Community

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1346
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-08-23 16:48:03
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-08-23 16:48:03
    [post_content] => More people are currently fleeing war and extreme poverty than at any time in history, but those who try to help often face criminal charges

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that 839 people have already died in 2019 trying to cross the Mediterranean. In 2018, the number of dead or missing was 2,277. At its height in 2016, 5,096 people died at sea. These are desperate people fleeing war and extreme poverty. But no state will take responsibility for them. 

Yet even as international accountability for human rights violations becomes a hollow joke, there are people who have taken it up themselves to dedicate their lives to rescuing and helping refugees, no matter what the personal cost. These are idealistic people who also have a firm grasp on reality: they know they cannot save the world, but they believe that capitulating to helplessness is not an option.

Salam Aldeen is the founder of Team Humanity, a Danish nonprofit dedicated to helping refugees who made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Lesbos. A Dane of Iraqi-Moldovan descent, Salam flew to Lesbos in 2015 to begin sea rescue operations two days after seeing the now-iconic image of Alan Kurdi, the three year old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey. Alan and his family had been trying to reach Europe in an inflatable raft.

In January 2016, Greek authorities arrested Salam and four other humanitarian volunteers after they responded to a distress call from a group of refugees on a sinking rubber raft. The arresting officers accused them of crossing into Turkish waters with the intent to traffic refugees into Greece. Salam spent 48 hours in jail, and then two more years on trial, with prosecutors seeking a life sentence. The five men were acquitted of all charges in May 2018 and Salam immediately went back to work, this time building a women and children’s center adjacent to Moria, a notorious refugee camp on Lesbos that is known for violence and horrifying conditions. Moria was built for 3,000 people but shelters more than three times that many, mainly Syrian refugees and Afghan asylum seekers. 

The Team Humanity center is a reprieve for the 1,500 women and children who use it daily. “All women and children are welcome,” Salam said, noting that 11 is the cutoff age for boys. There’s a playground, and space for people to gather to dance, listen to music and watch movies. The center is funded entirely through private donations from all over the world. The money goes toward providing camp residents with necessities like food, diapers, winter clothes, and underwear. Salam gets wistful when he talks about building a school. “I don’t have funds for chairs and tables.”

On August 11th, the night of the Muslim festival of Eid-al-Adha, a group of men attacked the women’s center. “It was Eid, Ramadan had finished and everyone was happy. People went out. But then some troublemakers started making problems,” Salam says. 

https://vimeo.com/355385248

Salam described a scuffle between camp residents, which included a drunk man, volunteer security people restraining him, and a woman who screamed and pretended to faint. “It was all over quickly, Salam says. “She fainted for attention, it was a joke, and the drunk guy apologized.” But then, he says, a rumor started in the camp that someone had hit the woman. Salam estimated that between 100 to 200 men from Moria showed up, angry. There were only 26 volunteers working at the time, with additional women and children inside. When some men began to climb over the fence, Salam chased after them with sparklers and they ran off. 

https://vimeo.com/355385512

The local Greek police took an hour to arrive. “They don’t want to help. They don’t want us to be there. They want us to suffer so we go home,” Salam says. 

On August 14th, the Greek police returned, this time to rearrest Salam. “The police said the fireworks that I used to protect us were illegal,” Salam says. “They held me for over two hours, and at the same time brought someone in to report me for hitting him. I don’t know what they promised him for that, but it’s so corrupt.” 

He doesn’t expect the harassment will stop. Salam says he received a letter from the United Nations last week, also sent to the Greek government, which condemned the legal actions taken against Salam and the criminalization of humanitarian aid. Still, his biggest hope is for celebrity intervention — a “We are the World” moment to capture international attention.

Salam Aldeen is not the only humanitarian volunteer facing legal charges for aiding refugees. Pia Kemp, the German captain of a ship that was impounded for rescuing migrants at sea, recently announced she was turning down a medal from the city of Paris. Addressing the mayor of Paris, Kemp wrote in a Facebook post, “Madame Hidalgo, you want to award me a medal for my solidarian action in the Mediterranean Sea, because our crews 'work to rescue migrants from difficult conditions on a daily basis'...while you raid protests and criminalize people that are standing up for rights of migrants and asylum seekers. You want to give me a medal for actions that you fight in your own ramparts." Kemp reportedly faces 20 years in prison in Italy on charges of aiding in human trafficking.

There is no humanitarian exception to the European Union Directive that criminalizes aiding illegal migration. The burden of hosting refugees and asylum-seekers falls heavily on Mediterranean countries due to the Dublin Regulation, an EU law which states that people seeking asylum are the responsibility of the first European country they land in. At the same time, whistleblowers in the Greek government have accused the state of misappropriating EU funds meant for refugees, and awarding inflated contracts to local businesses. As Salam put it, “Finance crisis, bullshit, I see new cars. They didn’t have them in 2015, now they do.”

In Denmark, Salam’s home country, the government’s laws and rhetoric are increasingly anti-immigrant. In 2016, Denmark passed the controversial “jewelry law,” which allows the government to confiscate valuables from refugees to pay for their care. The law has not been enforced, but the symbolism remains. “I’m ashamed that Denmark doesn’t take refugees. That’s why I’m here helping people. I’m trying to show that it’s not every Danish person that feels this way,” says Salam. 

In 2018, Arizonan geography teacher Scott Warren was charged by Border Patrol with three felonies for aiding a pair of Central American migrants. His trial resulted in a hung jury. Federal prosecutors have refused to drop the charges since the mistrial, and plan to retry Warren on two felony harboring charges in November.

Warren’s case, like his European counterparts, failed in court because prosecutors could not prove intent to commit a crime. Still, Warren’s arrest is part of an escalating attack on humanitarian volunteers, who for years have put out jugs of water for dehydrated migrants traversing the desert along the United States’ southern border.

Migration flows will increase as the planet warms and regions become uninhabitable. The post-World War II liberal order, built upon freedom of movement and freedom from persecution has failed. The Refugee Convention was not written to account for massive influxes of people fleeing widespread violence and climate change. Permanent impermanence has been normalized - the most obvious example being Palestinian refugees, who were placed under their own UN agency in order to sidestep UNHCR. 

Ironically, during World War II, Syria played host to thousands of European refugees. Now that the tables have turned, Europeans are treating the refugee crisis like a game of hot potato, selling out basic principles in order to keep Muslims out. What began with a 2016 deal to return refugees to Turkey was followed by an even worse deal with Libya. 

In America, our government has behaved no better. Just this week, the Trump administration announced a new policy that would allow for indefinite detention of migrant families and children. Meanwhile, Haitians who have lived for decades on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) now face deportation since the Trump regime denied them renewal. 

The crackdowns are real, and until new institutions are constructed to provide accountability, legal or otherwise, we’ll return to the same solutions humanity has used throughout history. 

There’s a Jewish teaching, naaseh v'nishma, which means “we will do and we will hear.” If somebody shows up to your doorstep, feed them, give them a bed, and ask questions in the morning.

Tyrants have always used vulnerable populations as pawns in their games with one another. But there have always been people willing to sacrifice their bodies and voices for others. 

Salam and his family arrived in Denmark in 1992 after fleeing civil war in Moldova, but he insists that his past is irrelevant to what he’s doing now. “Everyone can do what I do. No money in the world can give you the feeling you get when you’re saving a human from drowning. I can’t explain it to you because it’s something insane. Giving a baby back to their mother after pulling them from the water, that is something I’ll never forget. People if they want to do something — know one thing — don’t think that you will get something back, but you’ll get peace with yourself. That feeling when you help somebody, this is your reward. You’ll understand, I did something good. Because one day, maybe it’s you who is going to run.”
    [post_title] => 'Saving lives is not a crime': when ordinary people sacrifice everything in the name of humanity
    [post_excerpt] => Tyrants have always used vulnerable populations as pawns in their games with one another. But there have always been people willing to sacrifice their bodies and voices for others. 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => saving-lives-is-not-a-crime-when-ordinary-people-sacrifice-everything-in-the-name-of-humanity
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
https://vimeo.com/355385512
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1346
    [menu_order] => 305
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

‘Saving lives is not a crime’: when ordinary people sacrifice everything in the name of humanity

by Anna Lind-Guzik

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1218
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-07-19 18:03:53
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-07-19 18:03:53
    [post_content] => The current political climate seems disastrous for the Palestinians. But as recent history shows, the bleakest circumstances can yield great opportunities.

Alongside the dog whistle politics, much of Donald Trump’s public image is a throwback to 1980s New York City culture, with its gaudy society parties, unapologetic misogyny, and predatory real estate practices. His presidency jerks between rhetorical excess and emptiness. From negotiations with North Korea abroad to immigration policy at home, Trump’s actions have cycled between Twitter onslaughts devoid of meaningful content and the implementation of acutely retrograde executive orders. His administration’s recent effort to address conflict in the Middle East by convening the “Peace to Prosperity” conference in Manama, Bahrain, is a further case in point.

At the core of the Trump administration’s economic plans for the Palestinians is a glossy brochure released shortly before the summit itself. Notwithstanding the slick graphics and  the presentation, which makes it look like something a business consulting firm would publish, it is an astonishing study of hollowness and deception. The $50 billion dollar pitch book promotes all sorts of investments, including a desalination plant in Gaza and a transport corridor with the West Bank, but does not even mention the word “occupation” to describe Israel’s control over the occupied Palestinian territories. Particularly galling to Israeli and Palestinian civil society activists was the discovery that the photographs used to illustrate that glossy brochure were from promotional material for the very grassroots peace building initiatives — such as The Bereaved Parents Circle Forum and Olive Oil Without Borders — that the Trump administration had abruptly defunded in recent months.

Live-tweeting from the lobby of Manama’s Four Seasons hotel, where the workshop was held, journalist Jack Moore wrote that he was “was left speechless by the Davos-esque Conflab” he had witnessed during the two-day event. In a widely-circulated Twitter thread, he described a gathering of shady private sector grandees, all male panels, and patronizing U.S. flippancy toward absent Palestinian officials. In his opening speech, Jared Kushner described his vision for an economically vibrant West Bank and Gaza without broaching the political context in which such development might take place. Other participants had spent so little time on the ground in Palestine, that they mispronounced names of well-known places. Meanwhile, the head of FIFA touted the virtues of football as a means of “contribut[ing] to change” in the region. When the numbers were crunched, it was clear that the U.S. government was looking for a way to offload the major costs of economic investment to the Gulf states and private investors, shouldering even less of the paltry amount they now provide in the form of economic assistance in the occupied territories.

This opportunistic spirit of Manama fit with a broader pattern of pushing the Palestinians into a corner. During several interviews in the run up to the Bahrain Summit, Kushner reinforced the approach of excluding the PLO while dismissing fears of American imbalance. Asked if he understood why the Palestinians did not trust him, Kushner responded curtly, “I’m not here to be trusted.” As the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has argued, this “neocolonial arrogance” of the U.S. administration is a throwback to the British Mandate and the notion that Palestinians are not quite ready to govern themselves.

Israeli leaders have also promoted this paternalistic view. The former Education Minister and leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, for example, called for the Palestinians to govern themselves “in all aspects barring two elements: overall security responsibility and not being able to allow the return of descents of Palestinian refugees.” When asked whether his vision would provide self-determination for Palestinians, Bennett demurred. “It’s unrealistic…the Stability Plan is only partial self-determination, but in the real world you have to make compromises.”

Since Trump’s election the alignment between the U.S. and Israeli governments has yielded a series of transformative developments that in practice put an end to the two-state solution.

The most widely publicized of these developments was the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. With this move, the U.S. indicated that it no longer regarded as legitimate the Palestinians’ claim to East Jerusalem as the putative capital of their future state. The U.S. also closed its consulate in East Jerusalem, which had served Palestinian residents of the occupied territories; and it ordered the Palestinian mission in Washington D.C. to close, ending the official Palestinian diplomatic presence in the U.S. capital.

The U.S. withdrew its funding to UNWRA, the United Nations agency that provides essential services, like education and medical care, to over five million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank. The State Department denied visas to prominent Palestinian figures who had been visiting the U.S. for years — including PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi, who received her PhD from the University of Virginia. In addition to adopting a policy of complete indifference to Israel’s ever-expanding settlement expansion in the West Bank, the U.S. removed the word ‘occupied’ from government documents. When Netanyahu campaigned in the recent national election partly on a promise to annex the West Bank, which Israel has occupied for 52 years, the Trump administration did not even respond, even as it has chosen a permissive attitude towards the growing Israeli call for annexation of the West Bank. In all these ways, the conflict has returned to a pre-Oslo paradigm. The Palestinians are, as it were, stuck back in the 1980s.

Rather than simply lament the circus in Bahrain, the Palestinian leadership must look for a meaningful way to respond to this diplomatic farce. Some Palestinians have argued that since the Oslo Agreement has been fatally violated, the Palestinian Authority should formally be dismantled. Those who oppose this move say it would cause harm to the Palestinian population, and perhaps even lead to the outbreak of violence. Another historical parallel to consider is the PLO’s position following the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Abandoned by Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, sidelined in autonomy talks over their future without participation, surrounded by an expanding ring of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians were forced to confront both political efforts at state prevention followed swiftly by the 1982 military intervention in Lebanon and Israeli attempts to defeat the PLO in its Beirut stronghold.

This moment of acute crisis was also an opportunity for Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership to rethink the future of the national struggle. After the PLO was forced to retreat from Beirut in 1982, Palestinian political activists in Gaza and the West Bank forced a shift of power away from the exiled leaders, now based in Tunis, and a new reckoning with their demands, culminating in the outbreak of the first Intifada in December 1987. The mass grassroots protest against the then 20-year old occupation led to tangible results: the U.S. finally recognized the PLO; and by the early 1990s the Israelis began to engage with the Palestinian political movement. With that same occupation now extending over five decades, what new opportunities might be seized beyond the fulsome rejection of the Trump administration’s effort to impose what one Palestinian playwright has called a “slumlord’s peace”?

In the summer of 1986, the Palestinian political activist and intellectual Sari Nusseibeh toyed with an idea that might shake up the paradigms of political discussion. Writing in the newspaper Al-Mawqef, he posed a thought experiment about which situation was preferable: “autonomy or annexation with full equal rights [for Palestinians] in Israel?” In his view, freedom through the ballot box would give Palestinians joint control over their own lives and the lives of their Jewish neighbors. He soon appeared on a leading Israeli political talk show alongside one leader of the settler movement, who was startled by Nusseibeh’s argument. Either Palestinians would get a state of their own, or Israel would have a battle for equal rights on its hands. Suddenly, the left-wing Labor Party began invoking fears of a “demographic threat” as a means to accelerate negotiations, while the Israeli representative to the UN noted that “If Palestinians begin to think like this, then we’ve really got something to worry about."

These fears remain highly relevant today. What happens when the political conflict is framed as a conversation about equal rights, access, and citizenship? The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is acutely concerned about the rhetoric shifting in this direction, a fear underscored by the backlash against the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a means of pressuring Israel in economic, cultural and diplomatic realms. Recent efforts to criminalize BDS, and to label it anti-Semitic, underscore how far this battle of delegitimization can go.

In the face of these developments, advocates for an equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must continue to push for a values-centered approach where the language of rights and equality for Arabs and Jews remains at the center of political discourse. Trump himself was quick to dispose of the two-state paradigm in his first meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, telling reporters he was not wedded to the idea of territorial partition. But rather than promote an equitable alterative, his administration has tipped the scales firmly in one direction. To reverse this sense of defeat, a reorientation of the parameters of debate is in order. Rather than haggle over the crumbs of economic peace, there needs to be a clear demand for meaningful sovereignty and citizenship—along with the means of leveraging that equitable future—in whatever political constellation might eventually emerge.

A return to the 1980s can evoke retrograde politics, but it is also an opportunity to interrogate the political imaginaries that took hold at the end of the Cold War, and to imagine alternative paths not taken. Could contemporary developments offer a chance to rethink the Palestinian future, moving away from territorial division and statist demands? Are there lessons to be learnt from Nusseibeh’s earlier calls for annexation alongside Netanyahu’s promise of implementing a more restrictive version? Might this crisis provide a viable way for Palestinians to firmly back out of the narrow Israeli and American corner? The current political landscape might appear calamitous, but Trump and Netanyahu will not last forever. Even as the foolhardy mandarins like Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman demand Palestinian surrender, the threat of being vanquished can also be redirected in bracing new directions.

 

 

 

 

 

 
    [post_title] => Back to the future: How Palestine can pull itself out of the 1980s
    [post_excerpt] => Pushed into a corner by U.S. and Israeli policy and the indifference of Arab leaders, Palestinian leadership is in a moment of acute crisis. But the calamitous political landscape also presents an opportunity for creative new paradigms.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => back-to-the-future-how-palestine-can-pull-itself-out-of-the-1980s
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1218
    [menu_order] => 313
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Back to the future: How Palestine can pull itself out of the 1980s

by Seth Anziska

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1191
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-07-03 15:35:33
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-07-03 15:35:33
    [post_content] => An unlikely partnership between politically opposed billionaires raises questions about the role money plays in ...  everything.

Perhaps the most surprising news this week is the unlikely partnership between two billionaires who represent opposite sides of the political spectrum. George Soros, the billionaire known for his liberalism, is partnering with the far-right Charles Koch to fund a Washington think tank that will promote a non-interventionist foreign policy. 

Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, describes his reaction to the announcement in  an op-ed for the Boston Globe:

"The depth of this heresy can only be appreciated by recognizing the meretricious power that nourishes Washington’s think-tank ecosystem… In foreign policy, all major Washington think tanks promote interventionist dogma: the United States faces threats everywhere, it must therefore be present everywhere, and “present” includes maintaining more than 800 foreign military bases and spending trillions of dollars on endless confrontations with foreign countries.” 

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, as it will be known, will be led by a number of critics of American foreign policy, including Trita Parsi, the former president of the National Iranian American Council. Parsi said:

“It shows how important ending endless war is if they’re willing to put aside their differences and get together on this project. We are going to challenge the basis of American foreign policy in a way that has not been done in at least the last quarter-century.”

One of the loudest critics of billionaires bearing liberal gifts is Anand Giridharadas. In his book Winners Take All: the elite charade of changing the world,  the former McKinsey consultant turned social critic attempts to answer the question: “What is the relationship between the extraordinary elite generosity of our time, which is real, and the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time?” Giridharadas’s conclusion: that elite generosity is a partner of elite hoarding.

The billionaires’ partnership raises the issue of the role of money in, well, just about everything, explains Kelsey Piper in an article for Vox. 

Institutional pushback against “endless war” feels like a relief and a welcome change in Washington, D.C., but one should temper one’s reaction with a healthy skepticism of billionaires who want to shape the world. 
    [post_title] => The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts
    [post_excerpt] => George Soros and Charles Koch would seem to be the most unlikely of partners, but the two billionaires have found synergy in their newly launched think tank.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => the-problem-with-billionaires-bearing-liberal-gifts
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1191
    [menu_order] => 316
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts

by Jessica McKenzie

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1159
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-06-26 16:59:51
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-06-26 16:59:51
    [post_content] => We've changed our name and expanded our mission, but our ethos remains the same

In 2017 a group of journalists and academics with expertise in authoritarianism launched a Medium blog called The Anti-Nihilist Institute. Over the ensuing months they wrote sharp analysis about the historical and social context of anti-democratic forces, and published thought provoking interviews with experts in the field. With a rapidly growing readership of thoughtful people seeking new thinking about critical issues, the founders decided to migrate the Medium blog to its own, dedicated website.

We are delighted to announce that the launch of our new website comes with a new name — The Conversationalist.

The name reflects our expanded mission, which is to bring together thoughtful writers who are experts in a variety of fields to provide new insights into critical issues. Over the past half year we have published thought provoking articles on diverse topics that range from the role of art in times of political despair to a new way of thinking about how to treat opioid addicts. The thread that links these many ideas together is one of creative new approaches to the urgent issues of our times, from social inequality to the stale thinking that underlies political stagnation. We invite you, our readers, to contribute to this conversation: share our articles on social media, comment on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and send us your ideas for new topics to write about here.

We look forward to playing a role in supporting an ongoing conversation about how to make our society  more inclusive, healthy, environmentally sustainable, and thoughtful.
    [post_title] => The Conversationalist: a new name and an expanded mission
    [post_excerpt] => The thread that links these many ideas together is the intention to inspire creative new approaches to the urgent issues of our times, from social inequality to the stale thinking that underlies political stagnation. 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => the-conversationalist-a-new-name-and-an-expanded-mission
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1159
    [menu_order] => 319
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

The Conversationalist: a new name and an expanded mission

by Lisa Goldman

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1133
    [post_author] => 5
    [post_date] => 2019-06-20 16:00:09
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-06-20 16:00:09
    [post_content] => With leading publications having phased out their public editors, external watchdogs have stepped in, holding the media to account in an age of declining public trust.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has decided to fill the vacuum left by the near disappearance of public editors from major newspapers by appointing a few of its own: Gabriel Snyder will take on The New York Times; Ana Marie Cox will monitor The Washington Post; Maria Bustillos will keep an eye on MSNBC; and Emily Tamkin will oversee CNN. Whether or not the news organizations will engage with these outsiders much (if at all) remains to be seen, but the Columbia Journalism Review is counting on having enough organizational clout so their efforts are not in vain.

Emily Tamkin has already been on CJR's podcast to take CNN to task for filling the airwaves with “underqualified pundits.” An article in the Washingtonian provides more information on CJR’s project, reporting that staffers for various media platforms have already been in touch with editor Kyle Pope to suggest issues for the attention of the public editors.

Something those public editors should consider: Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab on the “new avoidance” phenomenon, which is unfortunately becoming more common globally, and especially in the United States. The report is dismaying, but also illuminating. Some of the comments from readers explaining why they sometimes or always avoid the news demonstrate real demand and hunger for more positive coverage of things that are working—problems that are being solved—which is part of our goal here at The Conversationalist.

In other news:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed a new law that permits undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. Read more.

An argument for targeting the world’s 2.4 billion gamers with messaging about environmental issues and sustainability. Learn more.

How is participatory budgeting enlivening democracy in New York? Read the op-ed.
    [post_title] => The important work of keeping the media honest
    [post_excerpt] => Journalists passionate about keeping the media relevant have taken on the job of shadow ombudsman

    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => the-important-work-of-keeping-the-media-honest
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
https://conversationalist.org/?p=1133&preview=true
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1133
    [menu_order] => 321
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

The important work of keeping the media honest

by Jessica McKenzie

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1083
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-06-06 14:36:45
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-06-06 14:36:45
    [post_content] => Expressing dissent in China is difficult and dangerous, but a brave few persist in telling their story. 

This week the world remembers the events that took place on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square — although remembering is easier to do in some countries than in others. China’s digital great wall blocks access to information about the massacre, often with the help of American technology companies. Demonstrators who were in Tiananmen and lived through the crackdown that followed don’t even tell their children about it, lest they ask questions of the wrong people. Even more disturbing, young Chinese students raised in a post-Tiananmen world question the value of knowing what really happened that day, as Louisa Lim, the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia, writes in the New York Times. 

But while the Communist party has succeeded in crushing dissent, it has not figured out a way to make people forget. Today some survivors of those horrific events that took place in Beijing 30 years ago still make tiny, subversive gestures to show they have not forgotten, thus proving that people can uphold the historical record even under the most repressive governments.

In a moving reported op-ed for the New York Times, China expert Ian Johnson describes this quiet dissent expressed by brave writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals as “unofficial history.” They “have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memories of the country’s many killings, famines, uprisings and government crackdowns,” he writes. This history is smuggled in and out of China, accessed through VPN software to avoid censorship, or conveyed in symbolic code. This unofficial history is a testament to the resilience of people and of storytellers.

In addition to the vibrant unofficial history kept alive by a community of people, Johnson writes for the New York Review of Books that the official history of Tiananmen Square continues to expand, most recently with a book about how the Communist Party rewrote history the week following the crackdown, including backdating political endorsements of the decision to use military force on the protestors. The “truth stubbornly endures,” Johnson writes.

In other news:

Can the social cost of carbon — a figure that estimates the economic burden of climate change per metric ton of carbon dioxide — help incentive climate change solutions? Read more.

What is “economic patriotism”? Read about Elizabeth Warren’s plan to reinvigorate American industry.

At this New York bakery, it’s not your past (whatever it may hold) that matters, but your future. What does employment based on the  Buddhist principle of “non-judgment” look like?
    [post_title] => This is how China's political dissidents keep historical memory alive
    [post_excerpt] => In China, brave writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memories of events their government works hard to repress with digital censorship and police harassment.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => chinas-digital-great-wall-censors-facts-but-memory-persists
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1083
    [menu_order] => 325
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

This is how China’s political dissidents keep historical memory alive

by Jessica McKenzie

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1064
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-05-30 14:56:40
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-30 14:56:40
    [post_content] => In the age of increasing government surveillance and declining privacy, can citizens take back their right to live an unwatched life?

This weekend I had the dubious honor of coming face-to-face with one of the robots being rolled out by the supermarket chain Stop & Shop. The purpose of the tower of cameras and lasers is purportedly to keep an eye on spills and litter in the aisles, as the Boston Globe credulously reported, but presumably it could also watch customers and employees. The encounter got me thinking about the many forms of surveillance takes in this day and age, and how individuals and governments can push back.

One of the most extreme examples of a surveillance state is the province of Kashgar in northwest China. New York Times reporters created this audio-visual essay in an attempt to convey the extent of perpetual, all-consuming surveillance and its restrictive effect on residents. There are cameras, everywhere; and checkpoints, everywhere. Residents are required to install software on devices so the state can monitor their calls and other movements; and they are subject to random, unannounced visits by police and other monitors at any hour of the day or night. As the Times points out, the effect is as much about “intimidation as monitoring.”

Should you worry about facial recognition technology? Technologist Shelly Palmer says we should not be, arguing that “we live in a post-privacy world of our own creation, and there’s no going back.” Essentially, he says, things are already bad, so there’s no reason to try to fix it.

But people aren’t buying what Palmer and others are selling. As the New York Times recently reported, shareholders have taken an activist role in pressuring Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to government agencies, and to conduct an independent investigation into potential violations of civil, human and privacy rights. In many ways, the perpetual surveillance Palmer describes as normal and everyday has raised awareness of how the technology can be abused. Since facial recognition is not-yet-ubiquitous, now is the time for individuals, governments and organizations to take a stand against it.

In another example of this anti-surveillance trend, CNET reports that cities across the United States are passing or considering legislation that would require public approval for new surveillance technologies that police departments are considering purchasing. Voters are asserting their right to decide whether surveillance systems are reasonable and acceptable.

In other news:

Infant mortality rates have dropped in states that expanded Medicaid access, according to a new study from the Georgetown University Center of Health Policy. Read more.

Fully one-half of retirement-age Americans can’t afford to stop working, but there are bills and other proposals on deck that could alleviate the crisis. Learn more.

The daughter of the man who coined the term “regenerative agriculture” wants to rethink the way we treat poop (specifically animal poop) in agriculture. Our food systems and health may depend on it. Read more.
    [post_title] => Reclaiming their privacy
    [post_excerpt] => While some shrug off perpetual surveillance as the new normal, others are taking action to prevent government abuse
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => ordinary-citizens-are-challenging-big-brother
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1064
    [menu_order] => 327
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Reclaiming their privacy

by Jessica McKenzie

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1041
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-05-24 16:42:49
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-24 16:42:49
    [post_content] => "The past is never dead. It is not even past."
—William Faulkner

Did you ever wonder why the American education system only gets serious about foreign languages in high school, while the rest of the world seems to start sometime before kindergarten? It’s not by accident, of course. In America, the attitude toward bilingualism has historically been uneasy at best. The tremendous cultural pressure on immigrants to assimilate and to speak English, presents a problem for ethnic and national groups committed to maintaining their own languages and cultural identity beyond the first and second generations.

When a growing Yiddish after school program asked the Milwaukee public school system for use of one of its buildings, it was a local rabbi who went on the record to protest the Yiddish program. “There is altogether too much hyphenism in our present Americanism…” said Rabbi Samuel Hirschberg. He added that foreign language education was wrong because “A foreign language as a household language tends to perpetuate foreignism…” Hirschberg insisted that foreign languages were so corrosive to the American national spirit that no foreign language should be taught before high school.

That was in 1916. Rabbi Hirschberg’s curious campaign to discourage Jewish literacy points to two important facts that tend to be in tension. First, bi- and even tri-lingualism has always been tied to American Jewish identity, both as an immigrant group and a diasporic people. Second, the discourse around bilingualism in America is in large part a function of attitudes toward immigrants. Between 1881 and 1924 some 2.5 million Jews immigrated from Eastern and Central Europe. By the time Rabbi Hirschberg went on the record, the popular conversation around immigrants, especially Jews, had reached unprecedented heights of ugly xenophobia. Less than a decade later, in 1924, Congress passed legislation that would essentially cut off all immigration from Europe, including Jewish immigration.

The persistence of bilingual culture

The case of Rabbi Hirschberg shows that the question of bilingualism was a complicated one, and that the conversations happening in the mainstream were also happening within the Jewish community.

But bilingual (Yiddish-English) Jewish communal life did persist in the United States, and well past its expected life span. In 1933, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, Hillel Rogoff, the managing editor of the most widely-read Yiddish newspaper in the United States, the Jewish Daily Forward, was asked about the future of the Yiddish press in America. Despite widely-held views that Yiddish was a dying language, Rogoff was optimistic. “There is no reason,” he said, “why the Yiddish press in America should not go on for many, many years…”

Today, at 122 years of continuous publishing, the Yiddish language Forverts newspaper has already outlived the traditional Yiddish blessing, “may you live until 120.” The history of Forverts reflects a mixture of enormous communal investment, dumb luck and, in the end, the overwhelming power of monolingualism. In that sense, for newer diasporic groups hoping to maintain an identity tied to a heritage language, the Forverts provides an important case study.

In the United States, maintaining an immigrant language and cultural tradition requires an act of tremendous will and coordinated community action. What’s so unique about the persistence of Forverts — which is still published to this day, albeit in a very diminished format — is not just that it defied the two-generation life span for immigrant media, but that it did so in spite of itself. The Forverts was itself a force for Americanization.

Established in 1897 at the peak of mass Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, Forverts’s most famous sections were aimed at helping new immigrants assimilate. A Bintl Brif (A Bundle of Letters) was one of the first American newspaper advice columns. It provided guidance on many of the dilemmas of Americanization, including, most poignantly, the cultural gap that inevitably arose between Yiddish speaking parents and bilingual American children, many of whom were ashamed of their foreign parents.

The Yiddish of Forverts was also highly ‘Americanized,’ employing many transliterated English words. Perhaps most importantly, given American political attitudes, while The Forverts was a proudly socialist publication, it was vigorously anti-Communist. The Yiddish paper of record managed to thread the needle of politically acceptable cultural autonomy.

The Forverts was always more than a newspaper. It was part of a wide-ranging, interconnected network of Yiddish flavored, socialist and labor oriented institutions that included WEVD radio, Amalgamated Bank, the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, a mutual aid society called the Workmen’s Circle, and a summer camp and after school education system that still exist today. 

At its height, the Forverts parent entity, the Forward Association, was a political machine, an organization with a constitution that spelled out expectations for members to vote along party lines, or risk disciplinary action that included expulsion.

Taken together, the Forverts was a symbol of an urban, all-encompassing model of Jewish life in America. It was explicitly built by and for its members and readers, and that sense of ownership continued to reverberate through later generations, even if in a diminished, distanced way.  

Xenophobia redux

Coordinated anti-immigrant hysteria brought an end to the great era of Jewish mass migration, with the passing of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Unfortunately, we are now seeing a resurgence of the ugly xenophobia that was such a salient feature of American life during the 1920s and 1930s. According to a recent Pew Foundation survey, almost one third of Americans feel uncomfortable merely hearing a language other than English in public. The irony is, for all the outrage about immigrants and their supposed resistance to assimilation, the process of Americanization is absolutely relentless and no group is immune to the inevitability of language loss.  

First generation immigrants to the United States generally learn English slowly. They depend on media in their native language, which they continue to speak at home. Second generation Americans are bilingual and may or may not be attached to the immigrant language and its institutions. Third generation Americans are, almost without exception, monolingual.

Many of the institutions created by the first generation of Yiddish-speaking immigrants still exist. While the WEVD radio station was sold to Disney, Amalgamated Bank and the Amalgamated Houses still stand. The Workmen’s Circle has created a new identity for itself in the twenty-first century, one that is different from its origins as a mutual aid society, but still centered on an understanding of American Jews as immigrants and descendants of immigrants. 

But those institutions, for all their longevity, did not create a legacy of contemporary Yiddish speakers. While the Workmen’s Circle offers superb and innovative Yiddish language classes for adults, it faces nearly insurmountable challenges in monolingual America. Providing systematic Yiddish language education for children was an exceedingly difficult proposition, given both the financial cost and the pull of assimilation. The Holocaust decimated Yiddish culture in Europe, reducing its native-speaking population by 85%. Today, outside of the Hasidic communities, Yiddish is spoken by only a small number of Jewish Americans. Many of them are people like me and my friends, residents of what we affectionately call Yiddishland.

The will to preserve a culture

So what are the twenty-first century strategies for creating fluent second and third generation heritage language speakers? According to my Yiddishland friends who are now parents, supplementary and all-day schools (which also exist for Russian, Chinese and Hungarian) have proven highly effective — if extremely expensive — for language transmission, especially where a first generation parent speaks the language at home. But it remains to be seen whether those schools alone can inspire the second generation to transmit to the third, the true challenge in monolingual America.

On this question of the third generation I turned to a young friend of mine, Shifra Whiteman. As a child in the 1990s, Whiteman was part of a small Yiddish-language playgroup called Pripetshik.  The group was created by a dedicated group of second-generation parents invested in Yiddish continuity. Pripetshik met in the Workmen’s Circle building in New York and lasted for years, morphing into a Yiddish chorus and producing lifelong friendships. As adults Whiteman, and the other members of the playgroup, have gone on to become activists and leaders in the Yiddish world.

The playgroup wasn’t just about teaching a language. It included cooking sessions, movies and history lessons. Pripetshik was about transmitting a very specific diasporic Jewish identity. Its location in the Workmen’s Circle building, a few floors down from the Forverts, was an important part of the lesson, showing the kids that they existed within an ongoing cultural project.  

In addition to her Yiddish playgroup, Whiteman also received a conventional Jewish day school education as well as many summers at Zionist summer camp. She recently started teaching Yiddish classes in cooperation with her city’s YIVO and Workmen’s Circle branches. Her students are almost entirely young people hungry for connection to an alternative kind of Jewish identity, one that is not rooted in nationalism or political ideology. At 30, she is ready to start thinking about children of her own, and plans to speak Yiddish with them, just as her parents spoke to her. As she put it to me, among the many Jewish worlds she inhabited as a young person, “the Yiddish stuck.”  

There are no easy answers to the question of how to preserve immigrant cultures and languages in the face of America’s fierce devotion to monolingualism. However, it’s clear that the success of multi-generational cultural transmission will depend on the durability of institutions, and whether the language and culture express values that the following generations find useful, and essential, to their sense of self. The Forverts was a newspaper for immigrants who wanted to become American. Today, many of its readers are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants, people who want to expand the definition of American and once again redefine Jewish life in the diaspora.
    [post_title] => Make bilingualism great
    [post_excerpt] => What are the twenty-first century strategies for creating fluent second and third generation heritage language speakers in a pervasively unilingual and often xenophobic culture?
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => make-bilingualism-great
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1041
    [menu_order] => 328
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Make bilingualism great

by Rokhl Kafrissen

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1019
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-05-17 16:53:51
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-17 16:53:51
    [post_content] => Gaza is often described as a humanitarian catastrophe, but its crisis is the result of self-serving policy implementation that could be reversed

Exactly a week after the most recent military escalation between Gaza and Israel, Haaretz, a left-leaning Israeli newspaper, placed on the front page of its Hebrew print edition a photograph depicting a crowd of Palestinians in Gaza gathered around a steaming cauldron of soup. Mostly men and boys, they are clamoring to get closer to the cauldron, clutching pots, bowls and even plastic storage containers to be filled. It is an aerial shot and you can almost hear the commotion through the image.

Over just three days during the first week of May, 25 Palestinian residents of Gaza and four Israeli citizens were killed while hundreds were injured. This was just the latest of eight military escalations since Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Israeli missiles and artillery fire damaged homes and businesses in Gaza, while barrages of rockets fired from the Strip hit dozens of homes in Israel in a tactic that seemed meant to overwhelm the Iron Dome defense system, which has until now prevented heavy damage and loss of life in Israeli cities and towns.

For most Israelis, Gaza exists only as a place of violence and misery. The images in the mainstream media depict its residents as either shooting rockets or clamoring for food. Israeli citizens can’t enter the Strip, and residents of Gaza are very rarely granted permission to enter Israel.

The misery-violence connection

While Israelis have little insight into the complex, nuanced realities of Palestinian society, many do see the link between violence and misery. In a poll conducted in early 2017, more than two-thirds of Israelis acknowledged that Israel would be serving its own interests by working to improve living conditions in Gaza. Israeli security experts — current and former military officials, analysts, and politicians — frequently warn that the misery in Gaza is a threat to Israel’s security.

The terms of each ceasefire agreement have been variations on the same theme: Expanding the fishing zone, allowing more goods into Gaza, and granting exit permits to more people. But Israel regularly fails to implement the terms of the agreements, and Gaza’s desperate situation continues to deteriorate. If misery drives conflict, and everyone acknowledges this, why isn’t Israel doing more to prevent the next round of violence?

A crisis rooted in policy

Neither increased aid nor improved infrastructure can resolve the crisis in Gaza. The endless cycle of escalations, ceasefires, and unfulfilled concessions are symptomatic of a broader problem. The international community has allowed Israel to “manage the conflict” with the Palestinians, rather than take meaningful steps to end it. From Israel’s perspective, keeping Gaza in perpetual crisis is the point —not the problem. The two parties will remain stuck in this holding pattern, with escalations becoming increasingly frequent and their magnitude stronger, until external players who have an interest in ending the conflict compel Israel to shift course radically and take responsibility for the well-being of civilians in both Israel and Gaza.

The crisis in Gaza today is rooted in policies implemented over the course of decades, particularly in Israel’s June 2007 decision, soon after Hamas took over, to declare Gaza a “hostile territory” and impose a closure. After 2007, Israel allowed only one crossing for the transport of humanitarian aid to remain open. The message was that Gaza could have aid but not an economy, subsistence but not prosperity. An Israeli official at the time said that the government’s policy was “no development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis” and in court proceedings the state articulated that its intention was to wage economic warfare against Gaza.  The justification for the closure, which Egypt joined by closing its own crossing point at Gaza’s southernmost point, was that it would squeeze Hamas into compliance — or place so much economic pressure on the general population, that it would rise up and overthrow Hamas.

Over the ensuing 12 years, there have been three major military operations, more than a dozen interim escalations that felt very much like war to those experiencing them, and more than a year of protests at the perimeter fence where Israeli snipers have killed hundreds of unarmed protesters. Millions of Palestinians and Israelis have been affected by violence. Palestinians in Gaza have borne the vast brunt of the conflict, with Israel using its formidable military force on the small territory, which lacks bomb shelters and has an underfunded and overwhelmed medical system. Israelis — mostly in southern Israel but not only — have also experienced the violence of Palestinian factions, whose use of sniper, mortar and rocket fire, and incendiary devices, has caused death, injury, property damage and trauma.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, realizing that Israeli policy created a situation in Gaza that was a liability as well as an image problem, has sought to manage the situation by keeping the pot simmering, believing he can prevent it from boiling over. But it keeps boiling over.

Israel has reversed some of its most egregious restrictions, like the one that forbade certain foods, books and children’s toys they described as ‘luxuries’ from entering Gaza. Nonetheless, 12 years after the Hamas takeover, there are dozens of policies that have nothing to do with security and everything to do with the logic of applying pressure or sanctions — i.e., creating more misery, which keeps all parties to the conflict locked in a loop of escalations and ceasefires. For example, Israel frequently closes Erez Crossing — the only pedestrian crossing for Palestinians who have permission to leave Gaza — and Kerem Shalom, its only commercial crossing. In 2018, Israel closed both crossings on seven occasions, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Human bargaining chips

Israel only issues permits to leave Gaza for what it calls “exceptional humanitarian” reasons, with some exceptions for merchants. The list of criteria determining who is eligible to request a permit for travel reveals the arbitrary nature of Israel’s access policy and a kind of violent and dystopian bureaucracy. Even after passing a security screening, Palestinians must meet additional criteria in order to be granted an exit permit. Permission to visit a family member, for example, is only granted in the case of a first-degree relative who is dead, mortally ill, or getting married. The processing time for permit applications can run up to 70 business days, and many applications go unanswered. Israel often disputes the request, asking whether the relative is still sick enough to warrant a visit or whether their death occurred so long ago that there is no longer justification for issuing a permit to participate in the mourning rituals. Israel routinely blocks travel that could allow residents of the Strip to establish trade ties or travel for professional development — including for women, who rarely meet Israel’s bar for what is considered legitimate business needs.

If Israel wanted to stave off misery in Gaza, it would take its boot off the necks of Gaza residents and stop using their lives as currency in its negotiations vis-à-vis Hamas. But Israel has no incentive to make compromises that would move the region out of conflict. It conveys the perception that it is “managing” an insoluble problem and that it is a victim of Palestinian violence, with neither responsibility for Palestinian misery nor the ability to alleviate it.

But the truth is that the status quo serves Israel well. As long as a weakened Hamas has control over Gaza while Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah heads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Israel can use divide and conquer tactics to manipulate the rift between the two parties and maintain its hold on the West Bank, where more than half a million Israeli settlers live and which Netanyahu recently said he plans to annex.

A deeper look at the situation in Gaza, and its connection to the bigger picture, reveals these truths. If the political leadership of Israel, Palestine and the international community were willing, collectively, to prioritize the needs and rights of civilians, in Israel and Palestine, there would be a clear path to negotiating a way out of the crisis. Israel’s control over freedom of movement provides it with ample opportunities to take meaningful steps in this direction.
    [post_title] => Policy, not aid: how to avert catastrophe in Gaza
    [post_excerpt] => Neither increased aid nor improved infrastructure can resolve the crisis in Gaza. The endless cycle of escalations, ceasefires, and unfulfilled concessions are symptomatic of a broader problem.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => policy-not-aid-how-to-avert-catastrophe-in-gaza
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1019
    [menu_order] => 330
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Policy, not aid: how to avert catastrophe in Gaza

by Tania Hary

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 974
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-05-03 16:55:51
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-03 16:55:51
    [post_content] => Healthcare professionals have found a treatment that could help end the opioid crisis, but their efforts to treat addicts are severely hampered by an arcane government regulation

Over the past two years, a team of medical scientists have been working on a project that could play a role in ending the opioid crisis. We are investigators on a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) project that seeks to revolutionize the treatment for opioid addiction available at hospital emergency departments by providing medical care providers with effective new tools. One of us is a health economist and health services researcher at the Mayo Clinic; the other is a health IT physician-scientist at Yale. The tools we have helped create work within hospital computer systems to help healthcare practitioners provide immediate treatment and link patients up with longer term follow-up to treat their addiction. In the next phase of the work, we will test these tools in five large healthcare systems across the country. We believe they will change the way hospitals treat opioid-addicted patients.

But these tools, combined with short-term treatment in the emergency department, are an incomplete solution to a national crisis. Throughout this year of work, we have been surprised and, frankly, baffled by the regulatory barriers around treatment of opioid addiction. Perhaps the most shocking (and heartbreaking) thing we’ve learned is that people addicted to opioids are resorting to the black market to treat themselves, because they are facing so many obstacles in obtaining treatment from their doctors and clinics in their communities.

Bureaucratic obstacles

There is a little known but extremely powerful regulatory deterrent to treating patients with opioid use disorder. It’s called the X-Waiver — it’s a legal requirement imposed on physicians to apply for a waiver in order to prescribe medicine that has been shown to be an effective treatment for opioid addiction. Following recent media coverage of this issue in several prominent professional publications (JAMA, STAT, NAM) and in the New York Times, the medical community is pushing to end the X-waiver. On April 8, the Departments of Health in 22 states signed a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services proposing that it be discontinued, asserting that the law is severely hampering the ability of physicians to fight the opioid crisis. We’d like to share with you details on this movement, in order to raise public awareness as part of the campaign to have the law changed.

The X-Waiver is a remnant of an earlier opioid epidemic in the United States. Just like today, headlines from the popular press 100 years ago lamented the high rates of opioid use in the U.S. — higher than any other country in the world — and the large number of people addicted to narcotic drugs. Many blamed physicians, pharmacists, and patent medication manufacturers, for getting and keeping patients hooked on these drugs. 

In response, and as part of the same temperance movement that supported alcohol Prohibition during the 1920s, laws were passed to criminalize manufacture, sales, and use of opioids except as part of “legitimate” medical practice. Policy makers were certain that prohibiting the use of opioids (and alcohol) would cause addiction to disappear. They were so certain of this, that they started closing treatment programs in anticipation.

Their mistaken belief was that addiction was a moral disorder — a failure of self-control that could be cured by taking away access to drugs and alcohol. Today, we know better. We understand that, just as diabetics cannot will their pancreas to start working and people with depression cannot will their brain to produce more serotonin, people who struggle with addiction cannot will themselves better.

Fortunately, we have very effective treatments for opioid use disorder that help people to live normal lives, free of disabling withdrawal symptoms. Medications to treat opioid use disorder include methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Naltrexone blocks the feeling of being high, reducing the incentive to take opioids. However, it requires that a person abstain from opioids for seven to 10 days, making it more difficult to start treatment. By contrast, methadone and buprenorphine — when properly dosed — prevent the symptoms of withdrawal and allow people to feel normal, without experiencing either the feeling of being high or the distress of withdrawing.

Unfortunately, the laws and stigmas held over from the last opioid epidemic more than 100 years ago are still preventing people from accessing these lifesaving treatments. Though the original law — the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914— is no longer in force, today’s laws regulating the use of methadone and buprenorphine for the long-term treatment of opioid use disorder are its direct descendants. They focus on punishment, distrust of physicians’ motives, and bureaucratic intrusion into the physician-patient relationship. 

Today, any physician with a DEA license (i.e., pretty much all of them) can prescribe buprenorphine or methadone to any of their patients in any amount, for dispensing in any pharmacy — as long as that medication is intended to treat pain. But in order to use buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder, clinicians must obtain a special DATA 2000 Waiver. That means they must take a special training course, apply to the federal government for a waiver, and agree to open their practice and records to unscheduled in-person audits during the working day by DEA agents. We have never cheated on our taxes, but we still don’t want to be audited by the IRS.

After meeting all these requirements a physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant applies for a DATA 2000 waiver, and gets a new DEA number that starts with an X — which is why these waivers are often called X-waivers. With an X-waiver in hand, the healthcare professional now has the right to prescribe any schedule III through V controlled substance (for now, only buprenorphine meets the criteria) for treating opioid use disorder, but only to 30 patients at a time. If a thirty-first patient shows up needing treatment, he or she must be turned away or another patient has to be discontinued. After a year, the medical care provider can apply for an increase to treat 100 patients at a time. And a year after increasing to 100 patients, the clinician can apply for an increase to treat 275 patients at a time as long as he or she either 1) has additional certification in addiction medicine or 2) practices in a “qualified practice setting”, which means, among other requirements, accepting insurance for some services—not necessarily addiction treatment, just some services.

A need for urgency

These are all worthy, wonderful things, and we agree that they are ideal, but we are in the grips of a national crisis. A person born in 2017 faces a greater risk of death from opioid overdose than car crash, for the first time in history. There aren’t enough X-waivered providers available to treat everyone who wants medical help in overcoming opioid addiction. There is no evidence to suggest that clinicians who accept insurance are safer or better at the practice of addiction medicine. Nor is there any evidence to support the claim that limiting physicians to 30, 100, or 275 patients improves safety or outcomes. In fact, quite the opposite. And we have ample evidence that buprenorphine saves lives. Of the estimated 2 million Americans with opioid use disorder, only 11% are receiving any treatment: that’s 1.8 million people who might be helped if treatment were easier to access.

It’s time to end these bureaucratic barriers that are discouraging physicians from providing safe, effective treatment to people who need it. That’s why healthcare professionals across the country are pushing to “X the X-waiver”: drop the restrictions on providing buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder. We need to increase treatment availability so that everyone who wants help can get it in a timely way. This will require clinicians from many specialties to work together: in the ED, clinicians can help people start on buprenorphine treatment, then refer them to a local community provider of medication for opioid use disorder who can provide long-term follow-up care. Our project is designed to help facilitate that process. And follow-up care doesn’t have to be with a specialist in addiction medicine--there aren’t enough of them to treat everyone who needs treatment. But just as primary care physicians provide long-term medication for diabetes or depression, they can also provide long-term buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder. 

Proponents of the current system argue that buprenorphine prescribed for opioid use disorder can be diverted for abuse. But the evidence shows that when buprenorphine is diverted –that is, when it is sold or given away by the person for whom it was prescribed—the most common use is for self-treatment for opioid use disorder or withdrawal. How heartbreaking is that? People are having so much trouble getting treatment that they go to the black market to treat themselves. Improving access to care should help to prevent this kind of diversion. But from a harm reduction perspective, buprenorphine is less likely to cause an overdose (it’s almost impossible for an experienced user of opioids to overdose on buprenorphine unless it is combined with other depressants, like alcohol or benzodiazepines), less attractive for recreational use (it’s harder to get high on), and it can’t be misused by injection because it’s formulated with a drug that will precipitate withdrawal when not taken orally. 

We have to do better with this opioid epidemic than we did the last time. The bureaucracy surrounding provision of the safe, effective treatment for opioid addiction has the effect of pointlessly rationing care for people who need and want it. Get rid of it: X the X-waiver.
    [post_title] => Doctors could alleviate the opioid crisis — if the government would let them
    [post_excerpt] => The X-waiver is a little known but extremely powerful regulatory deterrent imposed on physicians. It requires them to apply for a waiver in order to prescribe medicine that has been shown to be an effective treatment for opioid addiction. 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => doctors-could-alleviate-the-opioid-crisis-if-the-government-would-let-them
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=974
    [menu_order] => 334
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Doctors could alleviate the opioid crisis — if the government would let them

by Molly M. Jeffery and Ted Melnick

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 939
    [post_author] => 13
    [post_date] => 2019-04-26 11:42:00
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-04-26 11:42:00
    [post_content] => Smart Cities are controversial because they are sponsored by Big Tech, which is offering 'free services' in exchange for detailed private information. But there is a way to overhaul the concept so that it serves ordinary citizens. The real issue is finding the political will to tackle those necessary changes

From Toronto to Singapore, and New York City to Malta, municipalities flying the “smart city” flag are on the rise across the globe, promising to improve the quality of life for urban residents. Using artificial intelligence to analyze data collected from Internet-connected cameras, sensors, license plate readers, drones, digital identification cards, personal electronic devices, and mobile crowd sourcing, smart cities can, advocates say, eliminate traffic jams, improve energy conservation, assist in crime detection, better respond to weather conditions, and provide faster and better citizen services.

But the massive amount of data needed for smart cities to work has given the concept a bad name among those concerned about personal privacy. Tech companies supplying software and hardware to smart cities are hungry for citizens’ data, which they want to monetize and share with partners. For law enforcement agencies and municipal governments, data collected for smart cities represent a treasure trove of information about people’s movements, preferences, associations, and habits. Suddenly smart cities are starting to sound more like surveillance cities with less traffic jams. And there are plenty of people who’d prefer the traffic jams to the loss of control over their privacy.

Smart cities for the people?

Whether smart cities can truly benefit people in a meaningful way without handing over their private information to AT&T, Google, Amazon, and other corporations is unclear. We need to rethink the smart city concept to offer smart services to people without allowing corporations to exploit and profit off their data in the process.


At present, cities that want to become “smart” rely heavily on vendors that can supply the technical know-how about networking systems, AI algorithms, data optimization, cloud storage, infrastructure technologies, risk management, high-speed broadband, and security, just to name a few. City officials and municipal information technology departments don’t have the technical expertise to build and manage smart cities on their own. That’s where companies like Google come in.

The city of Toronto contracted with Sidewalk Labs in October 2017 to design a neighborhood on the city’s waterfront “from the Internet up." Sidewalk Labs is owned by Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company. According to the plan for this smart city initiative, a network of sensors will collect real-time data about the environment, while it also gathers location-based information about buildings and infrastructure. Citizens would access services through a personalized portal. The project will be a “global testbed where people can use data about how the neighbourhood works to make it work better,” Sidewalk said. 

Almost immediately, Toronto's residents began asking questions about data collection and privacy. Who would own the data, and how would it be protected? A privacy expert hired by Sidewalk to assist with these issues resigned a year after project launch, telling the Global News newspaper that she couldn’t support the project after learning that third parties might have access to identifiable data collected. Another technologist resigned her post on the project’s digital strategy advisory panel, saying it had disregarded residents’ concern about data. Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff said earlier this month that the company has no interest in monetizing personal information, just as a citizens’ group in Toronto launched #BlockSidewalk.

Citizens should be involved

There are more than a few lessons to be learned from Toronto. People are rightly concerned about their personal data being used without their knowledge and permission, and being tracked online. Recent privacy scandals at Facebook, numerous data breaches, and online misinformation campaigns have heightened those concerns.  Cities going “smart” should be prepared to respond with specifics about whether they or their technology partners, or those partners’ partners, will have access to identifiable data. And they should expect a public backlash if the answer is yes, or “we don’t know yet.”

Citizens should be involved in the planning and development of data collection efforts from Day One. They should have a strong say in how and where they are being surveilled rather than be told that Vendor X’s cameras will be installed on every corner filming 24 hours a day, and the feed will go into a massive data base to be kept indefinitely.

Cities need experts who can defend citizens’ privacy and challenge inadequate safeguards over private information. They must incoluate themselves before signing contracts or entering into agreements with vendors, by engaging with top-notch security and privacy experts who can match the tech smarts of Google engineers and demand a privacy and human rights framework for smart city projects. To accomplish this, cities would have to make big investments in their IT departments, hiring cryptography and experts in data anonymization. 

Smart city projects should start with the fewest privacy invasive methods of data collection, instead of using the most invasive and then winnowing that down. Vendors and developers would have to think creatively, in order to come up with ways to obtain data for smart city applications without defaulting to facial scans and license plate readers. 

Municipal governments need to get tough about rules regarding data privacy. The effective way to do this is as follows:

    
 	
  •  Pass ordinances or establish regulations that prohibit vendors from sharing citizens’ information
    • 
 	
  • Place strict limitations on turning data over to law enforcement or ICE
    • 
 	
  • Require vendors to anonymize personal data and purge it soon after use;
    • 
 	
  • Allow citizens to opt out of the collection of their locations, images, biometric data, and other personal information;
    • 
 	
  • Appoint executive level privacy and security czars to oversee data handling and storage and enforce data privacy practices. 
    • 


We have become accustomed to “free” technology — email, social media accounts, instant messaging and photo sharing platform — but of course we are paying for it with our personal information. It's a high price to pay. 

Data collection for smart city implementation presents the same uneven exchange, but on a much larger scale. Your commute home becomes faster because cameras are capturing, analyzing, and storing scans of your license plates and the plates of the drivers around you, which are used to predict congestion and trigger modifications to traffic lights and lane closures to avoid jam ups. You get a seat on the bus because facial scans of you and your fellow riders are stored in the cloud indefinitely to help city transportation departments predict when to deploy more buses during periods of peak ridership. We have become convinced that a high quality of life is predicated on convenience. Perhaps it is time to question that assumption — to ask whether the price for all this convenience is just a bit too high.
    [post_title] => Who's benefitting from Smart Cities?
    [post_excerpt] => Smart city projects should start with the fewest privacy invasive methods of data collection, instead of using the most invasive and then winnowing that down. Vendors and developers would have to think creatively, in order to come up with ways to obtain data for smart city applications without defaulting to facial scans and license plate readers. 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => how-to-have-smart-cities-and-privacy-too
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=939
    [menu_order] => 336
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Who’s benefitting from Smart Cities?

by Karen Gullo

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 850
    [post_author] => 12
    [post_date] => 2019-04-18 15:35:22
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-04-18 15:35:22
    [post_content] => A surprise electoral win by the first and only communist mayor in Turkey deserves a closer look at how his socialist policies won over the hearts of his constituents and then of the whole country

By Hande Oynar

After dancing with his supporters on the street, one of the first things Turkey’s first elected Communist mayor did, within a week of taking office, was to remove the police checkpoint and demolish the wall in front of the municipality building in the city of Tunceli. Fatih Mehmet Maçoğlu told the assembled television news reporters that he intended to make the administrative building more accessible to the public, in keeping with the platform on which he had run. He also tweeted that he would not accept any celebratory flowers or gifts; instead, he suggested to those who wanted to give him a gift that they could instead donate to a fund for the rehabilitation of the city’s stray animals. 

The results of Turkey’s municipal elections last month inflicted several losses on President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in strongholds such as Istanbul and Ankara, but the most remarkable victory went to Maçoğlu, a 50-year old healthcare worker with a bushy moustache and ever-present smile who won the race for the province of Tunceli with 32.7% of the vote. The communist challenger beat the candidate for the left-wing, Pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the incumbent from the CHP, historically the main opposition party. 

Maçoğlu called his election “a victory for the people of Dersim,” using the Kurdish name for the city to emphasize that its population is predominantly Alevi and Zaza/Kurdish. The city has seen several uprisings; most recently, it was run by a trustee appointed by Erdoğan as part of a crackdown on 24 Kurdish-run cities after the failed coup attempt in 2016.

Maçoğlu earned his political support over a period of five years as a regional small town mayor, in which capacity he established a sterling reputation for transparency, rectitude, and hard work. But even so, his win in last month’s municipal elections is an anomaly for Turkish politics, where the word “communist” has long been used as a slur. Since the 1920s, successive Turkish governments have persecuted communists, starting in the 1920s with the assassination of the party’s leaders, through the Cold War and the period of military rule during the 1980s. Under Erdogan, opposition leaders, journalists and intellectuals are in jail. Given all this, Maçoğlu’s overt embrace of communism is an act of great courage.

Rise of an idealist

Maçoğlu entered politics in 2014, winning  a local election with 36.1% of the vote. He beat his closest rival from Peace and Democracy Party (BDP, the precursor to today’s HDP) to become the mayor of his hometown of Ovacık, a rural district of Tunceli with a population of approximately 7,000. Previously, he had worked as a healthcare professional in public hospitals. But besides his well known socialist views and his union activism, Maçoğlu had no political experience. As mayor of Ovacık he inherited a debt of approximately $200,000 from the previous local government; and so he immediately set about to increase the district’s revenue.

In Ovacık, Maçoğlu’s first priority was to improve agricultural production and ease unemployment by allowing people to cultivate 160,000 acres of arable land that belong to the municipality. Comprised mostly of women and unionized teachers who had recently been laid off, Maçoğlu's army of amateur farmers began producing organic potatoes, garbanzo and cannellini beans — all crops that are relatively easy to grow in the province’s harsh climate, with its heavy winters that last five to six months. 

Subsidized by the municipality, the farmers founded an agricultural production cooperative, which eventually evolved into an e-commerce site, ovacikdogal.com (Ovacık Natural). Soon they added sustainably and organically produced honey, salt, cheese and molasses to their range of products. People in big cities who were following the communist mayor on social media began buying the communist beans of Ovacık to support the cooperative. 

The initiative performed beyond expectations. The amateur organic farmers of Ovacık succeeded not only in paying off the district’s debt, but also in providing local women with earned income for the first time in their lives. Part of its profits were put toward a small fund that helps college students from disadvantaged backgrounds to pay their school-related expenses.

Maçoğlu also reduced the cost of water, which is prohibitively expensive in Turkey, to a symbolic 50 kr (about 10 cents) per cubic meter. His reason: access to water is a basic human right. He transferred the annual budget allotted to cover the cost of gas for his unused official vehicle to the only bus that served the whole district, making public transportation free. He built a library containing 10,000 books for a small town of 3,200 people and organized public programs to encourage reading habits among children and adolescents. 

A folk hero

But perhaps the most striking reason for Maçoğlu having become a viral folk hero overnight was his radical fiscal transparency. At the end of the first fiscal year of his first term, he hung an enormous poster showing his administration’s profit and loss statement on the facade of the town’s municipality building. In the murky waters of municipal politics, where tenders miraculously go to people with close ties to administrators, this was a breath of fresh air. Across the country, both Maçoğlu’s supporters and his critics alike applauded his action. 

In Ovacık, Maçoğlu ran on a platform that promised transparency and accountability. He emphasized those two principles while championing and explaining his socialist values almost every time he opened his mouth, especially in front of cameras. And there were (and still are) a lot of cameras. People began to travel from across the country to meet the determined man with the cheerful smile, and to see his model of governance.

In fact, he has made a point of keeping his office door open and has set up his desk in such a way so that he sits alongside his visitors, instead of across from them behind his desk. In Turkey, every public officer has a portrait of Ataturk, the founder of the republic above their seats, but Maçoğlu has a picture of the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara up on his wall as well. 

As mayor of Tuncil, Maçoğlu has rejected the trappings of power. He made the official vehicle assigned to him available to newly weds who get married at City Hall, and opted to drive his own car while on the job. This is a significant statement in Turkey, where public officials enjoy driving around with security convoys of up to 50 vehicles, blocking traffic everywhere they go.

These small acts may seem trivial or even gimmicky to those unfamiliar with Turkish politics, but in the corruption-ridden atmosphere propagated over decades by local and central governments, simple gestures go a long way. 

“Socialism has an inherent understanding of how to create a culture that provides the ability to act in a way that is united and in solidarity based on equality and social justice,” Maçoğlu noted in an interview with the leftist publication SOL International. With his work in Ovacık and now in Dersim, he hopes to set an example in municipal governance for other cities across the country. The fact that these values are so rare in Turkey’s political landscape makes Maçoğlu a harbinger of hope for a new breed of public official, whose agenda is truly to serve the people

Hande Oynar is a freelance writer based in New York and Istanbul. She has been writing for various art and lifestyle publications for the past decade and is a regular contributor to Vogue Turkey. Follow her on Twitter @handeoynar.
    [post_title] => In Turkey, a communist mayor has become a national folk hero
    [post_excerpt] => Turkey's first communist mayor ran on a platform of radical transparency — and won, in a country where 'communism' is a dirty word		
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => in-turkey-a-communist-mayor-has-become-a-national-folk-hero
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:31
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:31
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=850
    [menu_order] => 338
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

In Turkey, a communist mayor has become a national folk hero

by Hande Oynar

Sign up for our newsletter