Globally, whistleblowers face determined vested-interests-blowback-and-fightback. In Ghana, the vested interests ripping-off Mother Ghana from the shadows, use their lackeys in the media and corridors of power, to exact revenge against those who expose them. The furious onslaught on the Auditor General, Daniel Yao Domelevo, today, because he has surcharged the Senior Minister, Hon.Yaw Osafo Marfo for wrongfully paying Kroll Associates a miilion dollars, is a classic example.
And, as we speak, Anas Amereyaw Anas, is public enemy number one, because, unlike most of those who expose corruption in Ghanaian society, he has international media collaborators and an international audience, to disseminate the results of his investigations into high-level corruption scandals in society, which expose powerful people involved in the brutal gang-rape of Mother Ghana that cases of egregious high-level corruption, in our country, represent.
No journalist worth his or her salt, who is honest, principled, and patriotic, and firmly on the side of Mother Ghana, as well as on the side of the ordinary people of our country, should allow his or herself to be used by powerful people to try and tarnish Anas' reputation.
Those who want to destroy Anas' reputation invariably do so for base reasons, and for selfish ends - regardless of how they cloak it. Full stop.
With respect, Anas is neither a crook, nor a blackmailer. He is a brilliant African investigative journalist and a patriot who loves his country and cares about the plight of disadvantaged Ghanaians. Nothing criminal about holding on to such societal common-weal-values. No. Zilch.
Above all, Anas has as much a right to aspire to own lots of landed properties, as the Kennedy Adjapongs and Bernard Antwi-Boasiakos do. At least we know the source of Anas' wealth: selling documetary films of his investigations into corruption to willing international media entities that are happy to purchase and telecast them.
Pretty hard to say the same about the precise sources of the dubious wealth of the garrulous and uncouth Kennedy Adjapongs and Bernard Antwi-Boasiakos. For Ghanaian society's well-being, we must protect all whistleblowers, in Ghana. Cool.
Mother Jones illustration; Getty, Robert Alexander/Getty
Over the past month or so, the New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, has been giving a handful of interviews about the role of journalism in general, and the New York Times in particular. One of these, with the BBC,
briefly had our ears burning. “I make it very clear when I hire, I make
it very clear when I talk to the staff, I’ve said it repeatedly, that
we are not supposed to be the leaders of the resistance to Donald
Trump,” Baquet said. “That is an untenable, nonjournalistic, immoral
position for the New York Times. If I was the editor of Mother Jones, I would say otherwise.”
Wait, what? I was working on this column on a plane next to my
teenager, who peeked over my shoulder as I transcribed the quote. “Whoa,
that guy is flaming you guys!” Don’t you think, I asked, that he could
just be saying that their work and ours is different?” He paused,
reread. “No, mom. He’s flaming you.”
Baquet is a strong and fearless editor whose career has often put him
at odds with the powers that be, not least as a pioneer in a field
where journalists of color have encountered nonstop obstacles
and are still dramatically underrepresented at the top. At the
beginning of the past decade’s wave of newsroom downsizing, he urged
editors everywhere to resist cost-cutting owners, and lost his job at the top of the Los Angeles Times masthead as a result. (That was when the fight was over cutting the LA Times’ newsroom from 1,200 to 960. Sob.)
So why would Baquet feel the need to sideswipe a competing news organization—and at Mother Jones, we’re not shy about competing with a newsroom 25 or so times larger—as immoral and nonjournalistic?
The answer is at the heart of the crisis in journalism right now. It has to do with how the Times,
and much of the rest of American elite mainstream media, has backed
itself into a defensive position that hurts their audiences and fails to
serve the democracy on which their work depends.
That’s what I believe. But this isn’t just about what I believe—it’s
about what the job of journalists should be. And while we journalists
would love to think we know the answer, it’s not really for us to
decide. It has to be a conversation with our audience: You. Nowhere does
that apply more than here at Mother Jones, since our work is possible only because of readers who support it.
So let’s have the conversation. Here’s a quick survey to get your
initial read; below I’ll also dig into some deeper questions that we’d
love your feedback on.
What do you think journalism’s most important job is at this moment of crisis for democracy? Choose one:
Let’s unpack this New York Times moment a little more. The Times
is an iconic institution, almost without peer in the journalism world.
Powerful people are obsessed with it, no one more so than Donald Trump,
who, it’s clear, still craves and courts
its approval despite all his vitriol. So are readers (especially those
on Twitter) who intently parse its choices, especially the controversial opinion section. Its successes set the bar for others, and so do its failures.
Baquet first rolled out
his not-leaders-of-the-resistance argument publicly after an infamous
failure, the “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism” front-page headline just
after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. In the face of an outcry from
readers and Times staffers, he impugned his critics’ motives. He cast the Times’ position as principled resistance, not to hate or mass shooters or a president who exploited both—but to its readers.
To be sure, part of the idea Baquet invokes is indisputable: A
newsroom should not cast itself as the leader of a political movement
(and no political movement that waits for a newsroom to lead it will get
far). But the critics of “Trump Urges Unity” were not asking the Times
to do that. They warned that uncritically amplifying a line like that,
from a president who has encouraged racist division at virtually every
opportunity, does not serve the truth. That, after all, is why the Times quickly changed the headline, and why Baquet said it had been a mistake.
We all make mistakes—a lot of them. Sometimes they are a tell of our
weaknesses. And the weakness of America’s elite traditional newsrooms,
including the Times, is their vulnerability to timidity and false equivalency.
These newsrooms are under fire right now from all sides. Lefty
Twitter has made it a sport to pile onto individual reporters in a way
that is hard to distinguish from bullying. But the most consequential
attacks have consistently come from the right. It’s conservative
billionaires who have launchedlawsuits against news organizations; conservative talk-show hosts who scream about bias everywhere but on their shows. It was a Republican Congressman who body-slammed a reporter, and it is a Republican president who has made the media his number one target.
(And make no mistake, these attacks are not about politics. They are about journalism, period. When the conservativeWeekly Standarddared to challenge Trump, it came under relentless fire and was finally shut down. Its former editor, Stephen Hayes, along with former National Review
editor Jonah Goldberg, are launching a site that aims to do real
reporting from a conservative point of view. I know there are lots of Mother Jones readers who wish there were such a thing; you can check them out here.)
What these attacks really are is the most basic form of working the
refs: By howling about the “liberal media,” the Trump partisans seek to
force their targets to defend their right flank. Elite mainstream news
organizations have invested a lot in being seen as neutral arbiters of
political discourse, and being characterized otherwise pushes all their
buttons. They allow themselves to be put on the defensive as their fears
are weaponized against them. And they end up missing important
stories—or overdoing it on not-so-important ones as a result. Hillary
Clinton’s emails were a story in 2016, but we know now that they did not
merit the wall-to-wall coverage the Times and others gave them, even as it downplayed the Russia scandal. (October 31, 2016, when the Times published its somewhat infamous “Investigating Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia” piece—even as my colleague David Corn exposed
the fact that the FBI was investigating Christopher Steele’s memos on
those same links—is perhaps the best argument ever for why we need a
diverse media ecosystem.)
Was false equivalency, and the impulse that for each Trump scandal
there had to be an equal and equivalent Clinton scandal, part of the
reason for these misjudgments? Was it why the Times allowed itself to be used to legitimize
Steve Bannon’s conspiracy theories—theories that would end up in the
president’s head as he tried to extort Ukraine? And regardless of what
happened in the past, will the right’s referee-working help amplify
propaganda and disinformation in 2020?
That’s an important question because the “liberal media” howls are
intended to influence not just newsrooms, but audiences too. And they
work—even with liberals. They establish a false equivalency between Fox
News and Breitbart on one “side” and the Times and CNN, or sometimes MSNBC and Mother Jones,
on the other. I can almost guarantee that someone will say it at your
Thanksgiving table: “When you watch Fox News and MSNBC, the truth is
somewhere in the middle.”
But that’s like saying the truth is in the middle between an apple
and an orange. MSNBC is an actual news network; it features a lot of
liberal commentary, but it won’t allow its journalists to run afoul of
the facts. (Remember how Lawrence O’Donnell had to apologize immediately
after he got out over his skis
with a claim on Trump and Russian oligarchs.) Fox News is nothing short
of a propaganda organization, its content a toxic mix of conspiracy and
contempt (and only a few
journalists with allegiance to reality sprinkled in). They have less in
common with news organizations on any point of the spectrum than they do
with the Trump campaign.
That’s why Baquet’s comments are such a shame. He uses Mother Jones as a punching bag to position the Times
as more palatable, more “tenable.” Look at those people over there,
he’s saying. They are the biased ones, the ones who want to lead the
resistance. But the “fake news” squad hates the Times for the same reason they hate Mother Jones—because they can’t stand it when journalists uncover inconvenient truths. The difference is that at MoJo, we can be unapologetic about this.
The fundamental mistake that conventional Washington journalism has
made over the past four years is to imagine all of politics as
two-dimensional—Democrat to Republican, left to right, with far too
little attention to the many other fault lines that run through, across,
and at a diagonal to that distinction. One of the most important of
these other fault lines is the one between those who stand for
democracy, with a small d, and those who abet authoritarianism and
minority rule.
In that battle, journalists can’t just dispassionately chronicle two
equally valid “sides.” A free press needs (and is needed by) lowercase-d
democracy. We can’t exist without it.
The Times can’t and shouldn’t be part of a capital-R,
partisan Resistance, but it better damn well be part of the lowercase-r
resistance against authoritarianism and illiberalism. And if leaders
like Baquet are worried about taking sides against the latter, they are
failing (not to get grandiose, but dammit, it’s Defcon One here) their
sacred mission.
This is journalism’s fight, but it’s not just ours. The people who
scream “fake news” when we report the truth are the same people who
attack anyone who dares to speak out online, women and people of color most of all. They literally raise money to go after individual journalists and their families. They file lawsuits against citizen activists and make local news anchors read robo-scripts.
Standing up to that is not about partisanship. It’s about speaking
truth to power and defending the freedom that allows us to do so.
That’s our case. But now it’s time for yours. What do you think is journalism’s mission? Where do you see the difference between the Times or other elite mainstream news organizations and MoJo? What would you like us to double down on as we head into 2020?
Your responses will inform our strategy going into an election year
like no other. We need to focus on the job at hand, and with your help, Mother Jones can.
Flight Centre, travel insurer drop South African Airways
JOHANNESBURG,
Nov 29 (Reuters) - International travel agency Flight Centre Travel
Group has stopped selling tickets on South African Airways (SAA) flights
after a travel insurance firm said it would no longer cover SAA tickets
against insolvency.
State-owned SAA failed to pay staff full salaries this month and has said it has almost no cash left after a week-long strike.
Flight
Centre said in a letter to clients dated Nov. 28 that its preferred
travel insurance provider and their underwriters were no longer willing
to cover SAA under their Travel Supplier Insolvency benefit “due to
doubts concerning to long-term viability of the airline.”
“In
light of the above developments and continuing concerns regarding SAA,
Flight Centre Travel Group South Africa has made a decision to no longer
sell SAA, until such time as we have obtained certainty in the market,”
the letter read.
Travel Insurance Consultants said in a
statement on its website that its re-insurers had instructed the company
to exclude SAA from its insolvency coverage.
Advertisement
South
African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government has taken a harder line
on SAA recently, saying that repeated government bailouts must come to
an end.
SAA has not made a profit since 2011.
Advertisement
A
board member told Reuters last week that the board could have to
recommend that the airline be liquidated if the government didn’t allow
SAA to access more state guarantees to unlock lending from commercial
banks.
Finance Minister Tito Mboweni is yet to authorise the use
of more state guarantees, although the public enterprises ministry said
on Wednesday that it was working on “immediate actions” to ensure SAA’s
survival.
In a flexible date search for a Johannesburg to London
flight on the Travel Centre website, SAA did not come up, despite it
being one of only three direct flights on the route. (Reporting by
Alexander Winning and Tim Cocks; editing by Jason Neely)
A new report released this week
at the Environmental Finance Natural Capital Investing conference in
London, opens up a new horizon for investors - the world of buying-in to
nature. It is a live topic in both London and Paris this week, with a
slew of events on either side of the channel examining how capital can
be deployed to both keep our Earth cool and to help finance the
restoration of nature.
It
sounds like a simple fix but in reality the vast majority of private
money is doing just the reverse, often encouraged by global subsidies
that create false price signals and massive market failures. I sense two
big potential upside winners in the future. The first is natural
climate solutions and second is reform of the food sector.
So
let's look at the first. Several billion years ago, our atmosphere was
95% CO2. Today it is around 0.041% CO2, but rising fast, by geological
standards. Earth created its own climate solution, long before we
dreamed up industrial carbon capture and storage. It deployed plankton
and trees. The former downloaded carbon as limestone and sediments, the
latter wall papered the land with leafy solar panels, creating coal,
peatlands and oil.
It
should be no surprise therefore that natural climate solutions, such as
reforming agriculture and planting trees to suck carbon up and also
investments to prevent burning down the store, (see Mirova Natural Capital
and others) as in preserving ancient forests, will become a growing
focus for investors. Today this solution offers between 30 and 40% of
what the world can do to stay below "2 degrees" between now and 2030.
Yet, at the last count, it gets just 3% of climate finance. What an
opportunity!
Why
do I sense a change? Forest carbon credits that had no buyers for a
decade have recently found a home. Large oil majors seeking
strategically to transition to a less carbon intensive model, bought up
millions of tonnes of these credits in the last quarter of 2018. Today
forest carbon credits are undervalued. They sense that others, like
aviation and shipping, will want them too, and will end up paying more.
In 2019 Shell offered carbon neutral fuel at petrol pumps for the first
time by buying forest carbon "transets" (I hate the word offsets), as
they transition to a new kind of energy future and help to save
rainforests at the same time.
Secondly,
the Loi PACT coming into force in 2020, in France, will mandate all
pension funds there to apply a % of their funds into green assets. In
China, the new 'green weighting' of the banking system requires less
collateral capital if lending into green businesses, than lending into
brown. A new Taskforce on Nature related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) is
in the works, as a follow on to the TCFD on climate, and in the coming
decade, this will help drive smart capital towards restorative nature
based asset allocation, rather than into destructive investments.
The firework on the cake this month came from none other than Pope Paul. He backed the concept of an International Law of Ecocide.
This was first promulgated by the late Polly Higgins, a visionary
London lawyer, who advocated that persons complicit in the wholesale
destruction of nature, that compromised the security of future
generations, should end up in court. So could we see Pension fund
Trustees or Bank CEOs subpoenaed for investing in callous plastics
companies polluting oceans or lending to reckless palm oil growers
destroying rainforests? You decide.
Toast Plc - Toast says 40% of bread is never eaten. Now you can drink it.
So what about food? Today, according to Faunalytics,
humans kill about 80 billion animals each year to feed 7 billion
people. I suspect we are reaching peak meat. The share prices of
alternative meat companies have been pretty frisky this year. Veganism
is up. Consumer realisation that the world's industrialised food system
is the biggest global destroyer of biodiversity and drives some 25% of
climate change emissions, makes us sick, and forces many traditional
farmers into suicide, is causing millions to think more carefully about
what they eat. Cheap food it seems, comes at a price.
The
mammals around the dinosaur's feet are insect protein units, vertical
farms, brewers using surplus bread for beer, and environmentally minded
impact investors. Few family office forums have cottoned on to this, but
they will. Cocoa and coffee producers are facing a double whammy of
drought and deforestation, which is forcing them to rethink
production, as increasing temperatures mean lowland mountain slopes will
become untenable, and cooler uplands are in short supply. As much as
40% of production may need repurposing. What an opportunity!
In June 2019, Ocado snapped up Scunthorpe based
Jones Food Company in a £17m investment into
vertical farming.
In
the next decade a "Bloomberg of Natural Capital" will emerge; possibly
many of them. They will offer data to guide a new demanding class of
green investors. The evidence is, that service providers such as
S&P, MSCI, and FTSE Russell are already flirting with new
acquisitions such as Trucost, Carbon Delta and Beyond Ratings.
A
combined approach of transparency, disclosure and regulation, with
standardised comparable dependency and impact data and tools, may one
day mean that the world of nature will indeed become an investment
oyster.
