Oct 25, 2012
Oct 24, 2012
Singapore Airlines to End World's Longest Flights
Singapore Airlines to End World's Longest Flights: Singapore Airlines said it was eliminating the two longest flights in the world, between its home city and Newark, N.J., and Los Angeles, with fewer people willing to pay premium fares and fuel prices remaining stubbornly high.
Obama's Ground Game Makes Iowa Tough Turf For Romney
Obama's Ground Game Makes Iowa Tough Turf For Romney: 
It's Election Day in Iowa, and it has been for weeks.
Recent polling in the state shows Republican Mitt Romney quickly closing the gap in the presidential race, but that may be less and less important with every day that passes. Political watchers say President Obama has been successful this year at getting his supporters to take advantage of Iowa's early voting system and that likely has given him a head start at a time when he still leads in the polls.
Pollster Ann Selzer, who runs the respected Des Moines Register survey, said there are signs that Iowans who have already cast a ballot are leaning heavily toward Obama.
"Two-to-one, people who say they have already voted are Barack Obama supporters," Selzer told TPM. "The majority of people who plan to vote early are Barack Obama supporters. The majority of people who plan to vote on election day, Romney supporters. I think that's what's gets tricky — you have to have a huge margin on election day to offset the Democrats."
Early voting in Iowa began on Sept. 27, and already nearly 520,000 people requested early ballots, according to elections officials. Of those, some 347,000 had filled out and returned them as of Oct. 22.
In 2008, a little more than 1.5 million people voted in Iowa and the state's six electoral votes went to Obama by a solid 9.5 points. Few expect that sort of margin this time around, and polling throughout the summer suggested the state might be one of Romney's best pick-up opportunities.
"I think that [Romney's] early showing has a lot to do with there being a Republican caucus and nothing happening on the Democratic side," Selzer said. "You had a lot of Republican messages in this state, a lot of 'Fire Barack Obama' messages. ... So that had a lasting impact."
As the summer faded, Obama started to tick up in the state in September and October, even though current polling has been mixed.
"The reason Obama became stronger is two things — first of all there are economic signals that things are getting better, and that became a little hard to ignore ... and I think Obama has in place a stronger ground game, and that is starting to pick up," Selzer said. "So all of the people that he had in place from four years ago, a lot of that infrastructure is still there. Romney sat out Iowa, really, and has chosen to have less presence in terms of a ground game ... and in Iowa, with so much early voting, that ground game is really critical."
And that could make all the difference in the state. Polls of late have been more cloudy -- President Obama held a solid 8-point lead in a NBC News/Marist College poll released Thursday, but Romney was up 49 percent to Obama's 48 percent in a survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling the day after. But among early voters — a solid 34 percent of the NBC/Marist sample and 31 percent those polled by PPP — two-thirds had already cast their ballots for the president, with a third going for Romney.
Overall, the PollTracker Average of Iowa shows Obama with a small lead.
"When likely voters intend to cast their ballot tells us a lot about what is happening in Iowa," Lee M. Miringoff, director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, said in a statement, citing the Obama advantage among early voters. "In contrast, Romney leads by double digits with those who will vote on Election Day."
That means a key for the Obama campaign will be to overwhelm the Republican ticket before Nov. 6 so that Election Day becomes somewhat a foregone conclusion.
Selzer pointed the youth vote. During the last month, President Obama, Vice President Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama have all campaigned on college campuses with an early voting station set up nearby. That allows the campaign to point supporters directly to the place where they can drop off their ballots before the buzz of the rally wears off.
Selzer said that kind of push could send early voter turnout to huge levels this year. Thirty-two percent of Iowa voters cast their ballots early in 2008 and 35 percent did in 2010. The question this year is whether it will approach 50 percent.
"If it's half, that will be jaw-dropping," Selzer said. "But it feels within the realm of possibility."
Ed. note: The post has been updated to reflect that the NBC/Marist and PPP polls showed two-thirds of early voters, not likely voters, had already cast their ballots for Obama.
It's Election Day in Iowa, and it has been for weeks.
Recent polling in the state shows Republican Mitt Romney quickly closing the gap in the presidential race, but that may be less and less important with every day that passes. Political watchers say President Obama has been successful this year at getting his supporters to take advantage of Iowa's early voting system and that likely has given him a head start at a time when he still leads in the polls.
Pollster Ann Selzer, who runs the respected Des Moines Register survey, said there are signs that Iowans who have already cast a ballot are leaning heavily toward Obama.
"Two-to-one, people who say they have already voted are Barack Obama supporters," Selzer told TPM. "The majority of people who plan to vote early are Barack Obama supporters. The majority of people who plan to vote on election day, Romney supporters. I think that's what's gets tricky — you have to have a huge margin on election day to offset the Democrats."
Early voting in Iowa began on Sept. 27, and already nearly 520,000 people requested early ballots, according to elections officials. Of those, some 347,000 had filled out and returned them as of Oct. 22.
In 2008, a little more than 1.5 million people voted in Iowa and the state's six electoral votes went to Obama by a solid 9.5 points. Few expect that sort of margin this time around, and polling throughout the summer suggested the state might be one of Romney's best pick-up opportunities.
"I think that [Romney's] early showing has a lot to do with there being a Republican caucus and nothing happening on the Democratic side," Selzer said. "You had a lot of Republican messages in this state, a lot of 'Fire Barack Obama' messages. ... So that had a lasting impact."
As the summer faded, Obama started to tick up in the state in September and October, even though current polling has been mixed.
"The reason Obama became stronger is two things — first of all there are economic signals that things are getting better, and that became a little hard to ignore ... and I think Obama has in place a stronger ground game, and that is starting to pick up," Selzer said. "So all of the people that he had in place from four years ago, a lot of that infrastructure is still there. Romney sat out Iowa, really, and has chosen to have less presence in terms of a ground game ... and in Iowa, with so much early voting, that ground game is really critical."
And that could make all the difference in the state. Polls of late have been more cloudy -- President Obama held a solid 8-point lead in a NBC News/Marist College poll released Thursday, but Romney was up 49 percent to Obama's 48 percent in a survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling the day after. But among early voters — a solid 34 percent of the NBC/Marist sample and 31 percent those polled by PPP — two-thirds had already cast their ballots for the president, with a third going for Romney.
Overall, the PollTracker Average of Iowa shows Obama with a small lead.
"When likely voters intend to cast their ballot tells us a lot about what is happening in Iowa," Lee M. Miringoff, director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, said in a statement, citing the Obama advantage among early voters. "In contrast, Romney leads by double digits with those who will vote on Election Day."
That means a key for the Obama campaign will be to overwhelm the Republican ticket before Nov. 6 so that Election Day becomes somewhat a foregone conclusion.
Selzer pointed the youth vote. During the last month, President Obama, Vice President Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama have all campaigned on college campuses with an early voting station set up nearby. That allows the campaign to point supporters directly to the place where they can drop off their ballots before the buzz of the rally wears off.
Selzer said that kind of push could send early voter turnout to huge levels this year. Thirty-two percent of Iowa voters cast their ballots early in 2008 and 35 percent did in 2010. The question this year is whether it will approach 50 percent.
"If it's half, that will be jaw-dropping," Selzer said. "But it feels within the realm of possibility."
Ed. note: The post has been updated to reflect that the NBC/Marist and PPP polls showed two-thirds of early voters, not likely voters, had already cast their ballots for Obama.
National Journal, Tuesday, October 23, 2012 | Last Updated: 11:07 PM |
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 | Last Updated: 11:07 PM |:
After an Indiana Senate debate, Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly 's campaign pounced on comments GOP Treasurer Richard Mourdock made about pregnancy resulting from rape being something...
This post has been generated by Page2RSS
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 | Last Updated: 11:07 PM |
5:55 p.m.
Romney Skips Foreign Policy on Campaign Trail
Rebecca Kaplan and Sarah Huisenga9:17 p.m.
HENDERSON, Nev. – Running mates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan aimed to project a sense of momentum and confidence as they entered the final two...
HENDERSON, Nev. – Running mates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan aimed to project a sense of momentum and confidence as they entered the final two...
Hotline On Call
Mourdock: When Rape Leads to Pregnancy, God Intended It
9:35 p.m.After an Indiana Senate debate, Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly 's campaign pounced on comments GOP Treasurer Richard Mourdock made about pregnancy resulting from rape being something...
This post has been generated by Page2RSS
Why Arizona Isn't a Battleground State (and Why It May Be Soon)
Why Arizona Isn't a Battleground State (and Why It May Be Soon): Arizona leans Republican but could become more Democratic if the state's Hispanic voters flex their political muscle.
Wed, Oct. 24 Electoral Vote Predictor
Wed, Oct. 24 Electoral Vote Predictor:
it is the electoral college that matters. If Obama wins the states the Democrats have won in the last five elections
(which seems likely) plus New Mexico (which is almost certain), he has 247 electoral votes. Throw in Ohio and he is at
265. From there, winning just one swing state bigger than New Hampshire is enough. Without Ohio, Romney has no chance.
If Romney wins only his base plus Ohio, he's not home free yet, but if he wins Ohio, he is very likely to win
North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida as well, and that would get him very close to 270. So in the last two weeks,
there will be a lot of focus, energy, and money poured into Ohio.
The other states that will get attention are Florida and Virginia, because they are big enough to change the dynamics.
The only other states likely to get much play are Colorado, Nevada (although it may be too late for Romney there), Iowa, and
maybe New Hampshire. These are the big seven. The rest don't count. Sorry about that if you live in one of the other 43--although
there might be an exciting Senate or House race nearby.
Click here for full story
With Less than Two Weeks to Go, It Is All About Ohio
The national polls--with the exception of Gallup, which is undersampling minorities--are very close, but as always,it is the electoral college that matters. If Obama wins the states the Democrats have won in the last five elections
(which seems likely) plus New Mexico (which is almost certain), he has 247 electoral votes. Throw in Ohio and he is at
265. From there, winning just one swing state bigger than New Hampshire is enough. Without Ohio, Romney has no chance.
If Romney wins only his base plus Ohio, he's not home free yet, but if he wins Ohio, he is very likely to win
North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida as well, and that would get him very close to 270. So in the last two weeks,
there will be a lot of focus, energy, and money poured into Ohio.
The other states that will get attention are Florida and Virginia, because they are big enough to change the dynamics.
The only other states likely to get much play are Colorado, Nevada (although it may be too late for Romney there), Iowa, and
maybe New Hampshire. These are the big seven. The rest don't count. Sorry about that if you live in one of the other 43--although
there might be an exciting Senate or House race nearby.
Click here for full story
Oct 23, 2012
In Final Debate, Romney Hides Position On The Auto Bailout
In Final Debate, Romney Hides Position On The Auto Bailout: 
At the final presidential debate Monday night, Mitt Romney obscured his early opposition to providing taxpayer funds to rescue the auto industry before it went through a private bankruptcy process.
"I would do nothing to hurt the U.S. auto industry. My plan to get the industry on its feet when it was in real trouble was not to start writing checks," he said. "I said they need — these companies need to go through a managed bankruptcy, and in that process they can get government help and government guarantees, but they need to go through bankruptcy to get rid of excess cost and the debt burden that they'd built up. ... I said that we would provide guarantees and that was what was able to allow these companies to go through bankruptcy, to come out of bankruptcy."
"The idea that has been suggested that I would liquidate the industry -- of course not," the GOP candidate said. "That's the height of silliness."
In fact, Romney had advocated against using the government to bail out Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, instead pushing for the auto companies to first undergo a managed bankruptcy, restructure their operations, and revive themselves with funds from the private sector. On Nov. 18, 2008, he wrote a op-ed in the New York Times famously titled, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," arguing that government assistance should only come after the auto makers go through bankruptcy on their own.
"If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye," Romney wrote. "It won't go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed."
At the time, the financial markets were in free-fall and credit was frozen. It was all but inconceivable that the critically wounded industry could have procured the funds to avoid liquidation if the government had not stepped in. As a result, President Bush issued a short-term rescue plan late in 2008 and President Obama extended it in the spring of 2009, extracting concessions from auto makers and shareholders to keep the companies afloat.
Late in 2011, while fighting for the Republican nomination, Romney stuck to his guns that the auto bailout as structured was the wrong way to go.
"My view with regards to the bailout was that whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go. I said from the very beginning they should go through a managed bankruptcy process, a private bankruptcy process. We have capital markets and bankruptcy, it works in the U.S.," he said. "My plan, we would have had a private sector bailout with the private sector restructuring and bankruptcy with the private sector guiding the direction as opposed to what we had with government playing its heavy hand."
But from the start, Romney did, however, advocate for federal financing but only after the auto companies emerged from bankruptcy, a dicey proposition without a government bailout.
"The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk," he wrote in the Times op-ed.
At the Boca Raton, Fla. debate Monday night, Obama accused Romney of trying to "airbrush history," in an apparent effort to sway voters in manufacturing-heavy states, most notably Ohio, against his opponent.
"I've made a different bet on American workers," the president said. "You know, if we had taken your advice, Governor Romney, about our auto industry, we'd be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China."
At the final presidential debate Monday night, Mitt Romney obscured his early opposition to providing taxpayer funds to rescue the auto industry before it went through a private bankruptcy process.
"I would do nothing to hurt the U.S. auto industry. My plan to get the industry on its feet when it was in real trouble was not to start writing checks," he said. "I said they need — these companies need to go through a managed bankruptcy, and in that process they can get government help and government guarantees, but they need to go through bankruptcy to get rid of excess cost and the debt burden that they'd built up. ... I said that we would provide guarantees and that was what was able to allow these companies to go through bankruptcy, to come out of bankruptcy."
"The idea that has been suggested that I would liquidate the industry -- of course not," the GOP candidate said. "That's the height of silliness."
In fact, Romney had advocated against using the government to bail out Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, instead pushing for the auto companies to first undergo a managed bankruptcy, restructure their operations, and revive themselves with funds from the private sector. On Nov. 18, 2008, he wrote a op-ed in the New York Times famously titled, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," arguing that government assistance should only come after the auto makers go through bankruptcy on their own.
"If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye," Romney wrote. "It won't go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed."
At the time, the financial markets were in free-fall and credit was frozen. It was all but inconceivable that the critically wounded industry could have procured the funds to avoid liquidation if the government had not stepped in. As a result, President Bush issued a short-term rescue plan late in 2008 and President Obama extended it in the spring of 2009, extracting concessions from auto makers and shareholders to keep the companies afloat.
Late in 2011, while fighting for the Republican nomination, Romney stuck to his guns that the auto bailout as structured was the wrong way to go.
"My view with regards to the bailout was that whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go. I said from the very beginning they should go through a managed bankruptcy process, a private bankruptcy process. We have capital markets and bankruptcy, it works in the U.S.," he said. "My plan, we would have had a private sector bailout with the private sector restructuring and bankruptcy with the private sector guiding the direction as opposed to what we had with government playing its heavy hand."
But from the start, Romney did, however, advocate for federal financing but only after the auto companies emerged from bankruptcy, a dicey proposition without a government bailout.
"The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk," he wrote in the Times op-ed.
At the Boca Raton, Fla. debate Monday night, Obama accused Romney of trying to "airbrush history," in an apparent effort to sway voters in manufacturing-heavy states, most notably Ohio, against his opponent.
"I've made a different bet on American workers," the president said. "You know, if we had taken your advice, Governor Romney, about our auto industry, we'd be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China."
America Forgets the World
America Forgets the World: Jonathan Freedland
Alec Soth/Magnum Photos
Minnesota, 2007
About an hour into the final televised encounter of the presidential campaign on Monday night, Slate’s Matthew Yglesias posted a hastily-produced map of The World According to the 2012 Foreign Policy Debate. It showed most of the globe blacked out, as if redacted, leaving only a sliver consisting of Iran, Israel, and Iraq, as well as Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya—and Mali. That last one was a surprise, a nod to Mitt Romney’s unexpected reference to the country in his opening statement, when he pre-emptively sought to puncture Barack Obama’s inevitable boast that he had weakened the terrorist enemy. Not in Mali, the Republican nominee said.
But that was an atypically exotic lapse. Most of the time, the world outside America consisted of three Is and (toward the end) a single C: the threat of a nuclear Iran, the need to stand with Israel, the wisdom of going into Iraq nearly a decade ago and of maintaining a troop presence there now, and finally the menace of job-stealing, currency-manipulating China. Europe surfaced just once, and then only in a list of regions where the US had strong alliances, alongside Africa and Asia. India, home to a billion people and a rising power, was mentioned not at all.
For the international audience, including admirers of America who would have nodded at Obama’s description of the US as “the indispensable nation,” watching the debate was a sobering experience—and not only for those playing the traditional “debate bingo” drinking game, waiting vainly for a shout-out to their country. Those ninety minutes told them starkly who mattered, and who did not. Political obsessives and night owls who watched the debate, as I did, in the small hours in London, for example, were divested of any delusions they might have still been nurturing about the so-called special relationship between Britain and the US. The UK was name-checked once by each candidate, but on both occasions only to illustrate a point about somewhere else: for Obama, that the US spent more on defense than the next ten countries, including Britain, combined; for Romney, that Islamabad would soon have more nuclear warheads than London.
It was the Middle East and its environs that mattered. Iran (mentioned forty-seven times)—or the “Iranian mullahs” as Romney put it—featured again and again, often in conjunction with Israel. Perhaps that is only to be expected, since that is one of the few foreign policy issues where actual votes might be at stake, whether those of Jews in Florida—where the debate was held—or of evangelical Christians, for whom hawkish support for Israel has become an article of faith. Viewers in the Arab world, primed on editorials and cartoons that depict—often in the visual language of medieval anti-Semitism—an America bending the knee to Israel or to purported Jewish power, will have had their worst prejudices confirmed.
The two candidates competed to be Israel’s best friend. While Romney referred to “my relationship with the prime minister” and upbraided Obama for failing to visit the country during his first Middle East tour as president, Obama recalled an earlier trip that took in the southern, rocket-hit town of Sderot and the Holocaust memorial institute Yad Vashem. One does not need to resort to myths of Jewish might to understand this display. The simpler explanation is that in the Obama era the Republicans, and Romney especially, have taken an issue that used to be broadly consensual and sought to exploit it for partisan advantage. Hence Romney’s claim in his convention speech that Obama had thrown Israel “under the bus.” That has left Obama on the defensive, forced to spell out his record of staunch support for and military co-operation with Israel, which he did again on Monday night. If Romney believed there were votes to be had in casting Obama as soft on Cuba, they’d have sparred on that too.
Within the debate’s limitations and narrow scope—with moderator Bob Schieffer’s approach varying between light-touch and barely-there—what impression did the two men convey? For those abroad who still see Obama the way the Nobel committee did when it awarded its Peace Prize in 2009, the debate would have come as a sharp reality check. The president was firm, his gaze steady when he declared, “[A]s long as I’m president of the United States, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon,” the implied meaning hanging heavy in the air. Coupled with the references to the killing of Bin Laden and the persistent use of drone strikes, that should have served as a reminder that, whatever fantasies Europeans and others might have once had about Obama, he is a fairly traditional American leader.
Romney sought to nudge in the other direction, to prove that he is less hawkish than you think. He spoke of “peace” often, a word that did not pass the president’s lips, and said we “can’t kill our way out of this mess.” It was Romney, not Obama, who mentioned the Palestinians, deploring the lack of progress on Middle East peace. He promised the troops would be out of Afghanistan by 2014. He did not pledge to go to war with Syria, and his talk on Iran was not much tougher than Obama’s (though he said he would not tolerate a “nuclear-capable” Iran, setting the bar lower than the president, who refuses to countenance an Iranian nuclear weapon). Those positions made sense for a candidate whose primary objective in the debate was to prove that he was not a neocon maniac who would plunge America back into the Bush years, but a level-headed man whom voters could trust in the White House.
And yet the larger picture that emerged was of a country looking inward rather than outward. It was telling that both men, but especially Romney, frequently sought to shift away from foreign policy altogether and talk about the economy instead. At one point the two candidates had an animated conversation about small business in Massachusetts. “This debate will go down in history as one of the moments where it is tacitly confessed that the US is a lesser power,” tweeted Carne Ross, a former British official at the UN and founder of Independent Diplomat. He was struck by what he regarded as the candidates’s shared lack of ambition: gone was the talk of spreading democracy around the globe, replaced by “retrenchment, defensiveness and caution.” That view, coupled with Yglesias’s map, suggested that—no matter who wins in November—this is an America whose world is slowly shrinking.
Alec Soth/Magnum Photos
Minnesota, 2007
But that was an atypically exotic lapse. Most of the time, the world outside America consisted of three Is and (toward the end) a single C: the threat of a nuclear Iran, the need to stand with Israel, the wisdom of going into Iraq nearly a decade ago and of maintaining a troop presence there now, and finally the menace of job-stealing, currency-manipulating China. Europe surfaced just once, and then only in a list of regions where the US had strong alliances, alongside Africa and Asia. India, home to a billion people and a rising power, was mentioned not at all.
For the international audience, including admirers of America who would have nodded at Obama’s description of the US as “the indispensable nation,” watching the debate was a sobering experience—and not only for those playing the traditional “debate bingo” drinking game, waiting vainly for a shout-out to their country. Those ninety minutes told them starkly who mattered, and who did not. Political obsessives and night owls who watched the debate, as I did, in the small hours in London, for example, were divested of any delusions they might have still been nurturing about the so-called special relationship between Britain and the US. The UK was name-checked once by each candidate, but on both occasions only to illustrate a point about somewhere else: for Obama, that the US spent more on defense than the next ten countries, including Britain, combined; for Romney, that Islamabad would soon have more nuclear warheads than London.
It was the Middle East and its environs that mattered. Iran (mentioned forty-seven times)—or the “Iranian mullahs” as Romney put it—featured again and again, often in conjunction with Israel. Perhaps that is only to be expected, since that is one of the few foreign policy issues where actual votes might be at stake, whether those of Jews in Florida—where the debate was held—or of evangelical Christians, for whom hawkish support for Israel has become an article of faith. Viewers in the Arab world, primed on editorials and cartoons that depict—often in the visual language of medieval anti-Semitism—an America bending the knee to Israel or to purported Jewish power, will have had their worst prejudices confirmed.
The two candidates competed to be Israel’s best friend. While Romney referred to “my relationship with the prime minister” and upbraided Obama for failing to visit the country during his first Middle East tour as president, Obama recalled an earlier trip that took in the southern, rocket-hit town of Sderot and the Holocaust memorial institute Yad Vashem. One does not need to resort to myths of Jewish might to understand this display. The simpler explanation is that in the Obama era the Republicans, and Romney especially, have taken an issue that used to be broadly consensual and sought to exploit it for partisan advantage. Hence Romney’s claim in his convention speech that Obama had thrown Israel “under the bus.” That has left Obama on the defensive, forced to spell out his record of staunch support for and military co-operation with Israel, which he did again on Monday night. If Romney believed there were votes to be had in casting Obama as soft on Cuba, they’d have sparred on that too.
Within the debate’s limitations and narrow scope—with moderator Bob Schieffer’s approach varying between light-touch and barely-there—what impression did the two men convey? For those abroad who still see Obama the way the Nobel committee did when it awarded its Peace Prize in 2009, the debate would have come as a sharp reality check. The president was firm, his gaze steady when he declared, “[A]s long as I’m president of the United States, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon,” the implied meaning hanging heavy in the air. Coupled with the references to the killing of Bin Laden and the persistent use of drone strikes, that should have served as a reminder that, whatever fantasies Europeans and others might have once had about Obama, he is a fairly traditional American leader.
Romney sought to nudge in the other direction, to prove that he is less hawkish than you think. He spoke of “peace” often, a word that did not pass the president’s lips, and said we “can’t kill our way out of this mess.” It was Romney, not Obama, who mentioned the Palestinians, deploring the lack of progress on Middle East peace. He promised the troops would be out of Afghanistan by 2014. He did not pledge to go to war with Syria, and his talk on Iran was not much tougher than Obama’s (though he said he would not tolerate a “nuclear-capable” Iran, setting the bar lower than the president, who refuses to countenance an Iranian nuclear weapon). Those positions made sense for a candidate whose primary objective in the debate was to prove that he was not a neocon maniac who would plunge America back into the Bush years, but a level-headed man whom voters could trust in the White House.
And yet the larger picture that emerged was of a country looking inward rather than outward. It was telling that both men, but especially Romney, frequently sought to shift away from foreign policy altogether and talk about the economy instead. At one point the two candidates had an animated conversation about small business in Massachusetts. “This debate will go down in history as one of the moments where it is tacitly confessed that the US is a lesser power,” tweeted Carne Ross, a former British official at the UN and founder of Independent Diplomat. He was struck by what he regarded as the candidates’s shared lack of ambition: gone was the talk of spreading democracy around the globe, replaced by “retrenchment, defensiveness and caution.” That view, coupled with Yglesias’s map, suggested that—no matter who wins in November—this is an America whose world is slowly shrinking.
Number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon passes 100,000 mark
Number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon passes 100,000 mark: Lebanon becomes third country in the region after Turkey and Jordan to reach the milestone. Region-wide the number climbs to more than 358,000.
Daily Number: 87% - Pakistani Public Differs from Taliban on Education of Girls
Daily Number: 87% - Pakistani Public Differs from Taliban on Education of Girls: In a 2009 survey, 87% of Pakistanis said it was equally important for girls and boys to be educated.
Indonesia Experiencing Increase in Religious Intolerance
Indonesia Experiencing Increase in Religious Intolerance: Acts of violence against minority faith communities in Indonesia are rising, casting doubt on the nation's tolerant image and what some have seen as proof that Islam and democracy can coexist. Analysts say violence is leading the country down a dangerous path.
In Madura, East Java, a local sports hall that is typically the venue for noisy afternoon badminton matches has for two months been a safe house for Shi'ite Muslims.
Umi Hani was among those who fled her home after a ...
In Madura, East Java, a local sports hall that is typically the venue for noisy afternoon badminton matches has for two months been a safe house for Shi'ite Muslims.
Umi Hani was among those who fled her home after a ...
Settlement Eases Rules for Some Medicare Patients
Settlement Eases Rules for Some Medicare Patients: Tens of thousands of people with chronic conditions and disabilities may find it easier to qualify for home health care, nursing home stays and outpatient therapy.
Qatari Ruler Makes History With Visit to Gaza Strip
Qatari Ruler Makes History With Visit to Gaza Strip: Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, on Tuesday became the first head of state to visit the Gaza Strip under Hamas rule.
The War We Aren't Debating
The War We Aren't Debating: Michael Massing
Marco Ugarte/AP
A soldier guarding a marijuana plantation discovered during military operations in northern Mexico, January 30, 2012
It’s a social policy that, many experts agree, has failed miserably since it was introduced more than forty years ago, tearing apart families and communities across the United States, consuming tens of thousands of lives abroad, and squandering huge sums of money. Yet hardly any national politician is willing to challenge it, and it’s been completely ignored during the 2012 presidential campaign.
I’m speaking of the war on drugs. Since 1971, when Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and stated his intention of waging a “new, all-out offensive” against it, the government has spent an estimated trillion dollars on the war. Much of that money has gone to street-level drug arrests, undercover raids, intelligence taskforces, highway patrols, and—most costly of all—prison beds. Of the 2.3 million people in prison in the United States today, nearly half a million are there for drug offenses, many of them of the low-level, non-violent variety. In 2010, 1.64 million people were arrested for drug violations—80 percent of them for possession.
In Latin America, the war on drugs has sown misery across a vast swath of territory stretching from the coca fields of Peru to Mexico’s border with the United States. Billions have been spent on crop eradication, commando units, military training, unmanned surveillance drones, and helicopters. The result has been endless bloodshed, widespread corruption, and political instability. In Mexico alone, an estimated 50,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the nearly six years since Mexican President Felipe Calderón (encouraged by Washington) declared war on his nation’s drug cartels. One result of the crackdown has been to push traffickers into Central America, where they now terrorize Guatemalans and Hondurans. All the while, drugs continue to flow unabated into the United States. In 1981, a pure gram of cocaine cost $669 (adjusted for inflation); today, it goes for $177.
As for consumption, cocaine use has decreased considerably since its peak in the mid-1980s, and methamphetamine use has also subsided after a destructive surge in the 2000s. But the abuse of prescription drugs, especially of opioid painkillers, has grown to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “epidemic” levels, and the number of accidental overdose deaths from such substances has soared. This spurt underscores that the real source of our drug problem lies not in Mexico or Colombia but inside our own borders, and that arresting and locking up users is a singularly ineffective way of addressing it.
On taking office four years ago, President Obama consciously retired the war-on-drugs rhetoric, and at every opportunity Gil Kerlikowske, his director of national drug control policy, describes drug abuse as a public-health problem. Nonetheless, the administration has largely continued the policy of its predecessors, devoting around 60 percent of the federal drug budget (now about $25 billion a year) to law enforcement, interdiction, and fighting drug cartels abroad and the remainder to treatment and prevention. In two areas, the administration has shown special zeal: prosecuting medical marijuana providers and extending the drug war to a host of new countries, including not only Honduras and Guatemala but also Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. The US is now trying to fight drug abuse in America by sending counternarcotics teams to Accra and Lagos.
Exposing the madness of the US drug war is the aim of The House I Live In, a new documentary written and directed by Eugene Jarecki. Like Jarecki’s previous film Why We Fight, a hard-hitting critique of the military-industrial complex, The House I Live In offers a sharp indictment of its subject, in part through frank interviews with several individuals who—once key props in the system—have turned decisively against it. One is Mark Bennett, a federal judge who describes his frustration at having sentenced hundreds of people to prison for fifteen years or more under the nation’s harsh mandatory-minimum laws. Another is a Kentucky prison guard who looks like he could have been Rod Steiger’s sidekick in “In the Heat of the Night” but who bemoans that his prison is largely filled with small-time drug offenders who have no business being there.
The House I Live In is especially effective at capturing the damage the drug war has inflicted on black America. Many of those given long prison sentences are African-American, male, and poor, and the film shows the wrenching effects their incarceration has had on their families and communities. In the film, David Simon, creator of The Wire, ably explains how the lack of economic opportunities in the inner city has pushed many young blacks into drug-dealing. Michelle Alexander, the legal scholar and author of the best-selling The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, describes how the war on drugs has replicated the effects of the Jim Crow laws in the South, subjecting black men to what amounts to discriminatory treatment in the criminal justice system.
Jarecki also makes clear how the drug war has given rise to interest groups vested in its continuation. These include police officers who rack up many hours of overtime, prison guards who can count on good salaries and benefits, and private prison operators who need to keep their beds filled. For the many Americans who, lulled by the lack of debate about drug war policy in Washington, have not been paying attention to it, such revelations will no doubt prove eye-opening.
The question is, how many of them will actually see the film? Few documentaries manage to gain a wide viewership, and The House I Live In has several shortcomings that, I fear, will limit its audience. At an hour and forty-eight minutes, it feels quite long. It features an extensive cast of characters who, flitting in and out of the film, are hard to keep straight. Though the film forcefully shows the noxious effects of the drug war, it barely takes note of the toxic effects of the drugs themselves. Drugs are seen exclusively as an issue that politicians exploit to show their toughness on crime. Even the crack epidemic is dismissed as a crisis that has been manufactured to justify a crackdown on African-Americans. But that epidemic was real and did incalculable damage to the black community.
Nor is the film helped by its forced effort to liken Washington’s drug policy to Nazi Germany. After an extended look at the disproportionate impact on black America, The House I Live In suddenly pivots to show that blacks have not in fact been its only victims. As a result of the recent surge in methamphetamine abuse, many whites have gotten caught up in the criminal justice system for low-level drug-related offenses. With the Jim Crow analysis inapplicable here, the film turns to Richard Miller, a historian who compares the drug war to, of all things, the Holocaust. Images of people being arrested on America’s streets are intercut with photos of Jews being forced into ghettoes and otherwise persecuted. By engaging in such outlandish hyperbole, The House I Live In seems intent on marginalizing itself.
But the film’s most serious shortcoming is its failure to consider the alternatives to current policy. Among Latin American governments, for example, widespread disillusionment with the drug war has fed growing support for drug legalization, an approach seriously raised at this year’s hemispheric summit meeting in Cartagena. President Obama has predictably demurred: wary of opening up a new avenue of attack for the Republican Party, the administration seems to feel the need to strike a tough law-and-order stance on drugs during this election year. Politics aside, the recent surge in prescription drug abuse shows the terrible human toll that can result when addictive substances are made more widely available.
A more effective—and politically feasible—approach would be to redirect government resources from imprisonment and interdiction to treatment and prevention. Rehab centers, methadone clinics, and after-school programs have been shown to be much sounder, and cost-effective, investments than border agents, narcotics squads, and long prison terms. In an era of shrinking budgets, such money-saving approaches may be the most persuasive. In states like California and New York, the surge in spending on correctional facilities, driven in part by the ever-growing population of non-violent drug offenders, has diverted funds from areas like higher education—a trade-off that seems increasingly indefensible.
Despite the absence of discussion of the issue in Washington, the political climate may be changing: polls show growing support for legalizing marijuana, and on election day Colorado, Oregon, and Washington state will offer ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate the possession of small amounts of pot. Even more striking, Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, in a speech in June, called the drug war “a failure.” Warehousing a prisoner for a year in his state costs $49,000, he said, compared to $24,000 for inpatient treatment. noting that people who become addicted to drugs are “sick” and “need treatment,” Christie advocated making residential treatment mandatory for all first-time, non-violent drug offenders.
Actually, many courts dealing with drug offenses are already doing this. And making treatment mandatory for all drug offenders would be wasteful, since not all are addicts. But the governor’s recognition that many of those who abuse drugs need help, and that treatment is an effective way of providing it, represents a major step forward. As prisons and courts continue to devour government revenue, perhaps other politicians will take notice.
The House I Live In is playing in theaters across the US.
Marco Ugarte/AP
A soldier guarding a marijuana plantation discovered during military operations in northern Mexico, January 30, 2012
I’m speaking of the war on drugs. Since 1971, when Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and stated his intention of waging a “new, all-out offensive” against it, the government has spent an estimated trillion dollars on the war. Much of that money has gone to street-level drug arrests, undercover raids, intelligence taskforces, highway patrols, and—most costly of all—prison beds. Of the 2.3 million people in prison in the United States today, nearly half a million are there for drug offenses, many of them of the low-level, non-violent variety. In 2010, 1.64 million people were arrested for drug violations—80 percent of them for possession.
In Latin America, the war on drugs has sown misery across a vast swath of territory stretching from the coca fields of Peru to Mexico’s border with the United States. Billions have been spent on crop eradication, commando units, military training, unmanned surveillance drones, and helicopters. The result has been endless bloodshed, widespread corruption, and political instability. In Mexico alone, an estimated 50,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the nearly six years since Mexican President Felipe Calderón (encouraged by Washington) declared war on his nation’s drug cartels. One result of the crackdown has been to push traffickers into Central America, where they now terrorize Guatemalans and Hondurans. All the while, drugs continue to flow unabated into the United States. In 1981, a pure gram of cocaine cost $669 (adjusted for inflation); today, it goes for $177.
As for consumption, cocaine use has decreased considerably since its peak in the mid-1980s, and methamphetamine use has also subsided after a destructive surge in the 2000s. But the abuse of prescription drugs, especially of opioid painkillers, has grown to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “epidemic” levels, and the number of accidental overdose deaths from such substances has soared. This spurt underscores that the real source of our drug problem lies not in Mexico or Colombia but inside our own borders, and that arresting and locking up users is a singularly ineffective way of addressing it.
On taking office four years ago, President Obama consciously retired the war-on-drugs rhetoric, and at every opportunity Gil Kerlikowske, his director of national drug control policy, describes drug abuse as a public-health problem. Nonetheless, the administration has largely continued the policy of its predecessors, devoting around 60 percent of the federal drug budget (now about $25 billion a year) to law enforcement, interdiction, and fighting drug cartels abroad and the remainder to treatment and prevention. In two areas, the administration has shown special zeal: prosecuting medical marijuana providers and extending the drug war to a host of new countries, including not only Honduras and Guatemala but also Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. The US is now trying to fight drug abuse in America by sending counternarcotics teams to Accra and Lagos.
Exposing the madness of the US drug war is the aim of The House I Live In, a new documentary written and directed by Eugene Jarecki. Like Jarecki’s previous film Why We Fight, a hard-hitting critique of the military-industrial complex, The House I Live In offers a sharp indictment of its subject, in part through frank interviews with several individuals who—once key props in the system—have turned decisively against it. One is Mark Bennett, a federal judge who describes his frustration at having sentenced hundreds of people to prison for fifteen years or more under the nation’s harsh mandatory-minimum laws. Another is a Kentucky prison guard who looks like he could have been Rod Steiger’s sidekick in “In the Heat of the Night” but who bemoans that his prison is largely filled with small-time drug offenders who have no business being there.
The House I Live In is especially effective at capturing the damage the drug war has inflicted on black America. Many of those given long prison sentences are African-American, male, and poor, and the film shows the wrenching effects their incarceration has had on their families and communities. In the film, David Simon, creator of The Wire, ably explains how the lack of economic opportunities in the inner city has pushed many young blacks into drug-dealing. Michelle Alexander, the legal scholar and author of the best-selling The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, describes how the war on drugs has replicated the effects of the Jim Crow laws in the South, subjecting black men to what amounts to discriminatory treatment in the criminal justice system.
Jarecki also makes clear how the drug war has given rise to interest groups vested in its continuation. These include police officers who rack up many hours of overtime, prison guards who can count on good salaries and benefits, and private prison operators who need to keep their beds filled. For the many Americans who, lulled by the lack of debate about drug war policy in Washington, have not been paying attention to it, such revelations will no doubt prove eye-opening.
The question is, how many of them will actually see the film? Few documentaries manage to gain a wide viewership, and The House I Live In has several shortcomings that, I fear, will limit its audience. At an hour and forty-eight minutes, it feels quite long. It features an extensive cast of characters who, flitting in and out of the film, are hard to keep straight. Though the film forcefully shows the noxious effects of the drug war, it barely takes note of the toxic effects of the drugs themselves. Drugs are seen exclusively as an issue that politicians exploit to show their toughness on crime. Even the crack epidemic is dismissed as a crisis that has been manufactured to justify a crackdown on African-Americans. But that epidemic was real and did incalculable damage to the black community.
Nor is the film helped by its forced effort to liken Washington’s drug policy to Nazi Germany. After an extended look at the disproportionate impact on black America, The House I Live In suddenly pivots to show that blacks have not in fact been its only victims. As a result of the recent surge in methamphetamine abuse, many whites have gotten caught up in the criminal justice system for low-level drug-related offenses. With the Jim Crow analysis inapplicable here, the film turns to Richard Miller, a historian who compares the drug war to, of all things, the Holocaust. Images of people being arrested on America’s streets are intercut with photos of Jews being forced into ghettoes and otherwise persecuted. By engaging in such outlandish hyperbole, The House I Live In seems intent on marginalizing itself.
But the film’s most serious shortcoming is its failure to consider the alternatives to current policy. Among Latin American governments, for example, widespread disillusionment with the drug war has fed growing support for drug legalization, an approach seriously raised at this year’s hemispheric summit meeting in Cartagena. President Obama has predictably demurred: wary of opening up a new avenue of attack for the Republican Party, the administration seems to feel the need to strike a tough law-and-order stance on drugs during this election year. Politics aside, the recent surge in prescription drug abuse shows the terrible human toll that can result when addictive substances are made more widely available.
A more effective—and politically feasible—approach would be to redirect government resources from imprisonment and interdiction to treatment and prevention. Rehab centers, methadone clinics, and after-school programs have been shown to be much sounder, and cost-effective, investments than border agents, narcotics squads, and long prison terms. In an era of shrinking budgets, such money-saving approaches may be the most persuasive. In states like California and New York, the surge in spending on correctional facilities, driven in part by the ever-growing population of non-violent drug offenders, has diverted funds from areas like higher education—a trade-off that seems increasingly indefensible.
Despite the absence of discussion of the issue in Washington, the political climate may be changing: polls show growing support for legalizing marijuana, and on election day Colorado, Oregon, and Washington state will offer ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate the possession of small amounts of pot. Even more striking, Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, in a speech in June, called the drug war “a failure.” Warehousing a prisoner for a year in his state costs $49,000, he said, compared to $24,000 for inpatient treatment. noting that people who become addicted to drugs are “sick” and “need treatment,” Christie advocated making residential treatment mandatory for all first-time, non-violent drug offenders.
Actually, many courts dealing with drug offenses are already doing this. And making treatment mandatory for all drug offenders would be wasteful, since not all are addicts. But the governor’s recognition that many of those who abuse drugs need help, and that treatment is an effective way of providing it, represents a major step forward. As prisons and courts continue to devour government revenue, perhaps other politicians will take notice.
The House I Live In is playing in theaters across the US.
National Journal, Tuesday, October 23, 2012 | Last Updated: 01:29 AM |
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 | Last Updated: 01:29 AM |:
This post has been generated by Page2RSS
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 | Last Updated: 01:29 AM |
Five Takeaways: Obama Drives Debate, but Romney Clears Commander Bar
12:28 a.m.
Foreign-policy debates between the presidential contenders follow a more predictable pattern than encounters over domestic policy. Inevitably, the...
Foreign-policy debates between the presidential contenders follow a more predictable pattern than encounters over domestic policy. Inevitably, the...
Obama-Romney Debate Likely to be Last Major Moment of Campaign
Alex Roarty12:14 a.m.
The Monday night showdown between President Obama and Mitt Romney was not just the final debate between the two men—it was in all likelihood the...
The Monday night showdown between President Obama and Mitt Romney was not just the final debate between the two men—it was in all likelihood the...
Walmart Moms Give Obama the Edge in Debate
Naureen Khan11:54 p.m.
President Obama scored a decisive win with the swing voters known as the Walmart moms participating in a focus group during Monday night’s...
President Obama scored a decisive win with the swing voters known as the Walmart moms participating in a focus group during Monday night’s...
What the Rest of the World Saw During the Final Presidential Debate
Michael Catalini11:14 p.m.
In Canada, they live-blogged. Same thing across the pond in Great Britain. Ditto in Italy and Israel . In France, they dubbed the debate with...
In Canada, they live-blogged. Same thing across the pond in Great Britain. Ditto in Italy and Israel . In France, they dubbed the debate with...
Obama, Romney: No Major Differences in Foreign-Policy Debate
Michael Hirsh11:09 p.m.
More than anything else, Mitt Romney needed to reassure Americans in the final presidential debate on Monday night that he was not a reckless...
More than anything else, Mitt Romney needed to reassure Americans in the final presidential debate on Monday night that he was not a reckless...
Obama Wins Third Debate but Romney Wins Debate Season
Ron Fournier10:33 p.m.
Bottom line: Obama won Monday night’s debate on points, benefiting from the blessings of incumbency and hard-world experience. But the...
Bottom line: Obama won Monday night’s debate on points, benefiting from the blessings of incumbency and hard-world experience. But the...
Who Won the Debate On China?
10:25 p.m.
Vote and tell us if you think Barack Obama or Mitt Romney won the debate on the China issue.
Vote and tell us if you think Barack Obama or Mitt Romney won the debate on the China issue.
National Journal Staff
9:27 p.m.
Weak car sales show the German economy at last beginning to crack
Quartz Daily Brief—Europe Edition—iPad mini, presidential debate, singing mice, talking whale
China and Brazil, both running out of steam, need to trade economic models—like a house swap
A poorly focused debate reveals an assertive Obama and the challenger who agrees with him
This post has been generated by Page2RSS
Oct 22, 2012
Facebooking for reform?
Facebooking for reform?:
The day after Indonesia’s last presidential election campaign started on 3 June 2009, the then-presidential candidate Megawati Sukarnoputri and her running-mate Prabowo Subianto made a surprise stop-over in the town of Tangerang in West Java. They visited Prita Mulyasari, a young mother defending two charges of criminal defamation. Shortly afterwards the then-Vice President Jusuf Kalla, General Wiranto and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – who is ordinarily non-interventionist when it comes to discussions of legal affairs – all made public statements about the unjust use of criminal defamation in the Mulyasari case.
This unprecedented level of political condemnation, media scrutiny and public debate about criminal defamation laws came about, in part, because of an effective social media campaign surrounding the Mulyasari case. Activists used social media to successfully raise the profile of problems with Indonesia’s criminal law. But while social media was effectively used to draw attention to these issues, it has not been a panacea for achieving long lasting legal reform.
In early 2009, the email came to the attention of Mulyasari’s treating doctors. In addition to filing a civil defamation law suit against her, the doctors also reported her to the Tangerang police for criminal defamation. In April 2009 Mulyasari was indicted for two criminal defamation charges by prosecutors at the Banten Prosecutors Office. Mulyasari should have been brought before a judge within 24 hours of her arrest. Instead, the prosecutors incorrectly used their powers under Indonesia’s Code of Criminal Procedure to place her in pre-trial detention for 21 days.
Ten years after Indonesia’s process of political reformation, Mulyasari’s situation attracted public attention because it highlighted ongoing weaknesses within Indonesia’s democracy. After the fall of Suharto, the Indonesian Constitution of 1945 was amended to protect citizens’ right to freedom of expression. But the Mulyasari case demonstrated that there were many legal hurdles to overcome before this right could be realised in practice, including the outdated Criminal Code.
Indonesia’s Criminal Code (adopted from the Dutch code during the era of colonial rule) imposes a jail term and/or a fine upon any person who intentionally makes a statement which contains insults or untruths which injure the reputation of the person or institution at which they are aimed. Owing to a new and controversial 2009 law, criminal defamation offences in relation to statements made on the internet or through electronic transactions have been strengthened. These new electronic based defamation offences are punishable by a maximum fine of Rp.1 billion (A$123 000), as well as a maximum of six years imprisonment. Mulyasari was charged with both the old and new criminal defamation laws.
Mulyasari's case lasted a long time because it was appealed on numerous occasions by the prosecution. The first of the trials against Mulyasari occurred in June 2009 at the Tangerang State Court, where the presiding judge dismissed the criminal charges against her on the basis that the prosec{jcomments on}ution case had not been proved. Following an appeal of the June decision by the Banten prosecutors, the State Court reheard Mulyasari’s case in September 2009 and acquitted her of both defamation charges. The acquittal was hailed as a victory by pro-freedom of expression activists who had made creative use of social media tools to support Mulyasari.
The images of Mulyasari, a young middle-class Muslim mother, in detention for an email she wrote to friends, caused a public stir in Indonesia. As a consequence, during her period of pre-trial detention a campaign using new social media emerged in support of her. The campaign, called Coin for Prita (Koin Peduli Prita), mainly operated through Facebook.
The purpose of the campaign was to raise awareness of Mulyasari’s plight and to encourage people to donate coins to help her pay any civil damages and the criminal fines. In this sense, it was a rapid and major success. The online campaign received widespread press coverage in Indonesia and across the world and by November 2009 its dedicated Facebook page had almost 400,000 supporters and was complemented with offline events including a fundraising concert. The concert, held at the Hard Rock Café in Jakarta, attracted high profile Indonesian politicians, business people and musicians, including a performance by pop sensation Nidji who wrote a song especially for the event.
By December 2009 the organisers of the Coin For Prita campaign had stopped collecting money after raising over Rp.800 million (A$98,584), comprising five truckloads of coins. The coins were ultimately converted into a cheque which was presented to Mulyasari, who used some of the funds to pay for her legal costs.
The Coin For Prita campaign successfully generated broad condemnation of the use of criminal defamation laws by senior political figures in Indonesia. The case also prompted a flurry of debate and discussion about how criminal defamation laws should be balanced against free speech rights in Indonesia. On one side of the debate were free speech activists calling for the abolition of the laws because they infringed Indonesian citizens’ constitutional right to freedom of expression. On the other side of the debate were a few government ministers and legal academics who argued that the laws were needed to protect the reputation of government, businesses and individuals. This debate played out in public interest litigation in the Constitutional Court, the opinion pages of major newspapers, blogs and in legal academic and policy forums. The Mulyasari case featured heavily in these debates.
However, the social media campaign, and the public debate which followed, has not resulted in reform to criminal defamation laws. Despite the fact that criminal defamation laws were so robustly opposed at the height of the Mulyasari case by major political figures, the laws (both the Criminal Code offence and the new 2009 offence) remain largely unreformed. In fact, they continue to be used to charge bloggers and other internet users in Indonesia. For example in March 2010, Muhammad Wahyu – a university student from East Java – was charged with two criminal defamation offences, after he made disparaging comments on the personal Facebook page of a fellow female student. Wahyu was given a three month jail term, suspended for six months.
Additionally, the campaign built around Mulyasari’s case ultimately did little to redress her own situation. After the initial hype surrounding the Mulyasari case died down, her case was again appealed by the Banten prosecutors in July 2011. Over a year after her last trial, the social media ‘conversation’ around Mulyasari had moved on to other issues, and consequently her Supreme Court appeal was not met with any of the social media fanfare which had surrounded her initial indictment. In what was a remarkably underreported event, the Indonesian Supreme Court convicted Mulyasari and handed down a six month suspended sentence.
Mulyasari’s experience shows that new social media can rapidly bring issues of injustice to the public’s attention through small simple messages and images. A large number of Indonesians use social media allowing these messages to rapidly go ‘viral’ across the internet and quickly generate political pressure. However, social media activism to date in Indonesia, so focused on short messages and rapid responses to new cases, often lacks the longevity and depth required to instigate systemic legal reforms. As Mulyasari’s case shows, once the initial hype over a particular case looses currency, and the social media ‘conversation’ moves on, the difficult, complex and longer term goal of creating law reform remains unresolved.
Arjuna Dibley (arjuna.dibley@gmail.com) is a Sydney based lawyer who wrote a thesis about criminal defamation and democracy in Indonesia, including the Mulyasari case, in 2010. He regularly writes about Indonesia on public policy blogs and in the press.
Inside Indonesia 110: Oct-Dec 2012
Social media campaigns highlight the need for criminal law reform in Indonesia
Arjuna Dibley
 |
A poster calling supporters of Prita Mulyasari to oppose restrictions on freedom of speech.Enda Nasution |
This unprecedented level of political condemnation, media scrutiny and public debate about criminal defamation laws came about, in part, because of an effective social media campaign surrounding the Mulyasari case. Activists used social media to successfully raise the profile of problems with Indonesia’s criminal law. But while social media was effectively used to draw attention to these issues, it has not been a panacea for achieving long lasting legal reform.
A problematic Criminal Code
Mulyasari’s case started from an email she sent to a group of around twenty friends and work colleagues in 2008, complaining about her treatment at a private hospital in Tangerang. In her email, Mulyasari claimed that she was misdiagnosed and that the hospital had given her unnecessary treatment to increase her medical bill. Mulyasari also wrote that when she complained about her treatment to the hospital management, she was treated poorly. Over the following months Mulyasari's private email went ‘viral’ over the Internet, circulating widely on blogs and news websites and was even published in full on the popular news web-site detik.com.In early 2009, the email came to the attention of Mulyasari’s treating doctors. In addition to filing a civil defamation law suit against her, the doctors also reported her to the Tangerang police for criminal defamation. In April 2009 Mulyasari was indicted for two criminal defamation charges by prosecutors at the Banten Prosecutors Office. Mulyasari should have been brought before a judge within 24 hours of her arrest. Instead, the prosecutors incorrectly used their powers under Indonesia’s Code of Criminal Procedure to place her in pre-trial detention for 21 days.
Ten years after Indonesia’s process of political reformation, Mulyasari’s situation attracted public attention because it highlighted ongoing weaknesses within Indonesia’s democracy. After the fall of Suharto, the Indonesian Constitution of 1945 was amended to protect citizens’ right to freedom of expression. But the Mulyasari case demonstrated that there were many legal hurdles to overcome before this right could be realised in practice, including the outdated Criminal Code.
Indonesia’s Criminal Code (adopted from the Dutch code during the era of colonial rule) imposes a jail term and/or a fine upon any person who intentionally makes a statement which contains insults or untruths which injure the reputation of the person or institution at which they are aimed. Owing to a new and controversial 2009 law, criminal defamation offences in relation to statements made on the internet or through electronic transactions have been strengthened. These new electronic based defamation offences are punishable by a maximum fine of Rp.1 billion (A$123 000), as well as a maximum of six years imprisonment. Mulyasari was charged with both the old and new criminal defamation laws.
Coin for Prita
Mulyasari's case lasted a long time because it was appealed on numerous occasions by the prosecution. The first of the trials against Mulyasari occurred in June 2009 at the Tangerang State Court, where the presiding judge dismissed the criminal charges against her on the basis that the prosec{jcomments on}ution case had not been proved. Following an appeal of the June decision by the Banten prosecutors, the State Court reheard Mulyasari’s case in September 2009 and acquitted her of both defamation charges. The acquittal was hailed as a victory by pro-freedom of expression activists who had made creative use of social media tools to support Mulyasari.
The images of Mulyasari, a young middle-class Muslim mother, in detention for an email she wrote to friends, caused a public stir in Indonesia. As a consequence, during her period of pre-trial detention a campaign using new social media emerged in support of her. The campaign, called Coin for Prita (Koin Peduli Prita), mainly operated through Facebook.
The purpose of the campaign was to raise awareness of Mulyasari’s plight and to encourage people to donate coins to help her pay any civil damages and the criminal fines. In this sense, it was a rapid and major success. The online campaign received widespread press coverage in Indonesia and across the world and by November 2009 its dedicated Facebook page had almost 400,000 supporters and was complemented with offline events including a fundraising concert. The concert, held at the Hard Rock Café in Jakarta, attracted high profile Indonesian politicians, business people and musicians, including a performance by pop sensation Nidji who wrote a song especially for the event.
By December 2009 the organisers of the Coin For Prita campaign had stopped collecting money after raising over Rp.800 million (A$98,584), comprising five truckloads of coins. The coins were ultimately converted into a cheque which was presented to Mulyasari, who used some of the funds to pay for her legal costs.
Limits of the social media ‘conversation’
 |
A photo distributed via Twitter calling volunteers to help count coins collected as part of the Coin for Prita campaignEnda Nasution |
However, the social media campaign, and the public debate which followed, has not resulted in reform to criminal defamation laws. Despite the fact that criminal defamation laws were so robustly opposed at the height of the Mulyasari case by major political figures, the laws (both the Criminal Code offence and the new 2009 offence) remain largely unreformed. In fact, they continue to be used to charge bloggers and other internet users in Indonesia. For example in March 2010, Muhammad Wahyu – a university student from East Java – was charged with two criminal defamation offences, after he made disparaging comments on the personal Facebook page of a fellow female student. Wahyu was given a three month jail term, suspended for six months.
Additionally, the campaign built around Mulyasari’s case ultimately did little to redress her own situation. After the initial hype surrounding the Mulyasari case died down, her case was again appealed by the Banten prosecutors in July 2011. Over a year after her last trial, the social media ‘conversation’ around Mulyasari had moved on to other issues, and consequently her Supreme Court appeal was not met with any of the social media fanfare which had surrounded her initial indictment. In what was a remarkably underreported event, the Indonesian Supreme Court convicted Mulyasari and handed down a six month suspended sentence.
Mulyasari’s experience shows that new social media can rapidly bring issues of injustice to the public’s attention through small simple messages and images. A large number of Indonesians use social media allowing these messages to rapidly go ‘viral’ across the internet and quickly generate political pressure. However, social media activism to date in Indonesia, so focused on short messages and rapid responses to new cases, often lacks the longevity and depth required to instigate systemic legal reforms. As Mulyasari’s case shows, once the initial hype over a particular case looses currency, and the social media ‘conversation’ moves on, the difficult, complex and longer term goal of creating law reform remains unresolved.
Arjuna Dibley (arjuna.dibley@gmail.com) is a Sydney based lawyer who wrote a thesis about criminal defamation and democracy in Indonesia, including the Mulyasari case, in 2010. He regularly writes about Indonesia on public policy blogs and in the press.
Inside Indonesia 110: Oct-Dec 2012
Clicktivism and the real world
Clicktivism and the real world:
The proliferation of the internet has made Indonesia one of the largest users of social media. In July 2012, the number of Twitter accounts in Indonesia exceeded 19.5 million, making it the fifth largest user population in the world. There are more than 5.3 million Indonesian blogs currently listed in the Indonesian blogger directory hosted by SalingSilang and Indonesian has become the third largest language used in Wordpress. Indonesians are also the world’s biggest users of the location-based social media site Foursquare and, with 42.5 million subscribers, the country ranks fourth in the world for Facebook users. Of the 55 million Internet users in Indonesia (a figure that is rapidly increasing), 46 million Indonesians – from becak (pedicab) drivers to professionals, from the working class to politicians and ministers, from artists to religious leaders – are now using social media.
These statistics suggest that Indonesia has become a social media nation. However, the extent to which social media has contributed to activism within Indonesia is another question. What matters in activism is not the availability of tools like the Internet or social media, but how civil society organisations and activists use these tools strategically and politically to advance their cause. In many cases, civil society organisations do not deliberately devise strategies for using the Internet and social media. Rather, the use of this online technology is often impulsive and reactive, responding to urgent developments in the field but failing to contribute to real-world change.
But the movement has not been able to mobilise significant support and advocacy beyond the online realm. There are many political, social, economic and cultural factors that may explain this, but a key problem has been the activists’ failure to make strategic use of the Internet and social media. For example, the twitter account @korbanlumpur does not regularly tweet. A more strategic approach would have also engaged conventional media like radio, television, and newspapers, allowing the movement to reach an audience beyond those who have access to the internet. Instead, these online campaign tools have failed to mobilise and retain support for the cause.
An example of a more deliberate and thoughtful campaign is #IndonesiaUnite, which shows how social media that responds to real world events can attract a lot of attention. On 16 July 2009, the Ritz Carlton and Marriot hotels in Jakarta were bombed. Daniel Tumiwa, a digital media professional, was the first to tweet the news about the bombings, with others quickly following with pictures and messages encouraging people not to be afraid of terrorism. The tweets, all with the hashtag #IndonesiaUnite, quickly dominated Twitter conversation, creating a space where citizens could support one another and express their hope for a better and safer Indonesia. For three days in a row, the #IndonesiaUnite was a world top ‘trending topic’. Its Facebook fans page attracted more than 400,000 supporters.
Ultimately, however, the effects of all that attention are unclear. #IndonesiaUnite managed to create a space for ‘online patriotism’, but despite the success it achieved in attracting followers, it was unable to generate any change beyond discussion about terrorism. It could have pushed the government to take the bombings more seriously, or generated a kind of ‘terrorism watch’. Instead, the movement just faded away in cyberspace.
On the day, 200 people came to the rally despite threats from the hardliner groups and police. The movement continued to gather support through an online petition which convinced 2535 individuals and 17 organisations to officially sue the Indonesian police force for failing to prevent violent acts committed in the name of religion. The official case was filed on the 10 May 2012 and the movement is now preparing for a class action. It has been criticised for being too middle class and for side-lining moderate Muslim groups but nevertheless, #IndonesiaTanpaFPI illustrates how activists used social media strategically to transform an online movement into offline action. These strategies made it possible for the wider public to participate, transforming these citizens from being observers and bystanders into agents for change.
However, these very same cases remind us too that, while new and ideas can spread very quickly online, off-line change usually develops much more slowly. Indonesian activists have certainly attempted to harness social media. But they need to use the technology strategically to facilitate their work. If they don’t, they’ll find only too quickly that poorly strategised use of social media has little chance of stimulating real world action, and so will only create false hope for change.
Yanuar Nugroho (yanuar.nugroho@manchester.ac.uk) is a Hallsworth Research Fellow in Political Economy of Innovations and Social Change at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, the University of Manchester, UK. He is also the author of ‘Beyond Click Activism: Social Media and Political Processes in Indonesia’ (FES Germany, 2012).
* Correction: Since publication the information about the number of people who attended the rally organised through #IndonesiaTanpaFPI has been updated to 200 from 1400. This updated figure was provided to the author by #IndonesiaTanpaFPI after this article was first published.
Social media tools are only effective if they can engage people off-line
Yanuar Nugroho
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Becak drivers surf the internet on their mobile phonesAdhi Kusumo |
These statistics suggest that Indonesia has become a social media nation. However, the extent to which social media has contributed to activism within Indonesia is another question. What matters in activism is not the availability of tools like the Internet or social media, but how civil society organisations and activists use these tools strategically and politically to advance their cause. In many cases, civil society organisations do not deliberately devise strategies for using the Internet and social media. Rather, the use of this online technology is often impulsive and reactive, responding to urgent developments in the field but failing to contribute to real-world change.
Clicking for the cause
Indonesia has hosted some serious online campaigns, not least around the Lapindo drilling disaster of 29 May 2006. Civil society activists and the victims have demanded that the company, owned by the powerful Golkar party chair, take responsibility for the disaster, pay compensation to those affected and recover the area. Protests have been organised locally and in Jakarta. Activists have established Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as a dedicated website (korbanlumpur.info) to seek support from the wider public. The movement has nearly 3000 supporters across at least seven different Facebook pages, including one fan page for korbanlumpur.info.But the movement has not been able to mobilise significant support and advocacy beyond the online realm. There are many political, social, economic and cultural factors that may explain this, but a key problem has been the activists’ failure to make strategic use of the Internet and social media. For example, the twitter account @korbanlumpur does not regularly tweet. A more strategic approach would have also engaged conventional media like radio, television, and newspapers, allowing the movement to reach an audience beyond those who have access to the internet. Instead, these online campaign tools have failed to mobilise and retain support for the cause.
An example of a more deliberate and thoughtful campaign is #IndonesiaUnite, which shows how social media that responds to real world events can attract a lot of attention. On 16 July 2009, the Ritz Carlton and Marriot hotels in Jakarta were bombed. Daniel Tumiwa, a digital media professional, was the first to tweet the news about the bombings, with others quickly following with pictures and messages encouraging people not to be afraid of terrorism. The tweets, all with the hashtag #IndonesiaUnite, quickly dominated Twitter conversation, creating a space where citizens could support one another and express their hope for a better and safer Indonesia. For three days in a row, the #IndonesiaUnite was a world top ‘trending topic’. Its Facebook fans page attracted more than 400,000 supporters.
Ultimately, however, the effects of all that attention are unclear. #IndonesiaUnite managed to create a space for ‘online patriotism’, but despite the success it achieved in attracting followers, it was unable to generate any change beyond discussion about terrorism. It could have pushed the government to take the bombings more seriously, or generated a kind of ‘terrorism watch’. Instead, the movement just faded away in cyberspace.
Getting it right
Sometimes, however, Indonesian cyber activism does cross over into reality. #IndonesiaTanpaFPI is an example of how the strategic use of social media can be effective. The movement started with a heated debate in Twitter on whether a group like FPI (the Islamic Defenders Front) was needed in Indonesia. It soon evolved into offline discussions in coffee shops in Jakarta that attracted non-Twitter users who shared the same concerns. The outcome was concrete: a commitment to organise a rally in the centre of Jakarta to draw more public attention to the dangers of violent groups like FPI that misrepresented Islam. The date was set for 14 February 2012 and the event was widely publicised via Twitter and Facebook as well as in venues like cafes.On the day, 200 people came to the rally despite threats from the hardliner groups and police. The movement continued to gather support through an online petition which convinced 2535 individuals and 17 organisations to officially sue the Indonesian police force for failing to prevent violent acts committed in the name of religion. The official case was filed on the 10 May 2012 and the movement is now preparing for a class action. It has been criticised for being too middle class and for side-lining moderate Muslim groups but nevertheless, #IndonesiaTanpaFPI illustrates how activists used social media strategically to transform an online movement into offline action. These strategies made it possible for the wider public to participate, transforming these citizens from being observers and bystanders into agents for change.
JalinMerapi (merapi.combine.or.id) is another case that illustrates the importance of combining online and offline activism. On the 5 November 2010 at 7:30pm, in the midst of the havoc caused by the eruption of Mt. Merapi, the Yogyakarta based volunteer group, JalinMerapi, received a desperate phone call. The caller requested meals for six thousands refugees who had fled the volcano and taken shelter in the town of Klaten. In despair, Akhmad Nasir tweeted the plea to @JalinMerapi’s 36,000 followers. At 8pm, he received a phone call from Klaten. To his disbelief, he was informed that they had received more than six thousand meals within 30 minutes. The network of @JalinMerapi followers had responded to the humanitarian disaster by forwarding the tweet as an SMS and passing the message on by word of mouth. Upon reading the message, people residing hundreds, or even thousands, of kilometres away from Yogyakarta called their relatives, asking for help to buy and deliver the meals. This success helped make JalinMerapi highly credible in the eyes of the public and the local government, eventually leading to an opportunity for it to contribute to the local disaster mitigation strategy.There is a big difference ‘liking’ something on Facebook or re-tweeting a post and joining a rally on a stinking hot day
Slow change
There is a big difference between posting a blog entry, forwarding an email, ‘liking’ something on Facebook or re-tweeting a post and joining a rally on a stinking hot day or donating cold, hard cash. Ultimately, effective and successful social media campaigns find ways to combine online activism and offline events, as in the case of #IndonesiaTanpaFPI and @JalinMerapi. When used strategically in this way, the internet and social media can help advance civil society’s efforts to create real-world change.However, these very same cases remind us too that, while new and ideas can spread very quickly online, off-line change usually develops much more slowly. Indonesian activists have certainly attempted to harness social media. But they need to use the technology strategically to facilitate their work. If they don’t, they’ll find only too quickly that poorly strategised use of social media has little chance of stimulating real world action, and so will only create false hope for change.
Yanuar Nugroho (yanuar.nugroho@manchester.ac.uk) is a Hallsworth Research Fellow in Political Economy of Innovations and Social Change at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, the University of Manchester, UK. He is also the author of ‘Beyond Click Activism: Social Media and Political Processes in Indonesia’ (FES Germany, 2012).
* Correction: Since publication the information about the number of people who attended the rally organised through #IndonesiaTanpaFPI has been updated to 200 from 1400. This updated figure was provided to the author by #IndonesiaTanpaFPI after this article was first published.
Inside Indonesia 110: Oct-Dec 2012
Online networking and minority rights
Online networking and minority rights:
In May 2012, Indonesian social networking media were flooded with statements in support of the Muslim Canadian author Irshad Manji, a public lesbian and campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities. Manji was in Indonesia at that time to launch her latest publication, but her scheduled appearance in Jakarta was cancelled after Islamist hardliners succeeded in pressuring the Indonesian police to shut down the event. In Yogyakarta, her launch ended when an attack by another Islamist radical group, Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (Indonesian Mujahedeen Council), left a number of audience members injured.
This kind of situation is not new to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in Indonesia. In 2010, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) regional congress in Surabaya was dispersed by police under pressure from local militant Islamist groups. Similarly, in 2010, the Q! Film Festival, an annual festival which showcases LGBT, HIV/AIDS and human rights films in Indonesia, was shut down when members of FPI (the Islamic Defenders Front) rallied outside the two Jakarta venues. These responses to LGBT events are supported by legal structures across the country that make it increasingly difficult for this community to be active. Members of the LGBT community are responding by using social media to work across national borders to ensure that they have space to share news, discuss issues and voice grievances.
The online censorship of minority rights, particularly of LGBT people, has increased further after the introduction of the anti-pornography law in 2008. The use of technical filtering that targets keywords and domain names related to sexualities under the category of pornography, including terms like ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’, has denied LGBT people access to a range of online information. The law has also restricted access to globally-circulating information on human rights specific to LGBT people. In February 2012, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) reported that its website had been banned by two of Indonesia’s major internet service providers, Telkomsel and IM2. In a widely circulated email, Cary Alan Johnson, IGLHRC Executive Director stated that ‘according to a spokesperson for the internet service provider IM2, the order came from the Minister of Communication and Information who banned [the website] due to its content, which they determined contains pornography’. Access to these networks is essential to Indonesian LGBT communities who are working hard to localise such information for an Indonesian audience.
The anti-pornography law also enables police to use surveillance powers to search cybercafés without prior notice. Although mobile phones are changing access trends, particularly in urban areas, cybercafés are, for many, the only way to access the internet. Since the late 1990s, they have been an important public space for Indonesians to escape the sometimes suffocating and intrusive domestic sphere. Police searches of cybercafés are often permitted without warrant since they are suspected of accommodating pornography as well as being locations where people can view, store and distribute pornographic materials. The law also spurred similar campaigns carried out by non-state actors such as FPI, creating more potential for communal conflicts.
LGBT activists do not prioritise mainstream media attention for their causes, and they are careful to use consistent language in their own media. For example, they often name groups and communities but not individuals and do not give addresses for meetings and events. Rather, information is circulated informally, through networks of trusted activists and sympathisers. Social media tools have enhanced the ability of LGBT activists to do this by allowing them to anonymously define their own campaigns and agendas.
Connecting with campaigns in other parts of the world is another important strategy for LGBT activists. These campaigns provide access to information and enable Indonesian LGBT activists to join broader global human rights movements. These links are often maintained through new social media which allows activists to side step the prejudices evident in more traditional media forms. One example is the LGBT news portal, OurVoice, which uses social media to increase public awareness about LGBT rights. It does so by covering stories that are largely absent in mainstream media. These stories are published at OurVoice, where they often receive extensive commentary and are shared through Twitter and Facebook. This kind of online engagement with the stories means that even if the OurVoice site suffers a cyber-attack, the story has already travelled far beyond the legal framework of Indonesia.
OurVoice maintains that strong networks within Indonesia and across the region will ensure that the voices of Indonesian LGBT communities are heard. Recently, as part of a regional network event facilitated by EngageMedia called Camp Sambel, OurVoice began collaborating with Malaysian citizen journalist organisation Malaysiakini. When the first OurVoice video was uploaded to Malaysiakini’s site, the link was shared enthusiastically across social networking platforms and was viewed more than 4000 times in the first day. Such links, particularly those in common languages across national borders, are essential for building solidarity between LGBT communities in the region.
Social media tools and online spaces alone cannot solve the problem of social prejudice that so often leads to violence. These problems require research, policy and action so that everyone is ensured human rights whatever their sexual orientation. New online networks, however, can create much needed solidarity and information, both of which are required to build strong anti-discrimination campaigns and increase the safety of LGBT people.
Rikky Muchammad Fajar (sidosidestory@gmail.com) is an activist filmmaker based in Jakarta. He is one of the founders of the LGBT news portal ourvoice.org. He is involved in human rights campaigns in collaboration with a range of organisations including 'Indonesia Tanpa FPI' and EngageMedia.
Alexandra Crosby (ali@alimander.com) is a writer, researcher, teacher and designer working with a wide range of groups and individuals in Indonesia and Australia. She recently submitted her PhD on the visual culture of activist communities in Java. She is project manager and communications coordinator at EngageMedia.
LGBT communities use social media to organise despite threats of violence
Rikky Muchammad Fajar and Alexandra Crosby
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Indonesian LGBT activists participate in a regional network called Camp Sambel |
This kind of situation is not new to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in Indonesia. In 2010, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) regional congress in Surabaya was dispersed by police under pressure from local militant Islamist groups. Similarly, in 2010, the Q! Film Festival, an annual festival which showcases LGBT, HIV/AIDS and human rights films in Indonesia, was shut down when members of FPI (the Islamic Defenders Front) rallied outside the two Jakarta venues. These responses to LGBT events are supported by legal structures across the country that make it increasingly difficult for this community to be active. Members of the LGBT community are responding by using social media to work across national borders to ensure that they have space to share news, discuss issues and voice grievances.
A repressive legal context
LGBT communities in Indonesia say that discrimination against sexual minorities has increased since the introduction of the system of regional regulations (Perda) in 2001. These regulations have enabled regional governments to pass legislation outlawing homosexuality, prostitution and other ‘social ills’, and this has opened up legal grounds for violent attacks on the LGBT community and sex workers by local branches of Islamic fundamentalist organisations. One province where these types of attack have taken place is South Sulawesi, where student activists have been in ongoing conflict with the FPI for over three years. Recently, on 2 June 2012, this conflict resulted in a transgender individual being injured in an attack by FPI members. |
A photo of a transvestite named Angela which was widely circulated in response to her attack in Makassar, June 2012Unknown |
The anti-pornography law also enables police to use surveillance powers to search cybercafés without prior notice. Although mobile phones are changing access trends, particularly in urban areas, cybercafés are, for many, the only way to access the internet. Since the late 1990s, they have been an important public space for Indonesians to escape the sometimes suffocating and intrusive domestic sphere. Police searches of cybercafés are often permitted without warrant since they are suspected of accommodating pornography as well as being locations where people can view, store and distribute pornographic materials. The law also spurred similar campaigns carried out by non-state actors such as FPI, creating more potential for communal conflicts.
Creating a safe space
The anti-pornography legislation draws LGBT activists into the moral fight against pornography, a terrain that makes their struggle for human rights less easily defined than for other groups. The law, in combination with mainstream media reports that portray LGBT people negatively, have led to a blurring of the boundaries between human rights abuses that limit freedom of sexual expression and vigilante efforts to protect society’s values. LGBT activists feel that they have to struggle against public opinion that associates them with sexual deviance and, at the same time, defend their basic right to live without fear of violence. Because of this slippery transformation of a political issue into a moral one, LGBT activists have to use different strategies to other activists.LGBT activists do not prioritise mainstream media attention for their causes, and they are careful to use consistent language in their own media. For example, they often name groups and communities but not individuals and do not give addresses for meetings and events. Rather, information is circulated informally, through networks of trusted activists and sympathisers. Social media tools have enhanced the ability of LGBT activists to do this by allowing them to anonymously define their own campaigns and agendas.
Connecting with campaigns in other parts of the world is another important strategy for LGBT activists. These campaigns provide access to information and enable Indonesian LGBT activists to join broader global human rights movements. These links are often maintained through new social media which allows activists to side step the prejudices evident in more traditional media forms. One example is the LGBT news portal, OurVoice, which uses social media to increase public awareness about LGBT rights. It does so by covering stories that are largely absent in mainstream media. These stories are published at OurVoice, where they often receive extensive commentary and are shared through Twitter and Facebook. This kind of online engagement with the stories means that even if the OurVoice site suffers a cyber-attack, the story has already travelled far beyond the legal framework of Indonesia.
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OurVoice website – connecting LGBT activists in Indonesia with supporters around the worldourvoice.or.id |
Networked change
While conditions remain hostile for many minorities in Indonesia and many individuals experience and fear violence, creative use of social media to build regional and international solidarity is helping Indonesia’s LGBT community to pursue their campaign for greater protection of their rights and freedoms.Social media tools and online spaces alone cannot solve the problem of social prejudice that so often leads to violence. These problems require research, policy and action so that everyone is ensured human rights whatever their sexual orientation. New online networks, however, can create much needed solidarity and information, both of which are required to build strong anti-discrimination campaigns and increase the safety of LGBT people.
Rikky Muchammad Fajar (sidosidestory@gmail.com) is an activist filmmaker based in Jakarta. He is one of the founders of the LGBT news portal ourvoice.org. He is involved in human rights campaigns in collaboration with a range of organisations including 'Indonesia Tanpa FPI' and EngageMedia.
Alexandra Crosby (ali@alimander.com) is a writer, researcher, teacher and designer working with a wide range of groups and individuals in Indonesia and Australia. She recently submitted her PhD on the visual culture of activist communities in Java. She is project manager and communications coordinator at EngageMedia.
Inside Indonesia 110: Oct-Dec 2012
Rock music and social activism on the internet
Rock music and social activism on the internet:
During the New Order, the widespread censorship of journalism, broadcast media and literature aimed to stifle subversive social movements. Popular music, however, was largely underestimated for its galvanising power. Popular artists like Iwan Fals and Sawung Jabo penned the era’s most renowned protest songs, illuminating social injustices like greed, corruption and unfair wages, and calling attention to the nation’s underclasses, from street children to prostitutes. Iwan Fals, in particular, gave a voice to the nation’s poor and disenfranchised, and – despite a brief arrest and numerous bans on public performance – was instrumental in defining the rock musician’s role as social activist in Indonesia.
Present-day rock band Navicula follows in Iwan Fals’s footsteps, combining songwriting, performance and street activism to draw attention to Indonesia’s societal ills. Environmental crises form the primary focus for the self-proclaimed ‘Green Grunge Rockers’. The Bali-based grunge/psychedelic rock outfit does not appeal to all Indonesian music fans, but has remained at the forefront of Indonesian music activism for much of its sixteen-year career. Most recently, through the use of social media, Navicula has uncovered a new platform for publicising the nation’s political, environmental, economic and social injustices.
Navicula also uses social media to publicise its political causes by participating in music competitions that use online voting. In June, Navicula submitted a music video for Metropolutan (Metro-pollutant), a song decrying Jakarta’s pollution crisis, to the worldwide band competition, the Next Røde Røckers. Navicula was among ten bands selected by a panel of expert judges to compete in finals, ultimately winning a recording contract at Record Plant in Hollywood, which it will take up in November, and a two-year equipment endorsement from Røde Microphones. By the end of the competition, more than 23,000 people had viewed the Metropolutan clip on YouTube.
Navicula also uses social media, as well as other online tools, to help raise awareness – and funds – for forms of offline activism, including community action and charity concerts. In 2011, Robi and Navicula manager, Lakota Moira, co-founded an environmental news media source called Akarumput.com. The magazine publicises urgent environmental issues such as poor waste management, water shortages, agricultural genetic engineering and overdevelopment. Akarumput also hosts community events, ranging from permaculture workshops to eco-awareness music concerts. Last October, in partnership with the Bali International School and members of the visual artist collective Komunitas Jamur, Akarumput created an 80-metre-long eco-mural on a concrete wall bordering a crowded neighborhood street in southern Denpasar. The night the mural was completed, Navicula joined several Denpasar-based rock bands to perform a free concert in the parking lot opposite the newly painted wall.
Social networking has also led to valuable partnerships. Earlier this year, Navicula released Orangutan, a song predicting the ultimate demise of Indonesia’s red apes as a result of deforestation. An accompanying music video, released on YouTube, caught the attention of Greenpeace Indonesia’s deforestation action team Mata Harimau (The Eye of the Tiger), anti-palm oil nonprofit Sawit Watch, and national environmental forum WALHI (Friends of the Earth Indonesia). Aiming to take its activism to ground zero, the orangutans’ dwindling habitat in Borneo, the band partnered with these environmental watchdogs to complete a two-week trek by dirt bike through central and west Kalimantan.
Navicula subsequently launched a ‘Tour to Borneo’ Kickstarter campaign, using this popular crowdfunding website to raise the money needed for the band’s travel expenses to Kalimantan. Through exhaustive campaigning on Facebook and Twitter, as well as public appearances in Bali and Jakarta, Navicula rallied enough supporters (or Kickstarter ‘backers’) to surpass their fundraising goal of A$2860. The tour, named after the endangered Kalimantan hornbill ‘Kepak Sayap Enggang’, included meetings between Navicula and marginalized Dayak communities in conflict with mining companies and palm oil plantations in the region, facilitated by the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples Archipelago (AMAN). Throughout the tour, the band web-released video logs documenting their encounters, created by noted filmmaker Rahung Nasution.
Despite these successes, the band remains on the periphery of the nation’s music industry. A number of rock music acts surpass their online popularity. Punk band Superman is Dead, for example, boasts a staggering 3.2 million fans on Facebook and nearly 131,000 Twitter followers. In second place are arena rockers Slank, with 2.6 million Facebook fans and 121,500 Twitter followers. Navicula, by comparison, has accumulated an audience of only 23,500 on Facebook and 9500 on Twitter. Robi suspects these lower figures are because the dogged social criticism of such ‘far left’ groups as Navicula may be too sombre or controversial for the average Indonesian rock fan. Superman Is Dead and Slank have also intermittently taken on social and environmental issues. Superman is Dead organises beach cleanups and Slank openly backs the nation’s Corruption Eradication Commission. But neither group has used their lyrics or online commentary to address social and environmental justice issues as persistently or precisely as Navicula.
Additionally, while Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in helping Navicula publicise its Kickstarter project, Robi cautions that online social networking cannot replace public appearances. In fact, following a public presentation on orangutan conservation in Ubud, Bali, Navicula raised 40 per cent of its total funds overnight. While the fundraising campaign was launched online, in this case, Navicula’s offline appearances - rather than concurrent online social media campaigning - were ultimately more valuable for rallying public support in the form of monetary donations.
Nevertheless, Navicula’s online presence is vital to its success. The band may not have as many online followers as some of its contemporaries, but it has succeeded in using social media to motivate social and environmental engagement among Indonesia’s youth. In making savvy use of Facebook and Twitter as rallying tools, Navicula not only gained an international audience for its activism, it also advanced the historical relationship between rock music and social critique in Indonesia.
Rebekah E. Moore (reemoore@indiana.edu) is a doctoral candidate (Indiana University) and public ethnomusicologist, working in Bali as Music Productions Manager for BaliSpirit Group. She is also a contributing writer and at-large editor for alternative environmental news source Akarumput.com.
Bali rockers Navicula find a platform for social change in online social media
Rebekah E. Moore
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Navicula performing their song Orangutan during a concert in Ubud, BaliAlfred Pasifico Ginting |
Present-day rock band Navicula follows in Iwan Fals’s footsteps, combining songwriting, performance and street activism to draw attention to Indonesia’s societal ills. Environmental crises form the primary focus for the self-proclaimed ‘Green Grunge Rockers’. The Bali-based grunge/psychedelic rock outfit does not appeal to all Indonesian music fans, but has remained at the forefront of Indonesian music activism for much of its sixteen-year career. Most recently, through the use of social media, Navicula has uncovered a new platform for publicising the nation’s political, environmental, economic and social injustices.
Musical activism online and offline
Navicula has made creative use of social media and the internet to disseminate its social justice messages. Utilising open source technology, the band often releases its most condemning protest songs for free download on their official website, cross-promoted on its heavily trafficked Facebook and Twitter profiles. In 2009, for example, the band released the song Mafia Medis (Medical Mafia) for free download in response to the arrest and imprisonment of Tangerang mother of two, Prita Mulyasari. Navicula also joined dozens of recording artists who used online social media to criticise her arrest and raise funds for the Coin for Prita campaign (see Dibley, this edition). According to Navicula front man, Gede Robi Supriyanto, the band hoped free access to Mafia Medis would support this movement by making it known to a larger audience.Navicula also uses social media to publicise its political causes by participating in music competitions that use online voting. In June, Navicula submitted a music video for Metropolutan (Metro-pollutant), a song decrying Jakarta’s pollution crisis, to the worldwide band competition, the Next Røde Røckers. Navicula was among ten bands selected by a panel of expert judges to compete in finals, ultimately winning a recording contract at Record Plant in Hollywood, which it will take up in November, and a two-year equipment endorsement from Røde Microphones. By the end of the competition, more than 23,000 people had viewed the Metropolutan clip on YouTube.
Navicula also uses social media, as well as other online tools, to help raise awareness – and funds – for forms of offline activism, including community action and charity concerts. In 2011, Robi and Navicula manager, Lakota Moira, co-founded an environmental news media source called Akarumput.com. The magazine publicises urgent environmental issues such as poor waste management, water shortages, agricultural genetic engineering and overdevelopment. Akarumput also hosts community events, ranging from permaculture workshops to eco-awareness music concerts. Last October, in partnership with the Bali International School and members of the visual artist collective Komunitas Jamur, Akarumput created an 80-metre-long eco-mural on a concrete wall bordering a crowded neighborhood street in southern Denpasar. The night the mural was completed, Navicula joined several Denpasar-based rock bands to perform a free concert in the parking lot opposite the newly painted wall.
Social networking has also led to valuable partnerships. Earlier this year, Navicula released Orangutan, a song predicting the ultimate demise of Indonesia’s red apes as a result of deforestation. An accompanying music video, released on YouTube, caught the attention of Greenpeace Indonesia’s deforestation action team Mata Harimau (The Eye of the Tiger), anti-palm oil nonprofit Sawit Watch, and national environmental forum WALHI (Friends of the Earth Indonesia). Aiming to take its activism to ground zero, the orangutans’ dwindling habitat in Borneo, the band partnered with these environmental watchdogs to complete a two-week trek by dirt bike through central and west Kalimantan.
 |
Screenshot of Navicula’s Kickstarter campaign pagehttp://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1637792006/golden-green-grunge-for-rare-red-apes-navicula-bor/?ref=kicktraq |
Limits of a radical agenda
Despite these successes, the band remains on the periphery of the nation’s music industry. A number of rock music acts surpass their online popularity. Punk band Superman is Dead, for example, boasts a staggering 3.2 million fans on Facebook and nearly 131,000 Twitter followers. In second place are arena rockers Slank, with 2.6 million Facebook fans and 121,500 Twitter followers. Navicula, by comparison, has accumulated an audience of only 23,500 on Facebook and 9500 on Twitter. Robi suspects these lower figures are because the dogged social criticism of such ‘far left’ groups as Navicula may be too sombre or controversial for the average Indonesian rock fan. Superman Is Dead and Slank have also intermittently taken on social and environmental issues. Superman is Dead organises beach cleanups and Slank openly backs the nation’s Corruption Eradication Commission. But neither group has used their lyrics or online commentary to address social and environmental justice issues as persistently or precisely as Navicula.Additionally, while Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in helping Navicula publicise its Kickstarter project, Robi cautions that online social networking cannot replace public appearances. In fact, following a public presentation on orangutan conservation in Ubud, Bali, Navicula raised 40 per cent of its total funds overnight. While the fundraising campaign was launched online, in this case, Navicula’s offline appearances - rather than concurrent online social media campaigning - were ultimately more valuable for rallying public support in the form of monetary donations.
Nevertheless, Navicula’s online presence is vital to its success. The band may not have as many online followers as some of its contemporaries, but it has succeeded in using social media to motivate social and environmental engagement among Indonesia’s youth. In making savvy use of Facebook and Twitter as rallying tools, Navicula not only gained an international audience for its activism, it also advanced the historical relationship between rock music and social critique in Indonesia.
Rebekah E. Moore (reemoore@indiana.edu) is a doctoral candidate (Indiana University) and public ethnomusicologist, working in Bali as Music Productions Manager for BaliSpirit Group. She is also a contributing writer and at-large editor for alternative environmental news source Akarumput.com.
Inside Indonesia 110: Oct-Dec 2012
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