Democracy And The Corporation: Corporatizing The Globe

Mirza Yawar Baig

“The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.”      Edward Dowling

We’re seeing a sudden surge of dictatorial fascistic leaders around the globe. Here’s something I wrote several years ago, trying to explain what’s happening especially when people give the example of good governance as Singapore, or Malaysia under Mahatir, or Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, or India under Indira Gandhi by saying that the national leader was a CEO.

My point is that yes, they were great CEO’s and that’s precisely what was wrong with them and their style.

The fault of the rest of us was that we accepted this situation without understanding what was behind it and were happy that the trains ran on time in exchange for our freedoms which were quietly taken away. I think that in today’s political scenario where totalitarianism is sought to be passed off as the price for efficiency, it is particularly important to reflect on what we are giving up for what and ask ourselves whether it is worth it? Remember that social change is more or less permanent. Once it is done, it is almost impossible to undo. A change of government will only change the bottoms in the chairs; not the chairs or the mentality that comes with them. Let us choose wisely because our choice is about ourselves, not anyone else.

Every time anyone protested the State-Corporation reacted like its business model; put down revolts mercilessly; interpreting dissent as treason and punishing it accordingly. That’s why I don’t see Occupy Wall Street, Arab Sprung (not a typo) and the latest Women’s Protest in Washington after the Inauguration of President Trump and similar things as winds of change but as incipient rebellions which will be crushed. Sorry for the jaundiced opinion but I don’t like to fool myself or anyone else. The Arab Spring is a case in point.

Those who want change will have to do a lot more than marching in the streets.

Today the biggest crime is not what The Empire commits daily, openly and blatantly but to criticize the Empire. The saddest/funniest thing is to see this new morality being enforced; not by agents of the Empire but by stupid little slave leaders who don’t even realize what they’re doing. The victims are enforcing their own victimization. How convenient for the oppressors…you get what you want without the bad name that should go with oppression.

Of late we have been seeing many articles lamenting the role of the Press and Media in today’s society and complaining how it is no longer objective and principled but seems to be more a propaganda machine than anything else. I thought it therefore necessary to try to put things in perspective so that we can recognize what is really happening to our world. That way we will either take the trouble to change matters or at least see how entirely expected and appropriate the role of the media and press is, under the circumstances.

The play Mouse Trap is the longest running play in history. It has been going on since 1947. But strangely the ending is always the same. Now isn’t that very peculiar? Or is it really quite understandable because though the actors have changed since 1947, the script is the same and so no matter which actor comes, he or she is forced to speak the same lines and so the play begins in the same way and the ending is the same.

I would like you to remember this analogy while I recall a quick history lesson. Once upon a time there was a multi-national company, run from a warehouse in London where its Board sat. It sent out its managers at first to trade with Indian kings. They took permission to build trading posts, then permission to recruit a small force to secure their goods. Gradually these trading posts metamorphosed into forts, the security guards into a private army and the country managers into Governors. The enslavement of India was well on its way, before the Indian leadership such as there was, even woke up to the fact. That India was more a geography than a political reality at the time was no doubt helpful to those who had a more global view. Robert Clive, Country Manager, British East India Company, became the Governor General (notice the title and its implication) of India, annexed independent states and assassinated their legitimate heads and installed his own Agents to administer what had been in effect independent countries in their own right. All with the knowledge and tacit approval of the British Crown.

It was the so-called ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, which only the last of the Great Mughals, Bahadur Shah Zafar had the courage to call by its real name, ‘The Indian War of Independence’, that forced the British Crown to take a more active role. The slavery of India did not end however; we just changed our owners. Bahadur Shah Zafar was accused of treason and banished from the land of his forefathers. His three sons were shot dead in cold blood and their bodies stripped naked and left in the street with orders not to be buried for three days. So much for the great justice of the British Raj. Bahadur Shah Zafar defended his position and pointed out that it was he, who was the king of the land, not the British East India Company and so he couldn’t possibly have committed treason against himself. It was the Company Sahib (note the address of respect, enforced on India) which was the intruder into a land where they came to trade and stayed to rule. Of course, the plea fell on the deaf ears of the British East India Company’s judge and Bahadur Shah Zafar was banished from the home of his forefathers forever.  That is when he wrote his famous couplet:

kitnaahaibad_naseeb “Zafar” dafn key liye
do gazzaminbhinamilikuu-e-yaarmein

(How unfortunate is Zafar that even to be buried
He couldn’t get two yards of earth in the land of his love)

He was banished to Burma and died in Rangoon; even his grave there today is all but forgotten.

Cut to 2017; a century and a half later and what do we see? The names have changed. The actors have changed but the script is the same and so the play continues. The objectives are the same and so are the methods; grabbing raw material, fuel, land, labor, power and markets in any way possible using any means at one’s disposal and treating any attempt by the rightful owners at self-defense as rebellion, to be crushed mercilessly with overwhelming force. The foundation of this method is of course even more ancient. The industrial-military complex and its methodology for global domination is first recorded more than 2000 years ago, in the annals of the history of the Roman Empire. The Empire is long gone, but ideology outlasts its proponents and so the lessons have been learned and are being practiced. The centurion replaced by the present-day soldier performing the same role; following orders from on high, crushing all attempts at exercising local freedom.

The world however has changed in some ways, in that public opinion does have a bigger say in things, than used to be the case with the Romans or the British Empire. So, thought-steering evolved to a fine art. That and the art of influencing others by means of repeating a lie over and over. Lessons once again learnt from a master, the head of Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry, Goebbels. Only, we are not silly enough to actually call it Propaganda Ministry. Instead we call it the Free Press. So, the lie becomes the truth. The victim deserves to die and the law is a handmaiden of the tyrant, designed to give his every action the veneer of legitimacy.

The New World Order is well on its way to achieving its aim of global domination, called by yet another harmless, even benevolent sounding name, Globalization.

Just reflect a bit on this: what differentiates a Corporation from a Democracy?

Corporation

1. Hereditary or nominated head
2. Absolute authority of leadership
3. If people don’t like the leader, they must leave
4. Attempts at asserting equality, freedom or questioning decisions are seen as Opposition = Rebellion = Treason = Punishment = ‘Death’: Firing from the job
5. Master plan for everyone. Others must align to it
6. Freedom is anathema except for the top leadership. Everyone else is free only to follow orders, couched in nice language.
7. Test of success = alignment to values
8. Mark of a leader = Can break unions
9. Mark of a trouble maker = represents the people = Union leader
10. Inequality is accepted even expected
11. Corporations seek to influence consumers
12. Media/Press = the PR Agency. It sings the official tune, its success lies in its ability to influence minds by interpreting (not reporting) facts, it invents language to ensure that all official actions appear good and all opposition to them appears bad
13. Freedom fighter = insurgent/terrorist; dead civilians = collateral damage; genocide = ethnic cleansing; murder = encounter. Its job is to ensure that the establishment always appears to be noble, good, pious   and kind; no matter what it does. It can never be objective

Democracy

1. Elected head
2. Participatory authority
3. If people don’t like the leader the leader must leave
4. Collective bargaining and decision making is encouraged. Citizens participate in leadership. Questioning and Opposition: Signs of a healthy democracy
5. Participatory master planning open to change as necessary
6. Equality and freedom are sacred; supported and defended by the constitution
7. Constituents are citizens, equal participants in the future of the collective
8. Citizens are equal free and encouraged to influence the government
9. Democracies seek to consult citizens
10. Media/Press is the agent of the people. It gives them a voice, it encourages debate, it provides a space for national debate/dialogue, it encourages divergent ideas and ideologies, it reports facts and it questions authority and official decisions. It is the interface between the government and citizens and by its role it tells the government what the people really want or what they think of one policy or another. It keeps authoritative tendencies in check by its ability to expose them and redresses the wrongs committed by those in power.

Corporations see people as consumers. Democracies have citizens

I can go on but I won’t. I will leave you to add to this list as you wish. Those of you who have read Collins and Porras’, Built to Last will read with interest the reasons for greatness that they cite for what they call ‘Visionary Companies’. Among them; Total Alignment to a Core Ideology and Cult-like Cultures are most critical. The single most critical need for a Cult-like Culture is a profusion of mindless followers, who will do what they are told, without question. That is what alignment is all about. And incidentally that is what the fascist state also needs. The success of the corporation is measured by how it can increase shareholder value. This is a direct result of high profits through good margins or high volumes or both. Everything else is subordinate to that goal.

That is the reason why in British India, the British rulers forced the farmers of North India to grow indigo instead of food and precipitated a famine that resulted in more than one million deaths, but of course, not one of them British. But the commercial success of the venture justified the cost in human lives. Especially when they were not British lives but those of some nameless poor black people in ‘that colony of ours’. Similarly, to create a market for the produce of the cloth mills of Yorkshire, the vibrant textile industry of Northern and Central India was deliberately destroyed including the smashing of looms. Millions of small weavers were reduced to penury overnight. And the inferior cloth from Yorkshire had a free entry into the huge Indian market. After all, one must wear clothes, no matter their origin. It is not an accident that Gandhiji took Swadeshi as his slogan, burnt his British clothes and donned the dhoti. He used the spinning wheel as his symbol and spun thread and made khadi cotton cloth.  Unlike many today, he knew his history very well and was a master at putting his finger on the nerve that hurt the most.

Corporatizing of Democracy: The Totalitarian State

The ideal situation for the corporation is when the state becomes a corporation. Then the head of state is proudly called a ‘CEO’. Productivity is at the peak, trains run on time, there is no disruption of work, students study, workers work, teachers teach their subject exclusively, parents condition the next generation properly and all government is left to those who walk the corridors of power. Indeed, this is as it should be and all is right with the ant colony. It is not accidental that countries like China, Israel and even Pakistan have long had most favored nation status with the US/Europe but India (when we were part of the Non-Aligned Movement: what an appropriate name it was!) did not. Those were the days when the trade union movement was vibrant though for those who worked for corporations this was something of a problem. Then came the criminalization (totalitarian control) of trade unions by political parties who floated their own unions and eventually trade union activity became a memory.

The Corporation is interested in one thing only as I mentioned; maximizing profit. Social, religious or political ideologies are of no interest to it in any way except in terms of how they support its goal.

Above all the corporation needs order. It calls it by many names; peace, harmony, goodness for all mankind, but what it really needs is order. The fastest and surest way to create order is by the use of overwhelming force. Zero tolerance. All protest, debate, demonstrations, criticism and ‘confusion’ must be eliminated to get silence and order.

Corporations and corporate language finds immediate resonance in the military because many if not most of modern corporate thinking has roots in military command theory. That is the reason why if you read the history of the development of any fascist totalitarian rule, you will find that the first collaborators of fascist rulers are always industrialists, businessmen; in short those who run corporations. For it is they who understand and empathize with the fascist leader the best.

Corporations are the most undemocratic structures in the world and stand for the exact opposite of all democratic values. However now we have a problem. And that is, what do we do with public opinion if we express the truth as I have done? The solution is language. Say the same thing but differently.

So, the Voice of the Corporation (their Media/Press companies) talks of freedom (they mean freedom to obey), equality (you are exactly equal to the next man on the assembly line), meeting aspirations (provided you keep your head to the corporate grinding wheel for 30 years first), progress (corporate goals are being met) and welfare (good living conditions for the enforcers). Crime and patriotism are both redefined. Any action that seeks to slow down or change the corporate goal is a crime. Any opposition to official ideology is treason. Patriotism is not love of and loyalty to the country but loyalty to the government of the day. Criticism is defined as disloyalty. Curtailing of freedom and human rights are justified in the interest of security.

In order to get people to not just agree to their freedoms being curtailed and human rights being reduced and violated, terror is used by the state or its agencies so that fear crazed people will come running into the open arms of the police asking for protection and gladly ratify the most draconian laws which imprison their minds, tongues and actions. Security is inversely proportional to functionality. People are taught this valuable lesson so that they tamely accept hours of waiting for flights, strange security guards delving into their most personal belongings and their probing hands and eyes rampaging all over their bodies, ostensibly searching for hidden arms.

People who have learnt these lessons also learn to keep their mouths shut even if they don’t actively support legislation legalizing torture, murder, detention without cause and disappearances in the night. And those who don’t learn this lesson become examples whose fate enables others to learn.

Freedom of speech is a very well-rehearsed charade. The Corporate State allows you to say whatever you want and to hold demonstrations of as many people as you want. This serves two very important ends: it supports the illusion of freedom of speech and allows people a way of letting off steam so that there isn’t enough buildup to bring about fundamental change. This also allows the Corporate State the opportunity to identify potential threats to itself and to take care of them later once the noise has subsided and all the demonstrators have gone back to their TV screens and popcorn. Then the Corporate State does what it intended to do anyway. The Iraq war, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Tiananmen Square massacre in China are all good examples.

There are many others but I will leave you to think of them. The same is the case of Judicial Enquiries where compliant judges sign on dotted lines and the case is always closed in favor of the Corporate State. Ask, when was the last time that the State was indicted in a Judicial Enquiry and its agents went to jail?

The last thing that a Corporate State needs is a thinking, questioning, middle class that has options. So, it seeks to remove them and to change their situation where the people are completely dependent on the state which then becomes the best way of controlling them. Financial meltdowns, whether they are deliberately engineered or the result of excessive greed are a very useful tool to bring the middle class down to earth. It is the middle class which loses the shirt on its collective back and has its homes repossessed and suddenly higher goals like freedom, liberty and human rights have to be subordinated to the immediate goal of putting food on the table or ensuring a roof overhead. After the meltdown, the Corporate State steps in with its bail-out plans, all neatly packaged with a veritable spaghetti of strings attached. All sensible people fall in line. Those who protest or worse, seek to show others the reality are struck down, often by their own badly frightened compatriots. If they escape that fate, the Corporate State removes them from circulation for the common good, silently watched by the mute majority.

Ask, in the latest meltdown who’s suffering the most? Corporate heads who are responsible for the meltdown or the middle class who were their faithful employees? Ask, how is it that heads of corporations which went bankrupt went home with multi-million dollar pay and bonus packages? What are these rewards for? Ask, who are the direct and immediate beneficiaries of the bailout packages? Ask, how many corporate heads lost their jobs or suffered pay cuts or lost their homes in the financial meltdown? Ask, where were the decisions that created the meltdown taken; in board rooms or on the assembly line? Ask, but who is the one who lost the shirt on his back and the roof over his head?

The Corporate State is a great supporter of technology. It funds and supports without limit all research that enables it to control the people better and more powerfully. The official line of course is that this is in the interest of the people themselves to better be able to protect them from harm. Anyone thinking of raising his voice against more and more invasive surveillance is silenced by his own people. Some truly amazing technological developments are being mentioned. Bugs with solar powered cameras which will transmit real-time images and audio to a satellite which will beam it back to a central console monitoring the doings of the target group. The term ‘fly-on-the-wall’ suddenly has a very different and sinister meaning. Satellite maps that pinpoint your home, car and yourself exactly and can track your every move. Cell phones, credit cards, ID cards, retina scans all to identify you positively and to track your every move. Once again, I won’t go on.

The point is that the vast majority of research and development that is currently going on is not in the areas of health, food production, environmental protection, education or economic development but in the area of what is euphemistically called ‘security systems. In fact, these are not security systems but surveillance systems, control systems and more sinister systems which all dovetail to focus on the overarching goal of enhancing the hold of the Corporate State on the world.

What can we do?

What the Corporate State can’t stand is the light of day on its activities. So accurate reporting of facts, shining the light of enquiry on shady deals, asking the unasked, speaking the unspoken and raising your voice against injustice right at its inception, are all necessary. Technology today gives us the ability to do all of this without depending on the Corporate Media to give us space. Thanks to the internet, camera mobiles, smart phones and the ability to upload images and text from almost anywhere, it is possible today to ensure that at least those who are interested can see the side of the picture that the likes of CNN, Times, Fox and other mouthpieces of the establishment have been hiding.

Ultimately to act or to sit and watch is the decision of the individual. We can’t force anyone to act. What we can and must do however is to ensure that people have access to correct information so that they can make good decisions. What we can and must do is to ensure that critical questions are asked and brought into the debate so that people can demand more and better information from the agencies of the Corporate State.

Whether they get that information or not immediately is not the issue. When they start asking the questions this in itself will generate positive trends where citizens will stop acting like consumers and start to exercise some of their rights. The right to information is one. The right to justice is another. Freedom of belief and speech is another. I believe that as citizens of democracies, no matter how flawed, if we can enforce accountability by sharing information and asking questions we will have achieved a great deal in ensuring that men and women can still walk free in the land, long after we are gone.

Tumblr and the Cult of the Safe

Binoy Kampmark

Be aware of the titty. Or pudenda. Or anything else suggesting a copulative angle familiar to most adults with a decent constituency of desire. The world of Tumblr, home of the expressive identity and sexual subculture, has shrunk before the pressings of those averse to the flesh, and much more besides.  The theocrats around the world will be proud; puritans will be celebrating with book-burning (app ridding?) excitement. The cult of the safe will have asserted itself with ghastly certainty under the usual pretext of protecting people from the serpent’s apple.  In ignorant boredom, you are safe.

Two weeks ago, the sharing and microblogging site announced that it would be imposing a new set of guidelines.  Not that this would have surprised anyone plugged into the modern zeitgeist of virtual censorship. The platform has, at points, engaged in such grand acts of condescension as reverting to “Safe Mode” and removing any reference to explicit content. “If the service is still working for you but the Safe Mode is turned on,” wrote Vikas Shukla for Value Walk in November, “you can manually turn it off to enter the forbidden land.”

That, it transpired, was linked to claims last month that child pornography had waded made its murky way through the site’s filters, leading to Apple banning it from its iOS App Store.  The blow was so apparent as to make Motherboard remark that, “With its massive distribution and strict rules, Apple’s App Store has had a broad homogenizing and sanitizing effect on the internet.”

Mandatory in any such announcements is the preliminary salute to openness, a sure sign that it is about to be modified, if not done away with altogether.  “Since its founding in 2007,” comes the explanation from CEO Jeff D’Onofrio, “Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of the community and culture.”  The pensiveness follows. “Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr.” (The censors have been agitating.)

In true organisation agitprop, Tumblr claimed it had to change.  Community members were supposedly consulted, but evidently only certain ones.  “Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).”

This is telling: Tumblr has retreated into a world without adults, and embraced a childish, sex-free, or at the very least unsexualised space of engagement.  But it is far more than that: the platform will be a “safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community.”  The discomforting will be eschewed like the plague; the propagandists of safety will be heralded.

The company seeks to assure users that this new policy “should not be confused” with standard protocols on child protection, “including child pornography” which “has no place in our community.”  While all “bad actors” can never be prevented from using the Tumblr platform, “we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.”

The company admits, like all good censors both actual and prospective, that the task of “filtering this type of content” comes with its problems.  “Automated tools” are being used to “identity adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check.”

A parental note of apology prevails: we are aware you will be unhappy being restrained from seeing or doing certain things, and mistakes will be made.  When these happen, it “sucks”.  Daddy D’Onofrio is clear on this: if you wish to see subject matter featuring adult content, take your viewing, and loading habits, elsewhere.  We are playing happy families here in “creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.”

Many users reacted with the understandable rage of people forcibly infantilised, while also noting that other content – for instance stomach churning subject matter from the alt-right – remained permissible.  (Mammary glands insufferable; Hitler, not exactly fun but tolerable.)  Otherwise innocent posts were also netted, the result, according to the BBC, of “poorly performing algorithms”.

The company in its December 17 post, issued clarifications and adjustments.   Posts containing GIFs, videos, and photos in violation of the platform’s policy would not be confined to oblivion but hidden.  Such content would be flagged, in which case an appeal might be made.  To puzzled identitarians, Tumblr “will always be a place to explore your identity”, a home for the “marginalised”.

This has been something of a snag for the content filterers given the frequent excursions of troublesome sexual fancy, or matters of the body, that finds its way onto the site.  “LGBTQ+ conversations, exploration of sexuality and gender, efforts to document the lives and challenges of those in the sex worker industry, and posts with pictures, videos, and GIFs of gender-confirmation surgery are all examples of content that is not only permitted on Tumblr but actively encouraged.”  Where the policy fits with dull heterosexual matters is less clear.

The December 17 post also seeks to clarify, if somewhat clumsily, that “erotica, nudity related to political or newsworthy speech, and nudity found in art, specifically sculptures and illustrations, is also stuff that can be freely posted on Tumblr.” And if you want further details, breast-feeding shots displaying the nipple suckled will be fine, including “birth or after-birth moments, and health-related situations, such as post-mastectomy or gender confirmation surgery.”  (Such sanitised delights!)

The protests have been thickening the social media sphere, but these are about as confronting as damp lettuce in search of a colander.  There will be no street protests, and it is unlikely that a massive exodus from the site will be precipitated.  A Log Off Protest is being staged by groups wishing to avoid Tumblr for the first day of the ban, though it is unlikely to invoke the changes demanded.  Central to the digital sharing age is not enthusiastic diversity but inadvertent submission; the tech controllers intent on predicting and ultimately influencing human behaviour have become a modern priestly caste.

A sense of the amateurish revolt against these minders, revealing a child-still-in-swaddling-clothes mentality, can be found in a post insisting that the log off be for at least two days, if not seven. Don’t delete the app.  “Make noise elsewhere.”  Even think of using other platforms, but importantly “do not give up.”  Months might pass, maybe years “to make them realize that the adult band [sic] is bad.  That Nazis and bots will exist after this.”

The rage of social media is, for all that, quick fire and amnesiac.  The greater lesson in Tumblr’s approach is the realisation that the Internet and the world of apps, sharing and expression did not usher in an endless frontier of expression and engagement, but one as policed as any other.  Market your service as if to children, and be spared the trouble.

Massive collapse of UK housing built for “social rent” in last decade

Simon Whelan

According to government figures the number of new homes built for social rent in Britain has fallen by almost four-fifths in the past decade. This shocking state of affairs has developed as 1.25 million families on council waiting lists must reside in temporary and substandard accommodation.

Around two-thirds of those awaiting housing have been on the council waiting lists for at least 12 months. On average every English local authority has more than 3,500 families awaiting housing.

In Britain, homes for social rent are usually provided by local councils, housing associations and charities.

The data released by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government exposes how only 6,463 homes were built in England for social rent in 2017-18. These figures are substantially down from what was even then an already near post-war record low of just 30,000 a decade ago. At this rate it would take at least 170 years to build enough to house those currently homeless.

While the number of properties for social rent has fallen drastically, the overall number of properties constructed in England that were classified by the government as “affordable” rose by 12 percent last year to 47,355. The misleading title of affordable housing means rental costs are capped at 80 percent of local private sector rents. Unsurprisingly these properties, rather than ones for social rent, are preferred by the construction industry and local authorities because they are more profitable than building genuine affordable public housing.

Housing campaigners have pertinently asked regarding so-called affordable housing—affordable for who exactly?—and criticised the term affordable in these circumstances as a form of Orwellian newspeak. The rent rates for social rental properties take into account local incomes, as well as house prices, unlike the criteria for affordable housing.

The number of so-called affordable rent properties built has increased since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government came to power in 2011, inversely over the same period the number of social rent properties has declined. Approximately 57 percent of all new affordable homes built last year were for affordable rent, with only 14 percent for social rent. The rest are intermediate affordable housing, which includes shared ownership properties and affordable home ownership schemes.

Housing provision for working class families has declined precipitously since its peak in the 1970s, when almost half the population of Scotland and cities like Sheffield lived in accommodation rented from the local authority. The number of council homes in Britain has halved over recent decades and is now at its lowest level since the late 1960s.

In the immediate post-war decades before mass council housing was built by British local authorities, unscrupulous and criminal private landlords like Peter Rachman predominated. Rachmanite slums have returned to the UK today, only fifty years after they were supposedly destined to the history books.

Today in the fifth richest country in the world, millions of working class families and individuals suffer chronic overcrowding, damp rooms, faulty heating systems or lack central heating or hot water, have no double glazing and/or broken windows, electrical faults and exposed live wiring, leaky plumbing, unsanitary and even outside toilets and, in more and more properties, infestations of rodents and insects.

Savage cuts to the welfare system have pushed many people into “slum tenure” in the private rented sector, according to recent research conducted by academics at the University of York. One in three homes in the cheapest 20 percent of the housing sector did not meet the government’s own Decent Homes Standard. The stock found to be in the very worst condition was located in the West Midlands, where 40 percent of private lets were deemed “non-decent.”

More than 1.3 million homes rented from private landlords failed to meet the national Decent Homes Standard. In addition, many working class families have bought properties for which they can barely afford to pay the mortgage let alone maintain. Millions of homes need urgent remedial action and regular maintenance.

Because of the destruction and privatisation of public housing since the 1980s, more people live in private rented housing now than at any time since the 1950s and hundreds of thousands of these homes are unfit to live in. Housing-related health inequalities are estimated to cost the National Health Service £1.4 billion a year.

Declining home ownership and a shortage of rented social housing have seen a surge in the number of people renting privately—particularly families with young children. These children are denied the dignity of privacy, somewhere to study, a separate bedroom and frequently must share with siblings of the other gender in addition to all the social problems associated with living in some of the most deprived parts of town.

Growing numbers of other young people do not have any stable accommodation. Figures released by the Shelter housing charity show that 131,000 children in England are homeless, the highest rate in a decade. Of these, 9,500 are living in emergency accommodation like B&Bs, with the remainder in temporary accommodation.

The housing catastrophe is a damning indictment of capitalism. The scandalous shortage of affordable housing has been meticulously designed and orchestrated over several decades, and is now delivering exactly the economic and social conditions it was intended to. In the process property developers, the construction industry and increasingly local authorities—many run by the Labour Party—and companies established by former local government figures, rake in vast amounts of money.

Since the 1980s Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat governments and local councils have conspired to destroy much public infrastructure of which public housing is only the most obvious example. In a country where the population were told to take pride in its social safety net, “from the cradle to the grave,” essential services like housing have been gutted, financialised and turned over to the capitalist market.

In London thousands are eking out an existence in sheds, garages, barges and all manner of temporary buildings, as the capital has been transformed into a playground for the global super-rich and has more billionaires than any other city in the world. In some parts of inner London, property prices have exploded by 800 percent since the 1980s. At the same time working class people are socially cleansed from London or their public housing turned into a death traps like Grenfell Tower.

Whilst the crisis finds its highest expression in London the housing crisis is not exclusive to the capital. For example, in Greater Manchester—the second largest urban region in the UK with a population of nearly 2.8 million—social housing stock has shrunk by 5 percent in just the six years since 2012. Simultaneously, waiting lists and homelessness have rocketed in the region.

Since 1980, 92,000 council homes have been privatised under the Right to Buy legislation in Greater Manchester alone, and today some 85,639 households languish on council housing waiting lists in the region.

The explosion in social inequality in the UK can be seen in the proliferation of luxury private apartments going up in all major city centres. Central Manchester’s skyline is awash with cranes constructing dozens of private residential developments. At the start of the year, 11,000 flats were being built in 41 schemes, with more underway. Last month, Labour-run Manchester City Council and one of its private development partners, Renaker, celebrated a topping out ceremony for the new 60 storey South Tower in the Deansgate area of the city. Prices for apartments there will start at £390,000 and go to £2 million. Residents will have access to a private swimming pool, sports hall and tennis court. There is no social housing of any kind in the development.

Access to decent affordable housing is a basic human right, but under capitalism it is increasingly unavailable. The never-ending austerity programme, which has plunged millions into poverty over the last decade, exacerbating the housing crisis, must be reversed and billions spent to provide decent-paying jobs, free and high-quality health care, housing, education and social services for all.

The wealth must be taken from the billionaires and used to meet essential social needs. Only a socialist reorganisation of society can satisfy the desperate and growing need for decent housing for all.

Protests against new labour law in Hungary

Markus Salzmann 

Braving freezing temperatures, several thousand workers have taken to the streets of Budapest on a daily basis since last Wednesday to protest against the tightening up of labour law by the Hungarian government. One week ago, 10,000 people protested against the new “Slave Law.” Police used tear gas and water cannon to brutally repel the demonstrators.

On Wednesday, parliament passed the new bill proposed by the right-wing Fidesz party led by Prime Minister Victor Orbán. On Friday and Saturday, riots took place with more than 50 participants arrested and many wounded in clashes with police. According to media reports, 14 police officers were injured. The media described the protests as “the most violent protests in more than ten years.” The initial protests were limited to the capital city, but protests also took place on Friday in Pecs in southern Hungary.

The law reform is designed to increase the annual overtime employers are allowed to demand from their workers from 250 to 400 hours. At the same time, companies no longer have to compensate or pay overtime within one year, but only within three years.

The protests not only included calls for the repeal of the new labour code, but also for the resignation of Premier Orbán and for basic political changes. In the 10 years Orbán has been in power, he has led Hungary towards dictatorship and strengthened the most right-wing elements in the country.

The protests are also directed against another law passed Wednesday, which subordinates the judiciary to even more control by the government. The law places new administrative courts directly under the justice minister, Laszlo Trocsanyi, a close ally of Orbán.

The tightening of the Labour Code serves the interests of international corporations operating in the country, especially the auto industry, which accounts for about one third of all Hungarian exports. Nearly all international carmakers, such as Audi, BMW and Opel, produce in Hungary. They are attracted in particular by wages that are around one third of what the auto companies pay in countries like Germany. Hungary is considered a “location with low labour costs, well-trained workers and weak unions,” the Wiener Zeitung notes.

As in other eastern European countries, massive emigration and the decline of the education system is beginning to affect the labour market. That is why companies are having increasing difficulty finding skilled workers. Orbán’s law means that such skilled workers can in future be compelled to work much longer hours.

Union representatives rightly refer to the law as a backdoor to the introduction of a six-day working week. Foreign Trade Minister Péter Szijjártó recently stated that investors have welcomed the proposals of the Hungarian government, because they will increase competitiveness.

In all of the protests, many participants wore yellow vests. They were expressing their solidarity with the protests in France, where the opposition to President Emmanuel Macron has assumed the dimensions of a mass movement of the working class against the capitalist system. The latest protests in Hungary have been supported by students and school pupils, as is the case in France.

Although the unions have increasingly adapted to the government line in recent years, they felt obliged to respond to workers’ pressure for the protests. The MASZSZ trade union group even threatened a general strike if the government did not withdraw the law. Other unions, such as the teachers’ union, also joined the protests. The Internet portal nepszava.hu published a survey by the polling institute Pulzus according to which 81 percent of respondents agreed with the protests.

The majority of protesters are expressing genuine anger at the right-wing government, but far-right forces are trying to exploit the protests for their own ends. The neo-fascist Jobbik party has called for rejection of the new labour law, and far-right-wing forces are using social media to mobilise against it. The Jobbik leadership called upon its regional organisations to travel to Budapest on Friday to participate in the protests.

A particularly vile role is being played by the so-called “left-wing” opposition parties. They are using the current situation to ally themselves with the ultra-right. When in power, the Socialist Party (MSZP) had also implemented policies attacking the working class and its rights. Now it is calling for collaboration with Jobbik.

MSZP MP Agnes Kunhalmi said that this was necessary to fight the Orbán government. She raised the possibility of an alliance for the European elections in the coming year, arguing that otherwise Orbán would ban all opposition parties.

A similar position is held by the right-wing neo-liberal Momentum movement, which supports the European Union. Its deputy, Anna Donáth, called for “solidarity” with all parties and groups opposed to the new the law.

The Orbán government is responding to the protests with an extremely aggressive, right-wing campaign. As was the case when the government took a fierce stance against refugees, Orbán raises the cudgel of anti-Semitism. According to Balazs Hidveghi, the communications director of the governing party, the Jewish US billionaire George Soros “organised the violence in Budapest.” Soros and his network were only interested in riots, and provocation and protests had been deliberately planned, as was the violence against policemen, Hidveghi explained, according to the Hungarian news agency MTI.

Recently, Hungary’s head of government initiated the bundling of media outlets favourable to the government in a new consortium. In early December, he signed a decree stating that this measure was of “strategic importance” and in the public interest. The measure permits Orbán to increase his influence over the press in Hungary and neutralise any media opposition. This explains why many of the Hungarian media outlets refuse to report on the protest or do so only to portray the protesters as “rabble.”

Bombings kill 62 in Somalia amid escalating US scramble for Africa

Bill Van Auken

The US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) claimed on Monday to have killed 62 members of the al-Shabab Islamist militia in a series of six airstrikes over the weekend in a coastal region south of Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu.

The bombings were only the latest in a steadily escalating US air war in Somalia. They follow a pair of air strikes last month that the Pentagon claimed killed 37 al-Shabab members, a strike in October that it said claimed the lives of 60 fighters and another in November of last year that supposedly killed around 100.

In the latest bombing, as in all those that have preceded it, the Pentagon insisted that there were no “collateral” civilian casualties, following a longstanding ground rule that anyone killed by American bombs and missiles is by definition a targeted militant.

Somalia is one of the shadow wars that Washington is waging in Africa, with little or no information provided to the public, much less even a shred of popular approval.

In the latest attacks, AFRICOM reported that US warplanes carried out four strikes on December 15, leaving 34 people dead, and another two strikes on December 16 that killed 28.

The latest strikes bring the total for this year to 46, a significant rise over the 31 carried out last year, which was itself double the number conducted in 2016.

The Trump administration introduced sweeping changes to the rules of engagement in Somalia, casting aside previous restraints on bombing and other operations.

In addition to the air war, AFRICOM maintains a force of 500 US special operations troops on the ground in Somalia, its largest combat deployment on the continent. These troops participate in search-and-kill operations together with Somali government forces.

In addition, some 20,000 troops from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi operate in Somalia under the auspices of the African Union and in conjunction with the US military operation.

Despite this array of military power, al-Shabab continues to hold sway over vast swathes of the country’s rural areas and is able to make frequent attacks throughout Somalia.

The government that the US is attempting to prop up in Mogadishu is riddled with corruption and crises, pretending to preside over a society that has been left shattered by a quarter of a century of US imperialist intervention.

In the week before the latest US airstrikes, the town of Baidoa, the capital of the southwestern Bay region of Somalia, was the scene of bloody clashes between protesters on the one side and Ethiopian troops and Somali security forces on the other that have left at least eight people dead, including one local legislator and a 10-year-old child.

The protests broke out after Ethiopian troops arrested Muhktar Robow, the former second-in-command of al-Shabab, who quit the group and became the leading candidate for the presidency of the southwestern state in what is the first of a series of regional elections. According to reports, he was tortured, flown to Mogadishu and imprisoned there.

Ethiopian troops are reported to have occupied Baidoa, driving tanks through residential neighborhoods.

The clashes are only the sharpest expression of the breakdown of relations between the central government in Mogadishu and the regional administrations, which have largely cut off cooperation with the capital as a result of multiple conflicts.

Meanwhile, in Mogadishu itself, legislators earlier this month initiated impeachment proceedings against President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed Farmajo charging him with signing “secret deals” with Ethiopia and Eritrea and acting unilaterally in the appointment of military commanders and judges. The lawmakers also accused the president of abusing his powers by authorizing the unlawful rendition of a leader of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), Muse Qalbi Dhagah, a Somali national, from Somalia to Ethiopia.

The intensive US air strikes in Somalia came on the heels of Washington’s unveiling of a new policy in which the operations of AFRICOM, whose ranks have swelled to 7,500—compared to about 6,000 in 2017—are being overtly developed from the standpoint of Africa as an arena of great power conflict.

Until now, AFRICOM’s operations, which involve deployments of US forces in virtually every country of the continent, have been cast as part of the “global war on terrorism.” The strategy outlined last Thursday by US National Security Adviser John Bolton, however, placed counter-terrorism as Washington’s “second priority,” eclipsed by the imperative of confronting “great power competitors, namely China and Russia.”

Bolton’s rabid address, delivered before the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, indicted both Beijing and Moscow for pursuing “predatory practices” that “threaten the financial independence of African nations; inhibit opportunities for US investment; interfere with US military operations; and pose a significant threat to US national security interests.”

The thrust of Bolton’s speech was that China and Russia have been poaching—with considerable success—on territory that Washington views as its own semi-colonial preserve.

In particular, the national security adviser laid stress on the Horn of Africa and its strategic location on the shores of the route for much of the world’s seaborne oil traffic from the Middle East to Asia. He called attention to the building of a Chinese military base in Djibouti, just miles from where AFRICOM has its own main base on the continent, and on a proposed deal that would place Djibouti’s main Red Sea port facility under the management of a Chinese company, saying that this would shift “the balance of power in the Horn of Africa” in China’s favor.

In what was undoubtedly the most laughable segment of Bolton’s speech, he vowed that Washington would carefully review and substantially reduce its aid programs to African countries, vowing that it would not “fund corrupt autocrats, who use the money to fill their coffers at the expense of their people or commit gross human rights violations.”

This from a government that has provided unconditional defense of the Saudi monarchy, supporting its genocidal war in Yemen and covering up for its brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside its Istanbul consulate. One would never guess from Bolton’s sanctimonious speech that Washington has been the principal prop for African dictatorships, from that of Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo onward.

Bolton’s speech, and the savage intensification of the US assault on Somalia constitute a warning: US imperialism views Africa as a battlefield in its global bid to employ military aggression as a means of defending its hegemony over every region of the planet. To the extent it faces challenges in terms of trade and investment from Russia and China, it will respond with intensified militarism, with the peoples of Africa suffering the consequences.

Financial market fall accelerates on global growth fears

Nick Beams 

US stock markets fell sharply yesterday, with the Dow down by 500 points, bringing its combined losses for the last two trading days to more than 1,000 points. The broader-based S&P 500 index was down by more than 2 percent, with the sell-off taking place across all sectors.

With all indexes now in “correction” territory, having fallen more than 10 percent since their highs, Wall Street is on track for its biggest annual decline since 2008. The Dow and the S&P 500 are set to record their worst drop for December since 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, having lost 7 percent so far for the month.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropped 2.3 percent, recording a loss of 2.2 percent for the year. Market analysts described the market as “treacherous,” saying the “buy the dip” tactic, which meant that previous downturns were relatively short-lived, was not in evidence this time.

There is a confluence of factors impacting the stock market, including: fears of a global slowdown and possible recession; the ongoing impact of the US trade war against China; concerns over the future course of interest rates and what the Federal Reserve will say following its meeting on Wednesday; the impact of political turmoil in the US; the fallout of the Brexit crisis in the UK; and the developing upsurge of the working class, as reflected in the “yellow vest” movement in France.

The signs of a slowdown in global growth are most clearly expressed in China and Europe. Last week, Chinese government data showed the biggest fall in the growth rate of retail sales for 15 years and a decline in the industrial production growth rate to the lowest point in three years. There are warnings that the overall Chinese growth rate, at its lowest point since 2008-2009, could decline further next year, as US trade war measures begin to take effect.

In comments to Reuters, Changyong Rhee, a senior International Monetary Fund official for the Asia Pacific region, said the trade conflict between the US and China was already affecting business confidence in Asia.

“Investment is much weaker than expected,” he said. “My interpretation is that the confidence channel is already affecting the global economy, particularly the Asian economies.” He warned that Japan and South Korea could be among the countries hardest hit because of their dependence on exports to China.

In Europe, major economic indicators are pointing to a significant slowdown, if not a recession. According to a report in the Financial Times on Friday: “Germany is ‘stuck in a low growth phase,’ France’s private sector has fallen into contraction for the first time since 2016, and euro zone business growth has closed out 2018 at its lowest level in four years.”

The report said the business information service IHS Markit had concluded the Germany was in a period of “tepid growth,” with the “exuberant boom of 2017 now a distant memory.”

Chris Williamson, the organisation’s chief business economist, said the contraction in France was not due entirely to the series of “yellow vests” protests. Some of the slowdown reflected disruption caused by the protests, but “the weaker picture also reflects growing evidence that the underlying rate of economic growth has slowed across the euro area as whole. Companies are worried about the global economic and political climate, with trade wars and Brexit adding to increased political tensions within the euro area.”

In the United States, there are concerns that the economy will enter a period of much slower growth and lower earnings in 2019 after the effects of the “sugar hit” of the Trump administration’s corporate tax cuts wear off.

This week, all eyes will be on the statement to emerge from the meeting of the Fed on Wednesday. While a further rise in the base rate of 0.25 percent is expected—some commentators suggesting that failure to go ahead could provoke increased turbulence because it would indicate the Fed expects a worsening outlook for the economy—the key issue will be what it plans to do next year.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell offered some reassurances to the markets in November when he said the central bank’s base rate was close to neutral, indicating that it might not go ahead with the series of rises previously indicated for 2019.

President Donald Trump has continued his campaign against Fed rate rises. In a tweet issued yesterday, underscoring the delusional character of his “America First” agenda, in which turmoil in the rest of the world supposedly benefits the US economy, he wrote: “It is incredible that with a very strong dollar and virtually no inflation, the outside world is blowing up around us, Paris is burning and China way down, the Fed is even considering yet another interest rate hike. Take the Victory!”

The Fed decision will be crucial for financial markets, where there are increasing signs of a tightening of credit and concerns over stability. US credit markets are reported to be “grinding to a halt,” according to a Financial Times report, with “fund managers refusing to bankroll buyouts and investors shunning high-yield bond sales, as rising interest rates and market volatility weigh on sentiment.”

Not a single company has borrowed money through the $1.2 trillion high-yield, or so-called “junk bond,” market so far this month, and if that trend continues it will be the first such occurrence since November 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis.

The former chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, issued a warning about the state of financial markets last October, saying there had been a “huge deterioration” in the standards of corporate lending.

That deterioration, however, is a direct product of the policies pursued by the Fed in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown, as, together with other central banks, it pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system, enabling the speculation which produced the crash to continue and reach new heights.

In a comment published at the weekend, financial analyst Satyajit Das, named by Bloomberg in 2014 as one of the world’s 50 most influential financial figures, warned that what he called the “everything bubble” was deflating and a new crisis was in the making. He wrote that since 2008, governments and central banks had stabilised the situation, but the fundamental problems of high debt levels, weak banking systems and excessive financialization had not been addressed.

While not directly referring to the beginnings of an upsurge of the working class, calling it a “democracy deficit” in the advanced countries and “rising political tensions,” he pointed to the “loss of faith in supposed technocratic abilities of policymakers,” which would compound economic and financial problems.

“The political economy,” he wrote, “could then accelerate toward the critical point identified by John Maynard Keynes in 1933, where ‘we must expect the progressive breakdown of the existing structure of contract and instruments of indebtedness, accompanied by the utter discredit of orthodox leaders in finance and government, with what ultimate outcome we cannot predict.’”

Keynes did not make a prediction, but history recorded what the outcome was: worsening economic conditions, the rise of fascist and authoritarian forms of rule, trade war and economic nationalist conflicts, leading ultimately to world war. Those conditions are now rapidly returning.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the present gyrations on financial markets, they indubitably establish that none of the irresolvable contradictions of the global capitalist system has been resolved. Rather, they have intensified, and faced with an intractable economic and financial crisis, the ruling classes will lash out with even more vicious attacks on the working class, deepening the assaults of the past decade.

Eighty years ago, the international working class was unable to prevent the descent into barbarism because, while undertaking powerful struggles in the United States, Europe and Asia, it lacked a revolutionary leadership. As it once again begins to enter enormous battles against the ruling elites, it must draw the lessons of history and arm itself with a global socialist strategy to confront the great political tasks now posed by the deepening breakdown of the global capitalist order.

The World Google Controls and Surveillance Capitalism

Julian Vigo

I have been following the scandal of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act(also known as the Snoopers’ Charter) and Holland’s Sleepwet and their relationship to the encroaching government powers over private data, privacy, data collection, surveillance, and free speech for several years now.  And very much related to these bills created ostensibly to protest us from “terrorism,” is Google’s encroaching powers over our lives, to include the freedom of expression protected by most national laws, not to mention EU and UN Charters, around the planet today.

When the Internet became a tool for communication and research in the late1980s (usually through universities and research institutes) and later rendered public through commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) in 1991, most people were slow to catch on. Initially, I was inculcated into Internet culture by virtue of being a graduate student at New York University where I came to depend on their computer labs to churn out papers when not using friends’ computers. I still remember Archie, Telnet, and line mode browsers before the release of ViolaWWW.  By the mid 1990s students were curious about hypertext through Memex and Xanada while many others made their personal webpage which they would write in html with the help of on- or off-line instructions.  The concept of a free website builder had not yet emerged and everything was very much ad hoc, individuals figuring out how to fiddle with html as if a late 20th century Mini Cooper under whose hood the user would play around.  And yes, the flashing bright lights that every webpage seemed to embrace as if a will to trigger everyone visiting their page an epileptic seizure.

These were the golden days of the Internet when anything was acceptable to include the aesthetically challenging, old school graphics, and the simple layout with repeating background images that defies any description. These were the days that websites were entirely about content such that if you want to read up on the Klingon Language Institute, presentation was tertiary, if even a concern at all. Even by the mid 1990s most businesses had not caught onto the potential of the Internet for marketing, public relations, and advertising.  The finances needed for publicity were still largely functioning through traditional modalities and when companies did not think that people would be using the Internet for commerce, much less research.

In 1995, when the NSF (National Science Foundation) began charging a fee for registering domain names there were only 120,000 registered domain names. By 1998, this number rose to over 3 million. And while Amazon started in 1994, the birth of eBay the year later kicked off e-commerce definitively.  Still most businesses did not actively incorporate the Internet into their structures and the cost of building a website was not even an afterthought for most given the Internet on a shoestring approach that many of us ran with. I was working on my PhD at this time and finding that my ability to learn languages was directly applicable to computer languages where I was able to volunteer for friends and even carve out a living writing web pages and making early e-commerce sites for friends.  Web designers in Manhattan were quickly becoming desirable and well paid as we rolled towards the new millennium with more and more businesses and individuals realizing the potential of the Internet.

The thing is until 2000, the Internet existed for most people as this virtual encyclopedia, news reference, information center to check out cinema times. There were even early prototypes of Skype and messenger like ICQ where peer-to-peer communications were viewed as a novelty. I had my first Internet conversation from my apartment in Park Slope to a man living at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. The Internet was an information highway, unregulated, and quite flexible considering kinds of technology it was slowly replacing.  Privacyschmivacy, right?

However, since 9/11 specifically and more recently around a series of culture wars, we are seeing how governments around the planet from the beginning of the new millennium had locked up ship and set out various legal initiatives that make it possible for governments to spy on its citizens. The US can be credited with fomenting such legislation that claims to do one thing (secure the “homeland”) while in reality, doing something quite different. So 45 days after 9/11 the Patriot Act, a vile piece of legislation that resulted in the disappearance of over 14,000 Muslim men within the United States, was born.  The residual force of the Patriot Act lay in the fact that this law made it easier for the US government to spy on its citizens with the government issuing National Security Letters (NSLs) without the need for a judge to sign off. The Patriot Act gave a new twist to McCarthyism since it put the power of the law into the hands of 43,000 law enforcement agents who had access to phone records collected through the NSLs. While most people today are aware of the importance of Edward Snowden’s and Julian Assange’s efforts to challenge the US government’s illegal acts of espionage on its own citizenry and illegal acts of violence, what many do not remember is how the Global War on Terror (GWOT) instigated much of the laws which rolled out enormous powers to Homeland Security, which decimated in the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and put immigration in the same bracket as terrorology.

From the US to the EU, one thing has become painfully clear to me in recent months: free speech, the freedom of conscience, and privacy are all under threat by big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. In fact, these companies are far more the enemy of the people than the NSA (National Security Agency) or GCHQ, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. And Snowden has said as much referring to how he and his colleagues in the NSA were at the very least subject to some degree of democratic oversight while companies like Google and Facebook, as we saw recently with Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress this past Spring, maintain a business model which perfectly combines capitalism with surveillance and it is all perfectly unregulated.

In 2014, John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney introduced the term “surveillance capitalism” in Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine where they explain its inception from the post-war architecture which combined the vehicle of sales framed within a Madison Avenue centralized corporate marketing revolution together with the creation of a permanent state of war headed by the Pentagon where the Cold War was buttressed by arms and fictional nuclear preparedness on the one hand, and the shop ‘til you drop on the other. The military-industrial complex and the marketing of society, according to Foster and McChesney, constituted the two principle surplus-absorption mechanisms until the financial crisis of the 1970s when a third vector of surplus-absorption was added: that of financialization which supplemented the system as the previous two mechanisms waned:

Each of these means of surplus absorption were to add impetus in different ways to the communications revolution, associated with the development of computers, digital technology, and the Internet. Each necessitated new forms of surveillance and control. The result was a universalization of surveillance, associated with all three areas of: (1) militarism/imperialism/security; (2) corporate-based marketing and the media system; and (3) the world of finance.

It is hard to do such a brilliant article justice, but suffice it to say that Foster and McChesney give an excellent history of how the hunt for Edward Snowden was not news. They chronicle a long history dating back to the “Army Files” (also known as CONUS) scandal where the Army had been spying on and keeping files on over seven million U.S. citizens through the use of over 1,500 plainclothes agents.  It was because of the CONUS scandal that Americans came to know of ARPANET, the precursor to today’s Internet where these secret files of Americans were kept and where the “limitless storage of data” proved a threat to healthy democracy.   

Surveillance capitalism is now part of our everyday where even the follow-up quality control questionnaires and all the privacy tick boxes we are asked to tick form part of a larger private sector databank of information. The problem is that most people think that such information is “harmless” and that it is of little consequence to their safety or privacy. But surveillance capitalism, as Foster and McChesney show us, surveillance capitalism could go much further than any government surveillance:

Like advertising and national security, it had an insatiable need for data. Its profitable expansion relied heavily on the securitization of household mortgages; a vast extension of credit-card usage; and the growth of health insurance and pension funds, student loans, and other elements of personal finance. Every aspect of household income, spending, and credit was incorporated into massive data banks and evaluated in terms of markets and risk. Between 1982 and 1990 the average debt load of individuals in the United States increased by 30 percent and with it the commercial penetration into personal lives.

So now with the government having the private sector doing its bidding in terms of farming information of its “client base,” business was not making a killing but private individuals were going further into debt while losing their freedom of privacy. Conterminous to individuals being stripped of their democratic freedom of privacy came the removal of the freedom of speech, recently cemented by the recent “redrafting” of NAFTA whereby major corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter were positioned to be the main benefactors of what is now called  United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA):

These big tech companies have been trying to reinvoke their immunity as previously held under Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act through NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) renegotiations. And last month they were successful as NAFTA’s substitute, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement(USMCA), will now extend the immunity Congress had earlier provided with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) into neighboring North American countries. Not only is this is a gift to the tech industry, but it is a complete paradox. The tech industry lobbied heavily to get back Section 230 immunity by invoking “free expression” for its users while conterminously taking on the policing free speech on its platforms. In short, big tech’s request for absolute immunity, in light of its use of Section 230 to justify political bias and censorship, reveals a troubling present for free speech on the net.

Over the past year there has been an unprecedented amount of thought policing on social media by Facebook and Twitter where now there are rules that penalize users for “fake news” and other thought crimes while Facebook and Twitter have closed down hundreds of political media pages just before November’s midterm elections.  Censorship is now commonplace on these platforms just as Google is once again facing a fresh wave of criticism from human rights groups over its plan to launch a censored search engine in China, a project called Dragonfly. In an eery twist to the democratization of Information that was once predicted in the early 1990s with the public launch of the Internet, we are now seeing how information, in the wrong hands, is not only not progressive, but is proving to be quite dangerous.

The masses of people playing Candy Crush and using Viber on their mobiles are overwhelmingly unaware of their participation in data mining how their participation poses a danger to a healthy democracy. We need to stay informed about the encroachment of big business and social media corporations in our private lives and the depths to which the private sector can farm information. In the end, who controls this information and how it is employed is another and far grimmer question that we must ask, even at the risk of uncovering terrifying and inexorable truths.