Showing posts with label youth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label youth. Show all posts

Jul 12, 2010

Tense Times in Dili

Image of Fundasaun Mahein from FacebookImage of Fundasaun Mahein

The Irrawaddy News Magazine - July 2010, Vol.18, No.7

by Matt Crook

Ozorio Leque stands accused of inciting a riot in Dili, the East Timorese capital, on April 28, 2006, when he publicly berated the government before a mob went on the rampage, attacking the government palace. The crisis that followed over the next two months led to 37 deaths and the displacement of 150,000 people.

One of the leaders of Colimau 2000, a resistance group comprising former freedom fighters, youths and farmers, Leque, 29, insists he was acting merely as an activist and that the real perpetrators of the crisis remain untouched. Meanwhile, frustrations among an increasingly disenfranchised youth demographic are now the country’s biggest social challenge.

“Now it’s more calm and more quiet and peaceful than before, but that does not mean that we don’t have conflict among the youths, among the leaders, that could lead to another social conflict in the future, particularly with martial arts groups,” he said.

In the crisis of 2006, a split in the armed forces over promotions led to clashes in the streets of Dili between the army (F-FDTL), police (PNTL) and martial arts groups. Rivalry between the army and the police remains a source of tension, but with an average age of 22 among the population of 1.1 million, the biggest threats to security are evident among the nation’s troubled young.

“This country is composed mostly of youths, but the major challenge that they are facing at the moment is the lack of skills and job opportunities. This is one of the issues that could lead to another social clash,” said Leque, whose trial at Dili District Court was again delayed on June 8.

The Indonesian military’s illegal occupation of Timor-Leste between 1975 and 1999 led to about 200,000 deaths and culminated in the destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure. Shifting a nation’s mentality from resistance to development is key to maintaining stability, Leque said.

“We were coached to use violence against the Indonesian government to achieve our goal of independence or to demonstrate to international societies that we were refusing the Indonesian presence in our country, and most of these youths who were involved in the conflict in 2006 were involved in the violence against Indonesia,” he said.

“It is time for this generation to think for themselves and then their society, their family and their country. It makes no sense when you talk about development if you don’t start from yourself. Human investment is one of the most important issues,” he said. “Creating job opportunities and facilitating youths is one of the priorities in this post-conflict situation.”

But while the streets of Dili are mostly calm, especially compared to 2006, there are still bust-ups between youths in some parts of the city. The government meanwhile has discounted reports that tension between rival martial arts groups is smoldering to the point of destabilizing the country.

Secretary of State Agio Pereira said in a statement that Timor-Leste has one of the lowest crime rates per capita in the world and that reports of serious crime continue to decrease.

But not all crime is reported and the government’s knee-jerk defenses have drawn flak.

Aniceto Neves of the HAK Association, a human rights organization that works with members of martial arts groups, said a balance between sensationalist reporting and defensive posturing is needed.

“The martial arts situation is not something which is dangerous for the security of Timor-Leste,” he said. “It is about social jealousy. It is about social frustration. It is not really affecting the stability of the situation in Timor-Leste.”

Australian gang specialist James Scambary said in his latest report, “Sects, Lies and Videotape,” that fighting, “sporadic but at times intense, sometimes involving over 300 people at a time, is taking place in eight neighborhoods across the city.”

But Neves said “outsiders” have a tendency to exaggerate.

“You cannot consider most places in Dili as dangerous. You cannot consider most of the youths located in different places as dangerous or threatening to others. It is not true. If there is a threat, then the fighting would be very often,” he said.

Nelson Belo, the director of Fundasaun Mahein, a local NGO focused on security sector issues, said Dili is stable, but the problem of unemployment must be addressed or else it could pose a serious threat.

Gainful employment is hard to come by in Timor-Leste, which has only been formally independent since 2002. Subsistence farming is the norm and half the country remains illiterate.

“The problem is language,” Belo said, adding that many Timorese feel unable to get top jobs in the country because they are unable to speak Portuguese, one of Timor-Leste’s official languages, or English.

“Many Timorese only apply for jobs that are insecure,” he said. “They only apply for jobs as security staff or cleaners, and so many of them are not in the decision level and this creates jealousy.”

The government should review its language policy so that Timorese who are unable to speak Portuguese and English can have the same opportunities as those who can, said Belo.

“Many internationals have good jobs and so people start to feel like they are guests in their own country,” he added.

The key to maintaining stability in Timor-Leste is greater involvement of people at the community level to shape future policies on security and better reflect the needs of the population, he said.

Another significant problem is the lack of coordination between Timor-Leste’s army and police force and the UN Police (UNPOL). The PNTL have been re-assuming policing duties from the UN on a district-by-district basis. To date, six of 13 districts have been handed over.

Cillian Nolan, a Dili-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, reported in February that it remains a “fiction” that the UN is in charge of policing Timor-Leste.

“The reality is a lot murkier. A formal handover of ‘executive policing responsibilities’ is progressing on a district-by-district basis, but response to recent events resembles a collective abdication of responsibility,” he wrote.

Recent allegations of excessive use of force have been leveled at the police over the beating of an unarmed man during a fishing competition and the fatal shooting of an unarmed youth in Dili last year.

In its latest “Security Sector Reform Monitor” for Timor-Leste, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) warned against the current militarization of the PNTL under police commander Longuinhos Monteiro.

“This situation underscores the need for a review of paramilitary policing and a drastic reduction in the number of PNTL weapons in a country with few illicit firearms.

“Everyday sightings of armed F-FDTL soldiers and PNTL officers, including paramilitary police units with semi-automatic assault rifles and district task force units in riot gear have increased substantially since the 2006 crisis,” according to the CIGI report.

Earlier this year, the police and military launched a six-month joint campaign after unfounded reports surfaced of “ninjas” terrorizing locals in the western districts. The heavy-handed response was widely criticized and cited as Monteiro’s way of justifying the gun-toting Public Order Battalion he created last year.

Monteiro’s show of strength may have had more to do with winning popularity points than hunting ninjas, but the stunt backfired as a torrent of complaints about human rights violations rained in on Monteiro’s men.

Then, in May, reports of a shoot-out between an illegally armed group and police in Ermera District spread through local media and triggered another wave of ninja talk, with Monteiro once again talking up the need for police action.

NGO Fundasaun Mahein on June 7 released a report casting doubt over Monteiro’s claims that there was an illegal group of gun-toting menaces on the loose, citing conflicting police reports and a lack of evidence.

“The alarmism raised by the general commander, Longuinhos Monteiro, is no different from the invention of the ninja situation in Bobonaro and Suai,” the report found.

“The rumors of illegal groups are strongly connected with PNTL’s militarization and have the potential to create competition between PNTL and F-FDTL.”

But for all the criticism, there have been improvements in the country’s police force, said Silas Everett, the country representative of the Asia Foundation in Timor-Leste.

“The police have been undertaking a transformation here, and in terms of community policing, there has been a real growing acceptance of it as an appropriate policing strategy. Officers are going out there and engaging with communities and all of that doesn’t make it into the media,” said Everett.

“In Timor-Leste, stories pick up on the violence, the poverty, and not enough is said about the good things that are happening, especially in regards to the security sector,” he added.

Yet even if security is bolstered, Timor-Leste’s ineffective justice system needs significant investment.

Neves added, “During the crisis in 2006 until present times, there are a number of people who suffered damages, who lost their houses, lost their families, had things stolen—there were people who killed—but what people face now is the absence of justice.”

A lack of qualified prosecutors has led to a backlog of about 5,000 cases at the Prosecutor General’s office.

“There is no responsibility. The ones who are suspected of killing are just free, just going around and walking freely. It makes people frustrated. Very easily they can turn to violence,” he said. “Social frustrations regarding the justice system are provoking people to be angry with each other and then they are fighting.”

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Apr 1, 2010

Memo From Bangkok - Thai Protesters Shed Culture of Restraint - NYTimes.com

BANGKOK, THAILAND - FEBRUARY 28:  Thai police ...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

BANGKOK — Thailand is a country of 145,000 Mercedes Benz sedans and about 75,000 villages, many of them hamlets afflicted by poverty.

During nearly three weeks of mass anti-government demonstrations here, luxury cars have had to share the streets of Bangkok with the blaring megaphones of rural discontent.

Standing in the back of a pickup truck and shaded by a wide-brimmed hat was Thanida Paveen, a 43-year-old mother of two who explained the epiphany that brought her to the demonstration.

“I used to think we were born poor and that was that,” said Ms. Thanida, who grew up in the provinces but now lives in Bangkok and rents out rooms to factory workers in the city’s industrial outskirts. “I have opened my mind to a new way of thinking: We need to change from the rule of the aristocracy to a real democracy.”

The Thailand of today is not quite the France of 1789 — there is no history of major tensions between rich and poor here, and most of the country is peaceful despite the noisy protests. But more than ever Thailand’s underprivileged are less inclined to quietly accept their station in life as past generations did and are voicing anger about wide disparities in wealth, about shakedowns by the police and what they see as the longstanding condescension in Bangkok toward people who speak provincial dialects, especially from the northeast.

The deference, gentility and graciousness that have helped anchor the social hierarchy in Thailand for centuries are fraying, analysts say, as poorer Thais become more assertive, discarding long-held taboos that discouraged confrontation.

BANGKOK, THAILAND - FEBRUARY 28: Supporters of...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The haves in Thailand have a lot — the country has one of the most inequitable income distributions in Asia, a wider gap between rich and poor than in China, Malaysia, the Philippines or Vietnam, according to a World Bank report.

Four years of political turmoil have brought clearer divisions between wealthy families and their domestic staff, between the patrons of expensive restaurants and the waiters who serve them, between golfing businessmen and the legions of caddies who carry their bags.

“This is a newfound consciousness of a previously neglected part of Thai society,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, one of the country’s leading political scientists and a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s FSI-Humanities Center. “In the past they were upset, but they weren’t cohesive as a force and coherent in their agenda. New technologies have enabled them to unify their disparate voices of dissatisfaction.”

The role of technology in bringing together the protesters has been crucial. The leaders of the protest movement have used community radio stations, mobile-phone messaging and the Internet to forge an identity for lower-income Thais and connect a vast constellation of people in villages and towns.

At times the protests in Bangkok could be described as flash mobs of the disaffected. Protesters, who wear trademark red shirts, have converged on government buildings, banks and military bases across the city guided by text messages.

“This would not have been possible 10 years ago,” said Ms. Thanida, who was returning from military barracks in Bangkok where protesters had demanded that soldiers leave the area. The military acquiesced. Like many protesters, she subscribes to D Station, a “red shirt” news service that gives updates and instructions to protesters.

The leaders of the red-shirted protesters have advertised the current round of protests as class warfare and describe themselves as defenders of the “prai,” a feudal word meaning commoner or lower-class citizen. “The blood of the prai is worth nothing” is a phrase now affixed on bumper stickers and T-shirts.

That may be overblown rhetoric. There are many stories of upward mobility in Thailand and, despite the presence of tens of thousands of protesters, the anger has not translated into personal attacks on the wealthy.

The main target of the protesters’ ire seems to be the system: the perception that bureaucrats and the military serve the elite at the expense of the poor. The protesters bewail the 2006 military coup that removed Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon turned prime minister who focused his policies on rural areas. And they question the fairness of a judicial system that removed two subsequent prime ministers who were allied with Mr. Thaksin.

To many outsiders, Mr. Thaksin’s role is puzzling: The notion that a billionaire is leading Thailand’s disaffected to rebellion verges on the absurd. It also infuriates the Bangkok elite, who see Mr. Thaksin’s role as largely self-serving. Mr. Thaksin, most analysts agree, was hardly a paragon of democratic values during his five years in power. He intimidated the media, stripped institutions like the anti-corruption commission of their independence and mixed his business interests with those of the government.

Many protesters, as well as associates of Mr. Thaksin, say the protest movement has taken on much larger dimensions than just a battle between Mr. Thaksin and his political rivals.

“This goes well beyond Thaksin,” said Pansak Vinyaratn, one of the main architects of policies during the Thaksin administration. “The question is, will the Thai state be able to harness this negative energy to something positive.”

It is significant that Mr. Thaksin made his fortunes in the telecommunications business. Even his critics concede that he was able to communicate with the rural poor and deliver results in ways that none of his predecessors had achieved. As prime minister, he gave lower-income Thais a taste of a better life, including cheap loans that allowed people to buy pickups and mobile phones, which inadvertently or not laid the groundwork for the current political movement.

In 2005, after four years of Mr. Thaksin as prime minister, the number of people using mobile phones in the vast, rice-growing northeast had more than doubled to 5.3 million.

Incomes in the northeast rose nearly 50 percent during the Thaksin government and even more in the provinces east and south of Bangkok.

The protesters today are not the country’s desperately poor, says Ammar Siamwalla, a prominent economist in Thailand who specializes in development issues. They are more likely to be people whose expectations were raised and then dashed: they started small businesses like hair salons in the Thaksin years when more money started circulating in rural areas, Mr. Ammar said. “It jump-started a lot of things.”

After the coup in 2006, these small-time entrepreneurs were stuck. “They were suddenly caught short by the lack of access to credit,” said Mr. Ammar, who is otherwise critical of Mr. Thaksin’s rule.

Debt levels in the northeast doubled to an average of about 100,000 baht, or just over $3,000, per family. Today rural families still carry this debt, but their incomes are relatively stagnant, in part because crop prices were deflated by last year’s economic crisis.

Beyond the economics, there is an intangible side to Thailand’s political crisis that may be even more significant for the country in the long run.

The once deeply ingrained cultural mores that discouraged displays of anger, that prized politeness and justified the entitlements of the royalty and the elite have been eroded by technology and mobility. The prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, rarely visits the northeastern part of the country because his aides fear a hostile reception. (Mr. Abhisit has been ensconced in a military barracks in Bangkok for much of the past two weeks.) Another group of protesters, the “yellow shirts,” who helped precipitate Mr. Thaksin’s ouster with their own demonstrations, held the country hostage by shutting down the airport for a week in late 2008, a protest that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers.

The traditional restraints on aggressive and argumentative behavior — the Buddhist clergy and a once deeply held fear of bad karma, among other factors — have been weakened, says William J. Klausner, an expert on Thai culture and Buddhism who has studied village life since he moved to Thailand in the 1950s.

“Villagers today feel far less inclined to accord deference and respect to those in authority simply because of their privileged position and perceived sense of entitlement,” Mr. Klausner wrote in an essay.

Many Thais say they are shocked by the coarse language used by political activists of all stripes today. Insults that were once rarely heard in public have become common.

Thailand appears to be losing a small part of what has long attracted millions of tourists to its shores: a culture of unflappable, bend-over-backwards politeness.

Pakawan Malayavech, a 55-year-old native of a northeastern province, reflected on these changes as she walked through a crowd of tens of thousands of red-shirted protesters recently. She left Thailand as a young woman for the United States, where she drove a Good Humor ice cream truck in Fairfax, Virginia, and did other odd jobs. Then, in 1999, she returned to retire, and now she sees the country like frames in time-lapse photography.

“People used to forgive and forget easily,” she said. “Now the new generation are more like Americans — they talk back.”

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Dec 25, 2009

Muslim leaders look inward after arrests of N.Va. men

LONDON, ENGLAND APRIL 3: A composite of undate...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 25, 2009; 11:34 AM

The adults thought they'd done all they could. They had condemned extremist ideology, provided ski trips and scout meetings, and encouraged young people to speak openly about how to integrate their religion, Islam, with the secular world.

But since five college-age Virginia men were arrested in Pakistan earlier this month after allegedly being recruited over the Internet to join al-Qaeda, many Washington area Muslims are questioning whether mere condemnation is enough.

Mustafa Abu Maryam, a Muslim youth leader who has known the five arrested men since 2006, said he was alarmed by their decision to go to Pakistan after exchanging coded e-mails with a recruiter for the Pakistani Taliban. "I always thought that they had a firm grasp on life and that they rejected extremism or terrorism," Maryam said of the young men from Alexandria.

A profile page  within the social network serv...Image via Wikipedia

Mosques and Islamic organizations across the U.S. regularly issue statements rejecting violence and fringe ideologies. But since the arrests, Muslim leaders are scrambling to fill what they describe as a gap in their own connection with young people, searching for new ways to counter the influence of the extremists young people may encounter, especially online.

"I'm really concerned about what the Internet is doing to my young people," said Mohamed Magid, imam at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Sterling. "I used to not be worried about the radicalism of our youth. But now, after this, I'm worried more."

Relatives of the five men have declined to speak to reporters.

"I have to be a virtual Imam," Magid said, explaining that his mosque and other Muslim organizations and institutions need a larger and more effective online presence. Referring to extremists, he added, "Twenty-four hours, they're available; I want to be able to respond to that."

Until now, many Muslim leaders have focused on what they saw as external threats to young people, such as Islamophobia or the temptations of modern secular life. Now they say it is time to look inward, to provide a counterweight to those who misinterpret Koranic verses to promote violence -- and to learn what rhetoric and methods appeal to young people.

LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 25:  In this photo ill...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Radicals "seem to understand our youth better than we do," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. "They use hip-hop elements for some who relate to that."

Bray said "seductive videos" gradually lure in young people, building outrage against atrocities committed against Muslims. Extremist videos "play to what we call in the Muslim youth community 'jihad cool' -- a kind of machismo, that this is the hip thing to do."

For some, a new approach cannot come too soon. Zaki Barzinji, 20, a Sterling native and former president of Muslim Youths of North America, said mosques are "sort of in the Stone Age when it comes to outreach. Their youth programs are not attractive, not engaging . . . . They're shooting in the dark because it's always adults who are planning this outreach."

Nor is the threat limited to the Internet, Barzinji said, adding that groups of "traveling Muslim proselytizers" sometimes appear at Virginia Tech, where he is a senior, often attracting foreign students, who tend to be more socially isolated.

This UML diagram describes the domain of Linke...Image via Wikipedia

"They go to the dorms, look for Muslim-sounding names, knock on the door and say, 'Hey, we'd like to talk to you about hellfire and how you're heading that way,'" Barzinji said. "All they're offering is social connection and acceptance."

Barzinji said Muslim groups should create online forums where young Muslims can find answers from authoritative sources. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman at CAIR's Washington headquarters, said he spent a recent day at work with a copy of "The Social Media Bible," trying to figure out how to do just that.

One idea: a Web portal offering video explanations of Koranic verses that are sometimes misinterpreted by radicals, as well as suggestions of "positive things you can do to rectify injustice," Hooper said. Many Muslim parents said they don't worry about the influence of radical strangers on their own children. "I just don't see it as a very widespread phenomenon," said Bob Marro, a Great Falls father of two college students who were active in their high school's Muslim Student Association. "I know for my sons and their friends, if they got a message like that, they would find it just laughingly funny. . . . . If you've been open with your kids and talked to them as they were growing up, they'll have enough of a sense of their own value and their place in the world."

His son, Nicolas Marro, 19, a sophomore at the University of Virginia, said the five young men's decision to go to Pakistan "seems like such an anomaly, especially in this area, where people take their studies so seriously."

Whenever he has seen radical rhetoric on a public forum, he said, it is usually shouted down. "There will be a plethora of responses -- 'Are you crazy?' 'Is something wrong with you?'" he said. But if even a few young people slip through the cracks, the results can be devastating for the community. "They ruin it for the rest of us," said Azraf Ullah, 15, of Herndon, who was attending a scout meeting at the All-Dulles Area center last week. "We have to work harder to show that we're not that."

"The impression is like, 'Every Muslim youth is involved with this thing,'" said Syed Akhtar Alam, a father of three who lives in Ashburn. At an interfaith youth group Alam is involved with, parents of other faiths approached him after the arrests in Pakistan. "They just wanted to know, 'How could this happen?'" he said, adding, "It just happened randomly. Bad people are everywhere. . . . It is parents' responsibility to tell their kids, 'This is your country and you need to protect it.'"

Magid, the imam at the Sterling mosque, said Muslim leaders should be more active on social networking sites and should create an online network of imams to talk to young people, "even addressing questions about jihad," he said. It is no longer enough, he added, to rely only on mosque-based scout troops, basketball teams and religious classes.

Hooper said some leaders are discussing an Islamic Peace Corps through which youth could help Muslims in underdeveloped countries. But someadvocate a more adventuresome approach, borrowing from the extremists' own methods. "A 20-year-old, he's not satisfied with a canned food drive to solve the world's problems," said a religious leader whose mosque would not permit him to be quoted by name. "You've got to give them something more, even a little macho. "These boys who got busted, . . . .they want to be baaaad," the leader said. "You've got to be as bad as the jihadis. You've got to show them jumping out of helicopters. This ain't no Peace Corps. "

Staff writer Brigid Schulte contributed to this report.

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Nov 6, 2009

Generation Recession - Nation

(The Depression) The Single Men's Unemployed A...Image via Wikipedia

When David Thyme was an even younger man than he is today, his fantasies of early adulthood did not include a 9:30 pm curfew and a bed in Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth. Then again, they also didn't include a recession so severe that his financially strapped father would ask him to help with rent--or that when he couldn't find an entry-level job to do so, his father would ask him to leave home. "He was like, Son, you got to do what you got to do. I can't have you in my house," recalled the thin-faced 18-year-old from the Bronx.

Shawn Bolden, an earnest 23-year-old from Harlem, also nursed a different vision of his youthful years. A graduate of Monroe College with a degree in criminal justice, he imagined dedicating his days to nurturing the minds of the next generation of neglected students, doing his part to solder shut the school-to-prison pipeline. But since losing his job teaching arts and college prep at a local nonprofit in June, he's been struggling to find his way back into the classroom, all the while worrying about feeding his newborn daughter.

And then there's Charles Channon. A 25-year-old graduate of George Washington University, he dreamed that his postcollege days would be devoted to an onward-and-upward career with an international development firm--or at least a job with which to pay off $65,000 in college debt. "I wouldn't pretend that there's absolutely no conceit in me, but I do want to get out there and make the best difference I can," he said.

So much for youthful fantasies.

These are not happy days for America's young and striving. Indeed, as the economy has rocked and tumbled its way through 2009, spewing jobs like a sea-sick tourist, these have become very, very bad days. In September, the unemployment rate for people between the ages of 16 and 24 hovered morosely at 18.1 percent, nearly double the national average for that month. At the same time, the actual employment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds dropped to a startling 46 percent, the grimmest such figure on record since 1948, the year the government began keeping track. Taken together, this same group of young people has lost more than 2.5 million jobs since the economy began deflating in December 2007, roughly one-third of all the jobs lost, making them the hardest-hit age group of the recession.

And it gets bleaker. Bad as the youth unemployment numbers are, the underemployment numbers are even more distressing, with young people once again taking the hit. During the second quarter of 2009, for instance, the underemployment rate for workers under 25 was an alarming 31.9 percent; for workers between 25 and 34 the underemployment rate was 17.1 percent.

All of which suggests that for all this country's unbridled fascination with the glories of youth; for all the teen-lusting TV dramas, wunderkind "it" kids and peewee tech moguls, to say nothing of all the industries built on making the rest of us look and feel teen-queen young--being a member of today's youth explosion isn't a particularly enviable position after all.

"Young people under 30 have been far more affected than other groups in the economy during the recession," says Andrew Sum, professor of economics and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "And the younger you are, the worse off you've been."

The reasons for this are multiple and complex, but perhaps the one that young people cite most is their desperate new job competition: adults twice their age with college degrees and decades of experience are now applying for entry-level positions. Moreover, those young people lucky enough to have found work often fall prey to the old "last hired, first fired" syndrome, putting them right back where they started. The result is that young people are not only working less than at any time since the Great Depression but could suffer the consequences deep into their individual and collective futures.

"These effects are long-lasting; they're not short and measly-lasting," explains Sum, citing several studies suggesting that a slow employment start can have long-term consequences. In the case of white male college graduates, for instance, an influential study showed that for as long as fifteen years after college, those who graduated into the recession-rocked economy of the early 1980s earned less than those who graduated into a sunny employment market. Equally disturbing: those who work only part time when younger, as so many young people must now do, see little benefit to their future wages compared with those working full time.

"We are throwing out of the labor market those kids who will benefit the most from the work experience they get, and they will lose that for the rest of their lives," Sum warns. "That's why it really is a depression for young workers. And I don't use that word lightly."

This was not the graduation party that most young folks imagined when they daydreamed about their liberation into early adulthood. It's certainly not the champagne-and-streamers rager that millennial boosters and other youth gurus anticipated when they dashed off all those messianic star charts predicting that this new wave of young folks would usher in the next epoch of dreamers and do-gooder types: the next Great Generation.

And yet, bleak as the current climate is, the story behind the statistics is also far more complicated--and, in some ways, uglier--than many of the recent apocalyptic pronouncements about a "lost generation" and "dead end kids" would suggest (see BusinessWeek's October 19 cover story and the September 27 New York Post, if you dare). Certainly there are scads of lost young souls roaming the aisles of job fairs, cluttering unemployment offices and weighing whether it's more important to pay the electricity or the phone bill. But in this generation of 80-odd million, some people are far more lost than others, while some have the luxury of not being lost at all. Quite simply, the real danger of the recession is not necessarily a lost generation of unemployed millennials so much as a Swiss cheese generation where the places once occupied by the least affluent--particularly the least affluent people of color--have simply been carved out.

"I hope people are really clear that this is not an equal-opportunity recession, that it's hurting the weakest," says Dedrick Muhammad, senior organizer and research associate for the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good, who has done extensive research on the recession's disparate, and decidedly racial, impact on the people of this country.

Once again, the data help tell the story. As reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early October, young African-American teens between the ages of 16 and 19 have an unemployment rate of 40.7 percent, while young Latinos of the same age are unemployed at a rate of nearly 30 percent--both drastically higher than the 23 percent unemployment experienced by their white peers. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the disparity is even more dramatic: while young white workers in their early 20s have an unemployment rate of 13.1 percent, their African-American compatriots are unemployed at the rate of 27.1 percent, more than twice as high.

Or as Sum summarizes, "If you are both low-income and black or low-income and Hispanic, you have lost the most. And if you are young, affluent and a woman, in terms of just labor market studies, you've done OK... although across the board everybody has lost."

These losses have stacked up quickly, but today's great youth crisis didn't happen overnight, the sudden result of an immaculate recession. For young workers--and in particular young, low-income and workers of color--the struggle began long ago, with the changes that began refashioning the economy as far back as the 1980s: the decline of unions; the long, slow death of manufacturing; the rise of the service economy; and the near-total disappearance of proactive government policy. The last decade in particular, with its post-dot-com recession followed by a jobless youth recovery, has been particularly bruising.

The result of all this has been that many of today's young people--again, especially the poor, those with less education and people of color--have a measurably harder road to travel than their generational elders, according to "The Economic State of Young America," a report published in spring 2008 by Demos, a New York-based research and advocacy organization. Between 1975 and 2005, for instance, the typical annual income for workers between the ages of 25 and 34 decreased across all educational brackets, with the exception of women with bachelor's degrees. Men without a high school diploma suffered most, their annual income plummeting by 34.2 percent, while men with a high school diploma or the equivalent earned the runner-up slot, with an income drop of 28.5 percent. As for women, those with less than a high school diploma, as well as those possessing just a diploma, lost less ground than their male counterparts; but then again, they're still doing worse than before and, perhaps more to the point, they still fare significantly worse than men their age.

At the same time, today's young workers have had to do more with less. College tuition rates have skyrocketed--in fact, rates for four-year public universities have more than doubled since 1980--with the unsurprising result that nearly two-thirds of students graduating from four-year colleges in 2008 left in debt. The cost of childcare now eats up as much as 10 percent of a two-parent family's income in many states (as much as 14.3 percent in Oregon). And young people between the ages of 19 and 34 are the most likely population to be uninsured--not because they don't want health benefits but because employers don't offer them. A case in point: 63.3 percent of recent high school graduates had employer-provided healthcare in 1979, whereas just 33.7 percent had it in 2004.

"What we're looking at is a situation where young people entered the recession already feeling the brunt of thirty years' worth of pretty gradual but nonetheless dramatic economic and social changes," says Nancy Cauthen, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos. "The recession just made a bad situation worse."

Thankfully, there's something of a pewter lining surrounding all this bleakness: not only are certain swaths of this generation among the most politically engaged in decades but the generation's politics in general trend decidedly toward the progressive. Indeed, many young people have already begun coming together, in protest and coalition-style advocacy, to push for everything from green jobs to increased bank regulation to state budgets that aren't balanced on students' backs (thank you, University of California protesters!).

This is promising, since the list of much-needed solutions to young people's recession problems is long and daunting--beginning, many researchers agree, with the need to create more jobs: green jobs, Job Corps jobs, public works jobs, even tax credit-induced jobs. However, these can't be just any old jobs; they must be jobs targeted toward young people, jobs for which employers are induced to hire the youthful, inexperienced and most vulnerable, because, as Sum says, "Very few kids are being hired by the stimulus." His solution: pull them into the workforce either through direct job creation, partial subsidies or targeted tax credits to youth-hiring businesses. Moreover, he advises, these jobs also must last longer than a brief six- to twelve-week summer fling. That's how long the roughly 284,000 summer youth jobs funded by the stimulus lasted, even though there is almost no evidence that a quickie summer job has any lingering effect on a young person's long-term prospects--though there is evidence that summer jobs that extend into longer-term employment help quite a bit, according to Sum.

But above all, these new jobs have to be far more plentiful and ambitious in scope than the ones created thus far, not the least because it will take years for the country to crawl out of the vast employment hole, roughly 10.7 million jobs deep, created by this recession. And while 284,000 summer youth jobs certainly represent an important start, they not only don't meet the current need but seem downright piddling compared with the nearly 1 million government-sponsored summer youth jobs that existed during the late 1970s.

"This is classic of Obama's situation: Obama can double something or increase it 100 percent from the previous administration, but it's still so insignificant to the problem," explains Dedrick Muhammad. By contrast, he observes, "Wall Street's booming because the government took seriously their problems and did a massive intervention."

Of course, even if a slew of youth jobs materialized overnight, it would only be the beginning, since, as Cauthen cautions, "the recession could end tomorrow and that's not necessarily going to mean a bright future for young people." For that, she and others have argued, this generation needs more systemic, probing change, including easier access to the protection of unions in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act, more affordable health insurance in the form of universal health coverage, childcare that doesn't decimate their paychecks. And that's just for starters. With these policies in place, the rising generation still has a chance at the starry future that's been predicted for it. Without them, well, just imagine the way things are now--and then extrapolate.

Two recent events in New York City illustrate the way the world is trending for two very different groups of young people--the young and bailed-out versus the young and bailed-on. The first took place amid the brick-and-ivy greenery of Columbia University, in the world of the bailed-out. It was mid-September, and several hundred college students had packed into the school's Faculty House for an intimate evening with a team of Goldman Sachs recruiters. A year earlier, these recruiters probably seemed like a dying species, a herd of expensively dressed mastodons taking their valedictory spin, while the sober-suited students must have looked almost pitiable. But on this evening, the recruiters looked very much alive--downright brash--as they wooed the standing-room-only crowd of eager if anxious-looking students. Clutching brochures that urged them to "make the most of your talent," these students listened in unblinking awe as the recruiters spoke of their bank's "competitive advantage," its "global impact," the golden "opportunity" that awaited all Goldman employees, old and young.

And in case the students missed the point, there was a promotional video, starring a comely squad of young analysts (all programmed, it seemed, to repeat the word "unique!"), that ended with the cultish mantra, "I believe, I believe, I believe in Goldman Sachs." It was as if it were 2006, not 2009, as if the good old days of overpaid young analysts with Town Cars and expense accounts were back again--which, thanks to the government, they essentially are.

"If you do well and you're ambitious, you really can do well," a handsome young trader of mortgage-backed securities promised a throng of students who'd gathered around him for advice.

Meanwile, several weeks earlier, in a part of town not touched by bank bailouts, a very different scene played itself out in a Covenant House conference room. There, nine homeless New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 20--among them, David Thyme--huddled around a table topped with pizza and soda and shared their failed attempts at finding a job. All of them wanted one, but none had managed to find one despite months of scratching at the closed doors of just about every fast-food, retail and service joint in town. According to Jerome Kilbane, Covenant House New York's executive director, the organization's job training program has placed 40 percent fewer young people over the past year.

"It's kind of discouraging when you go out and you come back empty-handed every day," said Samantha, a serious-faced 19-year-old who dreams of becoming a physical therapist someday but is currently so strapped for cash she can barely afford a MetroCard to look for a job.

"I feel if I had a job I wouldn't be here," added Leonda, who is charismatic, chatty and also 19. "Not to say that this is a horrible place, but I'd be able to stand on my own two feet and live as an adult and be me."

Samantha and Leonda, who are part of a wave of homeless young folks that has swollen the ranks of Covenant House's residents by 25 percent, expressed deep anxiety about their future. But they also knew their worth. When asked what they wanted to tell the people in power, Samantha didn't hesitate.

"I say, We are your future. If we don't make it now, then who's going to take care of you when y'all is in y'all retirement phase?" she asked. "If we don't make it out of this, then basically the whole world don't make it out of this."

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Aug 18, 2009

The Afghan Age Divide

Muhammad Shafiq Popal is one of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's more formidable opponents — yet he isn't a chieftain, a warlord or even a candidate in the Aug. 20 Afghanistan presidential election. Just 30 years old, Popal is a rare individual in the country: a community organizer who heads the Afghanistan Youth National and Social Organization (AYNSO), an NGO that, in a nation marked by division, transcends religion, ethnicity and tribe. AYNSO's broad objective is to promote democracy and human rights. But Popal's current objective is much more specific: mobilizing AYNSO's 32,000 members to unseat Karzai, who he believes has done little to address the needs of Afghanistan's youth. "The present government doesn't understand our value," says Popal. "That has to change." Nearby, at Kabul University, Qudsia Zohab, a freshman studying literature, says her classmates spend more time on the coming election than on their coming exam. "Most of the university students will vote," she says — but not for Karzai. "There is a feeling that he doesn't work for young people."

That Afghanistan is even holding an election is practically a miracle. The year is far from over, but it's already the bloodiest since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Large swaths of the southern and eastern regions of the country are under the control of militants, while some security analysts estimate that the Taliban has a permanent presence in at least 70% of the nation. As the election nears, the frequency and ferocity of attacks by insurgents have spiked. The U.N. reports that in the first six months of 2009, civilian casualties from such attacks — as well as from friendly fire — are 24% higher than in the corresponding period last year. July was the worst month ever for the NATO-led coalition forces: 76 soldiers were killed, more than half of them Americans. (See pictures of the U.S. Marines new offensive in Afghanistan.)

That's why this election is so crucial. Afghanistan last went to the polls in 2004, in what was widely seen as a referendum on Karzai as the interim leader after U.S. forces arrived three years earlier. It was the first time Afghans had ever elected a President, and while many hoped for change, the Karzai government soon reverted to the traditional practices of top-down leadership and relying on personal connections and patronage to run the country. That approach may work with the older generation, but it's left many youths frustrated. More than 70% of the country's 33 million people are under the age of 30, and estimates of registered voters ages 18 to 25 range from 8 million to 10 million, out of a total of 17 million. While today's young Afghans have experienced the ravages of war, they have also witnessed — as refugees or through TV and the Internet — an alternative: governments accountable to the public. "People assume the elders will tell the young how to vote," says 38-year-old Jahid Mohseni, CEO of the media organization Moby Group. "Young people still respect their elders, but they have developed a capacity to think for themselves. And the candidates that neglect that vote may be in for a surprise." (See art depicting war-torn Afghanistan.)

While security is a daily concern for most Afghans, the young in particular want a government committed to eliminating the corruption plaguing the country and to generating jobs that go to people who deserve them. Many youths feel that Karzai, with his emphasis on building relationships with tribal elders, warlords and other traditional power brokers, is not their man.

Besides the President, there are 40 candidates on the ballot, but only two are contenders: Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a onetime Foreign Minister, and Ashraf Ghani, Karzai's former Finance Minister, who used to be an analyst with the World Bank. In a recently released poll conducted by U.S. pollsters Glevum Associates in July, Ghani was considered a long shot — garnering only a 4% rating, compared with Abdullah's 25% and Karzai's 31%. But in recent weeks, the relentlessly pragmatic Ghani has steadily gained ground, according to private polls conducted by nonpartisan groups. Those polls also indicate that Karzai is unlikely to receive the 50% of votes required to avoid a runoff. Whoever joins Karzai in the second round will largely be the choice of the youth vote. For AYNSO, that individual is Ghani, whose platform includes government hiring based on merit, job creation through financial incentives and the modernizing of school curriculums to help bring the country into the 21st century. "Lots of candidates promise that they support the youth, but with Ghani, he says how he will do it," says Popal.

In Search of Honest Work
Esmatullah Kosar is someone who very much wants to be judged on his merits. A slight, shy 24-year-old, Kosar has just returned from three years of studying in a Bangalore university, on a scholarship from the Indian government. At age 2, Kosar lost his father in the war against the Soviets. His mother, a member of the Hazara ethnic group heavily persecuted by the Taliban regime, saw her sons' education as the family's ticket out of desperation. Kosar thought his fluent English and new bachelor's degree in human resources and management would guarantee him a good job in a country crying out for professionals. When he got an interview as a human-resources assistant in a government ministry, he was confident of getting the job — until he encountered the interviewer. "I was more knowledgeable than he was, and I was supposed to be his assistant," says Kosar. He was rejected. The same thing had happened to most of the other graduates in his scholarship program. "Thousands of graduates are coming out every year with talent and skills, but they cannot get jobs because those in higher posts are not professionals, so they are threatened by the younger generations who really know something."

See pictures of treasure hunting in Afghanistan.

Watch "Afghanistan's Ongoing War.

Disillusioned, many young Afghans try to find jobs overseas — sometimes with tragic results. In April, on the border with Pakistan, 62 young Afghans were found suffocated to death in a shipping container stuffed with some 100 illegal migrants. They had been bound for Iran. The estimated number of illegal migrants fleeing Afghanistan last year was 600,000 — nearly double the number in 2006. According to Basir, a human trafficker who asked that his full name not be used, most of the migrants are young and educated — "middle class, with enough money to pay me but not enough to live without a job." Though business is good for him — the going rate to Turkey is $6,000, Europe up to $15,000 — Basir is ambivalent about the exodus: "If the youth are leaving, that means there is no future for Afghanistan."

The needless deaths of so many young Afghans has sparked nationwide soul-searching and inspired at least one young Afghan to do something. At 20 years old, Sayed Hussain Fakhri is the youngest Afghan running for a seat on the Kabul provincial council, a position similar to that of a state congressman in the U.S. "There is no excuse for men to be going away and dying for jobs," says Fakhri. That's what made me think I should run for office, to see if I could change that." (Watch TIME's video "The Life (and Death Threats) of an Outspoken Afghan Woman.")

Because so many young Afghans feel that the government has failed them, some are taking control of their future and helping other youths in the process. Moby Group is Afghanistan's most influential broadcaster, having created a hugely popular local version of American Idol called Afghan Star as well as a program in which young Afghans argue, through debates, about why they should hold high office. CEO Mohseni chalks up Moby's success to its emphasis on young personnel: he reckons the average age of his 600 employees is 24. "They are a generation with fresh ideas," he says. "If [this generation is] earning an income and is engaged and involved, you have a better chance of moving the whole country forward."

Hope amid Despair
In Afghanistan, it is often said that the definition of Taliban (which literally means students) is "young man without a job." The Taliban, points out 23-year-old Moby manager Yosuf Shabir Mohseni (no relation to Jahid), started as a youth movement frustrated with injustices during the civil war of the early 1990s — injustices that Yosuf Mohseni feels still abound. "It just doesn't seem like the government is paying attention to what is really needed to fix this country," he says. "If young people are left in the dark, what do you think will happen in 10 years? The Taliban." Most young Afghans interviewed for this story believe the best — and simplest — way to defeat the militants is to give idle youth gainful employment. "We want to feel like we are part of society, that we can contribute and that our voices can be heard," says Kosar. "When you don't find that in normal life, you look elsewhere."

Twenty-year-old Shafiq Shah is an extreme example of that. He was arrested after his explosives-laden Toyota failed to detonate near his intended target: four foreigners working for an aid organization. Shah has spent the past several months in Kabul's Pul-e-Charkhi prison, where he was eventually moved to an isolation wing because of his aggressive proselytizing. He is intelligent, charismatic and wholly dedicated to the downfall of the current government. While he says the Afghan leadership isn't sufficiently Islamic, the real target of his rage is what he considers an absence of justice: "Afghanistan is a society where men rape children and go free. In the Taliban time, if they arrested a robber, they would kill him. If a butcher was cheating his customers, they would cut off his fingers."

Though Shah is a radical, literature student Zohab sees his point. After being denied an education for so long under the Taliban regime, she is finally able to pursue her dream of getting a degree by taking night courses while working at the Kabul Museum. Still, she says, she suffers periodic harassment as she enters and leaves the campus. She has been called names, threatened, even beaten. Appeals to the police never help. These days she goes to school only if her father or brother can drop her off. "I love Afghanistan," she says, "but sometimes I feel like I hate Afghans. Even if the economy improves and there are jobs after graduation, it is worth nothing if we [women] don't feel safe."

A constant sense of insecurity coupled with a chronic lack of opportunity: Afghanistan seems a nation in perpetual crisis, with no respite for young and old. But it is in the nature of youth to be optimistic, and Yosuf Mohseni, for one, finds hope in the coming election. "I do see a future, provided we choose the right person," he says. "If I can influence one person and he influences one person, we can all change. Who does the country have but us?"

See TIME's Afghanistan covers.

See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal Valley.

Aug 6, 2009

The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers

Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States.

After years of neglecting signs of trouble, elite opinion-makers have begun in recent months to recognize that things have gone horribly awry. Journals ranging from Time, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New Republic to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times concur on the diagnosis: newspapers, as we have known them, are disintegrating and are possibly on the verge of extinction. Time's Walter Isaacson describes the situation as having "reached meltdown proportions" and concludes, "It is now possible to contemplate a time in the near future when major towns will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters." A newspaper industry that still employs roughly 50,000 journalists--the vast majority of the remaining practitioners of the craft--is teetering on the brink.

Blame has been laid first and foremost on the Internet, for luring away advertisers and readers, and on the economic meltdown, which has demolished revenues and hammered debt-laden media firms. But for all the ink spilled addressing the dire circumstance of the ink-stained wretch, the understanding of what we can do about the crisis has been woefully inadequate. Unless we rethink alternatives and reforms, the media will continue to flail until journalism is all but extinguished.

Let's begin with the crisis. In a nutshell, media corporations, after running journalism into the ground, have determined that news gathering and reporting are not profit-making propositions. So they're jumping ship. The country's great regional dailies--the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer--are in bankruptcy. Denver's Rocky Mountain News recently closed down, ending daily newspaper competition in that city. The owners of the San Francisco Chronicle, reportedly losing $1 million a week, are threatening to shutter the paper, leaving a major city without a major daily newspaper. Big dailies in Seattle (the Times), Chicago (the Sun-Times) and Newark (the Star-Ledger) are reportedly near the point of folding, and smaller dailies like the Baltimore Examiner have already closed. The 101-year-old Christian Science Monitor, in recent years an essential source of international news and analysis, is folding its daily print edition. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is scuttling its print edition and downsizing from a news staff of 165 to about twenty for its online-only incarnation. Whole newspaper chains--such as Lee Enterprises, the owner of large and medium-size publications that for decades have defined debates in Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin--are struggling as the value of stock shares falls below the price of a single daily paper. And the New York Times needed an emergency injection of hundreds of millions of dollars by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in order to stay afloat.

Those are the headlines. Arguably uglier is the death-by-small-cuts of newspapers that are still functioning. Layoffs of reporters and closings of bureaus mean that even if newspapers survive, they have precious few resources for actually doing journalism. Job cuts during the first months of this year--300 at the Los Angeles Times, 205 at the Miami Herald, 156 at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 150 at the Kansas City Star, 128 at the Sacramento Bee, 100 at the Providence Journal, 100 at the Hartford Courant, ninety at the San Diego Union-Tribune, thirty at the Wall Street Journal and on and on--suggest that this year will see far more positions eliminated than in 2008, when almost 16,000 were lost. Even Doonesbury's Rick Redfern has been laid off from his job at the Washington Post.

The toll is daunting. As former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and Post associate editor Robert Kaiser have observed, "A great news organization is difficult to build and tragically easy to disassemble." That disassembling is now in full swing. As journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down, whole sectors of our civic life go dark. Newspapers that long ago closed their foreign bureaus and eliminated their crack investigative operations are shuttering at warp speed what remains of city hall, statehouse and Washington bureaus. The Cox chain, publisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin American-Statesman and fifteen other papers, will padlock its DC bureau on April 1--a move that follows the closures of the respected Washington bureaus of Advance Publications (the Newark Star-Ledger, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and others); Copley Newspapers and its flagship San Diego Union-Tribune; as well as those of the once great regional dailies of Des Moines, Hartford, Houston, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Toledo.

Mired in debt and facing massive losses, the managers of corporate newspaper firms seek to right the sinking ship by cutting costs, leading remaining newspaper readers to ask why they are bothering to pay for publications that are pale shadows of themselves. It is the daily newspaper death dance-cum- funeral march.

But it is not just newspapers that are in crisis; it is the institution of journalism itself. By any measure, journalism is missing from most commercial radio. TV news operations have become celebrity- and weather-obsessed "profit centers" rather than the journalistic icons of the Murrow and Cronkite eras. Cable channels "fill the gap" with numberless pundits and "business reporters," who got everything about the last decade wrong but now complain that the government doesn't know how to set things right. Cable news is defensible only because of the occasional newspaper reporter moonlighting as a talking head. But what happens when the last reporter stops collecting a newspaper paycheck and goes into PR or lobbying? She'll leave cable an empty vessel and take the public's right to know anything more than a rhetorical flourish with her.

The Internet and blogosphere, too, depend in large part on "old media" to do original journalism. Web links still refer readers mostly to stories that first appeared in print. Even in more optimistic scenarios, no one has a business model to sustain digital journalism beyond a small number of self-supporting services. The attempts of newspapers to shift their operations online have been commercial failures, as they trade old media dollars for new media pennies. We are enthusiastic about Wikipedia and the potential for collaborative efforts on the web; they can help democratize our media and politics. But they do not replace skilled journalists on the ground covering the events of the day and doing investigative reporting. Indeed, the Internet cannot achieve its revolutionary potential as a citizens' forum without such journalism.

So this is where we stand: much of local and state government, whole federal departments and agencies, American activities around the world, the world itself--vast areas of great public concern--are either neglected or on the verge of neglect. Politicians and administrators will work increasingly without independent scrutiny and without public accountability. We are entering historically uncharted territory in America, a country that from its founding has valued the press not merely as a watchdog but as the essential nurturer of an informed citizenry. The collapse of journalism and the democratic infrastructure it sustains is not a development that anyone, except perhaps corrupt politicians and the interests they serve, looks forward to. Such a crisis demands solutions equal to the task. So what are they?

Regrettably the loud discussion of the collapse of journalism has been far stronger in describing the symptoms than in providing remedies. With the frank acknowledgment that the old commercial system has failed and will not return, there has been a flurry of modest proposals to address the immodest crisis. These range from schemes to further consolidate news gathering at the local level to pleas for donations from news consumers and hopes that hard-pressed philanthropists and foundations will decide to go into the news business. And they range from ineffectual to improbable to undesirable. Walter Isaacson has proposed that newspapers come up with a plan to charge readers "micropayments" for online content. Even if such a system were practically possible, the last thing we should do is erect electronic walls that block the openness and democratic genius of the Internet.

Don't get us wrong. We are enthusiastic about many of the efforts to promote original journalism online, such as ProPublica, Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post. We cheer on exciting local endeavors, such as MinnPost in the Twin Cities--a nonprofit, five-day-a-week online journal that covers Minnesota politics with support from major foundations, wealthy families and roughly 900 member-donors contributing $10 to $10,000. But even our friends at MinnPost acknowledge that their project is not filling the void in a metro area that still has two large, if struggling, daily newspapers. Just about every serious journalist involved in an online project will readily concede that even if these ventures pan out, we will still have a dreadfully undernourished journalism system with considerably less news gathering and reporting, especially at the local level.

For all their merits and flaws, these fixes are mere triage strategies. They are not cures; in fact, if there is a risk in them, it is that they might briefly discourage the needed reshaping of ownership models that are destined to fail.

The place to begin crafting solutions is with the understanding that the economic downturn did not cause the crisis in journalism; nor did the Internet. The economic collapse and Internet have greatly accentuated and accelerated a process that can be traced back to the 1970s, when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off. It was then that managers began to balance their books and to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus. Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-size American city in the 1960s, and you will be awed by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which "outsiders"--civil rights campaigners, antiwar activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader--ended up on the front page.

As long ago as the late 1980s and early 1990s, prominent journalists and editors like Jim Squires were quitting the field in disgust at the contempt corporate management displayed toward journalism. Print advertising, which still accounts for the lion's share of newspaper revenue, declined gently as a percentage of all ad spending from 1950 to '90, as television grew in importance. Starting in 1990, well before the rise of the web as a competitor for ad dollars, newspaper ad revenues went into a sharp decline, from 26 percent of all media advertising that year to what will likely be around 10 percent this year.

Even before that decline, newspaper owners were choosing short-term profits over long-term viability. As far back as 1983, legendary reporter Ben Bagdikian warned publishers that if they continued to water down their journalism and replace it with (less expensive) fluff, they would undermine their raison d'être and fail to cultivate younger readers. But corporate newspaper owners abandoned any responsibility to maintain the franchise. When the Internet came along, newspapers were already heading due south.

We do not mean to suggest that '60s journalism was perfect or that we should aim to return there. Even then journalism suffered from a generally agreed-upon professional code that relied far too heavily on official sources to set the news agenda and decide the range of debate in our political culture. That weakness of journalism has been magnified in the era of corporate control, leaving us with a situation most commentators are loath to acknowledge: the quality of journalism in the United States today is dreadful.

Of course, there are still tremendous journalists doing outstanding work, but they battle a system increasingly pushing in the opposite direction. (That is why some of the most powerful statements about our current circumstances come in the form of books, like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine; or documentaries, like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine; or beat reporting in magazines, like that of Jane Mayer and Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker.) The news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion, spoon-feeding us lies masquerading as fact-checked verities. They missed the past decade of corporate scandals. They cheered on the housing bubble and genuflected before the financial sector (and Gilded Age levels of wealth and inequality) as it blasted debt and speculation far beyond what the real economy could sustain. Today they do almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spare not a moment to update us on the "Octomom." They trade in trivia and reduce everything to spin, even matters of life and death.

No wonder young people find mainstream journalism uninviting; it would almost be more frightening if they embraced what passes for news today. Older Americans have been giving up on old media too, if not as rapidly and thoroughly as the young. If we are going to address the crisis in journalism, we have to come up with solutions that provide us with hard-hitting reporting that monitors people in power, that engages all our people, not just the classes attractive to advertisers, and that seeks to draw all Americans into public life. Going backward is not an option; nor is it desirable. The old corporate media system choked on its own excess. We should not seek to restore or re-create it. We have to move forward to a system that creates a journalism far superior to that of the recent past.

We can do exactly that--but only if we recognize and embrace the necessity of government intervention. Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism. We understand that this is a controversial position. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently engineered a $765 million bailout of French newspapers, free marketeers rushed to the barricades to declare, "No, no, not in the land of the free press." Conventional wisdom says that the founders intended the press to be entirely independent of the state, to preserve the integrity of the press. Bree Nordenson notes that when she informed famed journalist Tom Rosenstiel that her visionary 2007 Columbia Journalism Review article concerned the ways government could support the press, Rosenstiel "responded brusquely, 'Well, I'm not a big fan of government support.' I explained that I just wanted to put the possibility on the table. 'Well, I'd take it off the table,' he said."

We are sympathetic to that position. As writers, we have been routinely critical of government--Democratic and Republican--over the past three decades and antagonistic to those in power. Policies that would allow politicians to exercise even the slightest control over the news are, in our view, not only frightening but unacceptable. Fortunately, the rude calculus that says government intervention equals government control is inaccurate and does not reflect our past or present, or what enlightened policies and subsidies could entail.

Our founders never thought that freedom of the press would belong only to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the notion that journalism should be regarded as the private preserve of the Rupert Murdochs and John Malones. The founders would not have entertained, let alone accepted, the current equation that seems to say that if rich people determine there is no good money to be made in the news, then society cannot have news. Let's find a king and call it a day.

The founders regarded the establishment of a press system, the Fourth Estate, as the first duty of the state. Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an accident. It had little to do with "free markets." It was the result of public policy.

Moreover, when the Supreme Court has taken up matters of freedom of the press, its majority opinions have argued strongly for the necessity of the press as the essential underpinning of our constitutional republic. First Amendment absolutist Hugo Black wrote that the "Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." Black argued for the right and necessity of the government to counteract private monopolistic control over the media. More recently Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, argued that "assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order."

But government support for the press is not merely a matter of history or legal interpretation. Complaints about a government role in fostering journalism invariably overlook the fact that our contemporary media system is anything but an independent "free market" institution. The government subsidies established by the founders did not end in the eighteenth--or even the nineteenth--century. Today the government doles out tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, including free and essentially permanent monopoly broadcast licenses, monopoly cable and satellite privileges, copyright protection and postal subsidies. (Indeed, this magazine has been working for the past few years with journals of the left and right to assure that those subsidies are available to all publications.) Because the subsidies mostly benefit the wealthy and powerful, they are rarely mentioned in the fictional account of an independent and feisty Fourth Estate. Both the rise and decline of commercial journalism can be attributed in part to government policies, which scrapped the regulations and ownership rules that had encouraged local broadcast journalism and allowed for lax regulation as well as tax deductions for advertising--policies that greatly increased news media revenues.

The truth is that government policies and subsidies already define our press system. The only question is whether they will be enlightened and democratic, as in the early Republic, or corrupt and corrosive to democracy, as has been the case in recent decades. The answer will be determined in coming years as part of what is certain to be a bruising battle: media companies and their lobbying groups will argue against the "heavy hand of government" while defending existing subsidies. They will propose more deregulation, hoping to capitalize on the crisis to remove the last barriers to print, broadcast and digital consolidation in local markets--creating media "company towns," where competition is eliminated, along with journalism jobs, in pursuit of better returns for investors. Enlightened elected officials, media unions and public interest and community groups that recognize the role of robust journalism are going to have to step up to argue for a real fix.

Fortunately, an increasing number of veteran journalists, scholars and activists are beginning to grasp the historical significance of the present moment and the central role of public policy. It was the late James Carey, decorated University of Illinois and Columbia journalism professor and no fan of government power, who saw this before almost anyone else, writing in 2002: "Alas, the press may have to rely upon a democratic state to create the conditions necessary for a democratic press to flourish and for journalists to be restored to their proper role as orchestrators of the conversation of a democratic culture."

We have to ask where we want to end up, after the reforms have been implemented. In our view we need to have competing independent newsrooms of well-paid journalists in every state and in every major community. This is not about newspapers or even broadcast media; it entails all media and accepts that we may be headed into an era when nearly all of our communication will be digital. Ideally this will be a pluralistic system, where there will be different institutional structures. Varieties of nonprofit media will have to play a much larger role, though not a monopolistic one.

We recognize and embrace the need for a system in which there will be a range of perspectives from left to right, alongside some media more intent on maintaining a less explicitly ideological stance. We must have a system that prohibits state censorship and that minimizes commercial control over journalistic values and pursuits. The right of any person to start his or her own medium, commercial or nonprofit, at any time is inviolable. From this foundation we can envision a thriving, digital citizen's journalism complementing and probably merging with professional journalism. What will the mix be? It would vary, with more not-for-profit and subsidized media in rural and low-income areas, more for-profit media in wealthier ones. The first order of any government intervention would be to assure that no state or region would be without quality local, state, national or international journalism.

We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the military in that regard. Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack. With the collapse of the commercial news system, the same logic applies. Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.

So, if we can accept the need for government intervention to save American journalism, what form should it take? In the near term, we need to think about an immediate journalism economic stimulus, to be revisited after three years, and we need to think big. Let's eliminate postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20 percent of their revenues from advertising. This keeps alive all sorts of magazines and journals of opinion that are being devastated by distribution costs. It is these publications that often do investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism.

What to do about newspapers? Let's give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. The newspapers would have to publish at least five times per week and maintain a substantial "news hole," say at least twenty-four broad pages each day, with less than 50 percent advertising. In effect, this means the government will pay for every citizen who so desires to get a free daily newspaper subscription, but the taxpayer gets to pick the newspaper--this is an indirect subsidy, because the government does not control who gets the money. This will buy time for our old media newsrooms--and for us citizens--to develop a plan to establish journalism in the digital era. We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well.

None of these proposed subsidies favor or censor any particular viewpoint. The primary condition on media recipients of this stimulus subsidy would be a mild one: that they make at least 90 percent of their content immediately available free online. In this way, the subsidies would benefit citizens and taxpayers, expanding the public domain and providing the Internet with a rich vein of material available to all.

What should be done about the disconnect between young people and journalism? Have the government allocate funds so every middle school, high school and college has a well-funded student newspaper and a low-power FM radio station, all of them with substantial websites. We need to get young people accustomed to producing journalism and to appreciating what differentiates good journalism from the other stuff.

The essential component for the immediate stimulus should be an exponential expansion of funding for public and community broadcasting, with the requirement that most of the funds be used for journalism, especially at the local level, and that all programming be available for free online. Other democracies outspend the United States by whopping margins per capita on public media: Canada sixteen times more; Germany twenty times more; Japan forty-three times more; Britain sixty times more; Finland and Denmark seventy-five times more. These investments have produced dramatically more detailed and incisive international reporting, as well as programming to serve young people, women, linguistic and ethnic minorities and regions that might otherwise be neglected by for-profit media.

Perhaps in the past the paucity of public media in the United States could be justified by the enormous corporate media presence. But as the corporate sector shrivels we need something to replace it, and fast. Public and community broadcasters are in a position to be just that, and to keep alive the practice of news gathering in countless communities across the nation. Indeed, if a regional daily like the San Francisco Chronicle fails this year, why not try a federally funded experiment: maintain the newsroom as a digital extension of the local public broadcasting system?

Currently the government spends less than $450 million annually on public media. (To put matters in perspective, it spends several times that much on Pentagon public relations designed, among other things, to encourage favorable press coverage of the wars that the vast majority of Americans oppose.) Based on what other highly democratic and free countries do, the allocation from the government should be closer to $10 billion. All totaled, the suggestions we make here for subscription subsidies, postal reforms, youth media and investment in public broadcasting have a price tag in the range of $60 billion over the next three years.

This is a substantial amount of money. In normal times it might be too much to ask. But in a time of national crisis, when an informed and engaged citizenry is America's best hope, $20 billion a year is chicken feed for building what would essentially be a bridge across which journalism might pass from dying old media to the promise of something new. Think of it as a free press "infrastructure project" that is necessary to maintain an informed citizenry, and democracy itself. It would keep the press system alive. And it has the added benefit of providing an economic stimulus. If these journalists (and the tens of thousands of production and distribution workers associated with newspapers) are not put to work through the programs we propose, their knowledge and expertise will be lost. They will be unemployed, and their unemployment will contribute to further stagnation and economic decline--especially in big cities where newspapers are major employers.

These proposals are a good start, but then the really hard work begins. We have to come up with a plan to convert failing newspapers into journalistic entities with the express purpose of assuring that fully staffed, functioning and, ideally, competing newsrooms continue to operate in communities across the country. The only way to do this is by using tax policies, credit policies and explicit subsidies to convert the remains of old media into independent, stable institutions that are ready to compete and communicate in the decades to come. To get from here to there, and especially to make possible multiple competing newsrooms in larger communities, policy-makers should be open to commercial ownership, municipal ownership, staff ownership or independent nonprofit ownership. Ideally the next media system will have a combination of the above; and the government should be prepared to rewrite rules and regulations and to use its largesse to aid a variety of sound initiatives.

We confess that we do not have all the answers. Neither, we have discovered, does anyone else. The fatal flaw in so many sincere but doomed responses to the current crisis is that they try to do the impossible, to create a system using varying doses of foundation grants, do-gooder capitalism, citizen donations, volunteer labor, the anticipation of a miraculous increase in advertising manna and/or a sudden--and in our view unimaginable--reversal on the part of Americans who have thus far shown no inclination to pay for online content. At best, these are piecemeal proposals when we are in dire need of building an entire edifice. The money from these sources is insufficient to address the crisis in journalism.

We have to open the door to enlightened public policies and subsidies. We need our members of Congress and our leading scholars to approach this matter with the same urgency with which they would approach the threat of terrorism, pandemic, financial collapse or climate change. We need an organized citizenry demanding the institutions that make self-government possible. Only then can we, like our founders, build a free press. The technologies and the economic challenges are, of course, more complex than in the 1790s, but the answer is the same: the democratic state, the government, must create the conditions for sustaining the journalism that can provide the people with the information they need to be their own governors.

About John Nichols

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.

About Robert W. McChesney

Robert McChesney is Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. He hosts the program Media Matters on WILL-AM every Sunday afternoon from 1-2PM central time. He and John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, are the founders of Free Press, the media reform network, and the authors of Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New Press). He has written 16 books and his work has been translated into 15 languages.