Homelessness in the Covid-19 Era

Rajan Menon

The novel SARS-CoV-2 has roared through the American landscape leaving physical, emotional, and economic devastation in its wake. By early July, known infections in this country exceeded three million, while deaths topped 135,000. Home to just over 4% of the global population, the United States accounts for more than a quarter of all fatalities from Covid-19, the disease produced by the coronavirus. Amid a recent surge of infections, especially across the Sun Belt, which Vice President Mike Pence typically denied was even occurring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the daily total of infections had reached a record 60,000. Arizona’s seven-day average alone approached that of the European Union, which has 60 times as many people.

Making matters much worse, the pandemic erupted during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, whose stratospheric self-absorption, ineptitude, denial of science, and callousness have reached heights even his most ferocious critics couldn’t have imagined. His nostrums, including disinfectant, sunlight, and hydroxychloroquine, could be dismissed as comical if they weren’t downright dangerous, encouraging possibly fatal experimentation, while breeding false hopes.

Public health safeguards that should have been initiated early on were neglected, above all testing and contact tracing. At the end of April, when President Trump first crowed that “we are the best in the world in testing,” the U.S. ranked 22nd in tests per 1,000 people in the 36-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of the globe’s wealthy states. Although testing nationwide had increased from 250,000 a day in early May to a current 571,574, that’s still less than half the number needed to begin to lock down the virus.

By portraying mask-wearing as effete and elitist, even as those who come near him are tested, disparaging social distancing (recall his reckless rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and unmasked Fourth of July celebration at South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore), and downplaying the danger of a second wave of infections, President Trump has been the problem, not the solution. It would be hard to imagine a less suitable helmsman to steer this country out of a public health catastrophe. His eternal spin, tweets, and fulminations about “fake news” can’t obscure the obvious: his administration’s management of the pandemic has been shambolic.

The Variability of Vulnerability

It’s common to hear that we’re all caught in the Covid-19 crisis, that we’re all its victims. Having spread across the country, afflicting people of all backgrounds, it certainly qualifies as a national security crisis, a concept that, militarized for so long now, seems odd when applied to the pandemic. The coronavirus, of course, has neither tanks, nor missiles, nor roadside bombs, and that may help explain the government’s abject failure to plan for and contain it.

Still, take a deeper look at Covid-19’s destructive path and you’ll see that it’s been highly selective in the suffering it’s caused and the lives it’s taken. Adjusted for age, fatalities per 100,000 have been significantly higher for African Americans, Hispanic-Latinx, and Native Americans than for whites across all age groups, as detailed studies demonstrate: for Blacks, 3.6 times higher and for Hispanic-Latinx, 2.5 times. The disparity becomes even greater when the comparison is made by age groups. Ditto hospitalization rates: 40.1/100,000 for whites, 160.7 for Hispanic-Latinx, 178.1 for African Americans, and a whopping 221.2 for Native Americans.

In addition, places with the highest income inequality have had the highest death rates. New York State, which surpasses its counterparts in income disparity, has had a Covid-19 death rate 125 times that of Utah, which has the least inequality. In big metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, where the number of infections has been particularly high, the death rate has unsurprisingly been steepest in low-income communities. People living in such neighborhoods, most of them minorities, are significantly less likely to have health insurance or access to good healthcare services and far more likely to have underlying respiratory ailments including asthma, in part because the air in their communities tends to be more polluted. Poor people also have less chance of surviving Covid-19 because the quality of care in hospitals closely matches the wealth of the neighborhoods they’re in.

National economic statistics help highlight Covid-19’s uneven effects. Thirty-nine percent of those who have lost their jobs since March made less than $40,000 a year compared to 19% of those earning $100,000 or more. In addition, social distancing works for those whose jobs can be done from home, but bus drivers, cabbies, janitors, meatpackers, caregivers, hairdressers, farm workers, home health aides, and the like can’t use Zoom to sever themselves from their workplaces. If you don’t have to work on-site (and can afford grocery deliveries to your doorstep), you’re undoubtedly on the upper rungs of the income ladder. Nearly 62% of those in the 75th income percentile managed to work from home compared to 9.2% of those in the 25th percentile. There are race-based differences as well: 37% of Asian Americans and 30% of whites can work from home versus 19.7% of African Americans and 16.2% of Hispanic-Latinx.

Then there’s age. The CDC reports that 80% of those who died from Covid-19 in the United States were 65 or older. The disease has particularly ravaged the elderly in nursing homes (as well as the personnel staffing them), accounting for about 43% of countrywide deaths attributable to the virus.

The upshot: If you’re old, poor, and African American or Hispanic-Latinx, your chances of infection are especially high and your odds of survival significantly lower. So, no, we aren’t really all in this together, especially since not everybody can easily take elementary safety precautions, certainly not the two million Americans who don’t even have running water at home and so can’t regularly wash their hands, let alone the Navajo, 30% of whom must drive an hour or more to fetch water. Covid-19, anything but blind to color and class, has visibly hit the most vulnerable segments of American society most fiercely.

Devastating the Homeless

Among those especially hard-pressed to avoid infection and death are people who sleep in shelters, on the street, in deserted buildings, in subway cars, or — and they are perhaps the “lucky” ones — in their own cars. The homeless don’t get all that much Covid-19-related media coverage, in part because they are a sliver of the population (0.2%) and so lack a significant political voice: you won’t find pricey lobbyists working for them in Washington. They can’t even take that most basic precaution advised by medical experts, sheltering in place. To do that, you need dependable shelter, which the homeless, by definition, lack.

If you live in a big city, you can hardly miss the homeless, and you’re undoubtedly familiar with the rituals of passersby. Some simply walk on, perhaps at a slightly quickened pace; others glance at the homeless but ignore, or pretend not to hear, their pleas for help. Some do give them money or food from time to time, knowing that the gesture amounts to slapping a band aid on a serious wound. Even those who see the homeless daily generally know very little about them — who they are, how they ended up on the street, how they manage to survive — and even less about the homeless who, having found a place in a shelter, are out of sight.

While statistics can’t substitute for this lack of knowledge, they can help us grasp the magnitude and nature of homelessness. According to the Department for Housing and Urban Development (HUD), on any given night in January 2019, 560,715 people were homeless. Nearly two-thirds of them lived in shelters. The rest slept wherever they could, often on sidewalks, relying, if in places with cold winters, on steam grates to stay warm. About a quarter of them were deemed “chronically homeless,” which, by the definition HUD adopted in 2015, meant that they had been “living in a place not meant for human habitation, a safe haven, or in an emergency shelter” for 12 months running or for that total over a three-year stretch. Since 2007, when the compilation of data began, homelessness decreased by 12% until 2018-2019 when it rose by 3%, chiefly because of a 16% jump in California. The economic damage done by Covid-19 will, however, ensure yet more future increases.

Four states alone — California, Florida, New York, and Texas — contain nearly half of the homeless. Add Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, and you’ll hit two-thirds. The vast majority of them live in large urban areas, with five — New York County, Los Angeles County, Seattle/King County, San Jose/Santa Clara County, and San Diego County — accounting for 29% of the homeless nationwide. A clutch of cities (in descending order, Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York) have a homelessness rate six times the national figure of 17 per 10,000, with San Francisco barely escaping this list of ill-fame.

So, though homelessness exists in every state, as well as in suburbs and rural areas, spatially it’s highly concentrated — and that concentration is racial, not just spatial. Whites comprise 76% of the American population but only 49% of its homeless. For African Americans, the corresponding figures are 13% and 40%, for Hispanic-Latinx Americans 18% and 21%. Native Americans and Native Alaskans, a mere 1.2% of the population, make up nearly 9% of all homeless people. The homelessness rate is similarly skewed: 66.7 per 10,000 for Native Americans and Native Alaskans, 55 for African Americans, 21.7 for Hispanic/Latinx, 11.5 for whites, and 4 for Asian Americans.

Covid-19 and the Homeless

From the start, the homeless were among the groups most threatened by the coronavirus. Compared to other adults, a far higher proportion of them have respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses, which increase the risk of being infected and reduce chances of survival. Because of the physical wear and tear produced by exposure to the elements, poor nutrition and hygiene, and the stress of living on the streets or in shelters (while fearing being robbed or assaulted), the state of their health resembles that of people who are two decades older. Moreover, an estimated 38% of the homeless are addicted to alcohol and 26% of them to drugs. Substance abuse can, of course, weaken the body’s immune system, putting the homeless at an added disadvantage in warding off the virus.

Some experts claim that infections and deaths among the homeless have belied the direst predictions. Still, by mid-May, the Covid-19 death rate for New York City had reached 187/100,00. In the city’s homeless shelters, however, it was 291/100,000, or 56% higher. A CDC study covering March and April found that in Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle, 25% of the residents and 11% of the staff in homeless shelters tested positive for the virus.

None of this should be surprising. After all, regular handwashing, hard enough for the homeless who don’t live in shelters, became especially so once bathrooms in places like libraries, restaurants, and bus stations were ever less available as the pandemic revved up. Hand sanitizer can, of course, substitute for water, but not if you don’t have enough money to eat regularly, much less buy such products. Psychological disorders create an added barrier to self-protection as about 25% of the homeless — some studies report even higher numbers — suffer from severe mental illness and fewer than half receive any treatment.

Testing and contact tracing have reduced the virus’s spread substantially in a number of countries, but considering how far behind the U.S. has been in both realms, you can bet that the homeless weren’t anywhere near the head of the line for either. In addition, many of the organizations that care for them lack the money, kits, disinfectants, protective gear, and trained personnel (relying as they often do on volunteers) needed for an effective test-and-trace regimen. Fever and coughing were used as markers for testing early in the pandemic, so those in shelters who exhibited neither symptom but were infected transmitted the virus to others unnoticed. A single individual in a San Francisco shelter, for instance, infected 90 fellow residents and 10 employees before he tested positive.

Not surprisingly, the homeless sleeping rough didn’t rush to such shelters in these months, deterred by news that the coronavirus had hit places particularly hard where people were packed together and slept in close quarters, often in bunk beds. The chances of dodging Covid-19 seemed better on the outside.

Moreover, once infections soared, many shelters went into emergency mode. To implement social-distancing mandates and create space to isolate the infected, they froze new admissions or substantially reduced the number of residents they held. Some even shut down. People seeking beds faced long waiting lists. Meanwhile, cities, already under financial strain from the economic effects of the virus, scrambled to house their homeless in hotels, convention centers, or even in RVs, as the shelters disgorged people, leaving them to fend for themselves. In places like San Francisco’s Tenderloin district (already teeming with the homeless), they sleep on the streets or in makeshift tents, which increased nearly threefold citywide. Before long, cities were overwhelmed by costs, logistics, and lack of space. It was one thing for mayors to insist that the unsheltered homeless would be protected, quite another to foot the bill for hotel rooms and basic amenities in places designated for their housing, not to speak of supervisory staff and security.

Could It Get Any Worse?

Covid-19’s staggering economic effects will make it ever harder to manage homelessness, especially if its numbers increase due to an upswing in unemployment. Job losses in this country have already been estimated at up to 40 million and, despite the fall in the June unemployment rate, the virus’s recent surge across significant parts of the country will make matters worse. Another 10 million workers have seen their work hours or wages cut. Put it all together — the unemployed, those whose earnings have been slashed, and those who have simply stopped looking for work — and the real unemployment rate for May reached something like 21%. Unsurprisingly under such circumstances, in June, 20% of renters and 18% of home owners couldn’t make their rent or mortgage payments, while an additional 10% in each category could only pay part of what they owed. Those earning $24,000 or less had the hardest time with 20% of them unable to pay and 18% paying only in part.

Rent strikes have proliferated and many localities have banned the eviction of those who fall behind on their rent due to pandemic-related circumstances. Yet while such moratoriums can be extended, there’s nothing permanent about them. In fact, they have already expired in all or parts of more than a dozen states. Nationally, as many as 23 million renters could face eviction as the fall gets underway and those with low incomes run the greatest risk. Congress included financial assistance (plus a 120-day stay on evictions) for tenants and owners in its March Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Security bill, but that legislation will expire this summer and Senate Republicans are anything but keen to support a follow-up bill.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) have banned home foreclosures until August 31st on mortgages backed by them. More than 30 states have also prohibited the filing of home-foreclosure proceedings against, and the eviction of, owners who haven’t paid their mortgages for Covid-19-related reasons, though the provisions vary greatly with lots of fine print, and not all will last until the end of the pandemic emergency. Once such moratoriums lapse, renters and owners will be on the hook for missed payments.

Together, prolonged unemployment, reduced earnings for those who retain their jobs, and a decline in savings for workers in the bottom 40% — a trend anyway over the past three decades — are likely to increase homelessness, especially if an eviction spiral begins. Columbia University economist Brendan O’Flaherty, who shared his data with me, estimates that the economic downturn caused by the virus could drive the number of homeless to 800,000, an increase of 40% to 45% from 2019.

Homelessness could increase for non-economic reasons as well in the Covid-19 era. Take recent moves to reduce the number of people in American prisons, one of the five top hotspots for the spread of the virus. Three-quarters of the inmates at Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution, for instance, tested positive for the disease. At the Cummins prison in Arkansas, 891 inmates and 65 employees tested positive. From mid-May to mid-June alone, infections at U.S. prisons doubled to reach a total of 68,000, while deaths rose by 73% to 616 and had reached 651 by July.

In a rush to diminish population density, prisons and jails started releasing certain categories of inmates, though of this country’s 2.1 million prisoners, only about 20,000 have been freed so far, the vast majority from local jails. Keep in mind that people leaving prison have difficulty finding jobs in the best of times, so some of those released to manage the pandemic will undoubtedly find themselves both poverty-stricken and homeless. Even in the pre-pandemic moment, former prisoners were 10 times more likely to become homeless than other Americans and, according to a 2019 study by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, striking numbers of them end up in homeless shelters soon after their incarceration ends.

In short, as the coronavirus continues to rage, this country is ill-prepared to handle a surge in homelessness, let alone help those already homeless. The pandemic massively increased the federal deficit. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it could reach $3.7 trillion in this fiscal year, while other estimates go as high as $4.3 trillion. Meanwhile, without exception, states face steep drops in revenue.

Sadly, even if the plight of the homeless worsens and their number rises dramatically, it will barely register in the corridors of power. The homeless are a miniscule fraction of the population and have zero political clout. Politicians can safely ignore them, particularly because they know that most voters do and that the media covers homelessness sporadically at best. The homeless, society’s all but invisible castaways, can hope for little at a time when they will need more help than ever.

Beyond tokenism: Accelerating rights of women and girls in a post-COVID era

Shobha Shukla

I am tempted to share this very recent photograph of a newly done up mural in a very prominent area of my city barely a stone-throw distance from the state parliament. It is a clear depiction of what our patriarchal society wants its women to be-meek submissive, docile, their colourless faces devoid of any hope or desires. I fervently hope that it is not the sign of times to come.

This year’s World Population Day theme of safeguarding the health and rights of women and girls is bang on spot, more so in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The recently held 2nd session of 10th Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (#APCRSHR10 Virtual) on “Accelerating Rights and Choices for all in a Post-COVID Asia-Pacific”, saw several gender equality and women rights’ activists draw attention to the ills plaguing women and girls, especially those living in the Asia Pacific region.

Dr Gita Sen, a scholar of international repute and Distinguished Professor at Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), rues that the pandemic has further heightened the risks of disturbing practices prevalent in Asia Pacific countries (including India) that harm women and girls and undermine their equality – as shown by The State of the World Population Report 2020 by UNFPA.

“The existing inequalities have only exacerbated during the current pandemic. We also saw emergence of another parallel pandemic of violence against women and girls—those who were locked up with their abusers in their homes during lockdown. We have seen too little active leadership to remove stigma and to deal with the backlash against gender equality and sadly some leaders have gone in the opposite direction and we really need to tackle this”, she says.

India has a long way to go to achieve the three zeroes (that were set in motion by UNFPA) by 2030: zero unmet need for contraception; zero preventable maternal deaths; and zero gender-based violence and harmful practices. The UNFPA report points out that India’s maternal mortality ratio (deaths per 100,000 live births) was still high at 145 and modern method contraceptive prevalence rate in women aged 15-49 years, was a mere 38%.

The report also corroborates that the majority of Indian women still lack the power to take decisions regarding their sexual and reproductive health and to negotiate and choose if they are willing to get pregnant or wish to give birth to a baby. A strong preference for a son by families is still prevalent, abetted by the country’s overwhelming patriarchal society.

In one of her articles, Dr Kalpana Apte, Director General, Family Planning Association of India (FPA India), said that sexual health is largely neglected and reproductive health is not a priority in policy discourse in India. Citing a recent report by FPA India, she shared some very disturbing data: 50% of maternal deaths among girls aged 15-19 years occur due to unsafe abortion practices; 26.8% women aged 20-24 years were married before age 18 years; more than 50% of children between the ages of 5-12 years have been sexually abused and more than half of the cases of sexual abuse and rape go unreported; 34% of adolescent married girls admitted to being physically, emotionally, or sexually assaulted.

The situation in many other countries seems no better. Abortion is still illegal in Philippines and advocates of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are called witches, said Dr Junice Melgar, Director of Likhaan Center for Women’s Health and a champion of SRHR and family planning in the Philippines.

“(Filipino) women have endured severe hardships to get sexual and reproductive health services during COVID-19 lockdown. They have had to walk 2-3 km (due to absence of transport) to reach the clinic and then wait for hours in queues (due to social distancing) to get injectables and implants, which they could not get from neighbourhood drugstores. Pregnant women faced bigger challenges, with smaller birthing centres closed and the bigger hospitals refusing to admit them due to fear of COVID,” she says.

Also for women experiencing partner violence, there were no shelters available, and no transport vehicle to take them to the safety of family or friends. Women were left with no choice but stay with the abusers until the COVID-19 storm passed.

Catherine Harry, who runs a popular video blog ‘A Dose of Cath’ that challenges the gender taboos still prevalent in her native Cambodia, makes a strong case for providing young people education on sexual and reproductive health.

Catharine shared that, “When I was young, I received very little sex education from school. It was something that teachers assumed we would naturally know, (which is far from true) and parents thought it was something that we should not know. Because of this, many young people turn to pornography to get information on sex education. Not only does pornography not provide any accurate depiction of what sex is, but it also perpetuates very harmful stereotypes. Pornography also rarely shows how to protect yourself from STIs and unwanted pregnancy.”

Then again, COVID-19 has shown us the importance of internet for providing online information and education to those confined to their homes under lockdown conditions. Onsite classrooms have turned to online classrooms. But women and girls and those from underprivileged communities are at a disadvantage in accessing this online information. Catharine calls this internet inequality: “When people do not have access to the internet, they lose access to a vast vault of information, and most of those people tend to be women. If a household has only one phone that can access the internet, that phone tends to go to a male in the family”.

Unless women have easy access to correct information and are aware of their rights, they will not be able to make what we call ‘informed choices’. So it is important to make the internet more accessible for everyone (in terms of its cost and coverage) and encourage more women to participate in technology, which is still a male dominated field, feels Catharine.

It is high time we stopped treating women as a commodity, or as a burden or at the best as an ornamental piece. She deserves to be respected and treated as a human being, no less.

Oniomania

Bilal Ahmad Dar

When life hasn’t got a swing anymore, people may give in to obsessive oniomanic compulsions, in as much as they are going out of their way to construct a flamboyant life style and change their identity from “don’t- need” to “must-have” consumers, so as to satisfy their gripping buying desire. Erike Pevernagie

Man is a creature of instincts, desires, feelings, volitions and all that. Digital and technological revolution has simplified the life of man. We complete complex works online. Due to the scientific advancement, modern man has become a kind of post-human. But this scientific advancement has some flipsides attached to it. Modern man has online buying options available to him. Modern man buys things online from online shopping portals like Flipkat and Amazon. We order an item online and next day it reaches us in the wee hours of the morning. These online shopping portals are very alluring and enticing. No doubt they save our time, but due to this online shopping, modern man has degenerated into an oniomanic and shopaholic being. Oniomania and shopaholism are two newly found psychological disorders of a modern man. Seeing an item online allures and entices us. The brilliant color and gaudy style motivates us to buy things even at very dear rates online.

Oniomania is the obsession of a person with very costly things. It is also called as CBD (Compulsive Buying Disorder). Oniomania is a term coined by the French psychiatrist Valentin Magnan. The term has gained currency when Max Nordau, a German physician, used it in his book Degeneration (1892). Max Nordau defines Oniomania as a “buying craze” a “stigma of degeneration”. Thorstein Veblen (sociologist and economist) has used a different bionomial term for this buying craze or oniomania. He calls it a conspicuous consumption. It is defined as the spending of money on costly and luxury goods and services in order to make the display of one’s economic power and clout.

Oniomania is  a fact these days. Modern man has certainly become an oniomanic being. He goes for shopping frequently. Brands and tags have obsessed the mind of modern man. He runs after the brand names like Adidas, Nike, Levis and many others. Wearing these brands gives him psychological comfort and social identity. He does not care a fig for local and unbranded items. Unbranded and local items, modern man thinks, are bland and lack identity and social respect. This line of thinking has led to extravagance and desire for extravaganza. Extravagance and desire for extravaganza can impoverish us. It can have negative economic implications for us. We should use our senses and discretion while shopping. Discretion is the best part of the valor. We should not be driven by our elite instincts and romantic tendencies.

Prior to digital revolution and online shopping options, shopping was not so frequent and maniac. Shopping was done on yearly or half yearly basis. But these days, shopping has become an obsession. Modern man goes for shopping on daily basis. I do not try to discourage people from shopping; I only suggest that we should not be much obsessed with it. We should not consider costly goods and apparels as desiderata. We can survive without donning ultra-modern suits, saris and shoes. We should avoid being lavish and spendthrift and profligate. We should follow frugality and thrifty life style. Lavish life style and extravagant attitude are the signs and symptoms of oniomania and shopaholism. Both Oniomania and shopaholism can lead to psychological disorders. It can make us social misfits. We should try to be less lavish and simpler. Thereby hangs a tale!

Fake news and the power of confirmation bias

Vineetha Venugopal

Internet offers pathways of enhancing democratic participation, increased interconnectedness and access to knowledge and entertainment. However, uncritical use of digital platforms and uncritical consumption of digital content can impede achieving the very goals it promises. For example, Fake news is currently a serious threat to democracies worldwide.

Collins dictionary defines ‘Fake news’ as ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting’. While such sensational / false information dissemination must have been an age-old phenomenon, the progress achieved in communication through telecommunication and digital technologies has exacerbated the spread, depth and impact of fake news. However, some scholars are of the opinion that the term ‘fake news’ is a misnomer as it is not entirely representative of the misinformation ecosystem comprising of misleading content, satire or parody, imposter content, fabricated content, false connection, false context and manipulated content. Here in this article, the term ‘fake news’ is used to indicate the entire misinformation ecosystem including false social media content.

It is very easy for a sensational forwarded message to become viral and cause real world havoc, be it mass exodus of migrant laborers from Bangalore or mob lynching. While it would be naive to attribute blame of these events to fake news alone ignoring the underlying social, political and economic factors, it can’t be denied that spread of misinformation through Whatsapp, SMS messaging and Facebook plays a major role in inciting panic. Much has been written about how to identify fake news. However, we may not be able to put those techniques into practice unless we are aware of our biases and able to counter them.

Fake news and confirmation bias

The author and her colleagues used to conduct digital literacy sessions with a group of urban youth in Bangalore. A part of the curriculum dealt with ways of identifying fake news. We covered various tips such as verifying the source, verifying the date, reverse image search, checking with fake news busting services, etc. After multiple sessions, we conducted an assessment. One of the questions of the assessment consisted of a forwarded image that claimed that Kannada language was awarded the Guinness book of records certificate for being the oldest language. The youth was asked to verify the authenticity of this message.

Out of the 17 youth who attempted this question, 58.8% (10 youth) answered that the forwarded message was true without doing any fact checking. They argued that the forwarded message must be true because Kannada language has a rich history. We got the impression that the bias arising from the affinity towards Kannada, their mother tongue as well as the existing knowledge about Kannada’s rich history, stood in the way of fact checking despite being trained on verifying fake news. On the plus side, this incident gave us an opening to discuss various psychological tendencies that facilitate belief in fake news including confirmation bias.

Psychology today summarises confirmation bias as follows:

“Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea/concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful thinking. This error leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views (prejudices) one would like to be true”

Unsurprisingly, digital humanities scholar Jason Ahler defines confirmation bias as ‘fake news’s best friend’. Most often, we fall prey to fake news due to a combination of confirmation bias and implicit bias. As psychologist David Braucher argues, due to our implicit bias, we tend to become friends with those who have the same political leaning as us, and as they share news that confirms our beliefs, this feedback loop gets entrenched, and we end up living in a bubble. Interestingly, in these bubbles we often tend to label news that contradict our political beliefs as fake news. Other two psychological tendencies that enable belief in fake news are cognitive dissonance (siding with what is comfortable rather than what is true) and motivated reasoning (scrutinising ideas more carefully if we don’t like them and scrutinising ideas less if we like them).

Unethical Technical Design

Another enabling factor for the spread of fake news is unethical technical design. To retain our attention, social media algorithms tend to give us more of what we like, thus giving them more time to mine data about us and also to show us more ads. If you liked or shared an article that claimed that ancient Indians possessed nuclear weapons, you are likely to see more such articles in your Facebook news feed and search results. Additionally, social media platforms keep us glued to them with likes and notifications. These are the results of conscious design choices based on behavioral economics built for profit maximization. Our well-being is secondary to these platforms.

Technologist Aviv Ovadya, argues that platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook prioritised clicks, likes shares and subsequent revenue generation through advertisements rather than quality of information. This strategy resulted in polarising and sensational information becoming more viral. Ovadya’s is one among the increasing calls for ethical technical design. However, due to wide spread backlash, Tech companies have begun to fact check and label fake news. For example, Twitter recently labelled a tweet by Donald Trump as ‘manipulated media’. However, it is questionable how effective these steps will be considering that 1) Not all posts are fact checked 2) Posts often go viral before they are taken down or labelled 3) These steps still do not address the fake news circulation via WhatsApp. While WhatsApp has restricted the number of times a user can forward a message, the sheer magnitude of the fake news spread via WhatsApp groups and private messages is overwhelming.

Ovadya further worries that the pervasiveness of fake news can result in a scenario called ‘reality apathy’, where beset by a torrent of constant misinformation, people simply start to give up. This can result in people simply being indifferent to information – ‘everything is fake news; so why bother’ or increase polarisation -‘If everything is fake news, I might as well, believe what best suits me and decry other news as fake news’.

Surviving in the post-truth age

Now that the glorification of the information age has somewhat subsided, the age we are living in is increasingly referred to as post-truth age. Philosophers like Yuval Noah Harari would disagree and say that fake news is an ancient phenomenon as old as religion and humans have always lived in a post-truth world.

Whether we have always lived in a post-truth world or whether the post-truth age has recently begun in earnest, we need to think of ways to minimise impacts of misinformation on ourselves and our democracies. We need to become critical and conscious in our news consumption, be aware of our biases and the lure of filter bubbles.

Further details emerge on far-right views of Canadian army reservist who tried to kill Trudeau

Roger Jordan

In the almost two weeks since army reservist Corey Hurren attempted to assassinate Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it has become manifestly evident that the 46-year-old was motivated by long-standing far-right political convictions. Yet even as more evidence comes to light exposing Hurren’s affinity for right-wing extremist views and websites, the political establishment, military, and corporate media continue to downplay the significance of his actions. Indeed, they are even trying to deny that they were politically motivated.

Hurren was detained on the grounds of Rideau Hall, the official residence of Governor General Julie Payette and temporary residence of Trudeau, after crashing his pickup through the main gate early on the morning of July 2. Officially on full-time military duty at the time of his arrest, he was heavily armed, including with at least four firearms. He is due to appear in court on Friday on 22 charges of firearms offences and uttering death threats.

Last week, anonymous sources spoke to the media about the contents of a note that Hurren allegedly wanted to deliver to Trudeau. The would-be assassin wrote that it was time for a “wake-up call” for Canada, which was in danger of becoming a “communist dictatorship” under Trudeau’s Liberal government. He also wrote of his concern that his truck would be repossessed due to the collapse of his sausage-making business amid the coronavirus pandemic. Such a development, Hurren complained, would make it impossible for him to remain part of the Canadian Rangers, a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) reserve unit responsible for patrolling rural and coastal areas.

However, Hurren’s far-right views were not merely a reaction to the economic and social distress triggered by the pandemic. A Toronto Star article published last weekend revealed that he had created a webpage in the early 2000s that promoted Infowars and other ultra-right conspiracy websites. Infowars is run by the right-wing extremist provocateur Alex Jones, who claims that the Democrats want to establish “communism” in the United States and conduct a “white genocide.”

Just one hour prior to crashing his truck through Rideau Hall’s gates, Hurren shared an online post associated with QAnon, an internet-based fascist trend that urges US President Donald Trump to order the arrest of the Democratic Party leadership and impose dictatorial rule.

The day prior to Hurren’s attack on Rideau Hall, a right-wing extremist “Dominion Day” rally was held on Parliament Hill. Among the signs at the protest were one showing a picture of Trudeau standing in a gallows, another calling for the reintroduction of the death penalty for the Prime Minister, and several indicating support for “QAnon.” It is not known whether Hurren attended the event.

The Star also revealed that Hurren penned an article in 2015 praising his family’s military service and promoting the use of the term “old stock Canadian,” a phrase coined by the political right to refer to white, Christian, English or French speakers whose descendants have resided in Canada for several generations. During the 2015 federal election campaign, the phrase was used by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper to whip up anti-immigrant chauvinism and mobilize the hard-right base of the Tory Party, including far-right elements.

“We are the people who built this country, defended this country, and made it one of the most desirable places on the planet to live,” wrote Hurren in his 2015 article. “That is also why people still want to come here and start a better life. If some of you still think it is an insult to be called an ‘Old Stock Canadian’ then I think you are wrong. It is a title and a heritage that you should be proud of.”

Hurren’s longstanding far-right sympathies and association with the military—he served as an artillery soldier between 1997 and 2000, before joining the reserves last year—raises many troubling questions. These include: Was the military, which claims to be concerned about the prevalence of racist and far-right views in its ranks, aware of Hurren’s views? Did he share them with fellow Rangers and other CAF personnel whom he came in contact with, including during the weeks immediately prior to his assault on Rideau Hall, when he was on full-time active service duty as parts of the Canadian military’s COVID-19 deployment? How did Hurren obtain his arsenal of weapons, at least two of which were illegal?

The corporate-controlled media has proven staggeringly uninterested in exploring any of these issues, just it has accepted the few details shared by the military and government about the events of July 2 as the full story. Thanks to the indifference of the corporate media, even basic information about the attack—such as whether Hurren carried it out in CAF battle fatigues—is not publicly known.

Publicly, at least, Canada’s political establishment is presenting the attempted assassination of the prime minister as a virtual non-event, worthy of little comment, let alone investigation. Since Trudeau gave a perfunctory thank you to the RCMP one day after Hurren’s arrest for their response to this “concerning” incident, no government official has bothered to speak publicly on the attempted killing of Canada’s current head of government.

The media coverage has been deliberately pitched to downplay and trivialize the event, with Hurren referred to as the “Rideau Hall intruder,” and someone who may have been seeking “suicide by cop.” Intelligence agency “experts” have also been cited to deny the obvious: that Hurren’s actions were politically motivated. “I still don’t necessarily see this as an ideologically-motivated attack. Just because [he believed] in conspiracy theories doesn’t mean that’s why he ended up doing what he did,” Jessica Davis, a security consultant and former CSIS analyst, told the Star. “His motivation really does seem quite mixed.”

The political establishment and corporate media are anxious to conceal how the dramatic shift of bourgeois politics to the right over the past two decades is incubating extreme right-wing forces, including in the institutions of the state. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Canada’s ruling elite united, in the name of the “war on terror,” around a policy of increased collaboration with Washington in aggression and war around the world, and attacks on democratic rights at home. In intrigues and military interventions from Haiti in 2004 to the ongoing CAF deployment in Ukraine, Canadian imperialism has pursued its predatory interests by allying with far-right and outright fascistic forces. Last year, a Canadian military intelligence report admitted that at least three dozen armed forces personnel were members of ultra-right groups or had voiced racist or extremist views.

Prime Minister Harper, while whipping up anti-immigrant and Islamophobic prejudice, including with the references to “old stock Canadians” that Hurren apparently found so appealing, also declared Canada to be a “warrior nation” whose citizens owed their freedoms to the military’s battlefield prowess. While Trudeau and his trade union and New Democratic Party (NDP) allies have distanced themselves from such explicitly bellicose assertions of Canadian imperialist interests, they are in fundamental agreement with Harper’s goal of massively expanding the resources of the military to wage war around the world. Trudeau has pledged to hike military spending by over 70 percent by 2026, and his government has integrated Canada’s armed forces even more fully into US-led military-strategic offensives in the oil-rich Middle East, and against Russia and China. In the latest coronavirus spending bill adopted by the Liberal government with NDP support on June 17, the government smuggled in over half a billion dollars to ensure ongoing funding for the building of two warships in Vancouver.

A serious examination of Hurren’s background, would reveal the fact that the military and security agencies of the Canadian capitalist state are breeding grounds for far-right forces. In so doing, it would cut across the efforts of Trudeau and his allies, including the NDP, to pursue rearmament and promote Canada as a benign, “humanitarian” and “pacific” force on the global stage.

It is within this context that the response of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to Hurren’s attempted assassination of Trudeau should be understood. Singh told a press conference last Wednesday that the main issue and concern raised by the July 2 events was that had Hurren been a “person of colour” it would have ended differently. Singh compared Hurren’s peaceful surrender after a 90-minute police “de-escalation” effort to the fate of Ejaz Choudry, a South Asian man who was shot to death by police in his own home in Mississauga last month just minutes after they had arrived for a wellness check. “That contrast—someone showed up to potentially kill the prime minister of Canada, or with weapons at his residence, and that person was arrested without any violence and you had a person who in his own home was killed,” commented Singh. “That to me is what systemic racism in policing is all about.”

Singh then proceeded to praise the fascist-minded Trump for the cosmetic reforms he presented in an executive order last month following the mass protests against the brutal police murder of George Floyd—protests that Trump had sought to suppress with military violence. “The fact that President Trump, who has been horrible on this issue, who has said hateful things and I’ve called him out on that, has done more in terms of a concrete policy change than the prime minister of Canada who says that he is an ally, that to me is really troubling,” said Singh. “He’s literally done nothing.”

Singh’s intervention is a deliberate effort to dissipate popular concern over and opposition to the rise of the extreme right and divert it in a reactionary direction. At the very point when workers should be questioning the complicity of the capitalist state, its parties and its institutions, including the military and police, in the growth and emboldening of far-right forces, the NDP intervenes to declare that everything can be put right. All that is necessary is to change the racist mindsets of a few cops and ensure racial “equity” within the existing state structures and social order— i.e., secure the equal “right” of wealthy blacks and whites to sit in corporate boardrooms, occupy senior positions within the repressive state apparatus, and exploit the working class.

New Zealand aluminium smelter to close, axing 1,000 jobs

John Braddock

The international conglomerate Rio Tinto announced on July 9 that it will shut New Zealand Aluminium Smelters (NZAS), known as the Tiwai Point smelter, within 18 months.

Jointly owned by Rio Tinto and Japan’s Sumitomo Chemical Co, the smelter directly employs about 1,000 people and supports a further 1,600 jobs in the Southland province. It is the major employer adjacent to the city of Invercargill, population 56,000, and contributes $NZ400 million to the region’s economy, over 6 percent of its GDP.

In a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange, the company said a strategic review had “shown the business is no longer viable given high energy costs and a challenging outlook for the aluminium industry.” The company has given electricity supplier Meridian Energy notice to terminate its power contract which ends in August next year.

The closure is a part of the escalating attack on jobs and the livelihoods of major sections of the workforce. The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is severe. With a sharp recession looming this quarter, unemployment is forecast to hit almost 10 percent this year. Even before the closure was announced, the Southland District Council had forecast regional job losses of 5,000 relating to the pandemic, and a local unemployment rate of 9.5 percent.

The Tiwai Point aluminium smelter

NZAS reported a net profit of $NZ220 million in 2018. However, the smelter’s viability has been questioned for much of the past decade due to falling metal prices, rising power costs, and over-capacity that has seen smelters closed around the world.

Last year the smelter announced a $NZ46 million loss, with CEO Stew Hamilton saying it had been hit by a 15 percent fall in global prices. Pressure on aluminium producers has increased with the slowdown or collapse of industries like car manufacturing, aircraft and aerospace production, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The plant’s closure has far-reaching implications. NZAS is New Zealand’s largest power consumer, using around 12 percent of the country’s electricity. Contact Energy, the facility’s second electricity supplier, is now considering the closure of its Taranaki Combined Cycle thermal power station at Stratford. Within hours of the announcement, fleeing investors had wiped more than $2.8 billion off the value of NZX-listed electricity companies.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported “continued uncertainty” around the future of Rio Tinto’s three aluminium smelters in Australia, also claiming pressure from energy prices, which account for about a third of their costs. Rio Tinto Australia’s CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques warned last August that the smelters, which employ thousands of people, were on “thin ice.”

NZAS electricity transmission costs had risen from $NZ40 million in 2008 to $65m last year, according to Hamilton. Yet a spokesman for power company Vector told an inquiry last November that the company was paying only about 5 cents a kilowatt-hour, about a quarter of the power price paid by consumers.

Hamilton rejected the criticism, saying that pricing was “a wholesale discount like you would get from any industry.” The company has continually demanded even cheaper prices from state-owned and private power companies.

One worker, Tim Talamahina, told Stuff that he had expected the closure, but still found himself “reeling” from the announcement. His father, Iki, has worked at Tiwai for close to 40 years, while Tim has been there 20 years. “I thought I was prepared for it, but no, not really. Reality kicked in and I thought, Wow.”

Seth Nips, a local tertiary student said it would be “quite terrible,” as people would lose their homes, and it would be hard to find work because many smaller companies would also shed jobs. Noel Ruffel, a retired builder, said it was a “real tragedy” and “there will be lots and lots of people who will suffer.”

The E tū union is collaborating with the closure as it has already done, alongside the Air Line Pilots’ Association, with thousands of redundancies at Air New Zealand. E tū spokesman Joe Gallagher said the Labour Party-led government had “the opportunity, post-COVID-19, to show a way forward for a proper, fair and just transition, including enabling workers to retrain or redeploy.”

These are meaningless words. The unions know that the government will do nothing to protect jobs and the reality is thousands of workers will simply go on the dole.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson flatly declared there was “an inevitability” about the announcement from Rio Tinto. He stated that it was “a very sad day for Southland but there are also opportunities attached to this.” This amounted to nothing more than a vague observation that more could be done “to extract value from the agricultural, aquaculture and manufacturing sectors in the region.”

Totally indifferent to the fate of the smelter workers, the trade union-funded Daily Blog posted a comment by John Minto headed: “Goodbye and good riddance to New Zealand (sic) biggest corporate bludger.” Minto suggested the government could fund “environmentally friendly job creation opportunities,” i.e. subsidise “green” businesses.

The multi-national company has been propped up by successive governments, led by Labour and the National Party, with price concessions, tax exemptions and lax environmental practices.

E tū’s statement included a pathetic plea for Rio Tinto to “think about the legacy it wants to leave as a company.” Gallagher told TVNZ the company had “a duty of care to their employees and their families” and should consider options to keep the smelter open.

Such statements are an attempt to sow illusions among workers and block any real fight against job cuts. The aim of Rio Tinto, like any major corporation, is, above all, to make profits. Its major shareholders have zero concern for the lives that will be ruined by the closure of Tiwai Point.

The mass redundancies taking place across the country, after the government handed out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to businesses, is an indictment of the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production, which the unions defend.

To fight for decent jobs and living standards, workers need to build their rank-and-file committees, independent of the trade unions, to link up with other sections of the working class in Australia and internationally facing similar attacks. Such struggles can only go forward on the fight for a workers’ government to implement socialist policies. This would include nationalizing major industries, such as aluminium, under the democratic control of the working class, to reorganize production for social need, not private profit.

Tens of thousands protest in Russia’s far east after Kremlin removes governor

Clara Weiss

Since Saturday, several thousand people have been protesting in Khabarovsk, a city of 600,000 in Russia’s far east, against the removal of the region’s governor, Sergei Frugal, by the Kremlin. Frugal, a member of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), was arrested by the FSB (Federal Security Service) in his house on July 9.

He is charged with involvement in the murder of multiple businessmen in Khabarovsk and adjacent regions in 2004 and 2005. A court ordered him to be jailed for two months while the investigation continues. Frugal has pleaded not guilty.

On Saturday, up to 35,000 people protested in Khabarovsk, the capital city of the Khabarovsk region, which is located almost 4,000 miles to the east of Moscow. Several thousand continued the protests on Sunday and Monday. Protesters chanted “Putin step down” and “Moscow get out.” Others carried signs saying, “I’m Frugal,” “I’m for Khabarovsk,” “Khabarovsk won’t let its own people down” and “Moscow, listen to us.”

Sergei Frugal

Smaller protests with just a few dozen people took place in smaller towns in the Khabarovsk region. Alexei Navalny, the right-wing leader of the US-backed liberal opposition, enthusiastically welcomed the protests, stating, “We are with you, Khabarovsk.” His staff in Khabarovsk helped organize several of the protests. A petition demanding Frugal’s release has been signed by over 40,000 people as of this writing.

Frugal was elected in the 2018 regional elections with almost 70 percent of the vote, by far outdoing his rival from the ruling United Russia Party. The LDPR now also controls the regional parliament. During his almost two years in office, Frugal has made limited populist appeals to social discontent. His party, the LDPR, is notorious for its whipping up of Russian chauvinism, especially anti-Chinese xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

It has provided a nominal opposition to the Kremlin’s United Russia Party for almost two decades now, while de facto backing every major initiative of Putin. Prior to his political career, Frugal was one of the leading figures in the regional timber and metal business, two of the main raw material resources of the region.

While it is very possible that Frugal was involved in assassinations of other businessmen—a common practice among Russia’s criminal oligarchs—the fact that the federal Investigative Committee, Russia’s highest criminal investigative body, decided to bring charges now, 15 years later, indicates that much broader political issues are behind the conflict.

Many things point to growing frictions between the Kremlin and regional elites as well as conflicts within the ruling class more broadly as central drivers behind the arrest of Frugal.

The arrest came just one week after a national referendum on constitutional reforms that significantly strengthened the powers of the president and enshrined far-right nationalist values in the Constitution. One significant aspect of the reforms is a limitation of the powers of regional and municipal authorities.

In response to the arrest, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a notorious racist, angrily threatened in the Russian Duma (parliament) that his parliamentary faction would walk out of parliament to protest the treatment of Frugal. In an unusual outburst, he shouted, “We gave you the Constitution, and you’re putting us in handcuffs.”

Members of the LDPR have claimed that conflicts between Frugal and elites in Moscow over the company Amurstal constitute a factor in Frugal’s arrest. Amurstal is the largest steel producer in the Russian far east and the largest manufacturer in the Khabarovsk region. The company maintains close business relations with Chinese companies. Since 2017, Amurstal has belonged to Toreks-Khabarovsk, which is co-owned by Larisa Starodubova, Frugal’s wife.

Khabarovsk was also one of two regions where the Kremlin failed to get a majority for the constitutional amendments, with only 44 percent voting in favor. Many have suggested substantial manipulation of the vote in other regions. Putin’s approval rating had recently been plummeting to record lows as the coronavirus ripped through the population, exposing the devastating impact of capitalist restoration and decades of austerity, especially on health care.

With over 732,000 cases, Russia has the fourth highest number of coronavirus infections in the world, but has already moved to fully reopen the economy. Tens of thousands of miners and oil and gas workers have been infected, for the most part in workplaces that were never properly shut down or reopened prematurely.

Many media commentators have pointed out that with the arrest of Frugal, the Kremlin is sending a message to other regional elites ahead of elections that are scheduled for many regions in the fall. In the spring, the Kremlin gave regional authorities significant leeway in dealing with the pandemic, allowing them to both lock down and reopen at different paces and scales. Now it is trying to roll back these limited freedoms.

Regionalist and separatist tendencies have long been simmering beneath the surface in Russian politics. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1991, the secession of the far east from Russia was discussed as a real possibility among both Russian and US elites. Throughout the 1990s, fierce conflicts within the rising oligarchy over the control of state assets and raw material resources often took regionalist forms in energy-rich regions like the Urals, Siberia and the far east.

In the North Caucasus, a full-blown separatist movement developed in the republic of Chechnya to which the Kremlin responded by waging two extremely bloody wars, in which approximately a tenth of the local population was killed.

Under Putin, the growing centralization of government and the establishment of the United Russia Party were aimed not least at suppressing these regionalist tendencies and establishing a firm control over regional governments. The liberal opposition that is heavily supported by US imperialism has deliberately appealed to and fostered these tendencies.

Navalny has repeatedly called for greater regional autonomy. He has also participated in several of the annual far-right “Russian marches,” where he shouted slogans like “Stop feeding the Caucasus,” which is not only racist, but is advanced by various nationalist and separatist forces advocating the break-up of the Russian Federation. The journalist Ben Judah noted in 2013 that “almost all the leaders of the Russian opposition have told me privately that they would let the North Caucasus go.”

Last year, Navalny’s supporters helped organize protests in Yekaterinburg, a major city in the Urals, together with Fedor Krasheninnikov, a businessman and former member of the LDPR who counts among the most prominent advocates of regional autonomy for the Urals.

Any progressive movement against the Putin regime and the threat of dictatorship must be based in the working class and oppose these reactionary attempts by the imperialist-backed opposition to foster separatism and nationalism.