Snowden’s act of sacrifice echoes self immolators

Edward Snowden is a remarkable man.

His decision to release a cache of top-secret intelligence documents was cooly considered for years. It will totally change his life and could even have him killed.

He knows that, having worked for the CIA and for outside contractors to the US National Security Agency.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided to the Guardian, he wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

Snowden’s act is one of supreme selflessness – bringing to mind those of people who have set themselves on fire to protest injustice.

Self immolation is routinely misrepresented as suicide, an act of violence in itself, which is not the case. This Counterpunch article puts that right, not least with this passage, quoting two deep religious thinkers, starting with the Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan:

“I think in Christianity that something very great has been lost. Jesus’ death, I think, in a very deep sense can be called a self-immolation. I mean that He went consciously to death, choosing that death for the sake of others, reasonably and thoughtfully.” Berrigan argues that people who burned themselves protesting the Vietnam War should not be said to have committed “suicide” since “suicide proceeds from despair and from the loss of hope and I felt that [Roger Laporte, a Catholic Worker self-immolator] did not die in that spirit.”

Thich Nhat Hant, a Buddhist monk says of self-immolation: “I think we must try to understand those who have sacrificed themselves. We do not intent to say that self-immolation is good, or that it is bad. … When you say something is good, you say that you should do that. But nobody can urge another to do such a thing. … It is done to wake us up.” He relates the story of a young Vietnamese woman, Nhat Chi Mai, who immolated herself — and was so joyous the month before that people thought she was planning on getting married. He also argues that others are burning themselves but [quoting another monk] “in a slower way. I am burning myself with austerity, with active resistance against the war.” (See chapter on self-immolation in The Raft is not the Shore — conversations between Berrigan and Nhat Hanh).

I hope Snowden escapes their fate, though it is clear from his Q+A that he’s under no illusion as to what his fate might be.

We should all do what little we can to support him.

And the winner isn’t…

Development reporting suffers exactly the same sort of problems as does  journalism that purports to cover conventional politics and economics – probably worse even. Too much focus on official sources and too little questioning of mainstream Western ideas about what countries and their citizens must do to “develop”. All the arguments of Fraudcast News with bells on when it comes to journalists failing to examine the realities of power, where true power lies and what ordinary people can do about it.

I thought it worthwhile spending a few days working up a grant proposal for the Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Programme run by the European Journalism Centre.

If it worked, I would get paid to do the journalism I attempt to champion in Fraudcast News while also leaving behind some of the same techniques for others who might do the same.

The idea, simple enough, was to produce a series of smartphone video reports from Mali’s  Inner Niger Delta asking the question: “Whose development for Mali?” Rather than just present another foreign perspective on resource grabbing, the idea had been to conduct a mobile phone video report training for Malians, leaving behind the means for local people to then tell their stories as they wished rather than relying on outsiders.

Had the proposal succeeded, I would have been part of a visionOntv training team working together with local and international NGOs working on the ground in Mali. It didn’t, the judges deciding instead to award grants to a variety of ideas shared across a number of media outlets from across Western Europe.

I wasn’t blown away by the winners. None strikes me as addressing the underlying assumptions of “aid” and “development” set against the effects of global trade, banking, financial markets and the rest as they benefit rich countries and global corporations. Shame – it would have been good to have had an opportunity put the ideas into effect with some sort of budget in hand.

Sour grapes? I hope not.

This was the failed proposal:

Development dilemmas in Mali – whose tale to tell?

Malians will go to the polls this July with two military coups and a French-led assault on Tuareg separatist and Islamist rebel groups fresh in their memories. Yet what difference will elections make, however “free and fair”, to the lives of ordinary citizens?

Even before Mali’s recent upheavals in government, subsistence farmers and fishers in the Inner Niger Delta faced ever-lower water levels during annual monsoon floods. While climate change might play some part, far more pressing threats come from hydroelectric dams and river diversions for massive, often foreign-owned irrigation projects.

Locals complain of national politicians who ignore their plight. Bamako leaders, their ears bent towards external creditors, donors and their advisers, promote impossible development models. While chosen policies might boost abstract measures of economic health, they also ruin local livelihoods and the natural environment.

No news there – Mali faces the same economic binds as poor and not-so-poor countries the world over. All struggle with questions of how to meet their populations’ basic needs without paupering citizens and their environments. Only the strongest dare question Western development orthodoxies. Most of them, saddled with debt, fall prey to strings-attached foreign investments, debt-led growth models or demands for privatisations and deregulation. The evident damages of such policies is ignored in the rush to “develop”.

Mali’s various versions of the problem play out in domestic cotton production, gold mining and livestock rearing. None illustrates it better than water, lifeline to communities dotted along riverbanks and seasonal islands across the Inner Niger Delta. Their river’s annual rise and fall follows a cycle quite unlike the ever-upwards demands of compound growth charts. Projects promising fat returns for distant investors, and payback for historic creditors, spell devastation and displacement for locals. Abstract policy becomes practical reality at the sluice gates, where operators decide who gets what water when, the weaker and voiceless invariably losing out.

The global crisis of capitalism, now an open debate in rich countries, has been clear to the world’s poor during decades of Western development policies. Their voice has gradually grown stronger and more authoritative, thwarting biased agendas in world trade and climate talks and driving business at the UN’s General Assembly. As yet they lack the power to counterweight the agenda of rich-country governments, corporations and financial markets. With conventional institutions deadlocked and bereft of fresh ideas, civil societies around the world are among the few offering hopes of alternatives.

This assignment will amplify those grassroots voices and foster civil society dialogue in Mali and beyond. It will bypass gatekeepers in governments and conventional media by publishing mainly direct to the internet. Three highly experienced reporter-trainers will use smartphones to make multiple video reports in the Delta and teach local stakeholder groups to do the same. Their reporting techniques, perfected by London-based NGO visionOntv, cut out the costly time-dumps of video capture, editing and encoding. Reporters’ bi-lingual output, combined with that of workshop participants, will offer multiple perspectives on Mali’s water dilemmas, opening a wider window on development questions themselves.

 

Why the media don’t understand money

This is a recent talk I gave to the annual conference for the non-governmental organisation Positive Money.

A word to make clear my interests: Positive Money is an organisation whose work I greatly admire and for whom I have done some volunteer work in the last year or so and for whom I may do more in the future.

I choose to do that work, while also being a journalist, because I think the structural failures of our governance systems are such that they are an integral part of any story political journalists should be covering. That is true of debt-based money, the issue raised by Positive Money, but also of other issues such as poverty, inequality, incessant Western war-mongering and environmental despoliation.

Our leaders’ feeble attempts at regulating banks, international finance and global markets have totally failed, leading to ongoing financial crises since the global meltdown of 2007-2008. The false debates created with regard to conventional economics, and our policymakers’ fixation with a sterile definition of prosperity as determined by economic growth, are major barriers to change. Conventional media themselves fail to convey the extent of these governance problems, or even to appreciate that governance issues are the problem.

The question I was tasked to answer was why conventional media don’t “get” the idea of debt-based money. My answer could be easily adapted to fit these various other issues, as I make clear in Fraudcast News – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies.

Panel discussion: Conventional media have failed us – the case for and against

I’ve pitched this panel discussion idea to the Global Editors Network 2013 News Summit, to be held from 19 to 21 June 2013 in Paris.

Cat’s chance in hell is the expression that comes to mind. Well miaou!

The case for:
Conventional media have woefully failed to dissect the lack of any true, public accountability in all layers of modern western government, from local to global levels.

This collective failure plays out across all major areas of government. It encompasses the vast bulk of reporting on governments’ economic and fiscal thinking, their responses to serial financial crises and pitiful efforts at regulation of global banks and finance. The problem extends to the superficial news treatment of political inaction over growing poverty and inequality, accelerating climate change and species and habitat loss.

Media literacy concerning the realities of representative democracy, versus politicians’ rhetoric, is spectacularly inadequate. That makes existing media part of the governance problem, not the solution.

Patrick Chalmers, an ex-Reuters reporter himself and author of Fraudcast News, will dissect the media’s failure to highlight people’s powerlessness. He will argue that journalists and their employers, far from being popular watchdogs, suffer the same problems of elite capture as politicians and governments themselves.

Yet he remains a dogged optimist, suggesting there are alternatives. They include mass training of ordinary citizens to help them revolutionise their democracies by revolutionising journalism, building from the grassroots upwards.

The case against: I’m sure you can find someone!

Fraudcast News one of Green Left Weekly’s books of the year

Nice to get some positive feedback on Fraudcast News from Green Left Weekly’s Mat Ward.

For me, a truly great book is one that stays in your thoughts for a long time after reading it.

I thought about this book daily for months after finishing it, because its main argument seems to be at the root of almost every injustice in the world. Former Reuters reporter Patrick Chalmers gradually realised, through his job reporting on the European Union, that what is commonly passed off as democracy is anything but. Politicians are held accountable only once every four years or so, after which they break nearly every pre-election promise.

Chalmers wants truly accountable democracy, in which politicians are held accountable for every decision they make. In this endlessly quotable book, Chalmers says it is the job of every journalist to make accountable democracy part of the conversation. Technology may hold the key to eventually making it a reality.

Graphics journalism as real journalism

I tried but failed to register a comment this morning on an article carried by the Global Editors Network about how the Guardian covered US elections.

Something to do with captcha errors that I couldn’t be fussed to wrestle with. The piece was all about the whizzy things done by Gabriel Dance and his team, which seemed fine enough as far as they went but hardly very illuminating politically.

So this is what I said in reply:

“fun”, “interesting”, “creative”, “engaging”, and “different” – these are fine things in the race to capture eyeballs but they’re only of any use, from a journalism perspective, if the work informs and illuminates the audience about the underlying political realities. Otherwise it’s just showbiz.

So be all these things to get people to pay attention to the elections but also take some more steps back from the razzamatazz of the two main presidential candidates, their parties and the campaigns for all the other elected posts. Don’t get carried away with the wrapping, remember the substance.

I would like, for example, to see the real-time graphics comparing pledges in presidential debates to the realities. Obama or Romney says “security” – I want to see the graphics asking the question: “who’s security” and pointing to areas of US military actions around the world, including drone strikes and detentions. Inviting tweets from people in those countries might produce some interesting dialogues. Get beyond narrow debate parameters set by the candidates, remember your journalistic responsibility to people, not just US voters either.

The candidates mention budget priorities – I want to see graphics about the numbers of US voters in poverty and how that has evolved in recent years, next door to graphics showing subsidies to banks and financial markets (including bail-outs), to fossil fuel companies, to agro-industries and the military-industrial complex as well of estimates about the scale of tax evasion by individuals and companies.

Also, as backgrounders, I want to see graphics showing the running totals of campaign spend, Democrat and Republican, official and de facto, and where that money is coming from, where it’s being spent (TV adverts, etc) and which media conglomerates benefit. You could also invite people to tweet in about how they think winning and losing candidates might go about rewarding their sponsors after the election.

Graphics innovations and their delivery over the internet, not least via social media and to mobile devices worldwide, open up the possiblity of some fascinating global conversations that could better inform people about the realities of US politics, any politics in fact. They could be a great tool in bringing about what Dan Gillmor talked about in “We the Media” – of grassroots journalism turning old media’s lecture into a conversation. Your commenters and tweeters are part of those grassroots.

Demand the impossible – sounds like the least we can do

‘We’ve created some feminists!’ … A study group on the Demand the Impossible course at Goldsmith’s. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

I’ve just come across this Guardian report about a free, five-day course at Goldsmith’s College in London on activism and radical politics.

I commented on the piece, criticisng the piss-taking style in which it was written while also including an offer to help out with future courses or with spreading the idea elsewhere.

Just in case such shameless self-promotion gets stripped off the comments section by the moderators, I’m pasting it here

Sounds great – shame the author had to pepper his article with leftie this, leftie that cheeky, chappy stuff.

This sort of teaching shouldn’t be classed as radical at all but part of a balanced, thoughtful education that teaches people to think for themselves rather than turning them into consumer automatons. Our existing system is all capitalist-, profit- and economic-growth driven.

You don’t get accompanying “rightie” this, “rightie” that when it comes to articles about Alan Sugar or Dragon’s Den as they vaunt the benefits of loadsamoney lifestyles that ignore what a complete mess we’re all in as a result.

That would be too “radical” for prime-time entertainment – too many people might get “the wrong ideas”. You’re not allowed to add together one + one to see the result of such thinking as consumer craziness and excess, tottering debt mountains, poverty, inequality, climate change, loss of green spaces, war etc. all that fun stuff which would make crap reality TV, piss off the professional politicians and frighten the business advertisers away. Oh no.

I would love to help out with this course – giving some insight from my own career as a Reuters reporter to talk about how our governance systems fail us and how conventional journalism is generally blinkered to those failures. On the upside, the good news. There are genuine, grassroots alternatives sprouting up around the world that could address both of these problems. There are some Creative Commons materials on my website you can take for free, if you want. I haven’t posted the address for fear of comment removal but I’m sure you can work out how to find it.

What would be interesting is to think about how to seed the ideas of Demand the Impossible to make it deliverable all over the place, not just in the UK.

Creative Commons How to manuals and accompanying video journalism reports made by participants and uploaded online would be good places to start.

Stand aside George

People’s budgets

The Chancellor George Osborne was talking of his plans to cut a further £10 billion from the UK’s annual welfare budget as I drove through rush-hour traffic to Kingston-upon-Thames.

News of his crowd-pleasing speech to the Conservative party conference spouted from the radio as I wondered how such questions might be decided with more accountability to the public.

Just what might UK finances look like if ordinary people had greater say over how much money gets raised in taxes and where to spend it?

Read on here….

William Cobbett – dead radical, dead relevant

People’s budgets – our cash, why not our call?