Colonial taxes built Britain. That must be taught in lessons on Empire

UK government ministers want the British Empire's benefits taught in schools. Don’t let them ignore the death and destruction it inflicted

Gurminder K. Bhambra
1 April 2022

Gurminder Bhambra as a child with her grandfather, Mohan Singh |
Gurminder Bhambra

Recent weeks have seen a variety of UK government ministers – from Oliver Dowden to Kemi Badenoch to, most recently, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi – both extol the benefits of British Empire and urge the teaching of those benefits. This follows on from the government’s response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which set out the need for a new model curriculum for history which would advise schools on how best to teach these issues. This is all part of the government’s Inclusive Britain strategy which calls on us to acknowledge the rich and complex history of ‘global Britain’.

In the spirit of this call, I offer one account of the complex, entangled histories of colonial taxation and national welfare that continue to shape modern Britain. Few people know that colonial subjects from the Indian subcontinent paid taxation, including income tax, to the British government in Westminster. Or that that taxation was used to alleviate the conditions of poorer people within Britain at a time when the working class and middle class here were exempt from paying income tax.

Taxation – and the ways in which it is returned to citizens through welfare – is one of the main ways in which the ‘imagined community’ of the nation comes into being. That is, the relationship between taxes and welfare is part of the process of constructing institutions and the idea of the nation. If we were to recognise that this ‘imagined community’ was built not only through national taxes, but also colonial ones, then how might that change our understanding of what it is to be British today?

My grandfather, Mohan Singh, was born in 1913 in a small village in the Punjab, in what was then British India. He was four years old when his father, Gurdit Singh, died and 17 when his uncle, Harnam Singh, who had been supporting him, also passed away. My grandfather had planned on attending the Government College in Lahore, but – needing to support his mother and younger sister – he instead spent six months training as a boilermaker. He then got married to Pritam Kaur and travelled to Calcutta to work in a variety of factories, engineering works and rolling mills.

In 1942, he travelled to the British colony of Kenya – bringing his family over later – and worked for 18 years at the East African Railways and Harbour Company. He spent the last two decades of his life in the UK, working at Chalvey Engineering in Slough as a sheet metal worker before retiring at the age of 65 in Southall, west London.

Calls to ‘go home’ have been the refrain of right-wing opponents of immigration from at least the 1970s

Mohan Singh criss-crossed three continents during his lifetime, but he never left the jurisdiction of the British Empire. In his application for registration as a citizen of the UK and Colonies – in the aftermath of the British Nationality Act of 1948 – he wrote: “I was born in British India.” He further noted that he lived and worked in India and Kenya, two countries that were colonies of Britain. It was these connections that confirmed his citizenship and gave him the right to travel to and live in Britain. He duly exercised those rights but, on arrival, he had them called into question by the local population, who were either unaware of them or indifferent.

Calls to ‘go home’ have been the refrain of right-wing opponents of immigration from at least the 1970s – as well as having been plastered on the sides of vans as part of the UK government’s ‘hostile environment’ policies of recent years. They are also implicit in an influential body of scholarly work oriented to questions of belonging and entitlement that argue for priority in public policy to be given to the ‘white working class.’ This is on the basis of them being ‘insiders’ who have contributed through their taxes to the wealth that is disbursed through welfare.

Former colonial subjects, like my grandfather, are regarded as immigrant outsiders even when they come to the metropole carrying passports of British citizenship. They are not seen to have contributed to the wealth of Britain by paying taxes and they are regarded as unfairly gaining access to the national patrimony. As Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young write in ‘The new East End’: “As newcomers, their families cannot have put much into the system, so they should not be expecting yet to take so much out.”

Britain established direct rule over India after suppressing the 1857 Indian Mutiny (also known as the First War of Independence). In 1860, it implemented an income tax upon colonial subjects, in part to pay for the costs associated with those revolts. Initially, a 2% rate was imposed on those earning between 200 rupees and 500 rupees a year and a 4% rate on those earning above 500 rupees annually.

The arrival of the British in India – first via the English East India Company and then through direct rule – had brought endemic famine across the subcontinent

When my grandfather started work in the 1930s, the average wage for a skilled worker in British India was about 40 rupees a month. He was very unlikely to have paid income tax, however, as he would not have earned enough to meet the threshold, which by then was 2,000 rupees a year. Of the amount that was collected, around three-quarters went to the imperial treasury, with only one rupee in a hundred for local purposes. Local purposes included the building of canals and roads, but not the alleviation of poverty, not even in times of catastrophic famine.

The arrival of the British in India – first via the English East India Company and then through direct rule – had brought endemic famine across the subcontinent. The 50 years after the implementation of the income tax saw one of the most intense such periods of famine, in which it is estimated over 14 million people died of starvation. This was in the context of grain being exported by rail from the famine regions (including to Britain) and colonial taxes continuing to be collected even in the worst-affected areas.

In all cases, the demands of ‘sound finance’ trumped those of public health and the primary thing to be avoided was any idea that the poor in India should be maintained at public expense. Ensuring sufficient funds for the ensuing military campaign in Afghanistan – from the taxes paid by colonial subjects for local purposes – was of more importance than using those taxes to alleviate severe hunger and avert the deaths of millions.

Here, we see quite clearly that the idea of the ‘imagined community’ created through taxation and its redistribution did not include colonial subjects. The taxes that Indians paid to the imperial treasury and to local provinces did not give them any entitlement to the redistribution of that income. Worse, any relief provided during famines was often dependent on undertaking hard labour in camps at a distance from a claimant’s locality.

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The most extreme instance was where the rations provided in return for heavy labour were scarcely above the level required for basic subsistence. The ‘Temple wage’ – named after the lieutenant-governor, Richard Temple, who brought it in – produced lethal results and, as Mike Davis notes in ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’, turned the work camps into extermination camps.

The death and destruction brought about by the Empire were known at the time. In 1925, Harry Pollitt, the leader of the Boilermakers Union in the UK, stated that the British Empire was drenched in blood. This was in the context of debates at the Trades Union Congress in Scarborough, where a resolution was eventually adopted – by three million votes to 79,000 – against imperialism and in support of the right of self-determination of those who were colonised.

Such sentiments, however, came up against more hard-nosed understandings concerning the utility of the Empire to those in Britain. As Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin proclaimed in Parliament in 1946, “I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire, because I know that if the British Empire fell … it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.”

Here, Bevin acknowledged that the life of all within Britain was enhanced as a consequence of Empire. However, Empire was overwhelmingly disastrous for the majority of people subject to it. Their standard of life fell considerably as a consequence of colonialism and the famines it produced and, in many, many cases, they lost their lives to it.

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One mode of survival was to move. This is why my grandfather moved from a village in the Punjab to train as a boilermaker in Lahore, before working in Calcutta, Nairobi and London. This is likely why his grandfather before him moved from famine-struck Orissa to Rajasthan to Punjab. These movements tend not to be seen to be part of the histories of Britain, global or otherwise, or of any consequence to understanding Britain or Britishness in the present.

The forgetting of the Empire involves also the forgetting of the political community – colonial and postcolonial – that was constructed through taxation. Few in Britain today understand the extent to which national projects – from social welfare to cultural institutions such as country houses, museums, and galleries – have been enabled through the taxes paid by former colonial subjects. There is an urgent need for us to recognise our shared histories and account for them.

One aspect of the ‘culture wars’ is the call to take the views of taxpayers into account when discussing ‘contested histories’. Samir Shah, the chair of London’s Museum of the Home, for example, argued that as heritage bodies are funded by taxpayers’ money, then the views of taxpayers – those he considers the silent majority – ought to be taken more explicitly into account. Given that both colonial subjects and their descendants paid taxes to the government in Westminster, then they/we also have a legitimate stake, in the government’s own terms, in how our shared history is represented. There is a benefit to the teaching of British Empire, but the reality is different from what these ministers suppose.

File:Hardt Michael Negri Antonio Empire.pdf - Monoskop 

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Western hypocrisy: What Joe Biden gets wrong about Russia

Those in the Middle East know the kind of destruction seen in Ukraine all too well – the West was the perpetrator


Paul Rogers
2 April 2022,

ODR: OPINION

Joe Biden's claims of the moral imperative of challenging Russian autocracy are likely to fall on deaf ears |
Yuri Gripas/Abaca Press/Alamy

Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine remains in a violent stalemate. Russian forces are pausing their attempts to occupy Kyiv, having withdrawn some of their forces from around the capital, but a major retreat is highly unlikely given Russia is recruiting several thousand mercenaries from Syria.

The Kremlin’s strategy now is to concentrate on overrunning the southern Ukraine port city of Mariupol, before joining up Russian forces in Crimea with those in Donbas to take control of as much of the region as possible.

This does not mean Putin intends to annex Donbas even if he can occupy it, since the economic costs for a weakened Russia economy would be considerable. He would instead support Donbas’s ‘independence’ and treat it as a client state, with the region’s reported shale gas reserves, coupled with the offshore gas reserves of Crimea, being satisfactory gains. If successful, this plan could, in time, undermine the Kyiv government and perhaps even achieve Russia’s original aim of installing a client government in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, global support for Ukraine remains strong but is very far from universal, with India, China and South Africa all studiously neutral. While many governments across the Global South supported the original UN resolution condemning Putin’s actions, plenty did not. And for many of those that did, the governments did not necessarily represent the views of their own people. While support for Putin may not be strong in the Global South, that does not translate into popular support for NATO, as openDemocracy’s Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu explained at the start of the war.

This mood was this week summarised in the opening line of an Al Jazeera analysis of world reaction: “The war in Ukraine has turned Russian President Vladimir Putin into a pariah – at least in the West.”

‘At least in the West’ is a theme that perplexes many people in the West. How is it that Russia can reduce cities to rubble – bombing hospitals, health centres and schools – and yet not face worldwide condemnation? It is a valid question and the answer is uncomfortable, but it must be faced if Russia’s actions are not to be repeated elsewhere. The answer, in short, is a widespread perception of Western hypocrisy.
A Western trail of death and destruction

Since 2010, the Watson Institute at Brown University in the US has been running the ‘Cost of War Project’, tracking and analysing the wars of the 21st century. In its recent study of the first two decades since 9/11, it reports that more than 929,000 people, including at least 387,000 civilians, have been killed by direct violence in US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. The institute believes that several times those numbers have died through indirect impacts, such as malnutrition, starvation, freezing to death and disease, which is hardly surprising given it reports 38 million people have been displaced.

Many of those wars – which were started and largely fought by the US and its coalition partners, notably Britain – ended in failure, including in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In Iraq alone, the current count for civilian deaths since 2003 ranges from 186,143 to 209,349, depending on the methodology used.

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Some would argue that the West’s more recent war, its sustained air assault on ISIS in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2018, successfully destroyed the group. But even that ‘success’ is now looking tarnished, as ISIS survives and remains active in both countries and, along with other extreme paramilitaries, is entrenched across the Sahel, has a presence in Mozambique and the DRC, impacts on Kenya and Uganda, and has links with groups in Somalia.

Put bluntly, states such as the US and UK, which now expect global support for their stance on Ukraine, have, in the view of many around the world, two decades of blood on their hands.

With that in mind, when President Biden talks of the moral imperative of democracies challenging the Russian autocracy, it is all too likely to fall on deaf ears. People simply contrast the president’s stance on Putin’s regime with Western links to autocracies worldwide, not least in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1986, to take but one example, during a spat between the US and New Zealand over nuclear-armed US warships visiting local ports, the US ambassador in Wellington, career diplomat Paul Cleveland, was moved to comment: “Sometimes it is more difficult to deal with a messy democracy like New Zealand than with some Asian dictatorships.”

Even so, there is still the argument that Russia’s brutal tactics in Ukraine, of reducing towns and cities to little more than rubble, transcend anything done by Western coalitions in the Middle East and South Asia. The problem is that this does not stand up to scrutiny; quite aside from US violence in Vietnam or rendition and torture in Guantanamo, there are plenty of more direct examples, not least from Iraq.

Take just three. In April 2001, a US supplies column to a forward base in the Iraq city of Fallujah was ambushed and it took hours of battle and reinforcements for those involved to escape to safety. There were casualties but no deaths, yet that night the Marine Corps called in the devastatingly effective AC-130 gunships and levelled six blocks of the city, in what was openly described as a punitive action. There is no record of the number of civilian casualties in the densely packed city.

In November of the same year, the Fallujah ‘problem’ was finally solved when the US took control during an all-out assault on the entire city. Thousands were killed, most of the public buildings were razed, and more than half of all the houses in the city were destroyed or severally damaged.

For many, what Russia is doing is not so different from what has been done by US-led coalitions

And, in the US-led war against ISIS (2014-18), the most difficult task was the taking of a key ISIS stronghold of western Mosul in northern Iraq, especially the old city. The US eventually succeeded in this aim, following intense aerial and artillery bombardment, but the cost was the near-complete destruction of the city, again with many deaths.

The appalling Russian bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities is broadcast to Western audiences thanks to near-24/7 coverage in the Western media. What is not realised by many of these audiences, is that this kind of coverage was also available, around the clock, during the Iraq War. Channels such as Al-Jazeera gave full accounts, including graphic images, of the injuries and deaths caused by Western forces, much of which was withheld on Western channels.

In short, there is rightly much anger across the West at what Putin’s forces have been doing and will continue to do in Ukraine. Many people living outside Western states are also appalled but, for them, what Russia is doing is not desperately different from what has been done by US-led coalitions in wars in South Asia, North Africa and especially the Middle East. If people are at a loss to understand why much of the world is not more forthright in its condemnation of Russia, that is where to look.

From: Inside Story

What’s next for Tunisia as its political crisis deepens?

President Kais Saied dissolves parliament in latest move to consolidate power.

It’s been nearly eight months since Tunisia’s president sacked the prime minister, suspended parliament and granted himself broad executive powers.

Kais Saied has now dissolved the parliament, accusing its members of attempting a coup.

KEEP READING

list of 3 items

list 1 of 3

Tunisia: Crisis deepens as opp’n leaders summoned for questioning

list 2 of 3

Tunisia caught between president and parliament as crisis deepens

list 3 of 3

Tunisia’s president dissolves parliament, extending power grab

end of list

But legislators say it is Saied who is grabbing power illegally.

The president – a former constitutional law professor – has rejected calls for elections within three months

So what happens now in a country that had been praised as the only success story from the Arab Spring revolutions?

Presenter: Mohammed Jamjoom

Guests:

Rabeb Aloui – Tunisian journalist

Moncef Khaddar – Associate professor, Department of International Relations, Cyprus International University

Cherif El Kadhi – Political commentator

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe was declared 'extinct' in the 1920s. New DNA research says otherwise.

Celina Tebor

Thu, March 31, 2022

California was home to over 1 million Native Americans before Spanish settlers arrived in 1769. By the 1920s, less than 20,000 were alive.

Almost one-quarter of Spanish missions in California were located in the Bay Area, and in 1925, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber wrote that the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe from the San Francisco Bay Area was “extinct for all practical purposes.”

Kroeber’s book was considered the “authority on California Indians” for decades, said Alan Leventhal, the Muwekma Ohlone's archaeologist and ethnohistorian.

The tribe has always bucked those claims and, now, there's scientific evidence on its side: Living Ohlone tribal members have a DNA link to their Bay Area ancestors from thousands of years ago, according to new research.

THIS IS AMERICA: Sign up for USA TODAY’s free weekly take on the news from reporters from a range of backgrounds and experiences

The study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, studied eight present-day tribal members and 12 ancient individuals from the Bay in two settlements occupied as far back as 1345 C.E. and 490 B.C.E.

DNA analysis from the ancient individuals and modern tribal members revealed genetic links between the two groups, a finding that was somewhat surprising to researchers considering the massive decimation Spanish settlers brought to the population. To the tribe, it only affirmed what they already knew.

Lydia Bojorquez, left, Sebastian G. Sandoval, center, and Sebastian F. Sandoval of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe sing a prayer before naming the eagle chick, foreground, during a dedication ceremony at the San Francisco Zoo's Avian Conservation Center.

The Ohlone have been petitioning the U.S. government for federal acknowledgment for almost 30 years. But the process has been entangled in legal battles and bureaucratic red tape. The new findings will be an “eye-opener” for policymakers, Leventhal said.

“This becomes a vehicle for those people who would not take notice, or who would doubt about the tribe’s validity and veracity – that perhaps this was another example of injustice toward a population of people who have resided in the San Francisco Bay Area for 12,000 years,” he said.

The study is innovative in several ways, said Noah Rosenberg, co-author of the paper and professor of population genetics and society at Stanford University. The type of genomic analysis that researchers used has only been developed within the past decade.

NATIVE AMERICANS IN CHICAGO HAVE HIGH OPIOID DEATH RATES: So why won't they get tribal settlement money?

Another novel aspect of the research, Rosenberg said, was researchers and tribal members working closely together and creating objectives that mutually benefitted both parties. Throughout the process, the tribe had full oversight of their ancestral heritage sites.

“The questions posed were developed together, with the tribe, based on their understanding about oral histories and their own records,” Rosenberg said. “Their ancestors had been in these locations in the East Bay for a very long time.”

He hopes this study will become a “case example” of collaboration between archaeologists, genomic researchers, and tribal leaders.

Although only about 500 Ohlone ancestors are alive today, the new research resurrects their history, Leventhal said. The tribe is in its final throes of trying to achieve federal recognition.

“Privately, this further validates the tribe,” Leventhal said. “Now, as politicians are reading, they're noticing. And now we'll be lending support for the tribe's reaffirmation.”

'TREAT ITS COMMUNITY MEMBERS WITH DIGNITY AND RESPECT': Rare move by United Nations nudges US to intervene in Native American eviction dispute

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: California tribe isn't 'extinct,' after all: DNA links Muwekma Ohlone

Stephen Colbert Eviscerates His Network CBS For Hiring Trump's 'Craven Toady'

Ron Dicker

Fri, April 1, 2022

Stephen Colbert gleefully bit the hand that pays him on “The Late Show” Thursday.

The host slammed his network, CBS, for hiring former Donald Trump official Mick Mulvaney as a contributor in its news division. (Watch the video below.)

“What the fuck?” he exclaimed, though the last word was bleeped out.

Colbert explained Mulvaney’s shoddy history as Trump’s “craven toady” while serving as the former president’s acting chief of staff. Mulvaney admitted that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt (then tried to walk it back), dismissed the emerging COVID-19 crisis as a media plot to take down Trump and promised that if Trump lost the 2020 election, he’d concede gracefully. “He’s Nostra-dumbass!” Colbert cracked of the far-right Mulvaney.

“Why would the Tiffany Network’s venerable news division put this craven toady to a tyrant on their payroll?” Colbert asked.

In an apparent disclaimer to appease the network brass, Colbert said he was joking. But that’s what comedians do ― use humor to comment on serious issues.

Mulvaney’s new gig seemed to be preordained in an an earlier speech to staffers by CBS News President Neeraj Khemlani. In a recording obtained by The Washington Post, he said the Republicans would likely “take over” in the midterm elections, and that the network required more perspective from their side of the aisle.

“They’re not just reporting the news anymore, they’re predicting it now,” Colbert jabbed at his network.

Fast-forward to the 8:20 mark.

 

A CBS News exec said the network is hiring more Republicans because 'we know' they'll take over after the midterms: report

Tom Porter

Thu, March 31, 2022, 

Donald Trump in Bentonville, Arkansas.Benjamin Krain/Getty Images

• The Washington Post obtained a recording of a meeting with the CBS News copresident Neeraj Khemlani.

• He said a "likely" Democratic wipeout in the midterms meant CBS needed to hire more Republicans.

• CBS recently hired Mick Mulvaney, a former Trump aide who's been accused of pushing misinformation.

A CBS News executive told staff earlier this month that the network was hiring more Republicans as analysts because he believed there would "likely" be a Democratic wipeout in the 2022 midterm elections, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a leaked recording it obtained.

Neeraj Khemlani, a CBS News copresident, made the remark just before the announcement that the network had hired Mick Mulvaney, who briefly served as President Donald Trump's chief of staff, as an analyst. The decision sparked internal backlash, The Post reported.

In February 2020, Mulvaney accused journalists of exaggerating the impact of the coronavirus to damage Trump. Mulvaney also played a key role in the campaign to pressure Ukraine to smear Joe Biden, which resulted in Trump's first impeachment.

In an apparent attempt to lay the groundwork for the announcement of Mulvaney's hiring, Khemlani told morning-show staff members that hiring Republicans would give the network better coverage, The Post reported.

"If you look at some of the people that we've been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms," Khemlani said, according to The Post.

"A lot of the people that we're bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation."

Mick Mulvaney.Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Political analysts widely expect the Republican Party to make significant gains in the midterms. A recent NBC News poll suggested that Biden's approval rating was sagging because of inflation and other economic issues.

If a "red wave" of Republican victories materializes, Democrats could lose control of the House and the Senate, stymieing Biden's plans for issues ranging from the environment to voting rights.

Relations between the media and the White House were at historic lows during Trump's term, with top officials frequently railing against the press and picking fights with individual reporters.

Many news outlets accused Trump and senior officials of spreading falsehoods and misinformation on issues including the COVID-19 pandemic and voter fraud.

Several former Trump officials have gone on to be employed as analysts on conservative-leaning networks including Fox News and Newsmax, though few have found regular gigs on mainstream networks.

CBS facing backlash from staff after hiring ex-Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as pundit, report says


Johanna Chisholm
Thu, March 31, 2022

Staff from within CBS News are expressing their dismay at the company’s decision to hire ex-Donald Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as a pundit for the network, the Washington Post reported.

On Tuesday, the company announced that the former Trump aide, who was notorious for spreading falsehoods and bashing the very press he’s now joining as an on-air contributor, would be a welcome addition to the network for the varied experience he would bring from within the White House (he’s served as both Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and chief of staff).

Notably missing from Mr Mulvaney’s first introduction on CBS, however, was that important context.

“So happy to have you here … you’re the guy to ask about this,” anchor Anne-Marie Green said, introducing Mr Mulvaney as a “former Office of Management and Budget director”, but failing to mention under which administration.

The Washington Post reported that an emailed message from the standards department at CBS was later circulated to staff, without explicitly referencing that morning’s segment, to remind staff that “as we introduce these folks, we must always identify relevant background and biographical information,” including the specific administration a person worked for as a necessary disclosure.

The Post went on to report that, according to a recording obtained of CBS News’ co-president Neeraj Khemlani addressing staff about the new hire, the decision to bring Mr Mulvaney into the CBS family was part of a larger strategy to bring in people who can help with “access” to otherwise untapped parts of the political spectrum.

“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” the network’s co-president said, according to the Post’s reporting.

“A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”


It’s not uncommon for administration officials to go on to cushy contributor jobs, oftentimes raking in annual six-figure salaries. But the particular gripe that has put some CBS staff, and many political journalists online, at unease is the record of truth-telling that Mr Mulvaney exhibited during his tenure in the Trump administration, and has much less to do with the fact that he worked under the previous president.


One anonymous source who works at CBS News told the Post that: “everyone I talked to today was embarrassed about the hiring”, while another staff member, who also asked the news outlet for anonymity because they were unauthorised to comment on the matter, said “everyone is baffled”.

The ire that’s being drawn up by Mr Mulvaney’s hiring stems from his track record both with the press and with the truth.


Poynter Institute’s Politifact, a nonprofit group of fact-checking journalists who have won a Pulitzer Prize for their work probing political claims made during the 2008 presidential election, ranks Mr Mulvaney’s scorecard as mostly false, false and at best, half-true.

In February 2020, while acting White House chief of staff, Mr Mulvaney attended the Conservative Political Action Conference and, while a deadly and then unknown virus was spreading across the globe and beginning to take hold in the US, he falsely claimed the “attention” then nascent pandemic was receiving was the press’ fault.


“They think this is going to be what brings down the president,” he told a room full of conservatives. “We know how to handle this.”

And in 2017, when acting as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, he went to the White House lectern and defended a Trump administration decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine for political purposes.

Column: Here are all the reasons CBS should never have hired Trump aide Mick Mulvaney for its newscast

Michael Hiltzik
Thu, March 31, 2022

Then-Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney at a press briefing in 2019. (Michael Reynolds /EPA-EFE/REX )

Staff members at CBS News are in an uproar over the venerable news department's hiring of former Trump White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as a news commentator.

Their indignation is understandable and proper. Mulvaney, a long-time Republican functionary, distinguished himself during his tenure in the administration as a loyal Trump lackey.

He showed a micron-deep understanding of political and economic issues even when he served as Trump's budget director and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If he loses, Trump will bow out gracefully.

Mick Mulvaney, the new political commentator for CBS, showing how well he knew Trump in 2020

But he displayed a bottomless capacity to promote Trump's political goals, which boiled down the evisceration of federal programs aimed at helping the average American.

We'll get into the details in a moment. But first, let's examine the explanation that CBS brass offered to the network's news staff when they questioned Mulvaney's hiring.

“Being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani told staff members, according to the Washington Post's Paul Farhi, who was working from a bootlegged recording of the meeting. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

This is, of course, absurd. CBS is perfectly entitled to hire as many lobbyists as it wishes to make its case on Capitol Hill; putting them on the air, in essence to lobby the public, is another matter entirely. One question it raises is what value Mulvaney brings to the table. He's hardly a neutral voice, but if he's on the air merely to present his partisan slant, who needs him? Don't we get enough of that from elected politicians?

To be fair, CBS isn't the only news organization trying to curry favor in this way. In the old days, political types offering nothing but spin would be thrown out of the press room; now they're given a well-paid sinecure to provide "balance."

What Khemlani doesn't appreciate — or maybe he does and doesn't care — is that the quest for "access" has become the scourge of American journalism.

It's what produces puff pieces about political insiders (they're known in the trade as "beat sweeteners") and softball questions for politicians on the Sunday TV news programs.

TV news has become expert at taking people at their own level of self-esteem. What that fails to produce, however, is incisive news coverage of the sort crucial to the workings of our democracy.

So here comes Mick Mulvaney, introduced for his first appearance as a CBS commentator by anchor Anne-Marie Green to deliver his opinion of President Biden's proposed billionaires income tax.

“So happy to have you here,” Green fawned. “You’re the guy to ask about this.” The burden of her introduction was that Mulvaney was a Man Who Knows, but with his first words he acknowledged that he didn't know anything more about the billionaires tax than was embodied in Biden's own proposal; beyond that, his analysis was largely dismissive and, more to the point, indistinguishable from what one might hear from any GOP politician. (Mulvaney served as a Republican congressman from South Carolina from 2011 to 2017.)



Now let's take a closer look at Mulvaney's qualifications to opine about public issues. He was always someone who never let facts get in the way of partisan goals.

Start with his appearance in March 2017 on the CBS Sunday program "Face the Nation," when he was director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump's White House. As I reported at the time, Mulvaney took the opportunity to deliver a drive-by shooting of some the nation’s neediest and most defenseless people: the disabled.

"Let me ask you a question,” he said to the moderator, John Dickerson, at the close of a seven-minute interview. “Do you really think that Social Security disability insurance is part of what people think of when they think of Social Security? I don’t think so. It’s the fastest-growing program. It grew tremendously under President Obama. It’s a very wasteful program, and we want to try and fix that.”

Dickerson's response to this volley of lies and disinformation, in its entirety, was: "OK, we’re going to have to end it there.”

Far be it from Dickerson to challenge someone who might be useful for providing "access."

If he were prepared to interview Mulvaney over matters of substance, however, he might have pointed out that, first, the disability insurance program has been part of Social Security since 1956, when it was signed into law by Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican president. He might have pointed out that Social Security is structured as both a retirement and an insurance program and has been since its enactment in 1935.

Dickerson might even have pointed out that Mulvaney was wrong to say disability was the “fastest-growing program." At the time, the disability rolls were not only not growing, but shrinking, and had been for more than two years. (The trend has continued up to the present day.)

Not only was the program not "wasteful," it had one of the lowest error rates of any government program — well below 1% of all benefits, as then-Acting Social Security Commissioner Carolyn Colvin had testified to Congress in 2012.

Mulvaney showed his commitment to sound government administration after Trump named him acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2018.

As one of his first acts in office, he went to a convention of credit union executives and boasted: “I am the acting director of the CFPB, something that’s apparently keeping Elizabeth Warren up late at night, which doesn’t bother me at all.”

Warren, you see, had conceived of the CFPB before her election to the Senate from Massachusetts in 2012 and had been its major defender in Congress since its founding. She had raised hell over several steps Mulvaney's CFPB had suddenly taken to scrap regulatory initiatives against abusive payday lenders.

Among them was a regulation, five years in the making, aimed at preventing payday lenders and other profiteers from lending to customers who they knew would be unable to repay the loans, as well as running up fees on customers and engaging in other abuses.

Mulvney abruptly withdrew, without explanation, a federal lawsuit against four allegedly abusive installment lenders. And he closed an investigation into World Acceptance Corp., a payday lender in his home state of South Carolina that had been accused of abusive practices, but had contributed at least $4,500 to his congressional campaigns.

To Mulvaney, Warren's objections to this deliberate enfeeblement of his agency's authority were grist for a comedy turn, offered for the amusement of the very financial services executives he was supposed to regulate. He saw his role as head of a consumer protection agency as protecting not only consumers, but the lenders from whom consumers needed protection.

“We are there to help protect people who use credit cards,” he told the credit union executives. “We’re also there to help and protect the people who provide that credit."

As Trump's chief of staff, Mulvaney spent his time trying to polish Trump policies. One might expect a politician's chief of staff to try to make his boss look good, but the policies he was defending don't speak well of Mulvaney's character.

In February 2020, he appeared at the American Conservative Union's CPAC conference to assert that news coverage of the emerging COVID pandemic was nothing but an effort "to bring down the President. That's what it's all about." It's almost certain that the White House knew at the time that the pandemic was a serious threat to public health.

On Nov. 7, 2020, Mulvaney's name appeared above a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he assured readers, as the headline put it, "If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully." That was four days after the election, when it was already clear that Trump had lost. "I’m familiar with his manner and style and know a little about how he thinks," Mulvaney claimed, based on his 15 months in the Trump White House.

That's a claim that, to say the least, hasn't aged gracefully.

To bring Mulvaney's judgment into present-day context, he also defended Trump's attempt to strong-arm Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden's son Hunter by implying he otherwise would withhold U.S. aid to the country.

Asked at a press conference whether Trump was proposing a "quid pro quo," Mulvaney answered, "We do that all the time with foreign policy." Trump would be impeached for this scheme.

Put it all together, and it suggests that there is good reason to put Mulvaney before the audience of CBS News.

CBS should put him on the air to explain why he lied about the coronavirus threat in 2020, and what made him think that Trump would bow out "gracefully" after losing the 2020 election.

And why he thought it acceptable to extort a friendly country for purely personal partisan ends. And why he viewed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a shield for lenders, not consumers.

That's an appearance I'd like to see. But for CBS, unfortunately for us, that would be an obstacle to "access."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

UN’s rights council adopts ‘fake news’ resolution, States urged to take tackle hate speech

NOT CITIZENS OR NGO'S; THE STATE

01 April 2022

At the UN Human Rights Council on Friday, Member States adopted a plan of action to tackle disinformation, at the request of Ukraine and with widespread – but not universal - support.

Officially sponsored by Ukraine, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the UK and US, the draft resolution presented to the Geneva forum emphasised the primary role that governments have, in countering false narratives.

It notes with concern, “the increasing and far-reaching negative impact on the enjoyment and realization of human rights of the deliberate creation and dissemination of false or manipulated information intended to deceive and mislead audiences, either to cause harm or for personal, political or financial gain”.

‘Common enemy’

Although China said that disinformation was a common enemy of the international community, it disassociated itself from adopting the draft resolution, saying that there was too little emphasis on the root causes of fake news, and the role of human rights mechanisms.

Venezuela also declined to approve the text, citing bias and alleging that some of the sponsors of the draft resolution were behind disinformation campaigns.

France, meanwhile, insisted that disinformation was increasingly being used to attack human rights activists and journalists and urged more coordination and efforts among States to tackle it.

Echoing that message, India, noted that that social media companies had an important role to play in combating fake news, as its impact on our societies was increasing.

For its part, Indonesia said that countering disinformation was a top priority, before insisting that policies were best designed by national authorities, to take into account cultural differences.

Digital boom

Although disinformation is not new, modern-day digital tools and social media platforms have allowed maliciously incorrect information to spread widely, before false facts can be challenged and removed.

At a global level, the dissemination of fake news came to the fore in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with unscientific remedies and anti-vaxxers gaining a massive online following among communities who were taken in by a proliferation of fake news and rumours.

In Colombia, the UN office there highlighted how several Latin America countries were targeted by enticing WhatsApp messages that said: “Stay home, the UN will bring you food,” in exchange for sharing personal data.

“It was false, of course. Yet, it led some people to go to the UN office, hoping to be given something to eat,” said Hélène Papper, head of UNIC Colombia.
Eroding trust in Ukraine

The problem has also surfaced in the Ukrainian crisis and affected the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has said that its lifesaving work there has been undermined by a “deliberate and targeted campaign of misinformation” aimed at destroying the relationship of trust that humanitarians need, to operate independently in war zones.

“False narratives around humanitarian work are dangerous,” ICRC spokesperson Ewan Watson told journalists in Geneva on Friday, adding that although the misinformation campaign was ongoing, “I’m relieved that it hasn’t translated into an inability to work”.

The Council’s decisions are not legally binding but carry the weight of the world’s pre-eminent body dedicated to promoting and protecting human rights.

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UN’s rights council adopts ‘fake news’ resolution, States urged to take tackle hate speech