Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

U.S. Attorney General William Barr is sworn in before testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 28, 2020.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On Saturday night, the New York Police Department arrested nearly a third of a 300-person protest. Demonstrators had gathered in Times Square to call for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. The protesters did no more than march and chant. They stayed on the sidewalk. Police outnumbered them 3 to 1. One demonstrator told CNN that officers descended from all sides and started ripping people off of the sidewalk. There were 86 arrests.

In the preceding days, small protest after small protest in New York had been crushed by overwhelming police force and aggressive arrests.

Such is the state of unchecked liberation in this, the anarchist jurisdiction of New York City.

Theres no subtlety in Trumps cynical base-pandering, aided once again by Barrs Justice Department inserviceas the presidents private law firm.

Alongside Seattle and Portland, New York City earned the official anarchist jurisdiction label from Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday. Other cities under Democratic leadership are likely to be added to this farce of a naughty list, targeting areas where potent antiracist, antifascist protests have erupted this summer. The designations are the latest act in President Donald Trumps theater of the absurd.

Because of the designation, the localities now stand to lose significant federal funding. Theres no subtlety in Trumps cynical base-pandering, aided once again by Barrs Justice Department in service as the presidents private law firm.

Residents of New York, Seattle, and Portland responded with bemusement on social media when they learned that their cities heavily policed, viciously unequal, racially segregated terminals and repositories of capital are, in fact, anarchist jurisdictions. New York City hasnt been an anarchist jurisdiction since CBGB closed, man, quipped comedian and writer Josh Gondelman on Twitter. Reminder: In this anarchist jurisdiction, alternate-side parking rules are in effect, tweeted MSNBCs David Gura. There was some heady riffing on whether the horizontalist, anti-hierarchical nature of anarchist organizing makes anarchist jurisdiction an oxymoron. The city is ours! #AnarchistJurisdiction, Brooklyn-based anarchist community center, The Base, mockingly tweeted.

It is hard not to scoff. There are over 38,000 officers in the NYPDs standing army. And the departments budget even after some toothless cuts in the new city budget will continue to exceed $5 billion. In June, during New York Citys historic six-night curfew, 1,349 people were detained by police and placed in holding cells, in the midst of a pandemic, for merely being out past 8 p.m. Not to mention that there are, even in New Yorks left-wing milieux, very few self-identifying anarchist groups. The citys new label is laughable.

Yet the material consequences for residents in the designated cities could be all too real. White House Budget Director Russ Vought is set to issue guidance to federal agencies on withdrawing funds from the cities in less than two weeks. The New York Post, which broke the story, noted that it is not yet clear what funds are likely to be cut, but the amount of money siphoned from New York City could be massive, given the Big Apple gets about $7 billion in annual federal aid. City coffers, devastated by the pandemic, now face more brutal cuts.

In no uncertain terms, Trump is punishing cities that have, again and again, shown themselves to be hubs of antiracist, antifascist resistance.

Theres an irony in the targeting of funds to governments that have, for the most part, cracked down heavily on anti-racist protesting. Democrats have been all too happy to see antiracist uprisings heavily policed and neutralized. As such, Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Jay Inslee of Washington state, alongside other Democratic state and city leaders, are only superficial targets here.

Some politicians highlighted the hypocrisy in Trumps move, pointing out that the cuts could hurt their ability to crack down on protests. New York Attorney General Letitia James correctly identified the central aim of the designations a pathetic attempt to scare Americans into voting for a commander-in-chief who is actually incapable of commanding our nation but added in her statement that Trump should be prepared to defend this illegal order in court, which hypocritically lays the groundwork to defund New York and the very types of law enforcement President Trump pretends to care about.

Such is the fulcrum of this bleak debate: Powerful Democrats respond to Trumps attacks by pointing to the police state that they, too, seek to uphold.

The Democratic officials insisting that Trumps order is illegal are almost as laughable, in this political moment, as the anarchist jurisdiction designation themselves. Trumps base-baiting speech acts have always served to create new and darker political realities beyond their technical legal scope.

The Justice Department may well have to defend this jaundiced, cynical move in court, but the work its meant to do has been done: the fortification of escalating efforts to repress dissent, building on Trump and his Justice Departments ongoing campaign strategy of groundlessly demonizing antifa, while decimating Black lives.

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Bill Barr: NYC, Portland, And Seattle Are Anarchist Jurisdictions - The Intercept

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The demands are clear: defund and abolish police. As those calls grow, so will efforts by reformers to propose new rules and regulations that they say will improve and restore legitimacy to policing. These bureaucratic reforms reflect the failed thinking that built up the carceral state, and they will make policing harder to dismantle. Reforms like this are meant to pacify social movements, replacing community self-determination with the expertise of lawyers, academics, and other professionals who are complicit in oppression.

Bureaucratic reforms are not just too little. They are also dangerous. Decades of judicial oversight, transparency legislation, and self-auditing requirements have not reduced the power of the carceral state. To the contrary, they have created a vast punishment bureaucracy giving political legitimacy and social inertia to a system of mass caging rooted in enslavement. Applying this same regulatory framework to the governance of policing will only expand the reach and harm of policing, just as it has helped to make the prison-industrial complex bigger, harsher, more durable, and racist as ever.

The chief proponents of police bureaucracy are typically professionals whose authority depends on working closely with the carceral state. Consider the recent L.A. Times op-ed by University of Texas professor Sarah Brayne, One way to shrink the LAPDs budget: Cut costly and invasive big-data policing. Brayne spent years embedded within the Los Angeles Police Department as a doctoral student at Princeton. Despite the op-eds title, it never proposes reducing let alone cutting any police surveillance. Instead Brayne writes about the secrecy that shrouds LAPDs data systems. She notes that New York City recently required the NYPD to disclose which technology it uses and what data it collects. She proposes that Los Angeles should follow suit.

Brayne asserts that surveillance technologies are largely missing from todays urgent conversations. That voice is missing only if one ignores local activists. Here in Los Angeles, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has fought to dismantle LAPD surveillance since 2011, recently forcing LAPD to end its LASER, Chronic Offender, and PredPol surveillance programs. An abolitionist organization, Stop LAPD Spying has also organized against laws like the one Brayne proposes importing from New York. That law, named the POST Act, tasks the NYPD with writing surveillance impact and use policies to post on their website, where the public has 45 days to comment. While police are asked to consider the comments, NYPD is not required to make changes or to share the information that underlies their conclusions, which will be framed by NYPDs army of lawyers.

These laws are also often coupled with efforts to limit use of a particular surveillance technology, like the restrictions on facial recognition enacted by San Francisco and the recently proposed Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, introduced by Senator Ed Markey and others this June. Explaining the bill, Markey acknowledged calls to dismantle the systematic racism that permeates every part of our society and noted that face recognition physically endangers Black Americans. But at the same time that his bill seeks to freeze police use of face surveillance, it outlines details of the regulatory scheme that Congress would enact to end the moratorium, including auditing requirements, standards for use and management, and minimum accuracy rates.

The idea behind these reforms is that policing can be tamed through paperwork and rules. This whitewashes the harm of surveillance, which will be used for racial domination no matter if it is lawful or unlawful, no matter if accurate. The politicians and lawyers behind the POST Act last month celebrated their tremendous and vital victory. But the truth is that legislation like this is the easiest possible win in this moment, betraying the bolder visions of the mass movement calling to abolish police.

No one is taking to the streets facing down tear gas to demand police bureaucracy. To the contrary, todays protests originate in the failure of past reforms, which have done little to end policings death toll. These protests have made police abolition a serious conversation. Whether and how legislation can be abolitionist are important questions. But if legislation is a goal, that power should be used to ban particular forms of surveillance, not just create a bureaucracy to regulate them. Calls for surveillance oversight ignore the lessons of past struggles against federal national security surveillance and Red Squad repression, which led to the creation of bureaucracies like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the NYPDs Handschu guidelines. Rather than dismantling policing, reforms like this help police adapt to criticism, to reinvent and rebuild.

When the POST Act was enacted, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition criticized the reform as surveillance bureaucracy and observed that laws like this presume that our communities want to be surveilled, so long as the state follows a heavily stacked process, pretends to consider input, and checks off a few baseline legal requirements. At the time, it may have appeared odd for activists from Los Angeles to criticize local legislation in another state. But Stop LAPD Spying observed that the national uprising against police terror will be used to force similar reforms across the country. We are seeing that now.

To be sure, this isnt the first time a reformer who worked closely with police has proposed surveillance bureaucracy laws for Los Angeles. In 2015 the ACLUs local Director of Police Practices sent a proposal for a similar local law that he had drafted to an LAPD deputy chief, asking if you have any concerns with any of the provisions that are in here and inviting ideas for provisions you think should be in here but arent. The ACLU later pushed a statewide version of similar legislation. An ACLU press release announced that the bill would offer a seat at the table and foster public debate to build community assent for surveillance.

This relates to the deeper issue with reforms like the POST Act, reflected both in who is advancing these proposals and in what these laws will create. Reform like this is pacification: it takes power away from the people, directing opposition into a bureaucratic process that marginalizes community voices, while elevating voices that support police or at most compromise with them. And at the end of the day, these reforms allow police to say that the community controls surveillance (community control is even in the title of the ACLUs model surveillance bureaucracy legislation, curiously named CCOPS) when the truth is that police set the agenda and violently hold the power. After securing public approval, police continue their harm with a claim of legitimacy. This is nothing like abolition. Its not even de-policing, reducing the scope of what police do. Its police preservation.

Abolition is decolonization. More than just ending policing and prisons, its a practice of building a new world. Those institutions are weapons of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, but they arent the only ones. Abolition requires dismantling all the weapons made using those ideologies. It requires dismantling universities, which colonize and hoard knowledge while credentialing experts who work to maintain oppression. It requires ending imperialism, whose wars, borders, and extraction are police violence on a planetary scale. And it requires dismantling the legal bureaucracies that legitimate and sustain a system of mass torture and killing.

Far more than dismantling and defunding though, abolition requires building the autonomy and self-determination that the carceral state denies. This begins with advancing the political vision of those who policing harms. Academics like Brayne arent the only people with ideas about how to address the harm of surveillance in Los Angeles. Brayne is using her authority to argue against the views of movement organizers who are working to dismantle LAPD surveillance. No matter her intentions, Braynes expertise comes from riding around in police cars and helicopters, shadowing police as they hunted people. In contrast, grassroots organizers speak from working to empower the communities harmed by policing.

Academics and lawyers dont need to get in the way of liberation. Instead of solely thinking about social problems, they can think with movements struggling to transcend those problems. They can defer to the deep expertise of communities marginalized by the state and participate in the daily work of building political power, advancing self-determination, and dismantling oppressive structures. They can amplify community leadership in an effort to ensure lasting social change, contributing their expertise to collective liberation rather than being another cog in the technocratic management and bureaucratic rationalization of structural violence.

The positive task of surveillance abolition building a world without mass suspicion and supervision poses questions that need deep attention. Surveillance extends beyond the hard social control and violence of police and prisons. Surveillance, writes Simone Browne, is the fact of antiblackness. Its purpose is to harm communities and administer an oppressive social order. Rather than settling for community control of this violence, communities that are resisting surveillance from the perspective of liberation are creating a new historical horizon, where at first light these important questions can be confronted and then in the fuller light of a new day can help new ways of life built around democratic self-administration to bloom. Advocating for reforms like the POST Act keeps us lost in the darkness of our present condition.

Abolitionists have long known that the purpose of policing is to violently maintain an oppressive social order. New rules and criteria will not end that violence. Instead, they will just lead police to invest more resources and expertise into monitoring and avoiding compliance with the latest rules. This will make our system of mass suspicion, incarceration, and banishment harder to dismantle. If academics and lawyers wish to play a role in advancing liberation, they need a radically different approach to expertise as well as deference to those working to build a world without policing. Reforms that build police bureaucracy go in the opposite direction, placing more authority in elite hands and giving police new footing to expand their violence.

Original post:

Police Bureaucracy and Abolition: Why Reforms Driven by Professionals will Renew State Oppression - CounterPunch

The past few months have sparked conversations about defunding the police, specifically through the Black Lives Matter protests held around the world. I want to explain, from a criminological point of view, why this is imperative.

We know that there have been more than 440 Aboriginal deaths in custody, according to Guardian Australia, since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody report and recommendations were released in 1991. We know that Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people make up approximately 28% of the total prison population in Australian prisons, despite making up only 2% of the total adult population in Australia.

We know and have witnessed police brutality, we have seen the lack of police discretion when it comes to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people in the community. We know that police surveillance on our young people is occurring through taskforces particularly in New South Wales. This includes children as young as nine years of age.

We know that deaths in custody would not occur if racist legislation was overturned, specifically in relation to the summary offence of public drunkenness. Victoria is still yet to decriminalise public drunkenness, despite the commitment to do so in August, 2019.

Defunding the police, prison abolition and dismantling the systems that created and continue the ongoing oppression, violence, discrimination and the othering of this countrys Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, is not a radical idea.

I was recently interviewed on Progressive Podcasts about prison abolition and defunding the police. The main points of this podcast are to look beyond punishment as a way to address crime. It is, after all, a social problem. I am certainly not denying there are people who need to be protected in society and vice-versa. However, in 2016, we knew that approximately 46% of people in Australians prisons were incarcerated for non-violent offences. The cost of incarceration of people in prisons for non-violent offences equates up to $1.8bn nationwide.

We need to be looking at redirecting those funds to services that adequately and appropriately address the social issues around non-violent offences. Prison abolition is not about simply opening the prisons up and letting dangerous people into the community. It is about supporting the services that are integral to society. This includes housing, health, education and employment. These areas have all been defunded, yet this is not seen as radical it is almost expected and accepted.

Police brutality is another reason why we should be looking to defund the police. Korey Penny, an Aboriginal man, said he was violently thrown off his bicycle by police officers in Melbourne recently and called a black cunt. An Aboriginal teenager in New South Wales was kicked to the ground by police officers in an incident caught on camera. Video footage also showed an Aboriginal man being arrested and hit by police in Adelaide, in June 2020. In Sydney, Aboriginal man Kris Bradshaw was tasered in the face and was thrown to the ground in June 2020. These examples have occurred over the past few months, but police brutality is a practice that has occured since colonisation.

We have seen time and time again that police are not held accountable for their excessive use of force and violence towards people in society.

What is radical is living in a society where acts of violence are accepted because a blue uniform is worn or where racist legislation exists.

It is not so radical to say we need to defund police and pour much needed funds and resources into areas that improve social issues such as housing, health, education and employment. These, in turn, reduce the incarceration rates of Aboriginal people and reduces the over-reliance of degrading and dehumanising punitive measures such as prisons. It also addresses the social issues that impact on the disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal people in prison. We need to be exploring alternatives to prison and stop violence in the community. We must address the issues at the beginning, not looking for services to respond and fix issues created by the criminal justice system.

Robyn Oxley is a Tharawal woman and has family connections to Yorta Yorta. Robyn is an activist and a lecturer at Western Sydney University in criminology. Her field is in the space of the criminal justice system and Aboriginal rights to self-determination. Her work primarily focuses on human rights, social justice, systemic racism and improving outcomes of Aboriginal people in relation to the criminal justice system.

Originally posted here:

Defunding the police and abolishing prisons in Australia are not radical ideas - The Guardian

We have seen renewed calls for the abolition of vernacular primary schools in Malaysia.

This is a drum beaten periodically by Malay leaders most recently Perlis mufti Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin and PPBM Youth chief Wan Ahmad Fayhsal who seek to remove the ability for native Mandarin- and Tamil-speakers to be educated in their mother-tongues.

As a social psychologist who has studied and written on national integration and race relations in Malaysia for the last 15 years, I believe these periodic calls are neither pragmatic nor do they contribute towards nation-building and mutual respect within a vibrant multicultural country.

Instead, they might be interpreted as assimilationists an attempt to subsume and erase under the seemingly benign and exalted guise of integration.

Given that we have an enormous investment economic, cultural, psychological and political in primary vernacular education in Malaysia, Asri and others who echo his proposal for single-stream primary education and some possible vernacular secondary education need to answer a basic question: What is the evidence that single-stream primary education leads to more integration compared with single-stream secondary education?

Is interracial, inter-religious mixing and schooling at the primary school level likely to produce citizens who are more open-minded and focused on integration compared with having such mixing at the secondary school level?

This is an empirical question, which we in Malaysia do not have the data to answer.

I have not come across evidence from any country that the period of childhood between the ages of seven and 12 (primary school years) is advantageous to promoting racial integration over the ages of 13-18 (secondary school years).

In fact, there is strong psychological evidence that shows how adolescence is a critical period for identity development, which would include national identity.

Further, minority groups have a reason to prefer vernacular education at the primary level because there is extensive global evidence, including from Unesco, that mother tongue education (for example, Mandarin or Tamil) makes it easier for children to pick up and learn other languages (such as Bahasa Malaysia), develop their personal and cultural identities, help develop their critical thinking and literacy skills, and also leads to higher enjoyment of school and academic performance.

An obvious fact that we often neglect in the furore over vernacular education, is that single-stream Malay-medium schools are essentially vernacular, or mother-tongue schools for Malay children.

Pretending that Malay schools are somehow not vernacular, but are purely national or culture-free, is either ignorant or disingenuous.

This is not to deny the value of a national language that unites us and educational opportunities that allow students from different backgrounds to mingle. But how we marry the legitimate cultural needs of different groups is a challenging question that we need to seriously work through, rather than seeking to flatten the diversity that our nation contains.

Based on the available evidence from educational and psychological studies, it seems that vernacular education should be available at the primary school level, while secondary school might be a particularly good place to encourage interracial and inter-religious mixing and co-education, potentially leading to greater racial integration.

This is largely what we are seeing in the current educational landscape, that is, based on the education ministrys 2018 data, students educated at Mandarin and Tamil vernacular primary schools migrate to mainstream Malay-medium secondary schools.

However, we see an opposite, separating pattern among Malay students, more of whom migrate to mono-religious secondary schools instead.

There is also the simple question of pragmatism, in that we already have multiple long-standing vernacular primary schools in Malaysia, some of which have a multicultural student body.

So, even if you agree with Asri on single-stream primary schools, his particular proposal for vernacular secondary education only works if he persuades the government to provide high quality and widely available vernacular education at the secondary school level, such as currently enjoyed by Muslim students in Islamic schools.

Otherwise, I think it is fair to wonder whether such proposals are little more than an excuse for covering the final goal, that is the abolition of vernacular education, and the resulting erosion of the culture and identity of Mandarin- and Tamil-speakers. All the while beating the beguiling drum of integration.

Ultimately, this is an empirical question.

Had Asri and others called for a careful study to be conducted to assess whether vernacular schools necessarily produce less patriotic students, and whether primary or secondary schools should be single-stream, this would have been a responsible way to proceed.

In the absence of such data, it is irresponsible and majoritarian to strongly recommend the abolition of vernacular schools.

Ananthi Al Ramiah is the founder of Dataluminescence Research and holds a PhD in social psychology from Oxford University.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

See the original post:

Why proposal to abolish vernacular schools is irresponsible and unfounded - Free Malaysia Today

Asia-Pacific, Children on the Frontline, Editors' Choice, Education, Featured, Headlines, Human Rights, Migration & Refugees, TerraViva United Nations

Migration & Refugees

Trafficking survivor Devendra Kumar Mulayam, who hails from Shahapur in the Chandouli district of Uttar Pradesh, had to begin working at age 12 to help pay off the two loans his father had taken out. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS

PUNE, India, Sep 22 2020 (IPS) - One of the worst fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the closure of industries in India, which caused thousands of migrant labourers to return home to villages in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal. In a region where the poorest have always been subjected to bonded labour, child labour and slave trafficking, it has meant revisiting the past.

Uttar Pradesh has seen 35 lakh [3.5 million] workers return home. Azamgarh district alone has seen 1.65 lakh [165,000] returnees. Of these, only 10,000 people could be given employment under MNREGA [Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act], activist and Rural Organisation for Social Advancement chief functionary, Mushtaque Ahmed, told IPS

Of late, as the country has progressed into a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions, and some workers who comprised the bulk of the skilled labour in industrial belts have returned to work.

Bonded labour formally ended in India with the passing of theBonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.

But in the underdeveloped districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where feudal lords exploited the lower castes and had them work for free on their lands in the past, it continues to exist in invisible forms, drawing sustenance from within the casteist social structure that has confined Dalits and Mahadalits to illiteracy and grinding poverty.

The Mahadalits, are especially vulnerable, with their abjectly low literacy of 9 percent, as compared to the Dalit literacy level of 28 percent. First-generation learners for the most part, the Dalits and Mahadalits are generally unable to access government schemes that guarantee a better future. Often, the inability to pay back a small loan of Rs 5,000 ($68) or Rs 2,000 ($27) sees entire families being bound into slave or bonded labour in brick kilns, or farms owned by the person they are indebted to for generations.

At times, families are forced to pledge a minor child to work for an unscrupulous trafficker, according to the Freedom Fund.

The health infrastructure in eastern Uttar Pradesh and in Bihar districts along the Nepal border has always been wanting.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have worsened the situation but matters become compounded as many villages in Bihar faced the fury of unprecedented floods last month, which saw almost 8.4 million people affected. Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres in Bihar have collapsed, with the unprecedented floods straining them to the hilt.

Children are more at risk because of the current circumstances than previously.

Human trafficking for slave or bonded labour may either see a child being sent to a place thousands of kilometres away from home, or across the border into Nepal. Within India, the modus operandi involves sending children from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Bengal to a southern state where unfamiliarity with the local language prevents the child labourer from escaping or negotiating a way out and returning home.

With so few options, parents are sometimes lured with a lump sum of Rs 5,000 ($68) to Rs. 10,000 ($136) paid in advance, as Manav Sansadhan Evam Mahila Vikas Sansthan ( MSEMVS)executive director Dr. Bhanuja Sharan Lal told IPS. MSEMVS is an NGO that focuses on the eradication of child labour.

But the stories many of the survivors have to relate are harsh.

Wage labourer Umesh Mari from Mayurba village in Sitamarhi district in Bihar, had to take a loan of Rs 300,000 ($4,080) for his wifes medical treatment.

Since Sitamarhi lacks healthcare facilities needed for serious medical problems, the family had to admit her to a hospital in the adjoining district of Muzaffarpur.

Unable to repay the loan, the family, comprising of four children and son-in-law, had no option but to look for additional, better-paying jobs.

It is how 13-year-old Ramavatar and his brother-in-law Kesari were recruited for a tile fitting job across the border, in Malangwa in neighbouring Nepal. The job promised a wage of Rs 300 ($4) per day. Once there, they found that the conditions entailed working from 9 am until 7 pm with just a half-hour break. It was bonded labour.

There was little food, and erratic or no payment for months. The recent COVID-19 lockdown helped Ramavtar escape and return to his village, as IPS found. However, the family remains worried on account of their unpaid loan. Chances are, Ramavatar may find it hard to resist the trafficking mafiosi, and may have to return to an enslaved existence in bonded labour in another factory once again.

Take the case of Devendra Kumar Mulayam, who hails from Shahapur in the Chandouli district of Uttar Pradesh. The second among five siblings of a landless Dalit family, Mulayam told IPS how the family became desperate for a source of income following two loans that his father had to take one was for the marriage of his elder sister marriage and second following an accident that resulted in this elder sister sustaining a sever head injury, which occurred after her wedding.

As the eldest son in the family, 12-year-old Mulayam had to drop out of school and start looking for a job, while his younger siblings had to forgo their education.

Courtesy of a recruiter, Mulayam soon found his way to a textile factory in Coimbatore, where he was hired as a loader, at Rs 150 ($2) per day in 2010.

He was made to work for 12-15 hours each day, and the payments were erratic. Worse still, he had to pay for his own treatment wherever he was injured during work.

Mulayam and his fellow-workers remained closely guarded and were never allowed to move away from either their workplace or living quarters.

Any breach of discipline or error at work invited severe beatings. In 2011, when things became unbearable, Mulayam and 18 other fellow workers decided to protest. Theirs was one of the worst forms of bonded labour.

Recounting the horror, Mulayam told IPS, We were heavily assaulted, and thrown out. Scared of being rounded up by the police and sent back to the clutches of our tormentors, we kept hiding in the forested tracts adjoining the town, for five days. Thankfully, I could manage to tell my family members back home of my plight. They sought the help of a local NGO, which managed to secure my release and arrange for my return.

Despite the pandemic, children are still being bonded.

We recently rescued nine children from Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh who were trafficked to a panipuri [an Indian snack] factory in Telangana after their parents were paid an advance of Rs 10,000 each. Once there, they were made to work from 2 am every morning to 4 pm in the evening. They were only given their meals, and had to work for free. Similar circumstances had driven eight children from Azamgarh (in Uttar Pradesh) to a textile factory in Gujarat where they were used as slave labour, Lal told IPS.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

TheGlobal Sustainability Network ( GSN )is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking and so forth.

Read more:

Fighting India's Bonded Labour During the COVID-19 Pandemic - Part 1 - Inter Press Service

SYDNEY, N.S.

Nova Scotia NDP Leader Gary Burrill spent some time in Cape Breton this week meeting with the party faithful and chatting with selected candidates for the next provincial election. On Wednesday, Burrill sat down with Cape Breton Post municipal affairs reporter David Jala to talk about Nova Scotias political landscape and his vision for a post-COVID economic recovery. Burrill, who has led the NDP since 2016, weighed in on a number of provincial and local issues that included equalization transfers, centralization and how to best spend economic stimulus monies.

A: (laughs) Well, I remember living here as a United Church minister when I was running for the leadership of the NDP, so I am well used to driving in and out of Sydney when there are different forms of weather. The real purpose of my conversations down here this week is to talk to people about the impact of COVID and hear the many different points of view from the different sectors. We are asking what are the things that are needed from the government of this province in terms of investments as we move into this coming period of recovery.

A: Its been a mixed bag. On the substance of the public health directives, I think theyve done a very fine job. But on the basic communication and clarity and coherence of how this is all implemented, I think that they have done a less good job and it has become less effective as time has gone on. There have been inconsistencies in coherences in their approach that have not improved public confidence and compliance. For example, when we opened up the borders between Nova Scotia, P.E.I and New Brunswick the other provinces were way ahead of us with a whole regime in place for how to track people coming into the province. We didnt have any of this. We were behind the 8-ball. I also think about how the economy was reopened before childcare was reopened and that caused all kinds of chaos. So, overall, I think the advice Nova Scotians got from the public health directive has been strong and weve been happy to participate and do our part as an opposition party, but at the same time, the core elements of good communication and coherence around that communication has been lacking.

A: Over the past six months, we have seen that there are particular areas of our society in need of investment and in need of improvement. At the same time, we know that as we come into the recovery period, every government, everywhere, is going to have signature levels of investment and stimulus spending. So, in our view, that mega investment, that mega stimulus that is going to be required everywhere to come out of the contraction of the COVID period must be directed to those places where in the pandemic we have seen a particular need. High on this list is the whole economy of care. Regarding long-term care, another report was issued earlier this week that said we dont have enough people to provide the adequate levels of care in our nursing homes. And that having two or three people in a nursing home room is a highway to the transmission of infection. We need to move to a place where we have one bedroom for one resident. Imagine the jobs that would be created and the economic stimulus that will be provided to the whole province. If the government directed the investment that is required in order for us to come out of this contraction to building nursing homes, where every one of those 8,000 people in long-term care in Nova Scotia had their own bathroom and where everyone had their own room, then this would be a wonderful economic development program that would fulfil a wonderful need.

A: The economy of care is paramount and it also applies to childcare. One of the most jarring experiences of the pandemic in Nova Scotia came three or four months ago when, as I mentioned, the economy was reopened before childcare was reopened so there was a period of a week or 10 days that families all over the province were in chaos and didnt know what to do. So again, imagine the jobs that would be created and the overall economic development stimulus that would be produced if investments were made to provide childcare that is affordable, high quality and available across the board. Not only would you have early childhood educators going to work in all areas of the province but youd also open the door for parents to go to work.

A: I think its important to recognize the unique character of the present economic moment. This is not the 08-09 recession, this is not the dot.com bubble of 20 years ago, anybody under the age of 85 has never experienced an economic contraction like we are in at the moment. This is a Depression-level contraction. So, it changes the economic conversation for us. For years that conversation has included questions like how are you going to pay for it, where are you going to get the money, but in this moment, every jurisdiction in the western world, every province, every state, every nation is going to move into a deficit position. So the question is no longer about whether or not there is a deficit, that is no longer in the conversation. The question now is what are you going to do with the deficit you are going to have. What we are saying is spread that stimulus to places where, during the pandemic, we have seen a particular need. How better to direct investment and economic development than to develop the local jobs that would be created by a major investment in commercial and residential building retrofitting, and in local renewable energy production. These are major job creation programs, major economic development programs and major stimulus programs that could address exactly the needs of the present moment.

A: I think it has created a moment of real volatility and fluidity in which anything can happen. And because of COVID, we were already in a moment of that kind. So, overall, so many of the fixed points on our political landscape arent fixed at this time, theyre not in cement, theyre floating all everywhere, theres a fluidity and a possibility that has been deepened and underlined by the resignation of the premier. Were now in a situation where anything is possible.

A: Were excited about our candidates. Were excited to have nominated former CBRM mayor John Morgan to run in Glace Bay, well nominate Kendra Coombes again in Cape Breton Centre where she is the incumbent and were excited to have Madonna Doucette back running in Sydney-Membertou. We have about half of our Cape Breton slate ready, so the team is coming together well.

A: We cannot have success as a province that has two cities, one of which has had an inordinate concentration of decision-making and power and the other, the CBRM, does not have the capacity to direct its fundamental affairs. We need a system that municipalities can derive their revenue in such a way as to provide comparable levels of service for comparable levels of taxation. Thats what equalization means and is what we support.

A: We are living in the midst of the greatest centralization that has ever taken place in Nova Scotia history. In the seven years since the Liberals came to power in 2013, there has been this hyper-concentrated withdrawal of decision-making power from the communities and municipalities across the province. Those powers have been relocated to Halifax. So, in those seven short years, we have seen the abolition of local school boards that was replaced with a Halifax-based advisory council of education. We have seen the abolition of the local district health authorities that was replaced with the Halifax-based Nova Scotia Health. We have seen the abolition of the department of regional and rural development that was replaced by the Halifax-based department of business. In our judgment, this is not a model that accords to the nature of Nova Scotia. This province is by nature a highly decentralized society. What works on the South Shore wont necessarily work the same way on the Eastern Shore or the Acadian Shore. Previous generations devised systems that had local decision-making power for things like health and education. So, when people in Cape Breton say that they have lost their voice, they are absolutely right, they are absolutely describing the processes that occurred over the past seven years. The present government dedicated itself to a program of withdrawing and shutting down local voices across the province and relocating them to Halifax. In our view, the road forward for the province has to be one of re-establishing the integrity and the capacity at local levels across Nova Scotia.

A: Ive coached baseball for many, many years. I love ball and have worked with a lot of kids, but I am a singularly poor ballplayer. And, I never cheered for the Expos or Blue Jays. Im from Yarmouth so I grew up cheering for the Boston Red Sox. My other favourite team, of course, is the Cape Breton Eagles. They are a big part of the community. When I lived here, I knew never to schedule any church meetings on a game night. That would have been a no-no.

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VIDEO: NDP leader calls for investment in the economy of care - SaltWire Network

What is it that unites us as citizens of a republic where a former slave becomes a great orator for the abolition effort and insists upon education as the means for keeping all men and women free?

Frederick Douglass a slave traveled to New England embraced by many and stated his case. Wisely, he resisted being drawn into politics and appealed instead to mans higher nature, Lincolns leadership, and The Declaration of Independence as guidance. He, after all, credited a white slave owners wife who taught him to read opening the door to thought and reason causing him to understand many things.

Race relations today and the vast achievement gap of Black and brown students that do not allow them to participate in that vision articulated over 150 years ago must be addressed. For this parents need school choice.

Equally important, all students need a long view of our countrys history that keeps us free and united. We are quickly losing this battle as politics and socialism replace our history and students hear different voices causing them to march, claiming systemic racism. Real progress in race relations relies on knowledge of our Declaration and Constitution as context for progress made: Progress evidenced by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments; progress noted by the work of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders who looked to the past to build on the future, not to tear it down; progress made in the future for school choice which is a necessary hand up!

Todays high school students desire an end to racism, and focus on the history curriculum in their suburban schools as the culprit for not preparing them for race relations today. Yet racism doesnt exist in a vacuum apart from the history and civics which has been given short shrift in social studies since the early 1980s! Only when our countrys history is respected and focused on the past and present as a continuum to the future are we allowed to see the progress made in race relations since our founding in 1776.

At the same time students learn uncomfortable truths about our country, including slavery, which many have risen above. Our Declaration and Constitution must once again be understood.

Susan Harris is a retired U.S. History teacher from Cheshire.

CTViewpoints welcomes rebuttal or opposing views to this and all its commentaries. Read our guidelines andsubmit your commentary here.

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To overcome racism, students need a better understanding of our history, Declaration of Independence and Constitution - The CT Mirror

Museum of the Grand Prairie will begin its fall speaker series Thursday, September 24th. All events will be virtual, and free, and will stream live on their Facebook and YouTube pages.

Thursday, September 24 at 7 p.m.

FROM THE LOBBY TO THE STREET: STRATEGIES USED BY VOTING ACTIVISTS IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

Lecture presented by Kyle Ciani, Historian, Activist, and Professor in Illinois State Universitys Department of History

Activism to secure women's right to vote changed in the 20th century as activists traveled across the country to educate communities. From lobbying politicians to staging spectacular pageants and marching in street protests, suffrage activists engaged in a wide array of strategies to communicate their message of voting rights. Kyle Ciani will virtuallypresent this engaging talk and will discuss some of those strategies and their outcomes.

Sunday, October 4 at 2 p.m.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE: THE ROAD TO ANTI-SLAVERY ADVOCATE

Lecture presented by Christina Hartlieb, Executive Director of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Toms Cabin, the important anti-slavery novel, based on her experiences living in the border city of Cincinnati. Learn more about the woman Abraham Lincoln credited with writing the book that started the Civil War, as well as other members of her large, social reform minded family including suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker and Illinois abolitionist, Edward Beecher. Christina Hartlieb is a former HS educator, she loves bringing together ideas of social justice advocacy, womens history, and historical literacy.

Thursday October 22 at 7 p.m.

THE DANGERS OF GIVING WOMEN THE VOTE: POLITICAL CARTOONS AND SUFFRAGE

Lecture presented by Dr. Julia diLiberti, Professor of Humanities at the College of DuPage and serves as the Global Education Faculty Liaison.

Many political cartoons of the late 19th century and early 20th century centered on the suffrage debate, Dr. Julia diLiberti will compare political cartoons from the suffragist era and those depicting female candidates today.

Sunday, November 1 at 7 p.m.

HISTORY BROUGHT TO LIFE: SUSAN B. ANTHONY

First-Person Interpretation presented by Annette Baldwin, Historian, Director, and Professional Actor.

It had been a 72-year struggle for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women their right to vote, with thousands of women dedicating themselves to getting the vote, but it was Susan B. Anthony, a former school teacher and advocate for temperance and abolition who through her leadership for womens political equality, became affectionately and respectfully known as the mother of The Cause. Hear from Ms. Anthony herself as she describes her tireless work towards a more just society. Join Annette Baldwin, as Susan B. Anthony, for this informative and inspiring presentation.

Sunday, November 15 at 2 p.m.

WOMEN, POLITICS, AND ABOLITION A COMPLICATED COLLABORATION.

Lecture presented by Stacey Robertson, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the State University of New York, Geneseo

Professor Stacey Robertson will reveal in this how women abolitionists in Illinois and the Old Northwest engaged in partisan politics as an avenue to end slavery and through this process found themselves increasingly aware of their own gendered disempowerment. Their efforts to expand their influence and power laid the groundwork for future womens rights accomplishments.

Thursday, December 10

HISTORY BROUGHT TO LIFE: ANN BRADFORD STOKES, AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR NURSE

First-Person Interpretation presented by Marlene Rivero, Historian and Professional Actor

Ann Bradford Strokes worked aboard the Navys first Hospital Ship Red Rover of Mound City, Illinois. She worked with sick and wounded soldiers aboard the United States Naval Hospital Ship throughout the Western Theater of the Civil War on both the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries. She volunteered with the Sisters of the Holy Cross and Naval ship officers working as first class boy, cook, laundress, mender- anything to get food to eat. Eventually, Ann assumed the role of a nurse, leading to the beginning of a profession that would last generations. She was the first woman to earn a pension for her work with the U.S.N. Red Rover. After 18 months as an African American Civil War nurse, she left service in November 1864. Several years later, Ann learned to read and write. She settled, remarried, and remained in Southern Illinois for the rest of her life. In a fascinating reenactment, Marlene Rivero will breathe life back into Ann Stokes and her story, captivating audiences and informing new learners. Program is supported in part by Illinois Humanities.

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Museum of the Grand Prairie announced their fall speaker series : SPlog - Smile Politely - Champaign-Urbana's Online Magazine

Back in May, Teressa Raiford's yearslong bid to be Portland mayor appeared over.

Raiford, 50, announced her challenge of Mayor Ted Wheeler in late 2017, the year he first took office. In the primary this May, in a field of 19 candidates, she got 8.5% of the vote, finishing a distant third behind Wheeler and Sarah Iannarone.

Then Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. Starting May 28, Portlanders took to the streets by the thousands to protest the police killings of Black people. With six weeks remaining until Election Day, those protests continue.

For Raiford, such protest is nothing new. For most of the decade, she has shepherded demonstrators who decry the actions of police. She has confronted elected officials in City Council chambers and consoled the families of people shot by officers. This summer, her nonprofit organization, Don't Shoot Portland, successfully went to court to limit the cops' use of tear gas.

The issue she has spent much of her life championingpolice accountabilityhas never been more prominent. So in July, her campaign volunteers asked a question: Why shouldn't she be mayor?

"She has been doing the work that a mayor should have been doing," says Jacinda Padilla, Raiford's campaign manager. "After so much turmoil, people didn't know that she was running for two years, and we didn't want that work to go to waste. People who didn't even vote for Teressa in the primaries started to turn back to Teressa."

So increasingly, the city is plastered with posters featuring an illustrated portrait and a demand: "Write in Teressa Raiford."

Raiford declined to be interviewed for this story, saying her campaign staff could speak for her. Those volunteers say Raiford's experience as a Black woman whose family has endured racism and violence as well as her activism and outreach make her the right candidate for the times.

Susan Anglada Bartley, an educator, writer and activist, is among the supporters of the write-in campaign.

"Teressa Raiford has so much talent and expertise," Anglada Bartley says. "She is a multidimensional person and frankly a superior candidate, especially for this political moment."

That's frustrating for Iannarone, who is trying to position herself to Wheeler's left and whose campaign has repeatedly scuffled with Raiford's backers online. But it also displays the divergent views among Portland progressives over what result should come from four months of protests.

If the mayoral election is a referendum on the future of the Portland Police Bureau, the three candidates offer competing visions. Wheeler calls for balance: He celebrates the promotion of a Black man, Chuck Lovell, to police chief and the cutting of $15 million from the bureau's budget but says the police force is needed to ensure public safety. Iannarone seeks wholesale reform and says Wheeler's changes don't go far enough.

Raiford? She wants to dismantle the bureau and replace it with something better.

"If you know anything about Teressa, she's not a traditional candidate," says Token Rose, a community organizer who is volunteering for Raiford. "She's for [police] abolition. She's calling for defunding of police. She's calling for radical ideas. That's always been Teressa, that's always been her niche in Portland, and after May 19 people started to listen."

Raiford grew up in Portland. Her family owned the Burger Barn, a Northeast Portland restaurant that in 1981 was the target of a notorious incident: Two off-duty Portland police officers tossed four dead opossums on its doorstep. In her 20s, she moved with her two children to Dallas, Texas, where she worked as a manager at Bank of America. In 2010, she returned to Portland, shortly before her nephew was killed in an unsolved shooting.

That death propelled her into activism. The group she founded, Don't Shoot Portland, seeks to comfort and organize the survivors of gun violenceparticularly shootings by police. In 2016, she formed a nonprofit. (Don't Shoot Portland's most recent filing with the state, in 2019, reported an annual revenue of $36,407; Raiford, the executive director, received no salary.)

Raiford has sought office before. She challenged City Commissioner Amanda Fritz in 2012, receiving 3.2% of the vote. She sought to unseat former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith in 2014 (she got 6.6%) and ran a write-in campaign for Multnomah County sheriff in 2016 (3.2%).

Meanwhile, she drew a fiercely loyal following of Black activists for her organizing, especially during protests of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. She was arrested marching to a Bernie Sanders presidential rally in 2015. Charges were dismissed, and she sued the police for allegedly targeting her for her statements. A judge dismissed the case last year.

Destiny Houston, an activist, doula, and organizer with the Kid-Centered March for Black Lives, says that history is part of Raiford's appeal. "Going through being harassed by the police and all the trials, she's somebody who can represent the Black experience in a police state," Houston says. "Her whole mission is to create a society where people aren't losing people to police violence."

Under Raiford's leadership, Don't Shoot Portland in July took organizational leadership of the most prominent display of resistance to Trump: the "Wall of Moms," a group of yellow-clad women who faced off in gas masks each night with federal officers. When that group dissolved amid internal rancor, Raiford founded another: Moms United for Black Lives. Don't Shoot Portland also briefly ran an all-you-can-eat, donations-only barbecue for protesters called Riot Ribs, until that operation also ended after organizers said an outsider hijacked it.

Raiford's volunteers say she isn't spending much time campaigning. Instead, she's focused on mutual aid effortsthat is, projects where citizens help each other through difficult times. This month, during massive wildfires, Don't Shoot Portland organized a donations drive to send air filters, personal protective equipment, and menstrual hygiene products to smoke-clogged neighborhoods on the edge of the city and the Warms Springs Reservation, where the Lionshead Fire raged.

Not everyone is impressed. Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, the most vocal critic of police on the City Council, quarreled with Raiford in 2016 during debate over a new police contract.

"Last time I had a conversation with her, we were in City Council chambers," Hardesty recalls. "She started attacking me. She said, 'The NAACP is just sucking up the all the money; you're going to jail.' I said, 'The only way I'm going to jail is if I kick your butt.'"

Hardesty hasn't endorsed in the mayor's race. But she doesn't support Raiford. "I don't find her someone that I would want to deal with," Hardesty says.

Some members of Raiford's coalition raise eyebrows. She has the backing of key members of Stop Demolishing Portland, a group of homeowners who oppose infill development.

Few people could find Raiford's write-in campaign as frustrating as Iannarone, whose campaign is trying to unite the left against Wheeler, only to find that some activists prefer Raiford, whom Iannarone thought she had already defeated.

"I respect her work," Iannarone says, "and we just had an election in May after she campaigned for several years, and she didn't break 10% of the vote. My singular focus this whole time has been on unseating Wheeler. And that's what I intend to stay focused on."

Anglada Bartley, the Raiford supporter, says Iannarone's candidacy is ill-timed.

"Given that she is, like myself, a white woman, she can't say she really understands all forms of marginalization Black and Indiginous people feel," she says. "That is knowledge Teressa Raiford walks in the door with."

Rose is more blunt. "People think that we owe something to Sarah," they say. "And we don't. She will never be the face of our revolution. We didn't ask for a white savior, and we didn't show up to protest for a hundred days now, risking all of our lives, for another white savior. We asked for Black lives to matter.

"Teressa had been talking about police brutality," Rose adds. "People are actually starting to see it. And so people are asking for ways to show up for Black lives. So now we're providing those answers. People noticing us is a win. Of course we're going to win. We anticipate winning, 1,000%."

Nigel Jaquiss contributed reporting to this story.

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Teressa Raiford Isn't on the November Ballot. Many Portland Activists Want Her to Be Mayor Anyway. - Willamette Week

American defense is dancing with its old nemesis. No, it is not an adversary per se, but the reemergence of questions on organization, enabled by the creation of the Space Force. This new service has attracted the ire of scholars, politicians, and even one of Starfleets most famous captains. It has also been subjected to no shortage of parody. The creation of the Space Force nestled under the Department of the Air Force has ignited debate and rivalries not dissimilar to those which nearly crippled American defense in the post-World War II decade.

The post-war defense unification debates were centered on the shape and scope of the roles and missions of the military services. Those who sought to referee the interservice rivalries found themselves searching for procedural panaceas that would lead to an organizational utopia. Questions pertaining to the role and function of each of the military services were not resolved with the abolition of the free-standing military departments. This led to compromises in the 1940s and 1950s, which focused on the unity of efforts towards workable strategy and defense policy. Although significant differences remained, it was agreed upon that if another service was ever created, combined experience and unity should emerge as its guiding ethos. Congress rejected the possibility that the American military would be held hostage to a system where one military department could alone control thought and theory, particularly where new frontiers of military activity occurred such as space. This is seemingly forgotten with the creation of the Space Force.

Congress, as the final arbiter on defense, increasingly fought service cultures and rivalries as the unification debates distracted decision-makers. This distraction made time an ally for the communist threat. Central to these debates were bitter divisions between the Navy and Air Force. The pitting of experience and new concepts against one another resulted in the rejection of limitations placed upon developing a coherent national doctrine where any single approach rooted in ideology became prominent. At the time, the near loss of the war on the Korean Peninsula exposed the perils of relying upon a single philosophy, doctrine, or weapon delivery system. The unification debates and global events resulted in pressure on Congress. They pushed for access to a broad pallet of concepts, experience and historical analysis from the strategic thinking community, because it was crucial to American defense. The newly formed Department of Defense was encouraged to not suppress free debate and thought. As a result, the Department of Defense faced the challenge of how to balance limits on emotive arguments and ideological dominance against being able to use and encourage open debate effectively. The challenge led to decades of the use and abuse of jointness. The experience of unification which highlighted that limiting breadth and depth of debate only served to hinder addressing strategic realities and the development of sound strategic thought. This was starkly apparent when reorganization related to changes to existing services or the prospect of the creation of a new service came to the fore.

The Perfect Solution That Never Was

The creation of Space Force was accompanied by debates that have demonstrated well-travelled and familiar divisions, which are rooted in rivalry, prejudices, and false narratives of the past. Arguments over space resonate with the rivalries of old, which were driven by loyal air power theorists. These theorists have viewed the creation of the Space Force as final vindication to not only the dominance of their theories but also misguidedly that space is an Air Force and air power domain alone. However, these debates which vary on a range of topics related to the Space Force and spacepower frame questions over the foundations, efficiency, and effectiveness of unified defense, and ask if rivalry and service culture reigns supreme against strategy-making.

Within months of the creation of the Space Force, air power advocates quickly turned to their prophet, Army aviator Billy Mitchell, who was the protagonist for an independent Air Force in the 1920s. His ghost deployed to define the culture of Space Force. The Air Force and their supporters attempts to expand their dominance are to service their cultural paranoia and perpetual insecurity over the question of the air forces existence since the 1920s. They sometimes add capabilities to their portfolio to prop up arguments for their existence rather than questioning if it serves their best interest or the interests of the Department of Defense. Notably, the Space Force underwent less scrutiny than the U.S. Navy or Marine Corps had undergone in the 1940s, when bitter conflicts between the Navy and Air Force mission were at their peak and the very existence of the Navy was in question. Suggestions and concerns raised across the defense community about the future of the Space Force were placated with offers of jointness. This ignored the fact that that organizational culture defines the environment in which thought can occur and that jointness should not be used to placate constructive criticism and feedback, nor manipulated to further single service agendas. Often, suggestions by naval thinkers were rejected and argued under the auspices that the Space Force needs a blank slate. Blank slates rarely exist or become possible when they are set within an existing organization that has already rejected ideas and set bounds and limits. Those who promote blank slates for the Space Force will presumably be the first to support removing the Space Force from the Department of the Air Force, enhancing the spacepower doctrine by protecting it from developing an ideological service bias.

Building a Strategic Space Community

Debates such as these echoed similar unification debates of the twentieth century. Unification debates fractured relationships, divided opinions and attempted to dismiss long-established experience while pushing new boundaries on civil-military relations, political oversight and fiscal control. The process of military unification failed to resolve anxieties of many of the services and culturally embedded concern of how easy it was to squander hard-earned experiences while demonstrating the perils associated with attempting to create something new. This was foremost in the mind of U.S. Navy Adm. Arleigh Burke. In the late 1950s, he observed other services rejecting changes to military funding of space and the creation of NASA. He realized that space would be a battleground for policy and warfare which would awaken old and long-held divisions, as he attempted to explain why space was best viewed in a maritime context but not bound to any specific doctrine, yet iterated space was still the best opportunity for all service participation. The negative response driven by interservice rivalries convinced Burke that the U.S. Navy would support the creation of NASA. Support for space through a different organization came with little surprise considering that navies had long been involved with exploration and working in conjunction with explorers, who often inherently militarized new frontiers space was no exception. Although hopes that space would be a frontier in which humanity would escape some of the trappings of its bloody past, the space race of the 1950s and 1960s was as much about beating the Soviets as it was about the challenge of a new frontier.

It can be no surprise that maritime thinkers and air power theorists debate space. A maritime strategic view of space is evidenced against the ideologies of warfighting and air power doctrine. Space warfare thinkers have lined up their complex assumptions, attempting to mold air power doctrine to space like it is a square peg in a round hole. The maritime-minded use Sir Julian Corbetts Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, identifying that similarly to the sea, space influences events on earth in support of military activity. Some of these concepts have started developing a spacepower doctrine. However, strategic space policy needs to be understood beyond military power instead, like maritime policy, where a broad spectrum of inter-relationships cross-ranging from science to trade, and from foreign relations to communications, amongst others. This is a reminder that organizations view mediums in different manners strategically, tactically and operationally. These are determined by how organizations view the art and theory of war, which reflects individual service specialties and preferences.

Those building a new strategic community to best serve strategic space theory and spacepower policy only have to look to NASA for inspiration on how to build a community of talented intellectuals. NASA avoided any particular culture, shaping its community by drawing on a diverse range of talent. The Space Forces substantial draw from the Air Force could undermine the rationale to its existence by pursuing a policy of cultural eliteness. This may be useful in limited circumstances but may be out of step with the Space Force mission such as special warfare. By contrast, Space Command has demonstrated the value of having a range of talent by being a joint operational command. Although intense scrutiny by Congress is vital, diversifying transfers would provide a crucial first step to enhance longer-term aspirations and funding for space within defense. At the present, hopes that space would avoid the fierce rivalry akin to the past have increasingly disappeared and have been accelerated by the creation of the Space Force. This acceleration has been further enhanced by the singlemindedness of some who view space more in a warfighting air power model than a domain in which to address strategic concepts first. The optics of an Air Force takeover of space aggravated deep wounds and concerns in the culture of each service. Understandably, military services facing great power competition and the cost from the exhaustion of decades in the Middle East approached the political mandate to create the Space Force with skepticism. They could ill afford to risk service or broader defense budgets by fiscally maintaining yet another service and potentially jeopardizing already struggling modernization programs.

Leave Behind the Eulogies

Todays vision for the Space Force, presented by the Air Force, hopes for a lean and agile organization with redirected Air Force funds within the Department of the Air Force. This was justified to reduce bureaucracy, costs and rivalry. Yet, it will have to be seen if it materializes as this has been elusive to planners across defense since 1947. The rise of the more is better philosophy demonstrates a lack of thoughtful reasoning and a requirement for an economy to support it. During the late 1940s, the Air Force criticized retaining the U.S. Marine Corps within the Department of the Navy, as according to them, it was an excuse to further justify the existence of the Navy. With Space Force increasingly within Air Forces control it could be argued that it presents similar optics. Depending upon the budget requirements to operationalize the Space Force, the military branches, primarily the Air Force, may face difficult choices or turn to Capitol Hill to face voices who already doubt space forces funding. If they are to retain strategic readiness across defense, revisiting long term planning may be the only option. If funding is not forthcoming, it could impact the broader defense budget, potentially deepening rivalry, where other service advocates reject funding changes that could impact their services.

Service loyalties become useless if they betray the development of sound thought and if minds are closed to being challenged by new, alternative and classic theories. Although jointness remains operationally essential, it should not hinder challenges that jolt thought patterns from comfortable paths of thinking. Challenges present the opportunity to hone and refine doctrine, policy and strategic models. Air forces around the world have pursued continental air force space models similar to the U.S. Air Force. Their own national air power dominance doctrines have also resulted in them promoting airpower and space as one, inflaming rivalry and doing little to advance thought and theory. For example, advocates for the British Royal Air Force openly declared that air force ownership of space forces and space operations is about the justification for an RAF, its funding and role in British defense. They promoted this role using outdated and distorted myths, such as the Battle of Britain in 1940. This demonstrates how space could be misused by advocates in the defense debate for alternative agendas. This undermines urgent calls to build a broad constructive forward-looking strategic space community, which is not disconnected from the wider strategic community behind a singular or departmental perspective.

Unification and Strategy: An Ancient and Troubled Relationship

The creation of the Space Force provides a warning marker that lessons identified in unification period had been lost: the dangers and damage of rivalry, the potency of old arguments, and the embrace of technicism over experience and outdated models. These are all emboldened by tightening resources. This may force fundamental questions buried wishfully or otherwise from the past to the fore. Strategic space strategy and space warfare will continue to grow in importance because of all-service usage of spaces resources and concerns in space itself with competitors, while retaining first and foremost its classic ability to influence events on Earth. The creation of new organizations presents the opportune moment for strategists to think again by utilizing past knowledge and experience while not being held back by it. Space forces should be looked at as an opportunity, rejecting dogmatic often-schizophrenic compromises where departmental oversight and agenda automatically defines culture and thought, displacing strategic realities. Furthermore, outdated land analogies place unnecessary cultural boundaries to the space community developing new concepts. Those interested in the affairs of other domains should be scrutinizing space forces due to the potential of division over resources, which renews old problems. Air power theorists demand that debate, thought and theory remain exclusively their own domains should be consigned to history, as an outdated and a negative force. Building a community that focuses on advancing strategic space theory through engagement between strategists, researchers and defense practitioners should be free from the culture wars. Retaining the development of defense space strategy, space theory and space warfare concepts within the cultural ideology of one service will hinder progress, giving new impetus to explore questions long avoided: How many services are needed, what are their roles, how are they funded, and how does this all work together to form a national defense strategy?

Americas space force has been brought to the forefront, showing that many of the hallmarks of a system that unification was meant to be superior to have been renewed and replaced in a new monolithic organization. Defense and service departments are temporary constructs, reflecting national choices that are therefore worthy of continual examination as they often lose sight of their beginnings. Considering all the promises of abolitionists of military services and the free-standing service departments, many should be reminded, at the creation of a new service, that many questions and problems remain unsolved by unification. The first U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, stated in 1947: Defense organization is driven by emotion, not by intelligence. He could have added that sentimentality worshipping prophets and false narratives when creating an organization defines its culture and hinders its ability to find wisdom from the repository of experience while thinking of how to address and respond to genuine questions and challenges. Adversaries are unlikely to share such sympathy and sentimentality over their organizations as they develop and execute their strategies.

James W.E. Smith is a final year Ph.D. researcher in the School of Security Studies and Department of War Studies at Kings College London. His Ph.D. research focuses on British and American defense unification and its relationship with the development of strategic thought and theory. He was awarded grants to explore a variety of threads related to defense unification; one focuses on the relationship between maritime strategy theory and strategic space theory.

Image: U.S. Space Force

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Space Force Creation Warrants Revisiting Defense Unification - War on the Rocks