Daily Archives: September 6, 2022

The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, 1956

I think that a revolutiona socialist revolutionwill break down the family structure as we know it now. The woman, being freed from her menial position, either as the lowest-paid worker or as household slave, will be out of the home more. The concept of marriage will change, because marriage right now is a kind of slave contract. Probably, in the future, marriage itself, as a contract, will not exist. People will have the freedom to relate to each other as humans, to enjoy each other intellectually, sexually, and whatever else. I dont see where there are any great advantages to the nuclear family at this point.

Denise Oliver, Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971

My sister and I grew up in the shadow of our parents divorce. The failure of that marriage, and the resulting financial impact, was our lifes lesson. We understood that wed come from a broken family. The message was clear: dont let divorce happen to you.

We came of age in the 80s and 90s: Nancy Reagans Just Say No to drugs and family values rhetoric, Bill Clintons welfare reform and the defense of marriage. Clintons end of welfare as we know it promoted work and marriage as a solution to poverty (as Sarah Jaffe has noted, the preamble of the 1996 law included Marriage is the foundation of a successful society). The Defense of Marriage Act defined the institution of marriage as a union between a man and a woman and allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages. By that time, the endless privatization of everyday life and necessary resources that we call neoliberalism, as Yasmin Nair puts it, had come into force.

My mother relied on our neighbors (themselves housewives) and family members for child care and rides to get us to and from public school while she was at work. Even though my mother had a college degree, she had spent ten years as a housewife and thus had a work gap on her rsum which didnt help in finding jobs that paid well. We lived, to borrow a phrase Bernie Sanders uses, paycheck to paycheck. My mother didnt get to do things she enjoyed: stargazing, astronomy, bike riding, or even just exercising. Her days were spent at work, and her evenings and weekends caring for children. It never occurred to me as a child to consider the love or care my mother was not getting while my sister and I were loved and cared for and managed to grow up and go off to college. What conservatives would see as a success story, I see as a kind of tragedy. I wish my mother had been, in the words of family abolitionist and writer Sophie Lewis, less alone, less burdened by caring responsibilities, less trapped.

As a child, I also understood that my family did not measure up to the family. As professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies Kathi Weeks has written, the family, characterized by privatized care, the (heterosexual) couple unit, and biologically related kin, is legislatively declared, legally defended, and socially prescribed in the United States. Theres a right way to do family, and a wrong way, as conservatives often tell us.

We all need familiessometimes more than onein order to survive. In a society built around scarcityof educational opportunities and jobs, healthcare, housing, and even the prospect of a dignified retirementa desire for coupledom and family makes sense. As M.E. OBrien, a writer who focuses on gender freedom and communist theory, puts it, theres a strong material logic to the couple form. If you find the right person, youre going to be okay. But beyond material considerations, even wealthy pop stars want the one and the family. John Mayer, the singer-songwriter and guitarist who rose to fame in the early 2000s, has been singing about serial monogamy for over 20 years and makes clear in his music (and in interviews) that he wants to get married and have children, a house, and a home life (things that have eluded him thus far). Pop star Adele has admitted that she was obsessed with the nuclear family my whole life because I never came from one. She got divorced a few years agoI was just embarrassed I didnt make my marriage workand said in an interview with Mayer that marriage had given her the safest feeling shed ever had.

The psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his 1956 book The Art of Loving that In the United States to a vast extent, people are in search of romantic love, of the personal experience of love that should lead to marriage. But, according to Fromm, capitalist societies had commodified human relations, particularly the search for spouses, to the detriment of humans. He wrote about the marriage market of his time, in which people looked for the best deal of personality packages. We now have online dating, which ultimately turns dating into a market (you must pay for access to that market) where people and their profiles are like items on a menu to choose from. For Fromm, love was a way of being, an orientation, not primarily an attachment to another person or the possession of a certain status (a marriage and family). And yet, he argued, we spend so much time searching for someone to love rather than cultivating the art of loving as a practice involving the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.

What this has to do with the family is that we have substituted rigid notions of family structure (and family values) for the practice of loving. What is the family but a set of norms around gender, sexuality, household labor, and the pooling of resources for economic survival? We only need families because our society is organized in such a way as to make atomized families the main unit responsible for our survival in an increasingly unequal society with limited social safety nets. Yet, marriage and the nuclear family are but one way we human beings can organize ourselves. They are not inevitable, universal, or timeless despite all the cultural and political signals we get that suggest they are.1

To critique the family, then, is to level a critique of the conditions of a capitalist society that makes the nuclear family our main source of support and survival and that uses the family as a weapon to discipline or stigmatize those that dont comply with traditional family structures or norms around gender and sexuality. In this sense, the family is, in OBriens words, an obstacle to human freedom. The family must be abolished, which means a breaking open of the family to free and unleash whats good in it and to generalize that into the social body as a whole. To make the necessary forms of care available to everyone unconditionally.

As Nair has argued:

We, culture at large and/or the state, need to recognize different forms of relationships. By that, we dont mean to be prescriptive about what creates a family but to demand that the state not determine whether we live or die based on what kinds of families or kinship groups we inhabit.

Everyone can support family abolition, even those who feel there is nothing wrong with their family. Family abolition is not about breaking up individual families but about radically changing the society that makes the family structure necessary, about creating a society in which everyone is cared for. We canand mustimagine and create better ways to live and to love each other.

We are often told by conservatives that the traditional family is the bedrock of a moral society. As Sarah Jones writes in Dissent,

Marriage is a conservative institution, a way for class to reproduce itself. It is the foundation for the little platoonsfamily, church, and community. To conservatives, marriage will cure poverty and childhood trauma and gun violence. But they long specifically for so-called traditional families, with a breadwinning father and a stay-at-home mother.

Take this family values passage from the 1976 Republican Party platform:

Families must continue to be the foundation of our nation. Familiesnot government programsare the best way to make sure our children are properly nurtured, our elderly are cared for, our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved. [I]t is imperative that our governments programs, actions, officials, and social welfare institutions must never be allowed to jeopardize the family. We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them.

The platform goes on to explain how the tax code, the estate tax (to minimize disruption of already bereaved families), and welfare stipulations encouraging marriage were to be designed with the preservation of the family in mind. Government policies still confer financial benefits to married people compared to singles. From 2001- 2014 the federal government spent nearly $800 million on marriage promotion programs, often targeting poor people of color for relationship counseling. These programs have been largely ineffective in achieving stated goals. As recently as 2021, the government maintained Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood program funding; its website claims that children do best when raised by two married biological parents, a longtime claim of social conservatives which has been refuted by recent research and which ignores the fact that many cultures practice communal child rearing, also called alloparenting. Despite such public policy, marriage rates in the U.S. are now at a 20-year low.

The right-wing, Christian family values agenda picked up influence in the 1970s, according to historian Anthea Butler. In White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Butler explains how the Moral Majority, formed in 1979 by evangelical leaders, explicitly teamed with Republican Party politics and political action to re-create this great nation according to white, Christian standards. Around the sametime, offshoot organizations such as American Family Association, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council began lobbying government on evangelical concerns about the family, marriage, abortion, and education. An underlying message of these groups, she argues, was that sexual immorality, including race mixing, would be its [Americas] downfall. Butler also argues that evangelicalism is no longer simply a religious movement but rather a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others. Evangelicals tend to vote in large numbers for right-wing politicians, including Donald J. Trump, who, as an accused sexual predator who has endorsed calling his daughter Ivanka a piece of ass, represents the opposite of family values.

The 1976 platform seems quaint compared to GOP Florida Sen. Rick Scotts chilling manifesto, An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America, released earlier this year. Decrying the militant lefts plan to change or destroy things like the nuclear family, gender, [and] traditional morality, Scott elaborates:

We will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs. The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is Gods design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science.

While Republicans are the most rabidly in favor of the heterosexual marriage-based family, both Republicans and Democrats use rhetoric around the family to appeal to voters, sometimes as part of the ongoing culture wars. Conservatives invoke family values to oppose everything from abortion, feminism, pornography, comprehensive sex education, and divorce to homosexuality, rights for trans people, same-sex marriage, critical race theory, and Black Lives Matter. Democrats often refer to families in the context of work: working families, a phrase frequently used by Bernie Sanders, or, as noted in the 2020 DNC platform: Enacting Robust Work-Family Policies, in which the Democrats claim to support 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for all workers and family units. (Not only have the Democrats failed to pass such a policy, were left to wonder what a family unit is defined as.) As Lewis has argued, to attack the family is unthinkable in our current politics. Nowhere on the party-political spectrum can one find proposals to dethrone the family, hasten its demise, or even decenter it in policy.

While conservatives are preoccupied with the family as a force for moral good, they are not as attentive to the ways in which the family harms people. As Lewis pointed out, feminist writer Madeline Lane-McKinley predicted early in 2020 that the pandemic would expose the dark underbelly of family and home life:

Households are capitalisms pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in houseworkcleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also child abuse, molestation, intimate partner rape, psychological torture, and more. Not a time to forget to abolish the family.

Indeed, there has been a significant rise in domestic violence worldwide since the start of the pandemic. Lewis has pointed out that the vast majority of queerphobic and sexualized violence takes place within the family. According to a 2019 Congressional Research Service report on homeless youth, LGBTQ youth face increased risk of homelessness, often because they are forced out of their homes due to negative reactions from family when they come out. As journalist Rachel Louise Snyder wrote in her 2019 book No Visible Bruises: What We Dont Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, domestic violence is responsible for 50 percent of cases of homelessness for women and is the third leading cause of homelessness in the U.S. Thus, Snyder writes, the private violence within families has vastly public consequences.

For many, family violence often has lasting effects. Sociologist Jennifer M. Silva interviewed 100 young working class adults (defined as adults whose fathers had not obtained a bachelors degree) for her 2013 book Coming up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. Silva noted that for many of the respondents in her book, hurtful and agonizing betrayals within the family lie at the root of their personal demons. The adults in Silvas cohort spent tremendous amounts of energy, sometimes unsuccessfully, trying to heal themselves from their family traumas.

As Nicole Sussner Rodgers and Julie Kohler write in The Nation, for the Right, the battle may be about the uterus, but the war is for the future of the family. Indeed, we are often told that the traditional family is in crisis. David Brooks 2020 Atlantic article, The Nuclear Family was a Mistake, argues that a lack of extended family (he laments the rise of single-parent and chaotic families) has increased inequality in our society. Popular books by academics also note the decline of the traditional family, or a family values-based way of life, arguing that non-traditional family structures are implicated in troubling social phenomena such as inequality and deaths of despair. Sociologist Robert D. Putman describes the opportunity gap between children born to parents with and without a college degree in his 2015 book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, noting different family structures (among other characteristics) between the educated and uneducated. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton describe deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses among the white working class in their 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Case and Deaton come to ominous conclusions. A lack of family values can be, in their view, an important part of a pathway to despair. And while the authors admit that the impacts of lifestyle choices do not have easily quantifiable values, the books heavy moralizing on such matters (for instance, the error unmarried women make in having children) is hard to ignore; the effect is to de-emphasize the importance of systemic policies that can be legislated, such as improved wages and working conditions, universal health care, free college, public housing, and universal child care and pre-K.

Conservatives are right that the family is in crisisto the extent that crisis means that the structures of peoples lives (their marital status, their living arrangements, their decisions regarding reproduction) often reflect their overall level of economic security (or lack thereof ). The traditional family has become unattainable for many, especially the working class. As Silva writes:

Traditional markers of adulthoodleaving home, completing school, establishing financial independence, marriage, and childbearinghave become strikingly delayed or even foregone in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly for the working class.

She notes that the majority of her respondents dealt with unstable and low-paying service jobs, credit card debt, family dissolution, and illness and work-related disabilities, domestic violence, and constant financial stress. In her study sample, respondents were haunted by an idealized working-class life of the past: of marriage, gendered norms (male breadwinner, female homemaker), home ownership, and having children. But for most, the overall instability of their lives precluded any chance of achieving this kind of life. This is a point that Putnam also concedes: Unemployment, underemployment, and poor economic prospects discourage and undermine stable relationshipsthat is the nearly universal finding of many studies, both qualitative and quantitative, he writes in Our Kids.

The family is in crisis, yet the family is so traditional. How can it be both?

The story of the traditional family is, like most myths, a mixture of truth and fantasy. As marriage historian Stephanie Coontz writes in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Like most visions of a golden age, the traditional family evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place. Nonetheless, what we think of as the traditional family with heterosexual couple, male breadwinner, female housewife, and children became possible due to the convergence of multiple factors in the early and mid 20th century.

The workers movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bolstered by unions, led to improved wages; the male breadwinner family was promoted as a desirable feature of (white) working-class life. The Depression era saw a disruption of the family, as massive unemployment and destitution led to homelessness. People sought refuge in shantytowns called Hoovervilles or moved in with others when possible. Children were unable to attend school; women turned to sex work; there was the sense that the family was broken. The New Deal response led the state to be more actively involved in the family, as this was the period which gave us Social Security and Aid to Dependent Children, among other programs. In Work Wont Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe writes that the New Deal period in the U.S.

gave us the thing we think of as the traditional family: the suburban two point five-kid picket-fence white nuclear household, June Cleaver mom at home making dinner in high heels and waiting for her husband to come home from his eight-hour day in his five-day workweek.

Putnam notes that around the mid 20th century, the male breadwinner nuclear family became common.

But since the 70s, a number of changes (including the stagnation or decrease of working-class wages and the shifting of gender roles, with women entering the workforce and obtaining higher education) have brought about the collapse of the family and a diversification of structures. OBrien writes:

The male-breadwinner family form is no longer characteristic of any sector of society, and has lost its social hegemony due to the convergence of several simultaneous trends. In its place, weve seen the dramatic and steady growth of dual-wage earner households, of people choosing not to partner or marry, of atomized and fragmented family structures. These dynamics have produced a heterogeneous array of family forms in working-class life.

In Our Kids, Putnam describes what he calls a two-tier family system of the U.S., which he says has predominated for the last 30 or so years (recall that the book was written in 2015). He breaks up society broadly into thirds: upper third is college educated, middle third has some post-secondary education, and bottom third has no more than a high school diploma. For the upper third, college-educated of society, theres the neo-traditional model in which the educated tend to marry each other and both spouses work; these families can afford to pay for labor and childcare that was traditionally carried out by a housewife. For the lower third of society, there are blended families, in which adults tend not to marry and tend to have children with multiple partners, sometimes called fragile families, a phrase Putnam attributes to the late sociologist Sara McLanahan. Much is made of these structures and how the children of the neo-traditional model enjoy better life outcomes than those unfortunate to be raised in the lower model. Putnam is careful to acknowledge that correlation is not causation. But there is an underlying assumption in his book: namely, that if we could make the lower third more like the upper third, more children could do better in life. The tendency is to think of family structure as something that needs fixing instead of simply giving care to everyone. (When I read about researchers discovering things that tend to be correlated with good outcomes for people (multiple parental incomes, education, stable housing, and so forth), I wonder why the argument isnt just to give people those things. Its like seeing someone floundering in water and refusing to throw them a life jacket or buoy.)

Rather than think of the collapse of the traditional family as a sign of moral degeneration of the citizenry, though, we ought to think of it as the inevitable fate of an institution that was never natural or stable to begin with.

Academic and political commentator Irami Osei-Frimpong recently argued (in the context of the Supreme Court leak about overturning Roe v. Wade) that much of the U.S. culture wars, including the question of abortion, boils down to a question of Who Gets to Have Sex? and under what conditions. The who can refer to race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or employment or marital status. The conditions can refer to what sex is for: Pleasure? Procreation? Exchange of money? Something else? The typical narrative on the Right is that heterosexual, marriage-based, procreative sex is legitimate, and behavior different from this is to be dismissed (and even outlawed) as an abomination. Sen. Rick Scott claims this narrative is based on science. But he is mixing value judgments with scientific facts. Science provides tools and observations we can use to understand the world but doesnt constitute a value system for those observations.

Scott claims that science is the basis of the family as Gods design for humanity and that science dictates strict gender binaries of male and female (implied as the basis of the pair bond). Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders to say otherwise is to deny science. When Scott conflates his values with other documented facts about the universe, he isnt just co-opting the vocabulary of liberal wokeness (Listen to the scientists, per President Biden). His argument goes much deeper. Hes promoting the family almost as if it were human nature.2

A simple consideration of other cultures different from our own provides examples of human behavior that do not adhere to Scotts story about the purpose of sex and marriage. One example comes from David Graebers Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In the book, Graeber cited anthropological observations of barter ceremonies between groups of neighboring people. In Australia, the Gunwinggu people were noted to carry out a barter ceremony called dzamalag. These elaborate ritualsthe one Graeber cited happened in the 1940sinvolved singing, dancing, and sex between members of the different groups, even individuals who were noted to be married. (Their idea of marriage must have been different from our own.) The Mosuo people in China, as another example, are a matriarchal society in which women have a great degree of sexual freedom:

Men and women practise what is known as a walking marriagean elegant term for what are essentially furtive, nocturnal hook-ups with lovers known as axia. A mans hat hung on the door handle of a womans quarters is a sign to other men not to enter. These range from one-night stands to regular encounters that deepen into exclusive, life-long partnershipsand may or may not end in pregnancy. But couples never live together, and no one says, I do.

Also consider that in Islam, the second most practiced faith in the world, there exists a temporary marriage of varying lengths called a mutah. While it is not practiced uniformly and has been likened by some within the faith to a form of prostitution because it involves the payment of money to the woman, the fact that this arrangement could be considered legitimate reveals how arbitrary (and culturally determined) our sexual mores can be. Just as we can observe a range of sexual and social behaviors among humans, sanctioned (or not) by religion or culture, it turns out that the U.S family as we know it also arose from specific historical conditions.

The nuclear family as promoted by the state has been imposed upon non-white and immigrant populations since colonial times. Consider the case of Native Americans. As Stephanie Coontz explains in The Way We Never Were, colonialists

forced Native American extended families off their collective property and onto single-family plots. They made Indian men the public representatives of families, ignoring the traditional role of women in community leadership, and placed Indian children in boarding schools to eradicate traditional Native American values.

Discoveries of mass graves at sites of these boarding schools reveal just one aspect of the larger genocide of Native people (survivors also recall rampant sexual abuse by Catholic officials at these religious schools).

Professor of Native studies Kim TallBear explains further that settler sexuality rested on notions of binary sexes, hetero-normativity, and sexual monogamy. Quoting Cree-Mtis feminist Kim Anderson in Making Kin Not Population, TallBear writes,

One of the biggest targets of colonialism was the Indigenous family in which women had occupied positions of authority and controlled property. The colonial state targeted womens power, tying land tenure rights to heterosexual, one-on-one, lifelong marriages, thus tying womens economic well being to men who legally controlled the property. Indeed, women themselves became property.

TallBear describes Native genders and sexual relationships as more fluid than that of the settlersespecially the rigid notion of monogamy, which she says can be considered a form of hoarding another persons body. Caretaking and domestic duties, she notes, were also carried out more diffusely, among extended kinship relationships. Thus, the idea of a single mother is nonsensical.

African American families have faced family-related oppression since the days of slavery. Most obviously, kidnapping African people to work in bondage was a form of destruction to those societies; slave families were routinely separated at the auction block. Once freed from slavery, Black people were forced into tenant sharecropping under the white backlash to Reconstruction which gave us Jim Crow. Sharecropping conditions favored marriage; at the same time, the workers movement gains of the early 20th century were denied to Black people; the New Deal also excluded domestic and agricultural workers, sectors where Black workers were concentrated. Thus, the male-breadwinner wage was largely inaccessible to Black men and families.

The Black family has been and continues to be pathologized and directly targeted by policy. The oft-mentioned Moynihan Report of 1965 (The Negro Family: The Case for National Action), which blamed Black mothers for the disintegration of the Black family and linked Black family demise to the urban unrest of the period, was used to justify the burgeoning war on crime that targeted neighborhoods of color. In Our Kids, Putnam admits that there are three policy choices that probably did contribute to [the] family breakdown that his book is concerned with: the war on drugs, three strikes sentencing, and the sharp increase in incarceration. This is a profound admission that I wish intellectuals across the political spectrumconservatives in particularwould engage with. To acknowledge that law and order policies, which are accepted by liberals and conservatives alike, are deleterious to families would be quite an admission indeed.

For a society so concerned about the family, the U.S. has traumatized the most vulnerable members of the familychildrenas a matter of official policy. As professor of law and sociology Dorothy Roberts has written:

Since its inception, the United States has wielded child removal to terrorize, control, and disintegrate racialized population: enslaved African families, emancipated Black children held captive as apprentices by their former enslavers, Indigenous children kidnapped and confined to boarding schools under a federal campaign of tribal decimation, and European immigrant children swept up from urban slums by elite charities and put to work on distant farms.

Finally, the state of U.S. children needs to be mentioned. Our child poverty rate is higher than many peer nations; social mobility has decreased; more than 140,000 U.S. children have been orphaned due to loss of caregivers from COVID; and a shortage of infant formula drags on (Pete Buttigieg matter-of-factly said that our capitalist economy doesnt make baby formula). Finally, the cruel family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border are also a reminder that the integrity of those families does not matter to the state. The U.S. does not seem to act like a society that cares enough about all children and their families.

In To Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development, OBrien explains that the Left has long critiqued the traditional family, from Marx and Engels, who saw the family as a key part of the bourgeois social and economic order (particularly via inheritance), to 19th century utopian socialists and the anti-capitalist feminists and queer radicals of the 1970s. Central to the leftist critique is the fact that the family is an institution that has been critical to the functioning of capitalism. Workers have to be fed, clothed, housed, and taken care of, and the household is the site where this care (and sexual reproduction, or the creation of new workers) takes place. Labor is gendered in the household, with women often doing unpaid work. The family also enables people who dont or cant workinfants and children, the elderly, and the disabled and unemployedto receive care. The family is where we are supposed to get all the emotional and physical care we need. The family is where we are made dependent on a wage laborerand disciplined in terms of gender roles and expression.

While liberal feminists wanted women to get out of the house and to secure equality in the workplace, radical feminists saw husbands as bosses in their own right. Radicals of the late 60s and 70s sought the abolition of the male-breadwinner, heterosexual nuclear family form as a means towards full sexual and gender freedom. But over time, feminists began to favor diversity of family form, which remains the dominant feminist approach to the politics of the family since the 1990s, writes Weeks. Yet diversification and representationmaking capitalist institutions (marriage, the military, politics) more friendly and inclusive to racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, or others who have been marginalizedare not radical. A radical leftist vision is one that seeks to dismantle or transform these institutions entirely, including the family.

As Weeks points out, popular leftist policy proposals around health insurance and wages could decrease our dependence on the family structure. These policies would compensate for injustices exacerbated by the family or obviate the need for the family altogether: policies like Medicare for All, free college and student debt cancellation, universal basic income (UBI), and a $25 minimum wage, just to name a few. With Medicare for All, healthcare benefits would not be tied to marital status; young people wouldnt get kicked off their parents insurance at a certain age. With free college, theres no need to take on mountains of debt to get a college degree, or to depend on parents who might be unwilling or unable to fill out financial aid forms or contribute to the cost of education. With UBI and higher wages, people do not have to stay dependent upon other wage earners or the living arrangements sometimes dictated by those relationships. These policies increase human freedom and thus our freedom from the confines of the family structure.

And yet, as Weeks explains, family abolition is more than a series of policies. Its a political project to create an entirely different society in which everyones needs are met. In Communizing Care, OBrien describes post-revolutionary, communist arrangements in which people care for each other in larger structures loosely based on the phalansteries conceived of by the utopianist Charles Fourier (the phalansteries were to rescue people from what Fourier saw as the dreadfulness of married life). These are not counterculture communes that exist within capitalism but true post-capitalist structures in which groups of a couple hundred people or so are in charge of taking care of everyone in the group and coordinating with other communes the production and distribution of goods and services that people need to live.

Whats especially notable about OBriens vision of the phalansteries is that there is a concern for everyones well-being, sexual needs as collective concerns, as well as attention and sensitivity to vulnerable people, to biological variation [what] we now define as disability, neurodivergence, or mental illness. While people would be free to form their own kinship units, including with biological relatives, the family as it is known would not form any kind of economic unit as in current life. We can imagine communal parenting, freedom of expression for sexuality and gender, and relationships not based on economic coercion.

The roots of such structures can be seen in the caring communities that pop up in protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in 2011 or Standing Rock, the Indigenous-led protest movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, in 2016. (OBrien describes such protest kitchens as part of insurrections as key features of family abolition.) In Our History is the Future, Native writer Nick Estes describes camp life at the site of #NoDAPL:

The main camp was a fully functioning city. There was no running water, but the Cannon Ball Community Center opened its doors for showers. There was no electricity, but Prairie Knights Casino, the tribal casino two miles up the road, had Wi-Fi. And there were no flushable toilets, but Standing Rock paid for porta potties. Where physical infrastructure lacked, an infrastructure of Indigenous resistance and caretaking of relations proliferatedof living and being in community according to Indigenous valueswhich for the most part kept people safe and warm. The main kitchen served three hot meals a day. (At its height there were about thirteen free camp kitchens and a half dozen medic tents.) Elders and children ate first, following a meal prayer. If there were guests they ate first. The donations tent was well stocked with sleeping bags, blankets, tents, socks, gloves, hats, boots, and so forth. Everyone was fed and clothed. Everyone had a place. At camp check-in, bodies were needed to cook, dig compost holes, chop wood, take care of children, give rides to Walmart, among other tasks. Many quit their jobs, instead making it their full-time work to cook and to keep others warm and safe.

The camp included a day school for children as well as direct action training. (And to be clear, family abolition is not about idealizing makeshift camp structures of survival or about making our living conditions less comfortable than we might imagine. The camps illustrate the how and the why of family abolition, not the end goals for the material circumstances of our lives.)

In August 2020, the Intercepted podcast Escape from the Nuclear Family featured a story about a group of people weathering the pandemic in Oakland, California. Four families had lived together for 15 years in a democratic community with friends. They talked about how their communal life enabled them to deal with the stress of the pandemic.

Its a lifesaver, you know, to have other people you know and trust and who care about you and care about your children being a part of your life. We need each other to be our best selves because its not as simple as an act of will. And so having that extra support around parenting and even just coordinating knowing that theres always people around and that my kids feel comfortable and safe. Thats hugely important and it creates an enormous amount of resilience in our ability to navigate disturbances, whether theyre small or big.

A policy change we can make now is to build public housing designed with social interactions in mind instead of more unaffordable single-family homes.

Transitioning from isolated units to communal living environments will be challenging; humans are complex and conflict-prone. A post-nuclear family society does not portend freedom from conflict or bad behavior; people could still harm each other. But it does mean people have the opportunity to change their surroundings if their relationships are not working out and would have more support instead of isolation within an abusive environment. The goal is also freedom from the economic constraints under capitalism that make conflict and violence a routine part of human interactions, whether within families or on the streets or in our jobs.

Humans are social creatures, and we evolved to cooperate with others for our survival. We face an epidemic of loneliness and deaths of despair in our society. As people who make it to old age live longer, we will need more care, not less. We need more community and more support, not less.

We also need the state to stop tying peoples relationship choices to taxes and to stop promoting one way (marriage) to bond with another person.

In todays language of the family, were to have it all: work-life balance. Were to work full time and (if we can afford it) hire other women to clean the house, do laundry, and care for children or other family members. As many on the Left have pointed out, society will pay people (often women, and often not much) to take care of children or the elderlyas long as those children and elderly are somebody elses family members. In reality, society should collectively pay for the care of people of all ages no matter who does the caring. Perhaps the most important point of family abolition is the idea of creating a society rooted in love for everyone, not just ones genetic kin. To love everyone means to be actively concerned with their care and growth, as Fromm put it. We should want care for everyone. As Lewis argues:

When you love someone, it simply makes no sense to endorse a social technology that isolates them; privatizes their lifeworld, arbitrarily assigns their dwelling-place, class, and very identity in law; and drastically circumscribes their sphere of intimate, interdependent ties.

The institution of the familyand those who defend itcontinues to limit our freedom, as current developments around gender, reproduction, and sexuality show. The federal right to an abortion has been overturned, and we are in the midst of a moral panic as the right promotes false narratives about drag queens and transgender people as sexual predators.

As Robin D. G. Kelley explains in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, freedom and love are revolutionary ideas, and we need both to imagine a better world. To imagine a society free from the oppression of the family, we need to imagine an expansion of love, not a contraction of it. An inclusivity of love for everyone, not the stifling exclusivity imposed by the family.

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Why We Should Abolish the Family Current Affairs - Current Affairs

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On the Need for Honest Abolitionists.

Throughout my work of abolition, Ive committed to standing with those that nobody else will. The ones who have no remorse. The ones who wish they could kill again. The ones that you would never want to meet on the street. While such statements are not true of all of the guys I work with, they are true of some of them.

I do not believe in progress without truth. If we are going to move forward as an abolition movement, we must tell the truth. Unfortunately, I dont believe that we currently know how. For far too long, we have told partial truths. We constantly speak of the need to recognize the humanity of folks on death rowbut we fail to speak of the many evil things that they have doneand in the process we dehumanize them by not giving them the chance to repent. It seems that we would rather look past such things. Then, we are amazed when society cant see the humanity of these folks when they are about to be executedthey cant see the humanity because we havent showed it to themwe have tried to sell the public a story of humanity that is partial, incomplete and ultimately false. There can be no truth without truth. We will never be successful until we completely lean into the complexity of our cause. Our work has to begin in evil and end in salvationif we dont deal with the evil then we can never find the salvationbut too often we want to start in salvationwhich is why people most often think that were nuts. Its strangebut I have no doubt that more people are being executed because we spend all of our time trying to humanize/rationalize folk on death rowinstead of leaning into the complexities of evil and telling the truth.

Let me make it plain, some of the people that I have worked with on various death rows are not people I would ever want to live next door to my family under any circumstanceor for that matter even meet on the street. Why are we scared to make such a statement? These folks are not worthlessthey have valuebut theyre not angelsmany are from ittheyre humansand by making them out to be angelswe are dehumanizing them. The zealous efforts of the movement to humanize has led to dehumanizationto creating fables when we need the truth. People need to hear about those who have no remorsethose who wish they could kill againthose you would never meet on the streetbecause if we can save those we can save them allbut we have to tell the truth. What they did is indispensably important to what they can be. What we have done is indispensably important to what we can become. We are all a part of all that we have met. Indeed, truth is the only path to real humanizationour collective salvation.

Amen.

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On the Need for Honest Abolitionists. | Jeff Hood - Patheos

Opponents of the new constitution cheer in the streets of Santiago, Chile, on Sunday night after results showed voters rejected a proposed new constitution. Matias Basualdo/AP hide caption

Opponents of the new constitution cheer in the streets of Santiago, Chile, on Sunday night after results showed voters rejected a proposed new constitution.

Chile spent the past two years writing a progressive new constitution, but the document was so soundly spurned by voters on Sunday that the result was clear less than two hours after the polls closed.

Nearly 62% of Chileans rejected the draft Magna Carta that was designed to replace the current one written during the country's military dictatorship while just 38% voted to accept it, according to official returns.

Although nearly every public opinion survey suggested the draft constitution was in trouble, Sunday's results were shockingly lopsided and a huge blow for President Gabriel Boric, a leftist elected last year largely on his pledge to shepherd through passage of a new constitution.

"As president I receive this message with a lot of humility," Boric, who is 36 and is Latin America's youngest president, said in a TV address Sunday night. "You have to listen to the voice of the people."

News that the "rejection" vote had prevailed sparked celebrations in Santiago, the capital, where lines of drivers honked their car horns and people gathered outside to chant and toast victory.

"We're happy because, really, we all want a new constitution, but one that is done right and this one didn't fulfill the expectations of the majority," Lorena Cornejo, 34, told the Associated Press, as she waved a Chilean flag. "Now we have to work for a new one that unites us. This one didn't represent us and that was clear in the vote."

In a traditionally conservative country married couples couldn't get divorced in Chile until 2004 many voters considered the new constitution too liberal. It was written by an elected special assembly dominated by leftists and progressives while only about one-third of the 155 delegates were conservatives.

The text called for legalized abortion, gender parity in government offices, the abolition of Chile's senate and the establishment of autonomous Indigenous territories. It included vast new protections for the environment that, according to critics, could have put the brakes on the country's lucrative copper mining industry. It also called for universal health care and the right to decent housing, education and pensions, which would have required steep tax increases.

People line up to vote on a proposed new constitution in Santiago on Sunday. Matias Basualdo/AP hide caption

People line up to vote on a proposed new constitution in Santiago on Sunday.

"We don't have the financial capacity to pay for all of these things," said Mitzi Rojas, an architect in Santiago who voted against the constitution.

The effort to remake Chile's governing guidelines stems from a deep political crisis. For decades the country was viewed as an economic powerhouse and a Latin American success story. But frustration over inequality and the high cost of health care, education and public transportation sparked violent protests in 2019 that nearly brought down Chile's right-wing government.

To address protesters' concerns and convince them to call off their demonstrations, Boric who was then an opposition congressman helped cut a deal to begin the long, complicated process of writing a new constitution.

The current one was written in 1980 under dictator Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile for 17 years and calls for private sector involvement in education, pensions and health care. Democracy was restored in 1990. But even though most nations that undergo momentous political transformations write new constitutions to reflect these new realities, Chile never got around to it.

"The original sin of the current constitution is that it was written during the dictatorship," said Rodrigo Espinoza, a political science professor at Diego Portales University in Santiago. "It has gone through reforms but is still seen as illegitimate."

In a 2020 referendum nearly 80% of Chileans voted to draft a new one.

However, experts say the best constitutions are usually short and to the point. By contrast, the document produced by Chile's special assembly was a confusing collection of 388 articles, said Claudio Fuentes, a Santiago political analyst. Another problem, he said, was a vast disinformation campaign that spread lies including claims that under the new constitution the government would disarm the police and confiscate people's homes.

Boric acknowledged these problems in his TV address but he also vowed to lead a new constitutional rewrite process.

"I commit to put my all my energies into building a new constitutional process alongside congress and civil society," said Boric, who plans to meet with the heads of political parties and both houses of congress on Monday.

Boric added that whoever drafts the next version whether its Congress or a special assembly they will have to produce a constitution that unites Chileans rather than divides them.

See more here:

Chile rejects a progressive constitution with big changes - NPR

At the New York Women's House of Detention, three inmates stare out the windows, 1941. (Photo by Irving Haberman / IH Images / Getty Images)

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Hugh Ryan became interested in the Womens House of Detention while writing his first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer. The prison, which operated on Greenwich Avenue in New York Citys Greenwich Village from 1931 to 1971, kept coming up in his research: a queer woman who had passed through it, a relationship that had started inside its walls. But it was a historical tour of the Village with Stonewall veteran Jay Toole, who did several stints in the House of D, that was revelatory for Ryan.1

Jay said, I do these tours because young people have forgotten, he recalled. And I thought, Thats my job as a historianto find the people in my community who say, Im being forgotten about, and to uplift their stories.2

Now, with The Womens House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Ryan has done just that. The book is an exhaustively researched history of the prison, beginning with its predecessor, the Womens Court, and continuing through its demolition in 1974. Along the way, we encounter figures from the familiar (Angela Davis) to the anonymous (Charlotte B.) in an engaging story that presents a compelling argument for a queer politics of abolition.3

In a recent conversation, Ryan and I talked about abolitionism, solidarity across liberation movements in the 1960s, and the unique role of queerness in historical analysis. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.4

Naomi Gordon-Loebl5

Naomi Gordon-Loebl: Talk to me about what your research process was like for this book. 6

Hugh Ryan: My first year was spent asking, Where are the stories as close as possible to the point of view of the women and trans folks who were incarcerated? I didnt want to tell the story from the point of view of the prison, because it would be a terrible story and it would be fake.7 Current Issue

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So I thought, There are two ways you end up in the archive. Either you have power, so your stuff is preserved. Orsomeone else has power over you. You become the raw material for their archive. When prisons do that, they reduce people down to fungible numbers. I needed to move away from that kind of power over to a power over that was at least somewhat more interested in the lives and voices of these people. And thats when I hit on social workers. At the time, there was an intimate connection between social workers working with incarcerated women (or people seen as women) and queerness. Queerness was a reason you could be arrested, or it could develop in you in prison; or being too butch could ensure that you would never be a wife or a maidthe only two jobs women could haveand you would go to prison for stealing, or something like that. So I knew that social workers were talking about the issues I needed to be talking about.8

I found this collection at the New York Public Library called The Womens Prison Association. Every box was under lock and key, and no one had ever looked at them. I reached out to the WPA, and they said yes immediately. But they said, We dont think youre going to find the information youre looking for. We dont think we were thinking about queer issues in the 30s and 40s.9

But they absolutely were. Within two hours of getting into the case files, I found one of the essential stories from the book. The story of Charlotte B. was one of the first files I came across. It was hundreds of pages long, and it followed her for decades.10

NGL: Wow, that must have been such a lightning-strike moment there. 11

HR: I shrieked in the archives!12

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NGL: Could you tell me about how abolition influenced your writing of the book? 13

HR: When I came to this book, I was not a fan of prisonsI probably would have said they were broken and needed to be fixed. But in doing the research and seeing the consistency with which the same problems came up over and over again, it became clear that prisons did not solve anything. No one involved seemed to think they would solve anything. And it didnt matter if it was a liberal administration or a conservative administrationthe only reform that ever happened was more money for human cages, bigger prisons farther away.14

And when I grappled with that, I had to turn to abolitionists. I read folks who were incarcerated in the House of D, like Angela Davis, but also modern abolitionists like Mariame Kaba. Once you disconnect from the idea that prisons are about justice or rehabilitation, you start to see what they really do and how they really function. And the only people who had a sensible, working understanding of that were abolitionistslargely Black women who were from communities that were over-policed and over-incarcerated. Not entirely, but largely. So I had to learn from that, and to see that this was not about15

a broken system; this was about a marvelously efficient system that was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.16

Prisons remain resistant to reform because they dont do what we think they do. They warehouse all the people we have abandoned with our broken safety net, our broken insurance system, our broken health care system, our broken education systemall of the places that abandon people. Our stateinstead of supporting people, or giving them safety nets, or supporting interventions that would allow them to stand on their feetfunds prisons to gobble them up. Thats the only way that prisons make any sense.17

I just didnt understand that. And Im a little ashamed of that. I should have been listening to more people. I should have known more. It took seeing the consistency of it in the record for decades to drive it home to me. And then engaging with abolitionist thought and abolitionist organizations helped sharpen my thinking.18

NGL: Whats great about the framing of the book as an abolitionist text is that it offers some suggestions for moving forwardnot just in terms of the politics around incarceration, but also queer politics. 19

HR: When we think about the fact that 40 percent of the people incarcerated in womens facilities today identify as LGBTQ, but we dont have laws that are focused on, for example, the arrest of lesbians, that tells us that the system is doing something that has nothing to do with justice or the law. Thats why the framing for the book is abolition. Abolition allowed me to see a more useful rubric for the queer movement that emphasizes care and bodily autonomy. Those are things that I can organize around as a queer personnot just Can I, as a gay man, get married? when marriage is an unequal institution that our government shouldnt be funding. Of course, I want that written inequality in the law destroyed, but Im more interested in a broader, deeper sense of equality that helps the community as a whole.20

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NGL: One of the things that the book explores is this fascinating duality: On the one hand, prisons are sites of oppression, dehumanization, violenceand at the same time, the Womens House of D was a space of queer community, connectiona hub for the Village in some ways. 21

HR: You know Allan Brubs book, Coming Out Under Fire? He talks about how World War II created the idea of homosexuality. Homosexuality existed, obviously, but it was explained to everyone who entered the service: They measured you, they tested you, and they told you about homosexuality. They defined it as this awful thingbut then people had their own experiences.22

The prison, particularly the House of D, does that for folks who have been arrested and incarcerated. In the earliest files, from the 1930s and 40s, many of these people came in saying, I knew about my desire. I knew, as Charlotte says, that women looked up to me like they would a dazzling football hero. But they didnt know the word homosexual, and they didnt know to feel some kind of way about it. And the prison did that for them.23

And then during the 50s and 60s, when bars were being shut down, the police were raiding private parties, and you could get arrested or beaten up on the streetthe one place the government was supporting as a site of queerness was the House of D, because they were arresting all the lesbians and trans guys and nonbinary folks and putting them there. They created that community, and that community then recreated the Village. Its foundational to the identity of the Village and to why the Village is the lesbian neighborhood in New York that it is.24

NGL: Language about the identities of folks in the past has become so politicized; theres so much litigation of what the specific identity was of such-and-such a historical queer person. And to me, those conversations miss the pointwere projecting language onto the past. I really admire the way you handle these questions in the book.25

HR: I get very frustrated when someone tries to boil this down to Was X person in the past a lesbian, or were they trans? Because in their time period, they had their own words for themselves. In a Victorian society, there was no conception of a sexual orientation. When we project one identity into the past, we project our whole world.26

I think that, often, what people are trying to do when they project these identities backward is to claim the past. But I dont think we need to do that to claim the past. Im not an identitarian in my history. Id much rather use a materialist basis that says, These practices are non-gender-normative for their time period. These practices are indicative of homoeroticism. These practices are indicative of queerness.27

Queerness, for me, functions a little differently from the rest of these words. The reason I use queer historically, as opposed to lesbian or gay or bisexual or trans, is that queer doesnt conjure up a specific typology of sexual or gender identity. Instead, queer indexes your sexual identity or gender identity in the hierarchy of your time period. So a queer person is one who is marginalized because of their gender or sexual identity. Its the marginalization that is the through linethe marginalization based on sex, based on the body, based on erotics.28

NGL: What Im interested in, as a queer person myself, is finding points of connection historically: Knowing that someone almost a century ago had a similar feeling to me, even if they would have described it in different words, is really moving. Im way more interested in those connections than I am in litigating what it would have been called. 29

HR: I always go back to the 19th-century invert model. The concept of the invert collapses and condenses our ideas today of being homosexual, being trans, and being intersex. It was assumed it was part of your body. In Victorian times, men were expected to spend all their time with men, express their love for other men, sleep in the same bed, etc. The same was true for women. All of these homosocial behaviors made homosexuality invisible, both to the world and to homosexuals themselves, largely. They understood that some people might be receptive or not. But they didnt think of themselves as a different kind of person.30

But inverts were a whole other class. An invert in todays time might identify as an effeminate gay man, or they might identify as a trans woman. Those are two groups that we think of today as being in different categories and which have different concerns. But we go back to the 19th century, and that was one group with one set of concerns. This bright line of sexual orientation that we think is the primary indicator of desire didnt matter all that much back then.31

Thats a different world, and thats powerful: It says that the whole world could be different in fundamental ways. Im not looking back on the past and saying, These fucking idiots, they didnt understand what sexual orientation wasthey were actually gay! Instead Im saying, Here are the concepts you lived in the world with; heres how you organized yourself. Its a different model. Its not wrong or right; its just different.32

Instead of flat containers, Im more interested in pathways. I think that a lot of the folks who might fit inside the circle of gay, for instance, are traveling on different paths. The behavior that our culture thinks matters is the same, but why it is being expressed, how we arrived at this state, how we think about the worldthats different for different groups inside this gay umbrella. The more we can allow ourselves to imagine that to be true for people in the past, the more we can start to imagine it for ourselves as well.33

NGL: The point is not to collapse difference, obviously. Its just to say that identity is specific to our time, to our culture. Even the very idea of personal identity is really a modern concept. 34

HR: Weve gotten very confused, I think, where we think identity is real. Like, its not real, but its true. Its like saying, Im a Democrat. Theres not a thing in nature that we can point to that is called a Democrat. And you and I might use that word and mean totally different things. Its a useful organizing principle and allows us to see certain things the same way from a distance. But you get up close, and its very different for everyone inside that container.35

I think we need to allow ourselves more thinking that way around gender and sexual orientation. But were so caught up in this [notion of] Im born this way. You have to give me rights, because I couldnt be something better. Which makes me want to vomit. I dont care if you were born this way or if you chose to be this wayits your right to be this way. It should not be this biological essentialism. But we are very essentialist about identities, and we police the boundaries of them. Because our rights are based on saying, I was born like this. I have no choice. And I just dont find that kind of thinking to be very helpful.36

NGL: Tell me about something that surprised you in your writing of the book. 37

HR: One thing that was flooring for me was to see how closely interconnected the Black Panther Party and the Gay Liberation Front were through specifically the House of D. Not just the larger, general organizational connections, but Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird being there on the night of Stonewall. The Gay Liberation Front being founded to support the Black Panthers, who were in the prison at that moment. The fact that the Gay Liberation Fronts first protest was outside the prison. We never talk about that!38

When Huey P. Newton got out of jail and came to New York, he met with reporters in Jane Fondas apartment. And Afeni Shakur called the Gay Liberation Front and said, Send people over here so that we can meet afterwards and talk about our concernsso that we can work together. Its so clear that these folks saw the interconnections between queer oppression, Black oppression, Latino oppression. All of these things flow through the prison-industrial complex, and that was spoken about openly. And thats why I think groups like the Gay Liberation Front and the Black Panthers had a real vision for transforming society. They werent looking at siloed identities; they were looking at the ways in which all of us were being oppressed by these systems.39

I kind of knew that, to a degree, or wanted that to be true, to a degree. But Id also spent years hearing stuff like, Those 60s and 70s liberationiststhey matter, but they were dumb and privileged in a lot of ways. Its another way in which we dont empathize with people of the past. We look down on those activists; we judge them by the things that we see them getting wrong. And they were getting those things wrong! We have to learn from those things. But we also need to give them the space to have gotten things right, to have things to teach us. To be full humans who make mistakes and also do some good.40

Read the original post:

Where Solidarity, Abolition, and Queer History Meet - The Nation

(Part 2)

The fourth reason why the Philippine sugar industry has not caught up with countries like Thailand in farm productivity is the paradox that, as we are aspiring to join the whole world in having our own Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4), we have not even completed the Industrial Revolution 1.0 that happened in England more than two centuries ago, when human labor was replaced by machines. The industry still depends on too many workers in the farm (including the so-called sacadas) that rising labor costs are making farming operations unprofitable. There are less and less young people who want to stay in the farms as they become more educated and opt to work in non-agricultural jobs, especially in services in the urban areas. These alternative jobs are less strenuous and provide higher compensations. To make matters worse, the average age of a Filipino farmer is now approaching 60 years. This labor shortage could have been solved by increased mechanization but farm equipment and more advanced technology are beyond the reach of farmers who own ridiculously small farms which are not economically viable for the cultivation of sugar. As mentioned above, the ideal size of a sugar farm so that it can adopt more modern means of cultivation is 50 hectares. As we will discuss below, this ideal size can be achievedwithout taking away the ownership of land from the beneficiaries of agrarian reformby what is known as block farming. Finally, the sugar industry suffered the same fate as many sectors of the Philippine economy that had long been managed by leaders with a protectionist, inward-looking and anti-market mindset. As Dr. Adriano wrote in his column: Too much government regulation and protection of the sector has the effect of shielding it from competition and inducing efficiency in its operation. It was much easier to impose higher tariffs against imported sugar (50 % for in-quota MAV or minimum access volume of 64,050 metric tons per year, and 65 % in excess of the MAV) and strictly regulate entry of imports through issuances of import permits than doing our homework of making the sector efficient. But their long-term result is the gradual decline and decay of the sector we are now witnessing. These words are perfectly applicable to so many other sectors of the economy in agriculture, industry and services that never became globally competitive and that nurtured domestic monopolies or oligopolies because of overprotection, many times in the name of nationalism or the so-called Filipino First policy. Fortunately, the recent amendment of the Public Service Act, allowing 100 % ownership by foreigners of telecom, transport and other public services, has dealt a significant blow against this mentality. We can thank the Duterte Administration for this game changer.

To make matters worse, because of the strong political clout of our sugar barons, they have gotten away with the highest tariff protection among agricultural products. Under the World Trade Organization(WTO), we agreed on the 50-percent tariff quota for MAV and the 65-percent in excess of MAV for sugar imports. These tariff rates are higher even than rice, a more important commodity for the population. The tariff on rice is only 15 % and for meat at around 40 %. Another vital information provided by Dr. Adriano could eventually lead to the abolition of the Sugar Regulatory Authority by the Administration of President Marcos Jr. Under the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the bound rate is only 5 %, meaning that sugar imports coming from ASEAN countries (like Thailand and Vietnam) will be imposed a 5-percent tariff duty. Because of the tariffication of sugar, the requirement of securing import permit should no longer be necessary because it is violative of our trade agreements with the WTO and our ASEAN partners. Curiously, no one seems to be challenging the current system of SRA issuing import licensing permits (the bone of contention in the current sugar import crisis) even if it is obviously a redundant system given sugar tariffication. It seems that the sugar industry is still the nino bonito of agriculture since no import licensing permits are needed for rice, corn, pork, poultry and other liberalized agricultural products outside of the required sanitary and phytosanitary clearances when importing. This first governance crisis under the newly installed Administration may be very providential: it may lead to a total revamp if not abolition of the SRA.

In fact, President Marcos Jr. may want to look into the possibility of abolishing both the SRA and the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) and transfer to the Department of Agriculture the task of sustaining what these two institutions started some years back to reconsolidate the small sugar farms that resulted from the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program that was unwisely applied to sugar, in contrast with the way the Taiwanese exempted sugar from the fragmentation process. I am referring to the block farming that showed promise in increasing the productivity of sugar farming, especially in regions like Western Visayas and Central Luzon where sugar farming, with the appropriate economies of scale, can still be profitable. In contrast, I see sugar farming as a dying industry in CALABARZON.As a Batangueno, I see sugar planting as being replaced by higher-value food products like vegetables and fruits as well as livestock in Batangas because of the very high real estate prices that are now prevailing in this rapidly urbanizing part of CALABARZON. In contrast, the greatest promise of improving the productivity of sugar farms is in Mindanao, especially Bukidnon, where the farms are still reasonably large enough to adopt the most advanced forms of mechanization and modern technology, very much following the examples of the banana and pineapple sectors that are globally competitive and contribute the most to our agricultural exports.

In a report of the Peace & Equity Foundation, block farming was described as a variation of the nucleus estate model that worked very well for the Malaysians in the growing of palm oil. Reference was made in the report to farmer Ernesto Obtinalla who registered his two-hectare sugar farm to block farming through Crossing Ibos Farmers Credit Cooperative (CIFCC). After a year, his production increased from fifty (50) tons per hectare to seventy-three (73) tons per hectare. His tonnage increased by 56 % and his net income by 93 %. CIFCC was just one of the cooperatives/ associations which joined the Diversified Sugarcane Block Farming Enterprise Program of Multi-Sectoral Alliance for DevelopmentNegros (MUADNegros). In sugarcane block farming, small sugar farmers enroll their two to three hectares of farmlands with their cooperatives/associations. Once the total number of hectares reach the size in which economies of scale can be achieved (about 50 hectares), a block farm is formed. Each block farm has twenty to twenty-five farmer participants. They sign an agreement with their cooperative, giving it full authority to co-manage the farmers enrolled land for three years.

Participating farmers were paid wages but were also considered part-time owners of the enterprise, sharing in the enterprises risk and rewards. They became agri-preneurs and were upskilled and reskilled to learn how to manage bigger farms. The Peace and Equity Foundation (PEF) collaborated with the MUAD farmers organization members and provided production capital for the 55 hectares per farmer organization, and offered incentives to the farmers with the highest tonnage of sugarcane. PEF also funded the business development services given by MUAD. PEF can serve as a role model for other Nongovernment Organizations (NGOs) or Social Enterprises that are devoted to uplifting the lot of small farmers. The goal is to reconsolidate the farms that were fragmented by CARP to reach an ideal size in which mechanization and other more advanced methods of farming become economical, such as having the right plant population, the planting of high-yielding varieties, proper nutrient management and cultivation. The larger hectarage being farmed makes it possible to obtain credit at lower rates of interest and to have access to heavy equipment like tractors for land preparation and dump trucks for hauling. All these can be promoted by the Department of Agriculture in close partnership with private business enterprises and civil society. The SRA and DAR would be superfluous organizations.

For comments, my email address is [emailprotected]

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Addressing the sugar crisis long term - Manila Bulletin

Experts react

September 5, 2022

ByAtlantic Council experts

On Monday, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss was selected as her countrys newest prime minister, after triumphing over former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak in a vote by some 160,000 members of the Conservative Party.

Truss takes over for Boris Johnson at a momentous time: War has come to Europe, inflation is battering the British economy, and the United Kingdoms messy divorce from the European Union (EU) is dragging on with a dispute over the Irish border. How will Truss, who joined the Atlantic Council in March to deliver the 2022 Christopher J. Makins Lecture, balance these challenges and deal with allies and foes abroad? We reached out to experts from the Atlantic Councils Europe Center for their thoughts.

Jump to an expert reaction:

Livia Godaert : Allies and friends will need to keep the new prime ministers attention

Sir Peter Westmacott: Expect a shift from campaign-trail rhetoric to governing reality

Ben Judah: The time for shape-shifting is over

James Batchik Which road will Truss take with Europe?

Less than eighteen months after the launch of Global Britain, its hard not to see it as a troubled initiative. Rising energy bills and inflation rates, a summer of heatwaves and heated disagreements with labor unions, and dramatic scandals turned domestic political crises have unsurprisingly pulled the countrys focus inward.

With the new prime minister decided after a tumultuous summer and contentious leadership race, we might expect that the premiership of Liz Truss will think both globally and locally. As foreign secretary, Truss spoke of a network of liberty that the United Kingdom was building with allies and like-minded partners. The network included many of the same priorities outlined in the Integrated Review last year: strategic trade and investment, economic security, tech leadership, and protection of freedom and democracy.

However, I predict that were headed for a UK foreign-policy shift: We are going to see a turn to economic diplomacy as the priority through the Group of Seven (G7) and aggressive trade-partnership negotiations, as well as a re-think of the United Kingdoms traditional partners on the world stage, continuing a process that began with Brexit.

While she is committed to NATO, Truss is far less enthusiastic about partaking in broader European political processes, exemplified by her wish to scrap pieces of the Northern Ireland protocol and her apparent frustration with French President Emmanuel Macron. She has also been described as skeptical of the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.

Ultimately, Truss sees the United Kingdom as first among partners rather than one of the pack and is seeking out international commitments that sustain this. The Global Britain exercise was meant to be an honest examination of the United Kingdoms place in the worldwhere it can be an effective leader, where it can be a successful facilitator and force multiplier, and where it should act in support of other key actors. Truss instead seems to be committed to Britain as a leader in a host of areas, whether or not they are where the country is most effective: support for Ukraine now and in the future, countering Russia and China, etc. But with rising challenges to the union from Scotland, new political winds in Northern Ireland, and fraying bonds in the commonwealth, her focus will be pulled in many directions beyond the domestic cost-of-living crisis. The United Kingdom has the potential to facilitate transformational policy change through collaborationwith tech regulation representing one underappreciated areabut its allies and friends will need to put in the work to keep the new prime ministers attention.

Livia Godaert is a nonresident fellow at the Europe Center.

Just 0.3 percent of the British electorate choose the leader of the Conservative Party and thusin this casethe next prime minister of the United Kingdom. To defeat her rivals, Liz Truss threw plenty of red meat at this unrepresentative, mainly white, male, southern, prosperous, aging, and anti-European sample of the electorate. This included commitments to cut taxes that have been widely criticized by economists (and some fellow Tories) and subsequently modified. She also made Britains allies wonder whats coming by declining to say that she thought the president of Francethe democratically elected (which she is not) head of state of Britains closest neighbor and allywas a friend of the United Kingdom. She advises the Ukrainians not to give an inch to Vladimir Putin, while asserting that she will soon designate China a threat to UK national security.

But recent leadership contests within both the Labour and Conservative parties have shown that what appeals to the membership doesnt necessarily appeal to the general public or win general elections. Truss has a record of rapidly shifting her positionson the monarchy, Brexit, economic policy, sending troops to Ukraine, and much elsewhen the need arises, and she did not win as big as the polls had predicted. So although she can be expected to continue blaming the EU for Britains economic ills and the self-inflicted problems caused by Brexit, there may be a more considered approach once the new prime minister gets her feet under the desk of 10 Downing Street, has to deal with the very real crises bequeathed to her by her predecessor, Boris Johnson, and finds that she needs friends abroad.

Sir Peter Westmacott is a distinguished ambassadorial fellow with the Europe Center and a former British ambassador to the United States, France, and Turkey.

Liz Truss has risen like a chameleon through British politicsalways trying to please her direct audience. She took her first steps in politics as a student activist for the third-party Liberal Democrats, advocating the legalization of cannabis and the abolition of the monarchy when she was at Oxford University, when that was a crowd-pleaser. She then turned into a Conservative MP who pushed for Britain to remain in the European Union when pro-EU politicians ran the party, before morphing into a strident Brexiteer. To win the leadership of her party she has run explicitly as a base-pleaser, making her pitch exactly what the aging, wealthy, and right-wing membership want to hear. This has taken her to the very top.

Truss will now, almost certainly, immediately shift her politics to fit the view from Downing Street, with talk of a one-hundred-billion-dollar package to tackle the energy crisis. The skills she will need now are the opposite of those that have taken her to this point. She will need to fix her name to big, precise policies and stick to them to face the magnitude of the crisis that confronts her countryand not shape-shift, which wont help Britain, let alone Liz Truss if she has any hope of winning the next election.

Ben Judah is the director of the Europe Centers Transform Europe Initiative and a veteran British journalist.

The European Union will need to wait and see which version of Liz Truss it will get. Having campaigned as a Remainer in the 2016 Brexit referendum but since evolved into a Brexiteer, Truss has been both confrontational and cooperative with Europe. Now, as prime minister, she finds herself at a crossroads with Europe again.

On the one hand, Truss risks seriously damaging her relationship with the EU early in her premiership over the situation in Northern Ireland. Truss is a sponsor of a bill to allow ministers to violate the Northern Ireland Protocol, which imposes EU-mandated customs and border checks for goods shipped to Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom rather than on the border with the Republic of Ireland. She has already threatened to invoke Article 16 of the agreement, unilaterally suspending part of the Protocol. The EU, for its part, has rejected renegotiating the agreement, having already launched legal proceedings against London for failing to enforce EU rules. Brussels is also debating additional retaliatory measures such as lawsuits or finessetting up a collision course with Truss. With sky-high inflation and energy shortages dominating the political agenda at home, there may be strong incentives for Truss to increase anti-Brussels rhetoric for domestic political gain.

On the other hand, Truss has found ways to work with Europe before. As foreign secretary, she attended the European Councils Extraordinary Foreign Affairs Council following Russias invasion of Ukraine, joining the United States, Canada, and the NATO secretary general to coordinate and show transatlantic resolve. The United Kingdom is a leading supporter of Ukraine among European countries and will be essential to the future of Europes security, as French President Emmanuel Macrons inclusion of Britain in his proposal for a European political community suggests. The recognition on both sides of the Channel of Britains role is an opening for a more functional, forward-looking relationship.

Which option Truss will choose with Europe is unclear. She may tread a middle ground, hoping to park but not resolve the Northern Ireland issue, or lean in on confrontation to score points at home and within her party. Until then, expect relations with Brussels to be uncertain.

James Batchik is an assistant director at the Europe Center.

Fri, Oct 8, 2021

Issue BriefByDame Karen Pierce, Max Bergmann, Peter Rough, Rachel Ellehuus, Yakov Feygin, Nate Sibley, Livia Godaert, Leah Scheunemann, Safa Shahwan Edwards, Margaret Jackson, Olivier-Remy Bel, Damir Marusic, Jrn Fleck, Julia Friedlander, Frances Burwell, James Batchik

What is happening to Britain in the world? Since 2016, when Brexit began with the United Kingdoms shock leave vote to quit the European Union, the conversation has become almost impossible to have without entering into a fierce and polemical debate surrounding the countrys departure.

Related Experts: Peter Westmacott, Ben Judah, and James Batchik

Image: FILE PHOTO: Conservative leadership candidate Liz Truss attends a hustings event, part of the Conservative party leadership campaign, in London, Britain August 31, 2022. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo

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Experts react: The United Kingdom has a new prime minister. What should the world expect from Liz Truss? - Atlantic Council

As a cardiac surgeon for nearly five decades, Upendra Kaul dedicated himself to his calling, and gave hundreds if not thousands of people their heart back. His own heart, however, has lain all these years in his beloved Kashmir, the longing an ache that he has lived with forever. These twin threads his passion for his vocation, and for Kashmir run through When the Heart Speaks, the memoirs of this celebrated doctor.

There isnt a Kashmiri who does not know of Dr U Koul. Go to Hawal (or Halle ) in Pulwama, and you will be shown the old Kaul homestead.

Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit, grew up in Delhi as his parents had moved to the capital in 1947, in the wake of the first India-Pakistan war. He was born a year later. Through the Delhi school year, he looked forward to the summer holiday when the family would go back home to Kashmir, into the warm embrace of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. He recalls failing one year in school. The punishment his father meted out was for him akin to a death sentence: no summer holiday in Kashmir.

The nostalgia-filled recollections of the life of a medical student in Delhi in the 1970s are an engaging read. Kaul writes unpretentiously, unselfconsciously with an evident honesty. A distinguished career took him from PGI Chandigarh to AIIMS to Batra, Fortis and Sir Gangaram.

It was as an undergraduate at Maulana Azad Medical College that he learnt to speak Kashmiri properly, from two other Kashmiri, both Muslims from the Valley, in his class. They quickly became thick buddies. Following graduate studies at G B Pant hospital, he followed his heart to Kashmir to try and join SKIMS. His effort drew a blank after Sheikh Abdullah, whom he had approached with a representation to let him join the hospital, barely gave him the time of day.

But through his work while at AIIMS he was among the first in India to use ballooning to open up arteries after training abroad and other non-surgical treatments he remained engaged with Kashmiris who came to Delhi for treatment, and remained friends with them for ever after. This is why it is a bit puzzling that his doctor-patient relationship with Yaseen Malik, the JKLF leader who is now in jail, finds zero mention.

The story is not unknown. He has been at the receiving end from trolls, especially after he was critical of the Centres abolition of Kashmirs special status. Within weeks of that, NIA took away his phone to check his exchanges with his patient, became unduly excited by a number that appeared in one message, only to be told it not rupees and crores but a blood value reading. His telling of how he was approached by one of the sharpest in Indias deep state to treat Malik, only to be become a suspect in the eyes of another arm of the state three decades later, told in his characteristically dry style, would have been a valuable addition to the book. Was it self-censorship in difficult times? Or did the publisher get cold feet?

Kauls Kashmir angst is very different from that of the Kashmiri Pandit who was uprooted in the 1990s as militancy erupted in the Valley and many in the community were targeted and killed, along with Muslims who did not toe the militants line. He writes of those times, and how he got OPD timings extended at AIIMS to accommodate Kashmiris Pandits and Muslims who were flocking to consult a fellow Kashmiri doctor, and how he helped many young uprooted Pandit men find employment in the capital. They did not care for referral systems, all they knew was there was a Kashmiri doctor who spoke their language. Sometimes he footed their bills too, and let them repay in their own time.

In 1997 came his first chance to go back to the Valley as a doctor, a long cherished dream. Persuaded by Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, he started visiting the Valley once a month to treat patients. That effort grew over the years and by 2020, Kaul and a group of doctors began a project called the Gauri Healthy Heart Project named after his mother, whose wish to a have a home in the Valley he could not fulfill in her lifetime. He also built a home in Srinagar that is also named after her. Last month, he opened a state of the art heart hospital in Hawal. He travels there every Thursday and returns to Delhi on Sunday.

Kaul may not have intended to, and he may even disagree, but his engagement with Kashmir and with Kashmiris, offers a model for the return of Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley.

Title | When The Heart Speaks Memoirs of a CardiologistAuthor: Dr Upendra KaulPublisher: Konark Publishers (2002)Pages: 224Price: Rs 750

Explained Books appears every Saturday. It summarises the core content of an important work of non-fiction.

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Explained Books | An eminent cardiac surgeon's account of his work, and of Kashmir - The Indian Express

In 2021, Harlem-based activist Shawanna Vaughn stated during aForbesinterview: Walking into prison at 17 was the most traumatic experience of my lifeAs a person who suffers from the remnants of mass incarceration, I am very clear that the trauma starts before prison and lingers forever until there is help.

Incarceration takes a heavy toll on ones mental and physical health. The conditions of jails and prisons in the United States have long been known to increase risk of infectious disease and erode mental health. However, even among formerly incarcerated adults, we observe stark health disparities including higher rates of chronic diseases and premature mortality, which suggests that incarceration has far-reaching health consequences.

Starting in the 1970s, major shifts in legal policies, including harsher drug penalties, led to an explosion in the penal population. In two short decades, the number of Americans incarcerated nearly quadrupled, with disproportionate representation of racial and ethnic minorities. This rapid growth in incarceration has since been dubbed mass incarceration. The US now holds the distinction of having the highest incarceration rates in the worldwith the vast majority of incarcerated people being convicted of nonviolent crimes.

As a result, a growing share of older adults are now aging with incarceration histories and poor health. We are just now seeing the long-term health consequences of mass incarceration policiesthe remnants that Vaughn described. However, this trend will continue as the cohorts most affected by mass incarceration are growing older. Although men are incarcerated at higher rates, women experience greater health burdens following incarceration. This is doubly true for older women of color.

Previous research posits that womens health declines following incarceration are attributable to institutional sexism and racism within the penal system. These health declines have been well documented in younger samples, but little research has explored whether the effect of previous incarceration varies by gender and race/ethnicity among older adults. To fill this gap in the literature, we used data from a nationally representative sample of Americans over the age of 50 to examine differences in mental health, measured as number of depressive symptoms, and physical health, measured as number of physical limitations like difficulty walking, by incarceration status, gender, and race/ethnicity. With nearly 12,000 respondents from the 2012/2014 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we were able to document important health disparities among older adults.

This research highlights how sexism and racism lead to unequal health following incarceration.

We found that formerly incarcerated older adults had worse mental and physical health than their peers who had not been incarcerated. Moreover, formerly incarcerated women reported worse mental and physical health than formerly incarcerated meneven after controlling for a host of social, economic, and early life factors. When we investigated differences by gender and race/ethnicity, we observed startling disparities among formerly incarcerated women of color. On average, formerly incarcerated women of color experienced an additional depressive symptom and physical limitation to the next highest group (formerly incarcerated white women) and more than triple the number of depressive symptoms and physical limitations as the healthiest group (non-incarcerated white men).

In Figure 1, we present the age-adjusted marginal means for depressive symptoms (range=0-8) by respondents incarceration, gender, and race/ethnicity status. Controlling for age, formerly incarcerated women of color reported nearly three-and-a-half depressive symptoms when surveyed; whereas, formerly incarcerated white women and formerly incarcerated men of color reported about two-and-a-half depressive symptoms. A similar pattern emerged for physical limitations (range=0-9). In Figure 2, formerly incarcerated women of color reported having approximately 4.7 physical limitations. For context, the average number of physical limitations for the entire sample was two physical limitations. These high levels of depressive symptoms and physical limitations put formerly incarcerated women of color at greater risk for clinical depression and self-care disability.

This research highlights how sexism and racism lead to unequal health following incarceration. The results of this work indicate that older adults aging with incarceration histories experience worse health; however, formerly incarcerated women of color face the greatest health disadvantage among all the formerly incarcerated groups. These health inequities are the result of decades of policy choices that have disproportionately harmed women of color.

The implications for public health policy are clear. By specifying those groups that are rendered especially vulnerable, we can better direct resources, such as targeted mental and physical health interventions for formerly incarcerated women of color. Because men are incarcerated at higher rates than women and more attention is paid to early-life incarceration experiences, formerly incarcerated older women may be an overlooked population who have not benefitted from current initiatives aimed at improving the health of formerly incarcerated adults.

Furthermore, we encourage policymakers, healthcare providers, and community organizations to take a life course perspective to incarceration and health. Re-entry or transitional programs for post-incarcerated people are often short in duration and do not recognize the need for consistent care and support into later lifepossibly long after incarceration has taken place. Our work also suggests that decarceration and abolition should be key priorities for public health. Critical scholarship in the social sciences has only confirmed what post-incarcerated people like Shawanna Vaughn know from experience: that prisons do not (merely) punish crime, but also exacerbate inequality through the production of poor health.

Featured image by Ye Jinghan viaUnsplash, public domain

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Formerly incarcerated women of color face worse health in later life | OUPblog - OUPblog

Opinion The sight of a former executive laying into their old company is rarely less than delicious. And when that company is Microsoft, the exec is head of user experience, and the complaint is about the solid slab of sadness that is the Windows 11 Start menu? This calls for not just regular salted popcorn, but truffle-oil popcorn on a silver platter carried in by a butler.

Yet ex-Rex of UX Jensen Harris, who also confesses to being the murderer of the Windows startup sound, is, if anything, far too sparing in his regal condemnations. In the 20 years since the Start menu first appeared, it has changed many times, but arguably to little user benefit. It isn't hard to find videos of youngsters barely older than the button reacting with growing pleasure as they click around the Windows 95 desktop.

That's because the desktop metaphor was basically done. By the time it came out, Windows 95 was the beneficiary of 20 years of evolution in graphical user interfaces, first introduced in the Xerox Alto of 1973. That supplemented but did not replace the text terminal, which would be familiar to teletype operators of the 1920s. Teletypes themselves were inheritors of the QWERTY keyboard of 1873. Some 150 years later, as you compose your emails or write your jeremiad against Windows, that's basically what you're using. Stability in UX is not a bad thing.

Happier times...

Constantly messing around with UX is a bad thing, however. All you need is for it to find resources, start software, control your computer, and arrange things to your liking. Windows 95 did that perfectly well, as did Apple's System 7. By rights the GUI should have settled down then, like every UI before it.

So what went wrong?

Innovation! Differentiation! The operation of the market! Excuses, not reasons. Nobody is served by having to relearn which corner of a window has the control buttons every time they change platform. Nobody is delighted by having to play hunt-the-menu. None cry out in delight when a computer silently stashes a downloaded app who knows where instead of just putting it on the desktop where it can be moved wherever the user wishes. From version to version, from OS to OS, and in the case of Linux seemingly from moment to moment, these things shift and shimmer.

As for innovation, put it in the apps. Put it in the services. Put it under the hood. A single stable desktop would be as detrimental to innovation as USB-C. Apple has special ownership of that nonsense: USB-C has demonstrated that a single connector liberates good ideas, not stifles them. The desktop should be the cognitive USB-C, not a throwback to the days when every device had its own incompatible charger and data connectors.

The reason for the unholy UX mess with no signs of converging is, of course, marketing, and the reason they get away with it is because of one of the greatest con jobs in IT. We have been taught, and never question, the near-abolition of customer support by the OS makers. Unless you pay extra, you cannot pick up the phone or email Apple, Microsoft, and especially not Linux, to ask basic questions. You cannot say to Apple, "Which bit of the Finder actually finds things?" You cannot complain to Microsoft that File Manager thinks "Share with Skype" is the second most important file operation, right after Open. You cannot pick up a phone to Ubuntu and scream "Stop! Stop! In God's name, stop!"

The OS companies have insulated themselves from user pain, the sort that soaks up customer service resources and actually costs them money. Go to the forums, thou sluggard, and try to work out which version the answers you find are actually about. They have created their own walled poison gardens where they can mess around according to the will of whatever internal faction is carrying the day, sentencing billions to useless frustration, cognitive load, lost work, and lost lives. It is frankly criminal.

So keep your frills and fantasies, if you must, but include an alternative. Just one, and it should be the same one across the industry, like the keyboard almost is. Pick the best bits of Windows 95 and System 7. Different styles are fine, extensibility is fine providing it's standard and portable. Hand it out, then leave it the hell alone. Guess what we'll all be using in a year's time?

No, OS people, you will no longer be able to parade your latest unwanted schemes and fancies at us. You'll have to make them worth our while finding and adopting them. Then we can all concentrate on getting the damn work done. Isn't that the idea?

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The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it - The Register

On 9 August, the people of Kenya went to the polls to elect a new president, the incumbent president, Uhuru Kenyatta, having completed the constitutional two terms in office. There were other elections at the governorship, parliamentary and county levels but the main focus was the presidential election, with four main candidates: Deputy President, William Ruto, 55, of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA)/Kenya Kwanza Alliance; Raila Odinga, 77, of the Orange Democratic Movement/Azimio One Coalition; Professor George Wajackoyah, 63, of the Roots Party of Kenya; and David Mwaure Waihiga, 55, of the Agano Party. On 15 August, the Independent Electoral and Boundary Commission (IEBC) announced victory for William Ruto, with 7.1 million votes (50.5 %), followed by Raila Odinga, with 6.9 million votes (48.9%). Wajackoyah scored 0.44% of the votes and David M. Waihiga, 0.23%.

The result was rejected by Raila Odinga and his running mate, Martha Karua, and their supporters who threatened that the result will be challenged in court. This was Odingas fifth shot at the presidency of Kenya. At 77, losing the election means he would not achieve his dream of becoming president. He would be 82 years by the next presidential election. He has refused to congratulate William Ruto, nor has he acknowledged Rutos offer of an olive branch to run an inclusive, people-focused government. Odinga was not alone. He enjoys the support of incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has never hidden his disdain for his deputy. Kenyatta openly supported Raila Odinga, resulting in the characterisation of the Kenya presidential election as a battle between hustlers and the products of dynasties, that is, between poor Kenyans and big, influential families. Kenyattas father and Odingas father are historical figures in Kenya. Ruto describes himself as the son of a nobody, a chicken seller, whose mother sold by the roadside but who is determined to lead Kenya. Kenyatta has also refused to congratulate his deputy, as of the time of this writing. The deputys offence was that he refused to support Kenyattas plan to violate the Constitution and do a third term in office!

Yesterday, both Kenyatta and Odinga were further humiliated when the Supreme Court of Kenya, in a seven-man panel led by Chief Justice Martha Koome, in a unanimous decision, ruled that the election of 9 August was validly won by William Ruto of the UDA. The Court had three options before it: To declare and validate the election, and hence allow it to stand, to rule that William Ruto did not score up to the 50.5% announced for him, and hence declare a run-off, or to cancel the election altogether and order a rerun. The Court held that Ruto won. The other winner is Wafula Chebukati, Chairman of the Kenya Electoral Commission, who insisted on the integrity of the election conducted under his watch. As he announced the results on 15 August, four of his commissioners walked out on him, led by Juliana Cherera, the vice chairperson of IEBC, and went on to announce their own verdict at a different location. Cherera and co rejected the results, saying it was opaque. Chebukati received death threats. The two remaining commissioners who stood by him were beaten up. Odingas supporters were restless, and there were fears that Kenya could slip into another round of electoral violence, as it happened in 2017, when the Supreme Court overturned the presidential election, and ordered a new election, which led to an orgy of violence that claimed 1,100 lives and the displacement of thousands.

In 2022, the Supreme Court of Kenya received a total of nine petitions, eight of which challenged Rutos election, while one supported his victory. The Court chose to strike out two of the petitions and consolidate the remaining seven into one. It then further reduced the issues for determination to nine viz: Did the technology deployed by the IEBC meet standards of integrity? Was there interference in the transmission of Forms 34A? Were there significant differences between the physical Form 34A and what was loaded on the IEBC portal? Did the president-elect get 50%+ one of the votes cast? Were there discrepancies in the results? Where were the irregularities alleged by the petitioners, if any, and to what degree? Did the IEBC act in accordance with the law? Did the postponement of Mombasa and Kakamega governorship elections and other polls result in voter suppression? What relief and orders should the Supreme Court consider? In the course of the 14 days during which the petitions were considered, Odingas lawyers insisted that the IEBC election technology was tampered with, and that election servers were pre-configured by mercenaries from Venezuela who intercepted and manipulated results.

The Supreme Court of Kenya, in determining the nine issues identified, ruled entirely in favour of William Ruto and the IEBC, and dismissed the claims by the petitioners. They found that the petitioners did not prove their case beyond reasonable doubt, that there were no discrepancies, no interference in the verification, uploading and transmission of results, that there was no evidence of pre-configuration of results or conspiracy to taint the transmission process. The Court also upheld the authenticity of Form 34A, and accused the petitioners of pushing sensational information, hearsay evidence, and actions bordering on perjury, while blowing hot air, and going on a wild goose chase. Thus, along those lines, the Supreme Court of Kenya confirmed the election of William Ruto as the fifth President of Kenya.

Their Lordships of the Supreme Court of Kenya deserve applause for giving a ruling that addresses the issues pointedly, promotes stability, and acquits the Court honourably in helping to protect democracy.Days before the ruling, there had been speculations in Kenya that the Supreme Court had been intimidated and bribed by the President and the ODM candidate, Odinga, and that attempts had also been made to bribe the Chairman of IEBC, Chebukati. In the course of the election petition, there had been so much disinformation and misinformation with persons pushing all kinds of conspiracy theories on social media. The big issue in the 2022 Kenya election would seem to be the distrust between the people and their institutions. The petitioners fuelled that divisive factor by simply insisting that there was no way their man could lose. The whole matter got messy when John Githongo, Kenyas corruption czar whose story has been told most eloquently in Michela Wrongs book Its Our Turn to Eat backed Odingas campaign and reported that he had information that indeed a 56-member hacker team manipulated Forms 34A.

What the Supreme Court ruling has done is to confer legitimacy on the results as announced by Chebukati on August 15. Future reviews of the ruling may well indicate that the Court downplayed some of the limitations of the election, while focussing heavily on the sensational and conspiracy-laden submissions by the petitioners, but the position of the law today is that Rutos election stands. For Rutos supporters, this will strengthen their belief in Kenyas democracy that it is indeed possible for the child of the poor to aspire to the highest position in the land. Except that Ruto had long ago moved from being a poor hustler, without a dynasty to a ranking member of the Kenyan establishment. For establishment figures like Kenyatta and Odinga, they are now under pressure to act like statesmen. As the Supreme Court delivered its ruling, anxious young Kenyans watched the proceedings on big screens on the streets of the Rift Valley of Eldoret and in Nakuru and Mt. Kenya: strongholds of the main gladiators.

On Sunday, both Ruto and Odinga promised to respect the decision of the Supreme Court. They must now be joined by President Uhuru Kenyatta and others in doing so. Shortly after the Supreme Court verdict, Martha Karua, Odingas running mate, wrote on Twitter: The court has spoken. I respect its decision, but disagree with the findings.Her principal Raila Odinga said more or less the same thing. He too disagrees, and accuses the Supreme Court of using unduly exaggerated language.But it is democracy that has won. It is time for Kenya to move on. Next week, William Ruto will be sworn in as next President of the Republic of Kenya. His victory has been hard-fought and hard-won. It is particularly instructive that ethnicity has not been a major, problematic factor in this election. Even in Bondo town, the Opoda home of Raila Odinga, there have been no protests. There have been no celebrations either.The people say they are ready to work with the new President but he must not sideline the region. Raila Odinga should listen to his own people.At the inauguration of the President next week, Kenyatta, Odinga, and all the other key figures in the election must project an image of unity, attend the occasion and show solidarity because Kenya is more important than their individual ambitions. William Ruto is not the thug or thetanga tanga man,Kenyatta says he is. He is the choice of the people of Kenya who certainly trust him to move their country forward.

Congratulations, President William Ruto. It is now time for work! The issue of the legitimacy of the election may have been settled by the Supreme Court but there is the remaining issue of how to build trust in government and promote unity across Kenya. You promised to eschew the politics of vengeance, and run an inclusive government. You recently invited Odinga to come have a cup of tea and a conversation. You should extend that invitation again not just to Odinga, but also to Kenyatta and others. Your wife, Rachel Ruto has been quoting the Bible and talking about destiny. She is probably right: William Ruto would be the first Deputy President in Kenyan history to succeed his principal, and the second Kalenjin after Daniel Arap Moi, to become President. Both the burdens of history and office place a great responsibility on Rutos shoulders. He must proceed with maturity and wisdom in the best interest of the people of Kenya who are painfully weighed down by the high cost of everything from petrol to national sovereignty and security. And for us Nigerians: here is a lesson: Look at how the Presidential election petitions in Kenya were swiftly determined all within two weeks, before swearing-in. In Nigeria, we delay so much and allow the declared winner to use state resources and institutions to determine outcomes.We need to reform that aspect of our electoral process, to avoid unnecessary delays and manipulation of institutions, and to encourage our judges to be courageous, by conferring the Supreme Court of Nigeria with original jurisdiction in Presidential election matters since in any case, they aresui generis.

II.

UK: Liz Truss for Leader

On Monday, 5 September, Mary Elizabeth Truss, 47, Liz Truss for short, was proclaimed the new leader of the UK Conservative Party, thus making her the new British prime Minister replacing Bris Johnson who resigned in July after his government was hit by what became known as the Party-gate scandal.The Returning Officer for the election said Truss got 81, 326 votes 57% while the runner up, Rishi Sunak got 60, 399 votes representing 43%. A total of 172, 437 Tories voted, turn-out was 82.6 %, only 654 votes were voided. It was a much smaller margin of victory than was predicted (just 18%) which means that Truss as PM would have a lot of work to do to carry other party members along. Rishi Sunak certainly was not disgraced, and he has been most gentlemanly in promptly congratulating the winner and asking the party to unite behind her. He deserves praise for his courage and his refusal to drop the ball even when all pundits predicted a Truss win. His ideas may well still find accommodation in the new administration.

Today, 6 September, Truss and Boris Johnson will travel to Balmoral in Scotland together for Boris Johnson to take his leave, and for Truss to receive the Queens authority to form a government in line with the UKs unwritten Constitution and the Queens role as Head of Government. They will depart from the Queens presence as a combination of the old and the new, and the beginning of a new momentum in Great Britain. In her acceptance speech, Truss praised Boris Johnson: Boris, you got Brexit done, you crushed Jeremy Corbyn, you rolled out the vaccine, and you stood up to Vladimir Putin. You are admired from Kyiv to Carlisle.These are very kind words, and history may indeed be kind in the long run to Boris Johnsons legacy, but it would also be remembered of him that he ended up as the first Prime Minister in UK history to have broken the law while in office. Truss is now the third woman to assume office as British Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May before her. She says she is a modern-day Thatcherite: she wants to cut taxes, address the cost-of-living crisis, address the concerns of households and businesses, and deliver in the next two years and also deliver victory for the Conservative Party in 2024. But can Liz Truss be trusted to move from political rhetoric to action and truly deliver?Her critics insist that she is a master of political convenience and chameleonic politics. With a political beginning as a Liberal Democrat who once advocated for the abolition of the British monarchy, she has shifted so ideologically along the political spectrum, between 2010 when she got elected to parliament till this moment, when she would lead Her Majestys Government.

For her, it must be the best of times personally, but the worst of times to be Prime Minister. She is practically inheriting an economic catastrophe in the UK. Inflation is over 10%, the highest in 40 years. The cost-of-living crisis is so bad that families now skip meals and companies like Lewis Partnership are promising free meals for staff during winter. Even pub owners are saying, without government help, they may have to increase the cost of beer by 500% per pint, making it 20 pounds per pint! Many families cant afford gas for vehicles or for their homes. Truss has not given any specific details as to what she would do, but certainly, this is no longer time to play to the gallery.

Nigerians should watch the UK space closely as we prepare for the 2023 general election. Liz Truss is the product of a well-honed internal party democracy system, which we do not have in Nigeria. The Tory election was issues-driven. Here, our politicians dont even understand the issues enough to talk coherently. Today, Liz Truss is likely to announce her cabinet. Tomorrow she will face PMs Question Time in parliament and slug it out with Keir Starmer. She was born in 1975. Whoever wants to become Nigerias President in 2023, must pay attention, and learn the best lessons from other jurisdictions.

Reuben Abati, a former presidential spokesperson, writes from Lagos.

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Kenya: William Ruto's triumph, By Reuben Abati - Premium Times