US-China conflict over TikTok intensifies as Trump’s forced divestiture deadline approaches

Kevin Reed

The aggressive move by the US to force the Chinese firm ByteDance to sell the video sharing app TikTok to an American company is intensifying as the September 15 deadline imposed by President Donald Trump for divestiture approaches.

Before boarding Air Force One for a trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday, the president reiterated to reporters the two conditions required for TikTok—which claims 100 million active users in the country—to continue to operate in the US.

“I told them they have until September 15 to make a deal—after that we close it up in this country,” Trump asserted, adding, “I said the United States has to be compensated, well compensated.”

While the forced divestiture of TikTok is contained in his executive order of August 6, Trump has not specified under what authority he has issued the compensation requirement. As reported by Bloomberg, government fee assessments on transactions of this type normally do not amount to more than $300,000, which “appear to fall short of what Trump has demanded.”

The imposition of massive fees to be paid to the US government for brokering the sale of the highly valued Chinese tech firm’s assets to an American owner—at bargain basement prices—is unprecedented and amounts to a White House-orchestrated fencing operation with TikTok as the loot.

This aspect of the Trump administration’s bullying of ByteDance has not been lost on the Chinese government, which has referred to the September 15 deadline as “a forced fire sale.”

Late Friday, China’s Commerce Ministry retaliated and imposed a new set of export controls on the country’s businesses, stating that artificial intelligence (AI) interface technologies such as speech and text recognition software and algorithms that analyze data and make personalized content recommendations are matters of national security.

It just so happens that AI and content recommendation tools are a core part of TikTok’s platform and success. In a June 18 blog post, TikTok explained some details of how these sophisticated technologies work: “When you open TikTok and land in your For You feed, you’re presented with a stream of videos curated to your interests, making it easy to find content and creators you love. This feed is powered by a recommendation system that delivers content to each user that is likely to be of interest to that particular user. Part of the magic of TikTok is that there’s no one For You feed—while different people may come upon some of the same standout videos, each person’s feed is unique and tailored to that specific individual.”

The core capability—and value—of the TikTok recommendation engine is not just its ability to analyze the previous behavior of users and serve up content that is specific to their interests. It is TikTok’s ability to predict future behavior that is the “holy grail” of social media advertising revenue because its compelling individualized content keeps users viewing their feed for longer and longer periods of time.

According to Eugene Wei, a tech startup investor from San Francisco, it is TikTok’s mastery of AI and “deep learning” that has made the platform a success. As Wei told the Wall Street Journal, “When you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you. To see it as merely a novelty meme video app for kids is to miss what is its much greater disruptive potential.”

The possibility that American companies can acquire these advanced systems at a fraction of their market value and without having to develop them from the ground up makes the acquisition of TikTok an especially attractive proposition. Facebook, for example—with its nearly 3 billion worldwide users and present stock market value of $850 billion—has only recently implemented a service called Reels on Instagram that emulates the capabilities of TikTok that have been in place for more than two years.

This fact is also clearly understood by the Chinese government and is the reason why Beijing has intervened with export rules to hold back this capability from a possible sale of the assets of the platform. According to the Journal, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a regular media briefing on Monday, that the US is using “economic-bullying and political-manipulation tactics against non-U.S. companies.”

The Trump administration’s emergency order threatening to shut down TikTok in the US is based on completely bogus and unproven national security claims that the Chinese-based company has been gathering the private information of American citizens and turning it over to Beijing state intelligence. The campaign is entirely motivated by the domestic and international political needs of the Trump administration for whipping up anti-Chinese sentiments within the US and prosecuting aggressive geostrategic goals aimed at suppressing the emergence of a major threat to American global hegemony.

The campaign against TikTok—along with the China-based WeChat mobile application—was initiated by Democratic Party leaders in Congress who began demanding in late 2019 along with their Republican counterparts that the app be banned among Transportation Safety Administration employees and US military personnel as a threat to national security.

The unity between the Democrats and Republicans on Trump’s xenophobic anti-Chinese economic measures is most clearly expressed by the New York Times, which has published a steady stream of articles that have applauded the forced sale of TikTok. In an article published on Monday, the Times takes a notably supportive position in relationship to the actions of the White House, noting, “If China does move to block TikTok’s sale, that could goad Mr. Trump into taking harsher action, further escalating tensions between the United States and China.”

On Monday, rumors that a sale of TikTok was imminent were being widely reported in the corporate business media. According to CNBC, the bidders for the platform included the software companies Microsoft and Oracle and the retailer Walmart. The report said, “Walmart emerged as a surprise contender last week, saying the social media app would augment its e-commerce efforts.”

However, unnamed individuals who are familiar with the negotiations said that the US government demanded that a tech company lead the offering and Walmart then entered into a consortium that included Alphabet (parent of Google and YouTube) and Softbank. When these two latter firms dropped out of the negotiations, Walmart teamed up with Microsoft.

The CNBC report said that a buyer had been selected to purchase TikTok’s US, New Zealand and Australian operations, and “Microsoft, in partnership with Walmart, and Oracle are the two top contenders. The sale price is expected to be in the range of $20 billion to $30 billion.”

Greek-Turkish standoff escalates war danger in eastern Mediterranean

Alex Lantier

The escalating confrontation in the eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and Greece has reached a new and dangerous stage. Top officials of NATO member states are openly threatening to wage war against one another in conflicts that could set the Mediterranean and the world ablaze.

Last Thursday, Turkish F-16 jets blocked Greek F-16s off Crete from overflying disputed zones of the eastern Mediterranean where Turkey is drilling for oil and gas. In July, Greek and Turkish naval flotillas steamed directly towards each other, avoiding a clash only at the last minute when Berlin intervened, calling Ankara and ordering the Turkish ships to change course. Tensions escalated in August, when France dispatched two warships and Rafale jets to back Greece.

The European Union (EU) foreign ministers meeting on Friday in Berlin marked a further shift to a more aggressive stance, backing Greece against Turkey. After the meeting, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borell said: “We are clear and determined in defending European Union interests and solidarity with Greece and Cyprus. Turkey has to refrain from unilateral actions.”

General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon Turkish (Image Credit: Robert Sullivan/Wikipedia)

Borell indicated the EU could adopt economic sanctions to strangle the Turkish economy later this month. While thanking “the efforts deployed by Germany in this attempt to look for solutions through dialogue between Turkey and Greece and Cyprus,” he expressed the EU’s “growing frustration” with Turkey and proposed sanctions against Turkish officials. He added that broader “restrictive measures could be discussed at the European Council on 24-25 September.”

In follow-up questions, Borell explained that the EU could target industries “in which the Turkish economy is more interrelated with the European economy.”

The same day, President Emmanuel Macron issued an extraordinary threat, comparing French deployments in Greece to the “red line” policy that saw France, Britain and the United States bomb Syria. This 2018 bombing, based on fraudulent allegations that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons, led Moscow to accelerate its build-up of Syrian air defences.

Macron said his policy is based on the view that aggressive military action is the only way forward. “When it comes to Mediterranean sovereignty, I must be consistent in deeds and word,” he said. “I can tell you that the Turks only consider and respect that. If you say words that are not followed by acts ... What France did this summer was important: it’s a red line policy. I did it in Syria.”

Turkish officials responded this weekend by warning that the Greek policy backed by the EU could provoke war. They cited Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ threats to expand Greece’s exclusive economic zone from six to 12 miles—including around Greek islands directly off the coast of Turkey—and reports that Greece is strengthening its ground forces on these islands.

“This would be grounds for war, a casus belli,” declared Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, while Vice President Fuat Oktay said: “If it is not grounds for war, what is it?”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “Their aim is to imprison our country, which has the longest coastline in the Mediterranean, into a coastal strip from which you can only catch fish with a rod.” Ankara has already staked out extensive maritime claims, blocking projected gas pipelines from Israel, via Cyprus and Greece, to Italy and the European mainland.

The eastern Mediterranean conflict is the outcome of decades of imperialist wars, particularly the NATO wars in Libya, Syria and Iraq since 2011. These wars plunged Libya into a decade-long civil war and triggered a devastating proxy war between NATO-backed militias and the Russian-, Chinese- and Iranian-backed regime in Syria. Now rivalries over undersea oil and gas have lit the fuse in a region that, as when World War I began in 1914, threatens to erupt into a regional and global war.

Both the Turkish and Greek governments, devastated by a decade of EU austerity, are unpopular and seeking to prop themselves up by inciting war fever. This policy unfolds, however, amid a swirling morass of global conflicts over markets and strategic advantage, similar to the economic rivalries that plunged Europe into World War I, that are relentlessly fueling the Mediterranean stand-off.

Geopolitically, the region is not only critical to efforts by the US and Europe to reassert their positions in the Middle East and Africa after their Syrian defeat, but also to Europe’s energy supply, and China’s attempts to build up trade ties to Europe via the Middle East in its Belt and Road Initiative.

It is widely acknowledged that the disintegration of US imperialism’s former hegemonic position is fueling the conflict. In an editorial board statement, “There’s a New Game of Thrones in the Mediterranean,” the New York Times pointed to the far-reaching implications of the collapse of US influence.

Stating that “only Germany seems to have the sway to mediate a return to sanity” in a “new and dangerous crisis,” it added: “In an earlier era, the United States would have stepped in to separate feuding NATO partners, as it did when Greece and Turkey almost went to war in 1996. President Trump did make a call to Mr. Erdogan urging him to negotiate, but that had no effect—the United States under the Trump administration is not regarded as a viable go-between...”

The Libyan war has, moreover, divided both Middle Eastern and European countries between backers of the Islamist regime in Tripoli, including Turkey, and those of warlord Khalifa Haftar in eastern Turkey along the Egyptian border.

In its article “How Europe is getting entangled in the big Middle East conflict,” the Turkish website Ahval notes: “On the one hand, there is the ‘revolutionary alliance’ of Turkey, Qatar, the Muslim Brothers, a regional movement, and Iran. On the other hand, we see the ‘status-quo entente’ of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel. … France, Greece, and Cyprus support the status-quo entente, while Spain and Malta seem more ready to support the revolutionary alliance, while Italy is jaywalking between the two, depending on the file.”

Riven by insoluble conflicts, the EU is apparently trying to unify itself around the most aggressive policy against Turkey. This weekend, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian invited his German counterpart, Heiko Maas, to address a meeting of French ambassadors held to prepare France’s EU presidency, which starts in 2022. Le Drian stated that France’s plans “would obviously be formulated to continue and complement the German presidency.”

Maas made clear that the critical question for the EU is to develop an aggressive, independent global policy amid the US war drive against China. “The United States looks at the rest of the world ever more directly through the lens of its rivalry with China,” he said. “In parallel, since Trump’s election, American readiness to play the role of a global power ensuring stability has fallen. We also know China is forcibly pressing its way into the geopolitical vacuum this has left behind, making facts on the ground and using methods that cannot be ours.”

On Turkey, Maas added, the EU foreign ministers meeting “made very clear that its destabilizing policy in Libya and the eastern Mediterranean cannot be further tolerated. European sovereignty protects the sovereignty of all member states, including Greece and Cyprus.”

Those arguing that German or European imperialism will peacefully adjudicate the Mediterranean conflicts are, however, placing heavy bets against history. Amid growing strikes and protests around the world against imperialist wars and official mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the critical question is the unification of the working class in a socialist, anti-war movement.

COVID-19 pandemic leads to huge spike in global hunger

Kevin Martinez

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a world hunger crisis of historic proportions. Despite advances in agriculture and global food surpluses, an additional 132 million more people will go hungry than previously predicted this year. According to some projections, before the year’s end, more people will die every day from starvation brought about by the pandemic than from the disease itself.

As a result of the pandemic, immense amounts of food are being destroyed because of the breakdown in global food supply chains while workers and peasants have less money to purchase food with as a result of the global economic collapse. Though the pandemic has severely exacerbated the crisis, it should be noted that global hunger was already rising in the years before it struck. Now, every region of the world is experiencing mass hunger, including countries that were thought to be relatively secure such as in Europe and the United States.

Already by 2019, the number of severely undernourished people was close to 750 million, or almost one in ten people on the planet, the majority living in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. If one considers the number of “moderately” undernourished people as well in this figure, the total number of hungry in the world last year approached 2 billion people.

Children at an orphanage in Haiti (Image credit FMSC/Flickr)

Even without taking the pandemic into account, if previous world hunger trends continued, by 2030 the number of severely hungry, those who have run out of food, and have gone a day (or days) without eating, would have risen to 840 million people. If the current forecasts are supplemented with the impact of COVID-19, an additional 83 to 132 million people will go hungry in 2020 depending on the economic situation.

Should there be an economic upturn in 2021, the number of hungry would go down somewhat, but would be still above what was originally predicted without the virus.

Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities at Drexel University, told Bloomberg, “We’ll see the scars of this crisis for generations. In 2120, we’ll still be talking about this crisis.” Early United Nations forecasts predicted that around one in ten people on earth will not have enough to eat this year.

The charity Oxfam International estimated that by the end of 2020, some 12,000 people will die every day from hunger linked to COVID-19. This figure is based on a more than 80 percent increase in those experiencing crisis-level hunger. So far, more than 860,000 people worldwide have died directly from the novel coronavirus.

Even the mildest forms of food insecurity, experts warn, can have an immense toll on the human body. Lack of nutrition leads to a weak immune system and lower mobility and brain functioning. Hunger in children can lead to physical ailments that last for the rest of their lives.

COVID-19, in addition to triggering economic depression conditions for many workers around the world, has also disrupted global food supply chains. Restaurants that used to account for many food distributors’ business are no longer in operation, forcing farmers to dump valuable food crops or simply let them rot in the field. With no adequate infrastructure in many parts of the world, there are no readily available means by which this food can be redirected to those in need.

Don Cameron, a cabbage farmer from California, told Bloomberg, “We know other parts of the country need what we have here. But the infrastructure has not been set up, as far as I’m aware, to allow that. There are times when there is food available and it’s because of logistics that it doesn’t find a home.” Cameron ended up throwing away about 50,000 tons of his crop since local food banks “can only take so much cabbage.”

Even before the pandemic, the UN predicted hunger rising to 841 million people by 2030. With COVID-19, the number of undernourished will be closer to 909 million. Despite unprecedented wealth concentrated at the heights of society, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) requires $13 billion to deliver food in 83 countries but has a shortfall of $4.9 billion for the rest of the year.

Those living in the major food-producing regions of the world have not been spared hunger either. Latin America, which exports agriculture all over the world, is leading the surge in hunger this year based on the WFP’s analysis.

Despite the UN’s findings that there exists more than enough food to satisfy every person’s need, social inequality prevents many from eating well. In the US, the richest country in the world, some 2 percent of the population, more than 5 million people, cannot afford a healthy diet.

Another 3 million Americans are unable afford basic energy costs. The situation is even worse in India, where 78 percent of the population, more than 1 billion humans, cannot afford a healthy diet. These figures, of course, existed well before the onset of COVID-19.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization observed that the rate of hunger began to level off in recent decades but began to steadily climb in 2015 as a result of climate change and ongoing wars stoked by imperialism. However, the forecast now will see hunger rise in 2020 at a rate higher than the last five years combined.

In 2015, the UN committed itself to work toward a hunger-free world by 2030. Despite advances in food agriculture, distribution, and a slight downward shift in the number of undernourished throughout the world in the last few decades, the goal of a hunger-free world in less than 10 years is more remote than ever under the present circumstances.

The figures cited by Oxfam and the UN are a vindication of the analysis provided by the World Socialist Web Site that the pandemic was a “trigger event” that metastasized all the irrational and reactionary tendencies that already existed under world capitalism. Or as the UN’s report put it, “Economic conditions, structural imbalances and the inclusiveness of the policy framework interact with natural and man-made causes to trigger persisting poverty and hunger.”

The resources already exist to provide a global system of food logistics that guarantees everyone with an adequate amount of nutritious food every day, but they are being squandered on war and fattening up the stock portfolios of the rich. Only a planned economy built on socialist principles can eliminate the main cause of hunger in the world today, capitalism. This can only be achieved by expropriating the wealth of the ruling class and redirecting it toward providing for everyone’s needs, not private profit.

The profits of August

Nick Beams

Over 30,000 people died in the US last month from the COVID-19 pandemic, while corporations carried out mass layoffs amid soaring unemployment, hunger and poverty.

At the same time, the US stock market recorded its biggest increase for the month since 1986. All three major American stock indexes have risen for five consecutive months since plunging in mid-March. The benchmark S&P 500 index has risen 65 percent, its biggest five-month gain since 1938.

Last month saw the wealth of Amazon chief Jeff Bezos climb to $200 billion. Tesla became the world’s biggest car company by share value, as its market capitalization rose to $465 billion, taking the personal fortune of its chief executive, Elon Musk, to more than $100 billion. Apple became the first company in the world with a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion.

Since the Federal Reserve’s bailout of major corporations in March, Apple’s stock has more than doubled, while Tesla’s stock has risen more than six-fold.

These figures underscore the nature of the Wall Street bonanza. It is taking the form of what has been called a “K-shaped recovery,” in which a group of corporate giants enjoy massive profits, driven by the run-up in stock prices, while most of the economy stagnates.

In 1914, the rolling out of the guns of August at the outbreak of World War I marked the start of a process that saw arms manufacturers rake in millions in profits amid death and destruction, the like of which had never been seen.

Likewise, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought devastation to the working masses in the US and around the world, has served as the occasion for all arms of the capitalist state to be mobilised to organise the greatest-ever redistribution of wealth to the heights of society.

There are two immediate causes for the massive stock run-up in August. First, the Federal Reserve carried out a far-reaching change in how it evaluates the risk of inflation, with the aim of ensuring ultra-low interest rates in perpetuity.

The announcement by the Fed last week that it was changing its basic monetary policy framework to aim for an “average” inflation rate of two percent meant that it could refrain from raising rates even if inflation hit and surpassed the two percent mark, allowing it to continue injecting money into the financial markets through asset purchases. In other words, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “Low Rates Forever.”

But even more important was the cutoff of the weekly $600 extended unemployment benefit provided to unemployed US workers under the CARES Act passed in March, which both the Democratic and Republican parties simply allowed to expire. Bypassing Congress’s exclusive constitutional power to tax and spend, Trump signed an executive order last month restoring, for a limited period, part of the weekly benefit; but the move was largely symbolic, with most workers getting no additional relief.

The Trump administration, backed by the Democrats, has provided some $2 trillion to bail out the corporations while cutting off what limited aid was provided to workers. At the same time, the Fed has funneled $4 trillion into the financial system, functioning as the backstop for every financial market.

These measures are being accompanied by a murderous assault on the working class. The policy of governments around the world, spearheaded by the Trump administration, is to force workers back to work, no matter what the dangers to their health and lives, in order that profit accumulation can continue.

The fate of millions of workers who face destitution, including the prospect of being evicted in the coming weeks, is ignored. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden did not even bother to mention the cutoff of emergency unemployment benefits it in a major speech he delivered this week.

This is because the cutting off of federal aid directly serves the interests of the corporations and the financial aristocracy, whom the Democrats and Republicans serve.

In the period leading up to the pandemic, concerns were growing that the labour market was becoming “tight.” The COVID-19 outbreak has been seized upon to solve that problem. It has opened up the way for corporations to proceed with restructuring operations, based on making permanent what were initially announced as temporary layoffs, as well as lowering wages for those who remain and intensifying their exploitation.

While the orgy of speculation on Wall Street is hailed by Trump as indicating the power and strength of US capitalism, the run-up of the markets is an indication not of strength, but weakness.

In the post-World War II period, American and world capitalism rested on the strength of the US dollar. But the American dollar is being undermined by the endless supply of cheap money by the Fed. At the end of July, Goldman Sachs warned there were “real concerns” about the longevity of the US dollar as the world reserve currency, as well as the stability of the entire international monetary system, as governments debased their fiat currencies. These warnings have proliferated in the month since.

US capitalism is confronted by the confluence of mounting social, economic and political crises and the growth of social opposition centred in the working class. Every measure taken by the ruling class to respond to the crisis, grounded in the class interests of a parasitic oligarchy, has the effect only of exacerbating the crisis.

Up to this point, the response to the pandemic has been dominated by the social prerogatives of the ruling class. But another social force is entering onto the scene: the working class, which is increasingly coming into struggle against the ruling elite’s back-to-work campaign.

Capitalism’s homicidal response to the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed this bankrupt social order before the eyes of the entire world. As workers enter into struggle, they will take up the demand for the expropriation of the capitalist class and the socialist reorganization of society.

COVID-19 and the Future of Autocrats

John Feffer

The outbreak of COVID-19 initially looked like a gift to autocrats around the world. What better pretext for a state of emergency than a pandemic?

It was a golden opportunity to close borders, suppress civil society, and issue decrees left and right (mostly right). Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and others took advantage of the crisis to advance their me-first agendas and consolidate power. Best of all, they could count on the fear of infection to keep protestors off the streets.

However, as the global death toll approaches a million and autocrats face heightened criticism of their COVID responses, the pandemic is looking less and less like a gift.

The news from Mali, Belarus, and the Philippines should put the fear of regime change in the hearts of autocrats from Washington to Moscow. Despite all the recent signs that democracy is on the wane, people are voting with their feet by massing on the streets to make their voices heard, particularly in places where voting with their hands has not been honored.

The pandemic is not the only factor behind growing public disaffection for these strongmen. But for men whose chief selling point is strong leadership, the failure to contain a microscopic virus is pretty damning.

Yet, as the case of Belarus demonstrates, dictators do not give up power easily. And even when they do, as in Mali, it’s often military power, not people power, that fills the vacuum.

Meanwhile, all eyes are fixed on what will happen in the United States. Will American citizens take inspiration from the people of Belarus and Mali to remove their own elected autocrat?

People Power in Mali

Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (IBK) won the presidential election in Mali in 2013 in a landslide with 78 percent of the vote.

One of his chief selling points was a promise of  “zero tolerance” for corruption. Easier said than done. The country was notoriously corrupt, and IBK had been in the thick of it during his tenure as prime minister in the 1990s. His return to power was also marked by corruption — a $40 million presidential jet, overpriced military imports, a son with expensive tastes — none of which goes over well in one of the poorest countries in the world.

Mali is not only poor, it’s conflict-prone. It has been subject to military coups at roughly 20-year intervals (1968, 1991, 2012). Several Islamist groups and a group of Tuareg separatists have battled the central government — and occasionally each other — over control of the country. French forces intervened at one point to suppress the Islamists, and France has been one of the strongest backers of IBK.

Mali held parliamentary elections in the spring, the first since 2013 after numerous delays. The turnout was low, due to coronavirus fears and sporadic violence as well as the sheer number of people displaced by conflict. Radical Islamists kidnapped the main opposition leader, Soumaila Cisse, three days before the first round. After the second round, IBK’s party, Rally for Mali, claimed a parliamentary majority, but only thanks to the Constitutional Court, which overturned the results for 31 seats and shifted the advantage to the ruling party.

This court decision sparked the initial protests. The main protest group, Movement of June 5 — Rally of Patriotic Force, eventually called for IBK’s resignation, the dissolution of parliament, and new elections. In July, government security forces tried to suppress the growing protests, killing more than a dozen people. International mediators were unable to resolve the stand-off. When IBK tried to pack the Constitutional Court with a new set of friends, protestors returned to the street.

On August 18, the military detained IBK and that night he stepped down. The coup was led by Assimi Goita, who’d worked closely with the U.S. military on counterinsurgency campaigns. Instead of acceding to demands for early elections, however, the new ruling junta says that Malians won’t go to the polls before 2023.

The people of Mali showed tremendous courage to stand up to their autocrat. Unfortunately, given the history of coups and various insurgencies, the military has gotten used to playing a dominant role in the country. The United States and France are also partly to blame for lavishing money, arms, and training on the army on behalf of their “war on terrorism” rather than rebuilding Mali’s economy and strengthening its political infrastructure.

Mali is a potent reminder that one alternative to autocrats is a military junta with little interest in democracy.

Democracy in Action in Belarus

Alexander Lukashenko is the longest serving leader in Europe. He’s been the president of Belarus since 1994, having risen to power like IBK on an anti-corruption platform. He’s never before faced much of a political challenge in the country’s tightly controlled elections.

Until these last elections.

In the August 9 elections, Lukashenko was seeking his sixth term in office. He expected smooth sailing since, after all, he’d jailed the country’s most prominent dissidents, he presided over loyal security forces, and he controlled the media.

But he didn’t control Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. The wife of jailed oppositionist Sergei Tikhanovsky managed to unite the opposition prior to the election and brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets for campaign rallies.

Nevertheless, Lukashenko declared victory in the election with 80 percent of the vote (even though he enjoyed, depending on which poll you consult, either a 33 percent or a 3 percent approval rating). Tikhanovskaya fled to Lithuania. And that seemed to be that.

Except that the citizens of Belarus are not accepting the results of the election.

As many as 200,000 people rallied in Minsk this Sunday to demand that Lukashenko step down. In U.S. terms, that would be as if 6 million Americans gathered in Washington to demand Trump’s resignation. So far, Lukashenko is ignoring the crowd’s demand. He has tried to send a signal of defiance by arriving at the presidential palace in a flak jacket and carrying an automatic weapon. More recently, he has resorted to quiet detentions and vague promises of reform.

Just like the Republicans who appeared as speakers at the Democratic convention, key people are abandoning Lukashenko’s side. The workers at the Minsk Tractor Factory are on an anti-Lukashenko strike, and many other workers at state-controlled enterprises have walked off the job. Police are quitting. The ambassador to Slovakia resigned. The state theaters have turned against the autocrat for the first time in 26 years.

Despite COVID-19, Belarus doesn’t have any prohibitions against mass gathering. That’s because Lukashenko has been a prominent COVID-19 denialist, refusing to shut down the country or adopt any significant medical precautions. His recommendations: take a sauna and drink vodka. Like Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro, Lukashenko subsequently contracted the disease, though he claims that he was asymptomatic. The country has around 70,000 infections and about 650 deaths, but the numbers have started to rise again in recent days.

There are plenty of oppositionists ready to usher in democratic elections once Lukashenko is out of the way. A new coordinating council launched this month includes former culture minister Pavel Latushko as well as prominent dissidents like Olga Kovalkova and Maria Kolesnikova.

Even strong backing from Russia won’t help Lukashenko if the whole country turns against him. But beware the autocrat who can still count on support from a state apparatus and a militant minority.

The End of Duterte? 

Nothing Rodrigo Duterte could do seemed to diminish his popularity in the Philippines. He insulted people left and right. He launched a war on drugs that left 27,000 alleged drug dealers dead from extrajudicial murders. Another 250 human rights defenders have also been killed.

Still, his approval ratings remained high, near 70 percent as recently as May.

But Duterte’s failure to deal with the coronavirus and the resulting economic dislocation may finally unseat him, if not from office then at least from the political imagination of Filipinos.

The Philippines now has around 200,000 infections and 3,000 deaths. Compared to the United States or Brazil, that might not sound like much. But surrounding the Philippines are countries that have dealt much more successfully with the pandemic: Thailand (58 deaths), Vietnam (27 deaths), Taiwan (7 deaths). Meanwhile, because of a strict lockdown that didn’t effectively contain the virus, the economy has crashed, and the country has entered its first recession in 29 years.

Like Trump, Duterte has blamed everyone but himself for the country’s failings, even unleashing a recent tirade against medical professionals. But Duterte’s insult politics is no longer working. As sociologist and former member of the Philippines parliament Walden Bello observes at Foreign Policy In Focus, “The hundreds of thousands blinded by his gangster charisma in the last 4 years have had the scales fall from their eyes and are now asking themselves how they could possibly have fallen in love with a person whose only skill was mass murder.”

In the Philippines, presidents serve one six-year term, and Duterte is four years into his. He may well attempt to hold on for two more years. He might even pull a Putin and change the constitution so that he can run again. A group of Duterte supporters recently held a press conference to call for a “revolutionary government” and a new constitution. Another possibility, in the wake of recent bombings in southern Philippines, might be a declaration of martial law to fight Abu Sayyaf, which is linked to the Islamic State.

But the combination of the pandemic, the economic crash, and a pro-China foreign policy may turn the population against Duterte so dramatically that he might view resignation as the only way out.

Democracy in the Balance

Plenty of autocrats still look pretty comfortable in their positions. Vladimir Putin — or forces loyal to him — just engineered the poisoning of one of his chief rivals, Alexei Navalny. Xi Jinping has just about turned Chinese politics into a one-man show. Viktor Orbán has consolidated his grip on power in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has suppressed or co-opted the opposition parties in Turkey, and Bashar al-Assad has seemingly weathered the civil war in Syria.

Even Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, despite an atrocious record on both the pandemic and the economy, has somehow managed to regain some popularity, with his approval rating nudging above his disapproval rating recently for the first time since April.

The U.S. presidential elections might tip the balance one way or the other. Although America still represents a democratic ideal for some around the world, that’s not the reason why the November elections matter. Donald Trump has so undermined democratic norms and institutions that democrats around the world are aghast that he hasn’t had to pay a political price. He escaped impeachment. His party still stands behind him. Plenty of his associates have gone to jail, but he has not (yet) been taken down by the courts.

That leaves the court of public opinion. If voters return Trump to office for a second term, it sends a strong signal that there are no penalties for ruining a democracy. Trump operates according to his own Pottery Barn rule: he broke a democracy and he believes that he now owns it. If voters agree, it will gladden the hearts of ruling autocrats and authoritarians-to-be all over the world.

Voting out Trump may not simply resuscitate American democracy. It may send a hopeful message to all those who oppose the Trump-like leaders in their lands.

Those leaders may have broken democracy, but we the people still own it.

UAE Geopolitical Gamble Keeps Palestinian Peace Prospects on Life Support

James M. Dorsey

The decision by the UAE to establish diplomatic relations with Israel keeps a negotiated solution with Palestine on life support. There is no indication that forging relations with Israel will be more successful in nudging the Jewish state towards peace with Palestine on mutually acceptable terms than the failed formula of offering Arab recognition in exchange for peace was.

Like it or not, the United Arab Emirates may have done the Palestinians a favor by forging diplomatic ties with Israel. On the face of it, the agreement deprives the Palestinians of a perceived trump card: Arab recognition in return for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied during the 1967 Middle East war even if it has not proven to be much of an asset.

Historically, forging diplomatic relations with the Jewish state has not been a magic wand to resolve a seemingly intractable dispute.

The carrot of recognition has not helped solve the Palestinians’ problem 72 years after they were first displaced by Israeli occupation and independence and despite the conclusion of peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan—two states that, unlike the UAE, had and still have a direct stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Nor did it stop US President Donald J. Trump from accepting the legitimacy of annexation of occupied Palestinian land.

Nevertheless, the UAE move contributes to salvaging options for a peace settlement that could be acceptable to both Palestinians and Israelis.

Most importantly, it has helped take immediate Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank off the table by giving Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu the opportunity to temporarily set aside his pledge to incorporate Palestinian land before the November US presidential election without being seen as caving in to American pressure.

To be sure, Mr. Netanyahu has suspended not cancelled plans for annexation in exchange for UAE recognition.

The reality is, however, that Mr. Netanyahu or whoever will eventually succeed him will unlikely get a US green light in the foreseeable future irrespective of who wins the American presidential election.

Neither Mr. Trump nor his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, will want to jeopardize evolving relations between Israel and Arab states that annexation no doubt would disrupt.

What that does is keep options open; it does not open doors, nor does it create the basis for renewed peace negotiations. The UAE has all but officially embraced Mr. Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan that explicitly endorses the principle of annexation – a non-negotiable non-starter for Palestinians.

In other words, Israelis and Palestinians will have to resolve their dispute themselves. External powers cannot do it for them. However, external powers can help ensure that Israelis and Palestinians have options and shape an environment that would be conducive to a peace process.

And that is where the problems start. Four decades of primarily US-led mediation efforts, often involving non-starters, have produced at best a seemingly intractable stalemate in which Israel has the upper hand.

Blame for the failure goes round.

Successive US administrations have favored Israel and been reluctant to sufficiently pressure it to enable a viable solution.

Israeli governments diverged in their sincerity in adopting a two-state solution, with Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving head of government, making it clear that he does not want a truly independent Palestinian state to emerge. In fact, he has redefined the concept as one perceived by Palestinians as a Bantustan at best.

Similarly, Palestinians proved to be their own worst enemies. A corrupt Palestine Authority prioritized its own vested interests.

Palestinians, moreover, were divided between Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas’ Fatah movement — that clings to the hope of some miracle that will get decades of peace talks back on track — and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip.

Stripped of its rhetoric, Hamas essentially argues that the Palestine Authority’s strategy of surrendering its trump cards – recognition of Israel and abandonment of the legitimacy of political violence – has not persuaded Israel to make the minimal concessions needed.

Those include an end to Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank, a Palestinian administrative stake in East Jerusalem, and an agreement on the final borders between Israel and Palestine based on the pre-1967 war frontiers, albeit modified by land swaps that recognize facts on the ground.

The UAE’s halting annexation for now and keeping the door to negotiations open constitutes a gamble. The primary risk is grey swans or predictable disruptions, not black swans or unpredictable events.

The biggest risk beyond an Israeli decision at some point to move forward with annexation is West Bank protest against Israeli policy to which Israel responds with a heavy hand and military escalation in Gaza.

Palestinian protest is almost a given in a world that has just ended a decade of defiance and dissent, with the 2011 and 2019/2020 popular Arab revolts as its centerpiece and the prospect of global social unrest in the 2020s as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the worst worldwide economic downturn since World War Two. Add to this the worldwide awareness of entrenched social injustice and racial inequality.

Protest is likely whatever happens. With hope for a two-state solution fading, the alternatives are a one-state solution or continued occupation. Both are potential drivers of social unrest.

Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated regions blockaded by Israel as well as Egypt, on a nightly basis as Israeli and Emirati diplomats finalized terms of their establishment of diplomatic relations. The bombings were in response to the firing of rockets and flying of balloon bombs from Gaza into Israel.

Potentially, heavy-handed Israeli responses to Palestinian protest and Gaza attacks could put the UAE in an uncomfortable position.

With freedom of expression in the UAE and much of the Gulf severely repressed and in the absence of credible public opinion polls, it is hard to assess public empathy for the Palestinians.

A rare poll in Saudi Arabia by a credible non-Saudi polling company showed that the Palestinian issue ranked second after Iran among foreign policy concerns of the kingdom’s public. It is fair to assume that the UAE would not be much different.

While UAE-based tweeters overwhelmingly welcomed the UAE’s outreach to Israel, it was left to Emiratis abroad to be more critical.

“The dustbin of history accommodates all traitors, whatever their names and the names of their families,” tweeted an Emirati activist in exile.

The UAE may hope that diplomatic relations will enable it to nudge Israel towards credible peace negotiations with the Palestinians, in part by empowering Palestinian leaders beholden to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

It is a strategy that the United States adopted for much of the past four decades with little result. It’s not clear why the UAE would succeed where others have failed.

The pseudoscience behind the right-wing drive to force schools to open

Benjamin Mateus

The strategy of “herd immunity” being carried out by the ruling class is inexorably connected to the drive to open schools. After trillions of taxpayer monies were siphoned into the coffers of the stupendously wealthy, the relentless exigencies to extract surplus value off the backs of the working class have risen to a new frenzy. There will be no more lockdowns, and the indispensable factor in bringing the entire nation back to work will be to throw open the school doors and have students seated in classrooms.

The present fight by teachers and their communities to save lives and to stem the rising tide of the pandemic has brought the working class into direct conflict with the capitalist rulers who demand that they comply with their diktats. If any teacher wants to understand the actual intent of the ruling classes, then they should ask why they have been deemed by the Trump administration and the Center for Disease Prevention and Control as “critical infrastructure workers.”

The scene in a hallway at Georgia High School last month

Speaking of the call for pursuing a policy of “herd immunity,” the veteran Irish epidemiologist, Dr. Mike Ryan, spokesman for the World Health Organization, said, “Humans are not herds. The term is relevant only to the field of animal husbandry, in which an individual animal in that sense doesn’t matter from the perspective of the brutal economics of those decisions. The use of the term can lead to very brutal arithmetic which does not put people and lives and suffering at the center of that equation.”

Even the venerable Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious disease, must be held to account when he said on July 29, at the American Federation of Teachers conference, with President Randi Weingarten present: “In many respects, unfortunately, though this may sound a little scary and harsh, I don’t mean it to be that way, is that you’re going to be actually part of the experiment, of the learning curve, of what we need to know. Because remember early on when we shut down the country, as it were, the schools were shut down. So, we don't know the full impact. We don’t have the total database of knowing what there is to expect.”

The Declaration of Helsinki, adopted in 1964, placed at the forefront the ethical principles in research regarding human experimentation. The proclamation is morally binding on physicians, an obligation that overrides any national or local laws or regulations, to respect the individual, their right to self-determination, and the right to make voluntary informed decisions regarding participation in any research. According to the guidelines established by the declaration, the investigator’s first duty is to the patient or volunteer’s welfare before the interests of science or society. Teachers, parents, and students have become vulnerable populations as they are threatened with poverty and homelessness if they oppose the nefarious conditions placed on them by the campaign for opening commerce and schools.

Repeatedly, the political establishment and the union executives have attempted to disarm teachers with platitudes about the needs of the psychology of the children, often claiming children are resistant to the infections caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. President Trump’s comments on Fox News are just the bluntest and starkest expression of this policy: “It will go away like things go away, and my view is that schools should be open. If you look at children, children are almost … and I would almost say definitely immune from this disease … they just don’t have a problem … we have to open our schools.”

Yet, recent studies have surfaced that demonstrate the potential lethality of school openings. It is this science that teachers and parents need to arm themselves with to ensure that their opposition to the state is based on the firm scientific understanding that the virus needs, first and foremost, to be contained and eradicated before communities can be assured that their children and teachers may resume academic relations in schools.

Herd immunity is the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results if a sufficiently high proportion are immune to the disease. That immunity can be conferred through a vaccine, as in the case of measles, polio, and other diseases that have been successfully curtailed through systematic public health campaigns.

In relation to coronavirus, however, where there is not yet a vaccine, herd immunity has no legitimate application. It refers to the natural immunity caused by people being infected by the disease and then surviving it, because their immune systems manufactured antibodies to fight it. Given the high fatality rate, however, if a majority of the population contracts COVID-19 and thus develops the needed immunity, millions will die in the US in the process, and tens of millions around the world.

By all accounts, seroprevalence studies that measure the antibody to the virus in the population indicate that less than 10 percent of the US population may now have immunity. Scientists have posited that to achieve herd immunity would require close to 70 percent of the population to have antibodies. There is still a long way to go to achieve this level of population immunity.

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead on the COVID-19 pandemic at the WHO, said at a recent press brief: “That means a large proportion of the population remains susceptible. Studies are underway to document the immune response to the virus to see how strong it is and how long it lasts. We do not have a complete picture of this yet.”

The policy of herd immunity: The case of Sweden

Sweden's chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, a proponent of a controlled approach to exposing the less vulnerable to the virus, wrote in an email on March 14 to his Finnish counterpart, Mika Salminen, “One point might speak for keeping schools open in order to reach herd immunity more quickly.” Salminen replied, “we have also considered that, but over time the children are still going to spread the infection.” Tegnell wrote in response, “True, but probably mostly to each other because of the extremely age-stratified contact structure we have.”

Johan Giesecke, who served as the state epidemiologist from 1995 to 2005, wrote to a Swedish insurance company in March, “I believe the virus is going to sweep like a storm over Sweden and infect basically everyone in one or two months. I believe that thousands are already infected in Sweden … it will all come to an end when so many have been infected and become therefore immune that the virus has nowhere else to go.” Secondary schools and universities were reopened in June.

Cumulative new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Germany

The policy was an abject failure. When Sweden was compared to neighboring nations, after the initial surge that led to lockdowns, Sweden's cases continued to accumulate fivefold higher. What is interesting to note was that once secondary schools and universities were reopened in June and the lockdown was lifted, the spike in new cases doubled, while in Denmark, Finland, and Norway, daily COVID-19 cases remained suppressed. When cumulative deaths are compared to the US, Sweden’s policy can be seen for what it was—herd slaughter.

Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people: Sweden vs the US

According to STAT News, “the Swedish approach was to allow businesses to largely remain open. And at first, it seemed to work, with a death count nowhere near what it was in countries such as Italy, Spain, and the UK. But even as Sweden was hailed as a model, its cases were steadily rising, and its death rate now exceeds that of the US. Sweden also did not seem to stave off the economic damage it was aiming to avoid.”

In a recent publication in The Lancet, in reply to correspondence from Johan Giesecke, 21 Swedish scientists wrote on August 8, “Giesecke's further assertion that, as of April 29, 20 to 25 percent of the Stockholm region have been infected only serves to reinforce his opinion of unreported cases. But this assertion is based on a narrow view of available data at that time. Of the three preliminary and unpublished serology studies from Stockholm in April, only one study, testing 527 of 2000 healthcare workers at a single hospital, is close to this estimate (20 percent seropositive). However, community estimates range from 7.5 percent to 10 percent, and suggest considerable clustering.”

Herd immunity was not a policy based on science, but a political endeavor phrased in scientific jargon to lull the population to adapt themselves as fait accompli that which was preventable and remains still stoppable. However, this requires recognizing that on a global scale, socialism is the cure for eradicating this pandemic, a disease that erupted as a byproduct of conditions created by capitalism.

Population studies on children and schools

Indeed, data on children, COVID-19, and the impact on the community have been limited. As Dr. Fauci even admitted, once schools were closed, the role of children in the spread of community was difficult to ascertain, though, as cited above, there was no reason to assume that children were impervious or noncontagious.

In mid-March, over a period of ten days, all 50 states closed K-12 schools and childcare centers with almost all colleges and universities following suit. The number of children affected included 21 million in daycare, 57 million in K-12, and 20 million college students, or close to 30 percent of the population. The quick measures taken had been based on previous experiences with pandemic respiratory pathogens, meaning officials clearly understood the potential that children were both vulnerable in acquiring infections and transmitting it to others. The lockdowns, including the rapid closure of schools, led to a significant reduction in community transmission of the virus, and without a doubt, a multitude of lives was saved.

Placing the impact of school closures on the pandemic in a national context, the authors Auger et al., in their study, published in JAMA Network on July 29, found that during the period from March 9 until May 7, school closures were associated with a 62 percent relative decline in COVID-19 incidence per week, which corresponded to an estimated absolute difference of 424 cases per 100,000. Additionally, school closures were associated with a 58 percent relative decline in mortality per week, an absolute decrease in 12.6 deaths per 100,000. Taking the US population under consideration, this implies that school closures were associated with 1.37 million fewer COVID-19 cases over 26 days and 40,600 fewer deaths over 16 days. These are quite significant figures.

In a study published in Nature, Hsiang et al. looked at the effect of large-scale containment policies on the COVID-19 pandemic across six countries, including the United States. They found that prior to the initiated lockdown measures across the country, the viral infection was doubling every three days. However, by April 6, when there were 365,304 cases, they estimated 4.8 million fewer cases developed because of the measures to close schools, commerce, and all nonessential work. Across the six countries, interventions prevented or delayed upwards of 61 million confirmed cases.

In a recent study published in The Lancet on July 30, scientists from the University College London reported on a modeling analysis they performed to determine the optimal strategy for reopening schools. Under several scenarios that included hybrid vs full-time school and various contact tracing and testing strategies, they concluded that for schools and society to reopen, a sufficiently broad coverage of a test-trace-isolate program would need to be implemented to avoid a second COVID-19 wave. The authors write, “Our modeling results suggest that full school reopening without an effective test-trace-isolate strategy would result in R0 [the growth factor for the transmission] above one and a resulting second wave of infections that would peak in December 2020, and be 2.3 times the size of the original COVID-19 wave.”

Though the US is not the UK and social interactions vary considerably, as a general analysis, the study highlights the urgent need for a robust public health strategy of tracing-testing-isolating. These population studies not only emphasize how communities can halt the spread of the contagion but also warn that without these measures, the pandemic will accelerate again. In this sense, the present change in guidelines by the CDC to avoid testing asymptomatic individuals is a criminal policy being enacted at all levels of the government in coordination with the very same institutions created to prevent diseases, essentially advocating for herd immunity. It is a deliberate effort to conceal the true nature of the health catastrophe to ensure the markets remain fully viable—a policy endorsed by the Democrats as much as the Republicans.

It should be mentioned, the seroprevalence studies, blood tests that look for antibodies against COVID-19 in the population, of the hardest-hit nations are on the magnitude of being five to tenfold less to achieving herd immunity.