Social media platforms implement aggressive censorship during the 2020 US elections

Kevin Reed

The major social media platforms stepped up their censorship operations before, during and after election day on Tuesday as the ruling establishment—especially the Democratic Party and the US intelligence state—attempted to control online public political discussion and debate.

All of the platforms assembled teams of moderators and used some form of fact-checking labels on content posted by users about the elections purportedly to “slow the spread of disinformation.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies remotely during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on antitrust on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, July 29, 2020, in Washington. (Mandel Ngan/Pool via AP)

In the case of Twitter, posts were fact checked after they were determined by a combination of algorithms and human analysts to be “false claims.” The Twitter labels—which have been used on numerous tweets by President Trump since the polls closed on Tuesday evening—included two different messages.

The first of these Twitter fact-checking labels allows posts in question to be displayed but with a label below them which states, “Official sources may not have called the race when this was posted.” Used primarily on Tweets claiming election victories, the label also contains a link to a Twitter “Election Results” page that hosts the video feed of an “authoritative news source” such as ABC News.

Another Twitter fact-check label covers up the posted content and says, “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Twitter users can still see the content by clicking on a “View” button, but they are not permitted to share or comment on the content in question.

Opting for a reactionary dragnet censorship approach, Facebook has placed a fact-checking label on every single post by all users that in any way mention the election. The fact-check label says, “See the latest updates on the 2020 US Election” and includes a link to the Facebook Voter Information Center.

This extraordinary measure by Facebook—no doubt also accompanied by a mechanism that throttles the circulation of the posts—shows the enormous fear that predominates within big tech that any post about the elections by users has the potential to go viral on the platform and spread outside of their control. As of this writing, the outrageous Facebook blanket labeling of political posts by users has not been mentioned anywhere in the corporate news media.

Other fact-checking labels from Facebook—which were also used on numerous posts from Donald Trump post-election day—are designed to suppress claims about vote counting or election results.

Facebook fact-checking label placed on every single post that contained a comment or link to information about the 2020 US elections

One label says, “Election officials follow strict rules when it comes to ballot counting, handling and reporting,” and the another says, “Final results may be different from the initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks after polls close.” Both of these labels state that their source is the Bipartisan Policy Center and contain links to the Facebook Voter Information Center.

In the case of YouTube, the fact-checking label is displayed below posted videos and says, “US elections: Results may not be final. See the latest on Google,” and includes a “Show Me” button that links to a curated Google search result on the elections with a national election summary at the top of the page from the Associated Press.

Reuters reported that TikTok removed a video by a group called Republican Hype House that featured “a false claim that Michigan found 138,000 ballots in a lake.” TikTok said the video violated its policy against misleading information.

The alignment of the social media censorship operation during the elections with the interests of the Democratic Party and the US intelligence state is evident in a report published in the New York Times on Monday entitled, “What to Expect from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on Election Day.”

Starting off with a reference to the unsubstantiated assertion that social media was misused by Russians “to inflame American voters with divisive messages before the 2016 presidential election,” the Times endorses the 2020 censorship regime of the platforms. The Times journalists, including Daisuke Wakabayashi, write that the social media companies have spent four years and billions of dollars to “clamp down on falsehoods and highlight accurate and verified information.”

In one significant passage, the Times states that one of the Facebook teams—among the 35,000 people working on “election security operations”—is led by a former National Security Council operative. This unnamed individual has been tasked with leading an effort to search for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” by “accounts that work in concert to spread false information.”

The Times also reports that Facebook has set up a “war room” of employees working remotely in order to “identify efforts to destabilize the election.” As reported previously on the WSWS, Facebook has “special tools” prepared for election-related violence and, although the details of these censorship techniques have not been revealed, their purpose is to slow down or squash the spread of information on the platform identified as “inflammatory.”

The Times goes on to state that “Facebook has also worked with government agencies and other tech companies to spot foreign interference.” Exposing the fraud about the unconfirmed threats of “foreign interference,” it is legitimate to ask: Why is it necessary to label the comments of every single user, including all 223 million US users, who is making a comment about the 2020 elections?

The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that the social media companies had been implementing election censorship operations for weeks and developing it right up to the day before the elections. The FT report says, “Facebook, in particular, raced out eleventh-hour policy changes, confirming just hours before election day that it was temporarily disabling its recommendations tool that directs users to join political groups, and also temporarily restricting Instagram users from discovering certain content from users they do not know.”

It is clear that these reports tell only part of the story of what the social media companies are doing to block the exchange of ideas on their platforms and make sure that political discussion that falls outside of the two-party system—especially left-wing, socialist and class-conscious dialogue—gets stifled and is prevented from getting widespread exposure.

Another 751,000 US workers file for unemployment benefits as job growth slows

Jerry White

Another 751,000 American workers filed initial claims for state unemployment benefits during the week ending Oct. 31, the US Department of Labor (DOL) reported Thursday. There were also 362,883 new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the federal program that provides benefits to independent contractors, the self-employed and gig economy workers who do not qualify for state unemployment aid.

The media highlighted the fact that initial state claims fell by 7,000 from the week before and have fallen for three weeks in a row. The narrative of the supposedly robust recovery of the economy will likely continue tomorrow when the government releases employment figures for October, which analysts expect to show an increase of more than half a million jobs. However, job growth has slowed substantially recently since first spiking in May and June when the Trump administration and both parties lifted partial lockdowns and non-essential businesses reopened.

Hundreds of people wait in line for bags of groceries at a food pantry at St. Mary’s Church in Waltham, Mass. earlier this year. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

In September, there were 661,000 new jobs, meaning it would take 17 months for the US economy to return to pre-pandemic employment levels. On Wednesday, the hiring firm ADP, which conducts a separate survey of employers, said private companies only added 365,000 jobs in October, well below expectations for 700,000 positions.

Broad masses of working people are facing an economic and social disaster that is unparalleled since the Great Depression. The total number of workers who have filed jobless claims since the pandemic began has reached 66.7 million, the equivalent of nearly 42 percent of the nation’s workforce.

Currently, the number of people collecting some form of state and federal benefits is 21.5 million, compared to 1.44 million in a comparable week in 2019. The real number of jobless workers in America, however, is far higher. Millions have already exhausted their benefits, dropped out of the labor force or are being forced to work short hours with a sharp loss in pay.

The states and territories with the highest insured unemployment rates in mid-October were Hawaii (11.3 percent), California (9.5 percent), Nevada (9.2 percent), New Mexico (9.0 percent), Georgia (7.6 percent), Puerto Rico (7.6 percent), District of Columbia (7.1 percent), Massachusetts (6.9 percent), and Louisiana (6.8 percent).

The new surge in COVID-19 infections is expected to lead to a further slowdown in job growth. The latest Paychex-IHS Markit Small Business Employment Watch recorded a slowdown in small business hiring in October. At the same time, major corporations, including the airlines, hotels, retail and other industries, are using the pandemic to slash jobs and restructure their operations.

Nearly one in 10 businesses plan to lay off workers during the final three months of the year as a result of the pandemic, according to a survey of human resource executives at 330 companies conducted by the Conference Board last month, which was reported by USA Today earlier this week.

Over 28,000 Walt Disney workers are expected to receive email notices this Sunday informing them that their jobs have been cut at theme parks, resorts, theaters and other entertainment operations. Tens of thousands of other workers have been given layoff notices over the last several days at Boeing (7,000), Exxon Mobil (1,900), Charles Schwab (1,000), Nike (700) and ESPN (300). With a 25–30 percent decline in demand for printing and writing paper, the ND Paper company announced that it was laying off 130 of its 650 workers at its paper mill in Rumford, Maine, where one worker died from COVID-19 and 21 were infected in September.

Even as the number of infections hit a record high of 115,000 on Thursday and the death toll surpassed 240,000, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 542 points and Wall Street enjoyed its best week since April. The corporate and financial elite have already factored in that a Biden administration would secure its interests and quickly dispense with any campaign rhetoric about increasing taxes on the wealthy, particularly with a Republican Senate. The markets were also bolstered by the anticipation of another federal bailout and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s assurance on Thursday that the central bank would continue record low interest rates and its $4.2 trillion asset purchase program, which includes spending $120 billion a month to buy up the bad debts of the banks and other major corporations.

At the same time, the Democrats and Republicans have deprived jobless workers of any significant economic relief in a deliberate effort to pressure workers back into the factories and other workplaces to pay for the mountain of government and corporate debt. The cutoff of government stimulus checks and $600 per week federal supplement to state unemployment benefits has contributed to a massive reduction in personal income, according to a government study cited in a Quartz article, titled, “The boom in US GDP does not match what’s happening to Americans’ wallets.”

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) found that personal income decreased $540.6 billion in the third quarter, in contrast to an increase of $1.45 trillion in the second quarter. “The decrease in personal income,” the report noted, “was more than accounted for by a decrease in personal current transfer receipts (notably, government social benefits related to pandemic relief programs) that was partly offset by increases in compensation and proprietors’ income.

Disposable personal income decreased $636.7 billion, or 13.2 percent, in the third quarter, in contrast to an increase of $1.60 trillion, or 44.3 percent, in the second quarter, the BEA reported. Personal saving was $2.78 trillion in the third quarter, compared with $4.71 trillion in the second quarter.

As a result, an estimated 54 million Americans are going hungry, 30 to 40 million face the danger of evictions and an estimated 8 million have gone into poverty since the pandemic hit.

At the opposite pole of society, the private fortunes of America’s richest 645 billionaires have risen by $845 billion—from $2.95 trillion to $3.8 trillion—and several corporations are seeing profits rise sharply. On Thursday, General Motors reported $4 billion in profits in the third quarter. This follows similar windfalls by Ford and Fiat Chrysler as all three Detroit automakers blew past Wall Street profit projections. Auto factories were reopened in mid-May after a two-month shutdown forced by a wave of wildcat strikes against the spread of the virus in the plants, which rank-and-file autoworkers carried out in defiance of the United Auto Workers union.

Workers who have been forced back into the infected factories are working harder and harder while wages stagnate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday that productivity in the third quarter rose by 4.9 percent, following a 10.6 percent increase in the second quarter, the largest two-quarter increase since 1965. Manufacturing productivity increases were even higher, rising at a 19 percent annualized rate.

At the same time, unit labor costs in the third quarter decreased at an annual rate of 8.9 percent and 18.2 percent in the manufacturing sector. This is driven by a 4.4 percent decrease in hourly compensation, the largest decline since 2009, when mass unemployment after the global financial crash was used to drive down wages, including a 50 percent pay cut for new hires in the auto industry overseen by the Obama administration.

Indian Magna Cosma workers continue strike against victimisation and for recognition of new union

Shibu Vavara & Sasi Kumar

Workers at an auto parts factory in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu have been on an indefinite strike since September 17 demanding the reinstatement of 18 victimised workers and recognition of their union.

Fifty-five of the 75 permanent workers at the Magna Cosma plant in the Sriperumbudur and Oragadam industrial hub, located 55 km southwest of Chennai, the state capital, have joined the industrial action.

Magna Cosma International India Private Limited is a part of Magna International, a Canadian global automotive supplier with 316 manufacturing operations and 84 product development, engineering and sales centres in 29 countries. The conglomerate employs over 125,000 workers in its global network.

Maruti Suzuki workers protesting several years ago to demand freedom for their imprisoned colleagues

The Magna plant at Vaddakupattu, a village in Oragadam, started manufacturing in 2013. It supplies auto parts to major companies, including Nissan, Ford, Hyundai and Kia.

As is widely practised in both public and private sector companies in India, Magna maintains a multi-tier work force to facilitate super exploitation, with just 75 permanent workers alongside 350 contract workers and 200 trainees.

Striking workers told the WSWS they have faced deteriorating conditions for three and half years, enforced by an openly pro-company union affiliated to the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), the union federation of the big business Congress Party.

Early this year they formed a new union affiliated to the Maoist Left Trade Union Centre (LTUC). The management responded by unleashing a witch-hunt against the militant workers who took the initiative in forming the new union. On March 19, it suspended six workers. The management also ordered the arbitrary transfer of another 12 workers to its plant in Pune, Maharashtra. After these workers refused to accept the forced transfers, they were also suspended.

The workers staged a protest and demanded the reversal of the company’s victimisations. On August 26, the permanent workers began a protest hunger strike. On September 17 they launched their strike. Although the strike involves a relatively small number of workers, it demonstrates a determination to fight for better conditions.

However, contrary to the expectations of the strikers, the LTUC has pursued its usual pattern of betrayal. The LTUC’s treacherous record includes its role in a 140-day strike in the same industrial hub by Motherson Automotive Technologies & Engineering (MATE) workers over higher wages, better conditions and union recognition from August last year to mid-January.

The LTUC isolated and betrayed the Motherson workers’ nearly five-month strike. It directed the strikers back to work on January 13 not only without meeting any of their demands but also leaving sacked 51 militant workers. This strengthened the hand of the management, culminating in July in the permanent dismissal of the 51 workers.

As at Motherson, the LTUC is working to isolate the Magna strikers, refusing to call out the contract workers and trainees at the plant. Such a call would inevitably raise the burning issues that the contract workers face—the need for permanency and higher wages.

No effort has been made by the LTUC, like during the Motherson workers strike, to appeal to workers in other Magna plants across India and globally, or to other sections of workers in the huge industrial hub and elsewhere in India.

Instead, the LTUC told the Magna strikers to make futile appeals to the right-wing AIADMK state government and the state Labour department to intervene to resolve their demands, despite the AIADMK’s open anti-working class record.

Some union officials from Sanmina and Ford appeared at the Magna strike and offered their verbal “solidarity” and some financial contributions. Ford Employees Union leader Selva visited the site on September 24, and declared support for the strike and gave some funds. He then told the strikers he would speak to the Ford company about their strike. He was not going to appeal to Ford workers, but to the management—underscoring the unions’ pro-company orientation.

The LTUC directed the Magna striking workers to go to nearby Panchayats (village-level local councils), including Vaddakkupattu, Chenna kuppam, Mampakkam and Panruti, to win support among village people and Panchayat leaders. According to a LTUC Facebook report, “they denounced the evil actions of the Magna management and said Tamil Nadu government should take action.” So, the campaign was again directed to appeals to the AIADMK government.

As well as the Motherson sellout, the Magna strikers must draw lessons from the bitter experience of workers at the Japanese-owned Maruti Suzuki car assembly plant at Manesar in the northern Indian state of Haryana.

In a monstrous company-government frame-up, 13 militant Maruti Suzuki workers are in jail serving life sentences for a murder they did not commit. This vendetta was unleashed in July 2012, in an attempt to suppress growing militancy at the plant, including strikes, protests and plant-floor sit-downs from mid-2011 against the company’s slave labour conditions.

India’s capitalist rulers were determined to persecute these young workers and make an example of them because they dared to challenge the brutal working conditions that prevail in the country’s globally-connected auto industry.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the WSWS launched a global campaign to win the release of the Maruti Suzuki workers, exposing this conspiracy, which involves the entire political establishment, the courts and the police.

The attack on the Maruti Suzuki workers was initiated by Haryana’s Congress state government and supported by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance that held power in New Delhi until May 2014. When these governments passed into the hands of the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP), the frame-up continued.

But no less determined to imprison the jailed Maruti Suzuki workers in a wall of silence are the Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India—and their respective trade union affiliates, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All India Trades Union Congress (AITUC).

The Stalinists are afraid that any fight to defend the jailed Maruti Suzuki workers would disrupt their political partnership with the Congress Party and their cosy relations with the employers. Exposure of the frame-up would also put the lie to their claim that the courts and other institutions of the Indian Republic constitute a “democratic” bulwark against the ruling class and the employers.

New documents show Mueller investigation unable to concoct charges against Assange and WikiLeaks

Oscar Grenfell

Previously redacted portions of the Mueller report into supposed Russian interference in the US, released this week, have shown that despite every effort, the Justice Department was unable to concoct evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on the part of WikiLeaks or Julian Assange in relation to their 2016 publications exposing the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton.

The revelation is the latest proof of the fraudulent character of the entire “Russiagate” narrative, used not only to smear Assange, but also to justify expanded online censorship and to push for greater US military aggression. It is evidence that the US state had been attempting to manufacture criminal charges against Assange, before an indictment was finalised in late 2017 over WikiLeaks’ completely unrelated 2010 and 2011 publications.

Assange interviewed by CNN in August, 2016. The network had a strap beneath him reading “Political disruption” throughout most of the interview. (Credit: Screenshot CNN online broadcast)

The 13 new pages of the 448-page Mueller report were released on Monday as the result of a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Buzzfeed News.

The Justice Department has sought to block the full release of the report since it was brought down in March, 2019, including through the use of extensive redactions. In September, a US judge ruled that the government had violated the law by withholding sections of the report without legitimate cause, labelling some of the redactions as “self-serving.”

The contents of the new material shows why the Justice Department was so intent on keeping it hidden. The documents disclose that despite a two-year investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller came up with nothing to prove the collusion between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence that had been trumpeted by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and the corporate media.

This is in line with the character of the report as a whole, which was unable to substantiate any of the “Russian interference” in the 2016 US election that the Mueller investigation had been tasked with identifying.

The new pages reveal that one of the focuses of the Mueller investigation was laying the groundwork for criminal charges against Assange and WikiLeaks under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

This was premised on the assertion that the internal Democratic National Committee (DNC) communications and emails of Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, were hacked by the GRU Russian military intelligence agency before being published by WikiLeaks.

In May, it was revealed that CrowdStrike, a cyber security company handpicked by the Democratic Party to examine the DNC servers had been unable to find evidence that documents had ever been exfiltrated from them. In other words, there may not have been any successful hack, Russian or otherwise.

This aligned with Assange’s repeated insistence that Russia was not the source of the material. It lent weight to the claims of WikiLeaks collaborator and former British diplomat, Craig Murray, who has stated that he has personal knowledge of the source of the DNC documents, and that they were provided by “disgruntled insiders.”

Significantly, even though it is based on the discredited Russiagate framework, the newly-released material from the report concluded that there was no basis for laying conspiracy charges against Assange.

“The most fundamental hurdles” to such a prosecution, it stated, “are factual ones.” There was not “admissible evidence” to establish a conspiracy involving Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks and Trump campaign insider Roger Stone.

To justify the fact that all of the resources of the American state were insufficient to manufacture evidence of the theory that it had promoted for years, the Mueller report pathetically claimed that one of the problems was that WikiLeaks’ communications with the GRU were encrypted.

“The lack of visibility into the contents of these communications would hinder the Office’s ability to prove that WikiLeaks was aware of and intended to join the criminal venture comprised of the GRU hackers,” the report stated.

This is truly clutching at straws and desperately attempting to save face. Mueller was left to claim that the only possible evidence of a conspiracy was contained in encrypted messages that he and the intelligence agencies had presumably never seen!

The report concluded that an attempted prosecution would fail. “[S]uccess would also depend upon evidence of WikiLeaks’s and Stone’s knowledge of ongoing or contemplated future computer intrusions—the proof that is currently lacking,” it stated.

The centrality of Stone to the attempts to concoct charges against Assange underscores the frame-up character of the entire operation. After the Mueller report was finalised, Stone was successfully prosecuted. But it was not for involvement in any conspiracy. Rather, Stone was sent to prison for falsely claiming under oath that he had ever had any relationship with WikiLeaks or Assange.

The new documents show that Mueller was intent on establishing the grounds for a prosecution of Assange, with the precise allegations and charges a secondary matter entirely subordinate to the overarching goal of imprisoning the WikiLeaks founder.

Thus the Mueller investigation extraordinarily canvassed the possibility of charging Assange with having made “illegal campaign contributions” to Trump. These contributions were not financial, but were the publication of the DNC and Podesta emails.

Mueller was well aware that this would be an attempt to criminalise the publication of true and newsworthy information, concluding that such a prosecution would come up against the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Significantly, the Mueller report also warned that a conspiracy prosecution, even if evidence could be concocted, would confront similar obstacles. Precedent, it noted, had established that “the First Amendment protects a party’s publication of illegally intercepted communications on a matter of public concern, even when the publishing parties knew or had reason to know of the intercepts’ unlawful origin.”

The Russiagate narrative had already been entirely discredited before the release of new information from the Mueller report.

But the material further highlights the flagrant illegality of the US attempt to extradite Assange from Britain, and prosecute him on conspiracy and Espionage Act charges over WikiLeaks 2010–11 publications of the Iraq and Afghan war logs, US diplomatic cables and files from Guantánamo Bay.

All of the First Amendment issues relating to the 2016 publications apply with equal force to the 2010–11 releases. They were obtained by the courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who had lawful access to them as an army intelligence analyst. The documents were published by Assange, who acted as an editor and a journalist exposing evidence of war crimes, human rights abuses and diplomatic intrigues.

That Mueller was seeking to lay the grounds for a criminal prosecution against Assange, on matters completely unrelated to those he has since been charged with, demonstrates the vindictive and political nature of the US Justice Department’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder.

It paints a picture of a US state apparatus, intent on silencing Assange because he exposed their crimes, searching for years to find some basis for bringing legal action against him. Virtually all of the evidence relating to the 2010–11 publications has been known for a decade. The Mueller report suggests, however, the US state may first have been seeking to charge Assange over the 2016 releases. Only as it became clear that this would fail was a December, 2017 indictment filed in relation to the 2010–11 material.

That indictment, which has since been repeatedly superseded, was based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the exact same legislation Mueller unsuccessfully investigated prosecuting Assange under.

The clearly political character of the entire process means that Assange’s extradition to the US would be unlawful. Existing treaty arrangements between Britain and the US explicitly ban extraditions for offences of a political nature.

The latest Mueller material has been overshadowed by the 2020 US election crisis. It has been ignored by almost all of the publications that promoted the fraudulent Russiagate campaign, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The timing, however, is somewhat fitting. For the past four years, the Democrats, in line with their character as a party of Wall Street and the intelligence agencies, have sought to divert all opposition to the Trump administration into right-wing channels, including feverish claims that the president is an agent of Russia.

The current election crisis has underscored the utter bankruptcy of that strategy.

Trump falsely claims “fraud” as vote counting erases his leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania

Patrick Martin

In an appearance on national television Thursday, President Donald Trump denounced what he falsely called “fraud” as the basis of his impending defeat in the 2020 presidential election. He was reacting to his plummeting leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania as mail ballots, predominantly from Democratic voters, were being counted in both states, despite lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign.

Trump’s televised appearance made clear that, for the first time since the ritual of presidential concessions was established in 1896, the defeated candidate is refusing to concede, introducing into the next two and a half months an element of extreme crisis. Trump’s combative response to his impending defeat contrasts with the stance taken by the Democrats in 2016, when president Barack Obama insisted that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton concede the very evening of the election even though she had a massive lead in the popular vote.

President Donald Trump leaves the podium after speaking at the White House, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

While Trump at present lacks the political support to overturn the results of the election, he is laying the basis for a campaign to present himself as the victim of a “stab in the back.” This narrative will be used by himself and members of his family to perpetuate the development of a fascistic movement, which will become a permanent and significant presence in American politics.

The president took the podium in the White House Briefing Room at 6:45 p.m., in the midst of the network evening news broadcasts, but ABC, NBC, and CBS all cut away from his remarks as he began to voice a series of blatantly false and self-contradictory claims about the process of vote counting in the five states where results in the presidential voting remain in question.

The decision of the three networks—all owned by giant media corporations—to cut away from a presidential appearance was unprecedented. It indicated that major sections of corporate America have lost confidence in Trump, and fear that his attempt to defy an electoral verdict will provoke massive popular opposition and destabilize the United States politically.

Similarly, Wall Street continued to rally based on the expectation of a Biden victory, thought to signify increased likelihood of a new federal bailout of big business, along the lines of the bipartisan CARES Act passed last March by Congress.

Another indication of Trump’s increasing isolation was the absence of Vice President Mike Pence at the briefing, or any other significant figure in the Republican Party. After Trump’s adamant declaration, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from me,” no leading congressional Republican issued a statement of support.

Trump was reacting viscerally to the sharp decline in his electoral fortunes. In Georgia, where he had a lead of more than 600,000 votes after the counting of in-person votes cast on November 3, the margin between the two candidates had shrunk by Thursday night to only 1,805 votes, with thousands of mail ballots still uncounted. In Pennsylvania, where Trump led by 700,000 votes on Election Day, the counting of mail ballots had reduced his margin to only 26,319 by late Thursday, with several hundred thousand mail ballots still to be counted in the state.

It was clear from the trends that by Friday Biden will be in the lead in both states, which have 36 electoral votes between them, enough to secure the majority in the Electoral College for the former vice president. It is likely that both network consortiums—ABC, CBS and NBC, and Associated Press-Fox News—will declare Biden the victor in the presidential election Friday.

Trump’s remarks were an attempt to preempt this. While emphasizing his campaign’s legal challenges to the vote counting, the initial results have not been promising. Judges in Michigan and Georgia flatly rejected the Trump campaign’s complaints about process violations. He offered not a scrap of evidence to back his charges of vote fraud. Failing to win support in the judiciary, Trump is appealing to sections of the fascist right to take action now to disrupt vote counting and prevent the official validation of his electoral defeat.

Georgia has a Republican governor and secretary of state, the chief administrator of the election process. In Pennsylvania, the majority of the counties now reporting mail ballot votes for Biden are Republican-controlled. Because of Trump’s dismissal of coronavirus fears, Democratic voters predominate in the mail balloting, even in Republican counties.

Trump suggested, without offering any evidence, that large numbers of votes were being “dumped” into the system if they were for Biden and removed if they were for him. But at every level, both Democratic and Republican officials were involved in vote counting.

In the two states where Biden, rather than Trump, is in the lead, the demand of the Trump campaign is to count the votes. In the states where Trump is in the lead, the demand is to “stop the count.” This contradiction only underscores the cynical falsifications of the Trump campaign: count my votes, but not his.

In Nevada, where Biden now leads by 11,428 votes, a small number of votes were counted in Washoe County (Reno) and Clark County (Las Vegas), as well as in the thinly populated rural counties, resulted in a net gain of about 3,500 votes for Biden. The bulk of the uncounted votes, some 51,000, are in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold, and these will be reported sometime Friday.

Only in Arizona is the Trump campaign gaining votes, after continued vote counting in Maricopa County (Phoenix) which accounts for 65 percent of the statewide total. But it was unclear whether Trump would win enough votes among the 400,000 uncounted votes to overcome Biden’s 60,000-vote statewide lead.

In order to win in the Electoral College, Trump must win Pennsylvania (20), North Carolina (15), Georgia (16) and either Arizona (11) or Nevada (6). If the four states—besides North Carolina, which has postponed a final count until next week—fall to Biden, his Electoral College vote would reach 306, the same as Trump’s total in 2016.

The focus on the Electoral College should not distract from acknowledging that Biden has already surpassed the previous record for the popular vote, set by Barack Obama in 2008, of 69.5 million. His vote total has already surpassed 73 million and is likely to approach 80 million votes once the late-counting, heavily Democratic West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington are fully counted.

All the legal challenges issued by the Trump campaign to the vote-counting process so far have been rebuffed by the judiciary. A superior court judge in Georgia dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign against vote counting in Savannah, Georgia. In Michigan, a state judge rejected a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign over vote counting in Detroit.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Attorney General William Barr had sent a memo to federal attorneys suggesting that they had the power to send armed federal agents into vote-counting centers across the country to suppress fraud. But Trump made no reference to such measures in his remarks at the White House Thursday evening.

2020 election results explode the identity politics narrative

Eric London

An initial examination of the voting data in the 2020 presidential election exposes as false the racialist narrative of American politics that is relentlessly promoted by the Democratic Party. Several aspects of the election data are particularly significant in showing the predominance of socioeconomic factors in the outcome.

A comparison of the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections shows that the major factor that turned the election was the impact of the pandemic and the economic crisis on a substantial section of working-class whites who cast their vote for Biden.

There was a substantial increase in turnout in the working class as well as sections of the lower middle class hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. This helped Biden widen the margin of his popular vote victory, which is expected to rise to an estimated 6 or 7 million votes—double the margin Clinton beat Trump by in 2016. Over 66 percent of eligible voters cast votes this year, the highest since 1900, before women had the right to vote. Turnout has not reached 60 percent since 1968 when it was 60.7 percent.

There was a pronounced increase of votes against Trump among men, white men and whites without college degrees. In states that were decimated by the coronavirus pandemic—including Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona—this shift among white men accounted for Biden flipping the state.

Biden won the votes of an estimated 8.6 million more men (of all races) than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, while Trump’s vote among men increased by roughly 2.2 million from 2016. Among all white voters, Trump won 57 percent of the vote, the same as in 2016. Biden, however, won 42 percent of white voters, an increase from the 37 percent won by Clinton in 2016. Overall, an estimated 6.4 million more white people voted for the Democrat in 2020 than in 2016.

Votes by Gender in the 2020 US elections

Among white men, Trump suffered a slight decline in 2020, winning an estimated 28.77 million votes in 2020, down from 28.83 in 2016 despite the overall increase in white male turnout. While Biden still failed to win a majority of this cohort overall, he won roughly 5.4 million more votes from white men than Clinton won in 2016.

Votes by Gender and Race in the 2020 US elections

In 2020, both Trump and Biden increased votes from white people without college degrees. While Trump was supported by an estimated 3.1 million more such voters in 2020 than he did in 2016, Biden turned out roughly five million more than Clinton did. In other words, Biden won the votes of “new” voters in this category by a 60-40 margin. Trump’s share of the vote fell slightly from 2016 while the Democratic share increased from 29 to 35 percent.

The 2020 results also show a shift against Trump in the working class.

There were roughly 23 million more votes cast for either Biden or Trump by voters with family incomes below $100,000 than were cast for Clinton or Trump in 2016. Among workers with family incomes less than $50,000, Trump won an estimated 2.1 million more votes than he did in 2016, but Biden won 4.9 million more than Clinton. This increased the share going to the Democrats from 53 percent in 2016 to 57 percent in 2020.

Among the wealthier cohort, Trump significantly increased his support. In 2016, Clinton and Trump tied among those with family incomes above $100,000, with each winning roughly 21.8 million votes. But in 2020, several million affluent people switched to support Trump. Wealthier voters supported Trump because his policy of “herd immunity” has fed the rising stock market and enriched this parasitic layer.

But as a share of the electorate, voters with family incomes over $100,000 declined substantially from 34 percent to 28 percent, an estimated 3 million vote decline from 2016 to 2020.

This is not so much the product of a decline in turnout among the rich, who always vote with far higher consistency. It primarily reflects the worsening economic position of substantial sections of the lower middle class, who went from having family incomes above $100,000 in 2016 to falling into the $50,000-$100,000 range in 2020. This layer, seriously impacted by mass unemployment caused by the pandemic, now makes up 38 percent of the electorate, a massive increase from 30 percent in 2016.

The “new” voters in the $50,000-$100,000 category (that is, those who either were in the higher bracket in 2016 or did not vote for either of the two main parties in 2016) cast an estimated 14.1 million votes for Biden versus 5.2 million for Trump. While Trump won this category by a 49-46 percent margin in 2016, Biden won it in 2020 by a 56-43 margin.

Votes by Income in the 2020 US elections

Particularly significant is the fact that Trump substantially increased support among women, the rich, and wealthier sections of the African-American, Latino, Asian-American and LGBT populations.

Among African-American men, Trump increased his share of the vote from 13 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020, accounting for an increase of roughly 500,000 overall votes. Democrats only increased black male turnout by some 600,000, meaning Trump and the Democrats split all “new” African-American male votes almost 50-50.

Among African-American women, Trump more than doubled both his vote total and his share of the vote. Trump won just four percent of African-American women in 2016, a total of about 383,000 votes. In 2020, Trump won eight percent, or 868,000 votes. These are unprecedented gains.

While exit polls do not break down the African-American vote by income category, it does break the overall “nonwhite” vote based by education, which is the closest proxy for income available. And Trump won an estimated 1.5 million more votes from this generally wealthier section of the population—a total of 5.4 million—than in 2016. He increased his share of the vote from 22 percent in 2016 to 27 percent in 2020.

Votes by Education in the 2020 US elections

The figures among Latino voters are similar to those for African-Americans and Asian-Americans. Among LGBT voters, Trump tripled his total votes and doubled the share of the overall LGBT vote. In 2016, Trump won roughly 950,000 votes from LGBT people—14 percent of the total to the Democrats’ 77 percent. In 2020, Trump won about 3 million votes, or 28 percent of the total to the Democrats’ 61 percent.

Although there was not an increase in turnout among young voters (aged 18-29), Trump lost 600,000 votes from this cohort compared with 2016, while the Democrats gained nearly two million. Young people made up slightly less of the electorate than in 2016, but the turn against Trump was very substantial.

The undermining of the racialist narrative infuriates those who make it their professional responsibility to promote racial divisions, claiming that the United States is based on “white supremacy” and that Trump is the natural representative of white men. Maintaining the racialist narrative is critical to the social interests of privileged layers of the upper middle class that use it to advance their own interests.

The New York Times’ Charles Blow wrote a column Wednesday pointing to some of the shifts in the votes of African Americans indicated above but concluding that it merely underscores “the power of the white patriarchy” and its ability to “reach across gender and sexual orientation and even race.” That is, Blow absurdly claims, a growing section of (wealthier) African Americans and other minorities voted for Trump in order to uphold white supremacy.

The dominant factors influencing shifts in voting patterns are socioeconomic in character, but this does not automatically mean that workers are conscious of their independent class interests. Workers are subjected to all sorts of influences and manipulations, including those voting for Trump, who in his own noxious way sought to appeal to economic uncertainties and capitalize on hostility to the Democratic Party, which is as much the party of bank bailouts, war and social inequality as the Republicans.

The great danger is that, within the framework of the existing political system, controlled by two capitalist parties, there is no genuine expression of the social and economic interests of the vast majority of the population, the working class of all races and genders.

The task of socialists is to develop within the working class a genuine class consciousness and to build a political movement based on their common class interests in opposition to the capitalist system.

India: How COVID-19 Accelerates Malnutrition in Women and Children

Akanksha Khullar

The COVID-19 pandemic and measures to contain it have had inevitable negative impacts. Rising unemployment, food supply disruption, a downturn in international trade, etc, pose serious challenges to the already precarious Indian food and nutrition security. Women and children will continue to bear a disproportionate burden of the pandemic-accelerated health and food crisis.

India’s Malnutrition Profile

There are about 189.2 million undernourished people in India; a majority of whom are women and children. Malnutrition and the widespread prevalence of stunting, wasting, and nutritional deficiencies among women and children are well-recognised elements of India’s profile in the Global Hunger Index.

According to government figures from the year 2015-2016, 22.9 per cent of women in the 15-29 age group are underweight, as compared to 20.2 per cent of men in the same age group. Further, according to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020 report, in 2016, nearly 51.4 per cent of women of reproductive age in India were suffering from anemia.

The prevalence of undernutrition and anemia among almost half of the women in India, especially pregnant women, puts a serious burden on the country’s food security. This is predominantly because undernourished mothers can trigger cycles of undernutrition by passing on nutrient and vitamin deficiencies to newly born babies.

In fact, approximately 60 million—which is roughly about half—of all children in India are underweight, about 45 per cent are stunted, 21 per cent are wasted, 57 per cent are vitamin A deficient, and 75 per cent are anemic.

Malnutrition has thus become the most significant contributor to the under-five mortality rate in India. While India’s under-five mortality rate for males is 38.4 per cent, it is approximately 40.4 per cent for males.

These statistics indicate that undernutrition in India is a gendered problem. The root cause for these male-female differentials can be found in native socio-cultural norms and mindsets. Such norms, rooted in patriarchy, would suggest that distribution of resources—including food—should be done in a hierarchical manner, with male members of the family typically at the top of the ladder.

This perception problem is compounded by factors such as poverty, access to public health facilities, decision-making power, etc, which widen the gender gap in access to food and nutrition.

COVID-19's Impact

The pandemic has threatened India's food security landscape across all four indicators: availability, access, stability, and utilisation of resources. It could in turn further intensify the existing problem of malnutrition among women and children.

The country-wide lockdown led to a sudden cessation of economic activity and triggered large-scale unemployement. According to a joint report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), nearly 4.1 million Indians have lost their jobs during this time.

People often adopt coping mechanisms such as purchasing less food, substituting wholesome food with less nutritious alternatives, and decreasing the number of meals eaten on a day-to-day basis to deal with the crisis and reduced incomes. A reduction in financial security risks increasing gaps in intra-household distribution of resources, which could further negatively impact women in the household. Further, women account for 81 per cent of the country’s workforce employed in the informal sector. The pandemic's impacts also cut off their access to steady jobs and salaries.

The disruption of food supply chains, labour shortages, limited production, and restricted mobility also have a direct bearing on pregnant women's food and nutrition consumption. For instance, a shortage of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, etc could potentially compromise nutrient supply to pregnant women and new mothers. This in turn accelerates undernutrition and lowers immunity in the midst of a pandemic, making them more prone to infections and diseases.

COVID-19 has also substantially affected the network of government-run health and development centres, popularly known as Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). These centres are responsible for providing food and primary healthcare, among others, to children below six years of age, and mothers—especially those from low-income-families—through anganwadi workers.

Although the Delhi government on 25 August announced the resumption of work by ICDS centres and anganwadi workers, it also noted that issues related to hunger and malnutrition would not be covered in the scope of activities.

Conclusion

There are clear pathways in which the pandemic intersects with a fragile food and nutrition security landscape in India. Together, this will very likely have a disproportionate impact on women and children, as detailed above. Conversations around how resiliency can be built into addressing the widening gender gap in access to nutrition must thus play a bigger part in policy considerations.