About the Award: During their stay at a host American university, Humphrey Fellows are invited to take graduate courses relevant to their professional interests. However, as the Humphrey Fellowship is not a degree program, participants spend a considerable portion of their time engaged in professional development activities including: consultations and affiliations with U.S. faculty and experts, field trips, workshops, research projects, and the development of practical useful strategies that could be applied in the Fellows’ home countries.
Field of Study: The Humphrey Fellowship offers opportunities in the following fields:
Sustainable Development
Economic Development
Educational
Public Health
Type: Fellowship
Eligibility:
Have a minimum of a four-year undergraduate degree from S.A. (BA + Honors)
Have a minimum of five years of full-time professional experience beyond the attainment of a first university/undergraduate degree prior to July 2020
University lecturers have to have management or policy responsibilities and experience. Exceptions apply to teachers of English as a foreign language and specialists in substance abuse preventions and treatment
Demonstrated Leadership Ability: candidates should have achieved positions of significant responsibility at the national, regional or local level and show clear promise to assume greater future leadership roles
A record of public service in the community: candidates careers must reflect a present and future commitment to public service, broadly defined in the public, NGO, or private sector
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of Award: The Fellowship provides for:
Payment of tuition and fees at the assigned host university;
Pre-academic English language training, if required;
A living allowance, including a one-time settling-in allowance;
Accident and sickness coverage;
A book allowance; one-time computer subsidy;
Air travel (international travel to and from the U.S. for the Program and domestic travel to required program events);
A Professional Development allowance for professional activities, such as field trips, professional visits and conferences.
Duration of Programme: 10 months
How to Apply: The online application can be accessed HERE
It’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.
In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.
Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.
As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:
A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.
Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.
Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.
As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.
What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.
It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.
Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.
The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.
The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers(manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.
The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.
Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.
Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”
In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.
We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.
Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.
Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.
As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.
As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.
On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.
The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.
After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.
Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.
Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, with more than 230 million inhabitants, is teetering on the brink of financial default. Its fast-depleting foreign currency reserves are currently around $3 billion, which is less than the cost of a month’s imports. Despite the approach of general elections, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his interim coalition government are implementing the International Monetary Fund’s socially devastating diktats in the hopes of convincing it to release the next tranche of a loan agreement and avert state bankruptcy.
The IMF suspended a $1.1 billion loan tranche last September following the government’s failure to meet its demands in full. Amid widespread fears within ruling circles that further austerity and privatizations could trigger a social explosion like that which erupted in Sri Lanka last April, the government last week implemented a series of preliminary measures demanded by the IMF as a condition for resuming talks.
An IMF team visited Islamabad on January 31, after the rupee was allowed to depreciate more than 7 percent in value last Thursday. By Monday, Pakistan’s currency had fallen further to 270 rupees to the US dollar. At the beginning of 2022, just over 175 rupees were equivalent to $1, meaning Pakistan’s currency has lost more than 50 percent of its value in just over a year.
Petrol and diesel prices were increased by 35 rupees per litre on Sunday, reaching new record prices of 249.8 and 262.8 rupees per litre respectively. These government-mandated price rises will have a knock-on effect on the cost of food and other essentials.
Even before the pandemic and the price-shocks caused by it and the US-NATO war in Russia, Pakistan had among the highest child malnutrition rates among so-called developing countries. According to a National Nutrition Survey from the last decade, nearly 44 percent of all Pakistani children are stunted and 15 percent are wasted. [Photo: Borgen Project]
In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal voiced his fears of mass social unrest if the IMF’s demands were carried out in full. “If we just comply with the IMF conditionalities, as they want, there will be riots in the streets,” he said. Repeating his government’s appeals for a “staggered programme” of economic “reforms” and insisting that the government is committed to the IMF, Iqbal said, “The economy and society cannot absorb the shock or cost of a front-loaded programme.”
The government has also lifted curbs that it had imposed on imports with the aim of limiting the depletion of foreign currency reserves. Domestic manufacturers had complained the curbs were self-defeating, since they adversely impacted the exports needed to earn foreign exchange.
The News reported unnamed sources had told it that the IMF is demanding 600 billion rupees in new taxes to partially recover a 2 trillion rupee “breach” in budgetary estimates. For its part, Dawn reported that energy subsidies are on the chopping block. Both the IMF and the government are hiding their discussions and agreements from the public.
The government is desperate for an agreement with the IMF, since all avenues of external financing have dried up, including from virtually all of its traditional allies among the Gulf monarchies. Islamabad needs $8 billion by June for debt repayments alone. Debt obligations by 2025 stand at a whopping $73 billion.
The interim government is also in a deep political crisis. Sharif’s Muslim League (PML-N) and its chief coalition partner, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)—both of which have long records of enforcing IMF austerity—orchestrated the ouster of Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government in April 2022 with the support of the army top brass and the judges of the country’s highest court. During his three and a half years in office, Khan carried out two rounds of some of the most brutal austerity and “reform” measures in the country’s history to secure and continue a $6 billion bailout agreement with the IMF. He was ousted after reintroducing energy subsidies in February 2022, in violation of an IMF agreement, in the hopes of mollifying mass discontent over price hikes.
Another factor in Khan’s ouster was concern among a significant section of the Islamabad elite that he was shifting Pakistan’s foreign policy too far away from its traditional alliance with Washington, and towards closer ties with Russia and China. China has been blamed for the debt crisis as Pakistan owes $30 billion to Beijing. Islamabad was ordered by the IMF to renegotiate power purchasing agreements with Chinese plants worth $1.1 billion. Reportedly, the IMF has taken exception to Islamabad’s failure to reschedule this debt. In contrast, Islamabad owes $41 billion to international banks, including the IMF.
Since his ouster, Khan has been able to win support among professionals and middle-class layers on the basis of anti-US rhetoric. He has blamed Washington for his ouster, and exploited the interim coalition government’s implementation of hated IMF austerity. The IMF released a long-delayed tranche of its loan package last August after the new government had implemented a series of devastating cuts.
The social catastrophe in Pakistan is most starkly revealed among 33 million people affected by last summer’s floods. A third of the country was inundated as an extreme heat wave provoked by climate change triggered glacial melting in the Himalayas that sent vast quantities of water plunging onto lower-lying terrain. Ten million children remain in dire need of “immediate, lifesaving support,” according to the UN. It has also warned that 4 million children are still living near contaminated and stagnant flood waters, “risking their survival and wellbeing.” “Nearly 15 million people in flood-affected areas need emergency food assistance, while an estimated 9 million people are being pushed into monetary poverty,” the UN reported in January.
Less than half of the utterly inadequate $816 million pledged to the UN’s emergency Pakistan relief fund has materialised. The UN fears there won’t be any money left beyond January to assist those in desperate need.
Last month, Prime Minister Sharif and UN Secretary-General António Guterres co-sponsored an International Conference on Climate Resilient Pakistan that was supposed to raise money to both support immediate flood rehabilitation projects and investments in infrastructure to protect Pakistan from the long-term impacts of climate change. While $9 billion was purportedly raised, the money is expected to be made conditional on the fulfillment of the IMF agreement. “There is no free money. And everybody who pledged their contributions today will come with certain expectations,” Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Development Program, said after the conference concluded.
In line with the global onslaught of finance capital, the IMF has refused to relax any of its stringent conditions even in the face of the devastation caused by the floods. Last year’s flooding is estimated to have caused over $30 billion in damage and wiped out 80 percent of the country’s crops. Exacerbating the plight of the masses, the government restricted its aid spending in order to remain compliant with the IMF.
The grossly underestimated official inflation rate was 24.5 percent in December. Prices of foodstuffs in urban areas were up by a 32.7 percent annual rate and by 37.9 percent in rural areas. Economist and former finance minister Hafiz Pasha estimated that annualised inflation will hit 70 percent in case of a default and 35 percent if an agreement with the IMF is reached.
Conditions of daily life are already horrendous. One person died and several others were injured, in Mirpurkhas in Sindh province, on January 8, in a stampede of several hundred people desperately trying to access a few truck loads of subsidized goods that had arrived in the town. They were attempting to buy a kilogram of wheat for 65 rupees, when the retail price is between 140 and 160 rupees. Large shipments are stuck at ports due to a lack of dollars to settle bills, which is contributing to price hikes.
Exacerbated by the supply chain disruption due to the global pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and unrestrained price gouging by large corporations, skyrocketing prices have worsened widespread food insecurity and hunger in Pakistan. The vast majority of workers and rural toilers cannot make enough to even pay for food. A daily wage worker earns between 15,000 ($56) and 20,000 ($75) rupees a month and in most cases must feed an extended family. In most areas of the country, a graduated teacher of a government school might make 22,000 ($82) to 30,000 rupees ($112) a month.
Aiming to cash in on the growing popular hostility to the government, Khan and the PTI are intensifying their demands for an early general election. In January, the PTI withdrew from provincial governments in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, forcing snap elections for both provinces, which must be held within 90 days. Punjab was the traditional power base of the PML-N, but the big-business party synonymous with IMF austerity has lost in all by-elections held since assuming national office in April.
The 12-hour power outage that affected the entire country on January 23, the second grid breakdown in three months, further discredited the government. The outage was attributable to aging and outdated infrastructure.
Regardless of which of the three main parties have held power, they have all propped up and bowed to the most powerful institution in the country, the US-backed Pakistan army. Pakistan’s ruling elite has a long history of resorting to brutal military dictatorships whenever it feels its grip on power challenged by opposition from below.
Without the IMF’s blessing, Pakistan can hardly raise a dime. And without Washington’s approval, the IMF will not talk to Islamabad. In comments to the Dawn last month, an unnamed US government official insisted that Islamabad must implement the pro-global investor reforms demanded by the IMF. “To put Pakistan on a sustainable growth path and restore investor confidence, we encourage Pakistan to continue working with the [IMF] on implementing reforms, especially those which will improve Pakistan’s business environment,” the official told the newspaper.
Twelve NATO countries have pledged to send between 120 and 140 modern main battle tanks to Ukraine, in what Ukrainian Defense Minister Dmytro Kuleba said was the “first wave” of tank deliveries, with more to come.
“The tank coalition now has 12 members,” Kuleba said Tuesday in an online briefing. “I can note that in the first wave of contributions, the Ukrainian armed forces will receive between 120 and 140 Western-model tanks.”
The announcements make Ukraine, at least on paper, one of the most powerful militaries in the world, on par with the tank capability of some of the major NATO powers. The UK maintains 158 Challenger 2 main battle tanks on active duty, while France operates 222 Leclerc main battle tanks.
Last year, Ukrainian officials called on NATO members to provide it with 300 main battle tanks. At the time, this was seen as an enormous number even among defenders of the war. But with weapons surging into the country, it is likely to be the lower bound.
The figure of 140 tanks does not take into account the hundreds of tracked armored personnel carriers already in or heading to the country.
Last week, the Pentagon announced that 60 Bradley fighting vehicles had shipped from South Carolina, and that the vehicles are arriving in Europe this week.
But even the massive quantities of weapons streaming into Ukraine are only a down payment.
Reuters reported that the White House will announce a further $2 billion worth of weapons shipments to Ukraine, including a long-range missile capable of striking over 100 miles.
The weapons system, known as the ground-launched Small Diameter Bomb, is a rocket-launched maneuverable glide bomb with double the range of the HIMARS missiles Washington has already provided.
The deployment would mark a repudiation of Biden’s pledge in May that “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders,” and his declaration that “We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia.”
In an interview with NPR on Tuesday, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov called for the US to send fighter jets to Ukraine.
“I’m sure that’s absolutely realistic,” he said. Reznikov discounted reported concerns among the NATO members over the escalatory character of such an action, declaring, “What is impossible today is absolutely possible tomorrow.”
Poland, Latvia and Lithuania have already publicly stated their agreement with this demand.
“Ukraine needs fighter jets ... missiles, tanks. We need to act,” Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu said Tuesday at a joint press conference in Riga with Latvian and Polish officials.
“Because fighter jets and long-range missiles are essential military aid, and at this crucial stage in the war, where the turning point is about to happen, it is vital that we act without delay,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said in an interview with Lithuanian National Television.
He concluded, “Those red lines must be crossed.”
Asked about sending fighter aircraft to Ukraine at a news conference on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron declared, “Nothing is excluded.”
On Tuesday, the US accused Russia of being out of compliance with the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia.
The treaty limits the total number of warheads that the US and Russia may deploy. The complaint sets into motion a series of steps that could lead to the breakdown of the treaty, further inflaming nuclear tensions escalated by the war.
In 2019, the Trump administration withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, allowing the US to ring Russia and China with short-range nuclear weapons.
In the month since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress, US-NATO involvement in the war has escalated enormously, first with the dispatch of the Patriot missile system, followed by the Bradley and Stryker fighting vehicles, and finally the Leopard and Abrams main battle tanks.
NATO war planners are seeking to continue this, with imminent plans to send Ukraine long-range missiles and active discussions about the dispatch of fighter jets to Ukraine.
Each of these new weapons systems—bringing with them enormous logistical, maintenance and training requirements—will even further entangle the US and NATO in the war and create the conditions for demands for further escalation, including the creation of no-fly zones and the direct deployment of US and NATO troops.
The latest edition of Theatre Facts, the annual survey of the state of the not-for-profit theater world in the US, came out in late 2022. The report is prepared each year by the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), an organization that promotes professional non-profit theater.
The most recent survey covers the state of the field in 2020-2021. That is to say, it provides a glimpse of the conditions produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, both short- and long-term.
Not surprisingly, theaters in the US (and elsewhere) were devastated. They remain threatened.
Theatre Facts explains that starting in March 2020, “theatres across the country closed their doors as the virus spread. The total loss to the performing arts industry attributable to the pandemic is over $3.2 billion, and changing COVID-related behavioral patterns have decreased audience ticket demand by 20-25 percent.”
The report focuses on 136 theaters that completed a TCG survey each year from 2017 to 2021—out of a nationwide total of 1,852 non-profit theaters, whose productions played before some 2.9 million audience members in 2021.
The total income of these 136 “trend theaters” peaked in 2019, then fell by 49 percent between 2020 and 2021. That amounts to a $900,000 loss in earned income per theater. Over the five-year period, earned income contracted by 61 percent.
Average subscription income to the 136 theaters fell by 82 percent over the same period. Average single ticket income also plummeted by 82 percent from 2020 to 2021, and fell 93 percent between 2017 and 2021.
Startlingly, the “net effect,” the report indicates, was a “a 90% reduction in total ticket income over the trend period, punctuated by a drop of 88% from 2020 to 2021. Total ticket income covered a high of 42% of expenses in 2019, in contrast to the low of 7.3% in 2021.”
“It was a crash,” as one media account commented bluntly.
Meanwhile, corporate funding fell by 28 percent from 2017 to 2021, and by 21 percent in 2021 over 2020 alone. Various other forms of private giving also fell. “Considering both earned and contributed income combined, total income fell over the 5-year period by 25%,” according to Theatre Facts.
If those operating not-for-profit theaters in the US did not lock up their venues and walk away it was principally because government funding increased sharply, reflecting political concerns about the consequences of the arts sector simply collapsing.
For the same group of 136 theaters, average federal government funding, for example, “ended the period more than 14 times greater than the 2017 level.” State support was more than 200 percent higher in 2021 than in 2017, while average local government funding ended 43 percent higher at the end of the same period.
These not-for-profit US theaters survived because of government subsidies. Of course, serious theater by its very nature requires state support. It is not a profit-making venture. The current artistically degenerated state of for-profit Broadway (where the average paid admission to a musical was $132 during the 2021-2022 season) and even Off-Broadway is convincing evidence of that.
Government funding was so relatively generous during the pandemic that many of the theaters, because of vastly reduced expenses, actually experienced operating surpluses. The various theaters’ working capital hit a peak in 2021.
This came in large measure at the expense of their workforce. At the “trend theatres,” average total staff fell 66 percent from 2017 to 2021, and total compensation declined by 33 percent. “There was slight growth in management and general personnel expenses over the trend period,” the survey points out, “but total personnel expenses in all categories fell from 2020 into 2021 with program personnel expenses cut by 44%.”
In any event, the “frothy blip of budget surpluses” will be short-lived. Special government programs and funding have disappeared, but audiences have not yet returned in force.
According to an October 2022 article at Marketplace.org, regional theaters, for example, “have particularly struggled to recover from those losses and get customers back in seats. Average ticket sales for performing arts organizations are at 75% of what they were pre-pandemic, and may reach 80% by year’s end.” The reality of “how audiences have and have not returned and where organizations are feeling that strain is different place to place, but across the board, almost nowhere is [it] back to 2019 numbers.”
Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia [Photo by RebelAt / CC BY 2.0]
Expenses, partly due to the general inflationary trends, have risen. “Sheets of plywood, sticks of steel, bolts of fabric, and then even the cost of paper to send the postcard out about the production costs more than it used to,” the managing director of one theater explained to Marketplace.org
Moreover, the pandemic brought with it “new health and safety protocols. Routine testing is the norm now in many theater companies, which isn’t cheap. Some organizations purchased HEPA air filters for theaters and rehearsal spaces, as well as see-through masks used in the earlier part of the pandemic during performances.” In addition, hiring understudies, previously impossible for smaller companies “is now in many cases necessary. As is the hiring of a COVID safety officer to oversee ever-changing pandemic protocols.”
A survey of Washington D.C. theatergoers discovered what should come as no shock to anyone, “Theatre attendance is down overall, and it is driven by continued concerns about COVID-19.” Theatre Washington found that while “58 percent of respondents previously attended the theatre six or more times, only 31 percent did so after reopening. Almost half (46 percent) of respondents have attended the theatre just three times or less since reopening.”
Again, unsurprisingly, the survey found that the central reason “why some patrons had not returned to theatres since reopening was their concern over becoming ill from COVID exposure. A full 68 percent of patrons stated that they consider the possibility of contracting COVID-19 to be a very important reason for not attending theatres.”
Concluding the survey, Theatre Facts 2021 observes that only “sharp reductions in expenses coupled with large growth in government contributions and investments kept theatres afloat” in 2020-2021. However, as audiences return to live performances, “theatres will be challenged to revive earned revenue income sources to counter reduced government relief and the effects of high inflation.”
Strikingly, over the four-year period 2017-2021, the number of theater performances in the US dropped more than 70 percent and attendance fell by over 80 percent, “with more pronounced drops for audiences age 18 and under.”
The study finally asks: “Will audiences, ticket sales, and subscriptions return to pre-pandemic levels? Will new sources of government support emerge to replace programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program? Will rising inflation hamper fiscal sustainability, and what impact might that have on pay equity in the sector?” The bureaucratic language notwithstanding, these are existential questions for serious theater production in the US.
Tuesday saw a second nationwide protest in France against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to slash pensions by raising the minimum retirement age to 64 and increasing the pay-in period to 43 years. Rail and transit workers, energy and refinery workers and public servants went on strike against the cuts. Protesters also denounced the Macron government’s broader policies, including France’s expanding role in the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
A line of riot police officers divides protestors at the end of the demonstration against plans to push back France's retirement age, at the Invalides monument, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023 in Paris. [AP Photo/Thibault Camus]
The protests were broader than those held on January 19, when 2 million people marched. According to the trade unions that called the nationwide action, 205,000 people marched in Marseille, 80,000 in Toulouse, 28,000 in Nantes, 25,000 in Nice and 18,000 in Toulon. In Rennes, where 23,000 people marched, police assaulted protesters with water cannon. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) announced that 500,000 people marched in Paris, 100,000 more than on January 19.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who before the protest announced that her raising of the retirement age was “non-negotiable,” mobilized 11,000 cops across France, including 4,000 in Paris.
This nationwide strike is part of a broader, international upsurge of strikes across Europe. Yesterday, as Turkish refinery workers mounted a work-to-rule action and Spanish air traffic controllers went on strike, 12,000 workers marched in protests in Brussels. Belgian rail and transit workers, teachers and health care workers were protesting against declining real wages and inflation, and demanding better working conditions.
On February 1, strikes are expected in Britain and Finland. The Finnish unions have proposed 5 percent raises in several industries, although inflation is far higher, at over 10 percent, and strikes are set to begin today and continue throughout the month.
In Britain, a half-million strikers are expected as school teachers, rail workers, public servants, university lecturers, bus drivers and security guards all go on strike. The British prime minister’s office at 10 Downing Street has publicly announced that Wednesday will be “very difficult.”
Across Europe and beyond, the working class is mobilizing as an international force against not national, but global problems: inflation, social austerity, health crises and war. The growth of opposition to war and military spending in France, after Macron announced a staggering €400 billion military budget, was particularly evident on Tuesday.
These strikes raise crucial issues of political perspective: How can workers overcome the obstacles posed by pro-government national union bureaucracies, unify the working class across national borders, and oppose the policies that emerge from union negotiations with Macron? It is crucial to unify the working class against NATO’s reckless escalation of its war on Russia in Ukraine, which the French CGT union bureaucracy has officially endorsed.
Protesters in Amiens hold signs saying "They can always find money for war, never for peace." [Photo: WSWS]
Valérie, who works at a school for handicapped children, told the WSWS in Paris that she feared the sending of tanks to Ukraine by Macron and other NATO powers would provoke a global conflict. “It’s true that the risk is real,” she said. “I’m afraid of all of that. But here we are, I get up in the morning and I tell myself I’m struggling for me, I’m struggling for my son and for my children, we are always struggling.”
The WSWS spoke to Maxime, who works at a bookstore and said he came to protest “Macron’s pension cuts and to fight against possibly having to work two years more for pensions that will in any case be very small.” He added, “And also, working at a bookstore is not a very high-paying job. When you are a bookstore employee, you get by without having very much. The only thing that we really know so far is that we’re being told no retirement before 64. In fact, most of us know it would be more like 67, 68 or even 70.”
Maxime denounced the vast sums Macron is spending on war and the police, and the soaring personal fortune of Bernard Arnault (€213 billion), the world’s richest man. “There is so much money for the army, for the police and for the security forces,” he said. “But on the other hand, when you start talking about raising workers’ wages, helping people, there is nothing—even though now, the world’s richest man is French. During Macron’s two terms, there have been enormous, constantly-renewed handouts to the corporations, while workers are supposed to foot the bill.”
Maxime said he hoped the protest would provoke a social explosion. “I think the movement against pension cuts is bringing together many frustrations about everything that has happened since Macron was elected,” he said, “and even before that, in fact. We are hoping it will turn out to be a catalyst for other movements, too, like the ‘yellow vests’ were in their time, which led to other protests, like against the security law and all of that.”
The WSWS also met high school students who were protesting against the rise in the retirement age. One of them said, “They want to make pensions come very late for everyone, even though some jobs are much tougher or more complicated than others. And so it’s obvious that some will die before getting to retire, and we do not want to die before retirement. We want to enjoy life and retire early enough that we can continue on with the rest of our lives.”
Jihan, a high school student, stressed the importance of uniting students with the working class: “I think it’s very good that high school students feel involved. It is better to wake up and fight this injustice. Just after graduating from high school, we will go to work or have to get a job to finance our studies, so students are very close to the workers.”
WSWS reporters also covered the protest in the city of Amiens in northern France, which was again larger than on January 19, with 18,000 protesters and many youth. They spoke to Augustine, a high school student, who said: “We protested in front of our school to get people to come to Amiens. We are there to support our elders. Macron’s army budget is a political choice made to support wars in the interest of the system.”
Students protest pension cuts in Amiens with a coffin saying, RIP Pensions, 1982-2023. [Photo: WSWS]
Rémi, a history student at Jules Verne University, denounced “conditions facing workers in this period of inflation,” and continued, saying, “The situation keeps getting worse and worse. We must stop useless spending like the military budget. During the pandemic they have relentlessly enriched the bosses. Now, people have trouble getting enough to eat.”
Three political science students at the same university said Macron’s cuts were “illegitimate,” with Louise commenting: “Macron makes the lives of youth precarious. We want to enjoy our youth without having to worry about what will happen to us in 50 years. But we have no future under this system. The military budgets are really frightening. This is not the time for such measures, when we are struggling for our lives.”
