Weekly Picks – March 17, 2024

Credits (clockwise from top left): Stefano Summo for ProPublica; Edges of Earth / Adam Moore; Mutual Aid (2009). Photograph by Timothy Vollmer / Flickr; Apu Gomes / AFP / Getty; Brian Snyder / Reuters / Redux; Cole Burston / AFP / Getty; Jon S. / Deed; Alice Martins

Collective struggle – a possible foundation for radical care; solidarity and its discontents the hallmark of destabilizing systems of oppression. Stories from those on the street facing their own unconquerable peaks. Hell on Earth in the heat of the desert, a growing fallout of sustained war, where neglected souls and zealots alike seek peace but remain trapped in turmoil. The surrender of a province and its environment to fossil fuel fanaticism. A historical review of a central African conflict, itself an allegory of how colonialism seeps through social strata. The compounding research behind the ill-effects of rising wealth disparities worldwide. Triads, illicit drug trades, exploited immigrants, and a cavalcade of avoidable problems linking nations who choose to criminalize substances to support their home-grown industries of terror. Freedivers off the coast of Japan preserving community as much as an ancient way of life. Finally, a comment on change in the media landscape, and on trust’s declining value as a commodity used to buy political engagement.

This week’s collection:

Quite a lot of doom and gloom shared above and below. A final comment for this week – you may remember one of the more recent reimaginings of Tears For Fears’ “Mad World”, as interpreted by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, and popularized by 2001’s Donnie Darko, tv shows, trailers, and video games:

People often remark on Gary Jules’ vocals, but the video’s exhibition, simple yet remarkable, should also be noted, carrying Michel Gondry’s signature in its frames. Worth revisiting as our perpetual cruelty towards one another seems unceasing, gaslighting the collective or impressing upon us, whether falsely or not, a powerlessness to act. But there is hope in preservation – in words, no less. An ongoing reassurance that alongside our deepest laments there exists a choice to latch onto a wider reality, one that persists through inferno.

Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. The Revolution Will Be Caring

“In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and uprisings against policing exposed crises of care and the rapacity of white supremacy, capitalism, and state violence. Aided by shared Google Drives, Discords, and social media, neighborhood residents organized food deliveries to homebound people, transferred cash to those who needed it, and offered to keep one another company. Mutual aid and collective care networks arose to meet care needs where governments and philanthropic efforts failed. The expansion of these practices raised questions, however: What makes something mutual aid or collective care and not capitalist charity? Many social media graphics have told us that the answer is “solidarity,” as in, “solidarity, not charity.” This galvanizing answer begets the questions of what the possibilities are for solidarity, charity, care, and mutuality under capitalism—a fundamentally antisocial, extractive formation of social relations.

Addressing these crucial questions is the goal of three new books, albeit from varied methodological and temporal perspectives. Nicolas Delalande’s Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity examines how 19th-century workers movements built international networks and institutions premised on solidarity. Let This Radicalize You, by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, outlines strategies and tactics for embedding care into social movements. These tactics offer glimpses of another world that O’Brien and Abdelhadi give life to in Everything for Everyone, a “polyphonic novel” that uses the form of the oral history interview to imagine what care could look like after capitalism.

Taken together, these books outline a past, present, and future of care that is collective and radical.

. . .

These texts collectively underscore how care and conflict are not mutually exclusive. In fact, conflict—including among allies—is necessary to the project of transforming social relations that mutual aid undertakes. If philanthropy attempts to smooth over conflict via patronage to maintain capitalist hierarchy and the forms of violence upon which it depends, then mutual aid and other solidaristic practices recognize that transformation comes through struggle.”

2. Sisyphus on the Street

“On the street with solutions to every problem sprawled a problem that defied solutions. “It’s not that we don’t care about the homeless,” explained an international consultant, hurrying past the slumped figures to get home. “But because we have something to do, we walk around them.”

As the snow fell, the scene grew bleak. “Joke! Joke! I ain’t no joke!” a disturbed man howled. Another had buried himself beneath a pile of cardboard boxes and blankets that a well-wisher had topped with a sandwich. An astonished tourist from Albania snapped pictures of the public destitution to show friends that “this is America.” I filed a dark story for The New York Times and wondered if in a half-century Americans would look back on the era with disbelief, “the way schoolchildren react to Dickens’s London.”

Thirty years on, that doesn’t seem likely. The Dickensian plight of the homeless continues, and the public may be less sympathetic.

. . .

Despite the frustrations, O’Connell connects with those he treats and occasionally helps transform their lives. He receives near-weekly visits at the clinic from a middle-aged man who held the record for drunken trips to the emergency room (216 in eighteen months) but got sober, housed, and employed. Four members of the board were once patients. One of them, Joanne Guarino, gives an annual lecture to first-year students at Harvard Medical School, recounting her recovery from thirty years on the street, where she survived rape and AIDS. Her pluck, grace, and affection for O’Connell draw an ovation.

Service to the poor is often sustained by faith, but O’Connell has little to say about God. He finds a model in Sisyphus—or Sisyphus as imagined by Camus, who converted the tale of futility into a parable of purposeful striving. Although Sisyphus is condemned forever to watch the rock he pushes uphill tumble back down, “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” Camus insisted. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Ameliorative work has its critics—on the right, some say it rewards indolence; on the left, some warn it masks injustice. O’Connell, the former philosophy student, just carries on. “This is what we do while we’re waiting for the world to change,” he says.”

3. The Open-Air Prison for ISIS Supporters—and Victims

“About fifty thousand people are currently imprisoned in Al-Hol, which is named for a dilapidated nearby town. The detainees hail from more than fifty countries: Chinese and Trinidadians and Russians and Swedes and Brits live alongside Syrians and Iraqis. Many of the adults had either joined ISIS or been married to someone who’d joined. But many others have no links to the Islamic State and fled to the camp to escape the punishing U.S.-led bombing campaign. Some were thrown into ISIS’s orbit by force: Yazidis enslaved by commanders, teen-age girls married off by their families. More than half the population are children, the majority of whom are younger than twelve. Dozens of babies are born each month. All the residents are under indefinite detention, as no plans have apparently been made to prosecute any of them—imagine if Guantánamo were the size of a city, and its inmates were mostly women and children. The United Nations has called Al-Hol a “blight on the conscience of humanity.”

The camp, which is in a region of Syria still protected by several hundred U.S. troops, is under the aegis of a beleaguered force of mostly Kurdish fighters—soldiers who had previously aligned with the Americans to defeat ISIS. They are largely backed by the United States, but the Pentagon declines to specify how much it spends annually on Al-Hol. The Kurdish fighters guard the camp’s perimeter in swat vehicles, and a primarily Kurdish civilian administration manages the camp bureaucracy, coordinating with aid organizations to distribute rations and deliver such basic services as sewage treatment and water. But the camp itself—block after block of dirt lanes and tents—is effectively under the control of its ISIS inmates. All-female squads of religious police pressure women to cover head to toe in the black niqab; violators have been dragged to makeshift Sharia courts, where judges order floggings and executions. Assassination cells gun down inmates accused of passing information to camp authorities.

. . .

In 2006, the Syrian government settled a few hundred Palestinian refugee families on a dusty, scorpion-infested stretch of brushland near the Iraqi border, south of the town of Al-Hol, which means, among other things, “the horror.” The Palestinians had been living in Iraq but fled the violence unleashed by the U.S. occupation; they had already been expelled from their ancestral lands by Israel in 1948. The U.N. built cinder-block houses for the refugees. During the Syrian civil war, the camp filled with more displaced families. In March, 2019, when the caliphate fell, thousands of its residents were corralled into Al-Hol, and the camp was abruptly converted into one of the world’s largest prisons. Today, Al-Hol’s fifty thousand residents are grouped into sectors divided by barbed wire; to walk from one to the next can take half an hour. Most sectors hold Syrians and Iraqis, but the so-called Annex is home to about six thousand Europeans, Asians, and Africans, some of whom have been denied repatriation by their home governments.”

4. ‘Fire Weather’: Big Oil’s Climate Conflagration

“Few places illustrate the destructive cycle of fossil fuel-driven climate change as well as Alberta, Canada. Home to the tar sands boom, the province’s remote north has also become a site of some of the worst climate disasters in recorded history—like the 2016 Fort McMurray Fire, which swallowed up 1.5 million acres and burned for three months. John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the Fort McMurray Fire, the tar sands industry responsible for the conditions that produced it, and the tinderbox world Big Oil has made in its all-consuming pursuit of profit.”

5. Intractable Crisis

“As the world is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, the wars in the eastern DRC are entering their fourth and perhaps most dangerous decade, with a risk of major regional escalation. The conflict, which currently involves about a hundred different armed groups, has killed and displaced millions over the years. Since 2021 it has entered a new phase, marked by the reemergence of a rebel organization known as the March 23 movement. Private security companies and neighbouring states have joined the fray, and the diffuse range of belligerents has galvanized along two clear fronts: one aligned with the Congolese government, the other with the M23. The situation is now deteriorating by the day, and the prospects of peace are distant.

. . .

Since the 1990s, there have always been moderate voices among the DRC population, who feel that they suffer from Kinshasa’s poor governance and divisive ethnic politics and from Rwanda’s ambitions to claim North Kivu as its backyard. They have consistently tried to resist the ethnic polarisation of conflict (with varying degrees of success). Today, though, online spin doctors, trolls and agitators on both ends of the spectrum smear their critics as either allies of the FDLR genocidaires or puppets of Rwanda, reducing the space for non-partisan discussion. Attempts to maintain a modicum of social cohesion are under serious threat.

Meanwhile, the conflict’s underlying structures – including the legacies of racist colonial rule, the divide-and-rule politics of the post-colonial era, and the wounds of the 1990s wars – remain intact.”

6. Why the world cannot afford the rich

“As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich. Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together1, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity2. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion.

The evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional. For example, bigger gaps between rich and poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment. They also correspond to more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being, social mobility and public trust3,4. The homicide rate in the United States — the most unequal Western democracy — is more than 11 times that in Norway (see go.nature.com/49fuujr). Imprisonment rates are ten times as high, and infant mortality and obesity rates twice as high.

These problems don’t just hit the poorest individuals, although the poorest are most badly affected. Even affluent people would enjoy a better quality of life if they lived in a country with a more equal distribution of wealth, similar to a Scandinavian nation. They might see improvements in their mental health and have a reduced chance of becoming victims of violence; their children might do better at school and be less likely to take dangerous drugs.

. . .

Many commentators have drawn attention to the environmental need to limit economic growth and instead prioritize sustainability and well-being6,7. Here we argue that tackling inequality is the foremost task of that transformation. Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.”

7. Gangsters, money and murder: How Chinese organized crime is dominating Oklahoma’s illegal medical marijuana market

“From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, an investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier has found. Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity.

Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in an interview.

Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes. A grim offshoot of this indentured servitude: Traffickers force Chinese immigrant women into prostitution for the bosses of the agricultural workforce.

The mobsters operate in a loose but disciplined confederation overseen from New York by mafias rooted in southern China, according to state and federal officials. Known as “triads” because of an emblem used long ago by secret societies, these criminal groups wield power at home and throughout the diaspora and allegedly maintain an alliance with the Chinese state.

. . .

The federal response, however, has been muted. With the spread of legalization and decriminalization, enforcement has become a low priority for the U.S. Department of Justice, anti-drug veterans say.

“The challenge we are having is a lack of interest by federal prosecutors to charge illicit marijuana cases,” said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They don’t realize all the implications. Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level, gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.”

The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese organized crime as a global powerhouse, current and former national security officials say. During the past decade, Chinese mafias became the dominant money launderers for Latin American cartels dealing narcotics including fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

8. The Plight of Japan’s Ama Divers

“On the last day of fishing season, Ayami Nakata starts her morning by lighting a small fire in her hut beside the harbor. The temperature outside hovers around freezing, and as Nakata warms, she changes into a wetsuit; gathers her facemask, chisel, and floating net bag; and walks to the docks with her husband, where they board his small fishing boat and motor a few hundred meters offshore. There she starts her shift.

For an hour and a half, Nakata takes minute-long plunges into the frigid water, free-diving 20 feet down to the rocky seabed and kelpy shore, and picking up any abalone, sea cucumbers, and turban shells she can find. The water is so biting that she can barely feel her fingers or pinch them together. She cups each catch in her hands and swims straight back up to drop it in her basket and breathe. “I have to be very mechanical,” says Nakata, waving her hands in a scoop-like shape. Still, despite the hardship, she says that diving calms her. To stay focused she sings her favorite songs in her head. “All the stress goes away,” says Nakata.

Nakata, who is 44 years old and a mother of five, is an ama diver: a freediving fisherwoman harvesting shellfish and seaweed according to an ancient Japanese technique. Although there are ama women scattered all over the nation, more than half of them reside in the Mie Prefecture, where Nakata’s home village of Osatsu is found and the traditions are most alive. She’s been diving for seven years, but her profession is slowly dying: Climate change has depleted the shellfish along Japan’s coasts, and younger generations have lost interest in the craft, abandoning coastal villages to pursue careers in big cities. Women like Nakata are left to question whether they’ll be the last to embody this way of life.

Ama, spelled 海女, means “women of the ocean.” Though male ama divers do exist, they are uncommon; ama diving has long been something women did independently while their husbands fished farther from shore.

. . .

“It’s the entire process of becoming one with nature,” says Kiku Kaito, an ama diver and the head of the ecotourism agency Kaito Yumin Club in Toba. “Ama divers love the sea.” She says they share a sense of duty since they are doing “something very difficult and risky,” so it creates a tight-knit community.”

9. Journalism’s Slow Death Threatens Democracy

“The public’s love-hate relationship with the media has tipped toward just hate in recent years, but professional news media, especially local news, are foundational to democracy. America’s constitutional framers took the media’s role as informers and educators of the public so seriously, they not only carved out freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights, but also subsidized the circulation of periodicals in the newborn republic, a federal practice that continued until relatively recently. The news business’s slow death spiral should alarm us across political divides.

Several crises are besieging the media simultaneously: People are increasingly dropping news from their information diets, ad-dollar-reliant business models continue to dry up, outlets and websites are closing, and the rise of artificial intelligence threatens to put yet more pressure on human newsgathering. The world isn’t going to end anytime soon, but mass media as we know it just might.

. . .

The thing killing quality journalism, even if it is incredibly obvious and boring to say, is in our pockets. Smartphones and our endless parade of screens have flattened all news, entertainment, and information into the digital sludge of “content” to be scrolled through mindlessly, with algorithms tailored to our desires on the way to the next brief dopamine hit. Those appetites rarely get satiated by nuanced coverage of the economy or a bone-dry recap of a city-council meeting…the content we eat up on our devices is the equivalent of comfort food, “the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture” that “embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises.”

. . .

As if the technological threat weren’t grave enough, regional and national outlets also have a trust problem. Trust in all institutions keeps waning, but it is worse for the media: Only 31 percent of Americans trust it to report the news fairly and accurately.”