Community

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    [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.
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The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-26 16:59:51
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    [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. 
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The Conversationalist: a new name and an expanded mission

by Lisa Goldman

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    [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

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The important work of keeping the media honest

by Jessica McKenzie

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

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [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
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Reclaiming their privacy

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [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?
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Make bilingualism great

by Rokhl Kafrissen

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    [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.
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Policy, not aid: how to avert catastrophe in Gaza

by Tania Hary

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

by Molly M. Jeffery and Ted Melnick

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    [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. 
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Who’s benefitting from Smart Cities?

by Karen Gullo

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

by Hande Oynar

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    [post_content] => Google is not known for self-sacrifice. That is why New York should be more skeptical of its latest 'free' offer

Earlier this week, Google opened their temporary "Grow with Google New York City Learning Center" on the first floor of the company's Chelsea offices. The "pop-up" space embodies techno-optimism: well-lit classrooms with nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, decorated in neutrals with occasional pops of primary colors, and well-stocked with Google Chromebooks. For five months, the technology company will provide free and open-to-the-public classes on topics like "Manage Projects More Effectively with Online Tools" and "Make Your Website Work For You."

The vast majority of classes are based on Google products: Learn to manage projects with Google Sheets; get your business online with Google My Business; discover new job opportunities with Google Search. In other words, Google is further entrenching their business monopoly under the pretence of helping entrepreneurs and job seekers. The company is  cynically deploying the American dream of hard work and the self-made success story for its own benefit, expecting New Yorkers to thank them for the opportunity to help make Google even richer and more powerful.

But, you say, knowing how to use Google products effectively is a great and marketable skill! Why shouldn’t we accept trickle-down education? Perhaps because to do so is to cede another facet of our society to a company that already has an outsized influence on our lives. The money spent on this glorified PR stunt could have been used to support the original programming of the initiative’s partner organizations, like the New York Public Library, which already offers free classes on subjects like basic computer skills, creating a resume, and social media marketing. Unlike the Google Learning Center, the NYPL won’t close up shop in five months.

Exploiting our fears

Enthusiasm for technology skills programs often stems from our collective anxieties about the future of work, or what will happen when the robots come for our jobs. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," goes this line of thinking. Google is subtly playing to these fears, to our desire to come out on top in a tech-dominated world.

"Tech related skills are essential for people looking for jobs in the modern economy, and Grow with Google will go far toward helping New Yorkers gain the expertise they need to thrive," Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer said in a statement given to a local reporter.

The cause-and-effect is made even more explicit in another article on a tech news website that covered the center's launch. "The Google NYC Learning Center is part of the "Grow with Google" initiative, first launched in 2017," AJ Dellinger writes for Engadget. "As part of that project, Google has pledged to spend $1 billion to help people adapt to an increasingly digital world and learn new skills that may place them in suitable jobs should their current career get wiped out by automation." Even if Google hasn’t made such a promise, the company has let the misconception stand.

Google describes the material taught at the learning center as "digital skills.” The phrase is almost meaningless given that nearly every facet of our lives is mediated by digital devices, but it conveys the impression that the company is generously preparing New York workers for an automated future — the very future they're doing their best to bring about.

The reality is not quite so cutting-edge: In addition to the Google product-based courses, there are classes like "Design an Effective Resume" and "Optimize Your Energy for High Performance" and "Coach Your Team to Success." These are important and valuable skills, to be sure — but they are not "digital skills." The marketing of this project is an ingenious and insidious bait and switch: offer glitzy and in-demand tech skills, but limit the actual courses to the walled garden of Google products, which has the additional benefit (for Google) of drumming up more customers for their services. The model is similar to Facebook's Free Basics program, whereby Facebook subsidizes free internet access, but only to an incomplete and partial internet that is mediated by Facebook. Thus neophyte users conflate Facebook with the internet, and become captive users of the social media platform.

Google's spokespeople have been more careful about what they promise. Ruth Porat, the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Google and Alphabet, characterizes the pop-up shop as part of their commitment to "STEM education, workforce development and access to technology." Porat describes Grow With Google as "our initiative to create economic opportunities for all Americans" — an ambitious goal that is so vague, it becomes meaningless. 

Torrence Boone, the NYC site lead, describes Grow with Google as "our program to help individuals and small businesses gain the skills that can set them up for success, today and in the future."

Digital robber barons

Even this seemingly innocuous statement is based on an outdated fantasy; it perpetuates the myth that it's easy to pull yourself up by the bootstraps in contemporary America.

In the United States between 1978 and 2012, the number of startups (companies less than a year old) plummeted, their share of all businesses falling nearly 44 percent. While there are a number of factors at play, the most significant is that the largest players are crowding out the little guys. Google is among those big baddies. As Robert Levine reported for The Boston Globe, Google controls 90 percent of the search market. It operates the most popular online video site, mapping application, and internet browser. The company has used their market dominance to stifle the competition — by giving Google products preference in the Google search engine, for example.

As Open Markets Institute outlines in this explainer on "Entrepreneurship and Monopoly," market concentration centralizes resources, talent, and money while squeezing out potential up-and-comers. This happens at the expense of the larger job market; nearly two-thirds of the nation's net jobs created over the past 15 years have been at smaller companies.

In other words, we have a monopolistic company with a track record of self-promotion and stifling competition dispersing crumbs of knowledge to the unskilled masses, while creating more revenue opportunities for Google.

And what Google is offering truly is just crumbs — not even a full loaf of bread. Students are limited to just three classes at the learning center, a fact that is not mentioned either in Google's promotional material or in any of the launch publicity. (Some partner organizations are using the space to hold their own private or public classes, which may run over three classes, but registration for those appears to be handled by the partners, not Google.) It's not clear from the class registration page if prospective students are limited to just three classes over the five weeks, or if one can only sign up for three classes at one time. Either way, three classes on any topic is hardly sufficient to prepare someone for a job they weren't already qualified to do.

Judging by the registration page, nearly every class at the learning center — through April 27 — is entirely full. There is clearly a demand for this kind of programming. Google worked with local partners like the New York Public Library to design course offerings that would be worthwhile for New Yorkers, but one might be justified in seeing this as a case of a tech giant having rebranded programming suggestions from local experts and taking the credit. But only a grinch would deny kids the opportunity to learn to code, so what’s the problem?

Gifts with strings attached

The gap between what has been promised and is provided is a problem, especially if Google is getting more from the programming than the company is giving. There is a question of what goodwill or favors initiatives like this will buy the company as they expand their New York City footprint. A $5 million investment in workforce development and job training was part of the deal with Amazon that fell through; what will Google get when they point to their generous free programming and say "Look what we did for you, NYC"? The same could be said for any of the cities and towns where Google has disseminated their “Grow With” programming, albeit over the course of weeks, not months.

Anxiety about the future of work is real. As local governments seek to prepare residents for potentially grim employment prospects, they will surely be tempted to cede responsibility to the tech giants. After all, local officials aren't usually known for being particularly tech-savvy, so why not let the experts handle it?

But when those experts are monopolistic corporate giants upon which society is already reliant and beholden in so many ways, we cannot trust them to fix the problems that their business models exacerbate. Their track record proves they are unwilling to share information that will help anyone but themselves. If we've learned anything from the surveillance economy, it's that nothing is ever really free.

Local government officials should follow Google’s example: look to public libraries to help create equitable paths to prosperity and ongoing education. Empower them and fund them. Don’t let the corporate monopolies stifling innovation and throttling the American dream determine the future of workforce development solely to their benefit and not ours.

Jessica McKenzie is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. You can follow her on Twitter @jessimckenzi.
    [post_title] => Beware of Google bearing gifts
    [post_excerpt] => 				Google's offer of free courses in digital skills is packaged as a philanthropic initiative, but a closer look raises serious questions about its motives and the intangible but serious costs to the public.		
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Beware of Google bearing gifts

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => In times of repression and despair, art plays an essential role — politically, intellectually, and spiritually

What do Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” and a giant penis on a drawbridge in St. Petersburg have in common? 

Both tell us something about the importance of art in political life.

In societies that place a high value on monetary wealth, and which regard not having money as a moral failing, artists, whose careers are precarious, are marginalized. In contemporary America, we like to think that people with the most brains and ambition go into finance, or head to Silicon Valley. 

The truth about artists and their function is far more complicated. Russian art is a good example here, because the oppressive mechanisms used against people in Russia are disturbingly similar to those employed by the current U.S. administration and its powerful supporters. The power of these reactionary forces could become even more entrenched after the 2020 election.  

It’s undeniable that the current U.S. president’s penis occupies its own space in cultural lore. With that in mind, recall the penis drawing that Voina, the Russian art collective supported by Banksy, drew to taunt agents inside the St. Petersburg headquarters of the FSB, the notorious state security agency. That drawing famously won a state-supported Russian art prize in 2011, despite the official uproar.

[caption id="attachment_809" align="alignnone" width="300"] A Dick Captured by the FSB, 2010, Liteiny Bridge, St. Petersburg. (photo: Voina)[/caption]

The FSB is one of the most feared institutions in Russia. Art critics understood that taunting the successor to the KGB with an enormous image of an erect penis drawn on the bridge outside its headquarters makes an interesting statement. Is that statement juvenile? Yes, it is. But it also identifies the fact that power in Russia, and power in general, is a dick-measuring contest.

Art as catharsis

The immaturity of the gesture is also a statement. In a chaotically repressive country like modern Russia, where self-expression can be an exhausting maze of dead ends because officials have power to make capricious decisions like cutting off an organization’s funding for political reasons, or having someone arrested on trumped up charges, waving a dick at an official organ of the state is catharsis.

Catharsis — and the fearless desire to shock — brings me back to Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, with his tight combination of laughs, parodies of racist fantasies of blackness, unflinching gun violence, and so much more. The song and the video for This Is America unspool into a dissertation’s worth of political commentary. But what ties Glover’s work together is how it elevates surviving malevolent, oppressive conditions into living; it flips the experience of being caricatured into owning the narrative. If you’re looking for ways to understand how important art is to real resistance (not the hashtag kind), this is it.

[caption id="attachment_810" align="alignnone" width="300"]Childish Gambino (This is America, screencap) Childish Gambino (This is America, screencap)[/caption]

In an oppressive political framework, the artist occupies an interesting position — and we shouldn’t always assume it to be subversive. All art can be co-opted by a repressive state apparatus, but its meaning and role in history can also change over time. 

Art as resistance

One of the most interesting, and sadly overlooked, examples of artistic resistance in practice was the husband and wife team of Arkadiy Aktsynov and Lyudmila Aktsynova. These two talented painters met and fell in love in the Soviet gulag; like millions of other Soviet citizens, the state had sent them there in the 1930s for imaginary crimes. Miraculously, they survived well into the 1990s and left behind a treasure trove of both joyful and contemplative work; their landscapes, which they frequently collaborated on, are a particular favorite of mine. Having been forced out of the Soviet cultural mainstream by the legacy of the gulag, they dedicated their lives and their work to provincial Russia, where they found recognition.

“We were saved by our faith in people and in kindness, and by an immeasurable fury in our work,” they recalled in their jointly authored memoir. The fury was both a symbol of their productivity and their desire to carve out a space for themselves, to create their own landscape, even while they were prisoners hemmed in by barbed wire.

[caption id="attachment_812" align="alignnone" width="300"] Landscape by Arkadiy Aktsynov and Lyudmila Aktsynova, 1962. Oil and cardboard.[/caption]

The nature of state oppression is such that it penetrates into all levels of society and all factors of daily life. It seeks to demonstrate that you do not “own” yourself, and do not have a right to any damn landscape — be it outside or in your head. In the Soviet Union, oppression had a totalitarian aspect; it was bloody and brutal at the beginning of the USSR and lackadaisical toward its end. In Putin’s Russia, oppressive measures are frequently random and chaotic, their goal more psychological than ideological, creating a gripping unease that allows a small group of people to casually plunder the country. Yet the mechanisms in both instances remain the same: your life can be changed at any moment, because an official stomped his foot or waved her hand, and you will have little to no recourse in the aftermath. 

For Americans who follow Donald Trump’s tweets — i.e. for Americans who until recently had not considered the unpredictable nature of marginalized existence as captured by Childish Gambino — that feeling of instability might suddenly seem familiar. 

Art as a teacher

The passage of time meanwhile has a salutary effect on the interpretation of art that was originally created as an act of subversion. The Aktsynovs created art in the gulag as an act of survival. But after the state rehabilitated them in the post-Stalin era, their work became woven into the history of the Soviet nation as a cautionary tale. The message was, “These terrific painters were forced to suffer because our government made terrible mistakes!” 

Today, I’m sure that many of the people who admire the Aktsynovs, collect their paintings, and help organize their exhibitions, are also Putin supporters. Putin wouldn’t be a very good authoritarian if he didn’t know how to harness collective complicity. As for what meanings can be gleaned from the Aktsynovs work in the future — and what kind of cultural space they will come to occupy — only time can tell. 

The history and fate of dissident artists under repressive regimes might sound discouraging, but it need not be. In fact, it should inspire. An authoritarian can tell you to look or not look at a certain work of art, and tell you how you should feel about it. For example, when Vladimir Putin was elected for the fourth time, Russian graffiti artists co-opted the classical ballet Swan Lake to express a political statement about the decline of Russia’s democracy. 

[caption id="attachment_813" align="alignnone" width="300"] Swan Lake graffiti by Yav Zone art collective, (Moscow, 2018)[/caption]

In Nazi Germany, the Nazis banned as degenerate some of the most important art and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But you are the one who is responsible for what you feel when you look at a moody rural painting by a repressed artist. I’m specifically using the word “responsible,” because authoritarianism, due to its controlling nature, is ultimately infantilizing; this is something that Childish Gambino captures brilliantly in “This Is America,” by demonstrating how oppressive infantilization was practiced against generations of black people. 

In Russia, the late artist Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe acted as a kind of bridge between the stuffy paternalism of the late Soviet era and the shiny cynicism in the age of Putin. Most people gravitate toward Mamyshev-Monroe’s depictions of male political leaders in bold makeup, and search for very serious political meaning. Mamyshev-Monroe was indeed a serious artist, but my admiration for his work stems from how much fun he had — how expressive, vulnerable, and powerful in his vulnerability this man was, whether dressed in drag to shock the elderly or poking fun at the celebrity cult embraced by Russia’s younger generation.

[caption id="attachment_823" align="alignnone" width="300"] Russian Questions and Life of Marvellous Monroes shining with gold and silver foil. (New Museum)[/caption]

Art to bind communities

Once, the West exported capitalism to the post-Soviet countries. Now, the former Soviet Union is selling capitalism back to the West in a purer, more vicious form. Donald Trump, the sleazy real estate man who would sell state secrets for the opportunity to build a dubious casino on the banks of the Moskva River, is a good example of this exchange. But this phenomenon is bigger than one individual. It is present in greater social atomization, in greater political extremes, and in our fetishization of voting as a purely individual, consumerist act. 

Today, Mamyshev-Monroe is a good artist to turn to if we’re looking for creative ways to respond to seismic changes and growing rifts in our society. He knew how to poke fun while maintaining compassion toward his subject matter, inserting himself into his work not out of narcissism, but a sense of intimacy. In other words, Mamyshev-Monroe observed extremes in society — Soviet bureaucracy, the extravagance of crony capitalism — and sought to contain them, and forge something new out of them. In this light, politically engaged artists are not just cool or interesting. They work to repair the common threads that run through society.

In good times or bad, art is not an escape. It’s about being present. The world being what it is, we end up being present for a lot of crap. Some people will sell you on the idea of art as transcendence, but I think of it as wading through the thick mess of existence alongside other people, reminding them that they are not alone. It’s a silly-sounding issue that is deadly serious: if we’re to make it through our current troubles, and the troubles yet to come, we must connect. We must be there for one another.

Natalia Antonova is a writer, journalist, and editor of Bellingcat. She is currently based in D.C. Follow her on Twitter @nataliaantonova.
    [post_title] => This is your mind on art
    [post_excerpt] => 				In times of repression and despair, art plays an essential role — politically, intellectually, and spiritually		
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Russian Stardust, by Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe (Moscow Museum of Modern Art)

This is your mind on art

by Natalia Antonova

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