Category Archives: Government Oppression

New Delhi/Lucknow, Jul 21 (IANS): Congress in Uttar Pradesh is on an active mode ever since Priyanka Gandhi took over as General Secretary In charge of the party in the state and have made strong interventions from taking up farmers issues in Sonbhadra to offering buses for migrants during the lockdown which ran into a controversy.

As Gandhi makes interventions at regular intervals, state President Ajay Kumar Lallu hits the streets almost daily.

And all this is happening even as former Union Minister Jitin Prasada is trying to mobilise his community -- the most influential Brahmins -- even though the state party unit, as a whole, is not focussing on this.

Priyanka Gandhi through her tweets, statements and strong intervention is trying to position the Congress as the main opposition in the state even though the party was decimated in the last Lok Sabha election, winning just one seat -- Rae Bareli, which is considered the Gandhi family pocket borough.

Nadeem Javed, Chairman of the minority department of the party, said, "After Priyanka Gandhi came to the fore raising the issue of Covid management and law and order, the party has managed to catch the eyeballs of the people.

Jitin Prasada, who is trying to cash on Brahmin resentment against the current government led by Yogi Adityanath, has floated Brahmin Chetna Parishad and have been meeting scores of people through social media and holding meetings of his community, said: "Since independence, Brahmins have been never felt so helpless and been subjected to harassment.

"Since the past few years, the Brahmins are being treated badly and have been insulted knowingly. This is a part of a conspiracy and it is time to raise the voice against such atrocities."

The Brahmins, though, constitute only about 11 per cent of the population but their influence could change the game for the Congress which has withered away since 1989, when the state saw its last Brahmin Chief Minister N.D. Tiwari.

The same strategy was adopted by Mayawati in 2007 when BSP came to power with majority and the credit was given to Brahmins. Later, the community switched over to the BJP.

Brahmins are opinion makers in the state.

Said a party insider, "There is a vacuum of Brahmin leadership in the party. We once had leaders like N.D. Tiwari, Kamlapati Tripathi and Uma Shankar Dikshit but the community has no leader in the Congress now."

Meanwhile Ajay Kumar Lallu the state President has been on streets agitating against the government. He said: "We are struggling for the people and Congress does not see it in terms of political benefit but the way the government has adopted the method of oppression to silence the dissenting voices."

The Congress is upsetting the equations in the state where the Samajwadi party is still considered as the main opposition party but in optics, Congress has taken away the sheen from it, political analysts feel, the problem for the Congress is its weak organisation and lack of proper social engineering in comparison to the SP and BSP.

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Cong unleash 3-fold strategy in UP to be main opponent - Daijiworld.com

Kim Campbell-McLean is the executive director of the AnnauKatiget Tumingit Regional Inuit Women's Association. (Submitted by Kim Campbell-McLean)

When I heard the Newfoundland and Labrador government decided it was no longer appropriate to have a holiday celebrating John Cabot, I was shocked and ecstatic, both at the same time.

Needless to say, as an Indigenous woman, I have never celebrated Discovery Day.

In June, Premier Dwight Ball announced that the government will no longer call the holiday nearest June 24 "Discovery Day." For now, it will be called "the June holiday."

Ball also stated that in the spirit of reconciliation, the government will consult with Indigenous governments and organizations before a new name is chosen.

I am excited for the prospect of a holiday we all can celebrate and enjoy as a province, and I was shocked because the issue finally got the attention it needed to bring about positive change and reconciliation.

I thought about my ancestors.

I thought about the oppression they went through and how strong and resilient they were.

The writings of my great-great-grandmother, Lydia Campbell, came flooding through my mind like from a burst dam.

She wrote about the first race of Inuit people and how tall and beautiful they were. She wrote about how many Inuit families there used to be and on her travels seeing 20 or more sealskin tents all together. She wrote about seeing the Innu in their beautiful red birchbark canoes paddling beautiful Lake Melville, with the Innu men steering from the back, the women helping by paddling, and the children in front singing songs in their mother tongue.

She wrote about seeing Inuit after they returned from a world's fair, and how much they had changed. They no longer spoke Inuttitut and no longer dressed like Inuit.

She went on to write that over the years there was only one kayak left in the bay and hardly any Inuit or Innu around like there used to be. In her published diaries, she blames the European settlers for their demise.

I reflected, and then I whispered, "This one is for you."

I quietly thanked two very strong women who made a major influence on my life while growing up. They taught me that when you go forward in life with the purest of intentions for the betterment for all, profound change can happen.

It was with that teaching in mind, when I agreed to contribute my thoughts to Maclean's magazine last year. A reporter was working on an article last summer about Discovery Day.

That experience led me to write Premier Dwight Ball, who is also minister of Indigenous and Labrador affairs, just days later, officially asking for the name of the Discovery Day holiday to be changed.

After all, it was the premier himself who stated that if he received an official request to change the name of Discovery Day, his government would be open for discussion.

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on CBC Radio's CrossTalkto talk about this very issue once again. The timing of the show was as profound as the message:the need for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and the need to decolonize our province.

Three days later, the premier announced that indeed, the holiday would be changed as of at that moment. Humbly, I have to wonder: did I help to make that change happen?

Well, folks, this is what reconciliation looks like in the year 2020. Decolonizing, one step at a time.

As a society, it is up to us to bring about reconciliation. It is up to us to look at and call out systemic racism for what it is and to advocate for change. The colonialistpolicies that make up government structures and institutions in our province and within Canada need to be challenged, by us.

It is up to us to do the work and hold our government accountable.

It is up to us.

Over and out.

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This is what reconciliation looks like: Why Discovery Day needed to go - CBC.ca

There are least two areas in which this government, despite the odds, seems to have done some stellar work the first is the diplomatic work by Mohammad Sadiq that is helping forge Pakistans seriousness as Afghanistans most reliable partner and neighbour, and the second is the work to contain Covid-19 by Asad Umar and the NCOC that has clearly eased the post Ramazan/Ramadan and Eidul Fitr spike of Covid-19 infections and fatalities.

Both represent major successes for Pakistan, tenuous and temporary as they may be. Yet PM Khan and his supporters will find little to no traction for celebration. Hardly anyone has even acknowledged these positive developments. It all seems a little unfair. The big question is: why?

Well, lets imagine Prime Minister Imran Khan waking up every morning to assess his stature as the countrys undisputed leader. How would he be feeling? He has a cabinet in which members go after one another harder than they do the opposition. He has a press and media that has stopped gushing at his every smile and soundbyte (for the most part). He has a regional security situation in which Indias oppression in Kashmir is intensifying, with reports of thousands of RSS thugs being shipped to further intimidate and cow ordinary Kashmiris. He also has to consider the world after a US withdrawal from Afghanistan, with worrying reports of TTP consolidation and public threats being made by a mysteriously free and liberated Ehsanullah Ehsan.

Most of all, PM Khan is going to be held responsible, rightly or wrongly, for a broken and dysfunctional economy in which Covid-19 has wreaked untold havoc scores of unemployed Pakistanis will either not be covered by the BISP/Ehsaas programme, or will not find a one-time Rs12,000 cash grant to be enough to survive on.

If you think about all this from PM Khans perspective though, it would seem a little bit unfair. Covid-19 wasnt invented by PM Khan, and yet he has taken a lot of flak (for off-the-cuff speeches and misstatements) and received little credit (for relatively better than expected infection and fatalities numbers in July, and a swift passing of the post Ramazan/Ramadan and post-Eid spike).

Indias annexation of Kashmir on August 5, 2019 was not enacted by PM Khan. Yet many question what the government and PM Khan have done for Kashmir and Kashmiris.

The economic mess that PM Khan inherited has certainly not been fixed, but prior to Covid-19 he and his team had certainly managed to lend greater stability to the macroeconomic numbers leave aside the fact that I believe deficit reduction to be a misguided setting of tactics as strategic objectives (fiscal and external balances are tools to achieve policy goals, they cannot and should not be goals in and of themselves).

In so many things, whilst this government has been ill-prepared to govern, incapable of grappling with the wider challenges, and undeniably bereft of a grip over its own ambitious reform agenda: it has not been terrible at everything. Indeed, in perhaps the issue that should matter most to all Pakistanis the well-being of our fellow citizens the expansion of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) under the Ehsaas umbrella, has been one of the truly great moments in Pakistani statehood. With over 16 million households now having received an unconditional cash transfer of Rs12,000, the path to a universal basic income in Pakistan is now clearly defined. This alone can (and should) stand as an outstanding achievement for this government.

Yet Islamabad is abuzz with rumours. The intensity of the whispering ebbs and flows, but there certainly continues to be an intense sense of foreboding in the air. Smart money knows that the three pillars of the current regime are not going anywhere. But there is constant uncertainty and a wider sense of instability that makes the monsoon air thick with intrigue and anticipation. Again, the big question is: why?

PM Khan and his supporters will claim that the criticism of the government is rooted in vested interests as he and his cabinet enact major reforms to the countrys system of governance. When asked for proof, they will offer up the declaration of assets by the special assistants to the prime minister, and the publication of the sugar and wheat pricing scandals. But publishing these lists is neither a reform nor particularly reformist. From Hamood-ur-Rehman to Quetta, to Abbottabad to Faizabad, if the publication or leaking of facts and analysis was the same thing as reform, Pakistan would look very different than it is. This government either doesnt want to, or worse, is not capable of distinguishing between noise-making and system-making.

And this, at its heart, is the problem. The current government is not nearly as incompetent and incapable of governing as it seems. Its most profound and serious challenge is not Maryam Nawaz Sharif, or Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, or Maulana Fazlur Rehman, or any other political competition. This governments most profound and serious challenge is the undiagnosed and untreated case of verbal dysentery that afflicts almost every single member of PM Khans inner circle, and especially aspirants to this inner circle.

This is a killer flaw, and it is why there is so much political uncertainty in Islamabad. On its merits, the Pakistani opposition today cannot even violate the gag orders that restrict the primary leaders of the most potent opposition party, the PML-N. They are not about to enact some grand scheme to take down PM Khan. But what the PML-N, PPP, JUI-F and every other opponent do have going for them is PM Khan himself. They know that, for example, a series of slogans shouted at him in the assembly can distract him from his agenda, and set him and his core PTI support base on a destructive path.

Opponents of PM Khan have figured out the killer formula. You dont need to beat Imran Khan indeed, given how power is configured in Pakistan today, you cant. All you need to do is let Imran Khan beat himself. And beat himself he will.

The most important challenge facing the PTI government and its survival is not politics. It is economics. Covid-19 has exposed the foundational mess the economy is in. Daronomics, whilst perhaps unsustainable, and certainly costly, worked. It produced the one thing that this country needs more than any other thing: GDP growth.

Ask PM Khan: what is your economic vision? You will get a flurry of feel-good soundbytes. The word corruption will appear early and often. Why? There is no vision. Ask PM Khan: how will Pakistan enact a jobs-heavy recovery from Covid-19? You will get more soundbytes. More corruption blah-blah. Why? There are no jobs. Not now. Not in six months. Ask PM Khan: what is the plan for Pakistan to take advantage of the economic opportunities Covid-19 creates in international trade? You will get some feel-good soundbyte about diaspora and the PTIs fundraising prowess. Why? There is no plan.

This government will not go down because it is incompetent. It is not dramatically more incompetent than any previous government. It will go down because it is stuck on a container, nearly six years after the container almost sunk the entire political capital of the PTI. Being PM or a member of the cabinet is not a performance on a container. It is real. The ultimate test of the Pakistani leader is how many jobs she or he helps create, and how much more money he can put in pockets, in showrooms and on the streets.

Take a good look at the words and actions of PM Khan and his cabinet and ask yourself: where will the jobs come from? Where will the growth come from? How will more money get into more Pakistani pockets?

Silence.

Thats why this government is in trouble. The rest is just noise. And most of it is coming from the government itself.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.

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Disembarking the container - The News International

On July 18, we remember and celebrate the life and achievements of a great leader Nelson Mandela.

But rituals of memorialising are hollow unless we ask ourselves the question, why do we recollect this and not that leader?

Nelson Mandela led the struggle against an inhuman political system in South Africa, and he skilfully piloted the transition from apartheid to democracy despite dire predictions that the country would descend into civil war. There is however much more to Mandela; a man of extraordinary courage, tremendous generosity, and remarkable vision.

Mahatma Gandhis doctrine of non-violence influenced Mandelas political strategy to some extent. In an essay on his political guru in The Time magazine of December 31, 1999, Mandela wrote of Gandhi who advocated non-violence when the violence of Nagasaki and Hiroshima had exploded upon us.

Both Gandhi and I, wrote Mandela, suffered colonial oppression, and both of us mobilised our respective people against governments that violated our freedom. I followed, accepted Mandela, Gandhian strategy as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Umkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to our struggle.

On December 16, 1961 Umkhonto cadres launched five bomb attacks on power stations, and government buildings in Port Elizabeth, Durban and Johannesburg. Mandela and other leaders were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, in what came to be known as the Rivonia Trials.

Umkhonto weSizwe founder Nelson Mandela, receives military training at an Algerian FLN camp in Morocco, 1962. Credit: South African History Online

In the 1980s the apartheid regime had begun to negotiate with the African National Congress. In South Africas dreaded prisons Mandela began to conceptualise peace for his tortured land. The question that now confronted him was: how do social groups that a perverse history has locked into roles of the oppressor and oppressed learn to live together as fellow citizens?

A political community cannot be founded on the empty language of legal entitlements; it has to be based on reciprocal obligations.

Mandela had entered prison as a rebellious young man. By the 1980s reflection transformed him into a wise leader who was to steer his people through the valley of shadow into the sunlight of freedom.

As his release date drew nearer, he recognised that after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre his country had changed. Violence had been unleashed by some groups. Settlers began to demand an assured place at the high table of power. International commentators prophesied civil war. Given the context, Mandelas speech on his release in 1990 is incredible.

During my life time, he said, I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. My ideal is a democratic and free society in which persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve, but, if need be, an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Also read: When Nelson Mandela Said Viva Fidel!

This was an amazing statement from a man who had suffered imprisonment for 27 years.

A free South Africa for Mandela had to be a compassionate country. People had to understand the frailties and the ambiguities of the human condition. Though his jailers in the three prisons were Afrikaners, he realised that their ideologies were not freely chosen. The sensibilities of human beings are shaped by the society they live in. That society is fashioned by state power. South Africa would see no peace until the whites realised they had to forsake their ambitions of domination, and unless the blacks recognised that Afrikaners could not be banished; they had nowhere to go.

Cuban President Fidel Castro, right, and African leader Nelson Mandela gesture during the celebration of the Day of the Revolution in Matanzas. Credit: YouTube

In a second significant speech, Mandela established the foundations of a democratic political community. On April 10, 1993, one of South Africas most beloved leaders Chris Hani, was murdered by a Polish immigrant Janus Walus. Walus was connected with a white right-wing group opposed to majority rule. Hanis assassination sparked off major protests, arson and violence across the country. He had been a popular leader of the South African Communist Party, and the Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Hani possessed great moral authority and played a crucial role in the multi-party negotiations that cleared the way to democracy. It was generally accepted that Hani would succeed Mandela as President in 1999. Anthony Sampson in his Mandela, The Authorised Biography observed that the assassination deepened perception among whites, and some blacks, that Mandela would not be able to control the tide of violence that threatened to swamp South Africa, let alone establish and head a stable government.

In the days following the assassination, cadres of the African National Congress tried to restore peace and calm passions by holding rallies and demonstrations. Mandela, determined to end the spiral of violence that could dislodge negotiations and the enactment of a Constitution, stepped into the charged atmosphere.

Today, he said in a speech broadcasted by the South African Broadcasting Corporation on April 13, 1993, an unforgivable crime has been committedThe calculated cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani is not just a crime committed against a dearly beloved son of our soil. It is a crime against all the people of our country.

Mandela took care to register that grief affected each inhabitant of the country white, black and coloured. What has happened is a national tragedy that has touched millions of people across the political and the colour divide. Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who from any quarter wish to destroy what Chris Hann gave his life for, freedom of all of us.

A woman flies a South African flag during the Nelson Mandela: A Life Celebrated memorial service at Cape Town Stadium December 11, 2013. Credit: Reuters

Mandela adeptly turned the raging debate between white and black into one that pitched peace against violence. This is a watershed moment for all of us. Our decision and actions will determine whether we use our pain, our grief and our outrage to move forward to what is the only lasting solution for our country-an elected government of the people, by the people, for the peopleWe, must not let the men who worship war, and who lust after bloodwhen we, as one people, act together decisively, with discipline and determination, nothing can stop us.

Mandela emphasised that all mourned Hanis death, all were overcome with grief irrespective of the colour of their skin, each citizen sympathised with her fellow citizens. Now it is the time for our white compatriots from whom messages of condolences continue to pour in, to reach out with an understanding of the grievous loss to our nation to join in the memorial services and the funeral commemorations.

The speech takes us right back to the eighteenth century, when Adam Smith spoke of sympathy as a bond that united humanity in his famous Theory of Moral Sentiments. People possess the ability to feel pain because they can imagine themselves in the position of others. In the same mode Mandela said:

Tonight I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depths of my being. A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know and bring to justice, this assassin.

He turned the political discourse of racism upside down. Human nature cannot be seen in essentialist terms. We can connect to each other because we have the gift of imagination and sympathy. This is the foundation of society, this is the foundation of common citizenship, and this is the foundation of solidarity.

Students of South African history and politics suggest that this was the day when Nelson Mandela was accepted as the undisputed leader of the country by the blacks, the coloured and the whites. This was the time that South Africans begin to walk on the path that led to healing, and peace through reconciliation.

Also read: Your Ideas Have Spread Like Wildfire: A Letter to Dr Anand Teltumbde on His Birthday

In a third momentous statement Mandela outlined his vision for a democratic South Africa. This was in the aftermath of the first all-race elections on April 27, 1994, and the victory of the African National Congress under his leadership. In his inaugural speech Mandela said.

The time for the healing of wounds has come, the moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come, and the time to build is upon usWe know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people for national reconciliation, for nation-building, for the birth of a new world. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans both black and white will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity-a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

Under Mandelas stewardship South Africa initiated the project of reconciling with the past rather than retributive justice. The logic of reconciliation is that the past, howsoever harrowing it might be, cannot be forgotten or set aside. In order to know where we are at the present moment, we must know where we have come from. We cannot understand the present, or plan for the future without knowledge of history and awareness of roads taken and roads not taken.

Forgetting, in sum, is not an option for history has a way of relentlessly intruding into collectively induced amnesia. Someone, somewhere, will recollect past injuries and pain. Someone, somewhere, will deploy these memories to light a conflagration, and punish the descendants of groups who committed these horrific crimes. If conflict in history is not addressed and accepted, memories of violence will continue to fester and deepen the wounds of the body politic.

The Freudian assumption that suppressed trauma will inevitably remerge in destructive ways has to be taken seriously. Societies that cannot come to terms with the past, or those who prefer to forget the past are fragile, ready to burst asunder at the mention of a pain-wracked history.

We never know when violence will break out around some or other grievance of wrongdoing and injustice. Societies can be set on fire if they fondly believe that they have forgotten, a mere spark is enough to do so. They have to acknowledge and accept that there is need to move on. Members may not forget, or forgive, but they should be able to accept the history of their country as irreversible.

A scene from 2009 film Invictus, Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon played President Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar, captain of rugby team, respectively. The film speaks of the aftermath of the apartheid and how one sport united the country. Photo: IMDb

Notably the process of reconciliation does not offer a magic mantra. The process is attended by a great deal of trauma and anxiety. Yet a number of theorists have advocated and supported the concept. The very realisation that perpetrators of human rights violations have conceded that they did wrong, has proved, in recent history, a therapeutic process. Victims feel that their pain, their humiliation and their trauma has been recognised or simply that they count.

At the core of the concept of reconciliation is the centrality of human rights, what should not be done to people, and what should be done for them. Reconciliation does not provide comprehensive solutions to the problems of the past; it seeks to change attitudes to historical injustice. Forgiveness may not be a key issue in reconciliation, it is more important to accept that wrong has been done, that the wrongdoer has accepted his crime, and that societies should now carry on. This was the lesson Mandela taught humanity. For this he should be remembered.

The process of reconciliation was set in place in South Africa under the leadership of Mandela, and guided by the same principles that he had expressed publicly, his earnest desire and his determination that South Africa belonged to all irrespective of race and class. The transition from apartheid to democracy was largely peaceful in as much as there was no open civil war or large-scale bloodshed as international commentators had forecast.

This is the genius of Mandela; this is why we remember him.

Neera Chandhoke is former professor of political science, Delhi University.

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Remembering Nelson Mandela, Who Honoured the Power of Reconciliation - The Wire

(Courtesy of Verso)

What is the way forward for progressives in a time when it seems both centrism and authoritarianism are resurgent? What should be the character and scope of a national program that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can and should embrace? There are many places to look for answers to these questions, and no doubt the answers will have many inspirations.Ad Policy

One of the most incisive articulations of an American progressive alternative is that of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Harvard Law professor, philosopher, and former Brazilian politician. He has written over two dozen books addressing an unusual diversity of topics, including critical legal theorywhich he helped developeconomics, philosophy, and religion. Given this range, it would be unfair to reduce Ungers work to one core idea. But perhaps the major theme of his work is summed up in his argument that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.

What this means is that nothing in our societythe economy, liberal democracy, the legal order, etc.is predetermined toward some definitive end. They are human creations, artifacts whose forms can therefore be challenged, transcended, and ultimately reoriented for the purpose of greater human liberation, individually and collectively.

What makes Ungers progressive vision of society unique are its religious and prophetic elements. He sees human beings as having a divinelike capacity to transcend their societal circumstances to achieve greatness. What prevents them from doing so is the false assumption that there can be no substantial alternative to inherited political institutions. His work exposes this false necessity while providing progressive social, political, and economic alternatives to it. In this regard, his work can offer progressives key resources for exposing the false necessity of the American liberal status quo and thinking constructively about a different progressive vision for the United States.

The Nation recently spoke with Unger about his proposal for an alternative progressive track for American politics. Along the way, we discussed racial injustice in the United States, Donald Trumps election, democratizing new technologies, the future of education, and progressive taxation. Of pressing importance is the topic of structural economic and political change, and in turn, whether Ungers vision is impractical. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Right now the streets are filled with protesters demonstrating in the aftermath of George Floyds brutal killing by Minneapolis police. Progressives have long struggled to confront and overcome racial injustice in the United States. You have criticized their approach, the dominant approach, to racial oppression. What is your understanding? And what is your proposal?

Roberto Mangabeira Unger: To grasp the meaning of this moment for the future of the country, it is useful to begin by distinguishing the immediate backgroundthe failure of the established approach to racial injustice in the United Statesfrom the larger context of which this failure forms a part: the disorientation of American progressives and the long-standing absence in American politics of any program responsive to the needs, interests, and aspirations of the working-class majority of the country, white or black.

The prevailing response to racial injustice in the United States has been the integrationist orthodoxy. It treats racial injustice as a threshold issue, to be addressed before all problems of economic equality and opportunity. Its signature expression is affirmative action. It has done little for those who most require protection, the vast number of black people who languish in prisons and dead-end jobs. This approach has offended the white working-class majority, who believe themselves to be victims of a conspiracy between sanctimonious white elites and the representatives of black workers. And it has provided a model for the identity politics that has addressed legitimate demands for respect and recognition only by diverting the country from engagement with its structural problems.

There is an alternative. The alternative is to distinguish individualized racial discrimination from the advancement of the unequipped, the excluded, and the impoverished. Individualized racial discrimination should be criminalized, as it is in many countries. Social advancement should be predicated on real disadvantage or exclusion, wherever it is found. Racial stigma should serve as only one of the standards that, together with other forms of disadvantage, trigger such advancement. Race should be combined with class rather than separated from it.

DSJ: How did the country arrive at its present situation, with the presidency in the hands of Donald Trump, after decades in which millions of working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party? MORE FROM Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

RMU: The principal vehicle of American progressives, the Democratic Party, failed to come up with a sequel to Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. The sequel would have had to be very different from the original, which focused on economic security rather than economic empowerment and offers no model for how to bring more American workers into the good jobs of the most productive parts of todays economy.

Let us look coldly at what has happened since then. Having begun under Lyndon Johnson by treating the poor as an insular minority in need of support and blacks as another insular minority in need of rights, progressives offered nothing to the working-class majority of the country other than later to dissolve them into a series of group identities and special interests. Conservatives responded with the formula by which, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, they won and wielded power for half a century: combining material concessions to the moneyed class with moral concessions to the moneyless classes. For this whole period, the United States has had no economic growth strategy other than cheap money, delegated by the federal government to the central bank, and productivity growth has stagnated. The majority of American workers have feltand beenabandoned.

Into the expanding vacuum that resulted from these successive abdications came the plutocratic populism of Donald Trump: a big fat hoax, given that it has done nothing for the abandoned majority other than to wage war against low-skill immigrants while continuingit must be acknowledgedto get high employment, with relatively few good jobs, on the basis of the cheap-money policy. What an opportunity for the progressives, if they had a program. They dont.

DSJ: What, then, should be the character of a national alternative that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can embrace?

RMU: The progressive program the country needs would address the supply as well as the demand sides of the economy, production as well as consumption. It would seek to innovate in the economic, educational, and political arrangements that shape the primary or fundamental distribution of advantage and opportunity rather than devoting itself solely, as the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable have, to the after-the-fact correction, through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending, of market-generated inequalities. More generally, the individual should be secured in a haven of capability-assuring educational and economic endowments and of safeguards against private and governmental oppression. Society all around him, however, should be opened up to contest, experiment, and innovation. In that storm, the individual, once safe and equipped, can move unafraid. The storm does not arise spontaneously. It needs to be arranged.

The true aim of the progressives should be a deep freedom, achieved by changing the structure of social life, rather than a shallow equality. The struggle against entrenched and extreme inequality is subsidiary to the larger goal, to become bigger together. And the method should be structural changethe criterion of depthchange in the established institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions. Real structural change is not the replacement of one indivisible, predetermined systemsocialism for capitalismby another. It is fragmentary but cumulative. The goal of shared empowerment and the refusal to take the established institutional form of society as an unsurpassable horizon are what together oppose the progressive to the conservative.

These generalities mark a direction. They do not excuse us from proposing the initial steps by which to begin to move in that direction in a particular society and time. A combination of innovations in the economy, education, and democratic politics would start to give shape to the alternative that the country lacks.

DSJ: You have argued in your most recent book, The Knowledge Economy, that progressives need an approach to the supply side of the economy. What does such an approach entail for the future of the American economy and the situation of American workers?

RMU: At the heart of the economic part of a progressive program must be the attempt to develop a socially inclusive form of todays most advanced practice of production, the knowledge economy, informed by science and devoted to perpetual innovation. It exists in every sector of the American economyin intellectually dense services and even in precision agriculture, as well as in the high-tech industry with which we tend, too narrowly, to identify it. In every sector, however, it appears only as a fringe, a series of insular vanguards of production excluding the overwhelming majority of businesses and workers. Practices, more than technologies, are what set the knowledge economy apart. These practices bring production closer to discovery. The insularity of the knowledge economy results in both economic stagnation and economic inequality. It causes economic stagnation by denying the most advanced practice to most economic agents. And it roots economic inequality in a lengthening chasm between the advanced and backward parts of production.

To move toward an inclusive knowledge economy, the country needs to develop a 21st century equivalent to the 19th century system of agricultural extension by which it created, on its agrarian frontier, family-scale agriculture with entrepreneurial attributes. That would require establishing between the government and the producers an intermediate cadre of support centers, with wide autonomy and professional management and financed by a combination of subsidies and fees, to give a wider range of small- and medium-size enterprises broader access to advanced practice and technology, as well as to capital, and to identify and disseminate best practice.

But it is not enough to lift up businesses. It is also necessary to reach out, by analogous means, to people who have little or no relation to business organizations. The best place to begin is the middle part of the job structurethe part most hollowed out by the economic changes of recent decadesimproving the equipment and skills of people such as machine repair technicians and nurse practitioners. The goal would be to turn them into technologically equipped artisans. From there, it is possible to move, with similar methods and intentions, both up and down the job hierarchy.

This second wing of the productive uplift effort in turn merges into initiatives designed to strengthen labor in its relation to capital. No dynamic of inclusive rise in productivity can flourish against the background of low-wage and insecure labor. In the United States, as around the world, stable employment is ceasing to be the norm. More and more jobs are temporary, part-time, or otherwise insecure. The reality of labor performed under decentralized contractual arrangements, rather than as part of a stable labor force assembled in large productive units, cannot be reversed. It results from changes in the forms of production. But it can be mastered by the law to prevent flexibility from meaning insecurity. The free-for-all gig economy must not become the rule. The counterpart to productive uplift is new labor lawto organize, represent, and protect unstable labor.

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DSJ: Progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and progressive academics like Thomas Piketty have emphasized the role of redistributive taxesincluding taxes on wealthin diminishing inequality. Why do you resist? And what do you see as the proper place of taxation in a progressive program?

RMU: No progressive program is feasible without a substantially higher tax than the United States now implements. Comparative fiscal experience reveals the truth about taxes. Structural or institutional change reshaping the fundamental distribution of opportunity and advantage decisively overshadows anything that can be achieved by retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer. Moreover, in determining the overall impact of the budget on both its revenue-raising and spending sides, the aggregate level of the tax take and how it is spent count for more than the progressive profile of taxation. A tax that is neutral toward relative prices may make it possible to raise much more public revenue with much less economic trauma, as the European social democracies do through heavy reliance on the avowedly regressive value-added tax, and then to spend it on redistributive public services.

That is not a reason to reject the steeply progressive taxation of both individual consumption and wealth, so long as we understand that the redistributive effects of these taxes are likely to be modest unless we have the power and will to radicalize them and to tolerate the resulting economic disruption. Evidently, many progressive politicians prefer pietistic gestures to transformative effects. Bereft of a structural program, they simply want to show on whose side they are. And some of them are now distracted by the pleasant thought that, regardless of special circumstances, they can evade the whole problem by printing money instead of raising it.

DSJ: The economic changes that you propose, including a socially inclusive knowledge economy, seem to have far-reaching implications for education. What are they, and how can they be reconciled with a class divide that is also an educational divide in America?

RMU: The United States suffers from a severe form of educational dualism. Its schools are some of the best and the worst among high-income countries. There are two tasks. The first task has to do with the institutional setting of the school system. In this vast, unequal country, organized as a federation, the priority is to reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality. Such a reconciliation is incompatible with the exclusive dependence of the schools on local public finance. And it requires cooperation within the federal system to take over failing schools and school systems, fix them, and return them fixed.

The second task is to recast education on a model of teaching and learning that gives primacy to the acquisition of analytic and synthetic capabilities over the mastery of information. That does so by preferring selective depth to encyclopedic superficiality in dealing with content. That puts teamwork among students, teachers, and schools in the place of individualism and authoritarianism in the classroom. And that deals with every subject from contrasting points of view. This approach is no less suitable to practical, vocational training than to general education, once the focus of such training shifts from job-specific and machine-specific skills to the higher-order capabilities required by the knowledge economy and its technologies. But it does depend on the creation of a nationwide teaching career through cooperation within the federal system.

The school under democracy should not be the instrument of either government or the family. It should be the voice of the future and recognize in each young person a tongue-tied prophet.

DSJ: Can these alternatives in the economy and in education advance unless we remake our political institutions? Our democracy was not organized to facilitate structural change unless crisis forces transformation.

RMU: A deepening of democracy must accompany, in a progressive project, the economic and educational changes for which I have argued: Political institutions set the terms under which change in all other areas can happen. The mark of such a deepening is to strengthen our collective ability as citizens to master the shape of society rather than to have it imposed on us by history or necessity. As a result, it diminishes the need for crisis to serve as the enabling condition of change and weakens the power of the past to determine the future.

Here there are three major focal points for institutional innovation. The setup of the government, as defined in the Constitution, which powerfully shapes our ability to change society through politics: the pace of politics. The arrangements that influence the level of popular engagement in political life: the temperature of politics. And the relation of the national government to the states and towns: the federal system.

A defining feature of the constitutional architecture of the United States is its combination of a liberal principle of fragmentation of power with a conservative principle of the slowing down of politics, expressed in Madisons plan. Americans believe mistakenly that these two principles are naturally and necessarily bound together. They are not. They are connected by design to inhibit the transformation of society by politics. We can reaffirm the liberal principle but repudiate the conservative one, for example, by allowing either of the political branches to call early elections for both branches in the presence of an impasse. But it is futile to raise this issue in the United States now. The constitutional setup is revered as part of the national political identity. Those who have dissented from this view, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, have gone unheard.

Of the other two areas of possible innovation in the arrangements of democracythe level of participation and the reshaping of federalism, progressives have given priority to the first and dismissed the second as marginal to their aims. The initiatives that would raise the level of organized popular engagement in political life would reform the relation between money and politics, the terms of free access to the means of mass communication by political parties and organized social movements, and the electoral regime. They are indispensable to a progressive program. Placing them first, however, is a misjudgment. All are highly contentious, legally as well as politically. By contrast, the reenergizing of federalism has immense potential appeal, cutting across divisions between left and right and offering a wonderful device for developing the economic and educational alternatives the country needs.

Cooperative federalism, vertically among the three levels of the federal system and horizontally among the states and municipalities, can serve as the initial stage of determined and broad-based experimentation in American public life. Contrary to common prejudice, strong initiative by the national government and the empowerment of state and local government are not opposites. It is possible to have more of both at the same time, so long as we define clearly which responsibilities of each part of the federal system are exclusive and which are concurrent. Later on and within limits designed to prevent oppression and abuse, parts of the United States should be able to diverge from the predominant policies and arrangements in the country and create countermodels of the national future. Without such a dialectic of dominant and dissident solutions, no vital democratic experimentalism can take hold.

DSJ: Arent you demanding and expecting more than political reality allows? Cant your views be dismissed as utopian? For a leftist or any sort of progressive, isnt there a choice in the end between inadequate reform and impossible revolution?

RMU: I am a revolutionary by conviction as well as by temperament. I believe it is likely that I am living in a counterrevolutionary interlude in a long revolutionary period in the history of humanity. I am determined that my thoughts and actions not be controlled by the biases of the interlude. But I understand that revolutionary change today must differ in form and method as well as in substance from what it was in the past. For any program, the direction and the choice of the initial steps are crucial. It does not matter that the steps are longer or shorter. It matters that they be the right moves in the right direction. My criticism of the American progressives is not that the steps they take are too small. It is that they are steps in the wrong direction, taken under the influence of bad ideas about the future, the present, and even the past. The notion of a sudden leap into another regime of social life is a fantasy. Its practical role today is to serve as an excuse for its opposite. Once its fantastical nature has been exposed, what remains for the disappointed fantasists is to sweeten the world that they have despaired of reimagining and remaking.

DSJ: For the alternative you defend to advance, step by step, it needs a social base, a coalition, that doesnt yet exist. What base does your program imply? And how can it become a majority coalition without winning support from groups, such as the small-business class, that have been mainstays of American conservatism?

RMU: Every consequential agenda for change in society builds its own base over time. But that effort has to begin by engaging the classes, communities, and forces that exist. It must move them to revise, little by little, their imagination of the possible as well as their understanding of their interests and identities. A program like the one that I have outlined must go in search of a transracial progressive majority. That convergence needs to include large parts of the blue-collar and white-collar working class, of the racially stigmatized underclass, of the small-business class, and even of the restless aspirants of the professional and business class. Such a majority is within reach. Nothing in the alternative direction that I have described is incompatible within any part of this majority. The single most dangerous bias of the left is its prejudice against the small-business class, which has always had an outsize influence on the countrys self-understanding. That class now shades into the growing legions of the self-employed. To give up on it and on them is to prepare defeat.

DSJ: Even when you deal with economic and political practicalities, your ideas have a prophetic undertone. Another recent book of yours is called The Religion of the Future. The country has had its prophets. Does it really need new ones?

RMU: When politics is most serious, it is also about who we are and what we can and should become. It turns into a struggle over consciousness as well as over institutions. The message of the American prophetsincluding Emerson, Whitman, and Lincolnwas that the individual shares in the divine attribute of transcendence over context and becomes more human by becoming more godlike. Under democracy, which puts its faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women, this idea comes down to earth and informs the organization of society.

It is not good enough to say that the message has failed to be enacted and that the country should return to its founding ideals. The message itself should be rethought. From the outset, it bore a double taint, which compromised and corrupted it. It misrepresented the relation between self-construction and solidarity, failing to do justice to the presence of the latter within the former. As a result, it tempted Americans to think of themselves as little self-crowned Napoleons. The second stain on the prophetic teaching was to exempt American institutions from the reach of challenge and change and hold them up as the definitive form of a free society. The exemption amounted to a species of idolatry, for which the American republic has paid and continues to pay a terrible price. The prophetic voice must speak again in the United States. In breaking its silence, it must also correct its message.

See the article here:

Roberto Mangabeira Ungers Alternative Progressive Vision - The Nation

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In Portland, Oregon, unidentified armed assailants dressed in military fatigues have been snatching people off the streets, piling them into unmarked vans, and taking them away.

Just as the founders intended.

No, seriously, the founders must have intended for that to happen. Otherwise the people who are always proclaiming their worship of rights, and freedom, and liberty people who are quite certain they know a lot more than you about what the founders intended would be condemning this assault on, well, rights, and freedom, and liberty.

And theyre not.

Any discomfort, any momentary tinge of cognitive dissonance, appears to be assuaged by whos in charge. The thugs dispatched to seize American citizens off the streets of a U.S. city, you see, are federal officers carrying out orders of the Trump administration.

The Oregon attorney general has filed a suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Protective Service. Oh, and the AG in Nevadas neighbor to the northwest has also sued John Does 1-10, who are so named, the suit explains, because the government has made it impossible for them to be individually identified by carrying out law enforcement actions without wearing any identifying information, even so much as the agency that employs them.

Aint that America?

The John Does and their cohorts have been conducting the aforementioned abductions of your fellow Americans without either arresting them or stating the basis for an arrest, since at least Tuesday, July 14, according to allegations in the suit.

Ordinarily, a person exercising his right to walk through the streets of Portland who is confronted by anonymous men in military-type fatigues and ordered into an unmarked van can reasonably assume that he is being kidnapped and is the victim of a crime, the suit notes. Which is true.

Defendants are injuring the occupants of Portland, the suit continues, by taking away citizens ability to determine whether they are being kidnapped by militia or other malfeasants dressed in paramilitary gear (such that they may engage in self-defense to the fullest extent permitted by law) or are being arrested (such that resisting might amount to a crime).

The abductions, in addition to creeping everyone out, are violations of the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments, says the suit, which seeks an injunction ordering the Trump administration to, well, stop being a bunch of lawless thugs.

Remember that one day when people who think fighting the covid is unconstitutional or something went to the Nevada governors office, with guns, to call him a dictator and shake their fists at the sky and yell about freedom?

Or remember that time a huge Blue Lives Matter march was supposed to be held in Las Vegas?

Imagine if, at such an event, federal officers started just cold grabbing protesters and hauling them away with no explanation whatsoever.

Imagine the outcry from the likes of, oh, Fox News, or Adam Laxalt, or Brobdingnagian Dan Rodimer, or Michele Fiore, or that one whosit carnival barker who used to have a column in the RJ. They would have had a cow (donated by Cliven Bundy no doubt).

So youd think those self-professed lovers of freedom and rights and liberty and the rule of law, those self-identified Real Americans, and their ilk would be pitching a fit over tyrannical and dictatorial federal actions designed to, as Trump likes to say, dominate the citizenry.

After all, as the Oregon AGs suit asserts, Citizens peacefully gathering on the streets of Portland to protest racial inequality have the right

Oh. Wait. It looks weve found the extenuating circumstances.

Its not as if people in Portland were making noise on behalf of some truly cherished American value, like the freedom to spread covid to others, or the right of a welfare cowboy to make taxpayers foot the bill to feed his cows.

Its not as if people in Portland were standing up to support the perpetuation of the traditional status quo, wherein police kill Black people and no one is held accountable.

No, the people in Portland have been protesting racial inequality.

Your freedom-loving, mask-despising patriots may, as a rule, view Big Guvment para-trooping a light military force into a state without giving notice to, let alone being requested by, that states duly elected officials or law enforcement as a violation of every star-spangled red white & blue value they hold so dear.

Unless the stormtroopers are violating the rights and liberty of people who are challenging North Americas 400-year legacy of cruelty, violence, theft, rape, and systemic oppression of people who arent white. When people are protesting that, kidnapping Americans is evidently OK. Even if the people being secreted away are white (seriously have you been to Portland?).

No one expects intellectual consistency, or intellectual much of anything, from Laxalt, Rodimer, Fiore & Friends.

And everyone, even and especially his supporters, know that law and order just means continued oppression and domination of everyone who isnt a Trump supporter when Trump says it.

Ah, but maybe these harsh and authoritarian tactics undertaken by the weak wannabe strongman will at least quell unrest or vandalism in Portland, and Dear Leader Trump will save the day after all.

Eh, not so much.

Their presence, the Oregonian reported Monday of Trumps invasion of Portland, has stoked the nightly strife in downtown, not tamped down tensions as professed by Trump or Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad F. Wolf, local and state leaders say.

Portlands mayor has said, well, a lot of things, as you can imagine. But this is the most important:

This could happen in your city.

As if on cue, Trump Monday blustered that hes going to send his American Gestapo to Chicago and several other cities all run by liberal Democrats.

No one would ever accuse Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman of being one of those. But she doesnt really run the metro area, the county commission does, and however to the left you may think they are, rest assured its more than enough to qualify as liberal Democrats in Trumps noggin. Laughable though it may seem, the same goes for Nevadas governor and Democrats who have majorities in the Legislature.

Trump hasnt targeted Las Vegas for unconstitutional and malicious military thuggery. Yet. But if and when he does, its a safe bet Nevada Trump supporters, states rights devotees all, will demonstrate their commitment to the nations founding principles of liberty and freedom by cheering him on.

Editor | Hugh Jackson has been writing about Nevada policy and politics for more than 20 years. He was editor of the Las Vegas Business Press, senior editor at the Las Vegas CityLife weekly newspaper, daily political commentator on the Las Vegas NBC affiliate, and wrote the then-groundbreaking Las Vegas Gleaner, which among other things was the only independent political blog from Nevada that was credentialed at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He spent a few years as a senior energy and environmental policy analyst for Public Citizen, and has occasionally worked as a consultant on mining, taxation, education and other issues for Nevada labor and public interest organizations. His freelance work has been published in outlets ranging from the Guardian to Desert Companion to In These Times to the Oil & Gas Journal. For several years he also taught U.S. History courses at UNLV. Prior to moving to Las Vegas, he was a reporter and then assistant managing editor at the Casper Star-Tribune, Wyomings largest newspaper.

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There's never a states' rights hero around when you need one - Nevada Current

The British just system has taken over 1,000 years to evolve into the one we recognise today. Its foundations and principles have been retained by so many countries that 30% of the worlds population live under its rule[1], and for those who are not fortunate enough to be governed by such, I suspect, envy those who are.

Yes we have miscarriages of justice and as a Barrister I dont dismiss these lightly but we have to accept, that no system, built by humans for humans, can ever be perfect. However, as a person of colour, I think I would rather hedge my innocence being proven through the balance and checks of our legal system than one from, say, in Guangzhou, China or perhapsMinneapolis, USA, but am I right to feel this way?

China is well versed in the criticisms levied against it by the world for inhumane treatment of particular ethnic groups in its society. In United Nations findings, 2018, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Amnesty Internationals Deputy East Asia Director Lisa Tassi said:

The Committees findings highlight the systematic oppression of ethnic minorities in China, including the mass arbitrary detention of Chinese Uighurs and others in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR)

The Committee found that the Chinese government were mass detaining certain groups under the pretext of countering terrorism, with the estimated number of those being detained ranging from tens of thousands to the unimaginable number of a million. Because of the broad way in which terrorism has been defined in legislation, this has meant that an act of peaceful or religious expression could be defined as a threat to the state, having the effect of targeting particular ethnic and religious groups.

In the USAs report of the same year (2018) to the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, this report also made some troubling findings.

In 2016 (the last figures), Black Americans made up 27% of the prison population, double their share of the total population. The USA criminal justice system caters for the largest prison population in the world (2015, over 6.7 million people were incarcerated). The figures collated in this report provide a clear picture of the disparity between the races.

African Americans were more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, were more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. African-American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than whites and Hispanics are 3.1 times as likely.As of 2001, one of every three black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as could one of every six Latinos compared to one of every seventeen white males.

This report concluded that the impact of systemic racism was a broad reason for the above findings, however, that deprivation also played a part where the USs legal system ran a two tier system one for the rich and one for the poor, essentially, if youre rich, you can buy your way to freedom. There is an over representation of individuals from poor areas in the criminal justice system who tend to come from ethnic groups.

In attempting to evidence its findings, the report compared and contrasted those arrested for drugs. Use rates of drugs in the States are largely comparable, and yet if you are African American, you are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested than a white person. The same disparities arise when you consider the USs equivalent to stop and search.

Closer to home, in France, the justice system based on the principles of freedom and fairness is also under scrutiny. French state policy rejects any references to a person being identified by his nationality, racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic difference. Anyone in contact with the State is faceless and cannot be judged on who they are or what they look like, purely for the deed they are being accused of committing.

This starts off well doesnt it? However, the experience of ethnic groups is very different. They describe themselves as being ignored, suffering racism (both direct and indirect) at community and state level, but with little clear path to seeking redress, because as is often the case, it is very hard to prove the causative reason for an act, merely that the act has occurred.

The French government refuse to conduct research on the experience of those that may be linked to their race. For example, it doesnt know how many of its people follow the muslim religion or identify as a member of an ethnic group.

Legally, the constitutional principle of equality has been interpreted as prohibiting the government from collecting data or statistics on the racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds of its citizens, in any context. This means for example that the socioeconomic status of groups across any indicators based on racial, ethnic, religious or other grounds is unknown, and that the national census does not include any questions about race or ethnicity.

So the French government, and its citizens, have no idea whether one group is suffering from discrimination, or to consider a more positive slant if the state is getting it right for all its citizens. There are few anti discrimination laws, but of the ones that exist there are even problems identified within those. In particular they refer to immigrants, even when the person who is attempting to rely on the protective law is a second or third generation French national and member of society.

In 2017, David Lammy MP undertook an 18 month review of ethnic groups and their contact with the English criminal justice system. Im sure you wont be surprised at what he discovered: Just 3% of people in England & Wales are Black, and yet 12% of our prison population is Black. Going further, 25% of our prison population, and over 40% of our youth prison population, come from ethnic minority backgrounds. That compares to 14% of the overall population, and for those facing imprisonment and identified as Asian or Black, were associated with a 50-55% increase in the odds of imprisonment, compared to those self-reporting as White.

You may also be familiar with the figure that a black male is twice as likely to die during an arrest than a white male and that he is 47 times more likely to be stopped and searched.

Clearly, my feeling that I would fair a better chance navigating my way through the criminal justice system in this country than any other is not based on the empirical evidence.

However, I take hope: in 2019 the EU undertook research into the experiences of racism suffered by black and other ethnic groups in the member states. It found that the level of racism experienced in Britain was relatively low in comparison to the other member states and even in the US.so maybe my feeling, although not completely justified, should at least be hopeful?

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A view from the Bar: Race and the British justice system - Open Access Government

In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art acquired one of Tania Brugueras most famous works, Untitled (Havana 2000), which debuted at the 7th Havana Biennial. The theme of that exhibition was Closer to One Another, an exploration of mass communication since the new millennia. The artist had set up her presentation inside amilitary vault within the Cabaa Fortress, which had historically been a site where Cuban counterrevolutionaries were imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases even killed. Visitorswere met with a quietly explosive piece: a vast, darkened space, its floor lined with milled sugarcane.

As viewers made their way through the darkened space, they would discover nude male performers seeming to scratch themselves while a video of Fidel Castro played on a tiny monitor. With its provocative critique of the strange power dynamics that guide life in post-revolution Havana, the work embodies Brugueras practice, which often involves provoking viewers into considering visible and invisible means of governmental oppression.

Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba, where she observed failings of the Cuban revolution, which gave way to economic hardship, creative censorship, and unchecked forms of power for officials. At the age of 12, she enrolled at the Escuela Elemental de Artes Plsticas in Havana; her mother, according to Bruguera, believed it would keep her daughter out of trouble. Brugueras early work focused on her own body as a site for social critique, often by subjecting herself to physical pain. In the 1996 performance, titled Studio Study,a nude Bruguera stood atop a high pedestal while pinned to the wall by metal restraints buffered by cotton. In her hands were slabs of raw meat.

In time, Bruguera expanded the definition of performance art into participatory events. Her audiencessometimes unknowinglybecame her collaborators. She has staged elaborate performances with institutions that have garnered her a Guggenheim fellowship in 1998 and a showcase at the Venice Biennale in 2015. In 2003 she developed the notion of arte til, roughly translating to useful artart that transcends representation to offer practical solutions to social issues. Art and ethics cannot be separated in this practice, Bruguera once said. They are interdependent, they define each other.Such art has invited backlash from the Cuban government, who regularly curtail her performances. Bruguera was arrested three times between December 2014 and January 2015, and was detained most recently last month en route to a Black Lives Matter protest in Havana.

Below is a guide to some of Brugueras most incisive performances.

Tribute to Ana Mendieta (Homenaje a Ana Mendieta), 198596

Among Brugueras most provactive early works are her site-specific reenactments of performances and unrealized projects by Ana Mendieta, the feminist Cuban artist who fell to her death in 1985 at the age of 36. Bruguera started by producing these reenactments for her thesis at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, and she continued doing them for the next 10 years, re-creating works such as Mendietas famed series Siluetas (Silhouettes), from 197381. Mendietas practice centered the spiritual marriage of abstract female forms and earth, and in the Siluetas, she left imprints and made carvings of her body into the earth, decorating the silhouettes with natural materialssuch as twigs, flowers, fire, and even animal hearts.

Bruguera performed her tribute to Mendieta in Havana, during a period where a heightened number of Cubans were immigrating to the United States. The act symbolically reclaimed Mendieta, who experienced a traumatic migration to the U.S. as a child and who has traditionally been considered largely with respect to U.S. art history, for Cubas artistic heritage.

El peso de la culpa (The Burden of Guilt), 1997

Bruguera debuted this performance in 1997 at her home in Havana as part of the series titled Memorias de la posguerra (Memories After the War). During the performance, which spanned roughly an hour, a nude Bruguera slowly consumed native soil mixed with salt water meant to symbolize tears. Throughout, a headless lamb carcass hung around her neck. The act was an allusion to the myth that, during the Spanish colonization of Cuba, Indigenous people ate nothing but dirt, a choice of death over captivity.

Eating dirt, which is sacred and a symbol of permanence, is like swallowing ones own traditions, ones own heritage, its like erasing oneself, electing suicide as a way of defending oneself, Bruguera said of the performance. What I did was take this historical anecdote and update it to the present. In later versions of the performance, a Cuban flag woven from human hair hangs behind Bruguera, a literal representation of the audience.

Desierro (Displacement), 199899

Much of Brugueras early work used her body to emphasize physical strain as a catalyst for political action. In Desierro, she encased herself in a suit of layered Cuban earth in the likeness of Congolese Nkisi Nkondi, mystical idols which, according to legend, housed spirits tasked with hunting wrongdoers and oath-breakers. The power figures became common among Afro-Caribbean religious practices. In Brugueras performance, the Nkondi becomes metaphors for the unfilled social and economic promises of the Cuban Revolution.

Untitled (Havana, 2000)

Artists participating in the 7th Havana Biennial were expressly forbidden to present work that criticized Fidel Castros regime. When Bruguera first proposed Untitled (Havana, 2000) to the biennial, she withheld plans to include in the work a looped video of the dictator unbuttoning hismilitary uniform to reveal that he is not wearing a bulletproof vest. All the while, Castro is smiling. Bruguera looks to highlight the dictators act of bravadofeigned vulnerability made possible only through his privileged position and military-grade protection.

Surrounding the video are nude male performers who stand atop mounds of sugarcane mash, Cubas most lucrative export. The video was not played until the Biennials opening day, when lines formed outside the dank military vault for a glimpse. In response, the exhibitions organizers shut off electricity around the vault, leaving the entirety of the biennial in darkness. Ultimately, the power was turned back on, but Bruguera wasnt allowed to show the video.

Department of Behavior Art (Ctedra Arte de Conducta) 200209,

In the early 2000s Bruguera founded Ctedra Arte de Conducta, a public artwork that also functioned as a participatory art school. The goal was to foster a new generation of less commercially-driven, more politically active artists of the sort that did not typically appear at Cubas traditional art schools, few of which taught performance art. Department of Behavior came about shortly after Bruguera returned from Kassel, Germany, where she showedUntitled (Kassel, 2002) at Documenta 11. The artist felt that, because the exhibition was so crowded, she was unable to activate the works message, and thus it was unsuccessfulbut it led to a breakthrough.

I started thinking about appropriating the structure and the resources of power as my medium, as my material, she toldTom Finkelpearl, author and New York Citys former cultural affairs commissioner. Instead of representing them, I wanted to put them in action; that would be my work. The curriculum focused on art as a tool for political and social action. The school opened in her home in January 2003 as a two-year program comprising weekly workshops on Behavior Art and discourse. In 2009, believing that the work had served its purpose, Bruguera closed the school.

Tatlins Whisper #5, 2008

For the performanceTatlins Whisper #5, visitors to Tate Moderns Turbine Hall were confronted by two mounted police in uniform, who aggressively patrolled the space, at times using crowd-control tactics such as closing off gallery entrances and corralling small groups into tight circles. Notions of power are the core of the workits title refers to Constructivist artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, who designed the Monument to the Third International, an abstract structure meant as a tribute to Communist power. The performance, which occurred at unannounced times, was contingent on the participation of the museums visitors, many of whom did little to resist the officers. The piece was an attempt to bring lived realities of some oppressed communitiespolice brutality, riot suppressioninto an art space.

Immigrant Movement International, 201015

This five-year project, presented in partnership with New Yorks Queens Museum and Creative Time, asked a simple but heady question: What makes a person in the United States an immigrant?For the first year of the project, Bruguera shared a a small apartment in in Queenss Corona neighborhood with five undocumented immigrants and their six children. During that time, she lived on a minimum wage, without health insurance, to better understand what many U.S. immigrants went through daily. Another aspect of the project saw volunteers offering educational programming, including language, nutrition, dance classes, and free healthcare and daycare services from a beauty shopturnedart space.

10,148,451, 2018

In 2018, Bruguera returned to Tate Modern to stage 10,148,451 for its Turbine Hall Commission. The number, which was stamped in red ink on each visitors hand, referred to the amount of people who migrated between countries in 2017, plus those who died during their journeys that year. Like many of Brugueras later works, 10,148,451 turned viewers into participants, inviting them to leave impressions on a heat-sensitive floor or to step inside a room next to the Turbine Hall pumped with an organic compound that induced tears. The commission also included the creation of the group Tate Neighbors, a group of 21 people tasked with imagining how the museum could be in dialogue with Londons local community. In response, they renamed Tate Moderns main building after local activist Natalie Bell. The change was originally intended to be temporary, but the name was formally adopted after the performance concluded.

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Tania Brugueras Most Famous Works: How the Artist Has Challenged Oppressive Forces with Incisive Performances - ARTnews

The provincial directive to end the "discriminatory practice" of birth alerts is a big step forward to keeping Indigenous and racialized families together, according to advocates in Ontario.

The directive, issued on July 14 by Ontario Associate Minister of Children and Women's Issues Jill Dunlop, ordered children's aid societies to stop issuing birth alerts by mid-October.

"For our community ... for Indigenous women across the province of Ontario ... this is a real sign of recognition of our rights as mothers, our rights as women but also, more importantly, this is going to improve the outcomes for Indigenous children and Indigenous babies across the province," said Dawn Lavell Harvard, president of the Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA).

She added, "I'm absolutely over-the-moon happy with the current government for taking this all-important step to recognize the autonomy of Indigenous mothers, to recognize their right to mother their own children something that was taken away with residential schools, were taken away with the Sixties Scoop and has been taken away generation after generation by racist governments."

The practice of birth alerts where a children's aid society notifies hospitals when they believe a newborn may be in need of protection has long been reported to disproportionately affect Indigenous families in Ontario.

Its elimination was also a recommendation made bythe National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Lavell Harvard said the systemic discrimination seen in the practice of birth alerts is reflected more broadly in the child welfare system.

"We know that there are currently more children in the care of the child welfare system than were in the residential schools at the height of the residential school system. And this is a result of poverty, is a result of racism, discrimination and systemic racism within the child welfare system ... where Indigenous mothers and Indigenous families are unfairly targeted."

"We recognize that in most cases, birth alerts do not support our goal of protecting children while supporting families to stay together. Every new mother and father need to be treated with respect, not negatively impacted because of an alert that might result in judgment with discriminatory measures," said Thelma Morris, executive director of Tikinagan Child & Family Services, a "community-based" child welfare agency that serves30 First Nations in northern Ontario.

The executive director for the Children's Aid Society of Thunder Bay, Brad Bain, said he sees the directive as a "positive step" made by the provincial government.

Bain acknowledged "the role that the Thunder Bay agency has played certainly, as well as our sector, in contributing to systemic racism and oppression."

He estimated that in recent years, the agency has issued five birth alerts per year, although noted that no birth alerts have been issued in 2020.

"As an organization, we are committed to the elimination of systemic racism and have an internal, anti-oppressive practices committee and we work in concert with our local stakeholders to inform our practices and our policies," Bain added.

Lavell Harvard said there is a lot more work to be done to keep families together.

"Indigenous-run child welfare organizations are discriminated against in terms ... they're expected to do more to hold families together with significantly less resources and then they are blamed when they have poor outcomes."

She added more "upstream" investment is needed to ensure Indigenous families are supported.

"If one wants to talk bottom line in terms of investments ... we need to be investing in that prevention, investing in providing Indigenous moms and their families with the tools they need to survive and provide for our families."

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'Discriminatory practice' of birth alerts to end in Ontario, and that's good for Indigenous families says ONWA - CBC.ca

On a cold winters night in July 2016, thousands of people gathered inside and outside Rotten Row Magistrates Court in Harare to await the verdict in the Zimbabwean governments case against Pastor Evan Mawarire, the leader of the #ThisFlag movement and a staunch opponent of then-President Robert Mugabe. When the magistrate eventually threw out the treason charges brought against Mawarire for peacefully rallying people against corruption, a street party broke out. It was an unexpected victory for the rule of lawwon, at least in part, through collective nonviolent action by ordinary people.

In its most basic form, the rule of law simply means that no one is above the law. Everyone is treated fairly and justly, and the government does not exercise its power arbitrarily. These principles lie at the heart of the ongoing protests against systemic racism and police brutality in the United States following the death of George Floyd. The rule of law is very different from rule by law, which characterises many authoritarian states and, increasingly, some democracies as well.

Many argue, not unreasonably, that building robust institutions is essential to strengthening the rule of law. But what do you do when the institutions which are meant to uphold the rule of law are so hollowed out that they have become the primary tools for its subversion? The conventional focus on building institutions can leave ordinary people feeling disempowered, waiting patiently for the all-important institutions to reform, while they remain on the receiving end of oppression meted out by those very institutions. It can also lead to unhelpful interventions by well-meaning external actors, which inadvertently strengthen the authoritarian capabilities of captured institutions, rather than the rule of law.

To strengthen the rule of law, we first need to focus on strengthening people, not institutions. This involves the difficult, dangerous, and often unglamorous work of grassroots community organising that empowers citizens to act through informal channels outside of established institutions. Such action includes non-violent protestsmarches, boycotts, strikes, and picketsas well as community initiatives that directly improve peoples lives, such as worker advice centres and community gardens.

Such efforts are especially necessary in authoritarian states where institutions are fundamentally broken. But even in established democracies, the recent failure of supposedly strong institutions to prevent the rule of law from being undermined has shown that there is no substitute for an active and organised citizenry. Such engagement cannot be legislated or decreed, or copied and pasted from another jurisdiction. People must build it collectively from the ground up.

Building people power starts with opening citizens minds to a different type of society and a new way of doing things. In apartheid South Africa, for example, the study groups and adult literacy classes in townships during the 1970s helped to lay the groundwork for the mass movement that emerged in the 1980s under the banner of the United Democratic Front. The UDF would go on to play a leading role in the struggle against apartheid, culminating in 1990 with Nelson Mandelas release from prison and the unbanning of the African National Congress.

Next, like-minded people need to organise themselves, connect with one another in the real world (not just on social media), and become actively involved in issues directly affecting their lives. These issues might at first be local rather than national, and involve less risky actions. Over time, however, people build mutual trust and gain confidence in both themselves and their collective power as a group. Coalitions form, and actions become larger in scope and perhaps more confrontational. Before you know it, a social movement emerges that is bigger than any of the individuals or organisations involved and can unlock peoples power to bring about change.

People power can strengthen the rule of law in at least three ways. For starters, it can counteract and even neutralise the top-down pressure placed on courts and police by the authoritiestypically, the executive. This can help to ensure that even hollowed-out or compromised institutions discharge their duties in accordance with the rule of lawas in the case involving Mawarire.

A people-power movement can also create alternative spaces that prefigure a society in which the rule of law is respected. The movement must operate internally in a just and fair way, and apply the same standards to all its members regardless of rank. And any civil disobedience must have a strategic purpose and be highly disciplined, so that participants understand that such action does not constitute a rejection of the rule of law, but rather a means of establishing it.

Third, people power has repeatedly proved to be an effective tool in defeating even the most brutal dictatorships and achieving a transition to a more democratic system of governance. Far-reaching reforms that strengthen the rule of law can then be implemented in ways that would not have been possible under a corrupted system. In November 2019, for example, Sudans new transitional authorityestablished after months of non-violent protests against President Omar al-Bashirs dictatorship and then against the military regime that ousted himrepealed an oppressive public-order law that had governed how women could behave and dress in public. Although Sudans transition is by no means complete, this represented a huge triumph for the rule of law. It would not have been achieved without people power.

Authoritarian leaders understand and fear people power. Soon after Mawarires hearing, the Zimbabwean regime erected a fence around Rotten Row Magistrates Court to prevent similar public gatherings there in the future. But just as authoritarian regimes adapt and learn from their past mistakes, those of us fighting for a society based on the rule of law also must adjust, innovate, and improvise, and accumulate enough power to dismantle the oppressive systems that shackle us. Only through the struggle of ordinary people can we eventually shift our focus to building strong institutions that protect everyone equally.

***

What do you think?

Dear reader, wed like to hear from you. We regularly publish letters to the editor on contemporary issues or direct responses to something the Post has recently published. Please send your letters to tkpoped@kmg.com.np with "Letter to the Editor" in the subject line. Please include your name, location, and a contact address so one of our editors can reach out to you.

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How people power strengthens the rule of law - The Kathmandu Post