherently masculine. Trump has said many false and harmful things, and the fact that other people might whisper them does not mean that they should be shouted from the presidential bully pulpit.”

The MAGA cult of “toughness,” according to French, manifests itself in the form of “the increased prevalence of open-carried AR-15s at public protests, the increased number of unlawful threats hurled at political opponents, and outbreaks of actual political violence, including the large-scale violence of January 6.”

French writes, “The author and academic Freddie deBoer has compiled a depressing list of articles, essays and interviews in prominent publications excusing and justifying violent civil unrest. The right-wing cult of toughness, in its distinctly Trumpist version, is no exception to this trend. When it is drained of limiting principles and tied to a man who would rather seek to upend our nation’s constitutional order than relinquish power, then the threat to the republic is plain. That threat will remain until the supposedly weak classical liberals on the left and the right do what they’ve always done at their best: rally in defense of liberty, the rule of law, and the American order itself.”

The great Canadian media swindle

Federal government allocated $595 million in subsidies to news media in 2019, but the bailout was based on questionable data

Marc Edge / November 22, 2021 / 9 min read

News media have undeniably been diminished financially in recent years due to the flight of advertising revenues online. The situation in Canada, however, seems to have been systematically overblown by stakeholders seeking government funding, writes Marc Edge.

 Photo from Radius Images.

Canadian media have perpetrated a self-serving grand deception for the past few years with a little help from academics, media consultants, and think tanks. It worked so well in enriching news media that Canada’s entertainment industries are now following the same game plan by pleading poverty and shamelessly fudging the facts. The news media bailout announced two years ago was worth $595 million, but if the media consultants behind the curtain have their way, a coming entertainment media bailout could be worth billions.

By my count, we are actually up to five news media bailouts now. The Liberals recently showered another $60.8 million in secretive election eve “emergency support” on news media through the federal Aid To Publishers program. It is one story you won’t read about in our mainstream media, and the silence became deafening after Conservative leader Erin O’Toole promised to cancel the $595 million bailout if his party won the recent federal election.

The first news media bailout came in the form of $50 million provided in the 2018 budget under a new Local Journalism Initiative designed to increase news coverage in underserved communities. Newspaper publishers criticized the assistance as a “Band-Aid solution” and howled for more. After a campaign of intense pressure, they were given a full bailout of $595 million in the 2019 budget. Québec also provided $50 million in assistance. Then the pandemic hit and Ottawa introduced the Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), on which publishers have since been feasting.

Newspaper profits are now the highest in years thanks to this firehose of government assistance. Postmedia Network, the country’s largest newspaper chain, recorded $67.7 million in operating earnings in its 2019-20 fiscal year (before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), which was up 37 percent despite the pandemic. Fully two thirds of its profits came from government handouts, according to its annual report, including $40.3 million in CEWS, $4.5 million from the federal bailout, and $700,000 from the Québec bailout. The massive CEWS payroll subsidy didn’t stop Postmedia from making layoffs at its newspapers across the country.

The bailouts began after a media-made crisis arose in 2016 when Postmedia, which is mostly owned by New Jersey hedge funds, merged the newsrooms of its duopoly dailies in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa. This came after the federal Competition Bureau rubber-stamped its $314 million acquisition of Sun Media, the country’s second-largest newspaper chain, which gave Postmedia 15 of our 21 largest dailies, including eight of the nine largest west of Manitoba. It also came despite Postmedia’s promises not to reduce news coverage in cities where it suddenly owned both dailies.

Heritage committee hearings on Media and Local Communities quickly convened in Ottawa and sat for more than a year. Before a report could issue, however, it was upstaged by one from the Public Policy Forum think tank titled The Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age. It portrayed a severe crisis in news media and quickly became the accepted wisdom, at least as far as Canada’s conflicted news media were concerned.

The Shattered Mirror was instead a masterpiece of disinformation, and it was only part of a larger campaign of corporate propaganda conducted by Canada’s news industry. The first clue was when the report claimed that Postmedia had lost $352 million in its most recent fiscal year. New Jersey hedge funds are not in the business of subsidizing Canadian journalism. That figure represented only an accounting loss on paper after an asset write-down of $267 million and other extraordinary expenses. On an operating basis, Postmedia instead made a profit that year of $82 million, of which $72 million went toward payments on its debt. That debt is absurdly held mostly by its hedge fund owners.

The Shattered Mirror seemed to conjure data out of thin air, at one point stating unattributed: “Since 2010, there have been 225 weekly and 27 daily newspapers lost to closure or merger in more than 210 federal ridings.” Daily newspapers have certainly been going away, but they have been largely giveaways. From 20 free dailies in 2014, mostly commuter tabloids, only one remained by the end of last year due to the ongoing flight of digital advertising revenues. The Shattered Mirror presented data from the Local News Map, a research project commenced the previous year at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, which was then headed by the wife of report author Edward Greenspon, a former Globe and Mail editor. Map data claimed to show that 169 vaguely categorized “news outlets” had closed in Canada since 2008, with 53 opened. The data were gathered using the easily-fiddled methodology of “crowdsourcing,” however, by posting an online map on which members of the public could record newspaper closures and openings.



First published in 2017, The Shattered Mirror is a 108-page, $270,000 report commissioned by the federal Liberal government and published by the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based think tank. It was widely panned by media experts and pundits alike.

The Local News Map project was headed by April Lindgren, the Velma Rogers Research Chair at Ryerson. A former newspaper reporter who did not hold a graduate degree, Lindgren may have inadvertently admitted the project’s purpose in a 2020 academic journal article she co-authored that counted 92 mentions of Local News Map data in news media reports before the bailout was announced in 2018, plus another 71 over the following year while it was being finalized. “At a time when funders are increasingly demanding evidence that research dollars are well spent… map data were incorporated into news and social media content that helped push the news industry’s problems onto the government’s policy-making agenda.”

The Shattered Mirror predicted that newspaper sales would fall to only two per 100 households by 2025, down from 18 in 2015. This ignored the fact that newspapers have never made money from copy sales, instead historically losing money on every copy sold only to make it all back and more through advertising sales. Carleton University professor Dwayne Winseck, who closely tracks media industries through the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project he directs, pointed to this prediction in accusing The Shattered Mirror of exaggerating the plight of newspapers. “The report is chock-a-block full of such examples, which lends to the impression that the report’s authors are goosing the numbers.”

Winseck also contradicted the report’s claim that between 12,000 and 14,000 journalism jobs had been lost since the 1990s. His 2019 study co-authored with Sabrina Wilkinson cited Statistics Canada data that showed the number of employed journalists increased from about 6,000 in 1998 to a peak of 13,000 in 2013 before falling back to about 11,000 in 2017. “There are in fact more journalists in absolute terms at the time of writing than at most points in the past 30 years.” Winseck noted in a scathing blog post that “these examples are not innocent. They are part of a process of ‘threat inflation’ with the aim of buttressing the case for the policy recommendations on offer.”

While The Shattered Mirror painted a worst-case scenario for news media, it made little or no mention of Postmedia’s industry dominance and foreign control. This was not surprising, according to Winseck, given that many of those involved in producing the report “have not just sat back and taken arm chair academic views on these matters but have been leading cheerleaders for the processes of consolidation.” He declined to identify the cheerleaders and urged readers to do their own research. “The industrious reader need only consult the list of acknowledgements to sort out who is who and draw their own conclusions. Given all this, that media concentration wasn’t on the agenda is not surprising.”

The report listed in its acknowledgements section hundreds of people who provided input, including a quartet of media scholars, none of whom was known for being critical of ownership concentration. Among the dozens of media consultants it listed, Ken Goldstein of Winnipeg’s Communic@tions Management Inc. was singled out as having been “particularly patient in helping us understand industry numbers.” A former vice president of Canwest Global Communications, Goldstein warned in a 2015 “discussion” paper posted on his firm’s website that “there will be few, if any, printed daily newspapers” left in Canada by 2025.

The paper, which did not disclose its genesis, purpose, or funding, simply extended circulation trends downward similar to The Shattered Mirror and forecast that newspaper penetration would fall below 10 percent of households by 2025. “To the extent that the trend lines are realistic, we do not believe that a viable print business model exists for most general interest daily newspapers once paid circulation drops below 10 percent.” In a 2017 paper, Goldstein doubled down on his projection of newspaper doom and included a graph that was almost identical to the one that appeared earlier that year in The Shattered Mirror. “The race against time and technology is no longer 10 years,” he concluded. “It is closer to five.”

The data source which definitively contradicted claims by The Shattered Mirror and the Local News Map, however, was published every year by the newspaper industry’s own trade association, News Media Canada. Well, every year except for 2018, when NMC’s case for a bailout was being made to the government through the media. The annual inventory of community newspapers usually showed that their number remained remarkably stable over the years at slightly over 1,000. The annual count was not updated for 2018 until the following year, however, after the bailout had been announced. It showed that the number had actually risen by 14 in 2018. It fell by 20 in 2019, however, for a net loss of six over the previous two years.




Community newspapers in Canada

A second disinformation campaign is now underway in pursuit of a bailout for Canada’s entertainment industries, which could be several times larger than what news media got. The campaign is epitomized by the well-reviewed 2019 book The Tangled Garden by media consultants Richard Stursberg and Stephen Armstrong. “The biggest media companies seemed destined for insolvency,” they wrote. “If the federal government does not wake from its torpor, the major Canadian media companies are likely to collapse. If this happens, English Canada will be effectively annexed by the United States.”

On the contrary, the annual profits of Canada’s largest media companies are greater than the entire economies of many countries. Bell’s $9.5 billion in profits that year would have ranked it 142nd in GDP among the 185 countries listed by the World Bank, while the $6 billion made by Rogers would have ranked it 151st behind Barbados and ahead of Sierra Leone. Their profit margins of 40 percent and more are fueled by some of the highest rates in the world for telecommunications services.

The book described how a Stursberg, former head of CBC English, devised the system of labour tax credits used in the news media bailout. It urged the federal government to tax foreign digital media such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google—for which it used the ominous acronym FAANGs—and re-route the proceeds to Canadian media. Making the FAANGs charge their Canadian customers federal and provincial sales taxes would bring in $100 million a year, it calculated, while disallowing the cost of advertising on foreign media as an income tax deduction would repatriate about $1.3 billion in ad sales annually. The advertising that didn’t return would be liable to pay an estimated $590 million a year in tax. Making Netflix and other foreign streaming services contribute 30 percent of their Canadian revenues to fund Canadian content, as the national television networks must, would bring in an estimated $438 million a year.

Ottawa was in the process of enacting the so-called “Netflix tax” before the election put a hold on legislation with Bill C-10, which would reap an estimated $800 million windfall. It was rammed through Parliament but stalled for the summer in a more skeptical Senate. More contentious will be a “link tax” pushed by publishers that would pay them every time a link to one of their articles appears on Google or Facebook. NMC and the lobby group Friends of Canadian broadcasting have been campaigning for such payments by claiming the digital giants are “stealing” news stories. The Toronto Star, which was recently acquired by a private equity firm, has joined the campaign with its long-running series “De-fanging Big Tech.”

It turns out that all those government reports issued decades ago—the Special Senate Subcommittee on Mass Media (1970), the Royal Commission on Newspapers (1981), and the Senate Report on News Media (2005)—were right when they warned that Big Media in Canada were getting too big and powerful. Now they are monetizing their power over public perceptions and laughing all the way to the bank as a result, at least from New Jersey.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, B.C. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com. The findings in this article were published recently in the peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Communication.

Five reasons the left won in Venezuela

These elections should put the Biden administration on notice that the fiction of Guaidó as ‘interim president’ has failed

Leonardo Flores / November 25, 2021 

A man casts his vote in front of a mural of late president Hugo Chávez in Caracas. 

Photo by Lavra Palavra.

For the first time in four years, every major opposition party in Venezuela participated in elections. For the fifth time in four years, the left won in a landslide. Voters elected 23 governors, 335 mayors, 253 state legislators and 2,471 municipal councilors. The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won at least 19 of 23 governorships (one race remains too close to call) and the Caracas mayoralty in the November 21 “mega-elections.” Of the 335 mayoral races, the vote count has been completed in 322 of them, with PSUV and its coalition taking 205, opposition coalitions 96 and other parties 21. Over 70,000 candidates ran for these 3,082 offices, and 90 percent of the vote was counted and verified within hours of polls closing. Turnout was 42.2 percent, eleven points higher than last year’s parliamentary elections.

Here’s why chavismo, the movement behind the Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, won:

1. Good governance in health, housing and food. Venezuela’s health policies in response to Covid-19 have been exemplary. The expectation in the US was that the coronavirus would overwhelm Venezuela’s healthcare system, which has been devastated by years of sanctions. And yet, per million population, Venezuela registered 15,000 cases and 180 deaths. For the sake of comparison, the figures in the US are 146,000 cases/million and 2,378 deaths/million, Brazil’s are 103,000 and 2854, and Colombia’s are 98,000 and 2,481. Unlike images we saw in Ecuador or Bolivia, there were no bodies of victims left on the streets, nor were there overflowing morgues like in New York.

In terms of housing, the Venezuelan government has built 3.7 million homes for working class families over the past ten years, the majority of which were built and delivered by the Maduro administration while under sanctions.

As deadly as the sanctions have been, things would be significantly worse were it not for Venezuela’s most important social program in the past five years: the CLAPs. These consist of boxes of food and other necessities, some of which are produced locally, which are packaged and distributed by communities themselves. Seven million Venezuelans families receive CLAP boxes every month, out of a country of 30 million people. Not only has this program been instrumental in keeping people fed, it has invigorated the base of chavismo and reconnected the government with grassroots after the PSUV’s defeat in the 2015 legislative elections.

2. The economic situation is improving. According to an August 2021 survey by opposition pollster Datanálisis, 50 percent of Venezuelans consider that their lives have improved compared to the previous year or two. Despite sanctions that have caused a 99 percent drop in government income, the Venezuelan economy is stabilizing. Inflation is down to single digits for the first time in four years. Credit Suisse projected 5.5 percent growth in 2021 and 4.5 percent growth in 2022. Oil production hit an 18-month high in October, helped by a trade deal with Iran.

3. The left is united (mostly). The PSUV didn’t win the elections alone, they were united with 8 other left parties in a coalition known as the GPP (Great Patriotic Pole). The PSUV itself held internal primaries in August, the only party to do so. Over half the GPP candidates were women, 52 percent, while another 43 percent were youth. Overall, 90 percent of the candidates hadn’t held office before, suggesting a renewal of the party from the grassroots. However, this marked the second election in a row in which the left wasn’t completely united. A coalition that included Venezuela’s Communist Party ran its own ticket. These parties got less than three percent of the vote in the 2020 parliamentary elections and their decision to run separately appears to have had no impact on the gubernatorial races.

4. The opposition is divided. Never known for their unity, the Venezuelan opposition suffered a major split as a result of some parties opting for boycotting elections and attempting to overthrow the government, while others preferred a democratic path. Despite all the major parties participating in these elections, the opposition was split into two main coalitions, the MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) and the Democratic Alliance. The vast majority of the 70,000 candidates are in the opposition and they were running candidates against each other in almost every race. Of the 23 gubernatorial races, six were won by PSUV candidates with less than 50 percent of the vote and by less than six points - more unity between the MUD and Democratic Alliance could have made the difference.

A count of the votes in the gubernatorial and Caracas mayoral races show the PSUV coalition taking 46 percent of the total vote, with the rest split between the various oppositions. A united opposition could win in Venezuela, but “united opposition” is an oxymoron.

5. The opposition is deeply unpopular. While much is made about the alleged lack of support for President Maduro (the millions of votes his party got will never be acknowledged by the US), it’s less known that the opposition is deeply unpopular. Here are the disapproval ratings for some of the opposition’s key figures: Juan Guaidó, 83 percent disapproval; Julio Borges (Guaidó’s “Foreign Minister), 81 percent; Leopoldo López (Guaidó’s mentor and mastermind of coup attempts), 80 percent; Henry Ramos Allup (longtime opposition leader), 79 percent; Henrique Capriles (2012 & 2013 presidential election loser), 77 percent; and Henri Falcón (2018 presidential election loser), 66 percent. All of these but Falcón are part of the MUD.

The MUD coalition spent years claiming they represented a majority, a claim which couldn’t be verified by their strategy of electoral boycotts. However, their return to the electoral process only marked a ten point increase in voter turnout compared to 2020. Moreover, the MUD placed below other opposition parties in nine of 23 states and in Caracas. The MUD only won one of the three governorships taken by the opposition. This might be due in part to widespread rejection of US sanctions. The MUD has repeatedly endorsed deadly sanctions despite the fact that 76 percent of Venezuelans reject them.

The MUD enjoys the political, financial and logistical support of the United States and the EU, while members of other opposition parties have been denounced and sanctioned by the US for negotiating with the Maduro administration. These elections should put the Biden administration on notice that continuing to support the MUD, and in particular, the fiction of Guaidó as “interim president,” is a failed policy.

Leonardo Flores is a Latin American policy expert and campaigner with CodePink.

This article originally appeared on CommonDreams.org.

Opinion: Gravel or Green: What Will Become of Alaska’s Coastal Plain?

Absent a suitable plan, the ghosts of the oil industry will haunt Alaska’s wildlife long after the wells are gone.


A rehabilitated drill pad (foreground) with an active pad (background). The revegetated plant community is almost exclusively grass, which differs from the original tundra system. Visual: Jonathan C. Slaght / WCS

BY JONATHAN C. SLAGHT
12.02.2021


LIFE ON THE COASTAL PLAIN of Alaska exists on a scale difficult to capture. It’s a wild place where herds of caribou move around wolves and bears in wide arcs, musk oxen graze among dwarf willows, and gyrfalcons search the terrain for waterbirds. The tundra ground cover — a thick mat of damp, stunted vegetation — has sat atop the permafrost that’s existed since at least the last ice age.

Conspicuous clusters of bright metal buildings also dot this landscape: oil wells, storage tanks, and generators — all linked by a sprawling system of roads and pipelines. Prudhoe Bay, at the center of the north Alaskan coastal plain, is one of the largest oil fields in North America. More than 800 wells stretch across more than 300 square miles, drawing oil from deep underground.

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Caribou migrate here across the imposing mountains of the Brooks Range unimpeded by human-made obstruction, only to bow their heads under pipelines when they reach the plains. Brown bears meander across the tundra under the watchful eye of oil workers, like teenagers shadowed by mall security. And wolves sniff the air to disentangle the mingling scents of prey and diesel.

In some ways this arrangement works. The oil companies, perhaps reluctant to attract additional public scrutiny, have imposed on themselves rules about how to live and work in the oil fields. Most travel directly on the tundra is forbidden for workers, and any interactions with animals are prohibited. For a place with so many roads and so much wildlife, vehicle strikes are surprisingly rare. The heart of this industrial landscape is unexpectedly clean.

Yet despite these safeguards, the ecosystem is thrown off balance. Oil infrastructure provides artificial nesting places for previously uncommon predators such as ravens. Red foxes, likely lured by anthropogenic sources of food and warmth, have moved into Prudhoe Bay to kill and displace Arctic foxes. Dust blowing off a gravel road may collect on adjacent land and hasten snowmelt. These disruptions — perhaps more than oil industry executives and the people who regulate them initially understood — have a long half-life.

The pursuit of oil is inherently ephemeral. Individual wells eventually dry up or cease to be profitable; whole fields dwindle. Companies pull stakes to move their carnival of drills, steel, and actors elsewhere across the coastal plain. The buildings may disappear, but ghosts of the infrastructure often remain. In the absence of adequate restoration plans, the disturbed environments will continue to impact local species for decades to come. Unlike the tropics, where human disturbances can be quickly repaired by new green growth, the Arctic remains fragile and exposed.

Oil companies have worked for decades to rehabilitate these fields with varying degrees of success. They strip gravel from old roads and obsolete drill pads to facilitate recovery, often reseeding the stripped area to return the land to a more natural state. At first glance, such sites may be difficult to distinguish from the surrounding vegetation, but on closer inspection, most show clear signs of past disturbance and some appear to have not recovered at all.

Restoration ecologists have found tundra difficult to restore. Though rather uncommon, salt on gravel sourced from the Arctic coastal plain may leach into the soil and inhibit new growth even after the rocks are taken away. Road removal projects sometimes strip too much gravel, exposing permafrost, accelerating melt, and turning what was once solid ground into a lake. Even when a site is successfully seeded with grass, geese can swoop in to feast on the fresh shoots, grazing these sites back to bare patches of mud.

These disruptions — perhaps more than oil industry executives and the people who regulate them initially understood — have a long half-life.

For disturbed tundra to have any chance of recovering to a more natural state, oil companies and land management officials will need to consider new treatments. Tundra sodding, an under-utilized approach consistent with Indigenous Iñupiaq methods, seems to be the most promising intervention: When new oil infrastructure is created on existing tundra, the sod from that site could be carefully removed and fit atop an old drill site in need of restoration, much like plugging divots on a golf green. In current practice, oil companies usually just build new drill pads directly atop the existing sod, killing the ancient tundra cover in the process.

Successful caretaking of the Alaskan coastal plain will depend on a multitude of factors and will likely require decades of monitoring and adjustment, and a long-term commitment from industry and regulators. Key to this success will be for oil companies and environmental stakeholders to determine, upfront, the true costs of rehabilitation — financial and otherwise — and the tangible outcomes of different treatments. Such clarity could catalyze rehabilitation efforts in Alaska and elsewhere. This is not merely a retrospective exercise, but a forward-looking one.

In fact, the state of Alaska continues to eye the 1002 Area, a 2,300-square-mile section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite a temporary moratorium on exploration and drilling within the Refuge. As exploration plans accelerate into this pristine landscape on the eastern border of the existing oil fields and elsewhere across the coastal plain, we still do not have viable and scalable tundra rehabilitation plans in place to address past actions, never mind what developers are eyeing next.

Oil companies and regulators must bolster nascent efforts to repair the damage that has already been done, and to ensure clean-up actions are built into the planning and implementation processes when expanding to new areas. We need to decide now what we want the coastal plain to look like in a hundred or a thousand years, after we have turned our attentions elsewhere.

Jonathan C. Slaght works for the Arctic Beringia Program of WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society). He is the author of “Owls of the Eastern Ice,” which won the 2020 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, and was long-listed for the National Book Award in Nonfiction.