"Subsidized Housing" - Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta, GA, US
Monday, December 26, 2016
Does Divestment Work?
As I have commented on those social media posts, which always support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel, for its continued brutal & illegal occupation of Palestine, that BDS movement won't work against Israel. This article partially supports my opinion.
It partially supports because it supports product boycotts but not divestment. But it is still correct in explaining how divestment from certain industries / companies doesn't work. So, for instance, divesting or selling stocks of Lockheed Martin (stock: LMT) because it supports wars by manufacturing weapons won't stop or help reduce wars, because investors who don't care about ethics or value money over everything else will snap up those stocks & make a fine buck. Lockheed Martin won't feel any effects of divestments, whatsoever.
I go one step further & assert that product boycotts also don't work. They don't work because all consumers, similar to the investment community, don't have a sympathy bone for Palestine & the plight of Palestinians, or, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. If a small section of the consuming public stops using a certain product, it might have a small to minimal effect on sales, & the resulting profits, of the company.
The root problem with BDS is that the movement assumes that a large public will catch on to its cause & will help fight it against illegal occupations, wars, climate change deniers etc. What it forgets that BDS, although being a noble movement, requires a large enough section of the public (investors, consumers, legislators etc.) to help with its causes. It's like a seesaw in the children's playground. If a heavy-set or large child sit on one end of the seesaw, the other end will need a similarly large-sized or at least enough children on the other end to bring down the other end of the seesaw.
For instance, Israel's GDP isn't hurt at all if a small section of the general public stops watching Fox Network or CNN because those news channels are demonizing Palestinians & supporting the illegal occupation of Israel. But, if, let's say, 70% of American adult general population stops watching Fox Network & CNN, advertisers will move their dollars to other cable news channels & that will hurt those networks.
As the article suggests, BDS movements should focus on the stigmatization of a country or industry or company. That stigmatization will hopefully lead enough investors, consumers, & legislators to stop investing, stop consuming & come up with sanctioning laws to help with BDS causes. But that's where the hard work starts for BDS movement. Raising enough awareness in the general public to bring that tide change requires massive effort, time, & money. Most people forget the cause in a day & move on with their lives. Continuing my example from above, how many Muslims, for instance, would or have stopped watching Fox Network or CNN? They might have one time or another but forgot it later on. On top of that, Muslims only make like 2% of the general population of America. So, even if all Muslims stop watching Fox & CNN, it won't make a damn dent in the profits of those networks.
On top of that, Israel's GDP is helped a lot by exporting war technology. How many Muslims, or even other people who sympathise with Palestinian cause, have any say, whatsoever, in their country purchasing war technology & weapons from Israel? Pretty much no one from the general public. So, how does BDS would help hurting Israel's GDP?
In summary, BDS movements are pretty much useless, since they require a quite large following to bring about any change to their causes. Many times, the public doesn't even have a say in doing anything which can bring about any change, since it is out of public's hands. BDS movements are essentially "feel-good" movements for their participants, because it makes the participants feel good that they are doing something, if anything, to help a good cause, even though, they are essentially wasting their efforts, time, & money because the focus of all their work is in the wrong place.
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Beginning in the early 1980s, students on college campuses across the U.S. demanded that their universities stop investing in companies that conducted business in South Africa, in protest of the apartheid system. As an example of social activism, the campaign was a phenomenal success: by the end of the decade, about 150 educational institutions had divested. But did the campaign succeed in pressuring the South African government to dismantle apartheid? The answer is less obvious than you might think. The economists Siew Hong Teoh, Ivo Welch, & C. Paul Wazzan studied how U.S. divestment movements affected the South African financial market & the share prices of U.S. companies with South African operations. Divestments were expected, on average, to decrease share prices, but the study found that, in fact, political pressure turned out to have no discernible effect on the shares’ public market valuations. According to the authors, a possible explanation of this finding is that “the boycott primarily reallocated shares and operations from ‘socially responsible’ to more indifferent investors and countries.”
Although contemporary divestment campaigns have the potential to do a lot of good, we need to be clear about what their path to impact might be. Divestment is an example of socially responsible investing—the practice of either investing only in socially valuable companies or, more commonly, refusing to invest in companies that are deemed “unethical.” Socially responsible investing is big: according to a 2014 report by the Forum for Sustainable & Responsible Investment, roughly one in six dollars, or about 18%, of the $36.8 trillion in professionally managed assets in the U.S. is involved in socially responsible investing. And the movement has exploded in the past two decades.
Students are lobbying their universities to divest from morally dubious industries, such as tobacco or firearms. More recently, a coalition of 2,000 individuals—including celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio—& 400 institutions worth $2.6 trillion has pledged to divest from fossil-fuel companies.
However, if the aim of divestment campaigns is to reduce companies’ profitability by directly reducing their share prices, then these campaigns are misguided. An example: suppose that the market price for a share in ExxonMobil is $10, & that, as a result of a divestment campaign, a university decides to divest from ExxonMobil, and it sells the shares for $9 each. What happens then?
Well, what happens is that someone who doesn’t have ethical concerns will snap up the bargain.
They’ll buy the shares for $9 apiece, & then sell them for $10 to one of the other thousands of investors who don’t share the university’s moral scruples. The market price stays the same; the company loses no money & notices no difference. As long as there are economic incentives to invest in a certain stock, there will be individuals & groups—most of whom are not under any pressure to act in a socially responsible way—willing to jump on the opportunity. These people will undo the good that socially conscious investors are trying to do.
There is an important difference, therefore, between divestment & product boycotts. If a group of people believes that the Coca-Cola Company is harming the world, whereas PepsiCo isn’t, & accordingly switch their consumption from Coke to Pepsi, the Coca-Cola Company is harmed. Their sales decrease, & they make less profit. By contrast, if the same group of people stop investing in Coca-Cola, & invest instead in Pepsi, things will quickly balance out, & neither company will notice much difference. As soon as an ethical investor sells a share, a neutral or unethical investor will buy it.
This means that divestment risks being harmful. Several studies have shown that, because of the pressure against investing in morally dubious companies, “unethical” investments (sometimes called “sin stocks”) produce higher financial returns for the investor than their “ethical” alternatives. The economists Harrison Hong & Marcin Kacperczyk found that sin stocks outperform other stocks by 2.5% per year. This has even resulted in a niche industry: for instance, the Barrier Fund, formerly known as the Vice Fund, is a “sin-vestor” mutual fund that exclusively invests in companies that are significantly involved in alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or defense. It has beaten the S&P 500 by an average of nearly two percentage points per year since 2002. By divesting from unethical companies, “ethical” investors may effectively transfer money to opportunists like the Barrier Fund, who will likely spend it less responsibly than their “ethical” counterparts.
Studies of divestment campaigns in other industries, such as weapons, gambling, pornography, & tobacco, suggest that they have little or no direct impact on share prices. For example, the author of a study on divestment from oil companies in Sudan wrote, “Thanks to China and a trio of Asian national oil companies, oil still flows in Sudan.” The divestment campaign served to benefit certain unethical shareholders while failing to alter the price of the stock.
There is some variation in divestment’s effects across different sectors. In a 2013 report by the Smith School of Enterprise & the Environment at the University of Oxford, the authors found that coal stocks are less liquid than those of oil & natural gas, & that divestment therefore has a greater chance of impacting share price because it is more difficult for alternative investors to be found. Indeed, Peabody Energy Corporation, a coal company, recently stated in its financial report that “divestment efforts … could significantly affect demand for our products or our securities.” However, even in this sector, the effect will probably be very small. In that same Oxford report, the authors cautioned campaigners that the direct impact of divestment is “likely to be minimal.”
There is one way in which divestment campaigns can have a positive impact. Campaigns can use divestment as a media hook to generate stigma around certain industries, such as fossil fuel. In the long run, such stigma might lead to fewer people wanting to work at fossil-fuel companies, driving up the cost of labor for those corporations, & perhaps to greater popular support for better climate policies.
This is a much better argument in favor of divestment than the assertion that you’re directly reducing companies’ share price. If divestment campaigns are run, it should be with the aim of stigmatization in mind. However, campaigners need to be careful. First, there is a risk of confusing people—suggesting that divestment will directly hit companies in the pocketbook when the evidence mostly suggests that it won’t. For example, the Campaign to Unload, which encourages divestment from gun manufacturers, describes its aim as “to hit back at irresponsible gunmakers where it hurts: their sources of funding,” even though gun manufacturers get funding from selling guns, not selling stocks. Moreover, in response to the question “How does a divestment campaign work?,” the group claims:
This sounds like an argument that divestment directly negatively impacts companies’ share prices, but that simply isn’t the case. Moreover, divestment campaigns may stigmatize organizations that are doing valuable work. For example, in 2014 the Gates Foundation came under scrutiny from protesters because of its investments in the G.E.O. Group, which runs private prisons. But the anger directed toward the Gates Foundation will cause more harm for the foundation, which is doing great work, than it will for private prison companies.
Above all, divestment campaigns risk distracting from more directly effective activities. If the environmentalist community focuses its time on divestment campaigns, they are left with less time for their other programs. This means less time spent lobbying for carbon taxes, or encouraging people to adopt life styles with lower carbon footprints, or calling on universities to boycott energy providers that rely on fossil fuels.
Where, then, does this leave us? Divestment campaigns have the potential to do good, but only with caveats. To avoid the risk of misleading people, those running campaigns should be clear that the aim of divestment is to signal disapproval of certain industries, not to directly affect share price. They should be clear that they aim to stigmatize the organizations (like fossil-fuel companies) that are being invested in, not those that do the investing (like universities, pension funds, or foundations). They should aim to maximize their media exposure. And, where possible, they should bundle the campaigns with actions that have larger direct effects, such as fossil-fuel energy boycotts, or with calls for specific policy changes.
William MacAskill is an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University & the author of “Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.”
It partially supports because it supports product boycotts but not divestment. But it is still correct in explaining how divestment from certain industries / companies doesn't work. So, for instance, divesting or selling stocks of Lockheed Martin (stock: LMT) because it supports wars by manufacturing weapons won't stop or help reduce wars, because investors who don't care about ethics or value money over everything else will snap up those stocks & make a fine buck. Lockheed Martin won't feel any effects of divestments, whatsoever.
I go one step further & assert that product boycotts also don't work. They don't work because all consumers, similar to the investment community, don't have a sympathy bone for Palestine & the plight of Palestinians, or, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. If a small section of the consuming public stops using a certain product, it might have a small to minimal effect on sales, & the resulting profits, of the company.
The root problem with BDS is that the movement assumes that a large public will catch on to its cause & will help fight it against illegal occupations, wars, climate change deniers etc. What it forgets that BDS, although being a noble movement, requires a large enough section of the public (investors, consumers, legislators etc.) to help with its causes. It's like a seesaw in the children's playground. If a heavy-set or large child sit on one end of the seesaw, the other end will need a similarly large-sized or at least enough children on the other end to bring down the other end of the seesaw.
For instance, Israel's GDP isn't hurt at all if a small section of the general public stops watching Fox Network or CNN because those news channels are demonizing Palestinians & supporting the illegal occupation of Israel. But, if, let's say, 70% of American adult general population stops watching Fox Network & CNN, advertisers will move their dollars to other cable news channels & that will hurt those networks.
As the article suggests, BDS movements should focus on the stigmatization of a country or industry or company. That stigmatization will hopefully lead enough investors, consumers, & legislators to stop investing, stop consuming & come up with sanctioning laws to help with BDS causes. But that's where the hard work starts for BDS movement. Raising enough awareness in the general public to bring that tide change requires massive effort, time, & money. Most people forget the cause in a day & move on with their lives. Continuing my example from above, how many Muslims, for instance, would or have stopped watching Fox Network or CNN? They might have one time or another but forgot it later on. On top of that, Muslims only make like 2% of the general population of America. So, even if all Muslims stop watching Fox & CNN, it won't make a damn dent in the profits of those networks.
On top of that, Israel's GDP is helped a lot by exporting war technology. How many Muslims, or even other people who sympathise with Palestinian cause, have any say, whatsoever, in their country purchasing war technology & weapons from Israel? Pretty much no one from the general public. So, how does BDS would help hurting Israel's GDP?
In summary, BDS movements are pretty much useless, since they require a quite large following to bring about any change to their causes. Many times, the public doesn't even have a say in doing anything which can bring about any change, since it is out of public's hands. BDS movements are essentially "feel-good" movements for their participants, because it makes the participants feel good that they are doing something, if anything, to help a good cause, even though, they are essentially wasting their efforts, time, & money because the focus of all their work is in the wrong place.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beginning in the early 1980s, students on college campuses across the U.S. demanded that their universities stop investing in companies that conducted business in South Africa, in protest of the apartheid system. As an example of social activism, the campaign was a phenomenal success: by the end of the decade, about 150 educational institutions had divested. But did the campaign succeed in pressuring the South African government to dismantle apartheid? The answer is less obvious than you might think. The economists Siew Hong Teoh, Ivo Welch, & C. Paul Wazzan studied how U.S. divestment movements affected the South African financial market & the share prices of U.S. companies with South African operations. Divestments were expected, on average, to decrease share prices, but the study found that, in fact, political pressure turned out to have no discernible effect on the shares’ public market valuations. According to the authors, a possible explanation of this finding is that “the boycott primarily reallocated shares and operations from ‘socially responsible’ to more indifferent investors and countries.”
Although contemporary divestment campaigns have the potential to do a lot of good, we need to be clear about what their path to impact might be. Divestment is an example of socially responsible investing—the practice of either investing only in socially valuable companies or, more commonly, refusing to invest in companies that are deemed “unethical.” Socially responsible investing is big: according to a 2014 report by the Forum for Sustainable & Responsible Investment, roughly one in six dollars, or about 18%, of the $36.8 trillion in professionally managed assets in the U.S. is involved in socially responsible investing. And the movement has exploded in the past two decades.
Students are lobbying their universities to divest from morally dubious industries, such as tobacco or firearms. More recently, a coalition of 2,000 individuals—including celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio—& 400 institutions worth $2.6 trillion has pledged to divest from fossil-fuel companies.
However, if the aim of divestment campaigns is to reduce companies’ profitability by directly reducing their share prices, then these campaigns are misguided. An example: suppose that the market price for a share in ExxonMobil is $10, & that, as a result of a divestment campaign, a university decides to divest from ExxonMobil, and it sells the shares for $9 each. What happens then?
Well, what happens is that someone who doesn’t have ethical concerns will snap up the bargain.
They’ll buy the shares for $9 apiece, & then sell them for $10 to one of the other thousands of investors who don’t share the university’s moral scruples. The market price stays the same; the company loses no money & notices no difference. As long as there are economic incentives to invest in a certain stock, there will be individuals & groups—most of whom are not under any pressure to act in a socially responsible way—willing to jump on the opportunity. These people will undo the good that socially conscious investors are trying to do.
There is an important difference, therefore, between divestment & product boycotts. If a group of people believes that the Coca-Cola Company is harming the world, whereas PepsiCo isn’t, & accordingly switch their consumption from Coke to Pepsi, the Coca-Cola Company is harmed. Their sales decrease, & they make less profit. By contrast, if the same group of people stop investing in Coca-Cola, & invest instead in Pepsi, things will quickly balance out, & neither company will notice much difference. As soon as an ethical investor sells a share, a neutral or unethical investor will buy it.
This means that divestment risks being harmful. Several studies have shown that, because of the pressure against investing in morally dubious companies, “unethical” investments (sometimes called “sin stocks”) produce higher financial returns for the investor than their “ethical” alternatives. The economists Harrison Hong & Marcin Kacperczyk found that sin stocks outperform other stocks by 2.5% per year. This has even resulted in a niche industry: for instance, the Barrier Fund, formerly known as the Vice Fund, is a “sin-vestor” mutual fund that exclusively invests in companies that are significantly involved in alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or defense. It has beaten the S&P 500 by an average of nearly two percentage points per year since 2002. By divesting from unethical companies, “ethical” investors may effectively transfer money to opportunists like the Barrier Fund, who will likely spend it less responsibly than their “ethical” counterparts.
Studies of divestment campaigns in other industries, such as weapons, gambling, pornography, & tobacco, suggest that they have little or no direct impact on share prices. For example, the author of a study on divestment from oil companies in Sudan wrote, “Thanks to China and a trio of Asian national oil companies, oil still flows in Sudan.” The divestment campaign served to benefit certain unethical shareholders while failing to alter the price of the stock.
There is some variation in divestment’s effects across different sectors. In a 2013 report by the Smith School of Enterprise & the Environment at the University of Oxford, the authors found that coal stocks are less liquid than those of oil & natural gas, & that divestment therefore has a greater chance of impacting share price because it is more difficult for alternative investors to be found. Indeed, Peabody Energy Corporation, a coal company, recently stated in its financial report that “divestment efforts … could significantly affect demand for our products or our securities.” However, even in this sector, the effect will probably be very small. In that same Oxford report, the authors cautioned campaigners that the direct impact of divestment is “likely to be minimal.”
There is one way in which divestment campaigns can have a positive impact. Campaigns can use divestment as a media hook to generate stigma around certain industries, such as fossil fuel. In the long run, such stigma might lead to fewer people wanting to work at fossil-fuel companies, driving up the cost of labor for those corporations, & perhaps to greater popular support for better climate policies.
This is a much better argument in favor of divestment than the assertion that you’re directly reducing companies’ share price. If divestment campaigns are run, it should be with the aim of stigmatization in mind. However, campaigners need to be careful. First, there is a risk of confusing people—suggesting that divestment will directly hit companies in the pocketbook when the evidence mostly suggests that it won’t. For example, the Campaign to Unload, which encourages divestment from gun manufacturers, describes its aim as “to hit back at irresponsible gunmakers where it hurts: their sources of funding,” even though gun manufacturers get funding from selling guns, not selling stocks. Moreover, in response to the question “How does a divestment campaign work?,” the group claims:
When many investors decide it’s time to sell at the same time, that company’s stock comes under pressure. Over time, a low stock price can make it harder for a company to get loans, finance its sales, or expand the business. And if the pressure is high enough, an entire industry—even a national government—can decide it’s time to change how they do business.
This sounds like an argument that divestment directly negatively impacts companies’ share prices, but that simply isn’t the case. Moreover, divestment campaigns may stigmatize organizations that are doing valuable work. For example, in 2014 the Gates Foundation came under scrutiny from protesters because of its investments in the G.E.O. Group, which runs private prisons. But the anger directed toward the Gates Foundation will cause more harm for the foundation, which is doing great work, than it will for private prison companies.
Above all, divestment campaigns risk distracting from more directly effective activities. If the environmentalist community focuses its time on divestment campaigns, they are left with less time for their other programs. This means less time spent lobbying for carbon taxes, or encouraging people to adopt life styles with lower carbon footprints, or calling on universities to boycott energy providers that rely on fossil fuels.
Where, then, does this leave us? Divestment campaigns have the potential to do good, but only with caveats. To avoid the risk of misleading people, those running campaigns should be clear that the aim of divestment is to signal disapproval of certain industries, not to directly affect share price. They should be clear that they aim to stigmatize the organizations (like fossil-fuel companies) that are being invested in, not those that do the investing (like universities, pension funds, or foundations). They should aim to maximize their media exposure. And, where possible, they should bundle the campaigns with actions that have larger direct effects, such as fossil-fuel energy boycotts, or with calls for specific policy changes.
William MacAskill is an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University & the author of “Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.”
Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (Part 2 of 3)
Another interesting interview of Noam Chomsky by Chris Hedges. This one discusses how people around the world, & in the US, have been fed the idea that they are living in the most democratic country in the world. That the world should follow the lead of United States of America when it comes to democracy, liberty, & free speech. However, the reality is very very different.
As Chris Hedges says in the first paragraph that "we are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history." The general public has been given the idea that if you don't concede to government's constant monitoring, then evil people will get you & ruin your life. Fear and hysteria is used to control the masses, & the ignorant masses follow along like a flock of sheep.
Continuing onwards, Chris Hedges puts out another question to Chomsky where he says that how our "liberal" political & legislative institutions have been actually "enslaved" within the power & money paradigm of modern politics. Power & money controls every aspect of modern politics. Those few at the top of social hierarchy who have amassed power & money, usually through illegal or immoral means, wield their significant influences to control the so-called "elected" officials to get what they want from the country.
As Chomsky says that "take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. ... When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation." How is that even close to democracy? Does it really matter who the masses elect because at the end of the day, the masses will still get the same result, regardless of who is in the office. But, the ignorant & naive public of the West & around the world (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, India, Australia, Singapore etc.) still believe that democracy exists in developed countries & developing countries are not developed because of a lack of democracy & liberty. Do they even have an idea what democracy actually is because frankly, voting is not democracy. Voting also happens in Egypt & Zimbabwe, for instance, but the public masses won't recognize them as democratic countries.
Through fear & propaganda of false information, the West has made it seem to the world that it is democratic & the rest of the world must follow its lead. Powerful elites has redefined democracy, knowing fully well that the ignorant masses will accept the propaganda without giving it a second thought. How can the masses fight back & bring true democracy back when they are sound asleep? That's why, political activism is dead nowadays & the public is easily controlled & manipulated by a small minority of the powerful elites in North America & around the world.
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CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: But that system, of course, is constant. But what's changed is that we don't produce anything anymore. So what we define as our working class is a service sector class working in places like Walmart. And the effective forms of resistance--the sitdown strikes, going back even further in the middle of the 19th century with the women in Lowell--the Wobblies were behind those textile strikes. What are the mechanisms now? And I know you have written, as many anarchists have done, about the importance of the working class controlling the means of production, taking control, and you have a great quote about how Lenin and the Bolsheviks are right-wing deviants, which is, of course, exactly right, because it was centralized control, destroying the Soviets. Given the fact that production has moved to places like Bangladesh or southern China, what is going to be the paradigm now? And given, as you point out, the powerful forces of propaganda--and you touched upon now the security and surveillance state. We are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history. And you cannot even use the world liberty when you eviscerate privacy. That's what totalitarian is. What is the road we take now, given the paradigm that we have, which is somewhat different from what this country was, certainly, in the first half of the 20th century?
NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think it's pretty much the same, frankly. The idea still should be that of the Knights of Labor: those who work in the mills should own them. And there's plenty of manufacturing going on in the country, and probably there will be more, for unpleasant reasons. One thing that's happening right now which is quite interesting is that energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren, but under the capitalist morality, the calculus is that profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. It's institutionally-based, so, yes, we're getting lower energy prices. And if you look at the business press, they're very enthusiastic about the fact that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we'll have lower energy prices, and therefore manufacturing will come back here, and we can even undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy because we'll have this advantage.
Britain is saying the same thing. I was just in England recently. As I left the airport, I read The Daily Telegraph newspaper. Big headline: England is going to begin fracking all of the country, even fracking under people's homes without their permission. And that'll allow us to destroy the environment even more quickly and will bring manufacturing back here.
The same is true with Asia. Manufacturing is moving back, to an extent, to Mexico, and even here, as wages increase in China, partly because of labor struggles. There's massive labor struggles in China, huge, all over the place, and since we're integrated with them, we can be supportive of them.
But manufacturing is coming back here. And both manufacturing and the service industries can move towards having those who do the work take over the management and ownership and control. In fact, it's happening. In the old Rust Belt-- Indiana, Ohio, and so on--there's a significant--not huge, but significant growth of worker-owned enterprises. They're not huge, but they're substantial around Cleveland and other places.
The background is interesting. In 1977, U.S. Steel, the multinational, decided to close down their mills in Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown is a steel town, sort of built by the steelworkers, one of the main steel-producing areas. Well, the union tried to buy the plants from U.S. Steel. They objected--in my view, mostly on class lines. They might have even profited from it. But the idea of worker-owned industry doesn't have much appeal to corporate leaders, which means bankers and so on. It went to the courts. Finally, the union lost in the courts. But with enough popular support, they could have won.
Well, the working class and the community did not give up. They couldn't get the steel mills, but they began to develop small worker-owned enterprises. They've now spread throughout the region. They're substantial. And it can happen more and more.
And the same thing happened in Walmarts. I mean, there's massive efforts right now, significant ones, to organize the service workers--what they call associates--in the service industries. And these industries, remember, depend very heavily on taxpayer largess in all kinds of ways. I mean, for example, let's take, say, Walmarts. They import goods produced in China, which are brought here on container ships which were designed and developed by the U.S. Navy. And point after point where you look, you find that the way the system--the system that we now have is one which is radically anticapitalist, radically so.
I mean, I mentioned one thing, the powerful effort to try to undermine markets for consumers, but there's something much more striking. I mean, in a capitalist system, the basic principle is that, say, if you invest in something and, say, it's a risky investment, so you put money into it for a long time, maybe decades, and finally after a long time something comes out that's marketable for a profit, it's supposed to go back to you. That's not the way it works here. Take, say, computers, internet, lasers, microelectronics, containers, GPS, in fact the whole IT revolution. There was taxpayer investment in that for decades, literally decades, doing all the hard, creative, risky work. Does the taxpayer get any of the profit? None, because that's not the way our system works. It's radically anti-capitalist, just as it's radically anti-democratic, opposed to markets, in favor of concentrating wealth and power.
But that doesn't have to be accepted by the population. These are--all kinds of forms of resistance to this can be developed if people become aware of it.
HEDGES: Well, you could argue that in the election of 2008, Obama wasn't accepted by the population. But what we see repeatedly is that once elected officials achieve power through, of course, corporate financing, the consent of the governed is a kind of cruel joke. It doesn't, poll after poll. I mean, I sued Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act, in which you were coplaintiff, and the polling was 97% against this section of the NDAA. And yet the courts, which have become wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state, the elected officials, the executive branch, and the press, which largely ignored it--the only organ that responsibly covered the case was, ironically, The New York Times. We don't have--it doesn't matter what we want. It doesn't--I mean, and I think that's the question: how do we effect change when we have reached a point where we can no longer appeal to the traditional liberal institutions that, as Karl Popper said once, made incremental or piecemeal reform possible, to adjust the system--of course, to save capitalism? But now it can't even adjust the system. We see cutting welfare.
CHOMSKY: Yeah. I mean, it's perfectly true that the population is mostly disenfranchised. In fact, that's a leading theme even of academic political science. You take a look at the mainstream political science, so, for example, a recent paper that was just published out of Princeton by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, two of the leading analysts of these topics, what they point out is they went through a couple of thousand policy decisions and found what has long been known, that there was almost no--that the public attitudes had almost no effect. Public organizations that are--nonprofit organizations that are publicly based, no effect. The outcomes were determined by concentrated private power.
There's a long record of that going way back. Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist near here, has shown very convincingly that something as simple as campaign spending is a very good predictor of policy. That goes back into the late 19th century, right through the New Deal, right up till the present. And that's only one element of it. And you take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. You get a little more influence as you go up. When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation.
I mean, you see this all over. I mean, take these huge so-called trade agreements that are being negotiated, Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic--enormous agreements, kind of NAFTA-style agreements. They're secret--almost. They're not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing them. They know about it, which means that their bosses know about it.
And the Obama administration and the press says, look, this has to be secret, otherwise we can't defend our interests. Yeah, our interests means the interests of the corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing the legislation. Take the few pieces that have been leaked and you see that's exactly what it is. Same with the others.
But it doesn't mean you have to accept it. And there have been changes. So take, say--in the 1920s, the labor movement had been practically destroyed. There's a famous book. One of the leading labor historians, David Montgomery, has a major book called something like The Fall of the House of Labor. He's talking about the 1920s. It was done. There had been a very militant labor movement, very effective, farmers movement as well. Crushed in the 1920s. Almost nothing left. Well, in the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of popular activism.
HEDGES: But it also changed because of the breakdown of capitalism.
CHOMSKY: There was a circumstance that led to the opportunity to do something, but we're living with that constantly. I mean, take the last 30 years. For the majority of the population it's been stagnation or worse. That's--it's not exactly the deep Depression, but it's kind of a permanent semi-depression for most of the population. That's--there's plenty of kindling out there which can be lighted.
And what happened in the '30s is primarily CIO organizing, the militant actions like sit-down strikes. A sit-down strike's very frightening. It's a step before taking over the institution and saying, we don't need the bosses. And that--there was a cooperative administration, Roosevelt administration, so there was some interaction. And significant legislation was passed--not radical, but significant, underestimated. And it happened again in the '60s. It can happen again today. So I don't think that one should abandon hope in chipping away at the more oppressive aspects of the society within the electoral system. But it's only going to happen if there's massive popular organization, which doesn't have to stop at that. It can also be building the institutions of the future within the present society.
HEDGES: Would you say that the--you spoke about propaganda earlier and the Creel Commission and the rise of the public relations industry. The capacity to disseminate propaganda is something that now you virtually can't escape it. I mean, it's there in some electronic form, even in a hand-held device. Does that make that propaganda more effective?
CHOMSKY: Well, and it's kind of an interesting question. Like a lot of people, I've written a lot about media and intellectual propaganda, but there's another question which isn't studied much: how effective is it? And that's--when you brought up the polls, it's a striking illustration. The propaganda is--you can see from the poll results that the propaganda has only limited effectiveness. I mean, it can drive a population into terror and fear and war hysteria, like before the Iraq invasion or 1917 and so on, but over time, public attitudes remain quite different. In fact, studies even of what's called the right-wing, people who say, get the government off my back, that kind of sector, they turn out to be kind of social democratic. They want more spending on health, more spending on education, more spending on, say, women with dependent children, but not welfare, no spending on welfare, because Reagan, who was an extreme racist, succeeded in demonizing the notion of welfare. So in people's minds welfare means a rich black woman driving in her limousine to the welfare office to steal your money. Well, nobody wants that. But they want what welfare does.
Foreign aid is an interesting case. There's an enormous propaganda against foreign aid, 'cause we're giving everything to the undeserving people out there. You take a look at public attitudes. A lot of opposition to foreign aid. Very high. On the other hand, when you ask people, how much do we give in foreign aid? Way beyond what we give. When you ask what we should give in foreign aid, far above what we give.
And this runs across the board. Take, say taxes. There've been studies of attitudes towards taxes for 40 years. Overwhelmingly the population says taxes are much too low for the rich and the corporate sector. You've got to raise it. What happens? Well, the opposite.
As Chris Hedges says in the first paragraph that "we are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history." The general public has been given the idea that if you don't concede to government's constant monitoring, then evil people will get you & ruin your life. Fear and hysteria is used to control the masses, & the ignorant masses follow along like a flock of sheep.
Continuing onwards, Chris Hedges puts out another question to Chomsky where he says that how our "liberal" political & legislative institutions have been actually "enslaved" within the power & money paradigm of modern politics. Power & money controls every aspect of modern politics. Those few at the top of social hierarchy who have amassed power & money, usually through illegal or immoral means, wield their significant influences to control the so-called "elected" officials to get what they want from the country.
As Chomsky says that "take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. ... When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation." How is that even close to democracy? Does it really matter who the masses elect because at the end of the day, the masses will still get the same result, regardless of who is in the office. But, the ignorant & naive public of the West & around the world (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, India, Australia, Singapore etc.) still believe that democracy exists in developed countries & developing countries are not developed because of a lack of democracy & liberty. Do they even have an idea what democracy actually is because frankly, voting is not democracy. Voting also happens in Egypt & Zimbabwe, for instance, but the public masses won't recognize them as democratic countries.
Through fear & propaganda of false information, the West has made it seem to the world that it is democratic & the rest of the world must follow its lead. Powerful elites has redefined democracy, knowing fully well that the ignorant masses will accept the propaganda without giving it a second thought. How can the masses fight back & bring true democracy back when they are sound asleep? That's why, political activism is dead nowadays & the public is easily controlled & manipulated by a small minority of the powerful elites in North America & around the world.
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CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: But that system, of course, is constant. But what's changed is that we don't produce anything anymore. So what we define as our working class is a service sector class working in places like Walmart. And the effective forms of resistance--the sitdown strikes, going back even further in the middle of the 19th century with the women in Lowell--the Wobblies were behind those textile strikes. What are the mechanisms now? And I know you have written, as many anarchists have done, about the importance of the working class controlling the means of production, taking control, and you have a great quote about how Lenin and the Bolsheviks are right-wing deviants, which is, of course, exactly right, because it was centralized control, destroying the Soviets. Given the fact that production has moved to places like Bangladesh or southern China, what is going to be the paradigm now? And given, as you point out, the powerful forces of propaganda--and you touched upon now the security and surveillance state. We are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history. And you cannot even use the world liberty when you eviscerate privacy. That's what totalitarian is. What is the road we take now, given the paradigm that we have, which is somewhat different from what this country was, certainly, in the first half of the 20th century?
NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think it's pretty much the same, frankly. The idea still should be that of the Knights of Labor: those who work in the mills should own them. And there's plenty of manufacturing going on in the country, and probably there will be more, for unpleasant reasons. One thing that's happening right now which is quite interesting is that energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren, but under the capitalist morality, the calculus is that profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. It's institutionally-based, so, yes, we're getting lower energy prices. And if you look at the business press, they're very enthusiastic about the fact that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we'll have lower energy prices, and therefore manufacturing will come back here, and we can even undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy because we'll have this advantage.
Britain is saying the same thing. I was just in England recently. As I left the airport, I read The Daily Telegraph newspaper. Big headline: England is going to begin fracking all of the country, even fracking under people's homes without their permission. And that'll allow us to destroy the environment even more quickly and will bring manufacturing back here.
The same is true with Asia. Manufacturing is moving back, to an extent, to Mexico, and even here, as wages increase in China, partly because of labor struggles. There's massive labor struggles in China, huge, all over the place, and since we're integrated with them, we can be supportive of them.
But manufacturing is coming back here. And both manufacturing and the service industries can move towards having those who do the work take over the management and ownership and control. In fact, it's happening. In the old Rust Belt-- Indiana, Ohio, and so on--there's a significant--not huge, but significant growth of worker-owned enterprises. They're not huge, but they're substantial around Cleveland and other places.
The background is interesting. In 1977, U.S. Steel, the multinational, decided to close down their mills in Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown is a steel town, sort of built by the steelworkers, one of the main steel-producing areas. Well, the union tried to buy the plants from U.S. Steel. They objected--in my view, mostly on class lines. They might have even profited from it. But the idea of worker-owned industry doesn't have much appeal to corporate leaders, which means bankers and so on. It went to the courts. Finally, the union lost in the courts. But with enough popular support, they could have won.
Well, the working class and the community did not give up. They couldn't get the steel mills, but they began to develop small worker-owned enterprises. They've now spread throughout the region. They're substantial. And it can happen more and more.
And the same thing happened in Walmarts. I mean, there's massive efforts right now, significant ones, to organize the service workers--what they call associates--in the service industries. And these industries, remember, depend very heavily on taxpayer largess in all kinds of ways. I mean, for example, let's take, say, Walmarts. They import goods produced in China, which are brought here on container ships which were designed and developed by the U.S. Navy. And point after point where you look, you find that the way the system--the system that we now have is one which is radically anticapitalist, radically so.
I mean, I mentioned one thing, the powerful effort to try to undermine markets for consumers, but there's something much more striking. I mean, in a capitalist system, the basic principle is that, say, if you invest in something and, say, it's a risky investment, so you put money into it for a long time, maybe decades, and finally after a long time something comes out that's marketable for a profit, it's supposed to go back to you. That's not the way it works here. Take, say, computers, internet, lasers, microelectronics, containers, GPS, in fact the whole IT revolution. There was taxpayer investment in that for decades, literally decades, doing all the hard, creative, risky work. Does the taxpayer get any of the profit? None, because that's not the way our system works. It's radically anti-capitalist, just as it's radically anti-democratic, opposed to markets, in favor of concentrating wealth and power.
But that doesn't have to be accepted by the population. These are--all kinds of forms of resistance to this can be developed if people become aware of it.
HEDGES: Well, you could argue that in the election of 2008, Obama wasn't accepted by the population. But what we see repeatedly is that once elected officials achieve power through, of course, corporate financing, the consent of the governed is a kind of cruel joke. It doesn't, poll after poll. I mean, I sued Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act, in which you were coplaintiff, and the polling was 97% against this section of the NDAA. And yet the courts, which have become wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state, the elected officials, the executive branch, and the press, which largely ignored it--the only organ that responsibly covered the case was, ironically, The New York Times. We don't have--it doesn't matter what we want. It doesn't--I mean, and I think that's the question: how do we effect change when we have reached a point where we can no longer appeal to the traditional liberal institutions that, as Karl Popper said once, made incremental or piecemeal reform possible, to adjust the system--of course, to save capitalism? But now it can't even adjust the system. We see cutting welfare.
CHOMSKY: Yeah. I mean, it's perfectly true that the population is mostly disenfranchised. In fact, that's a leading theme even of academic political science. You take a look at the mainstream political science, so, for example, a recent paper that was just published out of Princeton by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, two of the leading analysts of these topics, what they point out is they went through a couple of thousand policy decisions and found what has long been known, that there was almost no--that the public attitudes had almost no effect. Public organizations that are--nonprofit organizations that are publicly based, no effect. The outcomes were determined by concentrated private power.
There's a long record of that going way back. Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist near here, has shown very convincingly that something as simple as campaign spending is a very good predictor of policy. That goes back into the late 19th century, right through the New Deal, right up till the present. And that's only one element of it. And you take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. You get a little more influence as you go up. When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation.
I mean, you see this all over. I mean, take these huge so-called trade agreements that are being negotiated, Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic--enormous agreements, kind of NAFTA-style agreements. They're secret--almost. They're not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing them. They know about it, which means that their bosses know about it.
And the Obama administration and the press says, look, this has to be secret, otherwise we can't defend our interests. Yeah, our interests means the interests of the corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing the legislation. Take the few pieces that have been leaked and you see that's exactly what it is. Same with the others.
But it doesn't mean you have to accept it. And there have been changes. So take, say--in the 1920s, the labor movement had been practically destroyed. There's a famous book. One of the leading labor historians, David Montgomery, has a major book called something like The Fall of the House of Labor. He's talking about the 1920s. It was done. There had been a very militant labor movement, very effective, farmers movement as well. Crushed in the 1920s. Almost nothing left. Well, in the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of popular activism.
HEDGES: But it also changed because of the breakdown of capitalism.
CHOMSKY: There was a circumstance that led to the opportunity to do something, but we're living with that constantly. I mean, take the last 30 years. For the majority of the population it's been stagnation or worse. That's--it's not exactly the deep Depression, but it's kind of a permanent semi-depression for most of the population. That's--there's plenty of kindling out there which can be lighted.
And what happened in the '30s is primarily CIO organizing, the militant actions like sit-down strikes. A sit-down strike's very frightening. It's a step before taking over the institution and saying, we don't need the bosses. And that--there was a cooperative administration, Roosevelt administration, so there was some interaction. And significant legislation was passed--not radical, but significant, underestimated. And it happened again in the '60s. It can happen again today. So I don't think that one should abandon hope in chipping away at the more oppressive aspects of the society within the electoral system. But it's only going to happen if there's massive popular organization, which doesn't have to stop at that. It can also be building the institutions of the future within the present society.
HEDGES: Would you say that the--you spoke about propaganda earlier and the Creel Commission and the rise of the public relations industry. The capacity to disseminate propaganda is something that now you virtually can't escape it. I mean, it's there in some electronic form, even in a hand-held device. Does that make that propaganda more effective?
CHOMSKY: Well, and it's kind of an interesting question. Like a lot of people, I've written a lot about media and intellectual propaganda, but there's another question which isn't studied much: how effective is it? And that's--when you brought up the polls, it's a striking illustration. The propaganda is--you can see from the poll results that the propaganda has only limited effectiveness. I mean, it can drive a population into terror and fear and war hysteria, like before the Iraq invasion or 1917 and so on, but over time, public attitudes remain quite different. In fact, studies even of what's called the right-wing, people who say, get the government off my back, that kind of sector, they turn out to be kind of social democratic. They want more spending on health, more spending on education, more spending on, say, women with dependent children, but not welfare, no spending on welfare, because Reagan, who was an extreme racist, succeeded in demonizing the notion of welfare. So in people's minds welfare means a rich black woman driving in her limousine to the welfare office to steal your money. Well, nobody wants that. But they want what welfare does.
Foreign aid is an interesting case. There's an enormous propaganda against foreign aid, 'cause we're giving everything to the undeserving people out there. You take a look at public attitudes. A lot of opposition to foreign aid. Very high. On the other hand, when you ask people, how much do we give in foreign aid? Way beyond what we give. When you ask what we should give in foreign aid, far above what we give.
And this runs across the board. Take, say taxes. There've been studies of attitudes towards taxes for 40 years. Overwhelmingly the population says taxes are much too low for the rich and the corporate sector. You've got to raise it. What happens? Well, the opposite.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Illegal overfishing and the return of Somalia's pirates
As we, especially in the West, may have had heard or seen news stories about how Somali pirates were looting ships & abducting marine officials near Somali waters, we forgot to stop & think why Somalis were turning to piracy in the first place. Although, piracy has ended now, as the article suggest, it may rears its ugly head once again.
From news stories & popular media (for instance, Tom Hanks' 2013 movie, "Captain Phillips") never bothered to tell the public that Somali pirates are fishermen from whom their livelihoods had been taken away by other countries.
The truth is that be it in America or France or Somalia, people will turn to criminal ventures, if & when their livelihoods are taken away. A father will become a drug pusher or gang member or a pirate, when he watches his family struggle to feed themselves a proper meal or sleep under a roof or even cover themselves with proper clothes. All of us humans have an innate ability to tell the difference between what's right & what's wrong. People only get involved in crimes when they don't find the legal job opportunity to earn enough money to fulfill their & their family's needs.
Government officials, from their own governments, & international bodies readily blame the criminal for his/her actions but always forget to see the context & background of how & why a person becomes a criminal. Similar to a African-America "thug," a Somali fisherman might have become a pirate because he doesn't have any other way to make some money. And when government & law enforcement officials would find out the background, they would hopefully implement the right solutions to resolve the problem instead of just bombarding & killing the pirates, in the case.
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A hundred years ago, it was a bustling port that served the vibrant fishing community living along Somalia's coastline, the longest on mainland Africa.
Now, Durduri is a sun-bleached, wind-swept, white-sand graveyard of stone structures. There is no harbour, no jetty. The drying & smoking house is just a tumble of bricks.
This is one of many historical coastal trading towns that have risen & fallen with empires. When the busy trade routes moved away, fishing was one of the few lifelines left.
Talk to locals now & you will find this too has dried up - they say there are no more fish in the sea. They blame not the pirates who brought the attention of international law enforcement to Somalia's waters, but the foreign fishing boats that have plundered sea-life stocks.
And if things don't change, they say, a return to piracy will be their only way of survival.
'They take everything'
Ahmed Mohamed Ali walks disconsolately along the beach at Durduri, 100 kilometres west of the port city of Bosaso, perched on the northeastern point of Puntland, Somalia's semi-autonomous northern state.
Ali said he was forced to quit fishing, the only job he has ever known, after a foreign fishing ship bore down on him & his colleagues one night at sea.
"It was a huge ship. We fled for our lives. Had we not it would have all been over and we'd have been dead," the 27-year-old told Al Jazeera.
Large foreign vessels "come at night and take everything", he said, gesturing angrily out to sea. "With their modern machinery, there is nothing left."
And the Somali fishermen can't match them. "We don't carry guns; we don't even have any weapons," he said.
Ali's accusations are backed up by two new pieces of research, conducted by separate Somali development agencies, which suggest that international fishing vessels - particularly Iranian & Yemeni, but also European ships including Spanish - are illegally exploiting the East African nation's fish stocks on a massive scale.
Legacy of piracy
In a country torn apart by civil war, without a federal government until as recently as 2012 following more than two decades of fighting, the population of 10.5 million largely suffers from a crippling paucity of economic opportunities.
Somalis say illegal, unlicensed, & unregulated fishing forced them to turn to piracy 10 years ago in order to recoup their losses. "We got fed up and took guns to the sea," said one Bosaso fisherman, Mohamed Adan Ahmed.
Piracy put a stop to illegal fishing, but these findings suggest it was merely a hiatus; now that international anti-piracy task forces have halted the hijackings, illegal fishing vessels have returned.
In 2014, 86% of Somali fishermen spotted foreign fishing vessels close to the shore, according to a report by international charity Adeso, which conducted interviews down the length of the coastline over a six-month period last year.
Sightings were more frequent in Puntland & have more than doubled in the last 5 years, according to the IUU Fishing in the Territorial Waters of Somalia report.
It first became a problem in the mid-1990s, according to Halimo Isman, who said at the time she was the only fisherwoman working in Durduri's waters.
In the new village that has sprung up close to the old port, she told Al Jazeera huge foreign fishing vessels dwarfed the Somalis' small, fibreglass skiffs. "It became impossible to share waters with them."
Her family were originally pastoralists, but, like many Somalis, they lost their livestock in a drought, so came to the coast in search of a new livelihood. Isman married a fisherman in 1987 & he taught her how to fish, repair nets, & dry the catch of the day.
"Fish, including sharks, were available everywhere," the 55-year-old recalls. But in 1996, she quit. The seas were out of fish, she said. Today, Isman keeps goats & sheep & grows vegetables & date palms on the brackish land.
Search for a better life
Foreign vessels take three times more fish than Somalis do - 132,000 metric tons each year compared to 40,000 by locals - another report released in September said.
From 12 months' research, the agency Secure Fisheries found the amount of fish being harvested is unsustainable. Illegal vessels are harvesting tuna stocks at the maximum capacity, leaving nothing for Somalis, it said.
"Piracy can come back because people have nothing," said elder Saed Jama Yusuf, speaking at the harbour in Bosaso, where his fellow fishermen bemoaned their feeble catches. "We will make preparations, gather our resources for funds."
The federal government's Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources was unavailable for comment, but Minister Mohamed Omar Aymow has previously denied there is a risk of piracy returning.
"There is not a big fear," he told Voice of America in September. "We don't have pirate men who are organised like the group we are fighting against now [Al-Shabab]."
However, in March two Iranian vessels suspected of fishing illegally were seized by Somali pirates, an incident described as the first successful hijacking in 3 years. The crew of one ship escaped after nearly 5 months, while the others remain in captivity.
"If the illegal fishing doesn't stop, people will look for alternatives - like piracy, joining al-Shabab, becoming criminals, or migrating," said former fisherman Ali.
Last month, residents of Durduri told Somali news agency Hiiraan Online that members of ISIL had arrived on a boat & taken as many as 40 young men.
With no work available, it is easy for such violent groups to recruit young men, Ali warned.
Will anyone help?
The challenges of policing Somalia's waters are enormous. The 200-nautical-mile economic exclusion zone, representing 830,390 square kilometres, is far larger than its land area.
The maritime police in Bosaso, where human smugglers shelter migrants trying to sail north across the Gulf of Arden - one of the world's busiest shipping lanes - operate on a shoestring budget of less than $10,000 per year, said Colonel Mohamed Ali Hashi.
Coastguards are volunteers, dressed in makeshift uniforms, cobbling money together for fuel, he told Al Jazeera.
Hashi, the commander of Bosaso's maritime police, said foreign vessels are employing Somalis on board as armed guards, but he has "no speedboats, no firearms".
"If the government doesn't authorise me to fight illegal fishing, I can't," he said. "Since NATO has been here, piracy is down but illegal fishing has increased. NATO and the EU never help us, never give us a hand."
Robert Mazurek, director of the Secure Fisheries agency, told Al Jazeera "the international community has done very little to combat [illegal] fishing in Somali waters".
Asked for a response to the accusation, NATO responded: "Actions to counter illegal fishing would breach the scope and capabilities of the mission."
So what is the way forward for Somalia's fishing industry and security in its waters?
Development organisations want new legislation, improved information sharing between international & regional bodies, increased use of satellite tracking to identify vessels operating there, & investment in local fisheries infrastructure.
"We need more concerted efforts, advocacy, a holistic approach to address both illegal fishing and to support local communities affected by illegal fishing practices," Adeso programme director Abdi Mohamed Dahir told Al Jazeera via email.
Locals such as Ali believe Somalia's rulers must take responsibility.
"We have a government but it's fragile," he said. "A strong government that could protect our seas would be a solution. There is no other way."
From news stories & popular media (for instance, Tom Hanks' 2013 movie, "Captain Phillips") never bothered to tell the public that Somali pirates are fishermen from whom their livelihoods had been taken away by other countries.
The truth is that be it in America or France or Somalia, people will turn to criminal ventures, if & when their livelihoods are taken away. A father will become a drug pusher or gang member or a pirate, when he watches his family struggle to feed themselves a proper meal or sleep under a roof or even cover themselves with proper clothes. All of us humans have an innate ability to tell the difference between what's right & what's wrong. People only get involved in crimes when they don't find the legal job opportunity to earn enough money to fulfill their & their family's needs.
Government officials, from their own governments, & international bodies readily blame the criminal for his/her actions but always forget to see the context & background of how & why a person becomes a criminal. Similar to a African-America "thug," a Somali fisherman might have become a pirate because he doesn't have any other way to make some money. And when government & law enforcement officials would find out the background, they would hopefully implement the right solutions to resolve the problem instead of just bombarding & killing the pirates, in the case.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A hundred years ago, it was a bustling port that served the vibrant fishing community living along Somalia's coastline, the longest on mainland Africa.
Now, Durduri is a sun-bleached, wind-swept, white-sand graveyard of stone structures. There is no harbour, no jetty. The drying & smoking house is just a tumble of bricks.
This is one of many historical coastal trading towns that have risen & fallen with empires. When the busy trade routes moved away, fishing was one of the few lifelines left.
Talk to locals now & you will find this too has dried up - they say there are no more fish in the sea. They blame not the pirates who brought the attention of international law enforcement to Somalia's waters, but the foreign fishing boats that have plundered sea-life stocks.
And if things don't change, they say, a return to piracy will be their only way of survival.
'They take everything'
Ahmed Mohamed Ali walks disconsolately along the beach at Durduri, 100 kilometres west of the port city of Bosaso, perched on the northeastern point of Puntland, Somalia's semi-autonomous northern state.
Ali said he was forced to quit fishing, the only job he has ever known, after a foreign fishing ship bore down on him & his colleagues one night at sea.
"It was a huge ship. We fled for our lives. Had we not it would have all been over and we'd have been dead," the 27-year-old told Al Jazeera.
Large foreign vessels "come at night and take everything", he said, gesturing angrily out to sea. "With their modern machinery, there is nothing left."
And the Somali fishermen can't match them. "We don't carry guns; we don't even have any weapons," he said.
Ali's accusations are backed up by two new pieces of research, conducted by separate Somali development agencies, which suggest that international fishing vessels - particularly Iranian & Yemeni, but also European ships including Spanish - are illegally exploiting the East African nation's fish stocks on a massive scale.
Legacy of piracy
In a country torn apart by civil war, without a federal government until as recently as 2012 following more than two decades of fighting, the population of 10.5 million largely suffers from a crippling paucity of economic opportunities.
Somalis say illegal, unlicensed, & unregulated fishing forced them to turn to piracy 10 years ago in order to recoup their losses. "We got fed up and took guns to the sea," said one Bosaso fisherman, Mohamed Adan Ahmed.
Piracy put a stop to illegal fishing, but these findings suggest it was merely a hiatus; now that international anti-piracy task forces have halted the hijackings, illegal fishing vessels have returned.
In 2014, 86% of Somali fishermen spotted foreign fishing vessels close to the shore, according to a report by international charity Adeso, which conducted interviews down the length of the coastline over a six-month period last year.
Sightings were more frequent in Puntland & have more than doubled in the last 5 years, according to the IUU Fishing in the Territorial Waters of Somalia report.
It first became a problem in the mid-1990s, according to Halimo Isman, who said at the time she was the only fisherwoman working in Durduri's waters.
In the new village that has sprung up close to the old port, she told Al Jazeera huge foreign fishing vessels dwarfed the Somalis' small, fibreglass skiffs. "It became impossible to share waters with them."
Her family were originally pastoralists, but, like many Somalis, they lost their livestock in a drought, so came to the coast in search of a new livelihood. Isman married a fisherman in 1987 & he taught her how to fish, repair nets, & dry the catch of the day.
"Fish, including sharks, were available everywhere," the 55-year-old recalls. But in 1996, she quit. The seas were out of fish, she said. Today, Isman keeps goats & sheep & grows vegetables & date palms on the brackish land.
Search for a better life
Foreign vessels take three times more fish than Somalis do - 132,000 metric tons each year compared to 40,000 by locals - another report released in September said.
From 12 months' research, the agency Secure Fisheries found the amount of fish being harvested is unsustainable. Illegal vessels are harvesting tuna stocks at the maximum capacity, leaving nothing for Somalis, it said.
"Piracy can come back because people have nothing," said elder Saed Jama Yusuf, speaking at the harbour in Bosaso, where his fellow fishermen bemoaned their feeble catches. "We will make preparations, gather our resources for funds."
The federal government's Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources was unavailable for comment, but Minister Mohamed Omar Aymow has previously denied there is a risk of piracy returning.
"There is not a big fear," he told Voice of America in September. "We don't have pirate men who are organised like the group we are fighting against now [Al-Shabab]."
However, in March two Iranian vessels suspected of fishing illegally were seized by Somali pirates, an incident described as the first successful hijacking in 3 years. The crew of one ship escaped after nearly 5 months, while the others remain in captivity.
"If the illegal fishing doesn't stop, people will look for alternatives - like piracy, joining al-Shabab, becoming criminals, or migrating," said former fisherman Ali.
Last month, residents of Durduri told Somali news agency Hiiraan Online that members of ISIL had arrived on a boat & taken as many as 40 young men.
With no work available, it is easy for such violent groups to recruit young men, Ali warned.
Will anyone help?
The challenges of policing Somalia's waters are enormous. The 200-nautical-mile economic exclusion zone, representing 830,390 square kilometres, is far larger than its land area.
The maritime police in Bosaso, where human smugglers shelter migrants trying to sail north across the Gulf of Arden - one of the world's busiest shipping lanes - operate on a shoestring budget of less than $10,000 per year, said Colonel Mohamed Ali Hashi.
Coastguards are volunteers, dressed in makeshift uniforms, cobbling money together for fuel, he told Al Jazeera.
Hashi, the commander of Bosaso's maritime police, said foreign vessels are employing Somalis on board as armed guards, but he has "no speedboats, no firearms".
"If the government doesn't authorise me to fight illegal fishing, I can't," he said. "Since NATO has been here, piracy is down but illegal fishing has increased. NATO and the EU never help us, never give us a hand."
Robert Mazurek, director of the Secure Fisheries agency, told Al Jazeera "the international community has done very little to combat [illegal] fishing in Somali waters".
Asked for a response to the accusation, NATO responded: "Actions to counter illegal fishing would breach the scope and capabilities of the mission."
So what is the way forward for Somalia's fishing industry and security in its waters?
Development organisations want new legislation, improved information sharing between international & regional bodies, increased use of satellite tracking to identify vessels operating there, & investment in local fisheries infrastructure.
"We need more concerted efforts, advocacy, a holistic approach to address both illegal fishing and to support local communities affected by illegal fishing practices," Adeso programme director Abdi Mohamed Dahir told Al Jazeera via email.
Locals such as Ali believe Somalia's rulers must take responsibility.
"We have a government but it's fragile," he said. "A strong government that could protect our seas would be a solution. There is no other way."
Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (Part 1 of 3)
A great interview by Chris Hedges of Noam Chomsky. Nothing much to comment for me on this, except to reiterate that North American & European people think that they are living in a democratic & free society where you are free to speak & think as you wish. But it is what instilled in them through their education system.
Public Relations (PR) system works so well that it subtly sends the message to the public that you are expected to follow the authority, regardless of how wrong that authority is. A large section of the public believes whatever spews out of the governments' mouths. Another section of the public, even if it doesn't believe governments' lies, still follow what the government tells them to do because they are trained to think that that's how the system works.
How can there be any so-called "democracy" in a country when its public is considered as "bewildered herd" & "ignorant & meddlesome outsiders," & are treated as "spectators" instead of active participants in making the internal policies of the country?
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CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Let's begin with a classic paradigm which is throughout the Industrial Revolution, which has been cited by theorists from Marx to Kropotkin to Proudhon and to yourself, that you build a consciousness among workers within the manufacturing class, and eventually you lead to a kind of autonomous position where workers can control their own production.
We now live in a system, a globalized system, where most of the working class in industrial countries like the United States are service workers. We have reverted to a Dickensian system where those who actually produced live in conditions that begin to replicate almost slave labor--and, I think, as you have written, in places like southern China in fact are slave [labor]. What's the new paradigm for resistance? How do we learn from the old and confront the new?
NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think we can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution. It was, of course, earlier in England, but let's take here in the United States. The Industrial Revolution took off right around here, eastern Massachusetts, mid 19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system--men and women, incidentally, women from the farms, so-called factory girls--and they bitterly resented it. It was a period of a very free press, the most in the history of the country. There was a wide variety of journals, ethnic, labor, or others. And when you read them, they're pretty fascinating.
The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings who were being forced into what they called wage slavery, which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact, this was such a popular view that it was actually a slogan of the Republican Party, that the only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for a wage is supposedly temporary--pretty soon you'll be free. Other than that, they're not different.
And they bitterly resented the fact that the industrial system was even taking away their rich cultural life. And the cultural life was rich. You know, there are by now studies of the British working class and the American working class, and they were part of high culture of the day. Actually, I remembered this as late as the 1930s with my own family, sort of unemployed working-class, and they said, this is being taken away from us, we're being forced to be something like slaves. They argued that if you're, say, a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell your product, you're selling what you produced. If you're a wage earner, you're selling yourself, which is deeply offensive. They condemned what they called the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Sounds familiar.
And it was extremely radical. It was combined with the most radical democratic movement in American history, the early populist movement--radical farmers. It began in Texas, spread into the Midwest--enormous movement of farmers who wanted to free themselves from the domination by the Northeastern bankers and capitalists, guys that ran the markets, you know, sort of forced them to sell what they produced on credit and squeeze them with credit and so on. They went on to develop their own banks, their own cooperatives. They started to link up with the Knights of Labor--major labor movement which held that, as they put it, those who work in the mills ought to own them, that it should be a free, democratic society.
These were very powerful movements. By the 1890s, workers were taking over towns and running them in Western Pennsylvania. Homestead was a famous case. Well, they were crushed by force. It took some time. Sort of the final blow was Woodrow Wilson's red scare right after the First World War, which virtually crushed the labor movement.
At the same time, in the early 19th century, the business world recognized, both in England and the United States, that sufficient freedom had been won so that they could no longer control people just by violence. They had to turn to new means of control. The obvious ones were control of opinions and attitudes. That's the origins of the massive public relations industry, which is explicitly dedicated to controlling minds and attitudes.
The first--it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell--he didn't have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan "Peace without Victory". And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn't play Beethoven. And they succeeded.
Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. Again, you can guess what it was. And they've at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into warmongering fanatics.
And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found--the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.
The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a "new art" in democracy, "manufacturing consent". That's where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was "engineering of consent". The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We're the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be--I'm quoting--"free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd", the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"--the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be "spectators", not participants. And every couple of years they're permitted to choose among one of the "responsible men", us.
And the John Dewey circle took the same view. Dewey changed his mind a couple of years later, to his credit, but at that time, Dewey and his circle were writing that--speaking of the First World War, that this was the first war in history that was not organized and manipulated by the military and the political figures and so on, but rather it was carefully planned by rational calculation of "the intelligent men of the community", namely us, and we thought it through carefully and decided that this is the reasonable thing to do, for all kind of benevolent reasons.
And they were very proud of themselves.
There were people who disagreed. Like, Randolph Bourne disagreed. He was kicked out. He couldn't write in the Deweyite journals. He wasn't killed but he was just excluded.
And if you take a look around the world, it was pretty much the same. The intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause--all sides, Germans, British, everywhere.
There were a few, a fringe of dissenters, like Bertrand Russell, who was in jail; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in jail; Randolph Bourne, marginalized; Eugene Debs, in jail for daring to question the magnificence of the war. In fact, Wilson hated him with such passion that when he finally declared an amnesty, Debs was left out & had to wait for Warren Harding to release him. And he was the leading labor figure in the country. He was a candidate for president, Socialist Party, and so on.
But the lesson that came out is we believe you can and of course ought to control the public, and if we can't do it by force, we'll do it by manufacturing consent, by engineering of consent. Out of that comes the huge public relations industry, massive industry dedicated to this.
Incidentally, it's also dedicated to undermining markets, a fact that's rarely noticed but is quite obvious. Business hates markets. ... Markets, if you take an economics course, are based on rational, informed consumers making rational choices. Turn on the television set and look at the first ad you see. It's trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. That's the whole point of the huge advertising industry. But also to try to control and manipulate thought. And it takes various forms in different institutions. The media do it one way, the academic institutions do it another way, and the educational system is a crucial part of it.
This is not a new observation. There's actually an interesting essay by--Orwell's, which is not very well known because it wasn't published. It's the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn't feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn't say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press "is owned by wealthy men" who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.
But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you've gone to all the good schools, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say--and I don't think he went far enough: wouldn't do to think. And that's very broad among the educated classes. That's why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder--you should knock off England first. That's called criticism.
And sometimes it's kind of outlandish. For example, there was just a review in The New York Times Book Review of Glenn Greenwald's new book by Michael Kinsley, and which bitterly condemned him as--mostly character assassination. Didn't say anything substantive. But Kinsley did say that it's ridiculous to think that there's any repression in the media in the United States, 'cause we can write quite clearly and criticize anything. And he can, but then you have to look at what he says, and it's quite interesting.
In the 1980s, when the major local news story was the massive U.S. atrocities in Central America--they were horrendous; I mean, it wasn't presented that way, but that's what was happening--Kinsley was the voice of the left on television. And there were interesting incidents. At one point, the U.S. Southern Command, which ... gave instructions to the terrorist force that they were running in Nicaragua, called the Contras--and they were a terrorist force--they gave them orders to--they said "not to (...) duke it out with the Sandinistas", meaning avoid the Nicaraguan army, and attack undefended targets like agricultural cooperatives and health clinics and so on. And they could do it, because they were the first guerrillas in history to have high-level communications equipment, computers and so on. The U.S., the CIA, just controlled the air totally, so they could send instructions to the terrorist forces telling them how to avoid the Nicaraguan army detachments and attack undefended civilian targets.
Well, ... it wasn't publicized, but it was mentioned. And Americas Watch, which later became part of Human Rights Watch, made some protests. And Michael Kinsley responded. He condemned Americas Watch for their emotionalism. He said, we have to recognize that we have to accept a pragmatic criterion. We have to ask--something like this--he said, we have to compare the amount of blood and misery poured in with the success of the outcome in producing democracy--what we'll call democracy. And if it meets the pragmatic criterion, then terrorist attacks against civilian targets are perfectly legitimate--which is not a surprising view in his case. He's the editor of The New Republic. The New Republic, supposedly a liberal journal, was arguing that we should support Latin American fascists because there are more important things than human rights in El Salvador, where they were murdering tens of thousands of people.
That's the liberals. And, yeah, they can get in the media no problem. And they're praised for it, regarded with praise. All of this is part of the massive system of--you know, it's not that anybody sits at the top and plans at all; it's just exactly as Orwell said: it's instilled into you. It's part of a deep indoctrination system which leads to a certain way of looking at the world and looking at authority, which says, yes, we have to be subordinate to authority, we have to believe we're very independent and free and proud of it. As long as we keep within the limits, we are. Try to go beyond those limits, you're out.
Public Relations (PR) system works so well that it subtly sends the message to the public that you are expected to follow the authority, regardless of how wrong that authority is. A large section of the public believes whatever spews out of the governments' mouths. Another section of the public, even if it doesn't believe governments' lies, still follow what the government tells them to do because they are trained to think that that's how the system works.
How can there be any so-called "democracy" in a country when its public is considered as "bewildered herd" & "ignorant & meddlesome outsiders," & are treated as "spectators" instead of active participants in making the internal policies of the country?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Let's begin with a classic paradigm which is throughout the Industrial Revolution, which has been cited by theorists from Marx to Kropotkin to Proudhon and to yourself, that you build a consciousness among workers within the manufacturing class, and eventually you lead to a kind of autonomous position where workers can control their own production.
We now live in a system, a globalized system, where most of the working class in industrial countries like the United States are service workers. We have reverted to a Dickensian system where those who actually produced live in conditions that begin to replicate almost slave labor--and, I think, as you have written, in places like southern China in fact are slave [labor]. What's the new paradigm for resistance? How do we learn from the old and confront the new?
NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think we can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution. It was, of course, earlier in England, but let's take here in the United States. The Industrial Revolution took off right around here, eastern Massachusetts, mid 19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system--men and women, incidentally, women from the farms, so-called factory girls--and they bitterly resented it. It was a period of a very free press, the most in the history of the country. There was a wide variety of journals, ethnic, labor, or others. And when you read them, they're pretty fascinating.
The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings who were being forced into what they called wage slavery, which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact, this was such a popular view that it was actually a slogan of the Republican Party, that the only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for a wage is supposedly temporary--pretty soon you'll be free. Other than that, they're not different.
And they bitterly resented the fact that the industrial system was even taking away their rich cultural life. And the cultural life was rich. You know, there are by now studies of the British working class and the American working class, and they were part of high culture of the day. Actually, I remembered this as late as the 1930s with my own family, sort of unemployed working-class, and they said, this is being taken away from us, we're being forced to be something like slaves. They argued that if you're, say, a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell your product, you're selling what you produced. If you're a wage earner, you're selling yourself, which is deeply offensive. They condemned what they called the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Sounds familiar.
And it was extremely radical. It was combined with the most radical democratic movement in American history, the early populist movement--radical farmers. It began in Texas, spread into the Midwest--enormous movement of farmers who wanted to free themselves from the domination by the Northeastern bankers and capitalists, guys that ran the markets, you know, sort of forced them to sell what they produced on credit and squeeze them with credit and so on. They went on to develop their own banks, their own cooperatives. They started to link up with the Knights of Labor--major labor movement which held that, as they put it, those who work in the mills ought to own them, that it should be a free, democratic society.
These were very powerful movements. By the 1890s, workers were taking over towns and running them in Western Pennsylvania. Homestead was a famous case. Well, they were crushed by force. It took some time. Sort of the final blow was Woodrow Wilson's red scare right after the First World War, which virtually crushed the labor movement.
At the same time, in the early 19th century, the business world recognized, both in England and the United States, that sufficient freedom had been won so that they could no longer control people just by violence. They had to turn to new means of control. The obvious ones were control of opinions and attitudes. That's the origins of the massive public relations industry, which is explicitly dedicated to controlling minds and attitudes.
The first--it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell--he didn't have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan "Peace without Victory". And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn't play Beethoven. And they succeeded.
Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. Again, you can guess what it was. And they've at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into warmongering fanatics.
And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found--the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.
The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a "new art" in democracy, "manufacturing consent". That's where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was "engineering of consent". The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We're the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be--I'm quoting--"free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd", the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"--the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be "spectators", not participants. And every couple of years they're permitted to choose among one of the "responsible men", us.
And the John Dewey circle took the same view. Dewey changed his mind a couple of years later, to his credit, but at that time, Dewey and his circle were writing that--speaking of the First World War, that this was the first war in history that was not organized and manipulated by the military and the political figures and so on, but rather it was carefully planned by rational calculation of "the intelligent men of the community", namely us, and we thought it through carefully and decided that this is the reasonable thing to do, for all kind of benevolent reasons.
And they were very proud of themselves.
There were people who disagreed. Like, Randolph Bourne disagreed. He was kicked out. He couldn't write in the Deweyite journals. He wasn't killed but he was just excluded.
And if you take a look around the world, it was pretty much the same. The intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause--all sides, Germans, British, everywhere.
There were a few, a fringe of dissenters, like Bertrand Russell, who was in jail; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in jail; Randolph Bourne, marginalized; Eugene Debs, in jail for daring to question the magnificence of the war. In fact, Wilson hated him with such passion that when he finally declared an amnesty, Debs was left out & had to wait for Warren Harding to release him. And he was the leading labor figure in the country. He was a candidate for president, Socialist Party, and so on.
But the lesson that came out is we believe you can and of course ought to control the public, and if we can't do it by force, we'll do it by manufacturing consent, by engineering of consent. Out of that comes the huge public relations industry, massive industry dedicated to this.
Incidentally, it's also dedicated to undermining markets, a fact that's rarely noticed but is quite obvious. Business hates markets. ... Markets, if you take an economics course, are based on rational, informed consumers making rational choices. Turn on the television set and look at the first ad you see. It's trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. That's the whole point of the huge advertising industry. But also to try to control and manipulate thought. And it takes various forms in different institutions. The media do it one way, the academic institutions do it another way, and the educational system is a crucial part of it.
This is not a new observation. There's actually an interesting essay by--Orwell's, which is not very well known because it wasn't published. It's the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn't feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn't say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press "is owned by wealthy men" who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.
But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you've gone to all the good schools, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say--and I don't think he went far enough: wouldn't do to think. And that's very broad among the educated classes. That's why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder--you should knock off England first. That's called criticism.
And sometimes it's kind of outlandish. For example, there was just a review in The New York Times Book Review of Glenn Greenwald's new book by Michael Kinsley, and which bitterly condemned him as--mostly character assassination. Didn't say anything substantive. But Kinsley did say that it's ridiculous to think that there's any repression in the media in the United States, 'cause we can write quite clearly and criticize anything. And he can, but then you have to look at what he says, and it's quite interesting.
In the 1980s, when the major local news story was the massive U.S. atrocities in Central America--they were horrendous; I mean, it wasn't presented that way, but that's what was happening--Kinsley was the voice of the left on television. And there were interesting incidents. At one point, the U.S. Southern Command, which ... gave instructions to the terrorist force that they were running in Nicaragua, called the Contras--and they were a terrorist force--they gave them orders to--they said "not to (...) duke it out with the Sandinistas", meaning avoid the Nicaraguan army, and attack undefended targets like agricultural cooperatives and health clinics and so on. And they could do it, because they were the first guerrillas in history to have high-level communications equipment, computers and so on. The U.S., the CIA, just controlled the air totally, so they could send instructions to the terrorist forces telling them how to avoid the Nicaraguan army detachments and attack undefended civilian targets.
Well, ... it wasn't publicized, but it was mentioned. And Americas Watch, which later became part of Human Rights Watch, made some protests. And Michael Kinsley responded. He condemned Americas Watch for their emotionalism. He said, we have to recognize that we have to accept a pragmatic criterion. We have to ask--something like this--he said, we have to compare the amount of blood and misery poured in with the success of the outcome in producing democracy--what we'll call democracy. And if it meets the pragmatic criterion, then terrorist attacks against civilian targets are perfectly legitimate--which is not a surprising view in his case. He's the editor of The New Republic. The New Republic, supposedly a liberal journal, was arguing that we should support Latin American fascists because there are more important things than human rights in El Salvador, where they were murdering tens of thousands of people.
That's the liberals. And, yeah, they can get in the media no problem. And they're praised for it, regarded with praise. All of this is part of the massive system of--you know, it's not that anybody sits at the top and plans at all; it's just exactly as Orwell said: it's instilled into you. It's part of a deep indoctrination system which leads to a certain way of looking at the world and looking at authority, which says, yes, we have to be subordinate to authority, we have to believe we're very independent and free and proud of it. As long as we keep within the limits, we are. Try to go beyond those limits, you're out.
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
How a single-gender environment can lead girls to choose a STEM career
I believe I read an article in 2015 that co-ed education does not help either genders. Boys & girls learn in different ways because their brains are structured differently. But, in co-education system, & since most teachers end up being females, boys are treated the same as girls. This adversely affects the learning abilities of boys, so much so, that post-secondary education institutes in North America are reporting more female enrollment than males.
Now, here's an article highlighting the research how an all-girls education system provides positive role models & peers, which help more girls in learning & accepting that they can also achieve a successful career in STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) fields.
So, all this new research in 21st century is saying that co-education has worse outcomes for both genders. Didn't old religions also practice that thousands of years ago? I don't know about other religions whether they ever dealt with co-education issue, but Islam specifically said to keep the genders separate. Now, Islam's gender separation has a much bigger scope in society than only mixed gender schooling but schooling is a huge part of a student's life.
Western countries ridiculed the separate gender schooling system of the Islamic countries for hundreds of years. They systematically broke that system down in the guise of gender equality in education, even when, gender equality can still be achieved with separate education system. Islamic countries instituted co-education system in the name of modern & Western education system. Now, the research from Western education institutes is coming out to affirm the benefits of single-gender education system.
Western countries, & their public, are like those stubborn & rebellious children that when they are told by their parents not to do something, they will still do it, & when they suffer because of their actions, then they learn the benefits what their parents said, based on their knowledge & wisdom. Except, the difference in a child doing something wrong & then learning from it, & countries changing their social, educational, & political systems to follow certain other countries, & then learning that they might've made a mistake is not the same. Turning around such social, educational, & political systems take decades & decades, & affect generations after generations.
So the hard lesson here is, & especially for Muslims, that blindly following the West will only lead you to disaster. Critically analyse what & why something is positive & negative in the light of modern science of the time & religion, & then implement it if it seems beneficial.
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It's a call heard from academia to business: More women are needed in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering & math. But how best to encourage girls to consider careers in STEM?
It turns out simply encouraging them to take risks & be the best they can in any subject leads many to consider STEM fields.
This is the strategy of many all-girls' schools.
For St. Clement’s School principal Martha Perry, simply ensuring that her pupils receive a well-rounded education is the focus of the school.
“Our emphasis is girls learning, and if girls are interested and keen on a STEM subject then we’re going to make sure we support them and we are going to make sure that they have access to the best possible instruction, the best possible facilities and the best possible experience to be learning,” she says.
Not that she has to be overly concerned. Of the Toronto all-girls school’s most recent graduating class, roughly one third of the 64 students were going on to study STEM subjects at the post-secondary level.
Studying at a single-sex school may have a bearing on that. According to a study by Goodman Research Group, which evaluates programs, graduates of girls’ schools are six times more likely to consider majoring in math, science & technology at the postsecondary level compared with their peers at co-ed schools.
A similar study undertaken by the University of California, Los Angeles, commissioned by the U.S.-based National Coalition of Girls’ Schools, suggests that girls’ school graduates are three times more likely than their co-ed independent-school peers to consider engineering careers.
From Ms. Perry’s perspective, the nurturing surroundings of an all-girls school play an important part in their development. St. Clement’s doesn’t put an overarching emphasis on STEM subjects, believing instead that the school’s best role is to give its students the opportunity to believe that they have the capacity to make a difference in anything they do.
“I think a girls-only environment actually allows girls to explore their own passions and their own interests and affords us the opportunity to provide them with a wealth of different options to explore,” she says.
The reasons for this vary. According to Megan Murphy, the executive director of the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools (NCGS) in Virginia, two of the biggest are peer role models & overcoming a media message that too often portrays women as being less capable than their male counterparts in STEM subjects. In addition, she says, historically the majority of science teachers at girls’ schools were women, too.
“Whether it’s from a faculty perspective, a graduate perspective, or a peer perspective, girls at girls schools have a wealth of role models and I think that’s probably the key factor as to why we see so many more girls at girls’ schools pursuing STEM subjects as undergraduates,” she says.
In addition, she explains, being around peer role models who love science & math helps deflect some of the media or popular culture messages that portray women as less capable of successfully studying STEM subjects than men.
Being among peers doing the same thing, whether in a physics club or a science Olympiad, helps build girls’ confidence that they can thrive in STEM subjects. That confidence is key to a long-term commitment to a field of study. For instance, the UCLA study suggests that 47.7% of women entering postsecondary education from single-sex schools felt well prepared in math, compared to 36.6% entering college from co-ed schools.
“When you check out of Algebra 1, even in a little way, that’s a critical building block for every single science or technology class that comes after that,” Ms. Murphy says. “So if you lose them in the pipeline as middle schoolers, it’s really hard to get them back.”
...
Much like St. Clement’s, Elmwood School in Ottawa doesn’t put a direct emphasis on teaching STEM subjects, but helps its students build what headmistress Cheryl Boughton refers to as “balanced brains,” based on a concept explored by American educator & psychologist Dr. JoAnn Deak.
Consequently, the responsibility charged to Ms. Boughton & the rest of the faculty is to ensure that by the time the girls graduate from Elmwood, they are well versed in all areas of academia & not just the subjects in which they are particularly strong.
...
Now, here's an article highlighting the research how an all-girls education system provides positive role models & peers, which help more girls in learning & accepting that they can also achieve a successful career in STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) fields.
So, all this new research in 21st century is saying that co-education has worse outcomes for both genders. Didn't old religions also practice that thousands of years ago? I don't know about other religions whether they ever dealt with co-education issue, but Islam specifically said to keep the genders separate. Now, Islam's gender separation has a much bigger scope in society than only mixed gender schooling but schooling is a huge part of a student's life.
Western countries ridiculed the separate gender schooling system of the Islamic countries for hundreds of years. They systematically broke that system down in the guise of gender equality in education, even when, gender equality can still be achieved with separate education system. Islamic countries instituted co-education system in the name of modern & Western education system. Now, the research from Western education institutes is coming out to affirm the benefits of single-gender education system.
Western countries, & their public, are like those stubborn & rebellious children that when they are told by their parents not to do something, they will still do it, & when they suffer because of their actions, then they learn the benefits what their parents said, based on their knowledge & wisdom. Except, the difference in a child doing something wrong & then learning from it, & countries changing their social, educational, & political systems to follow certain other countries, & then learning that they might've made a mistake is not the same. Turning around such social, educational, & political systems take decades & decades, & affect generations after generations.
So the hard lesson here is, & especially for Muslims, that blindly following the West will only lead you to disaster. Critically analyse what & why something is positive & negative in the light of modern science of the time & religion, & then implement it if it seems beneficial.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's a call heard from academia to business: More women are needed in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering & math. But how best to encourage girls to consider careers in STEM?
It turns out simply encouraging them to take risks & be the best they can in any subject leads many to consider STEM fields.
This is the strategy of many all-girls' schools.
For St. Clement’s School principal Martha Perry, simply ensuring that her pupils receive a well-rounded education is the focus of the school.
“Our emphasis is girls learning, and if girls are interested and keen on a STEM subject then we’re going to make sure we support them and we are going to make sure that they have access to the best possible instruction, the best possible facilities and the best possible experience to be learning,” she says.
Not that she has to be overly concerned. Of the Toronto all-girls school’s most recent graduating class, roughly one third of the 64 students were going on to study STEM subjects at the post-secondary level.
Studying at a single-sex school may have a bearing on that. According to a study by Goodman Research Group, which evaluates programs, graduates of girls’ schools are six times more likely to consider majoring in math, science & technology at the postsecondary level compared with their peers at co-ed schools.
A similar study undertaken by the University of California, Los Angeles, commissioned by the U.S.-based National Coalition of Girls’ Schools, suggests that girls’ school graduates are three times more likely than their co-ed independent-school peers to consider engineering careers.
From Ms. Perry’s perspective, the nurturing surroundings of an all-girls school play an important part in their development. St. Clement’s doesn’t put an overarching emphasis on STEM subjects, believing instead that the school’s best role is to give its students the opportunity to believe that they have the capacity to make a difference in anything they do.
“I think a girls-only environment actually allows girls to explore their own passions and their own interests and affords us the opportunity to provide them with a wealth of different options to explore,” she says.
The reasons for this vary. According to Megan Murphy, the executive director of the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools (NCGS) in Virginia, two of the biggest are peer role models & overcoming a media message that too often portrays women as being less capable than their male counterparts in STEM subjects. In addition, she says, historically the majority of science teachers at girls’ schools were women, too.
“Whether it’s from a faculty perspective, a graduate perspective, or a peer perspective, girls at girls schools have a wealth of role models and I think that’s probably the key factor as to why we see so many more girls at girls’ schools pursuing STEM subjects as undergraduates,” she says.
In addition, she explains, being around peer role models who love science & math helps deflect some of the media or popular culture messages that portray women as less capable of successfully studying STEM subjects than men.
Being among peers doing the same thing, whether in a physics club or a science Olympiad, helps build girls’ confidence that they can thrive in STEM subjects. That confidence is key to a long-term commitment to a field of study. For instance, the UCLA study suggests that 47.7% of women entering postsecondary education from single-sex schools felt well prepared in math, compared to 36.6% entering college from co-ed schools.
“When you check out of Algebra 1, even in a little way, that’s a critical building block for every single science or technology class that comes after that,” Ms. Murphy says. “So if you lose them in the pipeline as middle schoolers, it’s really hard to get them back.”
...
Much like St. Clement’s, Elmwood School in Ottawa doesn’t put a direct emphasis on teaching STEM subjects, but helps its students build what headmistress Cheryl Boughton refers to as “balanced brains,” based on a concept explored by American educator & psychologist Dr. JoAnn Deak.
Consequently, the responsibility charged to Ms. Boughton & the rest of the faculty is to ensure that by the time the girls graduate from Elmwood, they are well versed in all areas of academia & not just the subjects in which they are particularly strong.
...
A real nation would not let this happen
A great opinion piece from last year when election campaign in Canada was all the noise (& news) in the media.
We Canadians like to think that we are all one nation & we care for each other. Non-Canadians come to visit Canada & see the urban, down-town real estate developments & enjoy the urban amenities, & consider Canada a great place to be. Canadian cities are regularly rated to be great place to live & work by international organizations.
But all that happens because nobody takes a peek behind the curtain to see how Canadian Aboriginals are faring on the forgotten reserves & even in the urban areas. Nobody, including politicians, wants to hear / see their plight. That's the same case everywhere around the world. Be it Aboriginals of US or Australia, or even poorest of the poor people, forgotten in the back country, of countries on African, Asian, & European continents.
Although, blaming the developing countries for forgetting the poorest of the poor might not be justifiable, since their urban (so-called, "middle-class") populations also struggle to make ends meet, but it is inexcusable when developed countries put millions, if not billions, in the outstretched hands of the rich suburbanites because they are a few dollars short for their new home renovations, new electronics, vacation trips, night life shenanigans etc.
The author is correct to say that although we think we are one nation; be it Canadians in Canada, Americans in America, Australians in Australia, Pakistanis in Pakistan, Indians in India, South Africans in South Africa & so on & so forth, when it comes down to our selfish interests, it is me against everyone else. We always want more. We always have less. Why?
Because we forget to look at people who are below us in our society. Perhaps, then, we can satisfy our constant hunger for more. We forget that, as a democratic nation, it is the responsibility of the general populace to reject the latest handout in the elections & annual budgets, & compel our politicians to take care of the least unfortunate & needy among us. After taking care of the humanity on the national level, all of us, as humans, are obligated to tell our politicians & international organizations to take care of the least unfortunate among us on an international level. Heck, a lot of animals (wolves & lots of grazing animals, for instance) take care of the whole herd, instead of taking care of their own little family. Are we humans worse than animals?
Michael Moore, the documentary film maker, said in one of his documentaries (if I may recall correctly, it was on the American healthcare system) that a nation is judged by how it takes care of the sick, old & needy.
Perhaps, we are eligible to call ourselves humans, only when, we take care of the whole humanity; be it in our own backyards, on our streets, in our cities, in our provinces / states, in our countries, on our continents, & in the world.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If it’s a typical eight weeks in Canada, then 1,425 Aboriginal kids dropped out of school, a rate three times the national average. Since the campaign began, 45 Aboriginal children died in infancy; they would have lived longer if they’d been born in Sri Lanka. As Canadian politicians bickered on the evening news, 1,074 Aboriginal children & 6,265 Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted. Since the writ dropped, 33,534 Aboriginals were violently victimized. Another 182 committed suicide, roughly eight times the national rate. And, if the last two months were anything like the last decade, 11 were murdered, at a rate almost seven times higher than the national average.
...
Politicians are pushing each other out of the way as they scramble to give the hard-pressed suburban middle class the help they need. Meanwhile, other Canadians living on reserves & in the inner city are disappearing, assaulting & killing each other & themselves, at a rate typically only seen in countries that have been torn apart by war.
...
The party leaders build their campaigns on ... isolated, focused announcements. Small promises for small men & women, them & us—because this strategy only works if we respond. And we do.
We respond because we are nothing more than a collection of special interest groups. We are dairy farmers or oil workers, urban or rural, francophone or anglophone, Manitobans or Nova Scotians. But we are not a people, not a nation, not really. If we were, we would not be able to ignore each other, ignore other Canadians, the way we ignore the Aboriginal community. We would not allow our politicians to reduce us to Pavlovian demographics, salivating at the sight of a specially crafted handout. We would be unleashing a full-throated cry of anger & dismay, that so many fellow Canadians are growing up alone & lost, that so many of us are living in abject poverty & then dying miserably.
We would shout down every stump speech about the “struggling” middle class & demand more for the least fortunate among us. We would scream in frustration as yet another young Aboriginal is found hanging, unnamed & unmourned.
But we don’t. We just stand there, heads down, hands out.
I don’t know who to be more ashamed of, our politicians or us.
We Canadians like to think that we are all one nation & we care for each other. Non-Canadians come to visit Canada & see the urban, down-town real estate developments & enjoy the urban amenities, & consider Canada a great place to be. Canadian cities are regularly rated to be great place to live & work by international organizations.
But all that happens because nobody takes a peek behind the curtain to see how Canadian Aboriginals are faring on the forgotten reserves & even in the urban areas. Nobody, including politicians, wants to hear / see their plight. That's the same case everywhere around the world. Be it Aboriginals of US or Australia, or even poorest of the poor people, forgotten in the back country, of countries on African, Asian, & European continents.
Although, blaming the developing countries for forgetting the poorest of the poor might not be justifiable, since their urban (so-called, "middle-class") populations also struggle to make ends meet, but it is inexcusable when developed countries put millions, if not billions, in the outstretched hands of the rich suburbanites because they are a few dollars short for their new home renovations, new electronics, vacation trips, night life shenanigans etc.
The author is correct to say that although we think we are one nation; be it Canadians in Canada, Americans in America, Australians in Australia, Pakistanis in Pakistan, Indians in India, South Africans in South Africa & so on & so forth, when it comes down to our selfish interests, it is me against everyone else. We always want more. We always have less. Why?
Because we forget to look at people who are below us in our society. Perhaps, then, we can satisfy our constant hunger for more. We forget that, as a democratic nation, it is the responsibility of the general populace to reject the latest handout in the elections & annual budgets, & compel our politicians to take care of the least unfortunate & needy among us. After taking care of the humanity on the national level, all of us, as humans, are obligated to tell our politicians & international organizations to take care of the least unfortunate among us on an international level. Heck, a lot of animals (wolves & lots of grazing animals, for instance) take care of the whole herd, instead of taking care of their own little family. Are we humans worse than animals?
Michael Moore, the documentary film maker, said in one of his documentaries (if I may recall correctly, it was on the American healthcare system) that a nation is judged by how it takes care of the sick, old & needy.
Perhaps, we are eligible to call ourselves humans, only when, we take care of the whole humanity; be it in our own backyards, on our streets, in our cities, in our provinces / states, in our countries, on our continents, & in the world.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If it’s a typical eight weeks in Canada, then 1,425 Aboriginal kids dropped out of school, a rate three times the national average. Since the campaign began, 45 Aboriginal children died in infancy; they would have lived longer if they’d been born in Sri Lanka. As Canadian politicians bickered on the evening news, 1,074 Aboriginal children & 6,265 Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted. Since the writ dropped, 33,534 Aboriginals were violently victimized. Another 182 committed suicide, roughly eight times the national rate. And, if the last two months were anything like the last decade, 11 were murdered, at a rate almost seven times higher than the national average.
...
Politicians are pushing each other out of the way as they scramble to give the hard-pressed suburban middle class the help they need. Meanwhile, other Canadians living on reserves & in the inner city are disappearing, assaulting & killing each other & themselves, at a rate typically only seen in countries that have been torn apart by war.
...
The party leaders build their campaigns on ... isolated, focused announcements. Small promises for small men & women, them & us—because this strategy only works if we respond. And we do.
We respond because we are nothing more than a collection of special interest groups. We are dairy farmers or oil workers, urban or rural, francophone or anglophone, Manitobans or Nova Scotians. But we are not a people, not a nation, not really. If we were, we would not be able to ignore each other, ignore other Canadians, the way we ignore the Aboriginal community. We would not allow our politicians to reduce us to Pavlovian demographics, salivating at the sight of a specially crafted handout. We would be unleashing a full-throated cry of anger & dismay, that so many fellow Canadians are growing up alone & lost, that so many of us are living in abject poverty & then dying miserably.
We would shout down every stump speech about the “struggling” middle class & demand more for the least fortunate among us. We would scream in frustration as yet another young Aboriginal is found hanging, unnamed & unmourned.
But we don’t. We just stand there, heads down, hands out.
I don’t know who to be more ashamed of, our politicians or us.
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
"Abandoning Religion" by Mike Luckovich
"Abandoning Religion" - Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta, GA, US
State of the World: In Search of Leadership
A good opinion piece on ineffectiveness of world leaders on leadership. Although, this piece is from last year's UN General Assembly, I have no doubt that this year's gathering will once again yield no concrete solutions but a lot of empty promises to improve the world.
A little search on Google or Amazon will get you millions of titles on the topic of leadership. Corporate world can't get enough of "leadership". But the one place the world needs leadership the most, it has the least leadership there.
Today's world leaders have big mouths but short on actually doing something about resolving several problems the world is suffering from. Today's leaders are more of "yes-people" / "butt-kissers" of the general population. Their words & actions are there to appease the general populations, just so they can be elected & money can be rolling in their bank accounts. Only difference between these so-called leaders is that some force their way in such a leadership role (dictators, for instance) & some hold so-called "elections" in so-called "democratic" countries.
Perhaps, then, we should blame the general populations of countries & even the whole regions. Today's leaders are essentially elected on the results of lofty campaign promises, not on the actual substance of their past achievements. General populations around the world have resorted to choosing their leaders based on physical attributes (Justin Trudeau of Canada, for instance) or how many lies a candidate can spew, as long as, those lies confirm the general population's own biases (Donald Trump, for instance, has been proven to state outlandish lies in his campaign speeches but millions of Americans still love him & ready to elect him their leader).
On top of that, leadership, nowadays, can be bought. Money has become the defining factor for a person to be leader, instead of, ethics, morals, empathy, conscientiousness, social responsibility, a strong sense of accountability for its own actions etc. These traits are sorely missing for today's world leaders. Instead today's leaders are the ideal definition of hypocrites. As the writer in his opinion piece says that they "preach that which they don’t practise, cause tensions, & create more problems than they solve." Furthermore, the secretary-general for Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, correctly accused the world leaders of hypocrisy "as they lecture about peace while being the world's largest manufacturers of arms, & how they rail against corruption while allowing corporations to use financial & tax loopholes."
The world indeed needs strong leadership to resolve its many problems, but, perhaps, it needs an educated & informed citizenry which chooses that kind of leadership in the first place.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here they go again. And here I am: once again in New York as world leaders pose for photographers & deliver lofty speeches at the UN's "new year" party gathering.
Judging from the attendance, the opening of the 70th session of the UN General Assembly promises to be no less of a tedious ritual than previous years.
...
The problem as I see it as I look around: There are many world leaders, but no leadership.
Spiteful and pathetic
Instead of leading by example among the "Family of Nations", world leaders are acting like toxic in-laws. They come into town to preach that which they don’t practise, cause tensions, & create more problems than they solve.
...
Obama and Putin will talk about Syria and Ukraine, but I doubt they will listen.
Such is the poor state of affairs among the UN in-laws. Political & diplomatic expediency dictate their communication, just as narrow interests hamper their cooperation.
When they do meet, as in last week's US-China summit, much of the preparation is centred on protocol, which apparently prompts other important or meaningful issues. Greetings, toasting, & playing national anthems are as - or perhaps more - important than dealing with dying Syrians or persecuted Rohingya.
What does the G-2 stand for?
Presidents Obama and Xi seemed to have decided, out of domestic concerns, that they can't or won't do much for each other, &, therefore, ensured that their summit included all the trappings of success but without any concrete achievements.
The Washington Post reported that ... there was little or no progress to report on currency manipulation & cyber espionage, etc, let alone Asian security & world poverty. ...
All of which dampens the hopes (wrongly) pinned on the new dynamics between G-2 powers - US & China - to responsibly manage the global economy, especially following the last international financial crisis.
Alas, they proved that they couldn't even act responsibly in Southeast Asia, where they're further complicating the security & economic landscape instead of improving it.
And while the US, Russia, & China fail the test of leadership, those in their shadows are incapable of coordinating among themselves or making the leap towards more meaningful roles.
Even Europe, which is presumably more capable than the rest to act globally, has been either terribly divided or playing catch-up with the US & Russia.
When was the last time you heard of Japan, India or the UK taking an international initiative of any sort? How effective is the group of G-20 when the leading G-2 fail to lead?
Brazil, India, & Germany might seek a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, but how will that lead to better world governance?
Ever since the world moved away from bipolarity of the Cold War, it's been torn between the unipolarity of US leadership, the new bipolarity of the US & China, & multipolarity of various world powers & groupings.
In other words: The old world order is no more, but there's no new world order either.
The confusion allows all to blame all, & in the process, everyone escapes accountability for their lack of international responsibility.
Lessons in leadership
For all practical purposes, world leaders have set themselves up to be lectured like amateurs on the rights & wrongs of leadership by an unlikely mentor.
Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, lectured his audience at the UN with clarity, boldness, & conviction that is lacking in great power politics.
Among other reprimands, the pope rebuked world leaders for failing to put an end to the many conflicts in the world, particularly in the Middle East, & for putting partisan interests above real human beings ...
The pontiff even scolded the global financial institutions that subject countries to oppressive lending systems & subject people to mechanisms, which generate "greater poverty, exclusion, and dependence".
The secretary-general for Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, also accused the powerful leaders of hypocrisy as they lecture about peace while being the world's largest manufacturers of arms, & how they rail against corruption while allowing corporations to use financial & tax loopholes.
...
Yes, the world is better off when leaders act in their nations' best interests. But civilisation is best served when leaders also act in the best interest of their region & that of the community of nations.
That requires leadership.
Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.
A little search on Google or Amazon will get you millions of titles on the topic of leadership. Corporate world can't get enough of "leadership". But the one place the world needs leadership the most, it has the least leadership there.
Today's world leaders have big mouths but short on actually doing something about resolving several problems the world is suffering from. Today's leaders are more of "yes-people" / "butt-kissers" of the general population. Their words & actions are there to appease the general populations, just so they can be elected & money can be rolling in their bank accounts. Only difference between these so-called leaders is that some force their way in such a leadership role (dictators, for instance) & some hold so-called "elections" in so-called "democratic" countries.
Perhaps, then, we should blame the general populations of countries & even the whole regions. Today's leaders are essentially elected on the results of lofty campaign promises, not on the actual substance of their past achievements. General populations around the world have resorted to choosing their leaders based on physical attributes (Justin Trudeau of Canada, for instance) or how many lies a candidate can spew, as long as, those lies confirm the general population's own biases (Donald Trump, for instance, has been proven to state outlandish lies in his campaign speeches but millions of Americans still love him & ready to elect him their leader).
On top of that, leadership, nowadays, can be bought. Money has become the defining factor for a person to be leader, instead of, ethics, morals, empathy, conscientiousness, social responsibility, a strong sense of accountability for its own actions etc. These traits are sorely missing for today's world leaders. Instead today's leaders are the ideal definition of hypocrites. As the writer in his opinion piece says that they "preach that which they don’t practise, cause tensions, & create more problems than they solve." Furthermore, the secretary-general for Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, correctly accused the world leaders of hypocrisy "as they lecture about peace while being the world's largest manufacturers of arms, & how they rail against corruption while allowing corporations to use financial & tax loopholes."
The world indeed needs strong leadership to resolve its many problems, but, perhaps, it needs an educated & informed citizenry which chooses that kind of leadership in the first place.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here they go again. And here I am: once again in New York as world leaders pose for photographers & deliver lofty speeches at the UN's "new year" party gathering.
Judging from the attendance, the opening of the 70th session of the UN General Assembly promises to be no less of a tedious ritual than previous years.
...
The problem as I see it as I look around: There are many world leaders, but no leadership.
Spiteful and pathetic
Instead of leading by example among the "Family of Nations", world leaders are acting like toxic in-laws. They come into town to preach that which they don’t practise, cause tensions, & create more problems than they solve.
...
Obama and Putin will talk about Syria and Ukraine, but I doubt they will listen.
Such is the poor state of affairs among the UN in-laws. Political & diplomatic expediency dictate their communication, just as narrow interests hamper their cooperation.
When they do meet, as in last week's US-China summit, much of the preparation is centred on protocol, which apparently prompts other important or meaningful issues. Greetings, toasting, & playing national anthems are as - or perhaps more - important than dealing with dying Syrians or persecuted Rohingya.
What does the G-2 stand for?
Presidents Obama and Xi seemed to have decided, out of domestic concerns, that they can't or won't do much for each other, &, therefore, ensured that their summit included all the trappings of success but without any concrete achievements.
The Washington Post reported that ... there was little or no progress to report on currency manipulation & cyber espionage, etc, let alone Asian security & world poverty. ...
All of which dampens the hopes (wrongly) pinned on the new dynamics between G-2 powers - US & China - to responsibly manage the global economy, especially following the last international financial crisis.
Alas, they proved that they couldn't even act responsibly in Southeast Asia, where they're further complicating the security & economic landscape instead of improving it.
And while the US, Russia, & China fail the test of leadership, those in their shadows are incapable of coordinating among themselves or making the leap towards more meaningful roles.
Even Europe, which is presumably more capable than the rest to act globally, has been either terribly divided or playing catch-up with the US & Russia.
When was the last time you heard of Japan, India or the UK taking an international initiative of any sort? How effective is the group of G-20 when the leading G-2 fail to lead?
Brazil, India, & Germany might seek a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, but how will that lead to better world governance?
Ever since the world moved away from bipolarity of the Cold War, it's been torn between the unipolarity of US leadership, the new bipolarity of the US & China, & multipolarity of various world powers & groupings.
In other words: The old world order is no more, but there's no new world order either.
The confusion allows all to blame all, & in the process, everyone escapes accountability for their lack of international responsibility.
Lessons in leadership
For all practical purposes, world leaders have set themselves up to be lectured like amateurs on the rights & wrongs of leadership by an unlikely mentor.
Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, lectured his audience at the UN with clarity, boldness, & conviction that is lacking in great power politics.
Among other reprimands, the pope rebuked world leaders for failing to put an end to the many conflicts in the world, particularly in the Middle East, & for putting partisan interests above real human beings ...
The pontiff even scolded the global financial institutions that subject countries to oppressive lending systems & subject people to mechanisms, which generate "greater poverty, exclusion, and dependence".
The secretary-general for Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, also accused the powerful leaders of hypocrisy as they lecture about peace while being the world's largest manufacturers of arms, & how they rail against corruption while allowing corporations to use financial & tax loopholes.
...
Yes, the world is better off when leaders act in their nations' best interests. But civilisation is best served when leaders also act in the best interest of their region & that of the community of nations.
That requires leadership.
Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.
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