Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in the same party as Joe Biden By Genevieve Leigh 28 January 2020

Democratic Representative from New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said in an interview with New York Magazine that she and former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, would be in different political parties in any other country.

The comment came in response to a question about what role Ocasio-Cortez might play as a member of Congress should Biden win. She said in response, In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.

Ocasio-Cortez added that the Democrats could be too big of a tent and criticized the Congressional Progressive Caucuss standard for lawmakers. They let anybody who the cat dragged in call themselves a progressive, she stated, adding, theres no standard.

The comments prompted a wide range of responses in the media. There were dozens of headlines touting (or lamenting) Ocasio-Cortezs radical left agenda, with many agreeing that the two prominent Democrats should not, in fact, be in the same party.

Jacobin, the unofficial media voice of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), ran an article with the headline: AOC Is Right: She and Joe Biden Should Not Be in the Same Party, which outlined the supposed gulf between the politics of Biden and those of Ocasio-Cortez on numerous issues. Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the DSA, and Jacobin and the DSA regularly celebrate the congresswoman as the way forward for the socialist movement in the US.

Jacobin concludes: She and Biden dont belong in the same party. No party is big enough for the both of them.

The obvious question is why, if Ocasio-Cortezs political opinions are indeed so radically different from Bidens, are they in the same party? Jacobin responds by attributing this to the particularly anti-democratic form of the American two-party system, with its restrictive ballot access laws and the absence of proportional representation.

In reality, Ocasio-Cortez, like Bernie Sanders, is playing a critical role that has long been assumed, in different forms, by supposedly left organizations and individuals within the Democratic Party: namely, channeling social tensions and opposition behind the oldest capitalist party in America.

There is the experience of the Peoples Party and the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan in the late 1890s, through which the populist movement was appropriated and smothered by the Democratic Party; the Farmer-Labor Party campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s in the upper-Midwest, which were absorbed by the Democrats; the Jesse Jackson campaigns in the 1980s; and most recently the campaigns of figures like Dennis Kucinich and Sandersall of whom served in one form or another to contain social opposition within the framework of the Democratic Party and the capitalist two-party system.

The DSA itself, from its inception, has existed as an auxiliary arm of the Democratic Party, with no serious pretense to independence. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. Michael Harrington was the founder of both the DSA in 1982 and its predecessor organization, the DSOC.

Harringtons early political training came in the 1950s as a leader of the Young Socialist League, the youth organization of the Independent Socialist League, led by Max Shachtman. Shachtman had split from the Socialist Workers Party, the pioneer party of American Trotskyism, in 1940, leading a petty-bourgeois opposition opposed to the defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism.

By 1950, the Shachtmanites were defending US intervention in the Korean War. In 1961, soon after merging his organization with the US Socialist Party, Shachtman supported the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He soon was defending imperialist war crimes in Vietnam.

Harrington broke with Shachtman over the latters vociferous support for the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. His criticisms were not based on principled opposition to imperialism, however, but rather on the view, shared by most sections of the Democratic Party, that the war was unwinnable and was undermining the interests of American capitalism.

Both Shachtman and Harrington, despite their political differences, sought to keep the working class tied to the Democrats. They attached themselves to different wings of this party of imperialist reaction.

Shachtman had become a top adviser to AFL-CIO President George Meany and to the most right-wing war hawks among the Democrats. Harrington was close to other sections of the trade union bureaucracy, and to the wing of the Democrats supporting George McGovern, the partys presidential candidate in 1972. The McGovern campaign played a critical role in the reorientation of the Democratic Party, abandoning all pretense of defending the working class and instead basing itself on privileged layers of the middle class on the basis of the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation.

The first issue of Democratic Left, the flagship publication of the DSOC, laid out its orientation: to build a progressive majority for the Democratic Party in 1974 and 1976. In a prominent editorial in the same edition, Harrington explained the function of the newly founded group: We believe that the left wing of realism is today found in the Democratic Party. It is there that the mass forces for social change are assembled; it is there that the possibility exists for creating a new first party in America.

The time period when Harrington was drawing the conclusion that the Democratic Party was the way forward for socialists and social change is of particular significance. American capitalism was entering a period of protracted economic decline. The Vietnam War spelled the end of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. By the late 1960s, the postwar boom had begun to unravel and the policies of the Democratic Party underwent a shift to the right. The ruling class was preparing to launch a social counterrevolution, beginning the process of tearing up all the gains workers had won in an earlier period.

Further on in the same commentary, Harrington added: We do not want to purge the New Politics from the Democratic Party; we choose, rather, to help bring out its best potential.

The New Politics to which Harrington referred was a reflection of the Democratic Partys attempt to absorb middle class elements emerging from the movement against the Vietnam War. None other than President Richard Nixon adopted a similar strategy after 1968 with his embrace of black capitalism, a program that included policies such as affirmative action and racial quotas aimed at promoting a layer of black businessmen and politicians who then helped preside over an immense increase in social inequality.

Harrington articulated the views of a broad layer of 1960s radicals who were moving to the right. They had abandoned any conception, to the extent they ever had one, of socialism based on the working class. This layer did not want to be burdened by any principles, socialist or otherwise, that stood in the way of their entry into the upper-middle class.

The four decades since the founding of the DSA have seen an unbroken movement to the right on the part of the ruling class as a whole, and the Democratic Party in particular. The Democrats long ago rejected any association with social reform. Under the Obama administration (2009-2017), the Democrats oversaw the biggest redistribution of wealth from the working class to the rich in US history.

There is mass popular opposition to inequality and war, which has erupted in the form of demonstrations and strikes throughout the world, along with a growing political radicalization of young people. More and more, young people are identifying themselves as socialists.

The emergence of Ocasio-Cortez is completely in line with the traditional role of the Democratic Party as an instrument of the ruling class to capture and strangle popular opposition to capitalism. She herself is not the head of a mass movement that the Democratic Party is working to co-opt. She is rather the product of maneuvers by the DSA, operating inside the Democratic Party, to preempt the popular support for socialism that was revealed in 2016 in the 13 million votes for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primaries.

Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, is a long-time functionary for the Democratic Party. He ran as the supposed opponent of the billionaire class and champion of a political revolution, which turned out to be a campaign to hustle votes for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of Wall Street and the political establishment.

Ocasio-Cortezs marching orders are to keep the growing opposition in the working class within the safe confines of the two-party system. Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Sanders has anything to do with a genuine movement for socialism, which must be based in the working class and guided by a program to mobilize workers on an international basis against world capitalism. In her brief tenure in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez has already demonstrated that her politics are entirely compatible with those of the Democratic Party establishment.

She has fully accepted the Democrats anti-Russia campaign and the right-wing, pro-war basis of their impeachment proceedings against Trump. She has dropped her demand to abolish ICE, which is spearheading Trumps war on immigrants, and cultivated a close relationship with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

She has been silent on the persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning and the associated attack on free speech, as well as the illegal military violence, mass spying and record deportations carried out by the Obama administration.

She, along with Sanders, joined in the disgusting chorus of praise for arch-warmonger John McCain following the Arizona senators death, tweeting: John McCains legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency. (See Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders praise McCain: An object lesson in the politics of the pseudo-left)

Her signature legislation, the Green New Deal, was put forward as a non-binding resolution. It features left-sounding rhetoric but has zero significance in terms of resolving the global warming crisis. It promotes the fiction that it is possible to avert an environmental catastrophe within the framework of capitalism and the Democratic Party.

At the end of the day, Biden and Ocasio-Cortez agree on all of the fundamental points that define the Democratic Party: support for imperialist war, which requires attacks on democratic rights and social programs; American nationalism and defense of the nation-state framework, which means attacks on immigrants and a buildup of police state repression; and the defense of capitalist ownership of the means of production, the source of the social evils that Biden and Ocasio-Cortez claim to oppose.

Ocasio-Cortez has moved steadily away from any association with the term socialism. In a particularly revealing interview with NBC News Chuck Todd last year, she was asked if one could be a socialist and capitalist at the same time. Ocasio-Cortez replied that she thought it was possible.

The working class has been repeatedly sold the same bill of goods about reforming the Democratic Party for more than a century. Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA are hoping they can pull off this political swindle one more time.

As the new decade opens, the working class is facing enormous political dangers: the threat of a third world war, the rise of fascism, a looming ecological catastrophe, and the further destruction of jobs and social services. At the same time, strikes and protests against social inequality and attacks on democratic rights are taking place on virtually every continent. The growing international movement against capitalism shows the potential for a revolutionary socialist alternative.

The critical question is the building of a revolutionary leadership, which requires the rejection and defeat of all those, such as Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA, who seek to trap working people within the confines of capitalist politics.

2019 has been a year of mass social upheaval. We need you to help the WSWS and ICFI make 2020 the year of international socialist revival. We must expand our work and our influence in the international working class. If you agree, donate today. Thank you.

Go here to see the original:
Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in the same party as Joe Biden - World Socialist Web Site

In Howard Zinns play Marx in Soho, Karl Marx remarks, They are all proclaiming that my ideas are dead! Its nothing new. These clowns have been saying this for more than a hundred years. Dont you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?

Reflecting on Zinns death 10 years ago, the parallel is striking: the right and all too many liberals still find it necessary to attack the historian, playwright and socialist thinker because of the remarkable clarity, power and danger his ideas represent today.

When whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison, charged with releasing classified documents, including the video of a 2007 U.S. airstrike on Iraqi civilians that killed two Reuters journalists, Manning declared: As the late Howard Zinn once said, There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

Get the latest news and thought-provoking analysis from Truthout.

Protesters have carried placards bearing this quote and many others by Zinn in marches around the globe, and graffiti artists and muralists have shared his words and image internationally.

Zinn continues to be referenced in popular culture, including recent appearances in John Leguizamos one-person Broadway show and television special Latin History for Morons, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobsons television series Broad City and Greta Gerwigs movie Lady Bird.

The actor Riz Ahmed, discussing his television miniseries Englistan, told Variety that A Peoples History of the United States had shown him the possibility of taking a different look at events of the past.

A Peoples History of the United States, Zinns most famous work, challenges traditional historical narratives taught in U.S. schools, and instead focuses on the history of those often erased from textbooks. A Peoples History of the United States continues to sell remarkably well, seeing a large bump after the 2016 presidential election, and has now sold more than 3.6 million copies of the U.S. edition alone. The book continues to influence how people both teach and learn history and how they see themselves in history.

More than 100,000 teachers have registered with the Zinn Education Project, which promotes and supports the teaching of peoples history in classrooms across the country, and are using its free resources and curricula in classrooms across the country.

Throughout his life, Zinn emphasized agency, not just of heroic individuals but of people in common cause, in organizations, in social movements. And he embodied in his everyday life a spirit of joyful defiance of authority.

This is at the heart of Zinns radicalism, and why he remains such a threat to the establishment, whether the right or establishment liberals.

Ten years after Zinns death, the world is at a perilous crossroads. The great English historian Eric Hobsbawm titled his history of the years 1914 to 1991 The Age of Extremes. But that title could well describe the decade we have just collectively survived, as well as the dangerous new one we are entering.

Right-wing authoritarianism in some cases, directly linked to newly emboldened fascist forces is openly shaping politics in Brazil, India, the United States and beyond.

The planet is on fire, as Naomi Klein has extensively documented, and eco-fascist movements are using the environmental crisis to advance their hateful ideology.

The ultra-rich hoard wealth, while billions face displacement, hunger, malnutrition, shortened lifespans, surveillance, caging and oppression.

The powerful would like to smash our planet, and grab as much as they can while they are alive. And they want no interference from the wretched of the Earth.

Zinn described our world as topsy-turvy, and dedicated his life to turning it right side up. That is why his ideas live on. That is why so many people need to declare them dead again and again.

Writing about the great writer and socialist Kurt Vonnegut, who died three years before him, Zinn noted his wry humor, a trait they both shared.

Zinn then observed, Vonnegut was often asked why he bothered writing. He answered this way: Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about. You are not alone. Millions and millions of people, all over the world, reading him, do not feel alone. What could be a more important achievement?

In our atomized and cruel world, the same can be said of Zinns remarkable life and achievement.

Zinn reminds us that we are not alone, that the only way anything has ever changed is when people collectively acted to bring about changes none of them could have imagined or achieved on their own, and that we can and must wrest the world from the fools who are destroying it.

Go here to see the original:
10 Years After His Passing, Howard Zinn Remains a Threat to the Status Quo - Truthout

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been denied access to evidence and even basic items like paper and pens by British prison officials, putting his US extradition case on the brink of judicial review, his lawyer has warned.

Solicitor Gareth Pierce was shocked to learn that District Judge Vanessa Baraitser only intended to allow the defence team one hour to review evidence with the Australian in the holding cells at the Westminster Magistrates Court on Monday.

Hes been charged in the US with 17 counts of spying and one count of computer hacking after WikiLeaks allegedly tried to help US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning conceal her virtual identity in the release of thousands of classified Pentagon files regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Assanges supporters in the public gallery, including British rapper M.I.A., silently waved and raised fists to him and he smiled and nodded before giving them a two-fingered salute.

Ms Pierce, who had expected to have a full day with Assange, explained that her team had previously been allowed just two hours to review evidence with him in prison.

It set us back in our timetable enormously, she told the court.

We will do our best but this slippage in the timetable is extremely worrying.

Ms Pierce described how the administration of Belmarsh prison, where hes being held, had obstructed access to her client to the point where she had even had to approach UK government lawyers to assist.

She warned that further denying Assange his human right to legal access was putting his case on the brink of a judicial review.

Judge Baraitser adjourned the case until later on Monday afternoon to allow the defence team to review case evidence with Assange.

Ms Pierce, who had expected to have a full day with Assange, explained that her team had previously been allowed just two hours to review evidence with him in prison.

It set us back in our timetable enormously, she told the court.

We will do our best but this slippage in the timetable is extremely worrying.

Ms Pierce described how the administration of Belmarsh prison, where hes being held, had obstructed access to her client to the point where she had even had to approach UK government lawyers to assist.

She warned that further denying Assange his human right to legal access was putting his case on the brink of a judicial review.

Judge Baraitser adjourned the case until later on Monday afternoon to allow the defence team to review case evidence with Assange.

In that second sitting, Ms Peirce said that she had only had an hour to speak to Assange.

Wikileaks ambassador Joseph Farrell called Assanges severely limited access legal representation to date as outrageous.

Given the way Belmarsh is dealing with this, its on the brink of judicial review, he told AAP.

To have three hours with your lawyers when youre facing 175 years in prison (in the US) is not acceptable.

Academy and Grammy award-nominated hip-hop artist M.I.A., who visited Assange in prison last year, said authorities had even denied him simple things like a pen and paper.

She said some books were denied as well due to concerns he could use them to secretly communicate with outsiders.

It blows my mind that England can have this going, and with the support of Australia, M.I.A. told AAP.

Mr Farrell said given the number of stumbling blocks presented to Assange it raised the question of whether the biggest media freedom case this century was actually a fair trial.

More importantly than all that, the fact that this is a trial at all is outrageous, he told AAP.

This is somebody who is in prison for exposing war crimes, for doing his job. Hes in prison for the very same reason as he was given a Walkley Award. This is not something that should be allowed to happen.

Assanges next hearing is scheduled for January 23. He is due to appear via video link from Belmarsh prison.

View original post here:
Assange denied access to lawyers in UK - Daily Times

On this weeks Dissenter Weekly Update, host and Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola discusses how military contractors are speaking out after President Donald Trump assassinatedand attempted to assassinateleaders of militias aligned with General Qassim Soleimani.

Current and former employees for a military contractor called Sallyport Global Services claim the Iranian-backed militia, Kataib Al Imam Ali, allegedly stole military hardware and issued death threats against their employees. The company, which had a billion-dollar contract with the Pentagon, bribed the militia with free trucks and a first, second, and third base for their operations. These fighters were aligned with the United States, probably fighting ISIS, wasting taxpayers dollars like most military ventures. Its how the business of war works.

Later in the program, Gosztola highlights a story involving an ex-employee of a firm that was contracted by Honduras to help the country rebuild their water and sewer systems. The ex-employee filed a whistleblower lawsuit because the Honduras government refused to pay the firm $51 million, and the Justice Department is backing the Honduras government.

Gosztola provides an update on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assanges extradition case. He will travel to London in February to cover an extradition hearing for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that has grave implications for global press freedom. Help us fund his trip by making a donation at https://shadowproof.com/donate.

The Dissenter Weekly Update airs every Thursday at 4pm ET on YouTube and covers whistleblower and press freedom news from that week.

Regulatory Board Accused Of Proposing Corporate-Friendly Rules To Deal With Accidental Pollution

Ex-Employee Of Ruined Alabama Firm Battles Honduras, US Government In Whistleblower Case

Bloomberg Insists Female Former Employees Should Not Be Freed From NDAs

Before the U.S. Bombed Soleimanis Militia Leaders, It Bribed Them

Julian Assange Still Denied Access To Lawyers In Fight Against U.S. Extradition

Former New York Times General Counsel: Will Alleged CIA Misbehavior Set Julian Assange Free?

***

As of this recording, Chelsea Manning has been in jail for 309 days and owes $200,000 dollars in fines.

Julian Assange has been in jail for 273 days since he was expelled from the Ecuador embassy in London.

Subscribe to Shadowproof on YouTube and send tips and feedback to editor@shadowproof.com

This show is brought to you by Shadowproof.com, a 100% reader-funded press organization. If you enjoy our work, you can support us with a donation or by subscribing for $5/month or more: https://shadowproof.com/donate

See the original post here:
Dissenter Weekly: Blowing Whistle On Business Of War In IraqPlus, Honduras and DOJ Cheat Whistleblower - Shadowproof

ARTS WORK IN THE AGE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY: SHAPING OUR GENETIC FUTURES

Through Sunday, March 15

The Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh

Where do we draw the lines dividing art from science, natural from unnatural, and boldness from hubris?

An exhibit at N.C. States Gregg Museum of Art & Design doesnt answer these questions. Instead, it offers head-spinning new ways to ask them at the nexus of art and biotechnology, sharpening our insight into the fields future and expanding our understanding of it into the past.

These hard-to-classify collaborations between artists and scientistsseethe with hot-button issues related to ethics, privacy, human nature, and more. But if they have one message in common, its to be careful what you wish for.

Arts Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures is the result of more than two years of planning led by Molly Renda, the exhibit program librarian at N.C. State University Libraries, and the universitys Genetic Engineering and Society Center. Guest-curated by Hannah Star Rogers, who studies the intersection of art and science, the main exhibit at the Gregg has annexes in Hill and Hunt libraries.

On a recent tour of the exhibit, Renda and Fred Gould, the co-director of the GESC, said that they wanted to bring artists into the welter of science-and-design innovation taking place at the university because their differing perspectives on fundamental human issues create balance, tension, and discovery.

In the course of this, Ive found that artists tend to be more dystopian and designers are more utopian, Renda says.

There are different ways of knowing things, Gould adds. Thats why Molly came up with the name: not artwork, but arts work. What is an artist supposed to do?

Some pieces take on the dangers of day-after-tomorrow DNA testing and engineering technology. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is best known for Probably Chelsea, a piece in which she collected DNA samples from Chelsea Manning and generated thirty-two possible portraits of the soldier and activist.

When we worry about biotechnology, we usually worry that our food is going to be dangerous. But sometimes you wish for something thats rare: What happens when biotechnology makes it available to you?

The Gregg is showing a similar piece in which Dewey-Hagborg harvested DNA from cigarette butts and gum she found on the street and created probablebut not definitereplicas of the litterers faces, which hang on the walls above the specimens. Dewey-Hagborg demonstrates not only the unnerving extent of whats currently possible with DNA testing, but also the limits, which create misidentification risks.

Other pieces probe how biotechnology might reshape life as we know it. In a film and a sculpture representing an ancient Greek rite for women, Charlotte Jarvis raises the possibility of creating female sperm, based on the idea that, because stem cells are undifferentiated, you could theoretically teach womens stem cells to develop into sperm.

Still other pieces pointedly poke holes in the boundary between science and art. Adam Zaretskys Errorarium (entitled "Bipolar Flowers")looks like a cross between an arcade cabinet and a terrarium. It houses a few genetically modified Arabidopsis specimens, which Gould calls the white mice of research plants. When you turn the knobs, it changes the sonic parameters of a synthesizer, notionally testing the effects of the sound on the mutant plants.

It doesnt really do anythingor does it? Zaretskys experiment with no hypothesis is a playful tweak on science with something a little dangerous in the background.

Joe Davis, a bio-art pioneer, touches on something similar in his piece, which consists of documentation of an experiment where mice roll dice to determine if luck can be bred. Renda says that Davis couldnt get permission to run the test (universities are wary of drawing attention for ridiculous-seeming experiments), so he did it as conceptual art at N.C. State, instead.

Its notable that two artists home in on luck, one of many human concepts that genetic engineering, which will allow us to take control of our bodies and environment in untested ways, will transform. In We Make Our Own Luck Here, Ciara Redmond has bred four-leaf clovers (without genetic modification), which ruins themtheyrelucks evidence, not its cause. This whimsical iteration of unconsidered consequences raises a serious question: What else are we not thinking of?

When we worry about biotechnology, we usually worry that our food is going to be dangerous, Gould says. But sometimes you wish for something thats rare: What happens when biotechnology makes it available to you?

The exhibit takes an expansive view of biotechnology. Maria McKinney uses semen-extraction straws to sculpt proteins from double-muscled breeding bulls, underscoring that weve been tampering with life since long before CRISPR. Biotech feels radically new, but its revealed as part of a centuries-long process.

Another part of the exhibit, which closed at the end of October but can still be experienced through virtual reality at the Gregg, was From Teosinte to Tomorrow, Rendas land-art project at the North Carolina Museum of Art. In what was essentially a walk back through agricultural history, a bed of teosinte, which is thought to be the ancestor of modern maize, waited at the center of a corn maze.

That teosinte was in some sense genetically enhanced by subsistence farmers in Mexico since the time of the Aztecs, Gould says. Now were doing it in the laboratory with the same genesso whats the difference? Arts work is to make us think and question.

Contact arts and culture editor Brian Howe at bhowe@indyweek.com

Support independent local journalism.Join the INDY Press Clubto help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.

View original post here:
At the Crossroads of Art and Biotech, a Warning: Be Careful What You Wish For. - INDY Week

Germany: Response to satirical childrens video exposes self-censorship of the media By Dietmar Gaisenkersting 11 January 2020

The week before Christmas, German broadcaster WDR posted an online video of a childrens choir singing an updated version of a satirical song Meine Oma fhrt im Hhnerstall Motorrad (My grandmother rides a motorcycle in the chicken coop), which was then made the subjected of a hysterical media storm.

In earlier versions, the grandma possesses many strange and wonderful things, such as a radio in her hollow tooth, glasses with curtains, a cane with a taillight or has a revolver in her garter. The chorus runs, My grandma is a very smart woman (meine Oma ist ne ganz patente Frau). The song and an English translation of the lyrics can be found here.

In the on-demand video WDR put online, the broadcasters Dortmund childrens choir sings a new version of the satirical song, which ends in the chorus Meine Oma ist ne alte Umweltsau (My grandma is an old environmental sow).

It is a harmless satire, which, according to its authors, is intended to use exaggeration and humour to target the conflict between the generations. The children sing about the discount meat-eating, SUV-driving and cruise ship travelling grandma. At the end of the video, a girl quotes Greta Thunberg saying, We will not let you get away with this.

The way the West German Broadcasting Corporation (WDR) then dealt with the so-called Umweltsau video is a prime example of how the media censors itself under the slightest pressure from the right and spreads the ideology of the far-right.

Spiegel Online, based on a Twitter survey by social media analyst Luca Hammer, has shown how right-wing trolls unleashed a tirade against the video.

His evaluation shows that the first accounts tweeted against the video on December 27, the article says. However, the first tweets about it hardly get any attention. But then the spark jumps over accounts that are too wide-reaching to be assigned to the right-wing spectrum. Many tweets complain about an instrumentalisation of children or speak derogatorily of state broadcasters. Starting from here, the outrage spreads quicklyuntil it finally reaches right-wing conservative multipliers and the first media reports appear.

Granny Gate is a typical example of right-wing outrage and mobilisationboth in terms of structure and in terms of issues and arguments, Patrick Stegemann, author of a book on Right-wing mobilisation, told Spiegel Online. Environmental issues have become insanely popular in right-wing mobilization lately, Greta [Thunberg] is the enemy personified of the right.

The Umweltsau song, according to Stegemann, is not an isolated case. Right-wing influencers and groups have tried again and again to provoke outrage. A lot of bait is thrown outand as soon as something catches, the machine really goes off, then it goes around.

The right wing did not stop at this Twitter tirade. On December 28, about one hundred right-wingers demonstrated in front of the broadcasters building in Cologne. Further demonstrations followed, which had been called by those around such neo-Nazi outfits as the Brotherhood of Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the extreme nationalist Identitarian Movement.

Choirmaster Zeljo Davutovic was accused of instrumentalising the singing children, AfD associations called him a child molester and tweeted his telephone number. The right-wing blogger Jrgen Fritz published the names and photos of members of the production team on his Facebook page. Some WDR employees received death threats, which should be taken seriously in view of the extreme right-wing murders of recent yearsfrom the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground (NSU) to the murder of leading Christian Democrat Walter Lbcke, to the attack on the synagogue in Halle.

But instead of standing up and protecting the WDR journalists and defending the freedom of press, opinion and satire, the broadcasters management, the state government and other media outlets stabbed them in the back.

WDR quickly removed the video from all its internet platforms. WDR director-general Tom Buhrow, who has also been chairman of the ARD, a joint organisation of Germanys regional public service broadcasters, since the beginning of the year, apologized explicitly. On the evening of 28 December, WDR broadcast a special radio program in which Buhrow himself apologized without ifs and buts for the video.

North Rhine-Westphalias state premier Armin Laschet (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) personally joined in, tweeting that the debate on the best forms of climate protection was being escalated by WDR into a generational conflict. Never should children be instrumentalized by adults for their own purposes. With the song, WDR had crossed the boundaries of style and respect for older people. In a guest article for the weekly newspaper Zeit, Laschet wrote, In these times, we urgently need a strong public broadcasting service that serves social cohesion, corresponding to its mission statement.

Deputy state premier Joachim Stamp (Free Democratic Party, FDP) also condemned the video, Perhaps we should make a joint effort for the new decade not to describe people in general as sows, pigs etc.

In the tabloid Bild, the editor-in-chief personally spoke out against the video, its makers and WDR. The paper quoted Bundestag (federal parliament) Vice President Wolfgang Kubicki (FDP) saying, The fact that a childrens choir is being abused to denounce and re-educate speaks against the TV makers and is a fatal reminder of the failed former East Germany.

In an open letter to Buhrow, more than 40 TV authors have expressed their solidarity with the makers of the video, demanded it be immediately reposted and accused the WDR director of falling into the trap set by right-wing trolls and abandoning his staff. Among the signatories of the solidarity declaration are authors of programmes such as Neo Magazin Royale, Dark and the heute Show.

The dispute over the song lacks any rational basis,, the letter says. Even the word satirical freedom seems inappropriate when the threshold of indignation is so low that it is ruptured by every other pop song. A (!) fictional grandmother discriminates against an entire generation just as little as the alcoholic father from Papa Was a Rollin Stone does not mean all men are unfit for marriage.

Writing about Tom Buhrow, the letter goes on to say, A media manager whose handling of modern, right-wing propaganda shows so much naivete and awkwardness and who is not able to defend his staff on the simplest questions of freedom of the press and freedom of opinion, endangers precisely these freedoms. He should draw the consequences.

In a statement, the WDR editors office also supported the producers of the video and sharply criticized Buhrow. We are stunned, it says, that the program director of WDR 2 has a video with a satirical childrens song deleted, and above all about the fact that director Tom Buhrow gives in so easily to a shitstorm apparently orchestrated by right-wing extremists, hastily distances himself editorially and not only apologizes in person, but also publicly (and repeatedly) in the process, (live on WDR 2, among others), instead of backing them up in the face of staged outrage against WDR and the other public broadcasters. According to the editors representatives, the internal freedom of broadcasting had thus been violated.

On Tuesday, a private meeting of editors took place at WDR, where Buhrow faced the criticism of about 700 employees. About 30 speakers made emotional contributions, one participant told the news magazine Der Spiegel. For some, the question arose as to whether it would be possible to employ satire at all in the future. Although Buhrow had stressed that everyone should continue as before, he had also said in principle that he would do the same again.

The WDRs self-censorship in the case of the Umweltsau video is symptomatic of the ruling elites shift to the right. In the face of growing social tensions, they are arming themselves both internally and externally and are no longer prepared to tolerate criticism and dissenting opinionseven if only in the form of satire.

Those who do not adhere to self-restraint and censorship are to be intimidated and attacked. The persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, who are in prison for having exposed war crimes, sets an international precedent for this development. It is not the perpetrators of crimes and grievances who are being prosecuted, but those who expose and criticise them.

2019 has been a year of mass social upheaval. We need you to help the WSWS and ICFI make 2020 the year of international socialist revival. We must expand our work and our influence in the international working class. If you agree, donate today. Thank you.

Read this article:
Germany: Response to satirical children's video exposes self-censorship of the media - World Socialist Web Site

In 2011, I began writing The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States, which was published by Routledge in 2017, just after the Trump administration succeeded that of Obama, and now appears in this PaperBoat Press edition. The book is an historical view going back to the 17th century of how we got to Trump, whom we should not forget we, the people elected. So, to start with, lets agree that Trump is not the problem, not the cause of what I understand as our currently collapsed democracy, but a particularly virulent symptom of its collapse.

The rise of Trump has produced some strong nostalgia for his predecessor, Barack Obama. But we should remember that Obama and those before him, going most immediately back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, set the table for Trumps gluttony. In The Disinformation Age I go back much farther to suggest a reason for the collapse of U.S. democracy from the Constitution forward, but for now, because in the mainstream press the contrast between Obama and Trump appears as stark as that between antagonists in a medieval morality play, representing the two poles of U.S. democracy, I want to look only at the two to suggest the ways the contrast blurs on close inspection. This is a result not of any similarities between the two menthey couldnt be more different in style and temperamentbut of what they represent: neoliberal capitalism.

The rise of Trump has produced some strong nostalgia for his predecessor, Barack Obama. But we should remember that Obama and those before him, going most immediately back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, set the table for Trumps gluttony.

Obamas economic advisers Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Robert Rubin and company were the very same people who engineered the Great Recession of 2008. After the Recession, with their advice, Obama invested largely in the big banks (Rubin and Geithner were two of the biggest bankers) that caused the economic collapse, not, by and large, in the millions of people who lost their homes and jobs because of it. Income inequality increased during the Obama administration as it continues to do under Trump, whose tax policy siphons tax dollars to the rich and corporationsnot that they werent already getting an abundance under the Democrats.

Under Obama, in 2015, the U.S. military budget was $598.5 billion, 54% of federal discretionary spending. Trump has added to that budget while Democrats in Congress voted overwhelmingly for the increase, passing a $716 billion military budget in 2018. Obama proposed a trillion dollars over thirty years to modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Trump supports this increase and more and has increased the danger of nuclear proliferation with his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. Obama signed a memorandum of understanding with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to increase by eight billion dollars over a ten-year period our military support for the apartheid regime in Israel, bringing the total to $38 billion dollars. Trump supports this increase and has doubled down on U.S. support for Israel with his approval of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Obama increased drone warfare initiated by the Bush administration. Trump has expanded the use of drones in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

However, Obama began to open relations with Cuba, while Trump is intent on closing them.

Obama deported close to three million immigrants. At the same time, he instituted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act (DACA), giving qualified relief from deportation to some of the children of undocumented immigrants. Trump, who is making war on immigrants from Latin American and the Middle East, began the phase-out of DACA in 2017. That phase-out is now in limbo due to court intervention. The Republican Congress failed to enact any version of the Dream Act, which would give these children, many now adults, who were brought here without agency of their own, a path to permanent residency. As of November 2018, the Democrats control the House; the Republicans remain in control of the Senate. And Trump remains in the White House so the possibilities for a stalemate on immigration are endless.

As for the Affordable Care Act, The Disinformation Age looks at how unaffordable this law has been for millions of people who live between expanded Medicaid (in the states where it exists) and Medicare. The Republicans want to eliminate the Act, so what seemed at best a half measure (instead of Medicare-For-All) at least protecting people with preexisting conditions, seems a full measure now, obscuring the need for universal, single-payer, affordable health care. In the 2018 midterm elections, the Democrats made health care the number one issue. But the party cant agree on what kind of health care there should be with the exception that preexisting conditions should be protected.

While Trump demonizes the presshis unsuccessful attempt to remove the press credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta resonatesthe Obama administration prosecuted whistleblowers, including sending the very visible Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who sought to inform Americans of autocracy-creep in the federal government, to prison and exile. Following the April 2019, arrest of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, Paul Waldman notes in his online April 11, 2019, opinion column in The Washington Post: The Obama administration, while critical of Assange, decided that the First Amendment implications of charging him with a crime were too troubling, so they declined to do so. Following suit in a way, the Trump administration at first charged Assange, if the British ever succeed in extraditing him, not with publishing documents obtained illegally, which would constitute a violation of press freedom, but with aiding Chelsea Manning in obtaining those documents by hacking U.S. government computers, even though the specific attempt charged was unsuccessful. But as of the end of May, 2019, the administration has changed those charges to espionage, thus threatening the basis of the First Amendment.

Under Trump, we now talk about fascism in the U.S.; but the militarized, corporate, surveillance state was already being put in place when Trump took office and added the singularly fascist component of scapegoatingdemonizing difference from the white, male, Protestant, heterosexual model.

While the Democrats are relatively strong in a generally conservative U.S. matrix on social issues of race and gender, and want to protect, by and large, Social Security and Medicare, the Republicans and Trump hate difference (demonized as deviance) from the white, male, Protestant, heterosexual modelhence their war on Muslim and Latinx immigrants. If we imagine a strong, government-supported network of basic social institutions in the areas of health, education, and welfare, think of the Republicans as the neoliberal wrecking crew without a plan for reconstruction except privatization to which the Democrats offer relatively little resistance (in comparison with the social programs of other Western European democracies): the economic condition of African Americans and other minorities deteriorated during the Obama administration as the entire U.S. middle-class continued to disappear. In his 2013 budget proposal Obama himself proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare in order to compromise with the Republicans and reduce the deficit, something that the Congressional Republicans as of 2018 were proposing, while simultaneously increasing the deficit with Trump tax cuts.

Obama, who was certainly rhetorically strong on the environment, implemented some modest measures in that area along the lines of reducing coal and carbon emissions and at the end of his administration in 2016 instituted a substantial ban on drilling offshore in the Atlantic and Arctic, which Trump may be able to overturn. As Marianne Lavelle notes: By relying on executive orders and regulations after his legislative majority disappeared, President Obama leaves his climate policies at risk under Donald Trump. For it was only in his second term, as Lavelle documents, long after his Congressional majority disappeared, that Obama began to get serious about the environment, having concentrated in his first term on rebuilding the collapsed corporate economy, including increasing fossil fuel production. After waffling in his first term on implementation of the Keystone XL pipeline with its deadly load of tar sands oil, Obama rejected it in his second. Before leaving office Obama also put a check on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), set to run under the Missouri river at a place immediately threatening the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. As expected, Trump has issued executive orders approving both pipelines. Both orders are being contested in the courts. But while the legal process has so far stopped the implementation of the Keystone XL, oil is flowing through the DAPL.

Obama signed the Paris Climate Accords, while Trump understands the environment only as a commodity to be traded for profit and signaled as much by planning to withdraw from the Accords. But many advocates of environmental justice have noted that the Accords, voluntary in the first place, are too little too late. This is no reason to shred but a reason to strengthen them and certainly not Trumps reason for opting outhe is in denial about climate collapsebut only to note that the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report tells us that if we do not reduce global warming by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2040 we are facing a catastrophic situation. The report describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population. In many ways, the catastrophes the IPCC describes resemble the world we are living in right now.

Overall, in a catastrophically unbalanced world, the Democrats are marginally preferable to the Republicans. But as The Disinformation Age argues, neither party, under the control of militarized, neoliberalist capitalism, has a demonstrable agenda to bring the world into economic, social, political, and environmental balance, which is a necessity if the human race is to survive. The world has already ended for millions of people and ends every year for millions more due to poverty, which is intensified by climate change. In the last chapter of The Disinformation Age, I ask us to think about how to achieve balance from an Indigenous perspective.

Although Barack Obama figures prominently in The Disinformation Age, the book is not about himhe mattered and yet matters little in the catastrophic global scheme of endless war and climate collapse. The same could be said for Trump, for that matter, or for any single leader. The book is, rather, an analysis of a destructive system, capitalism, for which Obama as the leader of the Democratic Party provided the principal, charming, hopeful mask at the time I was writing. Other presidents have worn the same mask. However unintentionally, Trump has ripped the mask off. The Disinformation Age focuses on the mask and what is beneath it, not the man.

Obama talked progressive and walked regressive, maintaining the neoliberal agenda (hegemony of privatization) at home and the neocon agenda (military expansion) at home and abroad. Trump marks the line where neoliberalism and neoconservatism begin to shade into fascism. On the level of style, Trump is the anti-Obama. He operates without Obamas charm or cosmopolitan intelligence and with a vicious political cunning that plays to the racism and misogyny of his base in contrast to the Hope Obama proffered but inevitably failed to realize because it cant be realized within the current system.

This failure, or more specifically, the failure of the Democratic Party as exemplified in the disastrous Hillary Clinton campaign offering more of the same, gave Trump his opening.

Eric Cheyfitz

Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where he has served as director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, the faculty coordinator of the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and the director of the Mellon Post-doctoral Diversity Seminar.

Read this article:
Obama and Trump: The Present as Prologue to a History of Inequality - laprogressive.com

Phillip Frazer1. We got planetary awareness

When Galileo said that the Earth went around the Sun, not the other way around, priests tortured him.

Even now, its still hard to get that this big old world is a speck of dust in the universe, and its just as hard to get that eight billion of us living our tiny lives on Earths surface could have collectively changed the behaviour of the entire planet, dramatically, over the course of a couple of hundred years.

But we have. We didnt mean to fuck it up, but thats exactly what we did. We invented machines that converted energy that was lying around doing nothing into energy we found useful; for example burning petrol to keep 1,200,000,000 vehicles in motion as of this year.

And we made chemicals that kill bugs and weeds, and others that help plants grow, and we have sprayed these chemicals over vast areas of land to grow crops to feed animals so we can eat them.

Only a very few people understood 200 years ago that these fuels and (later) fertilisers, once they pass through a car or a cow, become airborne in the form of carbon dioxide and/or methane. And all those carbon molecules in the atmosphere enlarge a blanket of gas that every year allows less of the suns heat to bounce off the Earth and back into space.

The heat accumulating under the carbon blanket is now creating disasters all over the globe, and it will get worse every day unless we can stop it.

An awareness that we are members of an ecosystem on a relatively small planet has been beyond our collective consciousness until now. But now that houses are burning down and coastlines are eroding all over the planet, that awareness is spreading like, well, like wildfire.

Thats the good news, being spread most effectively by teenagers. The bad is that we have just a few decades to think together, and act together to save our species, which will require some huge failed projects to be abandoned; such as most religion, wars, private property, profit-hoarding, and male domination, for starters.

In 2010, WikiLeaks published documents and videos they had received from secret sources inside the US government. These words and images showed us what a million privileged people already knew from their libraries and billions of others knew in their gut: that the American military, shielded by propaganda dressing invasions up as democracy, had routinely committed appalling crimes against humanity including its own citizens in pursuit of its real agenda, which was the spread of raw and rampant capitalism.

Africans for example, knew that dictators had half of their countries wealth hidden in banks in Switzerland, but WikiLeaks showed them the bank statements, the receipts, and the contempt with which those dictators viewed their people.

We all knew that emperors and warlords were just men, but Julian Assange pulled their pants down in the new global public arena, the Internet, which is why the American elite will kill him or imprison him for life for the crime of saying the unspeakable.

The people who leaked the secrets, primarily Chelsea Manning (previously Bradley Manning), were themselves Americans, but it was perhaps necessary that an almost-American outsider like Julian would be the one to pull down Uncle Sams pants.

The womens movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the peace movement, environmentalism, and the rest of the movements seeking to replace the exhausted cultures of the post Second World War world, all knew that the patriarchy and its rules were a plague on the planet.

Tarana Banks started the #MeToo movement in 2006 and it reached another tipping point in 2017. What #MeToo did was call out men who were pulling down their own pants and using their patriarchal power and privilege to violate women physically and in every other way.

When he saw 2017 Golden Globe award-winning women espousing #MeToo-ism from the podium, Stephen Bannon the brain behind Trumps rise to power saw #MeToos true meaning. Women are gonna take charge the anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history, he screamed at the television, and for good measure If you rolled out a guillotine, theyd chop off every set of balls in the room. This is Steves worst nightmare, and so it is for Trump, Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison, and all their truck nuts mates (https://tinyurl.com/trucknuts-com).

Putting men in charge of everything has achieved many great things, and, ultimately and spectacularly, it also has failed.

When Europeans invaded Australia 230 years ago, armed with the latest deadly weapons, they ignored the rights of the people who had been on this continent for 60,000 years or more. In fact, they enslaved them and killed them in numbers only now being counted.

As the 2010s have staggered to the finish line, the tipping point has been reached, such that Indigenous Australians can no longer be ignored or killed at the whim of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic branch of the patriarchy.

The Aboriginal community has had resistors who fought the Euro-Australians with weapons, some who pleaded with them for mercy, some who argued and even won an argument or two in court. And some white fellas saw the injustice and called it out.

But in 2017 the Uluru statement from the heart emerged as a definitive challenge, asking white fellas to walk with them, the black fellas. This time theyre not gonna take No for an answer, and they will get a voice, recognition, and compensation perhaps, even atonement, whatever todays rump of the patriarchy does or says.

Somewhere in all of the above are flickering fires of positive change and yes thats a terrible metaphor to use when half the country is on fire, but thats the kind of world we are in right now. Time is no longer on anyones side.

Tomorrow we start another spin around the Sun and another decade. Every day, more kids get it, that they cant allow the big Boys Club to own the Big Stuff one more decade.

Phillip Frazer does existential accounting at coorabellridge.com.

Read the rest here:
The big good things we got in the decade gone by - Echonetdaily

Elena Ferrante returns to Naples, Chelsea Manning unpacks everything in her powerful memoir, and thrillers get feminist in the year ahead

Its the first full week of January and for many the first week back to work that means some good old Jan blues, a neverendingunread inbox hitting triple figures, and maybe some identity crises for good measure. To plug the gap between meetings that could be emails and the thrum of existential thoughts, theres plenty of books to get excited by and escape into throughout 2020. From unflinching fiction in the era of #MeToo to dark thriller set against post-war Hollywood, a deep dive into South Koreas cosmetic surgery craze and profoundly moving memoir weve got you covered.

From the author of the wondrous A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing comes a piercing rumination on life, desire, and painful memories across nondescript hotel rooms in various capital cities. As the nameless woman enters new and unchanged hotel suites she stayed years before, shes forced to reckon with the turning tides in her life shes tried desperately to run away from. Will home ever come calling? Eimear McBride is a stellar master of language and pitch-black humour, elasticating it out and constricting it back in like a warren of endless lobbies and hallways, to explore the darkest depths of the womans mind. My heart throbbed and ached with this one. (AC)

February 4, Faber Books

Vanessa Wye was 15 years old when she first had sex with her English teacher. Now 32, and amidst the backdrop of the Me Too revolution, the teacher, Jacob Strane, has been accused of sexual abuse by another former student. What follows is a disturbing unravelling of memory and trauma as Vanessa is forced to redefine her first love as rape, and their relationship as abuse. A powerful and nuanced take on the emotional complexity of consent and manipulation, My Dark Vanessa is a gripping debut by Kate Elizabeth Russell, and goes to the centre of this ages discourse surrounding power dynamics and abuse. (GY)

March, 4th Estate

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is already an award-winning poet in her home country of the Netherlands, meaning lyrical language and lasting imagery come as a given in her debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening. Published in the original Dutch in 2018, the story follows a young girl, Jas, that lives on a dairy farm where Rijneveld also lives and works and how her world is warped by the death of her brother in an ice skating accident. You see the effects of the tragedy through her unflinching eyes: how it affects her family, and the strange, erotic, sometimes gruesome rituals she develops as a result. Good for a bit of light reading? Probably not. But this is an account of loss and its effects that will stay with you for some time. (TW)

March, Faber Books

Ali Smiths Seasonal Quartet will come to its much-anticipated conclusion in July this year, after first being published in October 2016. Launched with Autumn considered the first post-Brexit novel, dealing with issues raised by the EU referendum Summer is the last of the four standalone works. Though each novel tells a completely different story, they are linked by the timing of narrative each are written and published in real time. Where Autumn addresses the tragic murder of Labour MP Jo Cox four months earlier, Winter references a recent speech by Donald Trump. Though little is publicly known about the plot of Summer, its set to be a compelling conclusion to Smiths innovative quartet. (BD)

July 2, Penguin

You dont need to look to fiction to know that doomsday is coming, but you might need to read Jenny Offills third novel, Weather, to figure out how to continue ploughing on with the small stuff when the world is inevitably set to implode. Brooklyn-based protagonist Lizzie Benson is grappling with just that librarian by vocation, Lizzie also spends her time as a fake shrink, tending to her recovering addict brother. During a rare period of calm, Lizzie reconnects with her old mentor, Sylvia Lillier now famous for her prophetic podcast, Hell and High Water who wants Lizzie to answer mail she receives. Diving into the polarised world of Sylvias listeners left-wingers worried about the climate crisis and right-wingers concerned with the decline of western civilisation Lizzie becomes convinced that doomsday is approaching, and obsesses over preparations. Set against the trials and tribulations of modern-day New York over-crowded schools, the 2016 presidential election, meditation classes Offills novel is magically cynical. (BD)

February 13, Granta

The former Irish Laureate for Fiction and Irish Booker winner offers up a captivating fifth novel, where one woman traces her relationship with her mother, a legendary Irish actress. Its a delicate, knotty reflection on familial relationships, the gendered fug that hangs over Irish society, the corrosiveness of celebrity, and sexual power dynamics. As daughter Norah moves out of the wings of New York and Dublin stages from which she watched her mother to unpack her past and unknown paternity, she uncovers some startling hidden truths of the actress and saddles herself with her own. Enright author of the beautiful Green Road and The Forgotten Waltz is so brilliant at constructing her characters, and painting evocative pictures of glamorous post-war America and shaggy 70s Dublin. Its packed full of twists and turns, from bloody crime to battles with sexism, fame, and reality itself. (AC)

February 20, Jonathan Cape

No matter how #woke you think you are, Dr Pragya Agarwals Sway will probably prove you wrong. Exploring unconscious bias in a society that largely believes its egalitarian, behavioural scientist, activist, and writer Agarwal unravels how our individual biases affect the way we communicate and perceive the world, as well as impact our decision-making. Through case studies, interviews, scientific research, and personal experience, Agarwal looks at bias expressed via ageism, appearance, accents, sexism, and aversive racism, and takes on the question: if we dont know about our own bias, are we really responsible for it? Helping readers reflect on whats shaped them, Sway will encourage understanding about why we act the way we do, and open our eyes to our own bias. (BD)

April 2, Bloomsbury

Journalism lost a shining, vital light when Lyra McKee was murdered by paramilitary gunfire in Derry riots last year. McKee was astute and passionate when writing about Northern Irish politics, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues. Later this year, Faber & Faber will release an anthology of the formidable journalists writing, both unpublished and previously released articles. Her spirit lives on in her fast-moving and fierce works, her tone of voice deeply political and radically empathetic. One of McKees most widely known pieces, on post-conflict Northern Irelands concerning rates of suicide and mental health for The Atlantic, is startling, important journalism: we were the Good Friday Agreement generation, spared from the horrors of war, she wrote. But still, the aftereffects of those horrors seemed to follow us. (AC)

April 2, Faber & Faber

Elaine Feeney debut novel As You Were is a woman's story about womens struggles. Set in the confines of modern-day Ireland, where it was until only recently that patriarchal systems controlled womens rights over their bodies, Sinad Hynes, a young property developer, finds herself in an underfunded hospital, and carrying a big secret.

Through its effortless weaving of voices and histories, and hilarious observations about life on the ward, Feeneys novel highlights the importance of discourse between women, and their eagerness to open up and trust each other all while critiquing the institutional sexism faced by them on a daily basis. (GY)

April 16, Vintage Publishing

In her timely fourth novel, American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins humanises the migrant crisis. After the death of her journalist husband and 15 other relatives at the hands of a Mexican drug cartel, Lydia Quixano Prez and her eight-year-old son Luca are forced to flee their home city of Acapulco. Finding themselves worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence, Lydia and Luca are transformed into migrants, desperately searching for safety in the United States. Traversing the cruelty and kindness of strangers, the mother and son quickly realise that everyone is running from something, with no idea where theyre running to. Offering a heart-wrenching insight into the experiences of displaced people looking for sanctuary for their loved ones, Cummins subverts widespread misconceptions about migrants. (BD)

January 23, Headline

The dystopia of Gish Jens The Resisters is, unnervingly, quite familiar. In a near future US renamed AutoAmerica society has been divided into the Netted and the Surplus: rulers and consumers, respectively, in an AI-driven surveillance state. The former occupy the high ground, while the latter live in swampland or on water, thanks to half of the country disappearing under rising tides. When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics though, Gwen a baseball prodigy born to Surplus parents gets a chance to rise above her assigned place. This is a book about class mobility and its consequences that could look all too real in the near future. (TW)

February 4, Knopf Publishing

Praise be, more Ferrante! Though its another Naples-set novel, were forgoing our familiar heroines of the Neapolitan trilogy Elena and Lila to focus on Giovanna, a complicated 12-year-old who overhears her father comparing her to his very unliked estranged sister. From there, the Italian teenager cycles through the sweet-sour contradictions of adolescence, the emotional turbulence and surliness wed all love to forget if Ferrante would ever let us, to unravel a complicated family history and internal war. The novel, already out in Italian, is due in English this coming June, but has already been deemed explosive by longtime fans. Expect the wonderfully complex, unabashed writing Ferrante is loved for, and a multisensory reflection of the Italian city she loves. (AC)

June 9, Europa

On New Years Eve, Chelsea Manning tweeted a breakdown of her decade, revealing that she spent 77 per cent of it in jail, and 11 per cent of it in solitary confinement but asserted she spent 0 per cent of the last ten years backing down. In her as-yet untitled memoir, Manning details how her appeal for increased institutional transparency and government accountability ran parallel to her fight for rights as a trans woman. After exposing classified documents revealing American subterfuge against its own citizens and the killing of Iraqi civilians while working for the US military in 2010, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was freed by Obama in 2017. The day after her initial conviction, she publicly declared her gender identity as a woman and began transitioning. In her powerful memoir, Manning recalls her childhood, what led her to join the military, and the details of her WikiLeaks involvement. Despite having her sentence commuted, Manning has spent the last year in and out of jail, telling Dazed in February: There are some people who call me a hero. But things are worse now. Even worse than they were in 2010. (BD)

July 21, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Chas mesmerising debut novel takes place in contemporary Seoul a place where plastic surgery is a common playground, K-Pop stars are subject to obsessive fans and ancient social hierarchies determine much of South Korean life. Against this backdrop, we meet four young women with interconnected lives: Kyuri, who has a job at an exclusive bar entertaining businessmen while they drink, her roommate, Miho, a talented artist, down the hall from them Ara, a hairstylist, and one floor below Wonna, a newlywed trying to get pregnant. Their stories weave together the complexities and contradictions of modern-day Seoul, in an ultimately uplifting story of women living in defiance of oppressive customs. (DS)

April 21, Ballantine Books

The moment I got my job at Virago in 1978 I knew it would be a long time before I would leave, writes Lennie Goodings, the chair of the trailblazing feminist publishing house. I had found my home: where books, ideas, politics, imagination, feminism, and business was the air we breathed. A Bite of the Apple is part personal memoir, part history of the iconic Virago Press, told by a woman who has been with it almost since the beginning. Over her career as a publisher and editor, Goodings has worked with extraordinary authors who shaped the literary world and defined the feminist conversation, including Magaret Atwood, Marilynne Robins, and Maya Angelou. Following the chronology of Viragos titles, Goodings explores her thoughts on reading, writing, and breaking boundaries, celebrating all that can be achieved when women empower each other to make their voices heard. (PC)

February, OUP

When Deborah Orr died at age 57 last year, tributes poured in for the warm, incisive, witty, headstrong writer. Orrs posthumous memoir, Motherwell: a girlhood is her final masterpiece: a tumultuous, scintillating journey through growing up working-class in Motherwell, south-east of Glasgow, the daughter of John, a factory worker, and Win a strict, enigmatic woman Orr battles to reconcile with. With unflinching honesty and razor-sharp insights, the book mediates on what it means to mother well, scrutinising not just her mothers parenting, but also her own.

Beyond a retelling of delicate familial relations, Motherwell also provides illuminating social commentary on Britain. From the introduction of council homes to the reign of Margaret Thatcher, to the miners strikes and the move away from streaming in schools to mixed-ability education, Orr reflects on the impact each of these political decisions have had on peoples lives with clarity and boundless empathy. (DS)

January, Weidenfeld

With Instagram-perfect, feminist co-working spaces like The Wing more prevalent than ever among the rich, of course its about time there was a book set against the backdrop of one. Andrea Bartzs The Herd is set in New Yorks exclusive women-only workspace, The Herd, where in-the-know creatives desperately fight for membership. Among these hopefuls is Katie Bradley, a writer with a way in: her sister Hana is the best friend of the communitys founder, Eleanor Walsh. Just as shes determined to make Eleanor the subject of her next book, Katie is shocked to discover that The Herds founder has vanished without a trace. What unfolds is a desperate search for the truth, as Eleanors husband, colleagues, and closest friends become suspects in her mysterious disappearance. (BD)

March 24, Ballantine Books

Kevin Nguyens New Waves is a different kind of heist novel, not only because the heist goes wrong pretty much at the outset, but also because the object in question isnt money, or diamonds, or art. Dissatisfied with their jobs in a tech startup (where else?) Lucas and Margo, the companys sole and frequently-talked-down-to black employee, plot to steal its userbase as an act of revenge. But then Margo dies in a car accident and Lucas, shaken, is left to look for answers on her computer (again, where else?). Secrecy, friendship, and the idiosyncracies of online life all figure into what he finds, raising questions about whether we can really know anyone at all, deep down. Like snooping through peoples phones when theyre out of the room? This is probably one for you. (TW)

March 10, One World

What would happen if you took a group of queer activists and dropped them into the most homophobic town in the US? Thats the question Celia Laskey asks in Under the Rainbow. The novel follows various characters as a nonprofit sends a task force into the fictional community of Big Burr, Kansas, the town theyve awarded the aforementioned label to. Is it a coincidence that this is also the home state of the Westboro Baptist Church, which has driven away residents with homophobic hate speech? Probably not.

The idea is that the task force will live among the community for two years, bringing new perspectives, but of course new tensions as well. In a world where discourse seems to be getting increasingly divisive, a generous, witty book about encouraging more open minds doesnt sound like a bad option. (TW)

In Warhol, art critic Blake Gopnik attempts to unpack the legend and lore surrounding the cult artist, whose name alone is enough to conjure images of Campbell soup cans, the notorious Silver Factory, brightly-coloured celebrity silk screens, tales of amphetameme-riddled parties, and his brush with death at the hands of Valerie Solanas.

Despite this, the misinformation surrounding Warhols life has made it difficult for biographers to accurately reflect the man behind the wigged persona, and Warhol, drawing on years of archival research and interviews with hundreds of the New York artists surviving friends, lovers, and rivals, tracks the idiosyncratic artists life from his working-class upbringing in Pittsburgh as the child of Polish immigrants, to his twenties as a successful commercial illustrator, and his ascent into global stardom. (GY)

February, Allen Lane

Diane Keaton has had a successful fifty years in Hollywood, starring in many films since her first major role in The Godfather, but maybe most popular for starring in Woody Allen films. Brother & Sister, however, is a memoir that explores the other side of her life, examining the close relationship she shared with her younger brother, Randy, when they were kids, and how they drifted apart as he became alcoholic and reclusive in adulthood. Alongside Keatons prose it contains photographs, poetry, letters, and diary entries from the family including Randy to reflect on sibling relationships, mental illness, and ultimately the regret that comes with mortality. (TW)

February 4, Knopf

The exciting debut of Maggie Doherty brings together the important yet untold stories of five women that came together in the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. The institute, at Radcliffe College in Harvard, offered women postgraduate study opportunities at a time when women were expected not to step out of the domestic sphere. Doherty, a lecturer at Harvard, traces the history-making steps and lives of painter Barbara Swan, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin. Its a rich tapestry brought to life by Dohertys access to their personal notes, recordings, letters and works, weaving her own strong voice in with the individual women to tell stories of art, radical politics, relationships, and unfettered ambition. Though her eye is on the past, its most certainly a story to inspire our futures.

May 19, Knopf

Dares debut novel tells the story of Adunni a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl looking to escape the life of servitude imposed on her. She soon learns that the only way to develop what her mother calls a louding voice the ability to speak for herself and determine her own future is through education. But Adunnis father has other plans for her, removing her from school and selling her on as the third wife of a local man. Despite being instilled with a belief that her worth amounts to nothing, Adunni refuses to be silent, resolving to stand up not just for herself, but the generations of lost girls who came before her and those wholl inevitably sucede her. (DS)

March 5

When faced with the prospect of impending ecological collapse, its easy to slip into overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and despair. In their book, Digueres and Rivvet Carnac two principle creators of the Paris agreement offer an alternative narrative: that we can and that we will survive. At a critical moment for the future of humanity, the authors outline what we can do to safeguard our world with practical steps, willing us to face the crisis head on in this rousing call to arms. (DS)

February 25, Manilla

Following the groundbreaking, wildly successful first Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible in the summer of 2018,Adegoke and Uviebinen are back with an anthology follow-up. Featuringover 20 established and emerging black British writers, the anthology gives space to votes made largely invisible in the publishing sphere. Contributors write with wit and sharp insight on navigating life as a black woman today, amid political chaos and uncertainty with Brexit, the rise of the far right, and beyond to look to a future in which black women thrive brightly. An absolute must-buy for understanding and making your way in the world.

June 25, 4th Estate

Read more here:
All the books you should be reading in 2020 - Dazed

1. UN official equates Chelsea Manning's incarceration for refusing to testify to torture  WJLA
2. UN Letter: Chelsea Manning's Imprisonment Is Torture  The Intercept
3. Chelsea Manning Says She Is 'Never Backing Down' in Face of US Detention Meant to Break Her  Common Dreams
4. Chelsea Manning Responds After Top UN Official Labels Her Imprisonment 'Torture'  Gizmodo
5. UN official equates former US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning incarceration as torture  BreakingNews.ie
6. View full coverage on Google News

Read the original here:
UN official equates Chelsea Manning's incarceration for refusing to testify to torture - WJLA