Tag: Economy

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10167 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-02-12 19:38:24 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-02-12 19:38:24 [post_content] =>

A look at the cross-continental sloshing of capital beneath the art market bubble.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

Lately, a series of memes, graphs, and cartoons have gone viral, all asserting variations of the same thing: “The entire U.S. economy right now is 7 companies sending a trillion fake dollars back and forth to each other.” The source diagram for this claim was published in Bloomberg last October, in a piece highlighting why all these circular deals—largely between the usual AI suspects, such as Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI—indicate a likely bubble. Together, this cloud-based clusterfuck has generated a $1 trillion AI market and $192.7 billion in 2025 Venture Capital investments. As of yet, however, they’ve also yielded scant indications of any productivity gains whatsoever.

…Cue Steve Carrell in The Big Short. (Not for nothing, a leaked internal Nvidia memo recently name-checked Michael Burry.)

This cross-continental sloshing of a cool trillion is perhaps the only path I see to reconciling two recent, noteworthy art market headlines. The first, I mentioned in my previous column: In September, the Financial Times reported that blue chip gallery Hauser & Wirth’s London profits have slid a staggering 90%. The news of the mid-tier market collapse had dogged the art world all year, as many art loans began defaulting, and overleveraged galleries continued shuttering, unable to weather a shaky economy. But Hauser & Wirth’s blue chip standing made its numbers an especially macabre indicator of an imminent art market crash, cowing even the most optimistic.

The second, taken in context of the first, truly gave me pause: Frieze, which bought Armory two years ago, just announced a new Abu Dhabi "edition", which means that one group now has eight fucking art fairs a year, an even crazier cadence than the fashion calendar.

At a glance, the two headlines might seem in opposition to each other. How can an industry simultaneously report both catastrophic losses and breathless expansion in the prestige area of its retail sector? Well, one might also ask how 36% of American households are in medical debt (21% with bills past due) and the vast majority of millennials and Gen Z Americans cannot afford to buy homes, while the stock market is at an all-time high. Much as the American economy is increasingly a misery for those who live in it and incredibly profitable for those who invest in it, the art world remains very profitable for the tiny tranche of collectors who treat art as an investment tool, and a house of horrors for those who live and work in it.

Unsurprisingly, we’re starting to see this reflected in the art itself. To my eye, the art fair circuit of today largely seems to exist to dare to dream what slop—Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year—might look like in the flesh, spread out across a couple of hundred booths. Nearly 55 galleries participated for the first time at New York’s Armory fair this year, the second since Frieze purchased it in 2023. When I attended, I wondered how many of them actually belonged at Javits Convention Center. Surely, taste is subjective, but to me—and the art advisor who gifted me a VIP Pass—there wasn’t enough champagne in the joint to make the fair look anything close to well curated. I heard many whispers that the Armory show hadn’t sold all of its booths and, as a result, what they let in looked like the kind of upscale beach art you’ll see next to a store that only sells white clothing or Vilebrequin swim trunks in Amagansett. When you figure booths are about $40K, the metallic driftwood art made sense: That's nothing to the very rich, who spend about as much if not more on a Christmas vacation. A booth might placate any number of ailing family dynamics, from a bored spouse to a listless kid.

Questionable curation aside, it was also unclear if, and by what measure, the fair was even successful. Art media did a tentative dance around the Armory numbers: some press focused on individual stand-out sales, rather than overall figures; other articles emphasized how the absence of blue-chip galleries created opportunities for smaller ones. (This is a trend I also saw in press related to Art Basel Miami last December.)

Of course, many large corporations simply fudge the numbers when the going gets tough. They pay good money for sunnier analyses. But when paired with the news of Frieze’s expansion, this dissonance should ring alarms: Something is up. Why open more fairs when the ones they already have are neither profitable nor novel and of dubious artistic merit?

This discrepancy—and the chasm between plain facts—is instructive in matters far beyond the art world. Even superpowers are in on the trend: While the US unemployment is reported by the Department of Labor at 4.4%, the functional rate of unemployment (accounting for those who are underemployed) has been calculated at 24.7%. The Trump Administration used the government shutdown as an excuse not to release the October jobs report at all. Across the Pacific, China was accused of concocting its own low unemployment fiction all summer, too. Similarly, tech is in deep shit: Open AI is reportedly covering up for nearly $140 billion in losses over a four year period.

The cross continental slosh has a pattern, after all. It’s a game of appearances played across the globe until resources totally, utterly run out, and crash violently. As Ernest Hemingway famously put it: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ ‘Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.’” And, in the meantime, it is of the utmost importance to set up shop someplace new while the goods still have some value, and the brand hasn’t yet been completely tarnished.

In the art world, this is panning out in a palpable way. It's one thing to talk about AI slop as a harbinger of economic doom, or the imminent insolvency of Social Security, but it's even wilder as a bubble indicator to see mid-tier and blue chip galleries sliding horribly in Western world capitals, while the same art fairs that are coughing and wheezing in the West open entirely new ventures in Gulf States. Rather than cultivate a new base of collectors that might sustain art markets on a local level, the industry is continuing to cater to the uber wealthy, wherever it can find them—even as this model fails miserably in the West.

Of course, the art market isn’t quite a Ponzi Scheme, if you consider that the original investors aren’t technically promised an artificially high rate of return off the bat. But neither is, say, Nvidia, which hasn’t stopped its CEO from openly insisting his company “isn’t Enron” as its stock price tumbles. Like other markets, the art market continues on by force of its ability to lure in new investors. Frankly—to bring up Michael Burry again—the notion of carrying a certain tranche of goods from market to market in search of new investors while bundling them together (in this instance, as a fair), strikes me as a sort of arty CDO (collateralized debt obligation). Magical circular thinking abounds in budget offices across the board, from art to tech to government. But, I would argue, when consulting the US Treasury’s page explaining how the national debt is structured seems helpful in understanding our current predicament…it’s not looking good.

Perhaps there is someone in Abu Dhabi who will be thrilled to learn of the art world’s KKK: Koons, Kapoor, and Kaws. But you don’t need to read that US Treasury page to know who will be left holding the bag when the cross-continental slosh finally goes splat. Even if Frieze is able to eke out an existence from selling balloon dog sculptures to billionaires, it won't protect them from the inevitable pop, although it might provide a little delusional cushion in the meantime. As critic Jerry Saltz recently cautioned in an Instagram post, quoting Yale School of Management’s Magnus Resch, “Let’s be clear: multi-million dollar trophy auctions don’t reflect the health of the market. They reflect its distortion. What the art world needs isn’t more $50 million headlines. It needs more $5,000 collectors.”

To any working artist, that Resch observation has the infuriating tenor of the proverbial “Fork Found In Kitchen” headline. We need more art for art’s sake, much as we need communities that are affordable for creators. However, today’s collector class values art that functions as investment, not the health and cultivation of anything so quaint and unremunerative as artistic communities, or even individual artists. In the same way, corporations now chiefly exist to create value for investors, rather than to provide goods and services to consumers—let alone provide any kind of reciprocal benefit to workers.

To be perfectly clear, today’s billionaire class is one mostly disinterested in public works or philanthropy. Art collection itself is not about collecting objects that carry beauty or even status, but rather ones that accrue value and allow them to hide more money from the tax man. After all, the art world KKK is not an unholy trinity of art but rather a bundle of financial tools. If 1989’s independent cinema gave us The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 2026’s art market has given us The Collector, the Tax Attorney, His Wife & Her Art Advisor. Whether or not Frieze’s latest venture succeeds, the West cannot flatter itself that these new markets of Middle Eastern buyers seek Western signifiers of wealth so much as access to more of our gloriously opaque financial tools: to wit, the art itself. (That Richter will really tie the Swiss bank vault together!)

Perhaps the greatest work of art right now, then, is this art market bubble itself, that sloshes so showily as it grows. It is the work of a collective that daringly splits the newly irrelevant hair between metonymy and metaphor, spanning continents, industries, and banking systems. It performs the same wistful, elegant, melancholic drift of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 children’s classic, The Red Balloon, aping the film’s Gallic ennui with a Chanel sweater set for the booth and Ruinart champagne in the VIP room, dragging a damning homogenizing aesthetic in its wake like a dead zone in the ocean. And all it touches turns to slop as it grows and grows, for only homogenized slop signifies fungible, quantifiable value.

This homogenizing force and its flattening aesthetics are not unique to the art world, and might be handily encapsulated in 2025’s Q4 neologism, “chubai,” meaning something “chopped but also spiritually Dubai.” (Examples were given as Soho House, Goyard, and Carbone.) All the world’s a shopping mall, to borrow from the Bard. Beige is inescapable. Travel to any continent you like and you’ll find the same shit at every fair, much as the same internationally braindead flagship fashion stores anchor every fancy downtown strip in every major city around the world.

After all, that’s what a bubble does: it floats away, to foreign lands, all year round. As long as the ultra-rich need to keep their money safe from taxes, the art market will obviously continue to spurn its own sustainability—and why shouldn’t it? What market model indicates a path that creates something other than a tiny panic room full of winners, and utter doom for every other poor schmuck who won’t make it to the slopes of Gstaad this winter? Middle and working classes are so 20th-century, and the art market bubble is just one of many that’s eventually going to pop.

We live in a global society that valorizes the iterative as novel, lionizing AI and utterly unable to tell the difference between a tool and its master. Asses and elbows are easily conflated and confused. The art market itself has more to say about the state of contemporary art—and of the economy, of what the government has promised us and won’t deliver, and to what ends the tech world will go to deem anything innovative if it might push up stock prices to enrich that selfsame collector class—than a lot of art does. The sound of shit hitting the fan is perhaps a soothing one, a sort of white noise pedaled in Instagram ads. Or perhaps that sound is the sloshing itself, crossing continents and coming home in a fantastic, tidal fashion, to crash upon our shores.

[post_title] => "The Collector, the Tax Attorney, His Wife & Her Art Advisor" [post_excerpt] => A look at the cross-continental sloshing of capital beneath the art market bubble. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => the-collector-the-tax-attorney-his-wife-her-art-advisor [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-02-12 19:44:35 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-02-12 19:44:35 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10167 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 12, 2026February 12, 2026

“The Collector, the Tax Attorney, His Wife & Her Art Advisor”

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9889 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-08 00:16:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-08 00:16:00 [post_content] =>

While reporting on climate change isn’t always hopeful, the women I've met along the way are forging a path forward for intergenerational resilience.

In the dim flicker of a kerosene lantern on a fog-wreathed houseboat, I watched Nazia Qasim’s reed-scarred hands pierce threadbare fabric with her needle, weaving colored abayas as her eyes fixed on Dal Lake’s silt-choked horizon, diesel haze mingling with the sour tang of rotting lotus stems, where vibrant beds once bloomed.

I’ve heard endless tales from Nazia—and Qudisa, and Bano, and their sisters—about how the lake’s relentless shrinkage has mirrored their own lives’ contracting. Yet the women have overcome: As the lake withers, under absent snows and dying streams, the water now polluted and undrinkable, they have found new work and purpose through their weaving. For hours last January, I watched their hands move in the lantern’s glow, transforming loss into livelihood. This sisterhood, which once thrived on an endless, ancestral bounty of lotus, water chestnuts, and fish, now scraps stitched tight, the women’s quiet knots a fierce stand against the fade.

As a climate reporter based largely out of India, I am often tasked with telling stories on the frontlines of disaster. I have crouched in Pampore’s parched Karewas at dawn, watching farmers Farida Jan and Snobar Ahad recount the decline of saffron, a visceral dirge for disappearing traditions I could feel in the cracked earth underfoot. I’ve seen women shoulder jerry cans under a merciless sun, irrigating wilted bulbs past cobwebbed government drip lines, turning the world’s most prized spices into frantic wagers against the sky, where one failed season means debt for entire villages. And in countless moments, I’ve watched with growing frustration how easily the world abandons the Global South, which disproportionately bears the brunt of climate change, and how rarely the countries most responsible seem to face the same consequences.

This work necessitates exhaustive fieldwork in fragile ecosystems, sifting through scarce data amid conflict, and confronting the grief of vanishing landscapes and livelihoods. But in my writing on the realities of climate change, I’ve also made a conscious effort to find stories of resilience, rather than just stories of despair. Stories that not only show there are still people who haven’t given up on the fight, but who have made a meaningful difference in changing the tides.

These changemakers are often women.

Perhaps because of this, my work has always felt inherently hopeful: Despite climate theft splintering families—stealing not just saffron yields and Dal Lake’s bounties, but the heartbeat of a country’s soul—these women persist as resilient guardians, weaving their survival with fierce tenderness from the shattered threads.

This has also made it all the more important to me that I get their stories right. As a writer, I prioritize women’s agency and consent, letting them narrate their own stories however I can. This approach shatters poverty tropes, spotlighting their resilience and innovation over the victimhood stereotypes that dominate mainstream coverage of rural Indian women. It also imbues my work with deeper meaning, in hopes that harmful narratives might begin to shift as more of these women’s stories are allowed to take up space.

Over the years, I’ve chased India’s climate fury, from Kashmir’s vanishing glaciers to Maharashtra’s cracked fields and Tamil Nadu’s drowned coasts. And the women I’ve met along the way light a fire in me: Their grit isn’t survival, it’s rebirth for a warming world.

“When I got married, nobody asked my choices,” Kamla told me on her daughter’s wedding day, now nearly two years ago. “Today, I ensure hers.”

The message was loud and clear: Economic independence is agency in a patriarchal script. And for Kamla, it had allowed her to reclaim this agency on her own terms, and to give her daughter a chance at a better life.

I first met her in early 2024, while reporting my story “A Farm of One’s Own” for The Conversationalist. Kamla is a farmer from Khajraha Khurd’s sunbaked fields, in parched Bundelkhand’s Jhansi district, Uttar Pradesh. She leads local farming techniques to combat drought, something that has helped pull families in the region out of poverty, proving climate adaptation thrives on female ingenuity.

In the days we spent together, I crouched beside Kamla as she worked, enveloped in the mud’s earthy scent. Her eyes were sweat-stung, her fingers plunged into the sun-warmed soil. As she crunched freshly picked beetroot, she explained to me how she uses neem traps to ward off pests amid erratic rains. Her father-in-law burst out laughing, teasing her for explaining farming to me like she knew anything at all.

But it was clear she knew more than he understood. When the global coronavirus pandemic rapidly swept across India, some of the most vulnerable, and climate-vulnerable, migrant women were robbed of their work, Kamla included. She not only found meaningful work in the aftermath, but self-reliance, trading callused hands for hoe and seed, wresting millet, broccoli, and lentils from her own organic farm.

Kamla’s resilience was magical to witness. I spent many days with her, seeing how she started her day, plunging into compost heaps steaming with kitchen scraps and dung, spreading the fertilizer across her garden. Watching her wipe soil from her weathered palms, spinach bunch in hand, I saw her rooted at last from laborer to earth-tender, peace in every leaf, life hers again.

In the afternoon, she tiptoed through the fields and quickly kneaded the dough for lunch and put it on the tawa, slapping it thin and golden and slathering the sizzling ghee, serving it with a tin cup of frothy chai brewed strong over a chulha fire. We ate together in the rows of a multi-cropped farm, the air humming with neem leaves. This wasn't just a meal; it was a window into resilience in motion, women and girls weaving nourishment from the land. Nearby, her great-grandmother sat cross-legged on the earthen floor, her gnarled fingers deftly cleaning a mound of fresh red chillies in the sun—plucking stems, wiping dust, and muttering local songs on the front porch of her house, a visual treat to witness a silent hymn to preservation in a world of fleeting harvests.

As we ate, I thought of these women, whose callused hands not only yield the wisdom and knowledge of saplings and sickles, but carry it forward, forging an intergenerational resilience against climate chaos that exists beyond immediate harvests, or even lifetimes—ensuring the next generation endures.

Over the years, I’ve met countless women enacting change like Kamla, often without credit or acknowledgement. In India’s northern Haryana state, I met Sunita Dahiya, a woman pioneering eco-friendly menstrual products, and training rural women to produce organic pads that decompose rapidly, slashing microplastic pollution and the burden of billions of plastic disposables in landfills each year. In north Kashmir’s Bandipora district, I met Phula Bano, who manages large herds of wild dogs, cattle, and horses through daily treks in the Himalayas, helping to sustain a low-carbon, resilient ecosystem.

For an early story for The Conversationalist, I also met the beekeeper Towseefa Rizvi—a living embodiment of sisterhood in action. As the first female beekeeper in Ganderbal district, Kashmir, Towseefa has demonstrated, again and again, how one woman’s rise can create pathways for others to join her. Within her community, she also demonstrated that beekeeping could be a profitable path, as well as a productive response to ecological despair. Today, she still trains and supervises village women in the tender art of queen-rearing and swarm management, and sells local honey through various haats and online.

When I visited her home in Bandipora district in north Kashmir, I saw apple groves dotted with buzzing apiaries in her backyard, as she coaxed her bees into new, modern hives. She viewed her bees as family, and over the years, dedicated herself to learning about the restoration of biodiversity, pollination of resilient crops, and climate vagaries.

Her journey was also proof that true climate hope lies not in flashy summits, but more often, in one woman’s quiet and relentless work.

Centering hope in my reporting, of course, hasn’t saved me from the realities of writing about and from regions affected by climate change.

What started as whispers of women-led mangrove safaris while researching another story last year eventually evolved into a gruelling quest, marked by relentless weather delays and elusive sources. For months, I chased the story of Sindhudurg’s mangrove guardians—fierce women from one of Maharashtra’s pioneering women-led self-help groups (SHGs). And for months, I wondered if the story I hoped to tell would ever come to fruition.

Weather changes were unforgiving foes. Monsoons flooded coastal paths and stranded my sources with switched-off phones for weeks. Out of anxiety, I’d chase them via voicemail. Officials also proved phantoms as the network dropped along eroding coastlines.

It wasn’t easy to convince the women to entrust me with their stories; their promises fading with each storm surge and postponed boat trip. But visiting the coast and sharing chai in salt-lashed homes finally broke the ice last fall, and resulted in my final piece from the year, “Guardians of the Mangroves”, about how Maharashtra’s crab farmers are spearheading women-led coastal restoration amid local climate chaos.

Late in my visit, I stood with farmer Sonali Sunil Acharekar amid the hushed mangroves, her rough hands parting their roots in silent vigil, as cries of herons and egrets filled the skies. She paused mid-story about lost fish, her fingers sifting through the silty tides to snare a scuttling fiddler crab.

She grinned. “See? Even the birds know we’re guardians.”

I felt a spark of wonder that, despite rough weather nearly killing this story, I could still bring these women’s unbreakable strength into the light. As we enter a new year, I am ending the last with gratitude for their efforts, and the stories these women have shared. I hope, too, I continue to push myself to amplify excluded voices, to craft stories of climate hope that counter the despair-dominating headlines, and to show women as stewards of India’s Global South.

When we lose sight of hope, we risk nihilism that doesn’t allow us to see ingenuity amidst climate chaos—something women in the Global South have delivered time and time again, and something that has made me feel consistently hopeful in my work. While reporting on climate change itself isn’t always hopeful, there is always hope—and at the center of that hope are the women who bend, rise, and persist, their strength illuminating the fragile edge where water meets earth.

[post_title] => Planting the Seeds of Climate Hope [post_excerpt] => While reporting on climate change isn’t always hopeful, the women I've met along the way are forging a path forward for intergenerational resilience. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => hope-week-climate-change-resilience-action-profile-economic-independence-global-south-india [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-01-08 07:58:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-08 07:58:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9889 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 8, 2026January 8, 2026

Planting the Seeds of Climate Hope

by Aliya Bashir

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9937 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-07 07:35:47 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-07 07:35:47 [post_content] =>

Why Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts program is just the first step in better supporting the country's artists.

In 2022, visual artist Elinor O’Donovan was working as a receptionist in Cork, Ireland, when she began to receive the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) stipend. The Irish government had launched the program that year as a way to address the country’s unstable arts sector, which had left many artists without job security and consistent financial earnings—O’Donovan included. At the time she applied, she'd just graduated from university and was living with her parents as she tried to figure out the next steps for her career. When she found out she’d been selected from a pool of over 9,000 other applicants for the BIA, it was life-changing. As one of 2,000 artists receiving a weekly income of €325 over a three-year period, O’Donovan was able to quit her job and move to Dublin to make art full-time.

“The BIA has allowed me to be a bit more brave with the stuff that I make,” she tells The Conversationalist. “It allowed me to make whatever I want, and not feel as if I have to justify why it's important to a funding body.”

According to a cost-benefit analysis published by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport last September, the BIA has been a resounding success for beneficiaries, and Irish society at large. The report revealed that recipients were able to dedicate an additional four hours per week to art-making, and that the program “strengthened artists’ professional autonomy, capacity for creative work, and attachment to the arts sector.” Moreover, for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, the country received €1.39 in return—a value that accounts for an increase in earnings generated from art-making as well as an increase in public engagement with the arts. In short: Giving money to artists, with no strings attached, was demonstrably profitable.

For O’Donovan, income from the BIA not only gave her more time to make art, but provided her with newfound financial stability, something that affected every part of her life. She had more time to cook for herself, joined a gym, and for the first time, was able to afford to go to therapy. She was also finally able to plan for the future.

“I was 26 when I started receiving [the BIA], and I was able to start a pension fund,” she says. “Just having that fallback [was a relief], knowing that I would receive an income no matter what happened; if I got sick, I would still be able to pay my bills, pay my rent. It has really been transformative for my well-being.”

Importantly, the BIA has also allowed her to create opportunities for other artists: O’Donovan’s ability to explore filmmaking, something she was afforded because of the stipend, meant she could create new jobs in the field. “Having financial stability from the basic income means that I've been able to hire other people to work with me,” O’Donovan says. “So there's even been a kind of trickle down of the basic income to other artists and other creatives in Ireland.”

For artists around the world, the program has also offered one hopeful potential solution for a global arts sector severely hit with funding cuts and political uncertainties over the last few years. But while things have taken a recent downturn, the financial instability of the arts has been a major problem for decades, if not centuries, something that likely explains the growing admiration for the BIA around the world.

In a capitalist society, creative work is not valued as a productive or profitable field, which often means that artists are being underpaid for their work, if they’re paid at all. Creativity and art-making require passion and time, two resources that are generally scarce in an economic system more concerned with profit than beauty. Often, this forces workers to abandon or sideline their creative work in favor of taking a non-creative job that will provide financial stability. But a program like the BIA provides an alternative model, giving artists the financial foundation to create without the stress of figuring out how they will pay their rent or bills.

Joining other basic income pilot programs around the world, the BIA demonstrates that providing workers with financial stability first allows them to thrive, increasing a country’s worker satisfaction, contributing to better mental health, and resulting in higher housing stability, by supporting people pursuing their preferred fields of work.

Even the program’s most ardent supporters, however, argue that the BIA is only the start of a more stable arts field. In Ireland, the arts generate €1.5 billion in income each year, but according to Praxis, the artists’ union of Ireland, artists still face “extremely challenging economic conditions.” In an open letter published in September, the group cited that 50.7% of artists in Ireland still live in Enforced Deprivation, compared to 15.7% of the general population. (The Irish Central Statistics Office defines Enforced Deprivation as when a household experiences two or more of 11 national deprivation items, such as being unable to replace worn out furniture, or being unable to afford a drink or a meal with friends once a month.) The BIA, then, should be seen as just the first step in a bigger effort to make the industry more sustainable.

“It has always been precarious,” writer, editor, and Praxis policy director Michaele Cutaya tells The Conversationalist. “I've never managed to make a living off just my art income, [and] my situation, my difficulties, are not isolated instances.” As a union representative, Cutaya helped advise the government on the BIA’s design; but despite its success, she emphasizes that the country still has a long way to go.

“Quite a large part of the economy relies on the work of artists,” she says, citing the profit the arts brings to the hospitality sector in Dublin as one example. But very little money generated by the arts sector actually goes to artists, a discrepancy that continues to grow despite the BIA. In the last three years, work opportunities have diminished throughout the sector, a trend worrying to union leadership and artists alike. “Access to public funding remains the main source of income for artists, mainly through the Arts Council,” Cutaya continues. “[But] I find that the number of chances of getting your work selected has gone down because essentially there seems to be a lot more people applying [to public funding].”

This may explain why some are concerned that the BIA will become “the shiny object” of policies, while other issues in the sector go ignored, like unregulated pay, the use of AI, and the still-growing lack of opportunities.

“There's a lot of issues and they’re not doing much about it,” says actor Christophe Lombardi, who was in the control group of the BIA pilot program, where he received one yearly payment of €650 as compensation for participating, rather than the weekly stipend of €325. (The results of Lombardi’s control group were used so researchers could better understand how the BIA helps artists over a longer period of time, in comparison with those not receiving it.)

Emphasizing other issues he would like to see addressed, Lombardi points to Gayanne Potter, a voice actor whose voice was used without permission by ScotRail to create AI-generated platform announcements in Scotland. “We are facing all the [same] problems [in Ireland]. So I don't want [the government] to use the BIA as an excuse to pretend to help the artists, but behind the scenes, not [do] anything about the rest of the issues.”

Last April, the Irish Creative Industries Forum (ICIF) wrote to the Irish government requesting measures for the protection of artists from AI, and the enforcement of copyright infringement laws against the misuse of the technology. As of yet, however, the government has yet to implement any AI regulation policies in response.

Still, there is a widespread recognition that the BIA is a net positive, and can and should be used to help address many of the existing issues in the industry. In its letter, the ICIF requested that the BIA be extended to artists affected by job loss caused by AI. Across Ireland, unionized artists are currently campaigning for the BIA’s permanent expansion. “It does make a difference, obviously,” Lombardi says. “Because it's hard to stay creative, to keep things going, while you can't keep a roof over your head. There was [an] upswing in mental health—everything's better.”

In Praxis’ open letter, the union demanded for the program’s extension for an indefinite period of time, and for the income to be indexed to inflation. Additionally, the union urged the government to expand eligibility to include previously omitted art forms, like performance artists, socially-engaged artists, craftspeople, and designers.

Arguing that the BIA pays for itself in economic returns, Praxis warns this expansion should not come at the expense of other arts agencies, which also deserve resources, attention, and support. “The arts sector needs more funding, not less,” the letter reads.

O’Donovan agrees. Given her experience, she says the BIA should be one part of a “bigger ecosystem” that helps the arts sector thrive, and allows artists to be fairly compensated for their work. “I think what people don't understand about being an artist is how much work you do that goes unpaid,” she says. “Having the basic income means that I'm still able to live and I'm still able to work.”

The pilot program was originally set to end in December 2025, but has now been extended to February 2026. From September 2026, it will be a permanent program in the country, although the government has not defined eligibility criteria or the number of recipients moving forward. In an email to The Conversationalist, a spokesperson for the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport writes that “details such as the duration, eligibility and selection method… have not yet been decided.”

Cutaya says, so far, they’ve also been left in the dark about the expanded program’s specifics, something especially concerning because, while the program was initially launched under a progressive coalition government, the current government is conservative. “We know very little at this stage,” Cutaya says, but adds that Praxis is holding out hope their input will be taken into consideration as the program evolves.

This lack of transparency has also left current BIA recipients in the dark, unsure of how they will support themselves in the gap between February and September. “Realistically I'll just have to start working again,” O’Donovan says. “It feels like a shame. I'm really grateful to have had these three years where I've been able to work full-time as an artist because very few people who aren't on the basic income can afford that.”

Reflecting on how public arts funding is the first to be cut during economic hardship, Lombardi wishes that society at large would recognize the inherent value of artists’ labor for the mental health and wellbeing of the general population. “Imagine life without art,” Lombardi says, pointing to how artists played a key role in keeping people sane during the pandemic. “Imagine for six months, there is no art. You can't watch stuff, you can't read stuff, you can't go out and see stuff. You can't sing, there's no music, there's nothing. The only thing is work and sports. That's it. The decrease in mental health would be astounding, people would go around the bend.”

Having access to the most basic resources to be able to live while working in your preferred profession shouldn’t be a privilege for the few: Everyone deserves what the BIA has provided to artists for the last three years. But as too many places proverbially edge closer to the dystopia Lombardi describes, the BIA might be seen as a place to begin to reimagine how we value and fund the arts moving forward. Whether it’s an album, a painting, a play, a movie, a live band—whatever your preferred mode of expression—the arts remind us of the wonders of life, forcing us to see the beauty in between work shifts and growth indicators. Fair pay to the workers who deliver those reminders to the general population, then, is urgent; otherwise, we risk a world without fascination. The findings of the BIA pilot reveal the systemic flaws of how society treats its artists, and beyond the stipend, point to more hopeful solutions on the path to a world where art and artists are truly valued.

[post_title] => Painting a More Hopeful Future [post_excerpt] => Why Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts program is just the first step in better supporting the country's artists. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => hope-week-universal-basic-income-for-the-arts-artists-ireland [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-01-07 07:35:53 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-07 07:35:53 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9937 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 7, 2026January 7, 2026

Painting a More Hopeful Future

by Nicole Froio

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9839 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-12-17 18:25:59 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-12-17 18:25:59 [post_content] =>

How women crab farmers along India's coast have linked their livelihoods to environmental conservation.

A soft current ripples near Jamdulwadi Island as 15-year-old Prachi Santosh Acharekar guides her canoe through the gnarled trunks of a mangrove forest.

The afternoon sun warms the surface of the water, revealing a familiar scene to local communities around India’s Konkan coast: clusters of mud-covered crabs, basking on branches.

As she approaches them, she slows her boat. Prachi, a 10th-standard student, doesn’t just see mud crabs: She sees her future. Her focused gaze and deft handling of the boat are part of her autodidactic training, a testament to a burgeoning passion that runs deep within the Acharekar family.

Prachi Santosh Acharekar navigating her canoe through the mangroves, a part of her crab farming training.

Champions of the Mangroves

In Achara village, where she lives, crab farming season typically runs from October to May. When Prachi is fully inducted into her family’s business in about three years, during this time, she’ll be busy with preparations, stocking seed, feeding the crabs, and folding boxes to safely transport them once they’ve been harvested.

All of it will also formalize her role in a grassroots movement, led by women from India’s coastal belt: In Sindhudurg, women fisherfolk have become champions in linking their livelihoods with environmental conservation. Through crab farming, they’ve created a strong incentive to protect local mangroves, which serve as critical nursery habitats for mangrove crabs. The benefits of this are both economical and ecological: Alongside generating sustainable income for the women, the mangroves’ preservation stabilizes shorelines and mitigates erosion, enhancing coastal resilience against the impacts of climate change.

At the heart of this enterprise is Prachi’s aunt, 55-year-old Sonali Sunil Acharekar, a proud entrepreneur and leading member of Konkansparsh, one of Maharashtra’s pioneering women-led self-help groups (SHGs). Like all women of this SHG, for her, the mangrove is not just an ecosystem, but a dynamic marketplace.

“Be it dolphin safari, trekking, birdwatching, or traditional fishing, we do it all at Konkansparsh,” says Sonali, sitting in a charpoy at her home, surrounded by a vast area of mangroves. “But crab farming is our speciality. It is something we feel deeply attached to.”

Sonali and other leaders manage the entire crab farming supply chain, from feeding and harvesting the crabs to selling them. The process is meticulous but straightforward. Crab seeds are carefully placed one-by-one into fiber boxes. Each box is then deployed within the protected mangrove territories of Sindhudurg district, which boasts 6,940 hectares of mangroves perfectly suited for farming. Sonali also feeds the small raw fish stock twice daily, in the morning and evening. Then, once the crabs are ready, they’re harvested, boxed, and sold.

Sonali Sunil Acharekar in the backyard of her home in Achara village.

Overseeing the entire operation in this way has significantly enhanced the women’s access to resources, as well as to the market. The payoff is also demonstrable, including as a sustainable model: Last year, the Acharekar family, a seven-member unit that works in tandem, generated an impressive 150,000 INR ($1,706 USD) from the sale of 180 crabs. They also earned an additional 130,000 INR ($1,466 USD) from running mangrove safaris.

“It feels so good to partake in the process,” says Sonali. “This year, we intend to maintain 200 boxes fully. More boxes mean more business and more business means more prosperity.”

Their success also reinforces a crucial ecological benefit: According to research published in the Marine Biological Association of India, mud crab farming is not only a sustainable—and profitable—livelihood, but an essential strategy for mangrove conservation, supporting the region’s climate resilience through ecosystem protection. The mangroves provide a conducive natural habitat for raising mud crabs, or green crabs, commonly from the species Scylla serrata, which are indigenous to the region. By breeding and harvesting crabs, and building and tending to crabs pens in mangrove creeks, the women have both created a financial incentive for the mangroves' protection and helped to increase the local crab population.

In coastal areas, crabs are considered an economically significant species due to their huge demand. The crabs themselves can also tolerate a wide range of temperatures and salinities without destroying local ecosystems. But over the years, sand mining, saltwater intrusion, and rising water temperatures have contributed to a declining mud crab population, and are just a few of the ongoing stresses and trends that fisher communities have dealt with, and that local SHGs hope to tackle.

A wild baby crab crawls on the trunk of a mangrove tree.

In other coastal communities like Kerala, Maharashtra’s neighboring state, crab farmers who once caught wild juvenile crabs and had plentiful stock are grappling with rising costs and dwindling returns, as crabs have become scarce and stressed. Their annual incomes have dropped by 50,000 INR to 100,000 INR (around $600 USD to $1,200 USD) due to poor water quality, causing frequent disease outbreaks, pushing many farmers to downsize or cease operations altogether, largely due to reduced harvests linked to environmental degradation.

Sustainable crab models in coastal communities in Maharashtra aim to address the pressing problems of overfishing, habitat loss, and food insecurity through long-term economic stability. But without such practices, crab harvesting may yield fleeting profits, triggering ecological collapse and harm to a region’s inhabitants.

In addition to boosting the economy, this is part of why the SHG’s endeavors have been such a great boon to the area.

According to Kedar Palav, Livelihood Specialist at Sindhudurg’s Mangrove Foundation, women-led groups comprising 40 women have been active in Sindhudurg district during the 2024-25 crab farming season. “Our aim,” he notes, “is to facilitate strong livelihood opportunities for the women.”

Sonali Sunil Acharekar (left) and her niece Prachi Santosh Acharekar (center) in conversation with Mayur Pansare (right), a Project Assistant for the Mangrove Foundation.

But even those with formal careers are drawn to the potential. Sonali’s 32-year-old son, Omprakash Sunil Achrekar, an engineering graduate, has embraced crab farming full-time; and Manish Tari, 22, an undergraduate in fisheries science, launched Manish Agro & Seafood with his father during the Covid-19 pandemic, specializing in vertical crab farming.

“We deal in red and green crabs,” says Tari. “A single piece per kilo can go up to 2,400 INR. It’s very lucrative.”

Navigating the Tides

Despite the economic potential, the journey is not without profound risks and hurdles. The most immediate occupational hazard, however, is theft.

“Theft of crabs is a big problem here,” says Sonali. “Sometimes diseases can spread in the backwaters, as well…A mortality rate of 20 percent is considered normal.”

It’s a challenge that has historically forced some farmers out of business. Samiksha Gaonkar, 50, from Pirawadi village, recalls being part of Sindhudurg’s very first crab culture group, which operated between 2014 to 2019. Despite each group member earning around 5000 INR per month, they were forced to shut down.

“Our crabs got suddenly stolen,” says Samiksha. “We could not keep a check on the thefts and then we had to pull out.”

Anagarajan Joshi, 58, a former crab farmer, at her friend’s home in Pirawadi village.

Another hurdle is the scarcity of crab seed. According to Palav, there is only one hatchery in India: the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Aquaculture (RGCA) in the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu.

Sanjeevni Santosh Mithbavker, 43, a member of the Vedoleshwar SHG, says crab farming has become more difficult as a result. “We lack seed,” she says. “If the supply of seed becomes easy, we can take this business forward.”

Despite the scarcity, Sanjeevni sold crabs worth 60,000 INR last season. But while business is “great,” seed still costs 25 to 30 INR for a single piece—makings it an expensive venture for the average crab farmer.

A Wave of Resilience

To counter these challenges, government and non-governmental efforts have actively focused their support on the most vulnerable communities, placing women at the forefront.

Government initiatives such as the Mangrove Conservation and Livelihood Generation Scheme, alongside international projects like Enhancing Climate Resilience of India’s Coastal Communities (ECRICC), have been instrumental in fostering local interest in Sindhudurg’s coastal villages, including Achara and Hadi. As part of the Mangrove Foundation’s intervention, women’s groups also receive substantial training and support, including expert talks, presentations, and hands-on workshops that offer extensive practical training.

On the ground, additional support comes from 34 Sagar Mitras—fisheries graduates who act as vital resources for the women. Mayur Vinayak Pansare, Project Assistant with the Mangrove Foundation, sees themselves in a family-like role. While they occasionally help fix issues, like crabs breaking through fiber boxes, he says, “It’s heartwarming to see these women coming forward and taking steps towards self-reliance.”

Sanjeevni Santosh Mithbavker, 43, mends nets at her home in Hadi village.

The financial assistance is also significant: The Achrekar family, for instance, received a substantial 90 percent subsidy from the Department of Fisheries and the Mangrove Foundation. Between 2021 and 2025, larger initiatives like the Pradhan Mantri Machi Sampada have backed an additional 124 fisheries projects, with women as a remarkable 60 percent of beneficiaries between 2021 and 2025, says Bahar Vithala Mahakal, Sindhudurg District Program Manager at the Fisheries Department.

This focus is clear across other programs, too: The Sindu Ratna Samrudhi Scheme saw a 70 percent rise in female beneficiaries in a single year, between 2022 and 2023.

Planting the Future

Women’s presence as crab sellers in Sindhudurg’s main fish market signals a generational shift in the industry: They’re taking center stage in an otherwise male-dominated marketplace. For Dakshita (who asked we only use her first name), her presence here is about more than selling her own yield—she’s also reclaiming a little more of herself.

“What is the need for middlemen when I can run my own business?” she says, waiting for customers.

Dakshita, 50, sells green crabs at the Malvan fish market in Sindhudurg.

In Prachi’s case, the journey towards self-reliance began slowly. She initially “harbored no interest in crab farming.” But witnessing her family’s dedication and serving as a guide for tourists through the vibrant backwaters transformed her perspective, converting her initial disinterest into a passion.

In the shifting tides of the Maharashtra coast, Prachi represents the strong voice of a younger generation, seamlessly blending tradition with science to carve a new path forward. For them, crabs are the ‘green gold,’ promising economic returns.

While elder members strengthen their place in the market, Prachi is now articulating a dream that links her environment to her education, which she plans to pursue further by studying Marine Science.

“By protecting the mangroves, my crabs thrive,” she says. “The mangroves in return protect my family from storms, erosion, and the rising sea.”

A view of a mountain village in Sindhudurg.

In the nearby pond, Prachi and Sonali have also started to plant new mangrove saplings. Other efforts at sustainability have only grown. In 2017, scientists visited the area and told local crab farmers that in order to have a better catch, they needed to maintain cleaner water. To boost women’s participation in local water and pond management, women farmers are now being trained to regularly flush water through the crab ponds for freshness, monitor water quality, and prevent overcrowding. Since then, they’ve seen the return of many new birds in the area, from cattle egret to common sandpiper and Indian pond heron.

The tides speak louder than people in Sindhudurg’s coastal communities, and for these powerful women, mangroves stand like guardians along the coast. The more they nurture the mangroves, the more the mangroves give back to them, too. It’s a quiet partnership in nature, this connection between crab farmers and the mangrove forests, and a small step in healing the Earth.

[post_title] => Guardians of the Mangroves [post_excerpt] => How women crab farmers along India's coast have linked their livelihoods to environmental conservation. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => crab-farmers-farming-aquaculture-india-mangroves-conservation-climate-change-ecosystem [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-12-17 18:26:06 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-12-17 18:26:06 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9839 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

December 17, 2025December 17, 2025

Guardians of the Mangroves

by Aliya Bashir

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9725 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-10-28 19:30:22 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-10-28 19:30:22 [post_content] =>

Now, more than ever, we need art to do the heavy lifting of defining our values.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

In the art world this year, many a gallery’s story has ended with Chapter 11. For those who’ve been paying attention, this wasn’t surprising. Art sales are slipping everywhere, down as much as 35% at Art Basel. This month, the Financial Times reported that blue chip Hauser & Wirth’s London profits have slid a staggering 90%. August mid-tier galleries have begun shuttering with alarming frequency: Blum, Kasmin, and Venus Over Manhattan, to name a few. For artists and galleries alike, the walls are literally and metaphorically caving in: the model of an entire industry predicated on selling to a few rich people is no longer working.

When the hero’s journey comes to its final chapter, a certain existential reckoning occurs. The life and death of ideas is very real: many far outlive their usefulness, and perhaps one that needs to die right now is the idea that art should exist on the market principally as a financial tool. Art fairs are expensive, rents are obscene, and a global economic downturn accented with the panic and chaos of trade wars and ethno-nationalism all point toward the necessity of conservative budgets and cost-cutting. Yes, the tie between money, power, and art is irrefutable, the backbone and lifeblood of art history. But as the midtier market collapses, it might be nice to finally unfuck the gap between the hand-to-mouth life of the artist and the value of art in the market, beginning with a trial separation—at least as a thought exercise—between money and art.

Now, more than ever, we need art to do the heavy lifting of defining our values. Alternative thought is essential when the capitalistic world has agreed—with zero referendum—that artificial thought is in any way preferential or superior. By subscribing to the centrism that masquerades as progressivism in the United States, the art world lost touch with the political landscape and, with that disorientation, any ability to question it. Amid the art market highs and market-oriented inclusivity, art has also lost its critical capacity.

But what is the value of art that cannot be sold? What might be the purpose of art that is simply not meant to sit aside a red dot? Historically, of course, we have performance art and Situationism, along with their descendants. But, beyond art that is merely difficult to commodify, what does an expression of cultural values look like when consciously uncoupled from the art market?

I pondered these questions as I walked around my favorite show I have seen all year, Lydia Eccles’ “Jokes About Bombs Will Not Be Taken Lightly,” which was up at Goswell Road, an artist-run space in Paris, from May 15 until June 14. In 1995, Eccles, a Boston-based artist, had one hell of an idea for an art project. Rather than taking a ho-hum trip to the supply store, she nominated the Unabomber—at the height of his anonymous reign of terror—in the 1996 US presidential election. The show was a documentation of that campaign and the ensuing pen-pal relationship Eccles formed with Ted Kaczynski after his arrest and throughout his incarceration.

Conceptual art has given us everything from Chris Burden having a friend shoot him to Agnes Denes turning a strip of downtown Manhattan to a wheatfield. Art in this vein pushes what can be a canvas for expression: the human body, landfill. But never before had I seen an artist decide their chosen medium was a presidential election. By participating in the political arena with all the familiar trappings of the era—signs, slogans, bumper stickers, and even a dedicated camera crew—Eccles showed a presidential campaign for what it is: an hysterical circus that plays to our basest fears, one where infamy and fame are interchangeable.

Eccles documents the Unabomber’s “run” alongside his more literal run from the law and the dance he did with the media, most notably and implausibly with Bob Guccione. Her prolific campaigning warranted its own inane and disturbingly underinformed coverage. At one point in the winter of 1996, WRKO radio reported, “There are more Unabomber signs than there are for Clinton, Gore, or all the Republicans, so it looks like the Unabomber is leading in this precinct.” In a time of Luigi Mangione fandom and a renewed, bi-partisan interest in Kaczynski, “Jokes About Bombs” offered a riveting, prescient, wholly prophetic anti-capitalist critique of technology’s role in a broken political system. The phrase “artistic intervention” has been worn out to the point of farce, but Eccles had staged one in a presidential election and a federal manhunt.

I had to own the catalogue.

But: how to get it home??? The cover showed an old-fashioned political sign stuck in sludgy snow amid a warren of placards for Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan:

DON’T WASTE YOUR VOTE!
Write-in for President
UNABOMBER ’96
If elected he will not serve
★ VOTE AGAINST REPUBLICANS
★ VOTE AGAINST DEMOCRATS
★ VOTE AGAINST CORPORATE TECHNOLOGY
All you have to lose is the political illusion…
ARE YOU READY FOR THE RUPTURE?

I imagined myself at customs, declaring this tome. Anthony Stephenson, the gallery’s convivial proprietor, asked me if it would be so terrible to be stuck in France forever. He had a point. Still, I demurred and, frankly, chickened out of buying a book I really wanted to own.

In my own cowardice, I recognized that Eccles’ show was lightning in a bottle, and that my own hesitation indicated that I was in the presence of something genuinely avant-garde. I’d been conditioned to the shopping malls of art fairs, swapping out the Orange Julius and TCBY of my New Jersey childhood for the (aptly named) Ruinart Champagne Lounge. Despite my arty existence, in that moment of contact, I realized that coming across art that is actually outré (if you like your French cultural theory) or verboten (if you prefer your Germans), and has purpose, simply had not been my experience of most galleries where, at best, I sigh and think “Gee, if only I had a cool $30K lying around…” Like the idea of owning its catalogue, the show itself freaked me out a bit. I felt alive in my mind and privileged to be in the room, as well as to meet Eccles herself.

In its early pages, the catalogue for “Jokes About Bombs” contains the text of a speech James Baldwin gave in 1962, “Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. All artists are divorced from and even opposed to necessarily any system whatever.” These are, of course, the sorts of moral standards we expect whenever we read James Baldwin, who had a sixth sense for integrity the way sea turtles and migratory birds can use the earth’s magnetic fields for navigation. While I ultimately left the catalogue behind, as spring turned to summer, I let his words guide my art viewing.

I came across two moral stand-outs in London. The first was Ed Atkins at the Tate Britain, best known for his computer-generated, incredibly unsettling videos that plumb the uncanny valley. Atkins has been exploring the genre for decades, well ahead of AI moral and economic panic. Seeing his career retrospective made me think of a Democracy Now interview I saw with Karen Hao, who pointed out that, as we have no agreed-upon scientific definition of human intelligence, what, exactly, is Artificial Intelligence? Is it merely a projection of our perceived notion of intelligence, skewed entirely by capitalistic values? Are we creating “intelligent” bots with the same level of foresight and ethical depth as rare dog breeds concocted by bored, rich people that are so helpless they cannot even fuck on their own? (A sharp new ad for Merriam-Webster slyly posits their dictionary as an LLM and ends with the tagline, “There’s artificial intelligence, and then there is actual intelligence.”)

The second stand-out was “Leigh Bowery!” at the Tate Modern, a retrospective of fashion and nightclubbing as artistic expression. The text at the entrance to the exhibit read: “In his brief life Bowery was described as many things. Among them: fashion designer, club monster, human sculpture, nude model, vaudeville drunkard, anarchic auteur, pop surrealist, clown without a circus, piece of moving furniture, modern art on legs. However, he declared, ‘if you label me, you negate me,’ and always refused classification, commodification, and conformity.” The show was a riveting reminder of transgression and artistic expression in the face of AIDS, discrimination, and the rise of conservatism—and a call for the same as we face rising global authoritarianism today. In an era where fashion often feels like the reductio ad absurdum of vapid aspirational mass consumption amid our ever more precarious existences, online and in debt, Bowery’s ability to imbue costume with so much intellectual ambition and drive floored me.

These three exhibitions were recentering as reminders that art’s purpose—its true value—shouldn’t be monetary. Moreover, those figures don’t mean much just before a crash, when the numbers game is more of a hiding-the-real-numbers game. While blue chip galleries and their deep war chests can ride out the chaos for now, Hauser & Wirth’s stumble may tell us otherwise.

Right now, it is vital to uncouple cultural values from the marketplace. Commercial worth has always been baked into ideologies that align with power, whether you’re talking about royal court painters or the CIA and Abstract Expressionism. The market then reinforces that notion of value over and over again in a way that resonates into institutions and educational systems. Yes, that art market is experiencing a downturn that might spell collapse for many. It won’t be pleasant. However, chaos presents an opportunity for a reappraisal, and for finding what was lost. I would argue that—whether you love it or hate it—art that passes the Baldwin litmus test is a great place to start understanding what art with a valid critical stance looks like at this very moment in time.

Such art demands the same moral clarity from its viewers, too: I did return to Goswell Road this summer, and I bought the catalogue for “Jokes About Bombs Will Not Be Taken Lightly.” Despite my concerns, the book made it home through customs.

[post_title] => The Value of Art That Can't Be Sold [post_excerpt] => Now, more than ever, we need art to do the heavy lifting of defining our values. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => cultural-currency-value-art-cant-be-sold-galleries-profits-economy-goswell-road-lydia-eccles [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-10-28 19:30:26 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-10-28 19:30:26 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9725 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 28, 2025October 28, 2025

The Value of Art That Can’t Be Sold

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 3923 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2022-03-03 19:34:29 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-03 19:34:29 [post_content] =>

Menstrual inequity is not unique to developing nations. It affects all low-income girls and women.

What if someone’s circumstances forced them to experience their period without access to sanitary napkins or tampons? Would they go to school or to work worrying every minute about blood soaking through their underwear, whether the makeshift pad they made with a fistful of toilet paper, a dirty rag, or even cow dung or leaves stayed in place, whether it increased their risk of bacterial infection?

Would you?

Millions of young girls and women experience their monthly periods under these undignified and unhygienic circumstances. They miss school, they miss work, and as a result their earning potential and opportunities for social and financial advancement in their lives are irrevocably affected. In some extreme situations, young women even exchange sex for money to buy menstrual supplies. This is referred to as period poverty.

Period poverty creates poverty

“Imagine not being able to sit through class,” says Jessica Williams, Chief Communications Officer for Days for Girls, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that aims to improve educational and livelihood outcomes for women and girls by “turning periods into pathways.”

“You can’t work, you end up staying home, all these missed opportunities to contribute and make money. Period poverty literally creates poverty.”

The World Bank estimates 500 million women and girls globally lack access to adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management. That means access to basic needs like sanitary napkins, tampons, toilet paper, separate bathrooms with a door that can safely close behind them and running water to wash their hands and underwear. Half the world’s population in developing and poor countries lacks the fundamental necessities a woman needs to deal safely and with dignity with a bodily function that recurs monthly for 40 years of their lives.

Operating in over 144 countries in six continents, Days for Girls creates washable and reusable menstrual health products and kits that include carry pouches, underwear, soap and washcloths, and a menstrual cup alternative. These products are manufactured and sold locally by women, providing them with a dependable stream of revenue.

Period inequity is our problem, too

While menstrual inequity is far more pervasive in developing nations, it is not unique to far-away countries. Low-income girls and women, women in Indigenous communities, and women experiencing homelessness in western countries—where supermarket and pharmacy aisles are brimming with all brands, colours, sizes, and shapes of sanitary products—are still not able to afford basic menstrual products.

Many countries are now having long-overdue conversations about making sanitary products free or at the very least tax-free and affordable—finally seeing them as medical necessities women don’t have a choice about purchasing. Scotland was the first country in the world to make period products free. It’s perhaps no accident the bill was first introduced by a woman and passed by a government that has a woman at the helm. Countries like Canada and Australia have removed the GST from period products, New Zealand and a handful of U.S. States have already mandated free period products in schools. Recent U.S. studies have shown that about a quarter of menstruating students struggle to access period products, with both anxiety, stigma, and educational barriers cited as the direct result.

Breaking the stigma

Period poverty goes beyond a lack of access to period products. It also refers to taboos attached to menstruation.

“In some cultures, women on their period are considered unclean,” says Williams. “Our job is to help people overcome this, educate them on the subject, teach young boys, their brothers, fathers, husbands, about female bodies so they can be more understanding and supportive of what is essentially a basic human right.”

Nepali schoolgirls holding bags of washable menstrual products.

In Nepal, one of the countries Days for Girls operates in, menstruating women are considered bad luck. The stigma forces them into isolated menstruating huts every month, which makes them vulnerable to rape, animal attacks, and bad weather. Many young girls have died while alone. Aside from the physical dangers involved in forced isolation, superstitions like these also degrade women and position them as inferior in a society that should see them as equals.

The scent of solidarity

Barb Stegemann, founder and CEO of The 7 Virtues, a perfume company, decided to help the Nepali women who are shunted into menstruating huts.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, she’s launching Lotus Pear, a scent that uses sustainably sourced geranium from Egypt, with part of the proceeds helping to advance menstrual equity for 700 young women in Nepal.

“It’s about women and power, the loss of it, and getting it back,” Stegemann says. “Each of us is a potential agent of change.” The entrepreneur says she prefers empowerment over charity because it creates self-sufficiency and confidence in one’s abilities. As a young teenager, she saw first-hand how poverty can undermine one’s potential and self-esteem.

“We fell on hard times when I was a young,” she says. “My mom started having health issues and all of sudden… record scratch. We’re living in a trailer on welfare and mom is in the hospital all the time.”

Stegemann says she knows what period poverty feels like.

“Not to get gross,” she says, “but we were poor, I would often use toilet paper.”

Period kits that Day for Girls distributes.

Women lifting other women

Women helping empower other women is a running theme through Stegemann’s career and overall philosophy. When she launched her business 12 years ago, she worked out of her garage and bankrolled the venture with her credit card. She aspired to support families in war-torn nations by flexing women’s buying power to reverse issues of war and poverty.

Her fragrance collection is made with natural essential oils purchased and often manufactured in countries rebuilding after war or strife, from Haiti to Afghanistan and Rwanda, what Stegemann refers to as “retail activism.”

Impact partners like her are essential to the work non-profits like Days for Girls do.

“Without impact partners like The 7 Virtues, we wouldn’t be able to do our work because they essentially fund the work that we do,” says Williams.

Like Stegemann, the founder of Days for Girls is also a woman whose actions have been shaped by difficult personal experiences.

Celeste Mergens was born in Oklahoma, to a family that faced poverty, spent time living in a car and often went without food. At the age of seven she was raped. When she heard that some North American men were travelling to poor countries with suitcases full of menstrual products these women needed just so they could sexually assault them, she knew she had to do something. Since 2008, her organization’s two-pronged approach to period poverty—the sale and manufacture of menstrual pads and the education to eliminate taboos—has changed countless of lives.

“I was told over 400 women immediately came forward for the program in Nepal,” says Stegemann. “The organization has invested for so long in the community there’s now trust, and I think that’s what’s so exciting, it’s a movement.”

The invisible problem

The global pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges women and girls face. A recent report indicates almost 10 million children worldwide might never return to school. It predicts girls will have a harder time than boys, because many will be forced into early marriage or the labor market as families struggle with extreme poverty. With these obstacles in mind, efforts to tackle period poverty and the limitations it imposes on women worldwide can only be encouraged.

“I think the issue of period poverty should be part of everyone’s political platform,” says Stegemann. “It would be refreshing to hear a candidate say, ‘These are the things that advance a community,’ and find a way for companies to provide them for free.”

Stegemann says she was shocked to learn that a lack of sanitary products in the north of Canada, where a box of tampons can run from $16 to more than $45, remains a huge problem among Indigenous communities.

“Was I living around a rock?” she asks. “Why don’t more people know about these things?”

[post_title] => Why period poverty is everyone's problem [post_excerpt] => The World Bank estimates 500 million women and girls globally lack access to adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management. That means access to basic needs like sanitary napkins, tampons, toilet paper, separate bathrooms with a door that can safely close behind them and running water to wash their hands and underwear. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => why-period-poverty-is-everyones-problem [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3923 [menu_order] => 134 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 3, 2022August 28, 2024

Why period poverty is everyone’s problem

by Toula Drimonis

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The isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the pandemic have caused a sharp spike in demand for mental health care, but the system is not providing the help people need.



Chelsea, a 33-year-old part-time CrossFit coach, managed her lifelong anxiety by keeping herself busy and physically active, but the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing measures deprived her of those essential coping mechanisms. Suddenly she found herself alone at home and her anxiety, which had been acting up since 2018, became a serious problem. A resident of Edmonton, Canada, Chelsea tried to find a therapist within the public health-care system who could see her for free or on a sliding scale. But the waiting lists were long, and she was unable to afford a private therapist. She tried BetterHelp, a company that provides web-based therapy, but stopped when she realized she had to pay extra to speak with a therapist via video camera. She also tried a free phone service through the Edmonton municipality, but she needed long-term therapy—not a one-time chat.



Chelsea was on two separate wait lists for over two years but did not receive any updates so, to her frustration, she had no idea when her turn would be. Recently, thanks to a new job with improved benefits, she was finally able to find a therapist in the private system.



Canada’s national health-care system, which, for the most part, is publicly available and funded through contributions from the federal and provincial governments, has been stretched to its limits by the pandemic. But even in better times, before COVID, mental health care was difficult to obtain. The national health-care system places a priority on physical health, with a particular focus on critical and emergency medicine. But now, after two years of extreme stress caused by isolation, unemployment, uncertainty, loss, and increased family responsibilities, the demand for mental health care has spiked.



A recent survey by the Canadian Mental Health Association found that the number of Ontario residents currently seeking mental health care has risen to 24 percent, up from 9 percent in 2020. According to another survey conducted in the fall, about one in five Canadians rated their mental health as “poor,” while half the respondents said they were worried about a lack of access to care.



Dr. Simon Sherry, a clinical psychologist and professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said his waiting list has risen from 150 pre-pandemic to about 450 people today. “In Nova Scotia, poor mental health has become statistically normal,” he said, adding that people with pre-existing conditions are having “an especially rough time.” The pandemic has left them with physical and psychological scars.Dr. Karen Hetherington, a faculty lecturer at McGill’s School of Social Work, agreed with Dr. Sherry, pointing out that “it’s no surprise” to see a decline in the mental health of a person who might have spent months in lockdown in a small apartment during Montreal’s long, dark, frigid winter.



Lyla* is a mental health-care specialist in a Montreal hospital’s outpatient clinic, working with patients suffering from schizophrenia. She has seen many cases of people with severe pre-existing issues experiencing a complete breakdown during the pandemic. “I know some patients that just couldn’t function anymore because everything they had in terms of socialization was taken away from them,” she said.



A global calamity of this scale is a natural vector for a mental health crisis, but those who have worked in mental health care for years are grimly unsurprised that the system failed to respond to the sharp increase in demand. They have been asking for extra support for years, but felt as though they were screaming into a void.



“It’s simply been the case that both the health-care field and public health have focused overwhelmingly on physical health,” said Dr. Nicholas King, a professor at McGill University who is an expert in public health ethics and policy. “So, when you have a major, large-scale event that has a huge impact on mental health, that system for dealing with mental health is obviously going to come under strain.”



Dr. Javeed Sukhera is a pediatric and adolescent psychiatrist and Chair and Chief of Psychiatry at the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Previously, he lived and worked for a decade in Ontario. Dr. Sukhera trained in New York State, which, he believes “has a pretty decent” mental health care system. “Where I trained, if a young person needs support, regardless of whether they were poor or not, they usually got fairly timely intervention,” he said.  In Canada, by contrast, he encountered “huge obstacles in accessing basic evidence-based psychotherapies” for his patients.



Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care. In fact, Dr. Sukhera said, “There are many jurisdictions in the U.S. where access to basic evidence-based mental health support is way better than in many parts of Canada. And that’s a difficult piece of truth to recognize and reconcile for Canadians who idealize our system. But my lived experience would say that’s the truth.”



Like health workers more broadly, mental health-care providers have burnt out during the pandemic, with many choosing to quit. Lyla cited a combination of overwork, low pay, and a lack of acknowledgment as the factors driving the resignation among her colleagues in mental health. Now, newly vacant positions are going to inexperienced recent graduates. Lyla said that mental health-care jobs were once desirable and difficult to obtain. But these days she and her colleagues are constantly begging for extra support and left feeling that “the benefits [of staying in the profession] don’t outweigh the risks.”



Noelle* works in youth mental health care at a public clinic in Montreal. She, too, has seen many of her colleagues choosing to leave. The vacant positions are going unfilled, which increases the strain on those who stay, which in turn leads to more burnout and more departures. The problem with the public sector, she said, is the way it’s structured. In the type of clinic in which she works, psychologists are told they have “four months to help the patient and then you have to close the file and move on to somebody else,” she said, adding: “In a private setting, you don’t get that.” The government, she says, “treats people like numbers, like employees. Like the way overtime was mandatory for nurses for a long time. How is someone with children supposed to be working 18 hours in a row?”



Although everyone I spoke with agreed that additional funding for the public system was much needed, Noelle also recommends more funding go into community organizations, such as AMI-Quebec, a non-profit that helps the families of those with mental illness, or Cyprès, which provides direct mental health services to individuals in their community. Dr. Hetherington agrees. In her view, the culture in the public sector is simply too “top down. It has no understanding of the real needs of the population, the clientele. It’s so bureaucratic.”



She also does not believe the public sector can be adequately transformed to meet the needs of those suffering. “You can’t change a culture when it’s such an elephant. Then you need to build new structures that integrate a different culture,” she said. She’d like to see the Quebec government fund new non-profit mental health centers with public money. These centers could then contract directly with community organizations. She hopes that this would allow a new culture to flourish in mental health care.



When we last spoke, however, Dr. Hetherington was feeling newly optimistic about mental health care in Quebec, with the provincial government having recently announced that it would invest $1.2 billion in mental health services. “This is the first time the money is attached to a vision,” she said, with funding for both school and refugee mental health. The plan is also focused on bringing mental health services into the community and sensitizing the community. She confirmed that the pandemic “was a facilitator.”



“What we need,” said Dr. Sherry, “is a fundamental kind of courage from decision-makers and government to actually center people who are suffering when making decisions because they’re politically convenient or politically popular.” Many are still waiting for a public system that is failing to provide care for them. Private therapy “is really not affordable unless you’re making a lot of money,” said Chelsea. Without her new job, she’d still be waiting—along with thousands of others.



*Names have been changed upon request.

    [post_title] => A spike in pandemic-related mental illness has overwhelmed Canada's health care system
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February 24, 2022August 28, 2024

A spike in pandemic-related mental illness has overwhelmed Canada’s health care system

by Sophia Crabbe-Field

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Ajo, a traditional microsavings system based on trust, allowed women in the informal economy to survive the pandemic lockdown.

The outdoor markets of Lagos are a noisy clutter of shops and makeshift stalls. The traders are mostly women who call out their wares loudly, with customers clustering in front of the stalls to haggle while the business owner multitasks and chats with them all. The stall owners are friendly but competitive, bantering with one another all day.

In this familiar chaos, the women form sisterhoods and support systems. One of these systems is called “ajo” (or “esusu” in eastern Nigeria). It is an ancient informal cooperative savings culture passed down for generations, with the women contributing a portion of their earnings on a weekly or monthly basis and each receiving the full amount, in turn, to invest in her business.

This is a typical example of how an ajo works:

In a 12-unit rotation for 12,000 naira ($29.01) monthly, each member contributes 1,000 naira ($2.42) per month, choosing a number or month when they would like to receive their due. They give their money to a thrift collector, who is responsible for disbursing the collected money at the end of each agreed-upon period, and for keeping the women’s savings. At the end of the rotation, a member can cancel her contribution or start again. But a unit of 12 does not mean 12 people. It could also mean 12 “hands,” or contributions. Some members might decide to contribute two hands, or double the amount (2,000 naira), to collect double (24,000 naira).

The foundational principles of ajo are trust, familiarity, and an uninterrupted cycle of donation. These might not seem like concrete measures for financial security, but they are remarkably successful—most of the time. The restrictions and privations of the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted this usually reliable traditional micro-savings system. Women make up half of Nigeria’s informal labor force, which is unregulated and often exploited. Whether they are traders, farmers, or domestic workers, these women are often the family’s secret breadwinners (in this conservative patriarchal culture, the man must always be seen as the financial head of the family). The pandemic lockdowns, with income drastically cut due to restrictions that for several months kept market hours reduced to four from the usual 60 per week, made ajo more important than ever.

Surviving the pandemic, despite the prevalence of disinformation

In December 2021 I visited Addo market in Lagos to speak with some of these women. Ify, a single mother in her mid-thirties who sells dried fish, told me ‌she panicked when the government announced a lockdown in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. For several months hardly any customers visited the market; the few who came to shop were limited to one at a time. According to the women, if stallholders neglected to wear masks, the police forced them to buy one from them at exorbitant prices, or even kicked them out of the market. I could not independently verify this, but have no reason to doubt the women given the Nigerian police's well-documented corruption. To save on the expense of buying a new disposable mask to wear each day, Ify bought a reusable face shield.

Ify said she was not worried about catching the virus. She gets her information on COVID-19 from mainstream news outlets, but her opinions reflect the disinformation that circulates on social media. She said that one woman in the area died after she was vaccinated, although she acknowledged never having met her. Ify said she never met anyone who had caught the virus, nor did she believe she would catch it, which is why she did not plan to be vaccinated. She asked why the government was mandating vaccines when they had not done the same for HIV tests or antiretrovirals.

The government is, in fact, not mandating vaccines. As in other countries, vaccine passports are required to enter certain public spaces and in order to travel.

Ronke, a 21-year-old college student who helps at her mother’s vegetable stall during semester breaks, could only sell fresh produce to neighbors for their meals during the lockdown. “I saw no dead bodies or sick people in Nigeria even on social media, me and my family believe COVID-19 is fake and we will not be taking the vaccine,” she said.

Nigeria’s first phase of the vaccine rollout was in March–April 2021; it was limited to essential workers and the elderly, which excluded most of the women who work at the market. Before the lockdown, these women, some of whom have little or no formal education, received health information from the local radio, community workers, and primary healthcare centers. But the pandemic exposed them to unverified sources and misinformation on WhatsApp and Facebook.

Family and friends innocently share viral messages via WhatSapp groups; the messages, in pidgin English and various local languages, recommend homemade cures for the virus, like herbal steaming. Or they contain disinformation, like the claim that Covid vaccines inject magnetic chips into the body. According to this conspiracy theory, the chips attract metals, like spoons, which stick to the skin. According to another conspiracy theory the virus is fake and the pandemic restrictions are just another government ploy to steal public funds. Since people receive these messages from those they trust, like their faith leaders or educated members of their families, they believe they are credible.

How COVID affected the ajo system

Because they made so little money during the lockdowns and were struggling to feed their families on their reduced earnings, neither Ify nor Ronke could keep up their ajo contributions, nor could many other women in their groups. With contributions reduced by 70 percent, their ajo unit could not stay afloat. Contributions stopped, pending the lifting of the lockdown and the full re-opening of the markets. Ronke refers to the semblance of normalcy that followed the 2020 lockdown as the “end of Corona,” a sentiment shared by most women in the market. If they may trade, then “corona” must be over, they say, associating the virus with the period of restrictions and nothing more. These women go about their business without face masks or social distancing. The police no longer compel them to abide by any pandemic restrictions.

A study of the impact of COVID-19 on women’s savings groups carried out by a collaboration of think tanks and researchers, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Africa Center for Systematic Reviews, and Makerere University, found that households with women who are in informal savings groups were less likely to experience food insecurity and more likely to have savings, which was critical in getting through the pandemic. Women’s savings groups showed more potential for resilience and provided women with a platform for leadership and community responsiveness.

Ajo, however, still carries risk. The women in Addo market lost their savings during the pandemic lockdown to a thrift collector who suddenly “disappeared with everything.” In case of death or serious illnesses, no one is liable for the loss. Sometimes, bad loans accumulate from members who misappropriate funds. That is why researchers recommend that financial institutions and governments offer further support for ajo.

Beatrice Joseph is a thrift collector and restaurateur in Yola, Adamawa State, in northeast Nigeria, an area that has been plagued by terrorists and bandits. She manages the contributions of women across five markets in the state, engaging them in financial literacy training, bookkeeping, and loan repayment. During the lockdown, Beatrice lost all her investments when her restaurant was vandalized. She managed to keep her business and that of her members thanks to a partnership with Riby, a digital financial services (DFS) platform that supports financial cooperatives and trade groups in Nigeria. These services act as the central collector while simplifying the banking process by accepting social credit as collateral (the group stands as guarantor), using USSD codes and text messages instead of complicated apps, and securing their savings. This reduces the risk associated with ajo, while providing financial independence for the women by converting their savings to investments.

Ekundayo Kiyesi, general manager of Riby, describes the thrift collector as an individual microfinance bank that provides accountability, accessibility, and security to the ajo for a monthly service charge that is commonly around 25 cents. Platforms like Riby are formalizing the ajo system for larger collectives in markets and cottage industries like the unit Beatrice manages, but among smaller, homogenous groups some believe ajo should remain communal and independent.

Joy Ehonwa, a freelance writer and book editor in Lagos who runs a small ajo group for employed middle-class women, is one of them. Joy created a system of accountability for her group, a record and digitization process that involves registering a next of kin—which, she laughingly assured me, she had never had a reason to use.

Financial insecurity is just as much of an issue for women working in formal business employment, as it is for those whose income is derived from the informal economy. According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), approximately half the Nigerian working population earns less than 700 naira ($1.70) per day, even in formal employment; in cases where income is determined by gender (e.g. in the case of office assistants), women earn even less. With such low income and no collateral, they can neither save money nor afford to take a loan. This is where ajo comes in; it is a saving and interest-free loan system that they can depend on.

Nigerian women have more financial agency today than ever before, but societal and cultural norms are still very conservative. Husbands thus control the family finances due to the widely held belief that a man whose wife is financially independent is emasculated. A lack of education, religious and gender bias, and low trust in financial service providers are also reasons for financial dependence. But when women are empowered to earn and invest, they drive innovation, invest in health and child development and increase productivity and economic growth. The economic strength of a country is directly proportional to the economic strength of its women. Despite the digitization of ajo, it will remain a fluid system driven by community, trust and independence. With some financial education, Nigeria’s hardworking, innovative women will save their country’s declining economy.

[post_title] => How a traditional microsavings system enabled Nigerian women to save their businesses during the pandemic [post_excerpt] => Ajo, a traditional microsavings system based on trust, allowed women in the informal economy to survive the pandemic lockdown. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => how-a-traditional-microsavings-system-enabled-nigerian-women-to-save-their-businesses-during-the-pandemic [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3894 [menu_order] => 137 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 24, 2022August 28, 2024

How a traditional microsavings system enabled Nigerian women to save their businesses during the pandemic

by Nelly Kalu

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 3855 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2022-02-17 19:58:26 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-02-17 19:58:26 [post_content] =>

After two years of living under stringent pandemic protocols, Canadians are fed up. They might not agree with the freedom convoy's politics, but they understand their feeling of resentment.

“You’re taking the swastika out of context!”

I sat there wondering if someone had dosed my coffee with LSD.

“Excuse me?”

I could feel her seething on the other end of the telephone as she prepared to walk me through the ins and outs of Nazi iconography etiquette. Annette is a patient woman. She runs a private daycare in the suburbs north of Montreal — the kind of place that teaches toddlers to use sign language so they can tell their parents when they’re thirsty or need a fresh diaper.

But the swastika thing is testing her limits.

Two weeks ago, when a group calling itself the “Freedom Convoy” flooded downtown Ottawa with tractor trailers and an estimated 8,000 protesters, people were seen flying a Canadian flag with swastikas etched into it. There were a few, actually.

When I mentioned this to Annette, asking her why a protest about ending vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions seemed like such an inviting place for extremists, she took a deep breath. Annette, who supports the convoy, told me the symbol of the Third Reich on Parliament Hill wasn’t meant to be taken literally.

“It’s not a Nazi swastika, well it is but it’s not a pro-Nazi swastika. Okay, that sounds bad. It’s a comment on how Canada has become a fascist state with all these COVID restrictions.”

“So it’s an ironic swastika?” I replied.

“Yes,” she said, sounding relieved.

“But what about the actual Nazi flag?”

I swear I heard Annette’s palm hit her forehead. We agreed to change subjects.

The problem with Canada’s Freedom Convoy isn’t people like Annette. Well, it is and it isn’t.

Annette is triple vaccinated. She respects all of the COVID protocols and even voted for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government three times. But after two years of living with the ebbs and flows of a virus and restrictions that can feel improvised at the best of times, Annette is fed up. Which is understandable.

In Quebec—which has the most stringent COVID protocols of any province—an estimated two million people have contracted the Omicron variant since it arrived last fall. That’s roughly a quarter of my home province’s population. Of course, this is just an estimate since the latest wave wiped out Quebec’s testing capacity.

Annette’s frustration is perfectly normal. Where things get more complicated is that while the Freedom Convoy is supported by a small but sizeable minority of Canadians from all walks of life, it’s being led by a coalition with ties to American extremists like the Three Percenters militia, QAnon and even one former Trump staffer who’s helping with strategy on the frontlines.

But there are distinctly Canadian elements to the convoy as well. Alberta’s ultra-conservative “WEXIT” secessionists and Quebec’s Europe-inspired far right are both flying their colours on Parliament Hill. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention sightings of a few Proud Boys at the rally two weeks ago. Founded by Canadian Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys were recently designated a terrorist group by Trudeau’s government because of their penchant for insurrection and political violence.

The convoy’s logistics and messaging is handled by a group called Canada Unity, which is a mishmash of classic Canadian grievances — the Liberal government has never had a strong presence in Conservative strongholds like the prairies and rural Ontario, which only fuels a sense of mutual resentment — the French populist gilets jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement and American-style alt-right tactics.

Far-right activist Pat King is a major figure in the WEXIT campaign, which advocates for Alberta to secede from Canada; many in the oil-producing province resent their tax dollars going to the federal government’s coffers. Western alienation has been a central theme of Canadian politics since Trudeau’s father Pierre Elliot Trudeau was prime minister in the 1970s.

What’s different from past western protest movements is that Albertans are finding common ground with Quebec conservatives. Traditionally, these two groups aren’t even on speaking terms—partly because they speak different languages, but also because each sees the other as taking up too much space in the national conversation. But they appear to be finding common ground over their shared resentment of Trudeau and his multiculturalist view of Canada.

King also organized attacks on anti-racist demonstrators last year in northern Alberta, referring to his roughneck crew as “Patriots” — which certainly rings a bell to American ears. He says Muslim immigration will lead to the “depopulation of the caucasian race” which is a common theme for both the American and European far right. James Bauder, a leader of the far-right movement Canada Unity (in which King is also active), authored a “Memorandum of Understanding” that would force Canada’s unelected head of state, Governor General Mary Simon, and its unelected senate to negotiate with protesters and ultimately force Canada’s elected government to “resign their lawful positions” if they don’t meet the convoy’s demands.

A constitutional lawyer friend who looked through the document called it “somewhere between political witchcraft and January 6 fan fiction.”

Here, too, Canadians feel the influence of their southern neighbours, where far right activists and conspiracy theorists justified their attempt to overturn the presidential election on January 6, 2021 with an archaic and inconsistent reading of the U.S. Constitution.

And then there’s the question of who’s funding this thing. Political parties in Canada don’t raise money at nearly the rate of their American counterparts. Elections are almost entirely funded by the state and overseen by a robust arms-length entity, Elections Canada. For context, the Conservative Party of Canada raised $13 million in the second half of 2020 — more than any other party in the country during that period.

In the U.S. that kind of cash barely finances a down ballot congressional race.

So how is it that Canadians, who are notoriously thrifty when it comes to politics, put together a $10 million war chest for the Freedom Convoy in under two weeks? Most of that money, raised on the American GoFundMe platform, was frozen by the company because there was no way of tracking how it would be spent.

The federal government has since called on GoFundMe executives to testify before Parliament as to the source of this cash.

Determined not be thwarted by financial oversight, the Freedom convoy turned to GiveSendGo — the Christian platform that collected millions in donations for Kyle Rittenhouse — to keep their movement alive. It didn’t take long for millions more in donations to pour into the Convoy’s cause. This isn’t typical of Canadian politics.

QAnon slogans like “Free the Children” and “WWG1WWA” are scattered throughout the Ottawa site, alongside signs calling for Trudeau to be jailed and tried for treason, which bring some real “lock her up” vibes.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the Freedom Convoy is the ease with which journalists are harassed, attacked and threatened by supporters. In Alberta—where satellite protests are being staged—a reporter from CTV News tweeted a picture of himself removing the station’s logo from its TV truck to avoid being targeted by mob violence.

“It’s just not safe right now,” CTV reporter Justin Thompson wrote.

In Ontario, supporters of the convoy smashed the windows of a van belonging to Radio Canada, the French-language national broadcaster. The Quebec-based TVA Nouvelles started sending security guards alongside its reporters when covering the convoy’s Ottawa encampment. Meanwhile, the Canadian Association of Journalists reports that members covering the protest have been spat on and shoved, and have received countless death threats since the outset of the movement.

Last week, during a “press conference” organized by the convoy’s leaders, CTV News was barred from the event because organizers wanted to “(teach) the fake news industry what news is.” Again, this must sound familiar to Americans.

I’ve written just one article about the Freedom Convoy and some of its more enthusiastic supporters have threatened to stab, shoot, and hang me.

Adding another degree of American weirdness to the mix, former Trump administration advisor Paul Alexander has been on the frontlines of the protest, helping with strategy and sitting in on meetings with leadership.

For the residents of Canada’s notoriously boring capital city, life has been upended. A friend of mine, who works as an interpreter on Parliament Hill, told me she doesn’t feel safe at night walking past the encampment. But she also says she’s been so angry that she flips them off on her way to work every morning and struggles to suppress the urge to instigate a fight with them.

“I’m just looking for an excuse to throw a punch,” she said.

Here’s something an American audience might not realize. Canadians are perfectly capable of committing political violence independently of any outside influence. Though we may not have the American appetite for revolution, this country’s wealth is derived from stolen Indigenous land and ongoing colonial violence. But I digress.

Which brings me back to Annette.

We grew up in the same small town, where a huge percentage of our parents worked in the machine shops building airplanes for Bombardier, an aeronautics giant based out of Quebec. That changed after 9/11, when Canada’s aeronautics industry collapsed. Thousands of workers were laid off and while unemployment approached historic lows ahead of the pandemic, the years of a steady, well-paid job and access to home ownership feel like something that’s dying with our parents’ generation.

This too mirrors the economic anxiety of our southern neighbours. The Obama presidency may have turned the tide on the 2008 housing market collapse but income inequality persists and average household wealth hasn’t returned to pre-recession numbers.

So a lot of people — like Annette’s machinist husband — are living through an endless cycle of being laid off, hired again and then tossed back to the wilderness when the economy takes a dip. Meanwhile, companies like Bombardier get giant government bailouts even though they fail to meet benchmarks, continue laying off workers and rewarding their inept executives with millions in bonuses.

Add two years of COVID-19 to that and it seems only to have accelerated the frustration in Annette’s household.

“It’s time for this to end, I don’t recognize life in this country anymore,” she said. “We’re told to put our lives on hold and then start again and then put them back on hold. We have a set of rules that are constantly changing. Some of us have been vaccinated three times. What’s the end game here? Why are we being treated like idiots?

“I’m not a violent person, I am against the violence in the Freedom Convoy but I’m also angrier than I’ve ever been.”

U.S. influence among supporters of the Freedom Convoy is obvious but much of the anger fueling these protests has elements of western-Canadian alienation, resentment for a Liberal government that’s been in power 21 of the last 30 years and anxiety over a rapidly changing Canadian economy. Some of the far right elements of the movement have an American feel to them but there’s an anti-immigrant, Islamophobic segment of the protest that mirrors European conservative movements like Brexit, Front National or Éric Zémmour’s ultra nationalist Reconquête party.

The most worrisome aspect of the protest is how rapidly it was embraced by American conservatives with deep pockets, access to weapons and a wealth of knowledge about attacking democratic institutions.

Perhaps it’s just the LSD in my coffee making me paranoid but that seems like a dangerous combination. After all, we share the world’s longest international border.

[post_title] => The Freedom Convoy's politics are fringe, but the average Canadian's frustration is real [post_excerpt] => Here’s something an American audience might not realize. Canadians are perfectly capable of committing political violence independently of any outside influence. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-freedom-convoys-politics-are-fringe-but-the-average-canadians-frustration-is-real [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3855 [menu_order] => 138 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 17, 2022August 28, 2024

The Freedom Convoy’s politics are fringe, but the average Canadian’s frustration is real

by Christopher Curtis

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 3864 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2022-02-17 19:32:44 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-02-17 19:32:44 [post_content] =>

Canadians tend to see the extremism expressed by the truckers and their supporters as a fringe movement imported from the U.S., but that is a gross oversimplification.

The so-called “Freedom Convoy,” a highly disruptive protest organized and led by Canadian truckers who oppose vaccine mandates and other pandemic-related restrictions, is now entering its third week. Protesting truckers drove their rigs into downtown Ottawa and set up camp, blowing their horns at eardrum-shattering decibels for hours each day and holding tailgate parties, making the downtown area of Canada’s usually placid small capital city unlivable. City residents are incensed by the noise and disruption, while the chief of police has resigned under fire for his failure to disperse the demonstrators.

The protesters are deeply unpopular in Canada, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world with 90 percent of the population overall—including truckers— having received at least two doses. And yet, the Freedom Convoy has managed to dominate the news cycle and paralyze Canada’s capital city, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act, which gives law enforcement expanded powers to arrest protesters and break up demonstrations.

The angry, anti-vax truckers have harassed residents to the point that older people are afraid to leave their homes; they have committed multiple acts of vandalism and violence, some targeting journalists; and in one egregious incident were spotted lighting a fire in the lobby of a residential apartment building. They have blockaded roads, and not only in Ottawa. The freedom convoy participants have also shut down multiple border crossings as the protest has spread west, with particularly large presences elsewhere in Ontario and in Alberta, an oil-rich province known for cattle ranching and the prevalence of strong right-wing views, including secessionism—a combination that often elicits comparisons with Texas.

On Sunday police cleared and reopened the Ambassador Bridge, where protesters had for a week choked off a critical commercial route that connects Detroit, Michigan, to Windsor, Ontario. But the authorities have not yet found the stomach to forcibly break up the protest in Ottawa. As the siege drags on, journalists, pundits, and the public have been digging into the ideological motivations, funding sources, and cross-border networks of the protesters.

Protesters have displayed swastikas, Canadian flags, Confederate flags, Gadsen flags, Trump flags, U.S. flags, and QAnon messaging. Observers have also reported conservative Christian messaging and symbols that were likewise present at the U.S. protests against the 2020 election results that culminated in the January 6 insurrection. The elements clearly inspired by American right-wing Christians include “Jericho marches” around the parliamentary precinct in Ottawa, in a symbolic reenactment of the Hebrew Bible tale about God causing the city of Jericho’s walls to collapse after the Israelites marched while blowing ram’s horns, or shofars. Right-wing Christians have in recent years appropriated these Jewish ritual instruments, blowing them during church services and at “Jericho marches” in both the U.S. and Canada. The organizer of the Canadian “Jericho marches” is Benita Pedersen, an Albertan.

As Jorge Barrera reports for the CBC, “Christian faith — with an overtly evangelical feel — flows like an undercurrent through the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa.” But how much of this represents the direct influence of the American Christian Right, as opposed to an expression of homegrown, if fringe, Canadian extremism and majoritarian grievance?

Catherine Porter, the New York Times’s Canada bureau chief, observed that “many believe the unrest is essentially a U.S. import,” but this is an oversimplification. The discourse reminds me of how, when I first began researching networks involving U.S. Christian Right actors and right-wing, pro-Putin Russians (many associated with the Russian Orthodox Church) in 2013, the spread of illiberal, socially conservative policies in the global South, Eastern Europe, and Russia was often framed in terms of the exportation of America’s culture wars. A few years later, when the connections between Donald Trump’s campaign for president and various Russian actors became apparent, many liberals embraced the simplistic and frankly absurd notion that the U.S.’s right-wing extremism and deep social and political divisions had been essentially manufactured by Russian disinformation. The reality is that Russian influence operations managed to exploit and exacerbate problems that already existed.

Throughout those years, while monitoring the various networks and connections between American, western European, and Russian right-wing extremists, eventually in my capacity as a senior research associate with the Postsecular Conflicts project based at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, I stressed agency among actors from all factions and rejected temptations to view the efforts of organizations like the World Congress of Families (now known as the International Organization for the Family) as sites of unidirectional influence.

By the same token, the international ties between Canada’s right-wing extremists and those from other countries, primarily the U.S., must be seen in terms of multidirectional influence and feedback loops. The U.S. Christian Right does have ties to Canadian extremist groups, and at least a diffuse connection to the convoy wreaking havoc in Ottawa. Whereas transatlantic connections are usually limited to elite, higher-level actors, Canada and the U.S. share the world’s longest undefended border, making it easy for less well-funded, less sophisticated, less easily monitored actors to connect with one another—people who are ready to engage in street violence, or ideologues and agitators who are happy to appear alongside street brawlers.

Proud Boys Canada may have officially dissolved itself after Ottawa declared it a terrorist organization last spring, but the organization was founded by a Canadian. And, while the Proud Boys have become mainly an American group, some Canadians have been involved in violent right-wing protests on the U.S. side of the border. These include the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C., where at least one Canadian flag was spotted, and where a group of Proud Boys knelt in an unmistakably evangelical prayer that was captured on video before playing a prominent role in the violence. Canadian actors have also been present at right-wing protests and incidents of street violence in Portland, Oregon—a city frequently targeted by the Proud Boys and similar far-right group Patriot Prayer.

The most well-known Canadian who has frequented Oregon is the notorious Artur Pawlowski, a Polish-born evangelical pastor based in Calgary, Alberta, who has led raucous protests and direct actions against public health mandates in Canada throughout the coronavirus pandemic, claiming that public health protections violate his “religious freedom.” In one such protest, Pawlowski and other participants carried tiki torches in a clear nod to the August, 2017 white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pawlowski was recently arrested in Coutts, Alberta, in connection with his support for the protesters blockading the border crossing there.

As for the American Christian Right’s connections to the trucker protest in Canada, major figures such as Franklin Graham—world-famous evangelist Billy Graham’s son and head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—have spoken out in support of it. Although they are not household names, prominent “prophets” and “apostles” associated with the radical charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation—the kind of Christianity espoused by former Trump spiritual advisor Paula White—are also broadcasting their support, as researcher Bruce Wilson, who has published numerous articles documenting Christian Right and NAR activities and networks, confirmed when asked for comment.

The man holding the sign told 'The Catholic Register' that Pope Francis is a heretic and that the government is forcing people to take vaccines.

But perhaps the most significant U.S. Christian Right connection to the so-called “Freedom Convoy” is represented by the explicitly Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, which has become infamous in recent years for funding white supremacist causes, including the legal defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down supporters of Black Lives Matter at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Crowdfunding has allowed massive amounts of dark money to flow to the Canadian extremists behind the protest at a rate that dwarfs typical Canadian political fundraising, a worrisome development that could continue to undermine the country's civil society and democracy after the current protests are over.

Last week hackers broke into GiveSendGo’s network, releasing donor names, email addresses, and other information to journalists and researchers. One scholar looking into where the money originates is Dr. Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University. Lecaque posted a Twitter thread of messages from donors (without disclosing their names or other personally identifying information), as well as the countries (and in some cases states/provinces and cities) they come from. Eight of these messages “explicitly discuss Jericho,” Lecaque tweeted. The donations referenced in his thread mostly stemmed from the United States and Canada, but one came from the UK and another from France.

Lecaque told The Conversationalist that while the donors came from a broad geographic range, a high proportion were from the U.S. His keyword search of the messages donors posted brought up “a lot of religious themed entries, some more extreme than others.” Most of them were of the anodyne “God bless” variety, but there were some violent ones as well, with “themes of spiritual warfare or QAnon.” Lecaque acknowledged that explicitly religious messages were in the minority, but their presence nevertheless stood out.

The mostly white, racially aggrieved, conspiracy-theory believing crowd in the U.S. and Canada espouse unpopular views and support unpopular policies, but by using technology to connect and crowdfund internationally, they have managed to punch politically above their weight. Both countries have homegrown extremists and their own respective racist and colonialist realities to confront, but right-wingers from either side of the border are also influencing each other, probably more through media (including social media) than through direct cross-border interactions.

But what is it exactly that facilitates the mutual admiration and networking? That factor seems to be affiliation with conservative Christianity—especially, although not exclusively, evangelical Protestantism. This tracks with what I’ve observed in my own research both with respect to the domestic Christian Right and international right-wing networks. We are living through a moment of surging right-wing populism in North America, Europe, Australia, and some other parts of the world—a massive backlash against civil rights gains and the rise of multicultural democracy by the heirs of European colonialism and genocide.

A sense that they are outnumbered has contributed both to these individuals’ radicalization, and to the easing of traditional theological, cultural, and geopolitical enmities between various Christian and ethnic groups, paving the way for aggrieved (and mostly white) hardline Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Orthodox Christians to band together in attempts to assert dominance through the promotion of a “traditional values” agenda—whether in the European Court of Human Rights, the U.S. Supreme Court, or the streets of Portland and Ottawa. While most American, Canadian, and European Christians are not right-wing extremists, most American, Canadian, and European right-wing extremists identify with Christianity, and find in it a justification for their bigotry and anti-social, anti-government, and anti-democratic actions. For democracy to prevail, we must find more effective ways to counter the diffuse international threat of Christian extremism.

[post_title] => Conservative Christianity's influence on the 'Freedom Convoy' indicates global spread of authoritarianism [post_excerpt] => The protesters are deeply unpopular in Canada, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world with 90 percent of the population overall—including truckers— having received at least two doses. And yet, the Freedom Convoy has managed to dominate the news cycle and paralyze Canada’s capital city. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => freedom-convoys-extremism-poses-long-term-damage-to-canadian-civil-society [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3864 [menu_order] => 139 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 17, 2022August 28, 2024

Conservative Christianity’s influence on the ‘Freedom Convoy’ indicates global spread of authoritarianism

by Chrissy Stroop

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Finding the legal means to put children to work is another attempt to compensate for the 'great resignation,' with four million American adults declining to return to their low-paid jobs after the pandemic lockdown ended.

At the start of 2022, the United States set a global record with over one million Covid-19 cases reported each day—worse than at any time since the start of the pandemic. Just at this catastrophic moment, the government rolled back public assistance, which had become essential for millions of people struggling to deal with unemployment, the death of family members, and soaring food prices. This ongoing crisis has been particularly cruel to children, who have borne a disproportionate burden with the now-dominant Omicron variant.

Recent reports from the American Academy of Pediatrics show 11.4 million children have tested positive for the virus since the beginning of the pandemic, with 3.5 million pediatric cases reported in January alone.

Meanwhile, several Republican-controlled state legislatures want to weaken laws that limit child labor—even as Congressional Republicans oppose a continuation of Biden’s Child Tax Credit, which saw millions of children lifted from poverty virtually overnight. Those federal payments ended in December. As of January low-income parents are already in crisis and millions of children are poised to fall back into poverty.

At the federal level, the Biden administration is weakening child labor protection laws with its recently launched apprenticeship program, which lowers the minimum age for interstate long-haul trucking from 21 to 18, in an effort to ease supply chain backlogs by increasing the number of truckers. This is despite CDC research that shows motor vehicle accidents are highest among 16 to 19-year-olds. The director of the Truck Safety Coalition told the Huffington Post that putting teenagers behind the wheel of long-haul trucks was not safe, adding: “This is putting lipstick on a pig. They’re gaslighting the American people.”

The push to weaken child labor protection laws in an effort to fill what lawmakers call “labor shortages,” and which economists say is a shortage of jobs that pay a living wage, is most pronounced in Wisconsin. State lawmakers pushed a bill through the senate that would have expanded dramatically the number of hours 14 and 15 year-olds were allowed to work, to 11 p.m. on evenings that were not followed by a school day and as late as 9:30 pm on school nights.

This 1911 photo of children working in a Pennsylvania coal mine led Congress to pass child labor protection laws. Now government is rolling those protections back, undoing a century of progress.

The Wisconsin law only applies to businesses that are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and flagship child labor provisions. Adolescents who are 14 and 15 years old may not, for example, work more than 18 hours per week during the school year in a job covered by federal law—i.e., which take in less than $500,000 in revenue and are not engaged in interstate commerce.

Wisconsin State Senator Mary Felzkowski (R-Irma), who introduced the legislation, said in a press release that “The idea for this bill came from a small business owner in town who ran into staffing issues during summer hours due to their young employees not being able to work past 9 p.m.”

In an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale wrote, “The proposed change is the latest attempt by Wisconsin Republicans to solve the state’s so-called labor shortage on the backs of children.” The AFL-CIO, Wisconsin Education Association Council, and Wisconsin School Social Workers Association have all issued statements condemning the new law, saying it rolls back child labor protection laws.

Governor Tony Evers apparently agreed with the AFL-CIO: on February 4 he vetoed the bill.

Finding the legal means to put children to work is another attempt to compensate for the “great resignation,” with four million Americans declining to return to their low-paid jobs when the pandemic lockdown ended. The Wisconsin law allows businesses to keep wages low and fill job vacancies with adolescent employees—who should be focusing on their studies instead of working late on school nights—rather than increasing wages to attract adult employees. Another incentive for employers is that federal law allows them to pay workers younger than 20 as little as $4.25 an hour for the first 90 consecutive days of employment, which they can describe as a training period. Wisconsin is one of 20 states that have maintained the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour since 2008.

Small businesses have notoriously opposed attempts to raise the minimum wage, arguing that the increased labor costs would put them out of business. But big corporations are also capitalizing on the so-called labor shortage, in an effort to hire younger workers for low wages.

“They would like to see these hours of work change nationwide,” President Bloomingdale, who recently debated the head of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, tells The Conversationalist. “We need to renew our collective efforts to make sure that when people go to work, they have the ability to sustain a family.”

McDonald’s has come under fire in recent months for allowing a franchise owner in Medford, Oregon, to hang a banner outside that read “NOW HIRING 14 & 15 year-olds.” Job postings that advertise positions for 14, 15, and 16-year-olds at McDonald’s are still up online with a reminder that “during the summer months when school is out of session you are actually allowed to work up to 5 days a week and 38 hours a week.” Other fast-food chains have taken similar steps in a desperate attempt to alleviate staffing shortages.

Reid Maki, the Director of the National Consumer League’s Child Labor Coalition, said the government does not keep strong data on child labor. “There’s good reason to fear that the numbers could climb,” he said, adding that rising poverty caused by the pandemic could “drive kids to early work” rather than staying in school.

The Department of Labor warns that “the pandemic and subsequent economic downturns threaten to reverse decades of progress on child labor.” Labor disruptions, the death of family members, and school closures are listed as some of the key factors aggravating the situation. But this data is outward-facing and treats child labor as an international issue among developing nations.

In the U.S., one in seven children lives in poverty. They account for one-third of impoverished Americans, according to data from the Center for American Progress. The U.S. ranks third in child poverty rates among OECD nations, after Israel and Chile.

“The [American] public doesn’t really perceive that child labor is a thing of contemporary times,” Maki says.

Asked about the Wisconsin legislation, Maki said, “One issue is that kids who work a certain number of hours don’t do as well in school.” But he was also concerned about the safety issues that come with working later hours, both on the job and while driving home.

Maki is not opposed to teens working part-time jobs for some pocket money. His concern is for children who are compelled to work because the family needs their income to meet basic expenses. “We need to get to a point where all adults make a living wage and don’t need the income of their kids to help the family get by,” says Maki.

But with soaring inflation and millions newly cut off from unemployment benefits, the risk that children will have to go out and work in order to help their parents put food on the table is now very real.

Under Biden’s Covid relief package, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) provided families with $3,600 per year for each child under the age of six and $3,000 for each child 17 and under, with the funds paid out in monthly checks of up to $300 per child. These payments went furthest among families who typically don’t make enough money in a fiscal year to receive a full CTC under normal circumstances. The December expiration has now cut off a critical source of cash-in-hand for the poorest families.

For Republicans, that seems to be the point. The GOP Ways and Means Committee published a blog post in October 2021 denying that the Child Tax Credit had reduced child poverty by half and claiming that it discourages people from working. They cite a University of Chicago study that claims the CTC would cause 1.5 million workers to exit the labor force.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we believed children were largely “immune” to the virus. Now we know this isn’t the case. Children are contracting Covid, just not at numbers that register at the policy level. Our elected officials have shown that they’re willing to let children be the collateral damage of an ongoing crisis in more ways than one.

[post_title] => Republicans want to solve the labor shortage problem by putting children to work [post_excerpt] => Weak labor laws combined with poverty and soaring inflation could result in millions of children leaving school to help put food on the family table. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => republicans-want-to-solve-the-labor-shortage-problem-by-putting-children-to-work [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3778 [menu_order] => 141 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 9, 2022August 28, 2024

Republicans want to solve the labor shortage problem by putting children to work

by Indigo Olivier

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[post_content] => The historic election marks the final stage in the transition away from Pinochet's dictatorship.

Hundreds of thousands of people flocked onto the streets of Chile’s cities on Sunday night to celebrate a history-making presidential election. The sounds of cheers and honking car horns were everywhere as, with 97 percent of the votes counted, Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student leader who headed the leftist coalition Frente Amplio, became the country’s youngest president. The final polls heading into the election predicted a very close result, with the far-right Jose Antonio Kast, 55, slightly ahead of the much younger, progressive Boric. But the final tally was not even close: Boric won with 55.9 percent of the vote—12 percentage points ahead of Kast, who called Boric to concede at 7.10 p.m., after only 30 percent of the ballots had been counted.

[caption id="attachment_3644" align="aligncenter" width="740"] Jubilant Boric supporters poured onto the streets of Santiago on December 19, 2021.[/caption]

On Election Day I was in Concepcion, in south-central Chile, feeling anxious but also hopeful that the Chilean people would elect Gabriel Boric, the humane, democratic and environmentally conscious candidate. I was at a polling station as ballot counting began, watching as the numbers showed a consistent advantage for Boric. When the announcement was made that Gabriel Boric had been elected, becoming Chile's youngest president, I was euphoric.

"I will be a president who cares for democracy and does not risk it," Gabriel Boric said after he was elected to be the youngest president in Chile's history. The 35-year-old is the most liberal since President Salvador Allende in the early 70s. https://t.co/DEW4g8aNab pic.twitter.com/bijxRztHoZ
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 20, 2021

The two candidates campaigned on polarized visions for their country.

Kast, a conservative Catholic with nine children, is a Pinochet supporter. He ran a right-wing populist campaign that promoted a continuation of neoliberal economic policies and climate change denial. He vociferously opposed gender equality and abortion rights and incited against impoverished Venezuelans and Haitians who sought a better life in Chile.
Read more: Chile faces its most consequential election since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship
Boric is a former leader of the 2011-13 student movement, which sought better and more affordable education for all; as a young politician, he was one of the architects of the 2019 Agreement for Social Peace, which led to the 2020 referendum for a new, more equitable constitution to replace the Pinochet-era one. His platform calls for an overhaul of the economy, ending the neoliberal policies that have made the country deeply unequal; Boric campaigned on making Chile a more unified society—one fully transitioned away from the legacy of the Pinochet regime.
The campaign
Sunday’s election marked the end of a long process that began with the July primaries. Boric surprised everyone by winning the leadership of the leftist coalition over the Communist candidate, Daniel Jadue. The polls had projected a win for Jadue, but he made some serious missteps with various gaffes, including antisemitic statements; Boric, meanwhile, came off as inclusive, charismatic, and knowledgeable during the debates. With his moderate yet innovative positions, like the importance of finding a balance between economic growth and a response to the climate crisis, he attracted the millennial voters who played a decisive role in his becoming the leftist coalition's candidate. A high turnout for the primaries, with more than 1.7 million voters casting a ballot, created a solid electoral base for the first round of the presidential election.

Kast, on the other hand, did not participate in the right-wing party’s primary elections; nor was he a favorite in the polls at the beginning of the election campaign. His candidacy emerged from a political pact between conservative Christians and the new far-right Republican Party; he then went on to perform well during the first debates against Sebastian Sichel, his rival for leadership of the right-wing coalition. Sichel positioned himself as a center-right candidate, a move that proved to be a mistake: He pushed right-wing voters toward Kast, whom they saw as an “authentic” right-wing candidate. For the far-right, who supported the Pinochet dictatorship and opposed a new constitution, Kast represented both their natural political home, and the man who was more likely to bring a right-wing government to power. The center-right moved toward Kast because they saw him as the man most likely to be elected and they wanted a right-wing government at all costs, even if that meant tacitly supporting xenophobic proposals such as the construction of ditches in Chile’s north to prevent impoverished and desperate Venezuelan migrants from entering the country.
The race
In the weeks before Election Day on December 19, polls consistently showed Kast just slightly ahead of Boric in a very tight race. International legacy media outlets painted a picture of Chilean society polarized between two extremist candidates, although Boric’s views are hardly extreme—they would put him somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In Chile, the influential right-wing media outlets played an outsized role in promoting Kast’s campaign with fake news that incited against Boric. Kast, for example, claimed several times that the bearded, tattooed leader of the leftist coalition used illicit drugs, a baseless lie that the right-wing media amplified until it gained such wide credence that Boric felt compelled to respond. During the December 13 debate against Kast he released lab results that proved he had no cannabis, amphetamines, or cocaine in his bloodstream.

Besides creating a divisive and polarized atmosphere during the campaign, the far right’s aggressive rhetoric and fake news also disseminated fear of Boric’s purportedly “socialist” agenda. For example, Kast claimed that the Communist Party’s support for Boric was indicative of a dangerous, far-left agenda; evoking Venezuela’s socialist bogeyman, he said that Boric, if elected, would drag Chile into chaos. In fact, Boric is very much a moderate who has attracted broad support with a political platform that advocates policies similar to those of European social democratic parties.

Voter turnout in Chile hovers at 50 percent, which increased this time in the second round. Some analysts predicted that Boric would inspire a surge in the youth vote, propelled by their concerns about the climate crisis and rising authoritarianism. While there is no data yet about age groups, overall voter participation did increase by more than one million over the first round. This election saw the highest electoral turnout in Chilean history, with Gabriel Boric receiving more votes than any presidential candidate in previous elections.
A historic election
Kast’s extreme views on women’s rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights inspired a diverse political movement in support of Boric’s candidacy. One of his proposals, for example, was to allow police to detain suspects for five days in undefined “confinement centers.” The far-right candidate thus galvanized significant sectors of voters to find common cause in combating the threat of far-right populism. The close relationship between the far right and religious fundamentalists alarmed feminists and other progressive movements, mobilizing them to organize and get out the vote.

But Chileans remain divided about the causes and outcomes of the 2019 social movement that sparked nationwide protests, which in turn led to a political agreement for the establishment of a constitutional process. The far-right opposes any structural change to Pinochet’s system. Boric and his broad coalition represent Chile’s majority, who aspire to a stable social and political transformation. They support the constitutional process and want a more equitable economic system that will replace Pinochet’s neoliberal legacy with a welfare state and sound environmental policies. Boric’s administration will seek to introduce an ecological approach to governing, and to implement transformative policies to pensions and healthcare, two of the pillars of the unequal and segregated Chilean system. Boric represents hope for a nation that wants more dignity, a fact that puts positive pressure on the future government: it needs to be humane, fair, and efficient. I believe the newly elected President Boric is more than ready to take on this immense challenge.
[post_title] => Gabriel Boric becomes Chile's youngest president on a progressive mandate
[post_excerpt] => The historic election marks the final stage in the transition away from Pinochet's dictatorship.
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December 20, 2021August 28, 2024

Gabriel Boric becomes Chile’s youngest president on a progressive mandate

by Pedro Cisterna Gaete

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