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hatari-translations · 6 years ago

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I’ve been asked to translate this pre-ESC interview, which is pretty interesting! Since it’s eight minutes long and a lot of text, I’m not going to transcribe the whole thing, just translate/summarize what is said in the same vein as my translation of the People Behind the Costumes documentary.

Dramatis personae

The other people with Hatari in the interview there are:

- The host is Gísli Marteinn Baldursson, long-time talk show host. He’s also been RÚV’s Eurovision commentator for a good few years now.

- Bjarni Benediktsson (usually nicknamed Bjarni Ben), finance minister. Yes, the same one whose baking ad they were parodying that one time. Yes, he’s still finance minister. No, actually, after the 2016 election he was prime minister for a bit, until that government imploded because of more scandals, and after that election we just didn’t have a government for a while as none of the possible complicated multi-party coalitions worked out, until the Left-Green movement sold their souls to get together with the Independence Party and he got to be finance minister again. Independence Party voters are distressingly loyal and also like 20-25% of the country for some reason.

- Brynhildur Guðjónsdóttir, actress.

- Salka Sól Eyfeld, actress.

(I don’t watch this show, so I have no idea why on earth this is the combination of people he had on that night.)

English translation

The video starts with Gísli Marteinn interrupting something to introduce new guests, and explaining that this is being taped in advance because by the time it’s aired Hatari are going to be on their way to Tel Aviv. He introduces them as “the joy and pop band Hatari, or the dystopian electronica band Hatari”. Matthías, Klemens and Einar walk in with bottles of SodaDream that they offer to everyone, and Einar very deliberately squeezes in next to Bjarni Ben instead of with the rest of the band.

Everyone expresses their delight at getting to try SodaDream, and Klemens suggests a toast. Gísli Marteinn expresses his wishes for them to do well abroad, Bjarni Ben agrees.

Gísli Marteinn: “Welcome home, Einar, from the tour with Vök! Did that all go well?”

Einar stares silently into the camera.

Gísli Marteinn: “Right, Einar... he’ll just go over that later.”

Matthías: “He’s being punished.”

Gísli Marteinn is amused, then goes over how now it’s all about Hatari, a wonderful band, who won Söngvakeppnin and is currently working on bringing down capitalism. “How’s that going?”

Matthías: “It’s going well. Of course we have the loyal support of voters and our sponsors, and listeners, so we believe that as the momentum builds, we will succeed.”

Klemens agrees that they’ve built a lot of support and they’re planning to build up more; Matthías says they’re very flattered and touched by what they’ve achieved.

Gísli Marteinn: “Well, when you’ve gotten the finance minister himself on board with your anticapitalism, victory is clearly in sight.”

Matthías: “Yes. It’s basically in the bag.”

Gísli Marteinn goes over how they’re heading off soon and there’s a lot of interest in Hatari. “Are you feeling any stage fright? You know you’ll be followed everywhere out there, and everyone wants you to do something really brilliant and clever, do something, say something...”

Matthías: “Sure. Well, stage fright we can deal with. It’s more the tension over how this contest is being held where it is. The contest is a beautiful thing, in that it’s about peace and unity, but it’s being held in a country marred with conflict and disunity. And we said we’d use our agenda-setting powers to put those issues on the agenda, and that’s quite a project.”

Gísli Marteinn: “So are you sticking with... do you have a plan for how you’re going to do that?”

Matthías: “Well, plans A, B, C and D. I change my mind on which daily, but yeah. Yeah. It’s all according to plan.”

Klemens: “Of course, we get all our answers sent to us from Svikamylla ehf. every day, so we just take it day by day.”

Gísli Marteinn. “Right. But this is a massive affair, I mean, you’re bringing an entire media organization with you, Icelandic [sic] Music News.”

Matthías: “Very true. The most honest news organization in the country.”

Gísli Marteinn: “It’s wonderful. Very honest. They really prioritize honesty.”

Matthías: “Yes.”

Klemens: “...in the history of Iceland.”

Matthías: “Trust and courage.”

Gísli Marteinn talks about the costumes, and Matthías explains about the collaboration with creative studio Döðlur. Gísli Marteinn says Einar is there “all fired up” (it’s a bit hard to translate this phrase, “í miklu stuði”, which is literally more like “in a great mood” but really here means something more like oh, yeah, he’s doing exactly what he does best, awesomely). Klemens thanks SodaDream for sponsoring them.

Brynhildur says it’s very good sparkling water, but still kind of disappointing. Salka asks “Because it’s not champagne?” Brynhildur points out that no, it’s in the ingredients, and Matthías confirms: “Oh, yes, it’s carbonated water and disappointment.”

Gísli Marteinn goes over how we know 90% of the nation will be watching them compete in the semifinals (Icelanders are very passionate about Eurovision), hoping they’ll qualify, and asks if they’re as preoccupied with how they do.

Matthías: “How we do is important, but the other thing [i.e. putting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda] is more significant. We didn’t necessarily expect to get this far, and we don’t really know to what extent we could hope for victory, and haven’t really known that from the start. We’ve tried to use our agenda-setting powers, as we keep repeating, but we just wanted to ask - well, we hope people at home will ask themselves, and I’d not least like to ask all of you here, not least you, Bjarni, being in the government - about these issues, don’t you think it’s right to go out there and put these issues on the agenda, and recognize Palestine as an independent state? We are, after all, one of the countries who do so, and I’m proud of that.”

Gísli Marteinn: “Right. We’re one of few nations who recognize both, aren’t we? Well, what do you say on the couch?”

Bjarni: “Well, I think there’s no question that we should participate, and I personally always believe in dialogue, and I don’t believe in exclusion and burning bridges...”

Matthías: “Do you think Palestine should be recognized as a state?”

Bjarni: “That, on the other hand, is an entirely different issue, and I passed on that vote when that happened. It’s a process that’s had a very long buildup, but it was handled by parliament, and...”

Gísli Marteinn: “Well, the official policy of the Icelandic government is...”

Bjarni: “...a two-state solution, yes. But it’s very important to have peace on both sides of that border, and in recent years we’ve often discussed Israel and Palestine in parliament, and I think the location of the contest this year should absolutely not prevent Iceland’s participation. I think that’s ridiculous.”

(I think Einar is staring extra-hard into the camera throughout all this.)

Gísli Marteinn asks the actresses if they were on the boycott wagon. Salka says she never really formed an opinion, but she heard out both sides, and she’s very happy with Hatari’s act and was rooting for them from day one; she’s not worried about them out there and thinks they’ll make the Icelandic nation proud, and she hopes they’ll let their voices be heard.

Brynhildur: “We’re sending well-educated, well-informed and beautiful young people who know exactly what they’re doing.”

Salka: “I trust them 100%.”

Gísli Marteinn starts trying to wrap things up, and Klemens interrupts for some closing words: “Shouldn’t we clarify the message of our song a bit? We consider it to be a dystopia, and it’s a contemplation on power and powerlessness, hope and hopelessness, and if we don’t come together and forget to love, then hate will prevail. And that’s a message that should be heard in Israel and Palestine, as well as elsewhere in the world.”

I think this was pretty brilliant, because honestly I had no idea that Bjarni Ben was reluctant to recognize Palestinian statehood but Hatari sure just used their agenda-setting powers in this talk show interview to establish this for everyone watching.

#hatari #interview #translation #iceland #politics

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berniesrevolution · 7 years ago

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

On September 11, Norwegian voters go to the polls for parliamentary elections. For a long time it looked as though the center-left, led by the Labor Party, would take over government after four years of right-wing rule. However, in the last phase of the campaign the race is much closer, and a lot depends on which of the smaller parties get over the electoral threshold of 4 percent — the ones on the right or the ones on the left.

Still most polls are showing that the conservative coalition will have to step down and be replaced by a Labor-led government, supported by either the Greens, the Christian Democrats, the Farmers Party, the Socialist Left Party, the Red Party, or some combination of those.

For many in Norway, such a development would be relief after the last four years of tax cuts for the rich and attacks on the country’s still extensive labor protections. Those policies have been married to a clamp down on immigration and Islamophobic rhetoric.

Still, Labor Party leader Gahr Støre is no Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, he has likened himself with the French president Emmanuel Macron, and would much rather collaborate with the center than with the Left.

The good news is that voters don’t seem to be buying it. Norway is de facto a nine-party-system, although several other smaller parties exist. On the left, two parties are now surging in the polls, challenging Labor from the left and hoping to have a say on the course of the country’s policies the next four years. Jacobin’s Ellen Engelstad — editor of the online journal Manifest Tidsskrift — had a chat with Marie Sneve Martinussen, the deputy leader of Rødt (the Red Party) about their strategy for the election and their analysis of the current state of affairs in Norway.

Ellen Engelstad

Your party is quite small and not currently represented in the parliament, but that looks ready to change. You may get one, two, or three representatives elected, and possibly even seven to nine if you get over the 4 percent threshold. Can you say something on why you’re experiencing a surge now?

Marie Sneve Martinussen

It is not surprising to us, as we have built the party organization little by little over the years. Our membership has doubled since 2013, and most of the new members are younger: the majority are born in the 1980s, although we have representation from every age group.

Our breakthrough isn’t in this election, but the local elections held two years ago. We performed well and went into coalitions in local governments and cities, which means that more voters saw we want and how we perform than had previously encountered us. It is a new situation for us to explicitly seek power together with SV and Labor, and it is based on a strategy of having a bigger breakthrough in real politics. This has worked well in Oslo, the capital, as well as in other cities — we would not have experienced this surge if this were purely a phenomenon in Oslo.

Ellen Engelstad:

Your party was founded in 2007, but has roots in the Maoist movement of the 1970s, among other currents. Can you say something about your party’s formation, and also how this past has been used against you?

Marie Sneve Martinussen:

The party was formed in 2007 when the Workers Communist Party (AKP) and the Red Election Alliance (RV) dissolved to form Rødt together with AKP’s youth party Red Youth (RU) and independents. RV was originally the electoral front of AKP, but since 1991 it has worked as an independent party. I joined Rødt in 2009 and don’t know all that much about its past. However, a party consists of its members, and since a majority of them joined after 2013, that past is not all that relevant to them. When the media asks us questions about Pol Pot and our relationship to democracy, many of our members don’t get it. It’s not that they are upset or feel hurt, they just don’t understand the relevance of that history.

The formation of Rødt happened at the same time as the global financial crisis, at the same time as when the Socialist Left Party (SV) formed a government with Labor and opened the Barents Sea for oil and gas drilling. Later that government joined the NATO-led war in Libya, so there was a new radicalization in my generation and a demand for a real socialist party.

In 2012 there was a strategy dispute in the party, with a lot of debate and internal frictions. But at the general convention that year, a long-term strategy gained support and parts of the current leadership were elected, myself included. We wanted to sharpen our focus on the economy, democracy, and labor issues. It was not a question about moving to the right, but about putting labor and the economy at the heart of everything we do. That strategy has been working very well, and we have experienced a huge lift.

Ellen Engelstad:

Turning to the current state of affairs. Norway is a rich, Nordic welfare state with universal health care, free education including universities, cheap day care, and generous parental leave. There seems to be a political consensus on this welfare model too, at least in rhetoric. So what is the role of the Left in such a “successful” capitalist state?

Marie Sneve Martinussen:

The consensus for “the Nordic model” is only superficial. The capitalist class has abandoned the class compromise, but the Labor Party hasn’t gotten the memo. The welfare state is being attacked from below by commercial companies; for instance, there have been huge changes in our health sector and the pension system. And the Labor Party has overseen many of these changes.

What is important is to locate power and interests, not just move money on the state budget. For example, doubling child care benefits is good and costs money, but it doesn’t challenge any power structures. That’s why a party like Rødt, with our analysis, is important. We need to point out that power is not equally distributed, but we also need to make the connection between this analysis and people’s everyday lives. That has been the biggest problem for contemporary European left-wing parties: that they are unable to translate their knowledge into a politics that make sense to people in their everyday lives.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #norway #election #nordic socialism #Social Democracy #jacobin #jacobin magazine

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coin-news-blog · 5 years ago

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First Blockchain Free Trade Zone in China + More News

New Post has been published on https://coinmakers.tech/tech/first-blockchain-free-trade-zone-in-china-more-news

First Blockchain Free Trade Zone in China + More News

Crypto Briefs is your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.

Adoption news

The Chinese island province of Hainan is set to create the nation’s first blockchain free trade zone (FTZ), reports Xinhua. The news agency says the project will be backed by a USD 142 million fund, with an aim to nurturing finance-related blockchain companies. The FTZ’s operators will aim to “employ blockchain technology in multiple areas such as housing, healthcare, tourism and trade.”

Hyundai’s blockchain subsidiary Hdac has announced the creation of a new blockchain investment company. Per ZDNet Korea, the company will be named T Investment, and will be handed a USD 27 million war chest to invest in promising blockchain business startups. Hdac is thought to be particularly interested in nurturing dapps-related projects, and is looking to launch a PoS blockchain-related business line in early 2020.

Komodo (KMD), an open, composable multi-chain platform, said in an emailed announcement that it conducted the world’s first web browser-based atomic swap and plans on expanding their decentralized exchange solution, AtomicDEX, to web browsers to give users the ability to conduct cross-chain atomic swaps and run nodes in web browsers. The atomic swap is a smart contract technology that allows users to trade digital assets without any third-party involvement. The initial atomic swap exchanged ether ETH for an ERC20 token.

Neufund, Berlin-based challenger investing and fundraising platform, has closed the "world’s first fully compliant," blockchain-based Initial Public Offering (IPO) accessible to retail investors, raising EUR 1.4 million (USD 1.5 million), which is 179% of the cap, they said in an emailed announcement. With a minimum investment of EUR 100 (USD 111), the offering of a high-tech mobility company, Greyp, has attracted a total of 1,017 investors from 34 countries, a blog post states. The offer was conducted under the laws of Liechtenstein.

Heavily backed blockchain gaming developer Sorare has struck three new licensing agreements with top-tier European football clubs, reports Sport Techie. Spanish La Liga teams Atlético Madrid and Valencia have joined German Bundesliga team Schalke in signing with Sorare, which now boasts 30 professional teams on its fast-growing roster. The gaming company has previously won backing from the likes of ConsenSys and gaming giant Ubisoft.

Tech giant Microsoft partnered up with gaming platform Enjin (ENJ) to offer Azure Heroes, a digital rewards system for active participants in Microsoft’s Azure technical community. The announcement says that the two have collaborated in a local pilot to create a blockchain based recognition program. The Azure Heroes badgers were created in a number of original and unique designs which have been tokenised into a digital asset on the Ethereum public blockchain.

Bitcoin (BTC) mining giant Bitfury today launched Exonum Enterprise, the first such blockchain built from the ground up to let large corporations streamline their business and increase transparency using the Bitcoin blockchain, Forbes reported.

Today, crypto lender BlockFi launched its own crypto trading platform, BlockFi Trading. It will initially allow holders of cryptocurrencies to trade between bitcoin, ether and the Gemini dollar (GUSD), subject to geographic availability. Alongside the trading experience, BlockFi clients can interact with other products on their platform including the BlockFi Interest Account and loan product.

Exchanges news

Korbit, one of South Korea’s four biggest exchanges, has signed an MOU agreement with MatrixPort, a Singapore-based Bitmain subsidiary, per media outlet Newsway. MatrixPort, a cryptocurrency-powered payment service provider, was established in January this year. Korbit says the move comes as part of a wider plan to expand its range of financial services.

Binance says it will hand out USD 100 worth of Binance Coin (BNB) to HTC customers buying the Exodus 1 smartphone. The device features a cryptocurrency wallet. In an official Binance announcement, the exchange says that the limited edition “Early Adopter bonus” offer, which began today, will be available on a first-come-first-serve basis for 500 Exodus 1 customers.

bitFlyer launched their Instant Buy on its Buy/Sell exchange platform in Europe. The exchange says that the feature, available on desktop and smartphone, allows users to buy cryptocurrency directly from bitFlyer, using credit card, debit card or local instant transfer methods such as Sofort, iDeal and GiroPay.

Gate.io launched its new feature called ‘Crypto Loan,’ saying that it allows users to earn a stable profit with an annual interest rate of up to 73%, by placing lending orders (with BTC, ETH, USDT, etc.) through Gate.io’s lending and borrowing markets. Funds in the spot account can be used for crypto loan requirements. The minimum interest of the loan will be calculated per 4 hours. After the first 4 hours, the interest will be calculated on an hourly basis. Currently, the annual interest rate for USDT and BTC loans is about 7.3%, the exchange says.

Mining news

Politicians in Kazakhstan will only tax cryptocurrency miners if and when they exchange the tokens they mine into fiat, per Kursiv. The media outlet quotes Madi Saken, a legal analyst at the Astana-based National Association for the Development of the Blockchain and the Industry of Data Centers, as stating, “Tax liabilities only apply […] when cryptocurrencies are sold on an exchange for real money. This kind of income would be taxable.”

Regulation news

Top U.S. financial regulators recommended to federal and state officials to continue to examine the risks to the financial system posed by digital assets and distributed ledger technologies and their usage, according to an annual report published by the Financial Stability Oversight Council. The market capitalization of digital assets has increased in recent years and has been highly volatile, says the panel of regulators, adding that the market capitalization of stablecoins grew as well in 2019, and that distributed ledger technology may have applications that extend well beyond the simple transfer of value.

Project Participate, a coalition of some of the world’s leading virtual asset companies, has issued its first report on the detection of suspicious activity involving virtual assets, the press release says. The Project Participate report helps fill the gaps in the new guidance relating to virtual assets and Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) published by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in June 2019, by identifying typologies of potential criminal activity and related indicators of suspicion, as well as recommended measures to better detect and deter such activity. The report has been shared with the FATF and is available to vetted parties, including VASPs, software providers, and government officials. Project Participate was created in March 2019 to identify suspicious transactions and to report that activity to regulators.

Source: cryptonews.com

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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The Army Built to Fight ‘Medicare for All’

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-army-built-to-fight-medicare-for-all/

The Army Built to Fight ‘Medicare for All’

Illustration by David Senior

Chip Kahn took one look at the scene playing out inside the stately Hart Senate Office Building and knew he needed to do something about it.

It was mid-September 2017 and Sen. Bernie Sanders had just ascended a stage to the cheers of more than a hundred health care activists, grassroots organizers and political supporters. The packed hearing room had played host to some of the most solemn moments in Washington’s modern history: the crafting of a landmark missile treaty with the Soviet Union, the investigation of the 9/11 terror attacks, the consideration of at least five Supreme Court nominees.

On this day, it had been transformed into a staging ground for the first stop in Sanders’ latest political crusade. Standing in front of a bright blue HEALTHCARE IS A RIGHT banner tacked to the back wall, Sanders heralded the renewal of a “long and difficult struggle” to fulfill the liberal dream he’d pursued for decades: “Medicare for All.”

The speech was classic Bernie, full of grand visions for a universal health care system at the expense of greedy corporate executives getting rich off the status quo. For Kahn, the CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents more than 1,000 for-profit hospitals, it wasn’t so much the rhetoric that bothered him, despite the fact that he — as head of one of the nation’s most powerful hospital lobbies — was one of the corporate executives in Sanders’ crosshairs. A 67-year-old former GOP operative who’d worked in and around politics since high school, Kahn was familiar with the Vermont senator’s lengthy, mostly solitary campaign for single-payer health care.

What he couldn’t ignore this time was the group right behind Sanders. Nine Democratic senators, many of them rising stars and likely presidential candidates, stood on stage to pledge their support for Medicare for All — a proposal that would obliterate the private health insurance sector, reorder one-sixth of the nation’s economy and jeopardize a system Kahn and his industry allies had worked so hard to construct.

Democrats were less than a decade removed from passage of the Affordable Care Act, the most significant health care legislation in a half-century. The fight over how to shape, implement and ultimately rescue it had cost the industry millions of dollars in time and effort, and exacted a steep political price. But hospitals across America had now largely adapted to the new landscape the law had established—and now, Kahn recalled thinking at the time, politicians wanted to go out and do it all again?

“The Democratic Party had this …amnesia,” Kahn said in a recent interview, searching for the right word to express the disbelief he still feels many months later. “That set off alarm bells.”

As recently as a year earlier, Medicare for All was little more than a progressive pipe dream, a policy proposal dismissed in most Democratic circles as pure fantasy. Yet suddenly it had leaped from the fringes into the center of the conversation, urged on by the party’s progressive base and increasingly embraced by leading Democrats.

With the images of that Sanders event replaying in his head, Kahn made a phone call — and then, over the next few weeks, another and another. Those calls would lead to a series of secretive meetings in downtown D.C. where officials from every part of the health care industry — from insurance companies to hospital giants, drugmakers and even, for a time, doctors — would forge an alliance united to ensure that Sanders’ promises never became reality.

Out of their pact grew an influence operation known today as the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a multimillion-dollar cooperative designed to overwhelm not just the swelling Medicare for All movement, but every single Democratic proposal that would significantly expand the government’s role in health care.

Its core conviction: Right now, things aren’t actually that bad. Nine in 10 people have health coverage, insurance premiums are stabilizing and the system is working better than ever for the vast majority of the country. What Americans need now is a Washington willing to tinker and to shore up Obamacare’s weak points, not take a sledgehammer to the entire structure.

“The reason for the invention of the Partnership was that the Democratic Party was forgetting what it had done and, in our view, going off on a tangent that would shake everything up if they ever really got power,” Kahn said. “In this country, incremental change, and pragmatic change, has always been the style.”

Health care’s warring tribes

Like most blandly named coalitions in a town bursting with them, the Partnership is a vehicle for funneling the money and missions of a set of disparate organizations with just enough in common to make nice with each other against a common threat.

Though the health care industry is often seen as a single broad entity, in Washington it’s in fact more like an assortment of warring tribes competing to secure the biggest slice of the nation’s $3.6 trillion in annual health spending. Hospitals and doctors, for example, spent tens of millions of dollars this year fighting the insurance industry to a stalemate over who should pick up the tab for surprise medical bills.

At the same time, hospitals are playing defense against the pharmaceutical industry over an obscure-yet-lucrative discount drug program that allows them to purchase medicines at a steep markdown — ostensibly to aid low-income and underserved patients, yet with little accountability for where it directs the billions in annual savings. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, is at odds with nearly everyone over the rising cost of drugs, combating separate efforts by Democrats in Congress, Senate Republicans and the Trump administration to rein in prices — all while trying to shift blame back onto the insurers and pharmacy benefit manager middlemen it argues are the real culprits.

Even in a town with more than 20 lobbyists for every member of Congress, the corporate health care army is outsized; health care companies spent nearly $568 million on lobbying in 2018 alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, more than any other industry. For the past four years, its spending has topped a half-billion dollars.

With so much lobbying power often aimed in opposite directions, big changes to America’s health care system are already few and far between. But when it came to Medicare for All — a proposal that would upset the business model of every part of the health care industry at once — Kahn realized a more unified front was needed. He would have to broker a ceasefire.

At first glance, the timing was odd. Kahn and his private-sector colleagues had only weeks earlier received perhaps the best news of their year: Republicans’ bid to dismantle the ACA without any clear plan for replacing it had suddenly collapsed.

The health care lobby had initially regarded Obamacare with varying levels of disdain and even alarm, yet mostly ended up embracing the law, due largely to the financial incentives President Barack Obama dangled in front of it. Obamacare contained sweeteners for hospitals and insurers by covering more poor patients and expanding the private insurance market, and it mostly left the drug industry alone, declining to impose strict new restraints on the rising price of medicines. Republicans’ effort to eliminate Obamacare threatened to hurl that carefully crafted system into chaos, and the health care lobby threw its collective might into saving the law, and prevailed.

Still, as the health care world celebrated its victory over the GOP’s repeal attempt in the late summer of 2017, Kahn couldn’t help but notice the energy and fury building on the other side of the aisle — the growing sentiment within the Democratic base that Obamacare hadn’t gone nearly far enough, and the only way to secure its gains was with something more radical. And from Kahn’s perspective, if repealing Obamacare was bad for business, Medicare for All represented an existential danger.

“There was a centrifugal force taking place,” Kahn recalled. “Just as the Republican Party was pushing further and further to the right, that centrifugal force was pushing the Democratic Party further and further to the left.”

That newfound liberal momentum needed a counterweight, he added, something that could forcefully remind Democrats that their alternative to Republican repeal and replace — and the best pathway toward universal health coverage — was staring them right in the face. Better yet, it was already the law of the land. “You’ve achieved the framework you wanted to achieve as a party,” Kahn said of Obamacare. “Now let’s just make it work.”

‘Everybody saw the threat’

Kahn’s broad coalition would be a rare collaboration in Washington lobbying’s ultracompetitive culture, and it took some months to coax his chief rivals on board. There were negotiations over who would control the group and set its principles, coalition members present at the time said, and importantly, how it would remain isolated from the groups’ individual policy agendas.

“One of the ground rules we agreed upon early on,” said David Merritt, a participant on behalf of insurer lobby AHIP, “was you’re not going to bring your baggage to this coalition.”

But the hypothesis at the group’s core — that without organized pushback, Medicare for All represented a real and imminent threat to survival — was never in dispute.

Under Sanders’ single-payer plan, private health insurance — a $670 billion business — would cease to exist. Hospitals, no longer able to strong arm private insurers into paying far higher rates for care than the federal government, could lose billions. And drug companies would face fresh scrutiny and regulation of pricing practices that have allowed the cost of medicines to skyrocket.

“Everyone saw the threat,” said one lobbyist involved in the early discussions. “You didn’t have to convince anybody that this was a problem.”

The Partnership officially launched in June 2018 with five founding members: Kahn’s Federation of American Hospitals, AHIP and fellow insurer lobby the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, drug industry giant PhRMA and the country’s premier association of physicians, the American Medical Association.

It’s since expanded at breakneck speed, signing up the influential American Hospital Association and some of the nation’s largest individual hospital systems; biotech trade group BIO; the health care executive roundtable Healthcare Leadership Council; and a series of trade associations representing smaller slices of the industry like insurance brokers and financial advisers, generic medicine manufacturers and radiologists. Recently, the Partnership branched onto the state level, adding local Chambers of Commerce, industry groups and private companies.

In fact, by earlier this year, virtually every part of the health care industry was on board.

The coalition’s ambitions grew with its membership. Initially focused on beating back the Medicare for All movement, the Partnership has since expanded its efforts to oppose all major expansions of government-financed health care.

The industry still views single payer as the doomsday scenario. But by early 2019, it’d become far from the only worrying possibility, as prominent Democrats floated all manner of routes to universal health care. The problem: each achieved their goal in roughly the same way — by having the federal government annex broad swaths of the private insurance market, either by creating a competing public option or expanding the existing Medicaid or Medicare programs deeper into the private sector’s territory.

Those plans might sound more palatable to the ordinary American, but to Partnership members it still meant fewer customers, lower pay rates and a new, unnecessary regime of profit-pressuring regulations. So as each 2020 presidential contender rolls out their own signature take on an overhaul, the response from the Partnership has been loud and unflinching: No.

“The politicians may call it Medicare for All, Medicare buy-in, or the public option,” reads an ad run by the Partnership during September’s Democratic presidential debate. “But they mean the same thing.”

Defending a lucrative status quo

The Partnership received $5.1 million in 2018, during its first six months of existence, according to newly filed disclosures — a period that by several members’ admission was something of a test run for the coalition. Its current budget remains closely guarded, but members point to the clear ramp-up in activity nationwide this year, a suggestion its spending has grown noticeably. Kahn said only that the Partnership is prepared to spend “many millions.”

Measured by sheer size and the financial resources backing it, that would make the Partnership the most formidable source of focused resistance to 2020 Democrats’ health plans outside of the Trump reelection campaign.

And they have a lot to protect. The current health care setup is good business for many of the companies represented by those in the coalition. Insurance industry profits ballooned to $23.4 billion in 2018, up from $10 billion a year before Obamacare went into full effect in 2014. The hospital industry has consolidated, vacuuming up physicians and strengthening the nation’s largest systems’ abilities to negotiate higher rates for care, even as enrollment gains mean they’re treating fewer uninsured Americans for free.

Kahn is a veteran of Washington’s health care wars, having spent more than four decades in and around Capitol Hill; he’s played a role in every major piece of health legislation during that time.

He also has experience taking down ambitious plans for health care reform. As executive vice president of the Health Insurance Association of America — then the insurance industry’s main trade group — he was a driving force behind the “Harry and Louise” TV ads that played a key role in tanking Bill Clinton’s health care package in 1993 and setting the standard for a generation of hard-hitting special interest campaigns that have shaped policy debates ever since.

The Harry and Louise ads — which featured a middle-aged couple in their home, agonizing over the rising costs and fewer choices under what the ads called Clinton’s government-driven system — did little to shift public opinion on their own, studies later showed. But supplemented by grassroots pressure targeting key lawmakers, the television spots and publicity surrounding them unnerved Congress and helped tank support in Washington for Clinton’s health plan within a year.

“They weren’t run nationally, but the reporters covered them and showed them across the country,” Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), who was Clinton’s Health and Human Services secretary at the time, said of the ads. “It was earned media.”

The Partnership is now deploying a similar playbook. Run out of a Washington lobby shop and supported by a phalanx of consultants and political operatives, it aims to simultaneously influence voters’ perception of Medicare for All and its offshoots, while amplifying doubts about the plans’ political viability for the Washington elite.

Outside the Beltway, the Partnership pitches itself as a nonpartisan educational resource on health care. Inside the Beltway, it provides a constant reminder of the power players Democrats are up against if they try for yet another health care overhaul.

The message to both those audiences is simple: Health care reform will take away Americans’ “choice” and “control” and empower government “bureaucrats” by forcing everyone into a “one-size-fits-all system.” (Medicare for All proponents would counter that few Americans have choice or control now, since insurance is largely managed by their employers, and health care decisions are currently made by insurance, hospital and drug company bureaucrats with little transparency or accountability.)

The group bombards policymakers, journalists and voters with its talking points daily, leaning heavily on digital platforms to reach specific constituencies. Nearly $300,000 in the last year-and-a-half alone went toward Twitter and Facebook messages targeting voters in swing states, the primary battleground of Iowa and the lawmaker-heavy Washington area, according to metrics made public by the social media companies.

Many of those ads feature a local citizen — Matthew Majestic in Macomb County, Mich., Lisa Smith in White Stone, Va. — talking to the audience about government-run insurance systems that will force Americans to “pay more to wait longer for worse care.” It’s effectively Harry and Louise, if Harry and Louise happened to be real people living in your community. Another several hundred thousand dollars have gone toward similar TV spots, according to filings with the Federal Communications Commission.

Much of this messaging is aimed at eroding support for Medicare for All specifically among Democrats, and the Partnership has leaned on Democrats to make that case.

“You can basically get up to 98 percent coverage through our current structure,” said Lauren Crawford Shaver, a former Obama health official who is now the Partnership’s executive director and runs its day-to-day operations. “If you use the tools of the Affordable Care Act, if it was fully implemented, you will get more people covered.”

The coalition’s messages are built on extensive polling and research, and produced with help from Bully Pulpit Interactive, a well-known ad firm that works with the Democratic National Committee and until earlier this year aided messaging for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign. They’re designed to emphasize that, while the status quo may not be perfect, it’s a safer bet than whatever might come next.

“Building on what we have today and fixing what’s broken, not starting over — that earns the most support of any policy proposal,” said Phillip Morris, a former Obama field organizer and current partner at public affairs firm Locust Street Group who runs tracking polls for the Partnership.

To reinforce the point, the Partnership churns out reams of research warning of shuttered hospitals, dwindling competition and major shifts in employer-provided benefits under 2020 Democrats’ proposals. Federal lobbyists with ties to moderate Democrats encourage the party to keep the focus on pre-existing condition protections and defending Obamacare — issues that paid dividends during the 2018 midterm elections.

And the Partnership is in reporters’ inboxes often multiple times a day, highlighting the latest articles and polls casting doubt on any big health care overhaul — and offering rapid responses to whichever top Democrat happens to be pushing a universal coverage plan that day.

The overarching goal is to create a kind of anti-Medicare for All feedback loop, where the Partnership’s warnings are amplified through so many sources that they become ingrained in the national consciousness and make it feel — in perception, and potentially in reality — like the debate is shifting.

“I don’t think it’s difficult to get Americans worried about health care,” said Paul Starr, a Princeton professor who was a senior adviser on Clinton’s health plan. “These groups can take advantage of that anxiety.”

The doctors defect

The Partnership — as its critics are eager to point out — makes no claim to being a popular, up-from-the-ground movement. The biggest portion of its funding comes from a minority of its membership, and most of the 92 groups listed as Partnership members don’t weigh in on its day-to-day strategy in any substantial way.

Two Washington lobbying powers, meanwhile, defected in the past year. The National Retail Foundation quietly dropped out amid its escalating feud with hospital and doctor groups over surprise billing legislation.

Then in August came the bigger blow: The American Medical Association, the premier group representing the nation’s physicians and a founding member, headed for the exits. Partnership members launched a series of broadsides at the doctor group in the wake of its departure, with multiple coalition members accusing it of caving to the liberal left.

The AMA had come under pressure from more progressive factions within its membership, and months earlier agreed to study the feasibility of a public option. But it emphasized that the split was driven more by a desire to focus more on what the industry supports and not just what it’s vehemently against — a contention that Kahn now says is accurate.

“They wanted more specifics in terms of what the plan would be,” he said. “And I don’t think we’re in the plan business. I think we’re in the defending the law business.”

Still, it served as a reminder of the fragility of the industry’s single-issue truce. After a recent revamp, the Partnership’s website now includes a carefully worded section titled, “What we’re for.”

The critical calculation for Medicare for All proponents and the Partnership alike is whether, in the years since Harry and Louise, Americans have grown more frustrated with the health care system’s shortcomings — its expensive premiums, insurance denials, surprise bills and sky-high drug prices — than they are nervous about changing it.

The concept of Medicare for All polls well, in general. Senior citizens already benefiting from the government-run Medicare program overwhelmingly approve of it, and a majority of Americans support creating a single-payer system. Even more — about two-thirds of people — are in favor of trying out a public option. Kaiser Family Foundation polling this month found that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are most likely to trust Sanders on health care over the other 2020 candidates.

But in the two years since Sanders and his Democratic colleagues unveiled his plan, polls suggest that anxiety has also steadily risen. Voter support for Medicare for All narrowed from a high of 59 percent in March 2018 to 53 percent this month, according to Kaiser. High-profile Democrats from Harry Reid to Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama have warned the party establishment about embracing another health care transformation.

And of the four 2020 candidates who stood shoulder to shoulder with Sanders in 2017, only one — Warren — is still running on single-payer health care.

The Partnership can’t take all the credit. But it’s reveling in the results.

“The fact that Bernie Sanders was bothered about this,” Kahn said when asked how he’s measuring the coalition’s impact, pointing to a May op-ed Sanders wrote railing against the group. “That says he’s concerned people are making other arguments out there to his voters that there might be another way of looking at it.”

The Medicare for All movement’s leaders make a similar case about the Partnership. If the industry is training so much firepower on an effort still a few years and several dozen votes short of reality, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) mused to reporters one October day, it must mean proponents are doing something right.

A leader of the Democrats’ liberal wing and author of the House companion to Sanders’ Medicare for All bill, Jayapal was on her way to deliver copies to various Democratic lawmakers’ offices of a single-payer petition backed by 2 million signatures and a number of advocacy groups. It was one example, she contended, of how progressives are pushing back on the entrenched health care lobbies in a more organized and powerful way than ever before.

The Partnership, reform advocates argue, is evidence they’ve been successful enough to make the industry sweat.

“What’s lost often is the history of Medicare for All — Jimmy Carter ran on this in 1976,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the co-chair of Sanders’ campaign. “So why is it that over 50 years later we’re still debating it? Obviously, the special interests have been very effective.”

“We’re not up against an intellectual argument,” he added. “We’re up against interests.”

Sitting in his office one night earlier this fall, Kahn acknowledged that things might be different this time around — that the liberal voices within the Democratic Party are louder and more insistent, and that centrism has lost its cachet. Increasingly, there is sentiment on both sides of the aisle that the health care system no longer works, and the only solution is to blow it up and start over.

“I’m not stupid, Kahn said. “There’s part of the Democratic Party that’s bought into this.”

Kahn has a harder time predicting what comes next. He knows that the industry has always wielded outsize influence over Washington’s ambitions, whether in quelling the original single-payer effort 50 years ago, stalling Clinton’s health plan or giving Obama’s ACA a final shove over the finish line. And he believes that now, through the Partnership, industry is ready for the next fight. It has deep pockets and plenty of political sway. It’s got a strategy that’s time-tested and a simple message that works. And most important, Partnership members believe they can’t afford to lose.

“We have threads that hold health care together,” Kahn said, intertwining his fingers to represent the enmeshed interests of the health care industry. “If you just want to cut all those threads, I don’t know what the outcome will be.”

#fight #Foreign #medicare #Politics

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sallysklar · 6 years ago

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Answer Sheet: How Corporate Interests are Overtaking Well-Intentioned Goals of Personalized Learning

It’s been years now that we’ve been hearing about how “personalized learning” is the new thing in education. Actually, it isn’t.

In 2013, George Wood, then the superintendent of the Federal Hocking Local School District in Ohio and chair of the board for the Coalition of Essential Schools, wrote this:

“Personalization” and “engagement” seem to be the new catchwords in education reform these days. Too bad the concepts are not credited to the person who first talked about them. It was the late Ted Sizer — in the Common Principles that he developed for the Coalition of Essential Schools — who pushed for personalized learning environments that engaged young learners. These days, he is seldom mentioned when these terms are rolled out.

There may be a good reason for that. As polite as Ted always was, I think he might object rather passionately to the way “personalization” is being tossed around today.

I was reminded of this while attending a workshop this past week on using technological tools to “personalize” student learning. The speaker felt that it might be appropriate to give examples of such personalization. He cited the way Amazon offers you other books or items you might like based on your last purchase; how Apple will customize the computer you purchase; or how the grocery store offers you coupons at checkout for your favorite items.

This isn’t personalization — it is just marketing.

All these years later, the marketing has only increased, and there are real consequences for schools and students, as Faith Boninger and Alex Molnar of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder explain in this post.

The policy center has just published an analysis — by Boninger, Molnar and Christopher M. Saldaña — about this issue, which you can see here. The post below gives the highlights.

Boninger is the co-director of the National Education Policy Center’s commercialism in education research unit. Molnar is publications director of the National Education Policy Center and co-director of the NEPC’s commercialism in education research unit.

By Faith Boninger and Alex Molnar

The vision of personalized learning is enticing. Happy, self-motivated students following their own interests at their own pace, mentored through individualized learning pathways by teachers empowered with data detailing their progress.

This idyllic vision of personalized learning is aggressively promoted by millions of philanthropic dollars, amplified by intense tech industry lobbying and marketing by third-party vendors.

As a result, personalized learning programs are proliferating in U.S. schools even as parents have begun to argue that they are being adopted without going through a proper educational vetting process. Students are resisting spending more time with screens and less time with teachers. Students and parents alike are objecting to low-quality curriculum materials and violations of privacy.

[Why parents and students are protesting an online learning program backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook]

This dissatisfaction doesn’t surprise us. Our research finds that schools adopting tech-heavy personalized learning programs may indeed be threatening both the integrity of the education they provide and the privacy of their students and teachers.

We also found that the personal, child-centered vision of personalized learning is, in practice, being overtaken by corporate interests that emphasize data collection by digital platforms and software.

To understand what is happening, a good place to start is by examining the tech-friendly reality behind by the child-centered rhetoric of many personalized learning programs.

This reality is exemplified by the “working definition” of personalized learning offered by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (and its associated organizations) to schools implementing personalized learning programs. Despite explicitly mentioning technology only once, the Gates vision of personalized learning creates an implicit imperative to use digital technologies because its view of learning and competence requires that massive amounts of data be relentlessly collected and analyzed.

When schools adopt digital education technology products to manage all these data, they cede important school and teacher functions to third-party technology vendors.

Using these products means that, as B.F. Skinner wrote about his teaching machines in the 1950s, “one programmer [is brought] into contact with an indefinite number of students.” We would add that using these products also makes programmers and the corporations that employ them, rather than local educators, responsible for decision-making about curriculum, assessment, and student progression. These decisions thus become programmed into and come under the control of the algorithms that drive proprietary software.

The dangers of relying on algorithms to make consequential decisions about people’s lives in such domains as employment, career advancement, health, credit, criminal justice and education have been well documented by, for example, Cathy O’Neil, Frank Pasquale, and RAND Corporation researchers. These authors note that although algorithms are commonly thought of as purely mathematical and objective, in reality they are not. They reflect the myriad choices made by their developers and are thus value-laden and vulnerable to significant and difficult-to-correct error.

Hidden behind a proprietary curtain, the assumptions, perspectives, ideologies, and related social-class biases of the people who develop digital personalized learning products are concealed from review and critique.

The more sophisticated their software becomes (i.e., the extent to which it is adaptive and/or based in machine learning) the more profound and far-reaching the implications of the concealed bias become. Unlike textbooks or school board meetings, which are subject to public review, the public has no clearly defined right to review the algorithms used in education settings. Neither students nor their parents or teachers can examine how important decisions are made about their educations and lives.

The algorithms used in education technology products, such as the popular, well-funded and heavily promoted products we have reviewed (Nearpod, Canvas and Pearson Schoolnet), present additional threats to student and teacher privacy as they collect and store terabytes of data.

There are few legal safeguards to ensure that these data are not inappropriately used, shared, or properly protected from theft. In order to protect against built-in biases and threats to privacy, the programming of digital platforms used by schools should be reviewed by disinterested, third-party experts with a variety of perspectives, who would be tasked with flushing out their biases and exposing their susceptibility to being misused.

There is little if anything in the research literature that makes tech-centric personalized learning programs worth the risk of implementing them without proper safeguards in place.

The RAND Corporation research often cited in support of personalized learning actually found only small differences between personalized learning and “traditional” settings. Teachers in settings not explicitly defined as “personalized” or “competency-based” are as likely as their counterparts in personalized-learning settings to engage in a variety of personalizing activities, such as tailoring instruction to student needs and discussing individual learning progress with their students.

Teachers in both types of settings struggle to provide students choice of the topics and materials they study. Personalized learning settings cannot be distinguished from other educational settings when it comes to promoting so-called “21st century skills,” such as creativity, collaboration, and communication.

Interestingly, research on blended learning (i.e., settings that use both digital and nondigital pedagogical approaches) also offers little evidence that favors the use of blended learning in K-12 environments. It does suggest, however, that when blended learning outcomes are successful, it may very well be because of teachers’ efforts and not the technology used.

The lack of research support notwithstanding, digital products that effectively privatize curriculum and instruction, learning management, and assessment in schools has the potential to make a great deal of money for the companies that create and sell those products and for the investors who invest in them. For this reason, tech-centric personalized learning products will likely continue to be aggressively marketed.

Currently, educators do not have the policy tools necessary to enable them to critically evaluate tech-centric personalized learning products. Given the general lack of oversight and accountability, we recommend that policymakers declare a moratorium on implementing personalized learning programs until rigorous review, oversight, and enforcement mechanisms are established.

We further recommend that states establish an independent, disinterested, government entity responsible for evaluating the pedagogical approaches, assessment, and data collection embedded in digital personalized learning products.

Among the responsibilities of this independent entity would be to require that the curriculum materials and pedagogical approaches written into the education technology software used in personalized learning programs be externally reviewed and approved by independent third-party education experts to ensure that they are appropriate for intended student populations.

Further, the independent entity would ensure the security and privacy of student and teacher data by developing, implementing, and enforcing a standard, legally binding, transparent privacy and data security agreement to which all enterprises collecting student, teacher, and other data would be subject.

Without such explicit oversight of the details of how personalized learning products are designed and used, schools are at risk of compromising both their public mission and their students.

Establishing rigorous oversight is complicated and lacks the flash of the vision of personalized learning so heavily promoted by Silicon Valley. However, if personalized learning is to have any chance at all of fulfilling its promise and not harming students, it is essential that the first order of business now be developing regulatory, oversight, and accountability mechanisms — not promoting implementation.

elaine April 30, 2019

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Answer Sheet

Answer Sheet: How Corporate Interests are Overtaking Well-Intentioned Goals of Personalized Learning published first on https://buyessayscheapservice.tumblr.com/

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newssplashy · 7 years ago

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Opinion: When terrorists run city hall: The Islamic State files

MOSUL, Iraq — Weeks after the militants seized the city, as fighters roamed the streets and religious extremists rewrote the laws, an order rang out from the loudspeakers of local mosques.

Public servants, the speakers blared, were to report to their former offices.

To make sure every government worker got the message, the militants followed up with phone calls to supervisors.

The phone call reached Muhammad Nasser Hamoud, a 19-year-veteran of the Iraqi Directorate of Agriculture, behind the locked gate of his home, where he was hiding with his family. Terrified but unsure what else to do, he and his colleagues trudged back to their six-story office complex decorated with posters of seed hybrids.

They arrived to find chairs lined up in neat rows.

The commander who strode in sat facing the room, his leg splayed out so that everyone could see the pistol holstered to his thigh. For a moment, the only sounds were the hurried prayers of the civil servants mumbling under their breath.

Their fears proved unfounded. The commander had a surprisingly tame request: Resume your jobs immediately. A sign-in sheet would be placed at the entrance to each department. Those who failed to show up would be punished.

Meetings like this one occurred throughout the territory controlled by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, in 2014. Soon municipal employees were back fixing potholes, painting crosswalks, repairing power lines and overseeing payroll.

“We had no choice but to go back to work,” said Hamoud. “We did the same job as before. Except we were now serving a terrorist group.”

The disheveled fighters who burst out of the desert more than three years ago founded a state that was acknowledged by no one except themselves. And yet for nearly three years, the Islamic State controlled a stretch of land that at one point was the size of Britain, with a population estimated at 12 million people. At its peak, it included a 100-mile coastline in Libya, a section of Nigeria’s lawless forests and a city in the Philippines, as well as colonies in at least 13 other countries. By far the largest city under their rule was Mosul.

Nearly all of that territory has now been lost, but what the militants left behind helps answer the troubling question of their longevity: How did a group whose spectacles of violence galvanized the world against it hold onto so much land for so long?

Part of the answer can be found in more than 15,000 pages of internal Islamic State documents I recovered during five trips to Iraq over more than a year.

The Islamic State built a state of administrative efficiency that collected taxes and picked up the garbage. It ran a marriage office that oversaw medical examinations to ensure that couples could have children. It issued birth certificates — printed on Islamic State stationery — to babies born under the caliphate’s black flag. It even ran its own department of motor vehicles.

The documents and interviews with dozens of people who lived under their rule show that the group at times offered better services and proved itself more capable than the government it had replaced.

They also suggest that the militants learned from mistakes the United States made in 2003 after it invaded Iraq, including the decision to purge members of Saddam Hussein’s ruling party from their positions and bar them from future employment. That decree succeeded in erasing the Baathist state, but also gutted the country’s civil institutions, creating the power vacuum that groups like the Islamic State rushed to fill.

A little more than a decade later, after seizing huge tracts of Iraq and Syria, the militants tried a different tactic. They built their state on the back of the one that existed before, absorbing the administrative know-how of its hundreds of government cadres. An examination of how the group governed reveals a pattern of collaboration between the militants and the civilians under their yoke.

One of the keys to their success was their diversified revenue stream. The group drew its income from so many strands of the economy that airstrikes alone were not enough to cripple it.

Ledgers, receipt books and monthly budgets describe how the militants monetized every inch of territory they conquered, taxing every bushel of wheat, every liter of sheep’s milk and every watermelon sold at markets they controlled. From agriculture alone, they reaped hundreds of millions of dollars. Contrary to popular perception, the group was self-financed, not dependent on external donors.

More surprisingly, the documents provide further evidence that the tax revenue the Islamic State earned far outstripped income from oil sales.

The U.S.-led coalition, trying to eject the Islamic State from the region, tried in vain to strangle the group by bombing its oil installations. It’s much harder to bomb a barley field. It was not until last summer that the militants abandoned Mosul, after a battle so intense that it was compared to the worst combat of World War II.

“We dismiss the Islamic State as savage. It is savage. We dismiss it as barbaric. It is barbaric. But at the same time these people realized the need to maintain institutions,” said Fawaz A. Gerges, author of “ISIS: A History.”

“The Islamic State’s capacity to govern is really as dangerous as their combatants,” he said.

The day after the meeting, Hamoud, a Sunni, returned to work and found that his department was now staffed 100 percent by Sunnis, the sect of Islam practiced by the militants. The Shia and Christian colleagues who previously shared his office had all fled.

The militants sent female employees home for good and closed the day care center. They shuttered the office’s legal department, saying disputes would now be handled according to God’s law alone.

But the biggest change came five months into the group’s rule. The change involved the very department Hamoud headed, which was responsible for renting government-owned land to farmers. The instructions were laid out in a 27-page manual emblazoned with the phrase “The Caliphate on the Path of Prophecy.” The handbook outlined the group’s plans for seizing property from the religious groups it had expelled and using it as the seed capital of the caliphate.

“Confiscation,” the manual says, will be applied to the property of every single “Shia, apostate, Christian, Nusayri and Yazidi based on a lawful order issued directly by the Ministry of the Judiciary.”

Hamoud’s office was instructed to make a comprehensive list of the properties owned by non-Sunnis — and to seize them for redistribution.

The confiscation did not stop at the land and homes of the families they chased out. An entire ministry was set up to collect and reallocate beds, tables, bookshelves — even the forks the militants took from the houses they seized. They called it the Ministry of War Spoils.

The Islamic State’s promise of taking care of its own, including free housing for foreign recruits, was one of the draws of the caliphate.

As 2014 blurred into 2015 and Hamoud and his colleagues helped keep the machinery of government running, Islamic State soldiers set out to remake every aspect of life in the city — starting with the role of women.

Billboards went up showing an image of a woman fully veiled. The militants commandeered a textile factory, which began manufacturing bales of regulation-length female clothing. Soon thousands of niqab sets were delivered to the market and women who did not cover up began to be fined.

As he walked to and from work, Hamoud began taking side streets to dodge the frequent executions that were being carried out in traffic circles and public squares. In one, a teenage girl accused of adultery was dragged out of a minivan and forced to her knees. Then a stone slab was dropped onto her head. On a bridge, the bodies of people accused of being spies swung from the railing.

But on the same thoroughfares, Hamoud noticed something that filled him with shame: The streets were visibly cleaner than they had been when the Iraqi government was in charge.

The street sweepers had not changed. What had was that the militants imposed a discipline that had been lacking, said a half-dozen sanitation employees who worked under the Islamic State and who were interviewed in three towns after the group was forced out.

“The only thing I could do during the time of government rule is to give a worker a one-day suspension without pay,” said Salim Ali Sultan, who oversaw garbage collection both for the Iraqi government and later for the Islamic State in the northern Iraqi town of Tel Kaif. “Under ISIS, they could be imprisoned.”

Residents also said that their taps were less likely to run dry, the sewers less likely to overflow and potholes fixed more quickly under the militants, even though there were now near-daily airstrikes.

On the western banks of the Tigris River, in a pulverized building, I found an abandoned briefcase that belonged to Yasir Issa Hassan, a young administrator of the Trade Division inside the Islamic State Ministry of Agriculture.

The briefcase shed light on the scope of the organization’s revenue machine and offered a blueprint for how it worked.

The financial reports tallied over $19 million in transactions involving agriculture alone.

But perhaps the most lucrative tax was a religious tax known as zakat, which is considered one of the five pillars of Islam. It is calculated at 2.5 percent of an individual’s assets, and up to 10 percent for agricultural production.

It all added up to astonishing sums, as much as $800 million in annual tax revenue, according to a study by the Paris-based Center for the Analysis of Terrorism.

Though the militants are gone, reminders of the Islamic State and their particular style of governance remain.

In the northern town of Tel Kaif, for example, residents recall how the militants conscripted a committee of electrical engineers to fix an overloaded power grid. They installed new circuit breakers, and for the first time, residents who had been accustomed to at most six hours of electricity a day could now reliably turn on lights.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/04/opinion-when-terrorists-run-city-hall_8.html

#News

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kakoliberlin · 7 years ago

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Wildlife Weekly Wrap-Up: 07/21/17

Your weekly roundup of wildlife news from across the country.

WildSights:

From Emilie Chen

From Richard Magleby

Wild stories from the Week:

This week Congress reviewed six bills that would undermine the Endangered Species Act. This is just the latest chapter in the ongoing assault against the ESA by one of the most anti-wildlife Congresses we’ve seen in decades. Here’s what you need to know: http://dfnd.us/2gLvvzC

Wildlife-vehicle collisions cost over $8 billion each year. Just one more reason for #wildlife crossings: http://dfnd.us/2sLDGBo

Our Defenders in Action:

In Montana: Last week, Chamois Andersen of Defenders’ Rockies and Plains program was at the American Prairie Reserve (APR) in northeast Montana. For the past three years, Defenders has joined staff of APR and the Prairie Dog Coalition of The Humane Society of the United States to enhance prairie dog habitat on this vast landscape. The plan is to reintroduce the endangered black-footed ferret to these lands, once there are ample prairie dog acres (a minimum of 1,500 acres is key for ferret recovery). This year’s assignment on the reserve involves putting in some serious sweat labor to connect more than 600 acres of prairie dog habitat. Invented by former Defenders’ staffer, Steve Forrest, “Assisted Dispersal,” is a technique used in fieldwork that involves installing artificial burrows and creating grain or feed trails to encourage prairie dogs to establish a new colony or town and expand their range. This labor-intensive work is a four-part process of mowing, reducing shrubs, creating burrows for the dogs to occupy, and dusting prairie dog burrows for fleas that transmit the plague. This habitat enhancement project has really made a difference in expanding prairie dog habitat on the American Prairie Reserve, and is a good example of the collaborative fieldwork by Defenders for endangered species recovery.

In Colorado: On Monday the 17th, Aaron Hall and Ryan Wilbur, Representatives in Southern Rockies & Plains program, helped Colorado Parks and Wildlife release native greenback cutthroat trout back into the wild. Greenbacks, the state fish of Colorado, are absent from most of their historic range and therefore listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Putting these fish back on the landscape in their native watershed is a big step towards reclaiming a self-sustaining and healthy population. This is the second release site, and the first which is a lotic (stream) ecosystem. We hiked about 4 miles to our assigned release area, and each carried a bag with 20, 1-year-old greenbacks from the Salida Fish Hatchery in our backpacks.

In Geneva: Alejandra Goyenechea, our Senior International Counsel, attended the CITES Animals Committee meeting which is taking place in Geneva, Switzerland this week. Regional representatives of the Animals Committee and Parties of the Convention gathered to review and discuss topics on international trade of several species including our species of interest such as amphibians, sharks, rays and mantas and freshwater rays of South America. Defenders participated actively in the shark working group, freshwater ray working group and captive bred and ranched specimens where concerns and suggestions were expressed on behalf of imperiled species of focus. Defenders made several interventions including supporting amphibian species selected for case review of international trade as captive bred and in the encouragement to continue the discussions and interest on the further analysis of the South American freshwater rays. In addition, Defenders prepared and distributed information of support for the meeting to the delegates and co-hosted a side-event on Legal Acquisition Findings which will continue to be discussed in the agenda for the next CITES Standing Committee at the end of the year. Defenders will continue to work with Parties and other stakeholders to provide information that can be of use in the decision-making process.

Wildlife Wins

Pallid Sturgeon – Saving an Ancient Species

As part of a long legal battle to protect the highly-endangered pallid sturgeon, Defenders and our partners have been fighting since May to secure a temporary injunction to halt construction of a concrete dam and bypass channel on the Yellowstone River. If this dam is built, it will likely end any chance the pallid sturgeon has to survive in the Yellowstone River. The wild population in the Yellowstone and upper Missouri rivers has already dwindled to fewer than 125 individuals, and the dam and bypass channel would permanently block the fish from reaching the spawning habitat on the Yellowstone it needs to survive and recover.  On July 5, the U.S. District Court in Montana concluded that the government’s approval of the dam and bypass channel likely violates three federal environmental laws and halted its construction until the court can fully hear and rule on the merits of the case.  This injunction gives the pallid sturgeon a fighting chance at a future in the Yellowstone River. While we will continue to pursue this case in court, we will also continue to advocate for a common-sense solution: a pumping system to provide irrigation water to neighboring farms and a free-flowing Yellowstone River to provide secure habitat for this ancient fish that’s been around since the dinosaurs.

Endangered Species Conservation – EPA must consider harm to endangered species when approving new, harmful pesticides

On June 30, the D.C. Circuit Court affirmed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must consider harm to imperiled species when it approves pesticides for use in the United States. The ruling came in a challenge brought by Defenders of Wildlife, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Food Safety to EPA’s registration of cyantraniliprole, a new pesticide with deadly impacts on butterflies and other pollinators. The three-judge panel found that EPA failed to follow the law during its pesticide review and registration process and ordered EPA to look at harm to native and endangered species prior to greenlighting new pesticides. Use of cyantraniliprole will continue during the agency review.

Public Lands and Waters – Monuments Update

The Trump administration’s arbitrary and ill-considered “review” of more than two dozen national monuments continues, and there is some news to report. The public comment period on the review process ended last week—and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, figuratively speaking, got an earful. Americans who love our public lands, waters and wildlife submitted more than two million comments defending the size and protections afforded to the 27 monuments under threat from the administration. Defenders members and supporters generated nearly 60,000 actions in support of monuments (thank you!), and our staff submitted hundreds of pages of substantive legal and biological arguments in support of 22 monuments that are most at risk. Secretary Zinke will submit his report from the current review process to the president in late August, although he’s already formally stated that he will not recommend reducing the size or protections for two monuments: Hanford Reach in Washington and Craters of the Moon in Idaho. The Secretary has also indicated he might spare three other monuments in his recommendations. While this is good news, it immediately raises the question: are any of the of the remaining monuments on Mr. Zinke’s list any less important for preserving the cultural, historical and ecological values for which they were designated? The answer is a resounding, unequivocal “NO!”—which is why the Trump administration should not be messing with any of our national monuments and other protected public lands and waters.

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