Proposed Changes to Societies Act Invites Legal Attacks on Non-Profits Says Law Group

Proposed BC Societies Act could invite litigation against non-profits

by Andrew Gage - WCEL

We believe that BC’s incorporated societies – community development organizations, church groups, secular groups, community organizations, hunting groups, and, yes, environmental organizations such as West Coast Environmental Law Association – collectively make for a stronger British Columbia. That is why we’re outraged by a BC Government proposal that could be used by anyone who has a bone to pick with a society to drag it before the courts. If you’re concerned too, click here to send an email.

The BC Government is proposing a major re-write of the Society Act, to be named Societies Act – the legislation which governs approximately 27,000 non-profit organizations incorporated in British Columbia – and is inviting public comments until October 15th. While much of the proposed Societies Act seems unobjectionable, there are several provisions that concern us.

Court oversight of societies

In general, the proposed Societies Act seems to believe that the courts are a preferred tool to oversee societies. That’s disturbing, given that a great many – probably the majority – of BC’s societies are run by volunteers, on very limited budgets, without experience with the law or the resources to hire lawyers.

The most alarming of the proposed changes is the provision entitled “Complaints by Public” (s. 99), which allows any person “whom the court considers to be an appropriate person” to seek an order from the BC Supreme Court that a society is acting unlawfully or is “carrying on activities that are detrimental to the public interest.” The court is empowered to make a wide range of orders against the Society under this provision.

While we believe that it is likely that the courts will seek to interpret this section narrowly – recognizing that there are many competing views of what is in the public interest, and the courts should not be choosing between them – the mere fact that a society could find itself in court having to explain why a critic is not an “appropriate person” under this section, and possibly having to justify its actions to the court, will be extremely intimidating to many societies. And this type of action would waste valuable time and resources that could be better put towards the work of the society.

The government White Paper argues that the risk of this type of abuse will be low because “the court effectively controls the process,” but this argument fails to recognize that the act of forcing a society to appear before the court (and at least consider hiring a lawyer to do so) itself is a major part of the problem – even if the court is, in the end, deferential to the society’s choices about how it manages itself (as we expect). The section invites harassment of societies by any deep-pocketed and litigious opponents (mini-SLAPP suits, in effect).

In support of the provision, the government’s White Paper cites a general expectation that societies “will act in the public interest.” In fact, neither the current or proposed version of the Society Act supports such an expectation, stating that a Society may be incorporated, like other corporations, for “any lawful purpose or purposes” (although not for “carrying on a business for profit”). Of course, many societies are incorporated for “public interest” purposes, but even then each has their own understanding of what that means.

The White Paper also argues that “so many [Societies] are supported by public funding or monies solicited from the public,” but provides no information about what proportion of societies receive public funding (a very low percentage) or significant donations from the public (we suspect still a relatively small, but larger percentage).

In both of these statements, and elsewhere in the White Paper, the government seems to be confusing charities (which are federally regulated and required to act for charitable purposes) with societies (which can be run for just about any legal purpose). Registered charities unlike other societies or groups, can provide tax receipts for the donations they receive, but can only act for specific charitable purposes.

The Government’s commentary on this proposed court process acknowledges that it is unprecedented; there is no equivalent power for the courts to examine the legality of the operations of business corporations, or other types of incorporated society. Although business corporations can and do enter into contracts to receive public funds, only societies are singled out are singled out for this exceptional court scrutiny.

We presume that this extraordinary provision, as well as expanded powers for the government to investigate societies, is the result of the Portland Hotel Society (PHS) controversy – the Board of which resigned after two audits determined that it had misused public funds. With respect, very, very few Societies have anywhere close to the budget, or the amount of public funding, that PHS has, and nor have there been many other examples of misuse of public funds by societies. The PHS situation suggests a need for better oversight of government grants rather than a new and unprecedented court process.

In addition, the proposed Societies Act imports a number of provisions from the Business Corporations Act, giving the courts oversight over a Society, including:

• An action by a member of the society or other “interested person” where the Society’s actions are considered to be “oppressive to one or more interested persons.” (s.98) The concept of oppressive actions is borrowed from business corporations, where shareholders can complain to court of unfair action that prevents them from participating fully in the profits or other benefits of being a shareholder.

• A provision allowing a Director or Member or another appropriate person to, with the permission of the court, to bring or defend a “derivative” legal action on behalf of the Society. (s. 100)

• A power of a member, director or other “appropriate person” to apply to court to for a court order to prevent a contravention of the Society’s bylaws (s. 101).

• Allowing a person who is entitled to a Society record (ie. minutes, financial statements, etc.) to apply to court (after first seeking the document from the Registrar of Societies) for that record. As noted below, the types of records that the Society must potentially make publicly available has been expanded.

Unlike section 99, these sections seem clearer as to who should be allowed to bring these actions, limiting the potential for actions by individuals not connected to the society.

Nonetheless, these provisions raise important questions of whether and how these concepts should apply to societies, which are typically small, with very limited resources. Rules which effectively require societies to be able to retain expensive lawyers could deter many from incorporating societies. We would recommend that these judicial remedies, if they are kept, should be available only against societies with larger budgets, with the resources to participate fully in the judicial process.

In addition, these rules were developed for corporations where owning shares translates into an ownership interest and where the range of social goals typically considered may be considerably narrower than is the case for a society. We question whether these types of provisions are appropriate for the vast majority of societies. And if they are, the proposed Societies Act should provide some guidance on how they apply.

Other features of the Proposed Societies Act

Some other features of the proposed Societies Act that may be of interest to British Columbians who wish to comment on the White Paper include:

• Member-funded Societies (Part 12, Div. 1) – The Act allows a society to designate themselves a “member-funded society” in its bylaws, in which case its bylaws must state that the society is “funded primarily by its members to carry on activities for the benefit of its members…” Such societies are limited in their ability to solicit or receive public donations or government funding, but also do not have to disclose their financial statements to the public, or report on the remuneration of their directors and employees.

• Records disclosure (ss. 19-27) – The proposed Act would require each society to keep copies of many key documents. Directors generally have an automatic right to inspect and obtain copies of those documents. Members will also generally have such a right, unless the bylaws of the Society restrict access to those documents. A Society’s bylaws will determine whether the society has any obligation to make documents available to the general public, except for an obligation (which exists in the current Society Act as well) to provide a copy of a society’s financial statements on request.

• Remuneration Disclosure (s. 35) – The proposed Act requires the financial statements of a society to disclose any remuneration paid to the society’s Directors and the salary of the top 10 employees or contractors if they exceed a minimum amount (which the White Paper suggests might be $75,000). This requirement does not apply to “Member-funded societies” (although it is not clear why members of such societies are less concerned with remuneration than the members of other societies).

• Adult directors (s. 43) – The proposed Societies Act would make it illegal for anyone under 18 years of age to be a director. Although recognizing that this “may be problematic for some societies, especially those that have a youthful membership”, the White Paper maintains that the potential liability of a director makes it inappropriate for a young person to be a director.

• Remuneration of directors (s. 45) – The proposed Act would make it illegal to pay remuneration to directors (in their role as directors) unless a society’s by-laws explicitly allow for it.

• Investigation of Societies (s. 210) – As the White Paper points out, section 210 of the proposed Societies Act is not all that different from the current section 84, which also provides for an investigation of a society. However, unlike the current Act, the proposed Act allows the Minister to order an investigation of a society at any time, and without limiting the grounds on which an investigation can be initiated. The proposed section also expressly links that investigation to possible dissolution of a society (an exceptional power that also does exist under the current Act).

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of changes proposed or of interesting provisions of the proposed Act. Nor do we wish to suggest that they are all inherently bad ideas. However, collectively these provisions suggest an intention to regulate all societies with a heavy hand that seems to have arisen from a single, if notable, instance of society mismanagement. We question whether the government has made the case that the proposed changes would even have prevented that particular situation, much less that there is a widespread problem that needs to be addressed. As well, we do not see any evidence that the negative consequences of this increased regulation for smaller societies and for British Columbia as a whole have been considered.

Conclusion

The government, in drafting its white paper, seems to be focused on the Portland Hotel Society controversy, and with the need to appear to be taking decisive action to address those events. We agree that accountability and transparency are good things, and that the provincial government should itself be vigilant about how it spends taxpayers’ money. However, parts of the proposed Societies Act take matters in a different direction altogether by placing the interpretation of “public interest” before the courts.

Our view is that the public interest is served by having a lively and healthy civil society, and that over-regulating societies can harm that public goal. In particular, we are encouraging the provincial government to abandon proposals to make it easy for societies to be taken to court to argue about dueling visions of the public interest.

It appears to us that the drafting of this proposed Societies Act has been unduly influenced by the extraordinary singular event of the Portland Hotel Society controversy. Legislation driven by exceptional events and the perceived need to appear to be doing something can sometimes be unnecessarily blunt and reactive, and can cause more public harm than benefit.


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Who's In Your Corner Against NSA Snooping?

Are Apple and Google Really on Your Side Against the NSA?

by Bill Blunden - CounterPunch

In the past couple of days both Google[i] and Apple[ii] have announced that they’re enabling default encryption on their mobile devices so that only the user possessing a device’s password can access its local files. The public relations team at Apple makes the following claim:

“Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data… So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8″

The marketing drones at Google issued a similar talking point:

“For over three years Android has offered encryption, and keys are not stored off of the device, so they cannot be shared with law enforcement… As part of our next Android release, encryption will be enabled by default out of the box, so you won’t even have to think about turning it on.”

Quite a sales pitch? Cleverly disguised as a news report no less. Though it’s not stated outright the tacit message is: open your wallet for the latest gadget and you’ll be safe from Big Brother. Sadly, to a large degree this perception of warrant protection is the product of Security Theater aimed at rubes and shareholders.

The anti-surveillance narrative being dispensed neglects the myriad of ways in which such device-level encryption can be overcome. A list of such techniques has been enumerated by John Young, the architect who maintains the Cryptome leak site[iii]. Young asks readers why he should trust hi-tech’s sales pitch and subsequently presents a series of barbed responses.

For example:

• Because they can’t covertly send your device updated software [malware] that would change all these promises, for a targeted individual, or on a mass basis?

• Because this first release of their encryption software has no security bugs, so you will never need to upgrade it to retain your privacy?

• Because the US export control bureaucracy would never try to stop Apple from selling secure mass market proprietary encryption products across the border?

• Because the countries that wouldn’t let Blackberry sell phones that communicate securely with your own corporate servers, will of course let Apple sell whatever high security non-tappable devices it wants to?

• Because they want to help the terrorists win?

• Because it’s always better to wiretap people after you convince them that they are perfectly secure, so they’ll spill all their best secrets?

Another thing to keep in mind is that local device encryption is just that. Local. As Bruce Schneier points out this tactic does little to protect user data that’s stored in the cloud[iv]. When push comes to shove executives will still be able to hand over anything that resides on corporate servers.

Marketing spokesmen are eager to create the impression that companies are siding with users in the struggle against mass surveillance (never mind the prolific corporate data mining[v]). Especially after business leaders denied participating in the NSA’s PRISM program. Yet the appearance of standing up to government surveillance is often a clever ploy to sell you stuff, a branding mechanism.

It’s important to recognize that Internet companies, especially billion dollar hi-tech multinationals like Yahoo[vi] and Cisco[vii], exist to generate revenue and have clearly demonstrated the tendency to choose profits over human rights when it’s expedient.

Bill Blunden is an independent investigator whose current areas of inquiry include information security, anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. He is the author of several books, including The Rootkit Arsenal , and Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-Industrial Complex. Bill is the lead investigator at Below Gotham Labs.

End Note

[i] Craig Timberg, “Newest Androids will join iPhones in offering default encryption, blocking police,” Washington Post, September 18, 2014.

[ii] Craig Timberg, “Apple will no longer unlock most iPhones, iPads for police, even with search warrants,” Washington Post, September 18, 2014.

[iii] John Young, “Apple Wiretap Disbelief,” Cryptome, September 19, 2014.

[iv] Bruce Schneier, “iOS 8 Security,” Schneier on Security, September 19, 2014.

[v] Bill Blunden, “The NSA’s Corporate Collaborators,” Counterpunch, May 9-11, 2014.

[vi] Bill Blunden, “Corporate Executives Couldn’t Care Less About Civil Liberties,” Counterpunch, September 15, 2014.
 
[vii] Cindy Cohn and Rainey Reitman, “Court Lets Cisco Systems Off the Hook for Helping China Detain, Torture Religious Minorities,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, September 19, 2014.

A Fractured Middle East Policy: Negating the Realistic Solution in Syria

Blocking a ‘Realist’ Strategy on the Mideast

by Robert Parry  - Consortium News

Just last month President Barack Obama dismissed the idea of arming “moderate” rebels in Syria as a “fantasy” that was “never in the cards” as a workable strategy, but now this scheme has been dealt back into the middle of the U.S. war against the Islamic State, winning approval from solid majorities in Congress.


President Barack Obama talks with
President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine
and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker
following a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office,
Sept. 18, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) 

 Perhaps the only explanation for this apparent folly is that this implausible notion retains overwhelming support among Washington’s political/pundit class because it creates the appearance of being “tough” and “doing something” – allowing politicians to pretend to address a problem even if the approach might make matters much worse.

There’s also the other finicky little problem that the action of arming and training rebels and unleashing them against a sovereign state like Syria is an act of aggression (if not terrorism depending on what they do), similar to what U.S. officials have piously condemned the Russians of doing in Ukraine.

But this hypocrisy is never acknowledged either by U.S. policymakers or the mainstream U.S. press, which has gone into Cold War hysterics over Moscow’s alleged support for embattled ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine on Russia’s border — while demanding that Obama expand support for Syrian rebels halfway around the world, even though many of those “moderates” have allied themselves with al-Qaeda terrorists.

In a sense, this hypocrisy is nothing new. During much of Syria’s three-year civil war, the Obama administration has been covertly supporting the rebels with light weapons and military training while other U.S. allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states, have funneled huge sums of money to the cause of overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad’s relatively secular government. Assad has been a longtime “regime change” target of American neoconservatives and Israel.

Though it’s been known for quite awhile that the Syrian civil war had degenerated into a sectarian conflict with mostly Sunni rebels battling the Alawites, Shiites, Christians and other minorities who form the base of support for Assad, the fiction has been maintained in Washington that a viable and secular “moderate opposition” to Assad still exists.

The reality on the ground says otherwise. For instance, in Friday’s New York Times, an article by correspondent Ben Hubbard described the supposed Syrian “moderates” who are receiving CIA support as “a beleaguered lot, far from becoming a force that can take on the fanatical and seasoned fighters of the Islamic State.”

But the situation is arguably worse than just the weakness of these “moderates.” According to Hubbard’s reporting, some of these U.S.-backed fighters “acknowledge that battlefield necessity had put them in the trenches with the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, an issue of obvious concern for the United States. 

“Lt. Col. Fares al-Bayyoush, the former aviation engineer who now heads the Fursan al-Haq Brigade, acknowledged that his men had fought alongside the Nusra Front because they needed all the help they could get.

“Sometimes, he said, that help comes in forms only a jihadi group can provide. He cited the rebel takeover of the northern town of Khan Sheikhoun, saying that the rebels were unable to take out one government position until the Nusra Front sent a suicide bomber to blow it up. In another town nearby, Nusra sent four bombers, including an American citizen.

“‘We encourage them actually,’ Mr. Bayyoush said with a laugh. ‘And if they need vehicles, we provide them’.”

An Al-Qaeda Victory?

The “moderate” rebels also don’t share President Obama’s priority of carrying the fight to the Islamic State militants, reported Hubbard, “ousting Mr. Assad remains their primary goal.”

This dilemma of the mixed allegiances of the “moderates” has been apparent for at least the past year. Last September, many of the previously hailed Syrian “moderate” rebels unveiled themselves to be Islamists who repudiated the U.S.-backed political opposition and allied themselves with al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda.”]

In other words, the just-approved congressional action opening the floodgates to hundreds of millions of dollars more in military aid to Syrian “moderates” could actually contribute to al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate gaining control of Syria, which could create a far greater threat to U.S. national security than the consolidation of the Islamic State inside territory of Syria and Iraq.

While the Islamic State brandishes its brutality as a gruesome tactic for driving Western interests out of the Middle East, it has shown no particular interest in taking its battle into the West. By contrast, al-Qaeda follows a conscious strategy of inflicting terrorist attacks on the West as part of a long-term plan to wreck the economies of the United States and Europe.

Thus, Obama’s hastily approved strategy for investing more in Syrian “moderates” – if it allows a continued spillover of U.S. military equipment to al-Nusra – could increase the chances of creating a base for international terrorism in Damascus at the heart of the Middle East. That would surely prompt demands for a reintroduction of U.S. ground troops into the region.

There are also obvious alternatives to following such a self-destructive course, although they would require Obama and much of Official Washington to climb down from their collective high horses and deal with such demonized leaders as Syria’s Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, not to mention Iran.

A “realist” strategy would seek out a realistic political solution to the Syrian conflict, which would mean accepting the continuation of Assad’s rule, at least for the near term, as part of a coalition government that would offer stronger Sunni representation. This unity government could then focus on eliminating remaining pockets of al-Qaeda and Islamic State resistance before holding new elections across as much of the country as possible.

As part of this strategy to weaken these Islamic extremists, the United States and the European Union would have to crack down on the militants’ funding sources in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, as touchy as that can be with the Saudis holding such influence over the U.S. economy. But Obama could start the process of facing down Saudi blackmail by declassifying the secret section of the 9/11 Report which reportedly describes Saudi financing of al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks.

I’m told that U.S. intelligence now has a clear picture of which Saudi princes are providing money to Islamist terrorists. So, instead of simply sending drones and warplanes after youthful jihadist warriors, the Obama administration might find it more useful to shut down these funders, perhaps nominating these princes as candidates for the U.S. “capture or kill list.”

Getting Russian Help

To get Assad fully onboard for the necessary concessions to his Sunni opponents, the Russians could prove extremely valuable. According to a source briefed on recent developments, Russian intelligence already has served as a go-between for U.S. intelligence to secure Assad’s acceptance of Obama’s plan to send warplanes into parts of Syrian territory to attack Islamic State targets.

The Russians also proved helpful a year ago in getting Assad to surrender his chemical weapons arsenal to defuse a U.S. threat to begin bombing Assad’s military in retaliation for a Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Although Assad denied involvement – and subsequent evidence pointed more toward a provocation by rebel extremists – Putin’s intervention gave Obama a major foreign policy success without a U.S. military strike.

That intervention, however, infuriated Syrian rebels who had planned to time a military offensive with the U.S. bombing campaign, hoping to topple Assad’s government and take power in Damascus. America’s influential neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” allies – along with Israeli officials – were also livid, all eager for another U.S.-backed “regime change” in the Middle East.

Putin thus made himself an inviting neocon target. By the end of last September, American neocons were taking aim at Ukraine as a key vulnerability for Putin. A leading neocon, Carl Gershman, president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took to the op-ed pages of the neocon Washington Post to identify Ukraine as “the biggest prize” and explain how its targeting could undermine Putin’s political standing inside Russia.

“Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents,” Gershman wrote. “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.” At the time, Gershman’s NED was funding scores of political and media projects inside Ukraine.

What followed in Ukraine had all the earmarks of a U.S. destabilization campaign against Putin’s ally, the elected President Viktor Yanukovych. Behind the scenes was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover who had been an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and who is married to prominent neocon Robert Kagan. Nuland was caught in an intercepted phone conversation with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt handpicking the leaders of the new regime, which took power after Yanukovych was overthrown in a Feb. 22 coup.

Then, with U.S. officialdom and the mainstream U.S. press engaging in an orgy of Cold War-style propaganda, Putin was demonized as a new Hitler expanding territory by force. Anyone who knew the facts recognized that Putin had actually been trying to maintain the status quo, i.e., sustain the Yanukovych government until the next election, and it was the West that had thrown the first punch. But Washington’s new “group think” was that Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis so he could reclaim lost territory of the Russian empire.

President Obama seemed caught off-guard by the Ukraine crisis, but was soon swept up in the West’s Putin/Russia bashing. He joined in the hysteria despite the damage that the Ukraine confrontation was inflicting on Obama’s own hopes of working with Putin to resolve other Middle East problems.

Thus, the initial victory went to the neocons who had astutely recognized that the emerging Putin-Obama collaboration represented a serious threat to their continued plans for “regime change” across the Middle East. Not only had Putin helped Obama head off the military strike on Syria, but Putin assisted in getting Iran to agree to limits on its nuclear program.

That meant the neocon desire for more “shock and awe” bombing in Syria and Iran had to be further postponed. The Putin-Obama cooperation might have presented an even greater threat to neocon plans if the two leaders could have teamed up to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finally reach a reasonable agreement with the Palestinians.

At the center of the neocons’ strategy at least since the mid-1990s has been the idea that “regime change” in Middle East governments hostile to Israel would eventually starve Israel’s close-in enemies, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, of support and free Israel’s hand to do what it wanted with the Palestinians. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

The Putin-Obama collaboration – if allowed to mature – could have derailed that core neocon strategy and denied Israel the unilateral power to decide the Palestinians’ fate. But the Ukraine crisis – and now the plan to pour a half-billion dollars into the Syrian rebels fighting Assad – have put the neocon strategy back on track.

The next question is whether Obama and whatever “realists” remain in Official Washington have the will and the determination to reclaim control of the Middle East policy train and take it in a different direction.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

The Last Taboo - Letting Loose the Truth About Israel, Gaza, and the Next World War

Breaking the Last Taboo - Gaza and the Threat of World War

by John Pilger

"There is a taboo," said the visionary Edward Said, "on telling the truth about Palestine and the great destructive force behind Israel. Only when this truth is out can any of us be free."

For many people, the truth is out now. At last, they know. Those once intimidated into silence can't look away now. Staring at them from their TV, laptop, phone, is proof of the barbarism of the Israeli state and the great destructive force of its mentor and provider, the United States, the cowardice of European governments, and the collusion of others, such as Canada and Australia, in this epic crime.

The attack on Gaza was an attack on all of us. The siege of Gaza is a siege of all of us. The denial of justice to Palestinians is a symptom of much of humanity under siege and a warning that the threat of a new world war is growing by the day.

When Nelson Mandela called the struggle of Palestine "the greatest moral issue of our time", he spoke on behalf of true civilisation, not that which empires invent. In Latin America, the governments of Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have made their stand on Gaza. Each of these countries has known its own dark silence when immunity for mass murder was sponsored by the same godfather in Washington that answered the cries of children in Gaza with more ammunition to kill them.

Unlike Netanyahu and his killers, Washington's pet fascists in Latin America didn't concern themselves with moral window dressing. They simply murdered, and left the bodies on rubbish dumps. For Zionism, the goal is the same: to dispossess and ultimately destroy an entire human society: a truth that 225 Holocaust survivors and their descendants have compared with the genesis of genocide.

Nothing has changed since the Zionists' infamous "Plan D" in 1948 that ethnically cleansed an entire people. Recently, on the website of the Times of Israel were the words: "Genocide is Permissible". A deputy speaker of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, Moshe Feiglin, demands a policy of mass expulsion into concentration camps. An MP, Ayelet Shaked, whose party is a member of the governing coalition, calls for the extermination of Palestinian mothers to prevent them giving birth to what she calls "little snakes".

For years, reporters have watched Israeli soldiers bait Palestinian children by abusing them through loud-speakers. Then they shoot them dead. For years, reporters have known about Palestinian women about to give birth and refused passage through a roadblock to a hospital; and the baby has died, and sometimes the mother.

For years, reporters have known about Palestinian doctors and ambulance crews given permission by Israeli commanders to attend the wounded or remove the dead, only to be shot through the head.

For years, reporters have known about stricken people prevented from getting life-saving treatment, or shot dead when they've tried to reach a clinic for chemotherapy treatment. One elderly lady with a walking stick was murdered in this way - a bullet in her back.

When I put the facts of this crime to Dori Gold, a senior adviser to the Israeli prime minister, he said, "Unfortunately in every kind of warfare there are cases of civilians who are accidentally killed. But the case you cite was not terrorism. Terrorism means putting the cross-hairs of the sniper's rifle on a civilian deliberately."

I replied, "That's exactly what happened."

"No," he said, "it did not happen."

Such a lie or delusion is repeated unerringly by Israel's apologists. As the former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges points out, the reporting of such an atrocity invariably ends up as "caught in the cross-fire". For as long as I have covered the Middle East, much if not most of the western media has colluded in this way.

In one of my films, a Palestinian cameraman, Imad Ghanem, lies helpless while soldiers from the "most moral army in the world" blew both his legs off. This atrocity was given two lines on the BBC website. Thirteen journalists were killed by Israel in its latest bloodfest in Gaza. All were Palestinian. Who knows their names?

Something is different now. There is a huge revulsion across the world; and the voices of sensible liberalism are worried. Their hand wringing and specious choir of "equal blame" and "Israel's right to defend itself" will not wash any more; neither will the smear of anti-Semitism. Neither will their selective cry that "something must be done" about Islamic fanatics but nothing must be done about Zionist fanatics.

One sensible liberal voice, the novelist Ian McEwan, was being celebrated as a sage by the Guardian while the children of Gaza were blown to bits. This is the same Ian McEwan who ignored the pleading of Palestinians not to accept the Jerusalem Prize for literature. "If I only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out of bed," said McEwan.

If they could speak, the dead of Gaza might say: Stay in bed, great novelist, for your very presence smoothes the bed of racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and murder - no matter the weasel words you uttered as you claimed your prize.

Understanding the sophistry and power of liberal propaganda is key to understanding why Israel's outrages endure; why the world looks on; why sanctions are never applied to Israel; and why nothing less than a total boycott of everything Israeli is now a measure of basic human decency.

The most incessant propaganda says Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel. Khaled Hroub, the Cambridge University scholar considered a world leading authority on Hamas, says this phrase is "never used or adopted by Hamas, even in its most radical statements". The oft-quoted "anti-Jewish" 1988 Charter was the work of "one individual and made public without appropriate Hamas consensus... The author was one of the 'old guard' "; the document is regarded as an embarrassment and never cited.

Hamas has repeatedly offered a 10-year truce with Israel and has long settled for a two-state solution. When Medea Benjamin, the fearless Jewish American activist, was in Gaza, she carried a letter from Hamas leaders to President Obama that made clear the government of Gaza wanted peace with Israel. It was ignored. I personally know of many such letters carried in good faith, ignored or dismissed.

The unforgivable crime of Hamas is a distinction almost never reported: it is the only Arab government to have been freely and democratically elected by its people. Worse, it has now formed a government of unity with the Palestinian Authority. A single, resolute Palestinian voice - in the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court - is the most feared threat.

Since 2002, a pioneering media unit at Glasgow University has produced remarkable studies of reporting and propaganda in Israel/Palestine. Professor Greg Philo and his colleagues were shocked to find a public ignorance compounded by TV news reporting. The more people watched, the less they knew.

Greg Philo says the problem is not "bias" as such. Reporters and producers are as moved as anyone by the suffering of Palestinians; but so imposing is the power structure of the media as an extension of the state and its vested interests - that critical facts and historical context are routinely suppressed.

Incredibly, less than nine per cent of young viewers interviewed by Professor Philo's team were aware that Israel was the occupying power, and that the illegal settlers were Jewish; many believed them to be Palestinian. The term "Occupied Territories" was seldom explained. Words such as "murder", "atrocity", "cold-blooded killing" were used only to describe the deaths of Israelis.

Recently, a BBC reporter, David Loyn, was critical of another British journalist, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News. Snow was so moved by what he had seen in Gaza he went on YouTube to make a humanitarian appeal. What concerned the BBC man was that Snow had breached protocol and been emotional in his YouTube piece.

"Emotion," wrote Loyn, "is the stuff of propaganda and news is against propaganda". Did he write this with a straight face? In fact, Snow's delivery was calm. His crime was to have strayed outside the boundaries of fake impartiality. Unforgivably, he didn't censor himself.

In 1937, with Adolf Hitler in power, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times in London, wrote the following in his diary: "I spend my nights in taking out anything which will hurt [German] susceptibilities and in dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them."

On 30 July, the BBC offered viewers a masterclass in the Dawson Principle. The diplomatic correspondent of the programme Newsnight, Mark Urban, gave five reasons why the Middle East was in turmoil. None included the historic or contemporary role of the British government. The Cameron government's dispatch of £8 billion worth of arms and military equipment to Israel was airbrushed. Britain's massive arms shipment to Saudi Arabia was airbrushed. Britain's role in the destruction of Libya was airbrushed. Britain's support for the tyranny in Egypt was airbrushed.

As for the British invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they didn't happen, either.

The only expert witness on this BBC programme was an academic called Toby Dodge from the London School of Economics. What viewers needed to know was that Dodge had been a special adviser to David Petraeus, the American general largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this, too, was airbrushed.

In matters of war and peace, BBC-style illusions of impartiality and credibility do more to limit and control public discussion than tabloid distortion. As Greg Philo pointed out, Jon Snow's moving commentary on YouTube was limited to whether the Israeli assault on Gaza was proportionate or reasonable. What was missing - and is almost always missing - was the essential truth of the longest military occupation in modern times: a criminal enterprise backed by western governments from Washington to London to Canberra.

As for the myth that "vulnerable" and "isolated" Israel is surrounded by enemies, Israel is actually surrounded by strategic allies. The Palestinian Authority, bankrolled, armed and directed by the US, has long colluded with Tel Aviv. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Netanyahu are the tyrannies in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar - if the World Cup ever gets to Qatar, count on Mossad to run the security.

Resistance is humanity at its bravest and most noble. The resistance in Gaza is rightly compared with the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto - which also dug tunnels and deployed tactics of subterfuge and surprise against an overpowering military machine. The last surviving leader of the Warsaw uprising, Marek Edelman, wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian resistance, comparing it with the ZOB, his ghetto fighters. The letter began: "Commanders of the Palestine military, paramilitary and partisan operations - and to all soldiers [of Palestine]."

Dr. Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian doctor renowned for his heroic work in Gaza. On 8 August, Dr. Gilbert returned to his hometown, Tromso in Norway which, as he pointed out, the Nazis had occupied for seven years. He said, "Imagine being back in 1945 and we in Norway did not win the liberation struggle, did not throw out the occupier. Imagine the occupier remaining in our country, taking it piece by piece, for decades upon decades, and banishing us to the leanest areas, and taking the fish in the sea and the water beneath us, then bombing our hospitals, our ambulance workers, our schools, our homes.

"Would we have given up and waved the white flag? No, we would not! And this is the situation in Gaza. This is not a battle between terrorism and democracy. Hamas is not the enemy Israel is fighting. Israel is waging a war against the Palestinian people's will to resist. It is the Palestinian people's dignity that they will not accept this.

"In 1938, the Nazis called the Jews Untermenschen - subhuman. Today, Palestinians are treated as a subhuman people who can be slaughtered without any in power reacting.

"So I have returned to Norway, a free country, and this country is free because we had a resistance movement, because occupied nations have the right to resist, even with weapons - it's stated in international law. And the Palestinian people's resistance in Gaza is admirable: a struggle for us all."

There are dangers in telling this truth, in breaching what Edward Said called "the last taboo". My documentary, Palestine Is Still the Issue, was nominated for a Bafta, a British academy award, and praised by the Independent Television Commission for its "journalistic integrity" and the "care and thoroughness with which it was researched." Yet, within minutes of the film's broadcast on Britain's ITV Network, a shock wave struck - a deluge of emails described me as a "demonic psychopath", "a purveyor of hate and evil", "an anti-Semite of the most dangerous kind". Much of this was orchestrated by Zionists in the US who could not possibly have seen the film. Death threats arrived at a rate of one a day.

Something similar happened to the Australian commentator Mike Carlton last month. In his regular column in the Sydney Morning Herald, Carlton produced a rare piece of journalism about Israel and the Palestinians; he identified the oppressors and their victims. He was careful to limit his attack to "a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hard-line, right-wing Likud party of Netanyahu". Those who had previously run the Zionist state, he implied, belonged to "a proud liberal tradition".

On cue, the deluge struck. He was called "a bag of Nazi slime, a Jew-hating racist." He was threatened repeatedly, and he emailed his attackers to "get fucked". The Herald demanded he apologise. When he refused, he was suspended, then he resigned. According to the Herald's publisher, Sean Aylmer, the company "expects much higher standards from its columnists."

The "problem" of Carlton's acerbic, often solitary liberal voice in a country in which Rupert Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the capital city press - Australia is the world's first murdocracy - would be solved twice over. The Australian Human Rights Commission is to investigate complaints against Carlton under the Racial Discrimination Act, which outlaws any public act or utterance that is "reasonably likely... to offend, insult, humiliate another person or a group of people" on the basic of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin.

In contrast to safe, silent Australia - where the Carltons are made extinct - real journalism is alive in Gaza. I often speak on the phone with Mohammed Omer, an extraordinary young Palestinian journalist, to whom I presented, in 2008, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Whenever I called him during the assault on Gaza, I could hear the whine of drones, the explosion of missiles. He interrupted one call to attend to children huddled outside waiting for transport amidst the explosions. When I spoke to him on 30 July, a single Israeli F-19 fighter had just slaughtered 19 children. On 20 August, he described how Israeli drones had effectively "rounded up" a village so that they could savagely gunned down.

Every day, at sunrise, Mohammed looks for families who have been bombed. He records their stories, standing in the rubble of their homes; he takes their pictures. He goes to the hospital. He goes to the morgue. He goes to the cemetery. He queues for hours for bread for his own family. And he watches the sky. He sends two, three, four dispatches a day. This is real journalism.

"They are trying to annihilate us," he told me. "But the more they bomb us, the stronger we are. They will never win."

The great crime committed in Gaza is a reminder of something wider and menacing to us all.

Since 2001, the United States and its allies have been on a rampage. In Iraq, at least 700,000 men, woman and children are dead as a result. The rise of jihadists - in a country where there was none - is the result. Known as al-Qaeda and now the Islamic State, modern jihadism was invented by US and Britain, assisted by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The original aim was to use and develop an Islamic fundamentalism that had barely existed in much of the Arab world in order to undermine pan-Arab movements and secular governments. By the 1980s, this had become a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA called it Operation Cyclone; and a cyclone it turned out to be, with its unleashed fury blowing back in the faces of its creators. The attacks of 9/11 and in London in July, 2005 were the result of this blowback, as were the recent, gruesome murders of the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. For more than a year, the Obama administration armed the killers of these two young men - then known as ISIS in Syria - in order to destroy the secular government in Damascus.

The West's principal "ally" in this imperial mayhem is the medieval state where beheadings are routinely and judicially carried out - Saudi Arabia. Whenever a member of the British Royal Family is sent to this barbaric place, you can bet your bottom petrodollar that the British government wants to sell the sheiks more fighter planes, missiles, manacles. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, which bankrolls jihadists from Syria to Iraq.

Why must we live in this state of perpetual war?

The immediate answer lies in the United States, where a secret and unreported coup has taken place. A group known as the Project for a New American Century, the inspiration of Dick Cheney and others, came to power with the administration of George W Bush. Once known in Washington as the "crazies", this extreme sect believes in what the US Space Command calls "full spectrum dominance".

Under both Bush and Obama, a 19th-century imperial mentality has infused all departments of state. Raw militarism is ascendant; diplomacy is redundant. Nations and governments are judged as useful or expendable: to be bribed or threatened or "sanctioned".

On 31 July, the National Defense Panel in Washington published a remarkable document that called for the United States to prepare to fight six major wars simultaneously. At the top of the list were Russia and China - nuclear powers.

In one sense, a war against Russia has already begun. While the world watched horrified as Israel assaulted Gaza, similar atrocities in eastern Ukraine were barely news. At the time of writing, two Ukrainian cities of Russian-speaking people - Donetsk and Luhansk - are under siege: their people and hospitals and schools blitzed by a regime in Kiev that came to power in a putsch led by neo-Nazis backed and paid for by the United States. The coup was the climax of what the Russian political observer Sergei Glaziev describes as a 20-year "grooming of Ukrainian Nazis aimed at Russia". Actual fascism has risen again in Europe and not one European leader has spoken against it, perhaps because the rise of fascism across Europe is now a truth that dares not speak its name.

With its fascist past, and present, Ukraine is now a CIA theme park, a colony of Nato and the International Monetary Fund. The fascist coup in Kiev in February was the boast of US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, whose "coup budget" ran to $5 billion. But there was a setback. Moscow prevented the seizure of its legitimate Black Sea naval base in Russian-speaking Crimea. A referendum and annexation quickly followed. Represented in the West as the Kremlin's "aggression", this serves to turn truth on its head and cover Washington's goals: to drive a wedge between a "pariah" Russia and its principal trading partners in Europe and eventually to break up the Russian Federation. American missiles already surround Russia; Nato's military build-up in the former Soviet republics and eastern Europe is the biggest since the second world war.

During the cold war, this would have risked a nuclear holocaust. The risk has returned as anti-Russian misinformation reaches crescendos of hysteria in the US and Europe. A textbook case is the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner in July. Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its Nato allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian "separatists" in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible. An editorial in The Economist accused Vladimir Putin of mass murder. The cover of Der Spiegel used faces of the victims and bold red type, "Stoppt Putin Jetzt!" (Stop Putin Now!) In the New York Times, Timothy Garton Ash substantiated his case for "Putin's deadly doctrine" with personal abuse of "a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike face".

The Guardian's role has been important. Renowned for its investigations, the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why, even though a wealth of material from credible sources shows that Moscow was as shocked as the rest of the world, and the airliner may well have been brought down by the Ukrainian regime.

With the White House offering no verifiable evidence - even though US satellites would have observed the shooting-down - the Guardian's Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker stepped into the breach. "My audience with the Demon of Donetsk," was the front-page headline over Walker's breathless interview with one Igor Bezler. "With a walrus moustache, a fiery temper and a reputation for brutality," he wrote, "Igor Bezler is the most feared of all the rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine... nicknamed The Demon... If the Ukrainian security services, the SBU, are to be believed, the Demon and a group of his men were responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17... as well as allegedly bringing down MH17, the rebels have shot down 10 Ukrainian aircraft." Demon Journalism requires no further evidence.

Demon Journalism makes over a fascist-contaminated junta that seized power in Kiev as a respectable "interim government". Neo-Nazis become mere "nationalists". "News" sourced to the Kiev junta ensures the suppression of a US-run coup and the junta's systematic ethnic cleaning of the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine. That this should happen in the borderland through which the original Nazis invaded Russia, extinguishing some 22 million Russian lives, is of no interest. What matters is a Russian "invasion" of Ukraine that seems difficult to prove beyond familiar satellite images that evoke Colin Powell's fictional presentation to the United Nations "proving" that Saddam Hussein had WMD.

"You need to know that accusations of a major Russian 'invasion' of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence," wrote a group of former senior US intelligence officials and analysts, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"Rather, the 'intelligence' seems to be of the same dubious, politically 'fixed' kind used 12 years ago to 'justify' the U.S.-led attack on Iraq."

The jargon is "controlling the narrative". In his seminal Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said was more explicit: the western media machine was now capable of penetrating deep into the consciousness of much of humanity with a "wiring" as influential as that of the imperial navies of the 19th century. Gunboat journalism, in other words. Or war by media.

Yet, a critical public intelligence and resistance to propaganda does exist; and a second superpower is emerging - the power of public opinion, fuelled by the internet and social media.

The false reality created by false news delivered by media gatekeepers may prevent some of us knowing that this new superpower is stirring in country after country: from the Americas to Europe, Asia to Africa. It is a moral insurrection, exemplified by the whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. The question begs: will we break our silence while there is time?

When I was last in Gaza, driving back to the Israeli checkpoint, I caught sight of two Palestinian flags through the razor wire. Children had made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and they'd climbed on a wall and held the flag between them.

The children do this, I was told, whenever there are foreigners around, because they want to show the world they are there - alive, and brave, and undefeated.

This article is adapted from John Pilger's Edward Said Memorial Lecture, delivered in Adelaide, Australia, on 11 September 2014.

Follow John Pilger on Twitter @johnpilger and on Facebook - www.facebook.com/pilgerwebsite

Into the Streets for London's Climate March in Pictures

Photos: The People’s Climate March, London, September 21, 2014

by Andy Worthington 

21.9.14

On September 21, 2014, all around the world, hundreds of thousands of people in 166 countries took part in over 2,800 events calling for urgent, coordinated action on climate change.

The website for the New York City event — attended by an estimated 300,000 people — described it accurately as the “largest climate march in history.”

See my photos of the People’s Climate March on Flickr here.

The trigger for the coordinated events around the world was the Climate Summit taking place at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday, where over 120 world leaders “will try to rally the political will for a new world-wide climate treaty by the end of 2015,” as the Wall Street Journal described it.

I attended the event in London, which involved around 40,000 people, a largely sunny day and a very friendly atmosphere, and took the photos available on Flickr. It was a powerful demonstration of widespread concern about the climate that is an important antidote to the cynical and well-funded climate change denial lobby, and the general indifference of politicians, who sometimes make positive noises about the environment, but are more generally in bed with the polluters — and, in addition, find themselves unable to tell the truth to their electorates: that we urgently need to make the environment a priority, and that doing so has to involve curbing our own destructive appetites.

The London march was organised by The Campaign against Climate Change with the support of Airport Watch, Avaaz, BP or Not BP, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Climate Coalition, Compass, Fire Brigades Union, Fuel Poverty Action, Grandparents for a Safe Earth, Greenpeace UK, One Million Climate Jobs, Operation Noah, Oxfam, People’s Assembly Against Austerity, Tearfund, Transport Salaried Staffs Association, WWF-UK and 350.org.

Note: See the Guardian‘s report on events around the world here, and see here for an interview in the New Yorker with the journalist and environmental activist Bill McKibben, one of the main organisers of the march. Also see the Guardian review of Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, and an interview with Klein here.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

- See more at: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2014/09/21/photos-the-peoples-climate-march-london-september-21-2014/#sthash.NWKpHSQd.dpuf

Teach Your Children Well (And Make Them Pay Forever)

Education With a Debt Sentence: For-Profit Colleges as American Dream Crushers and Factories of Debt

by Astra Taylor and Hannah Appel  - TomDispatch

Imagine corporations that intentionally target low-income single mothers as ideal customers. Imagine that these same companies claim to sell tickets to the American dream -- gainful employment, the chance for a middle class life. Imagine that the fine print on these tickets, once purchased, reveals them to be little more than debt contracts, profitable to the corporation’s investors, but disastrous for its customers. 

 

And imagine that these corporations receive tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to do this dirty work. 

 

Now, know that these corporations actually exist and are universities.

Over the last three decades, the price of a year of college has increased by more than 1,200%. In the past, American higher education has always been associated with upward mobility, but with student loan debt quadrupling between 2003 and 2013, it’s time to ask whether education alone can really move people up the class ladder. This is a question of obvious relevance for low-income students and students of color.

Tomgram: Taylor and Appel, The Subprime Education Scandal

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: My thanks to all of you who responded to my recent offer and donated $100 for a signed, personalized, hot-off-the-presses copy of my new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World, soon to be on bookstore shelves everywhere. Each donation of this sort is a way to keep this site alive and kicking. And you can still be the first on your block to have a copy, so click on our donation page and check out the offer! In the meantime, here’s what Rebecca Solnit, who introduces today’s post and whose new Dispatch Book, Men Explain Things to Me, has become an indie bestseller (just going into its fourth printing!), has to say about Shadow Government:

“This is a book about secrets and surveillance, but I’m here to tell you one secret its contents won’t. For more than a dozen years, Tom Engelhardt and his website or blog or post-newspaper wire service Tomdispatch.com have been one of the great forces on the side of clarity, democracy, openness, and really good writing. Tom himself, a legendary book editor, is also one of the country’s most eloquent and tenacious political writers, electronically publishing three essays a week for all these years and writing many of them himself. This collection, focused on the new Orwellianism, is some of the finest writing and finest public service gathered together in book form for your portable pleasure and outrage.” Tom]

Taylor and Appel, The Subprime Education Scandal

 We used to hear more often about those malignant institutions serving, or rather plaguing, the poor: the loan sharks who charged 100% or more per year in interest, the furniture or radios that ended up costing several times their value on the installment plan. Two or three decades ago, however, we didn’t think of an education as being part of the landscape of predation upon the poor. Now, as Astra Taylor and Hannah Appel explain, when it comes to a new crew of “for-profit” colleges, higher education has gone hyena and is tearing at the financial flesh of the poor.

Even mainstream institutions can be sketchy these days, if you look closely enough. Most liberal arts college programs give their students a vague, if exhilarating, sense that the best possible outcome of their vocation is practically an inevitability, and yet there are far from enough tenure-track jobs, top galleries, or niches on bestseller lists for all the people being educated.

Though people make it in all these fields, they are a tiny minority. So many others pay their dues and get little for it, except whatever is inherently meaningful in their education, which won’t, of course, lighten their loan burden at all.

Once upon a time, it was different. The radicalism of the 1960s, for instance, should be chalked up in part to the great freedom of youth at a time when the fat of the land seemed inexhaustible and the safety net unbreakable. The two radicals I know who became wanted fugitives in the 1970s and then tenured faculty members (now retired with pensions) operated in a more forgiving era -- and a more affluent one.

My parents believed that any kind of bachelor’s degree pretty much guaranteed your white-collar future, and that was a truth of their era. Thirty years ago, when I came along, it was already less of a reality; today, so much less than that. Still, the hangover from that conviction lingers. I went to California’s public universities as their golden age of nearly free and superb education was ending and got through college scrambling to the sound of doors shutting behind me. It was all part of the end of an egalitarian dream birthed and nurtured by the New Deal of the 1930s, the creation of social security in the 1940s, and the Great Society programs of the 1960s. It’s now popular to say that, as president, Richard Nixon was to the left of Barack Obama, but what that means is that our society was then closer to a social democracy (and that since we’re really bad at talking about it, we’d rather focus our attention on figureheads).

Maybe communism was good for us after all, at least -- as David Graeber argues -- in scaring the powers that be into offering their own limited versions of equality and opportunity. California’s Proposition 13, enacted in 1978, was the beginning of the end of that dream, arising as it did from the now-entrenched belief that what we have separately beats whatever we have together anytime. Taxes were portrayed as the nails that stuck every breadwinning Jesus to his own personal cross, rather than the way to keep roads and bridges and schools in shape, have safe drinking water and, like, a postal system and libraries (and also a giant military eating up more than half of the federal government's discretionary spending). As the retreat into the private sphere began in earnest, people started forgetting how good, how secure life had been, while Republicans launched the mantra that future tax cuts would be a magical ointment capable of curing anything.

Part of the great work of Occupy Wall Street was to make some of the brutality of the current economy visible. People whose lives were being ravaged by housing, medical, and educational debt came out of the shame and the shadows to testify, while activists and homeowners took action against foreclosures and banks. From the beginning Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, was part of that movement and moment. Her work there led to her involvement with Strike Debt and the fledgling Debt Collective. Now, she and Hannah Appel focus on the conditions that produced the perfect educational storm in the form of the private for-profit university/corporation. Rebecca Solnit

Education With a Debt Sentence: For-Profit Colleges as American Dream Crushers and Factories of Debt

by Astra Taylor and Hannah Appel

 

As Cornell professor Noliwe Rooks and journalist Kai Wright have reported, black college enrollment has increased at nearly twice the rate of white enrollment in recent years, but a disproportionate number of those African-American students end up at for-profit schools. In 2011, two of those institutions, the University of Phoenix (with physical campuses in 39 states and massive online programs) and the online-only Ashford University, produced more black graduates than any other institutes of higher education in the country. Unfortunately, a recent survey by economist Rajeev Darolia shows that for-profit graduates fare little better on the job market than job seekers with high school degrees; their diplomas, that is, are a net loss, offering essentially the same grim job prospects as if they had never gone to college, plus a lifetime debt sentence.

Many students who enroll in such colleges don’t realize that there is a difference between for-profit, public, and private non-profit institutions of higher learning. All three are concerned with generating revenue, but only the for-profit model exists primarily to enrich its owners. The largest of these institutions are often publicly traded, nationally franchised corporations legally beholden to maximize profit for their shareholders before maximizing education for their students. While commercial vocational programs have existed since the nineteenth century, for-profit colleges in their current form are a relatively new phenomenon that began to boom with a series of initial public offerings in the 1990s, followed quickly by deregulation of the sector as the millennium approached. Bush administration legislation then weakened government oversight of such schools, while expanding their access to federal financial aid, making the industry irresistible to Wall Street investors.

While the for-profit business model has generally served investors well, it has failed students. Retention rates are abysmal and tuitions sky-high. For-profit colleges can be up to twice as expensive as Ivy League universities, and routinely cost five or six times the price of a community college education. The Medical Assistant program at for-profit Heald College in Fresno, California, costs $22,275. A comparable program at Fresno City College costs $1,650. An associate degree in paralegal studies at Everest College in Ontario, California, costs $41,149, compared to $2,392 for the same degree at Santa Ana College, a mere 30-minute drive away.

Exorbitant tuition means students, who tend to come from poor backgrounds, have to borrow from both the government and private sources, including Sallie Mae (the country's largest originator, servicer, and collector of student loans) and banks like Chase and Wells Fargo. A whopping 96% of students who manage to graduate from for-profits leave owing money, and they typically carry twice the debt load of students from more traditional schools.

Public funds in the form of federal student loans has been called the “lifeblood” of the for-profit system, providing on average 86% of revenues. Such schools now enroll around 10% of America’s college students, but take in more than a quarter of all federal financial aid -- as much as $33 billion in a single year. By some estimates it would cost less than half that amount to directly fund free higher education at all currently existing two- and four-year public colleges. In other words, for-profit schools represent not a “market solution” to increasing demand for the college experience, but the equivalent of a taxpayer-subsidized subprime education.

Pushing the Hot Button, Poking the Pain

The mantra is everywhere: a college education is the only way to climb out of poverty and create a better life. For-profit schools allow Wall Street investors and corporate executives to cash in on this faith.

Publicly traded schools have been shown to have profit margins, on average, of nearly 20%. A significant portion of these taxpayer-sourced proceeds are spent on Washington lobbyists to keep regulations weak and federal money pouring in. Meanwhile, these debt factories pay their chief executive officers $7.3 million in average yearly compensation. John Sperling, architect of the for-profit model and founder of the University of Phoenix, which serves more students than the entire University of California system or all the Ivy Leagues combined, died a billionaire in August.

Graduates of for-profit schools generally do not fare well. Indeed, they rarely find themselves in the kind of work they were promised when they enrolled, the kind of work that might enable them to repay their debts, let alone purchase the commodity-cornerstones of the American dream like a car or a home.

In the documentary "College Inc.," produced by PBS’s investigative series Frontline, three young women recount how they enrolled in a nursing program at Everest College on the promise of $25-$35 an hour jobs on graduation. Course work, however, turned out to consist of visits to the Museum of Scientology to study “psychiatrics” and visits to a daycare center for their “pediatrics rotation.” They each paid nearly $30,000 for a 12-month program, only to find themselves unemployable because they had been taught nearly nothing about their chosen field.

In 2010, an undercover investigation by the Government Accountability Office tested 15 for-profit colleges and found that every one of them “made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements” to undercover applicants. These recruiting practices are now under increasing scrutiny from 20 state attorneys general, Senate investigators, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), amid allegations that many of these schools manipulate the job placement statistics of their graduates in the most cynical of ways.

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an organization that offers support in health, education, employment, and community-building to new veterans, put it this way in August 2013: "Using high-pressure sales tactics and false promises, these institutions lure veterans into enrolling into expensive programs, drain their post-9/11 GI Bill education benefits, and sign up for tens of thousands of dollars in loans. The for-profits take in the money but leave the students with a substandard education, heavy student loan debt, non-transferable credits, worthless degrees, or no degrees at all.”

Even President Obama has spoken out against instances where for-profit colleges preyed upon troops with brain damage: “These Marines had injuries so severe some of them couldn’t recall what courses the recruiter had signed them up for.”

As it happens, recruiters for such schools are manipulating more than statistics. They are mining the intersections of class, race, gender, inequality, insecurity, and shame to hook students. "Create a sense of urgency. Push their hot button. Don't let the student off the phone. Dial, dial, dial," a director of admissions at Argosy University, which operates in 23 states and online, told his enrollment counselors in an internal email.

A training manual for recruiters at ITT Tech, another multi-state and virtual behemoth, instructed its employees to "poke the pain a bit and remind them who else is depending on them and their commitment to a better future.” It even included a "pain funnel" -- that is, a visual guide to help recruiters exploit prospective students’ vulnerabilities. Pain was similarly a theme at Ashford University, where enrollment advisors were told by their superiors to “dig deep” into students’ suffering to “convince them that a college degree is going to solve all their problems.”

An internal document from Corinthian Colleges, Inc. (owner of Everest, Heald, and Wyotech colleges) specified that its target demographic is “isolated,” “impatient” individuals with “low self-esteem.” They should have “few people in their lives who care about them and be stuck in their lives, unable to imagine a future or plan well.”

These recruiting strategies are as well funded as they are abhorrent. When an institution of higher learning is driven primarily by the needs of its shareholders, not its students, the drive to get “asses in classes” guarantees that marketing budgets will dwarf whatever is spent on faculty and instruction. According to David Halperin, author of Stealing America’s Future: How For-Profit Colleges Scam Taxpayers and Ruin Student’s Lives, “The University of Phoenix has spent as much as $600 million a year on advertising; it has regularly been Google’s largest advertiser, spending $200,000 a day.”

At some schools, the money put into the actual education of a single student has been as low as $700 per year. The Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee revealed that 30 of the for-profit industry’s biggest players spent $4.2 billion -- or 22.7% of their revenue -- on recruiting and marketing in 2010.

Subprime Schools, Swindled Students

In profit paradise, there are nonetheless signs of trouble. Corinthian College Inc., for instance, is under investigation by several state and federal agencies for falsifying job-placement rates and lying to students in marketing materials. In June, the Department of Education discovered that the company was on the verge of collapse and began supervising a search for buyers for its more than 100 campuses and online operations. In this “unwinding process,” some Corinthian campuses have already shut down. To make matters worse, this month the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a $500 million lawsuit accusing Corinthian of running a “predatory lending scheme.”

As the failure of Corinthian unfolds, those who understood it to be a school -- namely, its students -- have been left in the lurch. Are their hard-earned degrees and credits worthless? Should those who are enrolled stay put and hope for the storm to pass or jump ship to another institution? Social media reverberate with anxious questions.

Nathan Hornes started the Facebook group “Everest Avengers,” a forum where students who feel confused and betrayed can share information and organize. A 2014 graduate of Everest College’s Ontario, California, branch, Nathan graduated with a 3.9 GPA, a degree in Business Management, and $65,000 in debt. Unable to find the gainful employment Everest promised him, he currently works two fast-food restaurant jobs. Nathan’s dreams of starting a record label and a music camp for inner city kids will be deferred even further into some distant future when his debts come due: a six-month grace period expires in October and Nathan will owe $380 each month on Federal loans alone. “Do I want to pay bills or my loans?” he asks. Corinthian has already threatened to sue him if he fails to make payments.

Asked to explain Corinthian’s financial troubles, Trace Urdan, a market analyst for Wells Fargo Bank, Corinthian’s biggest equity investor, argued that the school attracts “subprime students” who “can be expected -- as a group -- to repay at levels far lower than most student loans.” And yet, as Corinthian’s financial woes mounted, the corporation stopped paying rent at its Los Angeles campuses and couldn’t pay its own substantial debts to lenders, including Bank of America, from whom it sought a debt waiver.

That Corinthian can request debt waivers from its lenders should give us pause. Who, one might ask, is the proper beneficiary of a debt waiver in this case? No such favors will be done for Nathan Hornes or other former Corinthian students, though they have effectively been led into a debt trap with an expert package of misrepresentations, emotional manipulation, and possibly fraud.

From Bad Apples to a Better System, or Everest Avenged

As is always the case with corporate scandals, Corinthian is now being described as a “bad apple” among for-profits, not evidence of a rotten orchard. The fact is that for-profits like Corinthian exemplify all the contradictions of the free-market model that reformers present as the only solution to the current crisis in higher education: not only are these schools 90% dependent on taxpayer money, but tenure doesn’t exist, there are no faculty unions, most courses are offered online with low overhead costs, and students are treated as “customers.”

It’s also worth remembering that at “public” universities, it is now nearly impossible for working class or even middle class students to graduate without debt. This sad state of affairs -- so the common version of the story goes -- is the consequence of economic hard-times, which require belt tightening and budget cuts. And so it has come to pass that strapped community colleges are now turning away would-be enrollees who wind up in the embrace of for-profits that proceed to squeeze every penny they can from them and the public purse as well. (All the while, of course, this same tale provides for-profits with a cover: they are offering a public service to a marginalized and needy population no one else will touch.)

The standard narrative that, in the face of shrinking tax revenues, public universities must relentlessly raise tuition rates turns out, however, to be full of holes. As political theorist Robert Meister points out, this version of the story ignores the complicity of university leaders in the process. Many of them were never passive victims of privatization; instead, they saw tuition, not taxpayer funding, as the superior and preferred form of revenue growth.

Beginning in the 1990s, universities, public and private, began working ever more closely with Wall Street, which meant using tuition payments not just as direct revenue but also as collateral for debt-financing. Consider the venerable but beleaguered University of California system: a 2012 report out of its Berkeley branch, “Swapping Our Futures,” shows that the whole system was losing $750,000 each month on interest-rate swaps -- a financial product that promised lower borrowing costs, but ended up draining the U.C. system of already-scarce resources.

In the last decade, its swap agreements have cost it over $55 million and could, in the end, add up to a loss of $200 million. Financiers, as the university’s creditors, are promised ever-increasing tuition as the collateral on loans, forcing public schools to aggressively recruit ever more out-of-state students, who pay higher tuitions, and to raise the in-state tuition relentlessly as well, simply to meet debt burdens and keep credit ratings high.

Instead of being the social and economic leveler many believe it to be, American higher education in the twenty-first century too often compounds the problem of inequality through debt-servitude. Referring to student debt, which has by now reached $1.2 trillion, Meister suggests, “Add up the lifetime debt service that former students will pay on $1 trillion, over and above the principal they borrow, and you could run a very good public university system for what we are paying capital markets to fund an ever-worsening one."

You Are Not a Loan

The big problem of how we finance education won’t be solved overnight. But one group is attempting to provide both immediate aid to students like Nathan Hornes and a vision for rethinking debt as a systemic issue. On September 17th, the Rolling Jubilee, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, announced the abolition of a portfolio of debt worth nearly $4 million originating from for-profit Everest College. This granted nearly 3,000 former students no-strings-attached debt relief.

The authors of this article have both been part of this effort. To date, the Rolling Jubilee has abolished nearly $20 million dollars of medical and educational debt by taking advantage of a little-known trade secret: debt is often sold to debt collectors for mere pennies on the dollar. A medical bill that was originally $1,000 might sell to a debt collector for 4% of its sticker price, or $40. This allowed the Rolling Jubilee project to make a multi-million dollar impact with a budget of approximately $700,000 raised in large part through small individual donations.

The point of the Rolling Jubilee is simple enough: we believe people shouldn’t have to go into debt for basic needs. For the last four decades, easy access to credit has masked stagnating wages and crumbling social services, forcing many Americans to debt-finance necessities like college, health care, and housing, while the creditor class has reaped enormous rewards. But while we mean the Jubilee’s acts to be significant, we know it is not a sustainable solution to the problem at hand. There is no way to buy and abolish all the odious debt sloshing around our economy, nor would we want to. Given the way our economy is structured, people would start slipping into the red again the minute their debts were wiped out.

The Rolling Jubilee instead raises a question: If a ragtag group of activists can find a way to provide immediate relief to even a few thousand defrauded students, why can’t the government?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s lawsuit against Corinthian Colleges, Inc. is a good first step, but it only applies to specific private loans originating after 2011, and it will likely take years to play out. Until it's resolved, students are still technically on the hook and many will be harassed by unscrupulous debt collectors attempting to extract money from them while they still can. In the meantime, the Department of Education (DOE) -- which has far greater purview than the CFPB -- is effectively acting as a debt collector for a predatory lender, instead of using its discretionary power to help students. Why didn’t the DOE simply let Corinthian go bankrupt, as often happens to private institutions, and so let the students’ debts become dischargeable?

Such debt discharge is well within the DOE’s statutory powers. When a school under its jurisdiction has broken state laws or committed fraud it is, in fact, mandated to offer debt discharge to students. Yet in Corinthian’s opaque, unaccountable unwinding process, the Department of Education appears to be focused on keeping as many of these predatory “schools” open as possible.

No less troubling, the DOE actually stands to profit off Corinthian’s debt payments, as it does from all federally secured educational loans, regardless of the school they are associated with. Senator Elizabeth Warren has already sounded the alarm about the department’s conflict of interest when it comes to student debt, citing an estimate that the government stands to rake in up to $51 billion dollars in a single year on student loans. As Warren points out, it’s “obscene” for the government to treat education as a profit center.

Can there be any doubt that funds reaped from the repayment of federally backed loans by Corinthian students are especially ill-gotten gains? Nathan Hornes and his fellow students should be the beneficiaries of debt relief, not further dispossession.

Unless people agitate, no reprieve will be offered. Instead there may be slaps on the wrist for a few for-profit “bad apples,” with policymakers presenting possible small reductions in interest rates or income-based payments for student borrowers as major breakthroughs.

We need to think bigger. There is an old banking adage: if you owe the bank $1,000, the bank owns you; if you owe the bank $1 million, you own the bank. Individually, student debt is an incapacitating burden. But as Nathan and others are discovering, as a premise for collective action, it can offer a new kind of leverage. Debt collectives, effectively debtors’ unions, may be the next stage of anti-austerity organizing. Collective action offers many possibilities for building power against creditors through collective bargaining, including the power to threaten a debt strike. Where for-profits prey on people’s vulnerability, isolation, and shame, debt collectives would nurture feelings of strength, solidarity, and outrage.

Those who profit from education fear such a transformation, and understandably so. “We ask students to make payments while in school to help them develop the discipline and practice of repaying their federal and other loan obligations,” a Corinthian Colleges spokesman said in response to the news of CFPB’s lawsuit.

It’s absurd: a single mother working two jobs and attending online classes to better her life is discipline personified, even if she can’t always pay her loans on time. The executives and investors living large off her financial aid are the ones who need to be taught a lesson. Perhaps we should collectively demand that as part of their punishment these predators take a course in self-discipline taught by their former students.

Hannah Appel is a mother, activist, and assistant professor of anthropology at UCLA. Her work looks at the everyday life of capitalism and the economic imagination. She has been active with Occupy Wall Street since 2011.

Astra Taylor is a writer, documentary filmmaker (including Zizek! and Examined Life), and activist. Her book, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books), was published in April. She helped launch the Occupy offshoot Strike Debt and its Rolling Jubilee campaign.

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Copyright 2014 Hannah Appel and Astra Taylor