Corona-fied: Employers Spying on Remote Workers in Their Homes

Steven Hill

The future of work is here, ushered in by a global pandemic. But is it turning employment into a Worker’s Paradise of working at home? Or more of a Big Brother panopticon?

Disturbing increases in the use of digital surveillance technologies by employers to monitor their remote workers are raising alarm bells. With the number of remote workers surging as a result of the pandemic—42 percent of U.S. workers are now doing their jobs from their kitchens, living rooms, and home offices—a number of employers have begun requiring their workers to download spying software to their laptops and smartphones. The goal is for businesses to monitor what their remote employees do all day, to track job performance and productivity, and to reduce so-called “cyber-slacking.”

Business software products from Hubstaff, which tracks a worker’s mouse movements, keyboard strokes, webpages visited, email, file transfers and applications used, are surging in sales. So are sales for TSheets, which workers download to their smartphones so that employers can track their location. Another product, called Time Doctor, “downloads videos of employees’ screens” and uses “a computer’s webcam to take a picture of the employee every 10 minutes,” NPR reports. One employee told NPR, “If you’re idle for a few minutes, if you go to the bathroom or… [to the kitchen], a pop-up will come up and it’ll say, ‘You have 60 seconds to start working again or we’re going to pause your time.’”

Another system, InterGuard, can be secretly installed on workers’ computers. The Washington Post reports that it “creates a minute-by-minute timeline of every app and website they view, categorizing each as ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’ and ranking workers by their ‘productivity score.’” Other employers are using a lower-tech approach, requiring workers to stay logged in to a teleconference service like Zoom all day so they can be continually watched.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, one surveillance company, Awareness Technologies, says it has seen its sales triple. Executives at Hubstaff and Teramind also say demand for their companies’ monitoring products has tripled. One website showing “Employee Monitoring Software in the USA” lists nearly 70 companies with products for sale.

Outdated Laws Keep It Legal

Despite this surge in online surveillance activity, currently, it is a legal practice in the United States. Individual state laws vary over whether companies must inform workers that they’re using tracking software, but in reality, “When you’re on your office computer, you have no privacy at all,” says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute. “Anything and everything you do is probably monitored by your boss.”

Current laws are vastly outdated, as they are based on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, when the primary form of electronic communication was the telephone. That was a distant time when desktop computers were first becoming popular, and smartphones were not yet a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye.

And now, in response to the coronavirus outbreak, companies such as Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Salesforce have developed intrusive applications that enable companies to continuously track the health status of their employees. Often they include a system for tracking contacts between employees within an office, and a mobile app for collecting information about their health status. A number of large U.S. employers, including Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot and Starbucks, are taking the temperatures of their employees before they are allowed to work. Certainly, employers have a legitimate need to collect the necessary data to safeguard their workplaces, especially in response to a pandemic. But what is the appropriate level of “health intrusion”? How voluntary is the participation of workers, and who gets to decide?

The reality of this constant Big Brother digital spying in people’s homes is that dozens of remote workers are starting to complain that they feel burned out by this pressure. A recent Fishbowl survey of major companies’ employees found that three-quarters of those polled were opposed to using “an app or device that allows their company to trace their contacts with colleagues.” Yet many fear they will be branded as a troublemaker or lose their job if they speak out. And since remote workers hardly see each other—and increasingly may not even know many of their coworkers—these factors will make labor organizing and collective worker empowerment increasingly challenging.

U.S. labor unions have been slow to advocate for updating these outdated laws. One union, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, has been working to blunt the worst of the abuses. Labor-friendly media have been missing this story as well. Not only should unions advocate to update the laws and limit digital spying, but why not also demand that home-based workers be compensated by employers for use of their house, utilities and the internet? And that the employer remains responsible to provide equipment and a safe workplace, even in the home?

Remote Workforce Growth—The New Normal?

As the number of remote workers rises, concerns are growing among labor advocates that this is quickly becoming the “new normal.” One survey by Gartner, Inc. found that 74 percent of companies intend to keep some proportion of their workforce on permanent remote status, with nearly a quarter of respondents saying they will move at least 20 percent of their on-site employees to permanent remote status. Google/Alphabet recently announced it will keep its 200,000 full-time and contract employees home until at least July 2021, and half of Facebook employees will work from home over the next decade. Hub International, a global insurance brokerage, has shifted 90 percent of its 12,000 employees to remote status. “Teleperformance, the world’s largest call-center company, estimates that around 150,000 of its employees [nearly half its global workforce] will not return to a physical worksite,” according to Social Europe.

Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom says:

“A recent separate survey of firms from the Survey of Business Uncertainty that I run with the Atlanta Federal Reserve and the University of Chicago indicated that the share of working days spent at home is expected to increase fourfold from pre-COVID levels, from 5 percent to 20 percent.

“Of the dozens of firms I have talked to, the typical plan is that employees will work from home one to three days a week, and come into the office the rest of the time.

But not all at-home workers are created equal. Bloom continues:

“Taken together, this is generating a time bomb for inequality. Our results show that more educated, higher-earning employees are far more likely to work from home—so they are continuing to get paid, develop their skills and advance their careers. At the same time, those unable to work from home—either because of the nature of their jobs, or because they lack suitable space or internet connections—are being left behind. They face bleak prospects if their skills and work experience erode during an extended shutdown and beyond.”

The future of work has become more uncertain than ever. In this “brave new world,” labor unions and advocates must ensure that the pandemic is not misused by businesses as an excuse to worsen conditions for employees who work out of the office. It is easy to imagine how the lines between ‘remote’ work and ‘platform’ work could blur, leading to more ‘Uberization’ as work devolves into ‘independent’ contracts, bogus self-employment and ‘pay-by-project’ arrangements that can be easily outsourced to remote (and lower-cost) destinations.

Worker advocates must push for a strong and modern legal data protection framework. And that should include an effective enforcement system against privacy abuse that disincentivizes illegal spying behavior. Remote work should not become a downward slide toward a Big Brother panopticon that penetrates into society ever more deeply, including into our homes.

FinCen Files Shine Spotlight on Suspicious Bank Transfers

Chuck Collins

On September 20th, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) –the reporters who brought us the “Panama Papers” and the “Paradise Papers” — released the “FinCEN Files,” in collaboration with Buzzfeed News.

The FinCEN Files are the result of a U.S. leak of 2,100 “Suspicious Activity Reports” (SARs) –covering over 18,000 transactions — filed by banks when they believe a transaction may involve fraud, corruption, or other criminal activity.  SAR reports are not public.  A former U.S. Treasury official leaked the documents to expose corruption.

The public should be concerned about the volume of suspect bank transactions that are the tip of the iceberg in terms of illicit funds, money laundering and tax dodging.  The U.S. has become one of the largest global destinations for illicit funds and tax dodging due to weak disclosure laws –with states like Delaware that do not require corporations to disclose their true beneficial owners.

Over the 18 years between 1999 and 2017, banks moved $2 trillion in funds that they considered suspicious, generating substantial fees in the process.  Some of the biggest global banks involved included Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, Barclays Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon.  Almost half the $2 trillion in suspicious loans were made by Deutsche Bank, a bank that has paid substantial fines for past money laundering activities.

The Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) showed that banks often moved funds for companies registered in offshore tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands, where the identity of the owner was not known. Banks could have refused these transactions.  But in many cases they allowed the transactions to proceed and then filed a SAR report to cover their reporting obligations.

The Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality has monitored anonymous luxury real estate transactions that disrupt local affordable housing markets.   Our reports about luxury real estate in Boston and Seattle reveal the large percentage of luxury property purchased by shell companies. The IPS Inequality Program has advocated for national FinCEN oversight of cash transactions in real estate over a certain value and has pressed for release of FinCEN data on the City of Boston.

The FinCEN Files provides a window into one aspect of the movement of illicit funds.  If I’m a narco-trafficker looking to launder my ill-gotten treasure, I may take funds from an offshore account and use them to purchase, often with cash, real estate in the United States.  At some point, I’ll need the services of a bank to facilitate the transfer of funds.

FinCEN oversight alone has been a deterrent to some suspicious activities.  In early 2016, FinCEN imposed a temporary transparency rule on Miami-Dade and Manhattan to crack down on dark money transactions.  Purchasers of real estate with cash over $1 million were required to disclose beneficial ownership.  After the implementation of these rules in March 2016, Miami-Dade saw an immediate 95 percent drop in cash real estate purchases by shell companies and anonymous corporations. An academic study found that the threat of greater transparency enforcement led to a 70 percent decline on all-cash purchases nationwide.

Some of the well-know figures exposed in the FinCEN Files include Isabel dos Santos, the Angolan billionaire accused of looting that country in a previous ICIJ disclosure, the Luanda Leaks.

Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was named in over 33 SARs covering over 620 suspicious transactions.  Manafort was a key figure in Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. election and was sentenced to 7.5-year prison term for fraud and tax evasion.

Many of the major banks covered by the FinCEN Files claim that they have changed their practices in recent years.  HSBC told Reuters that “all the information provided by ICIJ is historical” and that as of 2012,  “HSBC embarked on a multi-year journey to overhaul its ability to combat financial crime across more than 60 jurisdictions.”  Government oversight officials have expressed concern that the leaks may have a chilling effect and serve as a setback to transparency efforts.

A key part of the solution to the illicit funds and tax dodging is full disclosure of beneficial ownership of corporations, revealing the individuals responsible for a company’s behavior.  A growing number of sectors, including the Chamber of Commerce, are calling for greater ownership transparency.  Join the growing effort to press for ownership transparency, including legislation currently pending in the U.S. Senate.

Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life

Vandana Shiva

In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’.

‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said.

In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.

The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.

New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity, integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans, we are connected through disease.

According to the International Labour Organization, ‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’ According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.

Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism.

The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity.

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coronavirus pandemic and in the midst of the lockdown, Microsoft was granted a patent by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ‘Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….’

The ‘body activity’ that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees, or any other information or data.

The patent is an intellectual property claim over our bodies and minds. In colonialism, colonisers assign themselves the right to take the land and resources of indigenous people, extinguish their cultures and sovereignty, and in extreme cases exterminate them. Patent WO 060606 is a declaration by Microsoft that our bodies and minds are its new colonies. We are mines of ‘raw material’—the data extracted from our bodies. Rather than sovereign, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings making decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part, and to which we are inextricably related, we are ‘users.’ A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire.

But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable.

In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to ‘reinvent education.’ Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created ‘a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why with all the technology you have?’

In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades. For him students are mines for data. That is why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test, because these can be easily quantified and mined. In reimagining education, children will be monitored through surveillance systems to check if they are attentive while they are forced to take classes remotely, alone at home. The dystopia is one where children never return to schools, do not have a chance to play, do not have friends. It is a world without society, without relationships, without love and friendship.

As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’ people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves.

Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we must fight for. It is one we must claim.

We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?

What If Preventing Collapse Isn’t Profitable?

Richard Heinberg

The real downside of the green-profit narrative has been that it created the assumption in many people’s minds that the solution to climate change and other environmental dilemmas is technical, and that policy makers and industrialists will implement it for us, so that the way we live doesn’t need to change in any fundamental way. That’s never been true.

The notion that modern industrial civilization is fundamentally unsustainable and is therefore likely to collapse at some point is not a new one. Even before the Limits to Growth report of 1972, many ecologists were concerned that our continual expansion of population and consumption, based on the ever-increasing rate at which we burn finite supplies of fossil fuels, would eventually lead to crises of resource depletion and pollution (including climate change) as well as catastrophic loss of wild nature. Dystopian outcomes would inevitably follow.

This apprehension led environmentalists to strategize ways to avert collapse. The obvious solution was, in large measure, to persuade policy makers to curtail growth in population and consumption, while mandating a phase-out of fossil fuels. But convincing political and business leaders to do these things proved difficult-to-impossible.

The folks in charge used the following arguments to justify their refusal to act.

Population Growth: The choice of whether or not to reproduce is a basic human right, said the authorities. Seeking to interfere with that right also violates religious freedoms. Besides, population growth helps economic growth (see “Economic Growth,” below).

Economic Growth: Policy makers insisted that we need a bigger economy, not a smaller one, to pay for environmental cleanup, more of which seems to be required all the time. Also, we need growth in order to pay back public and private debt, which has ballooned in recent years due to the expectation of future profits and tax revenues. Further, we must raise the living standards of people in poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, and the only way to do that is to expand trade and other economic activity.

Fossil Fuels: Yes, of course burning oil, coal, and natural gas is problematic in the long run, political and business leaders admitted. But until a cheaper energy source comes along, fossil fuels are necessary for economic growth (see “Economic Growth,” above).

Together, these arguments were impenetrable—not because there weren’t any better counterarguments, but because they reflected the short-term imperatives of the economic system itself. It’s a system, after all, that has to keep moving and growing to survive. So, for environmentalists, it was back to the drawing board.

After strategizing feverishly, they came up with what seemed like a winning formula. What if there could be “clean” energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels, and what if economic growth could be achieved without more resource extraction and waste dumping? In short, what if industry could profit by saving the planet? If this really turned out to be the case, two of the basic ecological contradictions of modern society (increasing rates of resource depletion and pollution) would disappear painlessly. Meanwhile, we could simply ignore the population issue and hope that it somehow takes care of itself as economic growth makes people more affluent and therefore likely to have fewer kids. Everybody wins!

And so, starting in the 1980s, big environmental organizations relied to an ever-greater extent on partnering with corporations and on hopes for technological solutions to the growth dilemma. Climate change would be defeated through the development of renewable energy. The looming problem of resource depletion would vanish as a result of more efficiency and recycling. Pollution would disappear with the proliferation of harmless, biodegradable, recyclable materials. Building solar panels, manufacturing “green” products, and recycling old stuff would be profitable and would create jobs. Economic growth would be decoupled from environmental harms of all kinds. Our collective human economic metabolism would continue to increase in scale, but in ways that didn’t threaten wildlife or future generations of humans. Problems solved!

To be fair, environmentalists have also lobbied for carbon taxes, various regulations, and government investment to jumpstart the shift to alternative technologies, and some environmentalists never got on board with the pro-growth propaganda. But usually the promise was front and center: with just an initial nudge, planet-saving would soon become a self-funding growth activity for industry.

And here we are today. The opportunities for green growth have snowballed to the point where they are now seemingly endless. New machines have been invented to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere; these machines are expensive, and enormous numbers of them will be needed to make much of a difference with regard to climate change, so the profit potential is mind-numbing! Engineers have found ways of combining captured CO2 with hydrogen released from water by the application of electricity; the results are synthetic fuels that could replace oil and natural gas in transportation and industry. Those “synfuels” promise to be expensive to produce, so get ready for a torrent of new commerce as fuel users gear up to pay for them! The same goes for electric cars, as hundreds of new models move from drawing boards to showrooms! Meanwhile, solar panels and wind turbines are getting cheaper, so there’s little to prevent renewable energy from crushing the fossil fuel industry once and for all! Make way for green profits and jobs galore!

And yet, during the last few decades, as all these supposedly profitable green solutions have sprouted, our actual environmental problems have gotten worse. The Earth has warmed by more than one degree Celsius above its temperature fifty years ago. Forests are burning as never before. Storms are becoming mega-storms. And the number of climate refugees is climbing fast. Two-thirds of all wild animals have disappeared in this last half-century. The oceans appear to be dying from acidification, overfishing, and giant gyres of plastic pollution. Meanwhile, human population has doubled, from 4 billion in 1974 to nearly 8 billion today.

What’s the hitch? Have environmentalists simply not tried hard enough to sell their no-pain marketing plan? Has insufficient government investment and regulation prevented the big green profit machine from revving up to speed? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the eco-opportunity message?

It’s easy to make the case that government has dragged its feet on regulations and incentives. But if green alternatives are really so profitable, why the reluctance to wholeheartedly support them? Yes, fossil fuel companies have deliberately thrown tacks in the roadway, questioning climate science while hoovering up government subsidies, and they have spent vast amounts both to lobby and contribute to the campaigns of elected leaders. But surely that’s not the only impediment.

Consider renewable energy. Costs for solar panels and wind turbines have continually fallen, so these alternative energy sources should be Exhibit A for the green-growth argument. Unfortunately, however, the difficulties of a complete transition from fossil fuels to renewables cannot be boiled down to a question of cost per unit of electricity produced by solar versus coal. Renewables and fossil fuels are very different sources of energy, requiring different systems to manage and use them. Therefore, the transition will require a great deal of investment in infrastructure beyond panels and turbines themselves.

The intermittency of sunshine and wind imposes the need for energy storage technologies, for much greater redundancy of energy sources, for more robust transmission grids, and for infrastructure to turn electricity into fuels for technologies that will be hard to electrify (such as long-distance airplanes, big farm machinery, and high-heat industrial processes like cement making). All of these will be costly.

Take just the last of these—synfuels, of which considerable quantities may be needed, depending on how much aviation, shipping, intensive farming, and high-heat industry we want to maintain. We can make synfuels from free sunlight and wind, and CO2 captured from the air. It would seem to be a no-brainer. But it turns out that the process is inefficient and expensive compared to doing the same work with oil or natural gas. While sunlight and wind are free, the machines we use to capture energy from them are not; they are built from nonrenewable materials, just like oil derricks and gas pipelines. Fossil fuels are, in a sense, free too. Sure, they need extraction, refining, transport, and burning, but nature has already done the work of concentrating and transforming millions of years’ worth of ancient sunlight into substances that are relatively easy to store, transport, and use. Until these fuels start to get really scarce (which may happen sooner than a lot of people assume), fossil fuels will therefore continue to be cheaper, in many applications, than renewables.

Further, we already have the infrastructure required for finding, extracting, transporting, and using fossil fuels, whereas the production of synfuels would require a great deal of new infrastructure—so much that it would amount to a replacement for much of our existing fossil fuel industry, which took many decades to build.

So, even if solar panels and wind turbines continue getting cheaper, there will still be systemic technological and economic hurdles—in addition to any political foot-dragging—hindering a full transition.

Ugh. That was supposed to be the cheap and easy part of the green-growth solution. Unfortunately, there are even more difficulties to be faced in attempting to maintain a growing economy and an expanding population while dramatically reducing environmental harms.

Some of those problems are summed up in the word externality. In economics lingo, an externality is the impact of an economic transaction that is not priced into that transaction. No one sets out to produce externalities, in the sense that no one pollutes just for the sake of polluting. Pollution is a byproduct of doing business, and industry typically assumes that society as a whole will either learn to live with the mess or pay to clean it up. Only rarely does industry foot the bill (that’s what might be called internalizing the externality). Most of the time, industry profits, while nature bleeds and society pays.

Perhaps you’ve read reports that estimate the future costs of climate change. The numbers are staggering. Surely the prospect of such unprecedented financial losses over the coming decades will motivate today’s industrialists to invest in green alternatives! Not necessarily. Publicly held corporations are required by law to make decisions that result in the highest value to their shareholders, not society as a whole. Next quarter’s profits are therefore all-important. If climate change imposes unbearable costs on society at some point down the line, that’s society’s burden.

Another set of problems issues from our laws regarding private property. If a corporation buys land that happens to contain a major coal deposit, the corporation owns that coal and can mine and sell it. (In some cases, corporations can even buy rights to resources below land owned by others.) But no business made the coal, or the soil above it. Industrialists simply claim ownership by paying a fraction of real value, and then profit from the extraction of whatever valuable minerals may exist. Resource depletion is always our grandchildren’s problem, never ours. And our grandchildren have no seat at the table.

In other words, whether the problem is related to pollution or depletion, the incentives and advantages are all on the side of industry and growth, never nature and conservation, unless government steps in with a regulation or two.

Yes, there are occasional profits to be made from green energy and products. For example, companies sometimes earn profits by making and selling solar panels, electric bikes, biodegradable laundry detergent, and hemp T-shirts (note: I’m setting aside, for now, the full life-cycle ecological footprints of these products when I characterize them as “green”). But until the fundamental incentives and legal structures that support our current industrial growth economy are overhauled, the lion’s share of profits will continue to accrue to industries that extract and pollute. The reason these industries extract and pollute is that most economic activity is directed toward consumption, and most consumption inevitably depletes resources and pollutes. That’s why there’s been no overall shift in society’s direction.

So, what would actually be required to stop the bleeding?

First, we would have to abolish externalities. That would mean requiring industrialists to pay all the real costs of their activities—from mine to landfill. No more free pollution, including the free dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Then we would have to change laws related to the ownership of land. As American economist Henry George proposed back in the 1870s, and as Native Americans have always believed, land should be the common property of all people, and other species should have the right to habitat and survival. Workers should own the products of their labor, but no one should unilaterally own our common inheritance of nature’s bounty.

If we did these two things, most profits would disappear. Yes, people could still exchange products and services, but windfalls from resource extraction and from industrial processes that entail waste dumping would vanish. Therefore, policy makers would have to reorganize political and economic systems so that profit was no longer as important; instead, the well-being of people and planet would be paramount.

Without industrial-scale profits, an enormous amount of debt would come due that could not be repaid with interest. In effect, that would mean the disappearance of mountains of money. Again, policy makers would have to retool the political-economic system so that money and debt play less of a role in people’s daily lives.

There is a third and final realm in which action would be necessary. We would need to take the population question seriously. If population is growing, a shrinking economy becomes an ever-greater burden on each individual. But if population levels are declining, then economic degrowth imposes a smaller per-capita toll, and quality of life could improve as human numbers decline to a sustainable level.

The eventual result of taking these collective actions would likely be a happier society, but a smaller and slower one. Many people already yearn for a slower and happier way of life, and, ironically, under current industrial conditions they are forced to pay extra for simple, healthy food, clean air, and opportunities to feel creative and genuinely useful. The simplicity movement, the permaculture movement, the self-sufficiency movement, the maker movement, the tiny house movement, the sharing economy, and the back-to-the-land movement have all sought to cultivate and channel the understandable human urge to regain personal autonomy, re-weave social relationships, and reconnect with nature. There is advantage to be had in ending our assault on the planet; just not profit in the financial sense.

You see, the real downside of the green-profit narrative has been that it created the assumption in many people’s minds that the solution to climate change and other environmental dilemmas is technical, and that policy makers and industrialists will implement it for us, so that the way we live doesn’t need to change in any fundamental way. That’s never been true. The sooner we get that through our heads, the more time we will have to get used to living happily within limits—without nature imposing those limits in ways that aren’t so pleasant.

Huge tax cuts for the wealthy trigger nervousness in Australian ruling elite

Mike Head

In its delayed 2020 budget, to be handed down on October 6, the Liberal-National Coalition government plans to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic to bring forward the greatest ever handout of income tax cuts to the wealthy elite.

The scale of the bonanza being offered to the rich is evidently causing anxiety in some ruling circles over the potential for the tax package to fuel social unrest.

About 40 university professors and former political, central bank and public service chiefs—billed as “prominent Australians”—are backing an advertising campaign, to begin airing on television this week, opposing the early introduction of the tax cuts, which were originally legislated to be fully implemented in 2024.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg have said tax cuts are a top priority for the budget, supposedly to try to stimulate the economy amid the worst crash and mass unemployment since the 1930s Great Depression. Frydenberg has declared that the package will kickstart spending by putting “more money into people’s pockets.”

The proposed package will certainly put more money in some pockets. It will further boost the fortunes of the top 5 percent of income recipients.

According to tables attached to the original plan for 2024, the tax handouts will give a dual-income household on $400,000 an annual tax cut of $23,280, while a single person on $30,000 will receive just $255, or $5 a week.

This will be inevitably at the expense of the living conditions and social services of the vast majority of the population, especially the poorest members of the working class.

Millions of low-paid workers, students and welfare recipients will get nothing. Instead, their JobKeeper wage subsidies and JobSeeker unemployment benefits are being reduced to sub-poverty levels, starting from September 28.

The bonanza for the rich is on top of the more than $400 billion in tax concessions, subsidies and cheap credit already allocated to employers by the federal, state and territory governments since March—many times more than the bailouts that followed the 2008–09 global financial crisis.

The tax cuts also follow a $144 billion, three-stage, tax cut package passed by parliament in 2018, taking the total cost of the tax handouts to more than $300 billion over 10 years.

The “prominent Australians” include Bernie Fraser, former governor of the Reserve Bank, Stephen Grenville, ex-deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, Michael Keating, former secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and Cassandra Goldie, CEO of the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS).

The list features a tripartite line-up from the political establishment—John Hewson, former Liberal Party opposition leader, Emeritus Professor Carmen Lawrence, former Labor Party state premier and federal minister, and Cheryl Kernot, former Labor MP and leader of the Australian Democrats.

Their primary stated concern is that the tax cuts will not boost the economy. In the campaign media release published by the Australia Institute, a corporate and trade union-backed “progressive” think tank, Ben Oquist, the institute’s executive director, said:

“Cutting taxes for already wealthy Australians will undermine the long-term strength of our public services, like healthcare and education, while doing very little to stimulate economic growth.”

In so far as the people on the list oppose giving tax cuts to the wealthy, and not those on low incomes, it is mainly because people living in poverty are much more likely to have to spend the money, thus boosting profits.

ACOSS CEO Goldie said: “Most low and middle income earners get nothing. Yet it’s only low income-earners that will spend most of any government stimulus.”

Likewise, Keating told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “These tax cuts are incredibly biased in favour of high income earners. Because they’re so biased in favour of high income earners, the proceeds are very likely to be heavily saved.”

Some of the quotes, however, were intertwined with nervousness about the likely political fallout from the glaring inequality of the package. Significantly, Hewson, who lost the 1993 federal election to Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating after proposing a sweeping pro-corporate “Fightback” blueprint of tax cuts and de-regulation, said:

“The LNP [Liberal National Party] naively hope tax cuts are good politics, but they won’t be as they increase inequality and fail to ensure job security and increasing wages with our economy still struggling to exit recession.”

The slogan of the advertising campaign is: “Those demanding tax cuts today will be demanding service cuts tomorrow.” There is no doubt that the package will mean further severe reductions to already deteriorating social programs, including public healthcare, education and housing.

The 2020–21 budget deficit is expected to blow out to nearly $200 billion, just a year after the government falsely boasted, and assured the financial markets, that it would produce a surplus in 2019–20.

Workers queuing outside a Centrelink office in Sydney earlier this year (Credit: WSWS)

Nothing in the Australia Institute’s campaign, however, opposes social inequality itself, which has been deepening for decades. Nor does it point to the underlying thrust of the tax package. The income tax system will be transformed into a virtual “flat tax” regime, with a 30 percent rate applying from $45,000 to $200,000.

This is a major step toward eliminating what remains of the progressive tax principle that resulted from generations of struggles by working people.

No doubt adding to the unease in sections of the ruling class is the fact that the Labor Party opposition, led by Anthony Albanese, more and more openly agrees with rewarding the rich. From the standpoint of those backing the Australia Institute campaign, this increases the danger of working class people turning further against Labor and toward socialism.

Labor voted for the tax package last year, while feigning to have reservations about the final part of the plan, due in 2024, which will result in individuals receiving income of over $200,000 a year paying far less tax. Now, Labor has said it will consider any proposals to bring forward the tax cuts.

After Labor’s vote plunged to a new low of 33 percent in last year’s election, overwhelmingly in working class areas, handing Morrison’s hated and faction-torn Coalition an unexpected victory, Albanese declared that his party would be “first and foremost” in “the business of creating wealth.”

Labor’s backing for tax cuts for the wealthy is no anomaly. In fact, Labor governments began the decades-long rewarding of the financial elite at the expense of the working class. The Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996 slashed the top income tax rate from 60 percent to 49 percent, and the company tax rate from 49 to 33 percent.

This is a global process. Capitalist governments around the world have been competing to satisfy the financial markets and attract investment by slashing high-income and corporate taxes, while spending billions on their militaries and dismantling essential social programs, such as public health care, education and housing.

The worldwide crash triggered by the pandemic has now taken this transfer of wealth to the rich to a whole new level. In Australia, more than three million workers, or over 20 percent of the workforce, are unemployed or underemployed, and employers are decimating wages and conditions. But the top CEO salaries are soaring and by June the wealthiest 20 billionaires had enjoyed a 32 percent surge in their collected wealth to $189 billion.

Japan’s Democrats merge to launch new, right-wing opposition party

Ben McGrath

Japan’s two main opposition parties, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) and the Democratic Party for the People (DPP), merged into a new grouping on September 15. The new party, which also includes some former so-called independents, totals 150 members of the National Diet, far short of the 454 seats controlled by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner Komeito.

The party voted to retain the name CDP and elected Yukio Edano, head of the old CDP, as its leader on September 10. At a September 15 event to mark the new party’s launch, Edano offered vague pledges of mild social reforms while claiming his party now “serves as a launch pad for a change of power.” He criticized the LDP for the various scandals that occurred under former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

“The [Yoshihide] Suga administration is about to be launched. If it attempts to escape from discussing controversies in the parliament by selfishly dissolving the Diet and calling a general election, it is proof that it is engaging in politics with the people in an attempt to maintain power,” Edano stated. He claimed that his new party would take the LDP to task in parliament for the past scandals.

Conspicuously absent from Edano’s speech was any reference to the real situation facing Japan’s working class and youth as well as the issue of Japanese remilitarization and constitutional revision.

Japan’s official unemployment rate stands at just 2.9 percent, but it hides the reality facing millions. In the April-June quarter, Japan’s GDP fell 7.8 percent over the previous quarter, according to data released in August. It is the third consecutive quarter recording economic decline and the worst economic situation for Japan since 1955, according to the BBC.

Government figures show that more than 50,000 workers have lost their jobs since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this is likely an undercounting. In addition, 38 percent of the total Japanese workforce is in low-paid, part-time jobs, where workers lack protections and are at risk of being fired, especially as the economic situation deteriorates following the economy’s fall into recession as a result of the pandemic.

Another 2.4 million furloughed workers face the prospect of being fired as companies look to cut costs. At the moment, these workers have been kept on the payrolls through subsidies from Tokyo, in an attempt to avoid a social explosion. However, these funds are paid to the employers, who use them to cover only two-thirds of workers’ wages.

Voices are calling for an end to this program however. Taro Saito, who leads the Economic Research Department at the NLI Research Institute in Tokyo, stated that the subsidy program “is only delaying the deterioration (of the employment situation) and shouldn’t be kept in place for a long time.”

By launching the new party now, the Democrats are hoping to forestall an explosion of social anger. The new CDP leadership is consciously aware that the LDP has managed to stay in power for nearly eight years, despite scandals and mass unpopularity, due to the Democrats inability to offer a political alternative, a fact Edano acknowledged on September 15. As a result, powerful sections of the Democrat bloc, including former Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and Ichiro Ozawa, a longstanding right-wing figure among the establishment opposition, backed the merger.

However, the CDP cannot offer a political alternative to the LDP because, just like the latter, the Democrats are defenders of capitalism. While the two parties may differ in tactics, their goals are ultimately the same.

The Democrats also hope to block the development of an anti-war movement as the LDP, with the backing of numerous right-wing CDP politicians, pushes ahead with plans to revise the constitution, particularly Article 9, which bars Japan from going to war. New Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has stated he intends to follow in Abe’s footsteps and attempt to add a clause to Article 9 that explicitly recognizes the legality of Japan’s military.

While the Democrats pay lip service to maintaining Article 9, they represent various positions within the political establishment that fear pushing ahead too quickly with rearmament will trigger explosive opposition from the population, where anti-war sentiment is strong. Others within this bloc are striving to rearm on a more independent basis from the United States, believing that a too-close adherence to the alliance with Washington cuts across the interests of Tokyo.

The Democrats have already demonstrated they have no intention of carrying out any genuine anti-war measures. From 2009 to 2012, the Democrats, then calling themselves the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), held power and failed to fulfill pledges such as moving a controversial US military base on Okinawa. Under Prime Minister Noda, a supporter of Japanese remilitarization, Tokyo “nationalized” the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in 2012, sharply increasing tensions and the danger of war with China. Edano served in Noda’s cabinet as minister of economy, trade and industry.

Since being thrown out of office, the Democrats have attempted to posture as opponents of remilitarization by painting the war drive as a product of the Abe government alone. Belying this fact, the DPJ proposed legislation in February 2016 to replace the unpopular “collective self-defense” laws that the LDP had rammed through parliament the previous year that allow the Japanese military to enter conflicts overseas alongside allies. The proposed bill, however, was nearly identical to the LDP’s, merely adding the caveat that military action would take place as part of so-called United Nation’s peacekeeping operations.

The merger of the CDP and DPP is ultimately nothing but an opportunist, maneuver, carried out in the hopes of blocking the growth of social opposition to economic inequality and the drive to war. The new party, like its predecessors, lacks any progressive content and will pursue a similarly right-wing and militarist agenda as the LDP if elected to office.

A genuine struggle against the attacks on workers and youth must take the form of a fight for international socialism against capitalism and all its representatives.

Further revelations about sterilizations and medical malpractice at ICE detention facility in Georgia

Meenakshi Jagadeesan

There have been multiple new reports of the sterilizations and surgical procedures performed without consent on women held in the Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center run by the private firm, LaSalle Correction, has been in the news most recently because of a whistleblower complaint filed last week on behalf of nurse Dawn Wooten, who had worked in a medical capacity at the center until July. Wooten alleged wide-spread, horrifying medical malpractice including mass hysterectomies that targeted the vulnerable immigrant women held in the center.

Detention facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018 (Photo US Customs and Border Protection).

Much of the mainstream media attention, as well as the indignation of the Democratic Party has been focused on the question of whether or not there were in fact “mass” hysterectomies. The point, however, is not the number of surgeries, but rather the fact that such a situation even exists.

It is a well-established matter of public record that the plight of detainees in the vast network of camps run by private contractors, and overseen by ICE, is nothing short of inhumane. The already ugly situation has been exacerbated by the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of which in the network of detention camps are still to be fully exposed. Tales of detainees being packed into small spaces, being denied basic hygiene products, and handed a single mask to protect them from the highly contagious coronavirus are by now widespread. In this context, Wooten’s complaint serves as yet another glimpse of horrors that the Trump administration’s relentless war on immigrants has visited upon the most vulnerable sections of the working class.

Wooten highlighted the role of an unnamed physician that she had named “the uterus collector” because of the sheer number of surgeries he had performed on female detainees. An Associated Press (AP) review of the medical records of four women, and interviews with their lawyers, revealed even more evidence of medical malpractice by the physician, who had apparently performed numerous surgeries without the knowledge or express consent of the patients.

Mileidy Cardente Fernandez, a 39-year-old immigrant from Cuba, was informed that she was getting medical help to treat her ovarian cysts. A month after the surgery, Fernandez, who showed a reporter the scars on her abdomen, still does not know what surgery was performed on her. Cardente told the AP: “The only thing they told me was: ‘You’re going to go to sleep and when you wake up, we will have finished.’” Irwin County Detention Center, when asked to explain the surgery, handed over 100 pages of Cardente’s medical records, none of which mentioned the surgery.

Pauline Biman, who had been held in detention for nearly two years, asked to see a doctor because of abnormalities with her period. She was told she had an ovarian cyst and agreed to undergo a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to remove the cyst. When she woke up after the surgery, she was told one of her fallopian tubes had been removed. The procedure, which Biman did not consent to, made it impossible for her to be able to conceive naturally. At the time of the surgery, Biman was 29 years old.

As immigration attorney Elizabeth Mahern, who has many clients at the Irwin Detention Center told the Guardian, she was “not at all surprised” by the revelations and had been told by “multiple people [who] went to that doctor only to be told they needed to have an ovary removed.” As she pointed out: “That is a piece by piece sterilization, but it’s a sterilization...We think we’re going to find even more women who have had basically their fertility limited or taken away altogether because of the actions of this doctor and the facility to continue to take immigration detainees to him and for Ice to continue to foot the bill and approve their requests.”

This past week, the Intercept revealed that the physician in question was obstetrics and gynecology (OB-GYN) specialist, Dr. Mahendra Amin, based in Douglas, Georgia. Amin, who seems to have at least one other practice, works with Irwin County Hospital, where detainees have been taken for medical treatment.

When contacted by the Intercept, Amin acknowledged that he has performed medical procedures on immigrant women brought in from the detention center, but claimed that he had only carried out “one or two hysterectomies in the past two or three years.” In a statement to the media, Amin’s lawyer, Scott Grubman insisted that his client was innocent of all the charges, and that he was a “highly respected physician who has dedicated his adult life to treating a high-risk, underserved population in rural Georgia.”

Following the exposure of Amin’s name, Bryan Cox, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Tuesday that he would no longer be used to treat patients from Irwin.

The former Irwin employee, who along with a detainee and several detainee advocates, had exposed the physician’s name had a somewhat different perspective: “All I know is, if you go in for anything, the majority of the time, he’s going to suggest surgery...I don’t know why. I just — I don’t know why. He does a lot of surgeries.”

Amin, who is the only OB-GYN serving the detainee population at Irwin, was previously taken to court for filing false Medicaid claims. In the case against Amin, other doctors and Irwin County Hospital filed in the US District Court for the Middle District in Georgia, the government alleged that Medicaid was being billed for obstetric ultrasounds even when it was not necessary. The case was settled out of court with the hospital paying the government over half a million dollars without admitting liability.

Detainees who spoke to the Intercept pointed out that they had no choice but to see Dr. Amin for any gynecological problems despite his reputation for “rough treatment” and performing a large number of surgical procedures. One detainee, in fact, requested deportation after repeated medical visits, because she feared she was going to “lose her reproductive system” if she saw the doctor again. Another stated that “the doctor got mad when I didn’t want to have the surgery.” All of them stated that there were no interpreters present, and they were “unclear about the necessity or purpose of the proposed treatment.”

The testimony of the detainees makes obvious the very real fear and confusion that prevails among the immigrant women forced to seek medical help while in federal custody. The detention network built up by the Obama administration and developed by the Trump administration has frequently drawn comparison with Nazi concentration camps. This latest round of revelations, with its harrowing tales of forced sterilization, only strengthens the chilling parallel.