Research Outside of the Above: relevant work in areas that may not align with the research priorities highlighted above.
About Meta Fellowship:
The Meta Research PhD Fellowship is a global program designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students who are engaged in innovative and relevant research in areas related to computer science and engineering at an accredited university.
The program is open to students in any year of their PhD study. We also encourage people of diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply, especially those from traditionally under-represented minority groups. Applications are evaluated based on the strength of the student’s research statement, publication record, and recommendation letters.
Winners of the Fellowship are entitled to receive two years of paid tuition and fees, a $42,000 annual stipend to cover living costs, various opportunities to engage with Meta researchers, and an invitation to the annual Fellowship Summit
Type:
PhD, Fellowship
Selection Criteria and Eligibility
You are eligible to apply for the program as long as you are:
Enrolled in a PhD program at an accredited university in the fall following the application cycle (i.e., Fall 2023)
Engaged in research related to computer science and engineering in areas relevant to Meta, as specified in the Available Fellowships section
The program is open to students at all accredited universities around the world.
You would not be eligible if you are:
Graduating before the fall following each application cycle
Planning on working at another competitor company part-time while participating in the Fellowship
A contingent worker at Meta. We cannot pay the CW wage and the stipend concurrently.
A Meta AI Resident
Planning on doing a part-time internship with a competitor during the academic year (fall/spring). You can do an internship at another company in the summer before Fellowship or in the summer between academic years during Fellowship. This includes internship extensions into the fall.
We will not be offering awards to candidates whose research is outside the specified research areas described in the Available Fellowships section. Please review each Available Fellowship description carefully to ensure you are aligned with the correct research area.
We are currently unable to provide funding for undergrads, graduates in different disciplines, or alternative funding such as small grants.
Number of Awards:
Not specified
Value of Meta Fellowship:
Payment
Tuition money will be paid directly to the school. The total stipend of $42,000 will be paid to Fellow via direct deposit, unless otherwise specified. Stipends must be paid directly to Fellows. Stipend payment(s) are sent once a tuition invoice is received for the respective fall term each year.
The award funds are delivered during the fall term of the awarded year(s) and conclude at the end of the Spring term. If a Fellow graduates in the middle of the academic year, they will receive their full tuition for the semester, and half of their stipend amount (in alignment with the semester).
Transferring universities during the Fellowship should generally not pose an issue with payment. Please contact academicrelations@fb.com for more information.
Use of Funds & Other Restrictions
The $42,000 stipend cannot be redirected to the university’s lab as gift funding. Stipends must be paid directly to Fellows.
Tuition and stipend/travel funds cannot be combined and paid to the university.
Fellows do not receive equipment directly from Meta, but they are free to use their stipend to buy themselves a computer or any equipment necessary for conducting their research.
Fellows cannot join Meta’s savings account plans (e.g. 401k, Health Savings Account, etc.) since they are not Meta employees.
Duration of Award:
Facebook Fellowship Award to cover two years!
How to Apply for Meta Fellowship:
Applications Must Include
CV or resume. There is no page limit to the resume or CV. In this case, it may be worthwhile to have a longer CV to complement your achievements or any publications you would like to share.
Research statement. Statements of research should be 500 words or less and should clearly identify your area of focus, its importance to the field, and its applicability to Meta as it pertains to one of the Available Fellowships. Note that references or citations count toward the 500-word limit. To optimize the word count for research statements, references and citations should be added to CVs, which do not have a word or page limit.
Two letters of recommendation. One of the letters of recommendation needs to come from a PhD advisor or a research advisor. The other may come from another professor or an industry contact.
For application guidance from Fellows and Meta reviewers, see Application Tips below.
The 2023 application opens on August 3, 2022, at 9:00am PDT. Applicants may prepare to apply by creating a SurveyMonkey Apply account. During the application process, applicants will be asked to provide references’ contact information. Once the application is submitted, references will receive an email to upload their letters in SurveyMonkey Apply by October 6, 2022. Please visit SurveyMonkey Apply for more information on references and how to apply.
Applications close on September 20, 2022. After the application deadline, changes to applications will no longer be accepted. There is no interview associated with the Fellowship review process.
Winners are notified in mid-January 2023. Winners will be announced on the Meta Research blog. Due to the volume of submissions, we’re unable to provide individual feedback on proposals.
Nowadays, most travelers entering the U.S. have to undergo this weird thing: after officials take a headshot, software determines the geography of your face, including the distance between your eyes, the distance from your forehead to chin, and different facial landmarks. Your facial signature then becomes a mathematical formula, and can be compared to a database of tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) of known faces, or if you are crossing the border with your visa, passport, or even driver’s license photo.
Sounds like this has the potential to be creepy, right? Well, to set the record straight, House Homeland Security Committee member Clay Higgins (R-LA) argued before Congress in July that it’s just fine, just a matter of convenience.
“The image that has been presented to the citizens that we serve is that this is some sort of nefarious technology and big brother is watching you,” the congressman explained. “But really it’s using photographic images that travelers willingly have provided, or are available on their passports or visas, or driver’s licenses. We already have that information.”
Higgins wore a black coat, a blue button-down shirt, and a spotted tie. As he spoke during this hearing titled “Assessing CBP’s Use of Facial Recognition Technology”, he looked at Daniel Tanciar, the chief innovation officer of Pangiam, a company founded in 2020, which aims “to revolutionize the future of operations, security, and safety at airports, seaports, and land border crossings through the use of emerging technologies.” This company works with Customs and Border Protection on its sweeping, unprecedented deployment of facial recognition technology. That Pangiam is in the mix on this shouldn’t be a surprise. The company’s CEO is former CBP commissioner Kevin McAleenan. If you don’t remember, he was the guy in charge of border enforcement when agents were tearing apart families in 2018.
Rep. Higgins stressed the efficiency and convenience of this expanding technology, which is affecting more and more people. “It just speeds up the traveler’s passage through the security checkpoint,” he said.
At the International Summit on Borders that I attended in Washington, DC, in June 2018, there was a panel titled “The Border Force Officer of the Future.” I was taken aback when one of the panel’s participants, an immigration official from Canada, said that with the direction of global border control, “The face that God gave you the day you were born will be your passport.”
Though chilling, this seemed far-fetched. Four years later, however, I see that I did not realize how fast it was all arriving, fueled by the public-private partnership exemplified by Higgins and Tanciar, a partnership that is powerful yet hidden. Never once at the hearing was Tanciar asked about his financial stake in the facial recognition system he was promoting. In his testimony, Tanciar gushed that “over 100 million travelers have been successfully processed by CBP’s use of this technology. While there are always improvements that can be made, CBP has implemented a well-performing program that meets the congressional biometric mandate while maintaining privacy, civil liberties, and data security.”
Facial recognition has become the primary biometric technology for CBP. Everyone who enters the country has their picture taken, though supposedly people can opt out (that often isn’t obvious, thanks to a lack of signage; I cross the border constantly and have never seen anything about opting out). The surveillance technology has also been deployed at 32 airports for people exiting the country. CBP partners with airports and airlines to add another layer to this private-public nexus.
During the hearing, Rebecca Gambler of the Government Accountability Office testified that CBP “is in the early stages of pilot testing the technology for other areas of the land environment.” She did not give details about what that means. According to internal documents, during previous secretive testsof facial recognition in Arizona and Texas, authorities obtained a “massive amount of data,” including images of “people leaving for work, picking up children from school, and carrying out other daily routines.” And DHS has called for companies to develop medium-sized drones with facial recognition cameras.
Market forecasts, such as this one from Grand View Research, predict that the global facial recognition market will nearly triple its worth in seven years—from $4.45 billion in 2021 to $12 billion in 2028. As GVR explains, “The market for facial recognition technology is growing enormously. … From its application in social media and mobile technology to security applications at airports, law enforcement, and targeted marketing campaigns, the deployment of facial recognition technology is inevitably part of our future.”
There were, however, witnesses at the July hearing, such as Jeramie Scott of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who were not so keen on a future of constant techno-surveillance. In his testimony Scott described facial recognition as a “dangerous surveillance technology” and said it poses “serious threats to our privacy and civil liberties.”
“CBP uses the technology heavily to track migrants along both sides of the U.S. southern and northern borders, and employs the technology at U.S. international and foreign airports, subjecting travelers to dangerous tools that sweep up massive data into U.S. databases with little scrutiny. The technology has an inherent racial, gender, and age bias, compounding existing discriminatory practices common among CBP and ICE agents.”
Facial recognition is but one component of a much larger border apparatus composed of walls, drones, armed agents, jails, and an expulsion system that regularly separates family members. It is difficult to separate the one from the other.
Franzblau also zoomed in on the border-industrial complex and stressed that it is vital for members of Congress “to closely examine the link between DHS employees and the surveillance tech industry. The revolving door between DHS officials and companies that benefit from the surveillance tech contracts fuels a toxic cycle of policy choices driven by profit over humanity.”
These links went undiscussed at the July hearing. Higgins did, however, ask what happens if the recognition technology makes an error. “And if for some reason [a traveler’s] image is not recognized or flagged with a false identity, they are pulled out of the line and go through a normal check of a human being. Is that correct?” he asked Tanciar.
“Yes, that is correct,” Tanciar replied. All would be fine was their consensus. Before Tanciar was hired at Pangiam in 2020, he worked at CBP’s biometric entry and exit program for four years. Like his boss McAleenan, he was a living example of the revolving door, in which CBP officials pass from public institutions to private corporations with ease, and presumably grease the wheels of the contract conveyor belt.
Pangiam claims that its technologies are “futureproofed,” because their artificial intelligence can replicate human intuition. It can protect you, the Pangiam website says, from “both today’s threats and, for the first time, the threats of tomorrow.” The border officer of the future is already here and it is public and private, human and automated, dystopic, and profitable.
Under intense pressure by states, activists and health institutions to respond to the spread of monkeypox, the Biden administration yesterday afternoon declared the new pandemic to be a public health emergency.
On Tuesday, Biden appointed Robert Fenton, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator for region nine, to be the national monkeypox coordinator. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who currently works at the Division of HIV Prevention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with clinical experience on health issues affecting the LGBTQIA+ communities, will serve as his deputy.
In an effort to appease public concern after weeks of official inaction and downplaying of the evolving crisis, the White House statement declared, “Fenton and Daskalakis combined have over four decades of experience in Federal emergency response and public health leadership, including overseeing the operations and implementation of key components of the Biden Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and leading local and Federal public health emergency efforts such as infectious disease control and HIV prevention.” In other words, they are the president’s men and can be called to do the White House’s bidding, not to bring monkeypox under control, but control the messaging on monkeypox.
Despite the World Health Organization’s declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) nearly two weeks ago, the White House had resisted making a similar announcement even though the three hardest hit states followed en suite—New York, Illinois and California—to declare a state of emergency to obtain much-needed federal resources.
Having mulled the issue of a national declaration for more than a week—during which the president was quarantined with a COVID-19 infection—the White House eventually acquiesced, although it carefully crafted the messaging to reassure the financial markets.
The administration claims it remains in control of these developments and informed the public that they have released monkeypox vaccines to affected regions and increased testing capacity to 80,000 per week, albeit only recently. Notably, unlike COVID-19, where the test kits had to be manufactured from scratch, these tests have been available in the US diagnostic arsenal for decades but had not been acted upon based on early assessments that the monkeypox outbreak would be limited and quickly disappear “like the flu.”
Testing and vaccination
Monkeypox testing is labor-intensive, requiring lab workers to swab the lesions, a risky procedure, then extract the virus DNA through multiple steps and amplify the genetic material through PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to obtain a result. The slow process takes two to three days for results while the patient waits. Additionally, such tests require a physician’s order.
A rash develops much later in the course of infection. After symptoms of fevers, aches, fatigue and enlarged lymph nodes, there is an incubation period of 2–3 weeks before the characteristic rash develops. Only then can a confirmatory test be conducted. However, as these rashes can be located anywhere on the body, it requires a heightened awareness of a monkeypox diagnosis on the part of health care workers. Since testing is a lagging indicator of community spread, contact tracing and isolation are critical in stemming the spread of infection.
As for post-exposure treatment, the vaccination of a person known to have been exposed to someone with a confirmed monkeypox infection must be carried out within three days of the exposure. There is limited data on the efficacy of the Jynneos vaccine in immunizing individuals against the monkeypox virus and even less information on using the current vaccine to treat people after they have been exposed. The guidance has been extrapolated from experience with smallpox, and a comprehensive review can be viewed here.
Figure 1: The graphic references several smallpox outbreaks and the timing of postexposure vaccination. Symptoms were prevented in 75 percent or more of those exposed when the vaccines were given within three days. Source: the journal Vaccine.
With the narrow clinical window in treating the exposed and delays inherent in confirmatory testing, a vaccination-only strategy is doomed to failure. Only implementing a broad-based contact tracing and isolation initiative, which must include the isolation of secondary contacts and an expanded ring vaccination program, which means the number needed to vaccinate grows exponentially to cover secondary contacts, can achieve the aim of eradication.
Additionally, patients with confirmed or suspected infection or exposure must also isolate for at least four to eight weeks until they are cleared of harboring the virus or the disease is allowed to run its course and they are no longer infectious. Depending on their symptoms, they need constant evaluation and monitoring by medical professionals.
How the monkeypox virus is transmitted
Perhaps an important consideration that has not had any serious and honest discussion in the media and by Federal public health officials is the potential airborne route of infection for monkeypox. There has been an insistence that infections occur predominately through prolonged contact exposure.
Dr. Donald Milton, a professor of Environmental health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health who is an internationally recognized expert on the aerobiology of respiratory viruses, has written extensively on the airborne nature of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 virus. He wrote a critical review article in 2012 on the implications of the mode of smallpox transmission for biodefense which is an essential read.
After an extensive analysis, he concluded, “Smallpox appears to have been most effectively and virulently transmitted by fine particle aerosols and therefore should be classified as an anisotropic infection, an infection where the route of transmission influences either virulence and or probability of infection, formerly called a ‘preferentially’ airborne infectious disease.”
He added, “Current recommendations for control of secondary smallpox infections emphasize transmission ‘by expelled droplets to close contacts (those within six to seven feet per CDC 2002, 2003). Recommendations include vigilant maintenance of standard, droplet, and airborne precautions. However, emphasis on spread via large droplets may reduce the vigilance with which more difficult airborne precautions are maintained.”
The precautionary principle is at play here, meaning that the best interests of the patient and public health require a scientific understanding of how the virus moves and how the various routes of transmission affect the severity of the disease. An assumption that infections occur only through prolonged contact with infected individuals raises the danger of furthering the community transmission of the virus, repeating the catastrophic failures already seen in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Without a coordinated effort to bring the expanding outbreak to an immediate end, the monkeypox pandemic could begin impacting the labor force and manufacturing in the next few months. A worker at Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Michigan recently informed the World Socialist Web Site that there had been a confirmed case of monkeypox at the plant, which the union and management are attempting to cover up.
The announcement of the appointment of Fenton and Daskalakis to coordinate a “strategy and operation to combat the current monkeypox outbreak, including equitably increasing the availability of tests, vaccinations, and treatments,” is nonsense. Given the experience with the failed and criminal policies allowing COVID-19 to spread unchecked, these statements are purely sentiments for political purposes.
Problems in vaccine production and storage
What is not being mentioned is that the shortage of vaccines is real, and the effort to ramp up manufacturing faces a bottleneck, with only a single pharmaceutical company in Denmark, Nordic Bavarian, able to produce the smallpox vaccine known in the US as Jynneos. What is apparent is that there is no clear and compelling strategy other than reaction down the line.
Worse, Jynneos (a non-replicating smallpox vaccine) and the second-generation vaccine ACAM2000 (a live smallpox virus) were manufactured for use against the possible reintroduction of smallpox in the event of bioterrorism or accidental lab spillover but have never been tested against monkeypox. MedPage Today wrote recently, “[N]o one knows how well the Jynneos vaccine will serve as a get-out-of-infection-free card.”
The much-quoted 85 percent effectiveness of smallpox vaccines against monkeypox is based on a very limited study conducted in Africa in the 1980s that showed cross-protection. However, MedPage noted, “One data expert calls its findings ‘pretty weak.’ Other studies have only been conducted in animals.” No studies have been undertaken on ACAM2000 and Jynneos. Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and response in New York, recently explained, “It is absolutely critical that public health officials work on messaging this uncertainty to people being vaccinated.”
Though the US has more than 100 million doses of ACAM2000 smallpox vaccines available, they have remained largely untouched. The vaccine needs to be injected into the skin using a two-pronged needle utilizing a series of jabs to provide a small dose of the live virus into the skin. Health care workers would require to be trained to do this. Evidence of vaccination involves the formation of a small abscess a week later for confirmation, and some may need another jab.
ACAM2000 can also severely compromise those who have an underlying immunocompromised state. The rare, dangerous side effects of ACAM2000 include a six in 1,000 chance of heart inflammation, with one or two people in a million expected to die. Jynneos was intended for this population of around 66 million eligible people in high-risk households, according to the New York Times. The vaccine is an injection administered in two doses four weeks apart, which was criticized as not being ideal in a bioterror attack.
In 2013, the US had around 20 million doses of Jynneos, previously known as Imvamune, sitting in freezers in the Strategic National Stockpiles. In 2015, another 8 million doses were added due to the three-year limit on their shelf life. However, federal agencies decided at the time to allow vaccine doses to expire without replenishing the stockpile as they waited for a freeze-dried version of the vaccine to be developed and approved, a process which has been dragging longer than expected. By the time monkeypox appeared in the US mid-May, only 2,400 usable doses were left in the stockpile.
The Times wrote, “From 2015 onward, the United States instead placed orders for hundreds of millions of dollars of bulk vaccine product—basically raw vaccine stored in large bags, which would be converted to freeze-dried doses once the company perfected the process and had the necessary FDA approval.”
The 300,000 doses of vaccines recently ordered were sitting in Denmark and had to be filled by a contractor and then shipped back to the US in batches in a wait-and-see approach taken by the administration. Due to strict temperature requirements, the Danish pharmaceutical firm has stored the bulk of 1.4 million doses ordered for the US.
Bavarian Nordic’s new fill-finish facility, which was up and running in 2021, has only recently been inspected by the FDA and greenlighted for fill and shipment. However, logistical details mean there will be continued delays in seeing large quantities of vaccines delivered to the US or any other country seeking to vaccinate their population.
As explained by a Bavarian Nordic spokesman, when an order is placed, the company has to receive a container known as a “cocoon” that has to be frozen to temperature for five days before the vaccines can be packed and shipped. Additionally, the recent airline strikes and flight delays have impacted the delivery of these vaccines.
According to the CDC, as of August 3, 2022, with more than 25,000 cases globally, 6,617 infections have been documented in the US. The global seven-day rolling average of daily monkeypox cases is presently at 1,200 and rising. For the US, that figure has reached 532 per day. Presently, New York state is the epicenter of the monkeypox pandemic in the US, with 1,666 total cases. California has recorded 826 cases, and Illinois, Texas, Florida and Georgia each have more than 500, indicating a broad geographic spread of the disease.
Figure 2: Seven-day rolling average of monkeypox cases in the United States. Source: data scientist Antonio Caramia.
The first case in the US was diagnosed on May 18, 2022. One month later, on June 16, cumulative cases surpassed 100. By July 13, cases surpassed 1,000. At the present rate, by mid-August, the cumulative figure will more than exceed 10,000 infections. The rapidity of the spread has caught the entire federal public health infrastructure off guard once again, despite the repeated calls by principled health experts about the burgeoning threat.
Despite the acclaimed rise in testing capacity, cases are climbing much faster. For such patients, a confirmatory test is required to access antivirals like tecovirimat, which was approved to treat smallpox disease in adults and children but can cause significant side effects. Meanwhile, as of this writing, the CDC has yet to make monkeypox a notifiable disease for states.
Additionally, the number of tests and their positivity rate have not been publicly available. This fact raises the question of whether contact tracing is being conducted earnestly. Caitlin Rivers, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Wired, “If we had those metrics, we would have a better understanding of how much of our existing capacity is being used and whether it’s reaching enough people to be able to say confidently that we’re finding cases.”
Even though most cases remain among men who have sex with men, the number of women infected is growing. For instance, in Indiana, the Department of Health reported that 20 percent of the 30 confirmed cases on July 22 were among women. The case count has risen to 45, and two children are among the infected.
Five children have thus far been confirmed with monkeypox in the US. These must be seen as sentinel events, a forewarning of the spread of monkeypox into more vulnerable populations, especially as the school year will soon see millions of children return to in-person classes.
The social issues raised by a second lethal pandemic are being suppressed by the likes of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who vehemently rejected any concerns over monkeypox during a recent press conference. He declared, “We are not doing fear, and we are not going to go out and try to rile people up and try to act like people can’t live their lives as they’ve normally been doing because of something.”
Given the last three years with COVID-19, it isn’t difficult to recognize that such sentiments will prevail within the corporate elite and its political servants in both capitalist parties. But there is scientific guidance that has been extrapolated from experience with smallpox, and a comprehensive review can be seen here.
A Russian court sentenced 31-year-old Brittney Griner, a star of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) in the United States, to nine years in a penal colony and a $16,400 fine on Thursday, based on charges that she had deliberately committed the crime of smuggling drugs into the country. Her lawyers announced that they will appeal the verdict.
Griner was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport on February 17, one week before the imperialist-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. In her luggage, the Russian police found less than 1 gram of cannabis oil (CBD). Griner pleaded guilty on the charges early in the trial, saying that she had made and regretted “an honest mistake.” She had been prescribed the cannabis oil for medical purposes in the US and claims to have accidentally included it in her luggage.
In court, she said, “I never meant to hurt anybody, I never meant to put in jeopardy the Russian population, I never meant to break any laws here. I know everybody keeps talking about political pawn and politics, but I hope that, that is far from this courtroom.”
WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner is escorted from a court room after her last words, in Khimki just outside Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. Closing arguments in Brittney Griner's cannabis possession case are set for Thursday, nearly six months after the American basketball star was arrested at a Moscow airport. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
The sentencing of Griner is cruel and completely out of proportion. The average time in jail for this type of crime in Russia, by itself grossly excessive, is only five years, and, according to one of Griner’s lawyers, almost a third of those convicted usually get parole.
There is no doubt that the Kremlin, in the midst of a proxy war against the US and other NATO powers in Ukraine, is seeking to make an example of the American athlete and use her as a pawn in negotiations with Washington.
For weeks, the White House has been negotiating a prisoner exchange with the Kremlin, involving not only Griner but also Paul Whelan, a US citizen and former Marine who was arrested in Moscow on espionage charges in 2018 and sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison.
In contrast to Griner, Paul Whelan is a highly dubious figure who has deep ties to the American military and intelligence apparatus. According to the White House, the US has made a “substantial offer” to the Kremlin to exchange Griner and Whelan for the Russian national Viktor Bout, who is serving a 25-year sentence in a US prison for arms trafficking.
The fact that Griner is black and a well-known advocate of the LGBTQ community is likely another motivating factor in the Kremlin’s decision to target her. For many years, the Kremlin-controlled media has engaged in an openly racist campaign against refugees and immigrants in both Russia and Europe, while many prominent commentators denounced the 2020 George Floyd protests from the right.
Members of the LGTBQ community in Russia are barred from marrying and displaying their relationships in public and are routinely vilified as “abnormal” in the media. With the war effort, this longstanding reactionary promotion of far-right Russian chauvinism and backwardness, as well as the crackdown on democratic rights, has assumed an evermore vicious character.
But as reactionary as the Kremlin’s sentencing of Griner is, workers must reject with contempt the campaign unleashed by the White House and its hangers-on in the media in response to the sentencing. In a statement, US President Joe Biden called the sentencing “unacceptable” and denounced Russia for “wrongfully detaining” Griner as well as Whelan. What nauseating hypocrisy!
The United States imprisons more people than any other country, the majority of them for drug offenses, many of them based on evidence just as flimsy and concocted as that against Griner. And it is Biden himself who made one of the largest contributions to this tidal wave of repression, sponsoring numerous “law-and-order” bills and shepherding them through the Senate during his years as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Internationally, the US has devastated entire societies in the Middle East and Africa with bombs, drone missiles and outright invasions, killing and maiming millions, and has deliberately provoked the current war with Russia over Ukraine which threatens mankind with a nuclear catastrophe.
The American military and intelligence apparatus are known to have cruelly tortured, illegally detained and assassinated countless civilians, including American citizens, over the past decades. No one can forget the hideous photos of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, stripped naked and forced to pose for celebratory photos with their captors, or the revelations about waterboarding and other crimes at CIA secret prisons.
The most important political prisoner in the world, the Australian-born publisher Julian Assange, has been illegally hounded and tortured at the behest of Washington for over a decade because he revealed some of the most heinous war crimes of US imperialism in the Middle East to the world population. Assange has been detained without charges in Belmarsh prison and is now set to be extradited to the US, where he faces a prison sentence of 175 years. After a British judge announced his extradition in late June, he was stripped naked and placed under suicide watch in an isolation cell, only the latest in a series of horrific attempts to torture him and effectively force his slow death in detention.
The government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe is intensifying its repressive actions amid growing opposition among workers and anti-government protesters.
Police mobilised at Parliament Road in Colombo May 6, 2022
* The president issued a gazette notification at midnight on Wednesday extending its repressive Essential Public Services Act (ESPA) which designates the supply of electricity, the supply and distribution of petroleum products and the health sector as essential services.
According to this draconian act, any employee in these sectors who does not attend work faces “conviction, after summary trial before a magistrate” and will be “liable to rigorous imprisonment” of two to five years and/or a fine of between 2,000 and 5,000 rupees ($US5–13).
The “movable and immoveable property” of those convicted can be seized by the state and his or her name “removed from any register maintained for profession or vocation.” It is also an offence for any person to “incite, induce or encourage any other person” to not attend work through a “physical act or by any speech or writing.”
These repressive measures are in force while the Trade Union Coordinating Centre, which comprises unions in the health, electricity and petroleum sectors, have announced a one-day protest on August 9 against the government’s crackdown on protesters. The unions have taken the decision to deflect the growing anger among workers over intolerable price rises and acute shortages and Wickremesinghe’s anti-democratic actions.
* On Wednesday evening, police arrested Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Ceylon Teachers’ Union (CTU), at the union’s head office. The police claimed the arrest was due to the violation of a court order banning a protest march near police headquarters on May 28. Fort magistrate Thilina Gamage yesterday ordered the union leader to be remanded until August 12.
Police also arrested the secretary of the Bank of Ceylon branch of the Ceylon Bank Employees Union, Dhananjaya Siriwardana, and its former branch president, Palitha Atampala. They were accused of forcibly entering the Presidential residence on July 13. Both union leaders were released on bail yesterday.
* The police yesterday issued an ultimatum to anti-government protesters who are still occupying one corner of the Galle Face Green to vacate the area before 5 p.m. today. The police notice read out to protesters yesterday stated that they were occupying the area illegally and faced legal action if they did not leave.
At a media conference, protesters declared they would not vacate the area and had filed a court appeal requesting a writ order to prevent police forcibly clearing the area.
On July 22, hundreds of heavily-armed police and a military contingent mounted an early morning attack to forcibly evict protesters occupying the Presidential Secretariat and the surrounding area. Many were injured and nine were arrested.
Last week protesters refused to leave Galle Face Green until Wickremesinghe steps down. They are now confined to a government-designated “protest site” in Galle Face Green.
These repressive measures come in the wake of raids by two police teams on the Colombo office of the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) last Friday. The police ignored the opposition of FSP members, claiming they were searching for the convener of the Inter-University Student Federation, Wasntha Mudalige.
According to the media, more than 100 protest activists have already been arrested by police and military squads.
Officers of the Department of Immigration Emigration have barged into the home of British social media activist Kayleigh Frazer on August 3 and confiscated her passport. Police accused her of supporting anti-government protests on her Facebook page. However, when questioned by the media, the officials declared that the “department is yet to determine whether she has violated her visa conditions.”
While the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) has fundamental political differences with the union leaders, the FSP and protest organisers, we unequivocally condemn all of these arrests and police actions.
The SEP warns working people that the Wickremesinghe regime is preparing a far broader repression against all opposition to its severe austerity measures that are creating enormous hardship and suffering. We call on workers and rural toilers to demand the immediate dropping of all charges and release of those arrested.
A protest organised on Galle Face Green on August 3 demanded an end to police repression and the current state of emergency, and the resignation of Ranil Wickremesinghe and his government. Another protest organised by the Trade Union and Mass Organisation (TUMO) yesterday called for the immediate release of Joseph Stalin, other trade union leaders and anti-government protestors.
The trade unions, however, bear political responsibility for opening the door to these police-state measures by deliberately limiting the strike movement that developed among workers in opposition to intolerable living conditions. In doing so, they gave the ruling class vital time to prepare its counter-offensive.
Millions of workers participated in the strikes of April 28, May 6 and then on May 10 and 11 against President Gotabhaya Rajapakse who fled the country on July 13 amid mass protests. The TUMO and Trade Union Coordinating Centre not only did all they could to limit the scope and duration of the strikes but sought to divert the movement into the dead-end of parliamentary manoeuvres.
Their demand for an “interim government” was completely in line with that of the opposition parties—the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). None of the parliamentary parties, however, have any fundamental disagreement with the anti-working class agenda of the Rajapakse and now Wickremesinghe government to force working people to pay for the deep economic crisis of capitalism.
In his policy statement to parliament on Wednesday, Wickremesinghe reiterated his determination to impose the savage austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While imposing a state of emergency and launching a police dragnet, he cynically declared that the government would allow “peaceful protests” at government-designated sites and would open a “hotline” for protesters to express their grievances to him.
This is nothing but a transparent façade for police-state repression. If the Wickremesinghe regime has not launched a full-scale crackdown on all opposition, it is only because the ruling class is extremely nervous about unleashing an eruption of opposition by workers and the rural poor. Wickremesinghe is testing the waters, denouncing more militant protesters as “fascists” and arresting them while preparing for far more savage police-state measures.
In a recent strike ballot, 97.6 percent of Lufthansa passenger airline pilots and 99.3 percent of Lufthansa Cargo pilots voted in favour of taking action, the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) pilots’ union announced last Sunday.
Lufthansa pilots in the cockpit of an Airbus A380 [Photo by Steve Jurvetson / flickr / CC BY 2.0] [Photo by Steve Jurvetson / flickr / CC BY 2.0]
Six rounds of negotiations with the Lufthansa board had failed to produce results. Management did not even present a serious offer. Under pressure from its members, the pilots’ union felt compelled to declare the negotiations a failure and hold a strike ballot.
At the same time, it signaled to the board that it did not want a strike and offered to continue the formally failed negotiations, now being called “exploratory talks.”
Even before the ballot was counted, VC negotiator Marcel Gröls declared that it was “initially” a “warning signal to the Lufthansa Executive Board.” Management was now expected to “finally make good offers.” What was needed now was “a serious will to find a solution on the part of Lufthansa, in order to jointly create creative solution spaces in the interest of the company and its employees,” the VC collective bargaining boss said.
Lufthansa’s 5,000 or so pilots confront the fact that the union is restraining and sabotaging their large, almost 100 percent willingness to strike. This, in turn, strengthens and encourages Lufthansa management to stick to its provocative wage policy aimed at reducing pay. To push through their demands, pilots must therefore wage a battle on two fronts.
They must join together in a rank-and-file action committee, independent of the pilots’ union, to put their decision to strike into practice. At the same time, such an action committee creates the prerequisite for linking the pilots’ struggle with that of other Lufthansa employees, such as the ground staff, who are also currently engaged in collective bargaining disputes.
In addition, it creates the possibility of establishing contact with striking aviation workers in other companies and countries, coordinating their struggles and mobilizing the full fighting power of the pilots and all other aviation workers.
Without breaking VC’s control, the struggle cannot be won—despite a great willingness to strike. Conflicts already arose when the pay demands were being drawn up. Pilots working for the subsidiaries Eurowings, Austrian Airlines, Swiss, Air Dolomiti, etc., which belong to the Lufthansa group, but who earn much less than employees of the core brand, demanded a significant wage increase to compensate for the losses of the past years and inflation.
VC limited its demand for this year to 5.5 percent, which, even if fully implemented, would mean a massive real wage loss, and postponed a demand for automated inflation compensation until next year.
Add to that the union’s demand for a single collective bargaining agreement covering all cockpit personnel, and it is a double-edged sword. While it is desirable to overcome the different agreements in the various flight operations, the Executive Board is trying to break the previous leading role of the core brand and make low wages the standard.
The pilots’ great willingness to strike is also a response to the massive concessions made by VC in recent years because of the coronavirus pandemic. These have led to a significant deterioration in working conditions and enormous income losses.
In spring 2020, shortly after the start of the pandemic, VC had already agreed to reduce pilot salaries by up to 50 percent, initially until the end of the year. Shortly before then, the VC leadership extended this pay cut until the end of June 2022. In addition to short-time working, the package included concessions on pay and pensions.
“The concessions agreed this spring and now additionally offered amount to a total value of over €600 million. This corresponds to salary reductions of up to 50 percent compared to the pre-crisis period,” Markus Wahl, then VC president, declared just under two years ago.
The two other unions at Lufthansa, Verdi and UFO (Independent Flight Attendants Organization), also offered to cut vacation and Christmas bonuses and accept a pay freeze and the waiving of allowances, bringing the total income give-backs by the workforce to around €1.3 billion. At the same time, Lufthansa cut 32,000 jobs, including many pilots.
The unions’ claim that the company would honour these concessions as soon as flight operations picked up and passenger numbers rose again was quickly refuted.
At the end of last year, management terminated the so-called “perspective agreement.” In it, the pilots of the core brand—Lufthansa and Cargo—were guaranteed a minimum fleet size and thus job security and predictable opportunities for promotion.
Instead, Lufthansa management now wants to further shrink the core brand and hand over the feeder traffic coming into the two hubs in Frankfurt and Munich to the planned Cityline 2.0 airline, which will again mean lower wages and worsened working conditions. In addition, staff cuts are continuing. In May alone, 281 Germanwings pilots received notice of termination.
This threat overrides the ongoing collective bargaining talks. As business daily Handelsblatt reported: “In view of this, there are also numerous voices in the pilot community who believe there can be no solution without industrial action.”
Lufthansa is particularly unscrupulous in its treatment of young pilots and junior staff. Six months after the start of the pandemic, which for the pilots-to-be meant a complete interruption of their expensive training, Lufthansa management invited its 500 or so student pilots to a video call. Stephan Klar, then managing director of LAT, the Lufthansa subsidiary responsible for pilot training, opened up by saying to the shocked students that there was “no economic or [career] perspective sense” for you to “continue your training.” The students were called upon to “reorient themselves professionally,” he said.
Around 200 Lufthansa students filed a legal complaint against this. But the Frankfurt Labour Court dismissed the suit last December, as well as injunctions against the closure of pilot schools in Bremen and Phoenix, Arizona. LAT chief Matthias Spohr (brother of Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr) welcomed the court ruling, citing the alleged “reduced need for pilots” due to the pandemic. In the meantime, Lufthansa is resuming pilot training, on much worse terms.
After Lufthansa and other airlines were rescued with billions of euros of government money in the wake of the pandemic, these amounts are now to be squeezed out of the staff via cuts in real wages and job reductions. Resistance to this is growing. The Lufthansa pilots’ willingness to strike is part of a wide-ranging wave of strikes in the international aviation industry that has been continuing for months.
Pilots in Spain, at Europe’s second-largest low-cost airline Easyjet, have announced a strike for August that is to last nine days. Some 900 SAS pilots from Denmark, Norway and Sweden went on strike in early July; hundreds of flights operated by the Scandinavian airline were cancelled. The company used the industrial action as a pretext to file for bankruptcy and reorganize flight operations under new conditions.
A vote on a strike by cockpit staff at British Airways is underway after a walkout by ground staff was called off at the last minute. And earlier this week, Portuguese unions announced strikes at all major airports to begin in the second half of August.
But the trade unions everywhere are trying to isolate these international strike movements from each other and prevent a joint struggle. In Germany, service sector union Verdi is desperately trying to stall the collective bargaining dispute of the 20,000 or so Lufthansa ground workers with a rotten compromise to prevent a joint struggle with the pilots.
About the Award: The Knight-Hennessy Scholars program will annually identify a group of 100 high-achieving students from around the world with demonstrated leadership and civic commitment to receive full funding to pursue a wide-ranging graduate education at Stanford, with the goal of developing a new generation of global leaders. The Knight-Hennessy Scholars is the largest fully endowed scholars program in the world.
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The organisers encourage applications to Knight-Hennessy Scholars from citizens of all countries. That’s natural since we expect Knight-Hennessy Scholars to have global impact.
Did you earn a degree at an institution outside the U.S.? To be eligible for graduate study, you must hold the equivalent of a U.S. bachelor’s degree from a college or university of recognized standing.
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Duration of Program: The Knight-Hennessy Scholars program funds up to the first three years of your graduate education, and if your degree program exceeds three years – such as an MD or PhD program, or a Stanford dual- or joint-degree program – then your Stanford home department will fund the remainder of your education to the extent consistent with its standard funding commitment for that program. (That is, e.g., six years for PhDs in engineering, five years for PhDs in humanities.)
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