Breaking-Up Big Tech: Will History Repeat Itself?

David Rosen

Congress, the media and, increasingly, the American public are concerned about the ever-growing power of Big Tech. The recent revelations about Facebook made by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a data scientist, give insight into just how insidious Big Tech can be in its effort to manipulate market power to maximize profit. Many are calling for the break-up of Big Tech companies.

Over the last century, the U.S. has witnessed repeated efforts to break-up, if not outlaw, monopolies, cartels and trusts. The classic effort occurred in the fin de siècle era, from the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), with the breakup of Standard Oil and other companies. Nearly a century later, a similar spirit led to the break-up of American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T, the old Ma Bell) in 1984. While those promoting the current anti-monopoly efforts share much with earlier advocates, today’s efforts face a very different economic situation.

The forces driving Big Tech are just the tip of an economic restructuring that’s been brewing for years. “Since 2008 American firms have engaged in one of the largest rounds of mergers in their country’s history, worth $10 trillion,” The Economist noted in a 2016 study. “Unlike earlier acquisitions aimed at building global empires, these mergers were largely aimed at consolidating in America, allowing the merged companies to increase their market shares and cut their costs.” Consolidation is occurring in all sectors as diverse as airlines, retail, telecom, hospitals & health care, food and even eyeglasses.

A careful consideration of the break-up of Standard Oil and AT&T suggests how the current effort to break-up Big Tech may play out — with unanticipated consequences that could make things worse.

Standard Oil Trust

In 1863, John D. Rockefeller and his partners founded the Standard Oil Company in Cleveland, OH, not to refine gasoline but kerosene.  By the early ‘80s, it controlled the refining of 90 to 95 percent of all oil produced in the U.S. “The price of refined petroleum dropped during the 1870s from about 25 cents per gallon to less than 10 cents,” reports Yale economist, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “much faster than the general price level, and it remained essentially flat in real terms into the twentieth century.” In 1882, the Standard Oil Trust and founded, in 1892, they lost a case in Ohio under the Sherman Act. They then reincorporated in New Jersey as a holding company with 34 subsidiaries.

Concerns were raised not only about the company’s use of secret discounts for railroads to force rivals to sell out, but its power to influence legislators. Ida Tarbell, in her classic 1904 study, The History of the Standard Oil Company, characterized Rockefeller as a “living mummy,” warning, “our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises.”

During the fin de siècle and the early-20^th century, the U.S. suffered through what Mark Twain dubbed “the Gilded Age.” This was the age of the Robber Barons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie; it was also an era marked by deepening poverty, growing unemployment and wide-spread corruption. Between 1897 and 1904, over 4,000 companies were consolidated down into 257 corporate firms. For example, U.S. Steel was formed by the merger of nine of the largest steel companies. By 1904, some 318 companies controlled nearly 40 percent of the nation’s manufacturing output. One estimate claims that a single firm produced over half the output in 78 industries. These corporations became known as “trusts” or “cartels” – and they ruled with a vengeance. One of them was Standard Oil and it was not alone in using predatory pricing, exclusivity deals and other anti-competitive practices to undercut smaller local businesses.

The Dept. of Justice filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Standard Oil in 1909; two years later, it won the case. As a result, Standard Oil was broken-up into 34 companies. The reformed Standard Oil became a cartel with Standard Oil of New Jersey becoming Exxon and Standard Oil of New York became Mobil (and they became ExxonMobil), Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco, and Standard Oil of California became Chevron. However, while each company was overseen by an individual board of directors, Rockefeller and other owners controlled the investment equity for the separate companies.

During the Progressive era, other trusts were broken up, including:

Northern Securities (1904), with backing from Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, it held majority control of Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy (CB&Q) along with the Great Northern along with smaller railroads; Swift & Co. (1905), a leading beef-packing firm that coordinated with other leading meatpackers to fix prices; and American Tobacco (1911), acquiring more than 250 brands and growers, including Lucky Strike, and controlled 90 percent of all cigarettes in 1890.

Now, a century-plus after Standard Oil was formally broken up, the environmental crisis deepens, driven my emissions from the fossil fuel industry.

AT&T Monopoly

On June 2, 1875, while experimenting with his “harmonic telegraph,” Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, discovered that sound could be transmitted over a wire. Bell, not unlike Samuel Morse, is remembered for one famous line – “Mr. Watson – Come here – I want to see you” – considered the first words spoken over the telephone.

A century later, AT&T was, according to Steve Coll, author of classic tale, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T, “the largest corporation in the world.” It had over 1 million employees, controlled almost all U.S. local and long distance telephone service as well as the equipment in most homes and networks; and its Bellcore was the nation’s leading research organization.

The Bell Telephone Company was formally organized on July 9, 1877, with Brazil’s Emperor Dom Pedro II the first person to buy shares in the new tech company. During the early-20^th century, AT&T became a “monopoly,” controlling over four-fifths (83%) of all American telephone service. The Bell companies consisted of two dozen companies that provided local telephone service throughout the country. In the wake of Great Depression, concerns rose in Congress and the media that the communications companies – and AT&T in particular — were plagued with financial abuses. As one observer noted, AT&T “operated free of effective regulation, particularly at the interstate level.”

This concern contributed to the drafting of the Communications Act of 1934 and the establishment of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Act called to “make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, a rapid, efficient, nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communications service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.”

For decades AT&T operated as was a legal – if moderately regulated — monopoly. In 1974, the Justice Department filed an antitrust case against AT&T to break up the Bell system and, a decade later, U.S. District Judge Harold Greene oversaw what was formally known as the Modification of Final Judgment (MFJ) that broke-up AT&T. “What the Bell System did was illegal,” Greene noted. “It abused its monopoly in local service to keep out competitors in other areas. Competition will give this country the most advanced, best, cheapest telephone network.”

The MFJ consolidated AT&T’s 22 subsidiary companies into seven Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs or “Baby Bells”). The new AT&T kept its long-line business and Yellow Pages, but it was prohibited from providing “information services” (e.g., cable television) or manufacture equipment. In addition, it had to provide all interexchange carriers — MCI, Sprint, etc. — equal access to its networks.

A decade after the MFJ, Pres. Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that was envisioned bringing telecom service into the 21^st century. Clinton argued that it would “promote competition as the key to opening new markets and new opportunities.” He insisted that deregulation “will protect consumers by regulating the remaining monopolies for a time and by providing a roadmap for deregulation in the future.” Well, that future never arrived.

The Act “deregulated” innovate telecom service and fostered a wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) leading to the restructuring of the telecom industry. Over the following few decades, the telecom industry was recast and four corporations – AT&T, Comcast, Charter Communications and Verizon — came to dominate, controlling wireline and wireless services as well as internet and streaming services, and moving to acquire media/content businesses and theme parks. In the wake of the break-up of AT&T and deregulation, the U.S. has become a second-tier telecom nation.

Does History Repeat Itself?

Today, history may be repeating itself – but with a postmodern twist. We are witnessing the reemergence of the old Robber Baron cartels. As Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft replaced Standard Oil and Ma Bell, so too have Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, et al., been superseded by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet. These parallel developments – of companies and individuals – bespeaks the fundamental transformation of capitalism over the last century. Yet, it’s a transformation in which nothing fundamental really seems to have changed but only gotten worse.

Perdue University economist John Connor defines cartels as “voluntary associations of legally independent companies that manipulate market prices or industry output in order to increase their collective profits.” He distinguishes between “private” cartels (i.e., “not protected by national sovereignty or by treaties”) and “international” cartels (i.e., those that have participants from two or more nations”). He adds, “private cartels operate secretly to avoid detection.” This development underscores The Economist’s concern that the current round of “mergers were largely aimed at consolidating in America, allowing the merged companies to increase their market shares and cut their costs.”

“Big Tech is a cartel, and must be regulated,” declared an “Opinion Editorial” in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. It took offense at Apple and Google for stopping new users from downloading the Parler, a rightwing social networking app, and at Amazon for cutting the app from its web-hosting services. In the telecom sector, which enables Big Tech to operate, a cartel may dominate. The journalist David Cay Johnston, in a 2012 New York Times op-ed, linked the issue of cartels to the telecom crisis. He argued, “what we’ve witnessed instead is low-quality service and prices that are higher than a truly competitive market would bring.” He went on, noting, “after a brief fling with competition, ownership has reconcentrated into a stodgy duopoly of Bell Twins — AT&T and Verizon. Now, thanks to new government rules, each in effect has become the leader of its own cartel.” He added, “because AT&T’s and Verizon’s own land-based services operate mostly in discrete geographic markets, each cartel rules its domain as a near monopoly.”

One can only wonder if the process by which the old Standard Oil and AT&T were broken-up only to be reconstituted in an even-larger cartels will be the same fate of the current Congressional procedure with regard to Big Tech. Sadly, history seems to repeat itself but only with graver consequences.

UK government adds more draconian measures to Police Bill, aimed at suppression of working class opposition

Ioan Petrescu

The Johnson government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is in the final stages of its passage through Parliament, and set to become legislation early next year.

The Bill, which already included massive attacks on the right to protest, was updated on November 11 and in December with even more draconian measures in a series of post-debate amendments—aimed at suppressing all social opposition as the government goes ahead with its murderous pandemic policies and austerity agenda.

A further 18 pages were undemocratically added to the bill after it had passed through the Commons, and after the second reading in the House of Lords.

The bill was first introduced to Parliament in March 2021 and grants wide-ranging discretion and powers to police officers. It adds “noise” if it is deemed to cause “serious unease, alarm or distress” to bystanders to the list of intervenable offences under the Public Order Act 1986, which enables police to restrict a protest if they deem it risks “serious public disorder”.

The new amendments, inserted at the last minute while the bill is being scrutinised in the House of Lords, were spearheaded by Home Secretary Priti Patel. They follow the widespread disruption caused by environmental activists from Insulate Britain, who blockaded major motorways and roads, including in London, in the lead-up to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Climate change protesters extracted and arrested in Trafalgar Square, London, October 10, 2019 [Credit: AP Photo/Alastair Grant]

One amendment to the legislation is a provision for Serious Disruption Prevention Order (SDPO). It represents one of the most egregious assaults on freedom of speech and assembly anywhere in the world.

An SDPO can be imposed by the courts on anyone convicted of a “protest-related offence”. This category is extremely broad. It includes “infractions” such as holding hands during a protest or possessing superglue near a demonstration.

Under Amendment 342M.2.iii of the new legislation, SDPOs can be imposed on people whose activities “were likely to result in serious disruption”. The chilling meaning of this is that one does not even have to have been previously convicted of a crime or to have ever caused “disruption” to be subject to a SDPOs. It’s enough that the state deems that someone’s activities might cause disruption.

Writing in the i, Ian Dunt noted, “Once the order is imposed, it eradicates your rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Those under an order can be forced to report to the authorities whenever the courts demand it, as often as they demand it. They must ‘present themselves to a particular person at a particular place at… particular times on particular days’”.

“They can also be prohibited from being at a certain place, or possessing certain items, or participating in certain activities, or socialising with certain people, for up to two years. They can be blocked from using the internet to ‘encourage’ people to ‘carry out activities related to a protest’. Someone who used their social media account to promote a demonstration could be found in breach of the order.”

The Open Democracy campaigning web site noted that the amendments around “serious disruption” are actually “protest-banning orders, which can be imposed on people if they have previously been convicted of what the amendment calls a ‘protest-related offence’—or even if they have just been to two protests in the past five years in which they carried out activities that could have caused serious disruption.”

Further draconian measures inserted into the revised Bill are around stop and search. Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, police can use this power if they have “reasonable grounds for suspecting” someone is carrying certain items or something which could be used to violate certain laws, like burglary or theft. The bill proposes that police will be able to deploy a stop and search “without suspicion” if they claim it could avoid “serious disruption” or a “public nuisance”. They can be initiated “whether or not the constable has any grounds for suspecting that the person… is carrying a prohibited object”. It is a carte blanche for invasive police action.

Those who refuse to give themselves up to this intrusion face the full force of the law. Anyone found guilty of obstructing a police officer in the context of a stop and search during a protest faces a jail term “not exceeding 51 weeks”. This could also put at risk legal observers on protests carrying “bust cards”—cards with advice and information on what to do if a protester is arrested, usually including the names and numbers of solicitors who can help them.

Amendment 319A creates an offence of “locking on” or carrying equipment which might facilitate it. It targets anyone who attaches themselves to “a person, to an object or to land”. These all come with a potential 51-week prison sentence. There is no definition of the term “attach”, so it could equally be applied to protestors who link arms during a sit-down protest, or even hold hands. It could apply to someone found with superglue while walking past a protest, or to the disabled activists who chained their wheelchairs to traffic lights over benefits cuts.

While some of the amendments take immediate aim at the Insulate Britain protests, their main target is the working class.

As the legislation was sent to the House of Lords, the government told the second chamber, via a private letter, that it intends to “introduce a new offence of interfering with the operation of key infrastructure, such as the strategic road network, railways, sea ports, airports, oil refineries and printing presses, carrying a maximum penalty of 12 months’ imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both”.

Amendment 319C criminalises “willful obstruction of a highway”. Amendment 319D criminalises the obstruction of “major transport works”, including roads, rail lines or airport runways. The ruling class will not hesitate to use these provisions in the case of a major strike that brings to a halt rail or road traffic. Just last month, anti-deportation activists managed to prevent deportation flight to Jamaica by blocking the road leading to the detention centre near Gatwick Airport. With the police bill such these tactics will be outlawed.

The attacks contained in the expanded bill are being forced through alongside a raft of other legislation curtailing democratic rights. These include the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Elections Bill and the Judicial Review and Courts Bill. Last month, the government quietly introducing new amendments into the Nationality and Borders Bill as it passes through report stage. Among these were measures further strengthening the state’s ability to revoke citizenship without even needing to give notice of their actions.

These assaults on democratic rights are part of a worldwide offensive by the ruling class, aimed at silencing any opposition from the working class. The bourgeoisie is seeking to stifle dissent under conditions of a worsening political and social crisis, deepened by the profit-driven and criminal reopening of workplaces and schools in the middle of a global pandemic.

The Police Bill is in line with similar profoundly anti-democratic moves in the US and Australia to effectively strip millions of working class, poor and vulnerable people of the right to vote. It follows the attacks on the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) by the German state, who have designated the Trotskyist party as a “left-wing extremist” organisation because of its opposition to capitalism. Ever-more staggering levels of social inequality, intensified by the pandemic, are incompatible with democratic forms of capitalist rule.

The Police Bill was met with demonstrations and protests in many cities when first introduced. By July, 600,000 people had signed a collective petition organised by civil liberty and human rights groups against it being legislated. This initiative was framed as an appeal to the government to change course. The Tories predictably ignored the objections raised by a swathe of the British public, hundreds of NGOs and academics, three UN Special Rapporteurs and even Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights. Instead, they have doubled down on their frenzied law-and-order agenda, to better impose the dictates of the big banks and corporations.

There is no constituency for democratic rights among the political representatives of the capitalist class. Despite their vast resources and millions of members, the Labour Party and trade unions have done nothing in opposition to the Police Bill. Labour even originally planned to abstain on the Bill and supports several of its provisions, particularly stiffer sentences for a number of crimes. It only reversed its support following the widespread protests at the police for the brutal attack on the vigil held on London’s Clapham Common following the murder of a young woman, Sarah Everhard, by a Metropolitan Police officer.

Tokyo considers boycott of Beijing Olympics

Ben McGrath

As Japan fully embraces the war drive being led by the United States against China, Tokyo is increasing pressure on Beijing on a number of fronts. These moves are highly provocative and can only push Northeast Asia further towards the brink of armed conflict. Tokyo’s manoeuvres are designed to lend credence to the bevy of lies coming out of Washington to demonize the Chinese.

Last Saturday, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is likely to join the US-led diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February, by not sending a Cabinet-level official to the event, according to government sources. NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, also confirmed the report.

National Speed Skating Oval in China. (Arne Müseler/Wikimedia Commons)

However, Tokyo may try to offset any diplomatic fallout by sending Japanese athletic officials, such as Yasuhiro Yamashita, the president of the Japanese Olympic Committee, or Seiko Hashimoto, the president of the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. A final decision is expected by the end of the year.

Prior to the report, Prime Minister Kishida stated on December 9 in regards to a potential boycott, “I will decide the Japanese government’s response at an appropriate time in the light of national interests after comprehensively considering diplomatic and other factors.”

Washington announced hypocritically on December 6 that it would send no official delegation to the Beijing Olympics in order to ramp up pressure on China over “human rights.” Since then, a handful of other nations have joined the boycott, including Australia, Canada, and Britain.

One of the loudest voices in Tokyo seeking to push the Kishida government more openly into conflict with Beijing, including over the Olympics, is that of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He told a meeting of his Hosoda faction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on December 9, that Kishida’s government was “required to show a political attitude and send out a message about the human rights situation” in Xinjiang. “Isn’t it the time to express Japan’s will?” Abe added. Kishida is from the opposing Kochikai faction.

Abe in recent weeks has also inflamed the situation over Taiwan, which under the “One China” policy is considered a part of Chinese territory. On December 1, Abe made a statement tantamount to a threat of war, saying, “A Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency, and therefore an emergency for the Japan-US alliance. People in Beijing, President Xi Jinping in particular, should never have a misunderstanding in recognizing this.”

Under Japan’s so-called pacifist constitution, the country is supposedly barred from having military forces or waging war overseas. These constitutional limitations have been successively undermined, including under Abe, but Japan’s military forces still nominally require a justification of “self-defense” or “collective self-defense” of an ally like the US to justify their involvement in a war.

The comments drew anger from Beijing, with China’s assistant Foreign Minister Hua Chunying summoning Japanese ambassador Hideo Tarumi for a meeting. Hua reportedly stated that Beijing would “reconsider how it approaches bilateral relations and how it treats Japan” if Tokyo takes further action on Taiwan.

As Abe does not serve in the government in an official capacity, Tokyo has brushed aside his remarks as those made in a private capacity. However, despite resigning from office for health reasons in 2020, Abe still maintains a great deal of influence within the LDP.

Abe elaborated on what such a “Taiwan emergency” could look like on December 13, stating, “In the event of an attack on a US vessel, it could be a situation posing a threat to Japan’s survival, which would allow the exercise of collective self-defense.” In other words, a US-staged provocation in the Taiwan Strait could be seized upon as the rationale for Tokyo to go to war with China alongside Washington.

While claiming opposition to Beijing is based on false accusations of genocide against the ethnic Uyghur population in Xinjiang, other “human rights” abuses, and supposed threats against Taiwan, the countries participating in the Olympics boycott include those responsible for the destruction of entire societies throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan over the past thirty years. These countries—the US, UK and Australia in particular—are also those most actively engaged in military preparations aimed at China.

Japan’s participation would be highly provocative. It reflects the push to deepen Tokyo’s own involvement in the US-led war drive in an effort to cast of its constitutional restrictions and secure its imperialist interests on the Asian continent.

Prime Minister Kishida has also made provocative statements over Taiwan, including giving support to the island’s participation in the World Health Organization (WHO). Under the “One China” policy, with which Tokyo is formally in agreement, Taiwan is not an independent country, but a part of China. Beijing justifiably fears that if Taiwan declares independence, Washington and Tokyo will turn the island into a military base aimed at the mainland.

“We have consistently insisted at the WHO that there should not be a geographical void in dealing with international health issues and have consistently supported Taiwan's attendance as an observer,” the prime minister told the National Diet on December 9. “It is important to widely share information and knowledge of the countries and regions.”

Washington in particular has pushed for Taiwan’s inclusion in the WHO as a means of furthering the lie that China sought to cover up the COVID-19 pandemic or was directly responsible for creating the virus. In this regard, references to “sharing information” are meant to denigrate the efforts of Chinese scientists and doctors to deal with the pandemic while claiming Beijing is hiding information, as well as to promote Taipei as a democratic alternative to Beijing.

Amid this push to demonize Beijing, Tokyo has also pledged to deepen its alliances with the other G7 nations, which issued a threatening communiqué on December 12 directed at China and Russia, following a two-day foreign minister summit in Liverpool, Britain.

On the sidelines of the meeting, Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi met with his counterpart, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The two stated that it was “indispensable to bolster the deterrence and response capabilities of the alliance amid the increasingly harsh security environment.” They pledged to work closely with Australia and India, the four of which comprise the “Quad,” a quasi-military alliance of so-called democracies aimed against China.

The foreign ministers from Australia and India were also invited to the G-7 summit, as were those from South Korea and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), in a manoeuvre to increase pressure on Beijing. In talks with his Australian counterpart Marise Payne, Hayashi once more emphasized Tokyo’s commitment to the Quad. Tokyo is moving ever closer to a dangerous conflict with China that would engulf the region.

Time’s person of the year Elon Musk: Worshipping the pandemic profiteer

David Brown

Time magazine, expressing the spirit of the rich and complacent, utterly indifferent to human suffering, has declared Elon Musk their 2021 person of the year. Musk is the epitome of the most loathsome creatures on planet Earth: the pandemic profiteers, those who have seen their wealth skyrocket while millions of human beings lost their lives, because capitalist governments all over the world refused to carry out elementary public health measures in order to fuel the rise of the financial markets.

The five million official COVID deaths count for nothing, in the eyes of the corporate media, for which Time speaks, compared to the $250 billion increase in the wealth of Elon Musk—$50,000 for every life snuffed out by the pandemic.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk (Wikipedia photo)

Musk’s accomplishments for the year include being investigated for fatal car crashes involving the fictitious “full self-driving” feature on his company Tesla’s cars, pretending that Tesla was developing and going to sell a robot, and watching speculation in his company’s stock elevate him to the position of richest man in the world.

According to Time: “The man from the future where technology makes all things possible is a throwback to our glorious industrial past, before America stagnated and stopped producing anything but rules, restrictions, limits, obstacles and Facebook.”

Time envisions Musk as a modern robber baron whose ruthless determination will transcend meager things like law and society to shape the future. If ordinary workers are killed or maimed in the process, Time considers it a small price for progress. One of the many problems with Time’s narrative is that Musk’s fortune has almost nothing to do with production.

Over the course of the pandemic, Elon Musk’s wealth grew from a mere $25 billion in early 2020 to just over $300 billion in October 2021 before settling to a mere $250 billion today. Detached entirely from any developments in production, Tesla share price grew from only $86 at the end of 2019 to over $1,200 in November 2021. Only in the second quarter of 2021 did Tesla make its first net profits from auto sales without relying on government emission credits or speculation in cryptocurrency.

The cars that roll off of Tesla’s line have a reputation of shoddy production and glaring design flaws. According to tesladeaths.com, 10 people have died using the Tesla’s autopilot feature currently being sold as “Full Self-Driving.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently investigating 11 incidents since 2018 where Teslas using autopilot crashed into parked emergency vehicles.

Tesla’s total market valuation is now almost $1 trillion, roughly five times the valuation of the largest car company by revenue, Toyota. Tesla produces less than 1 million cars a year compared to more than 7.5 million by Toyota. At this point, the main value of Tesla’s stock is not from any actual innovation but the conviction that its price will continue to rise. It has become the most important single driver of the upward thrust of world financial markets.

Musk has benefited wildly from the government decision to prop up financial markets at all cost. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have created a deluge of risk-free money seeking profitable investment, through their policies of quantitative easing. Keeping interest rates low and backing markets through government purchase of toxic assets created the speculative storm for Tesla’s rise, but why did lightning strike that minor car company? Why has its carnival barker CEO been elevated to unprecedented heights of wealth that so enamor the editors of Time?

The Time piece presents Musk as an innovative genius and unquestioningly repeats some of his most absurd claims. Musk claims SpaceX will land its first manned mission to Mars in five years. Given transit times and launch windows, a Mars mission would have to already be in production. The fuel needed to take off from Mars would be roughly 20 times what it takes to return from the Moon, and would, of course, have to be transported all the way from Earth, but Musk optimistically predicts that his company SpaceX will manage to land on the Moon in three years, repeating NASA’s achievement of 1969 a mere 55 years later. As a courtesy, Time didn’t bring up Musk’s ramblings about solving urban traffic congestion with elevators and tunnels.

In Musk’s pseudo-scientific musings, which have attracted a following on social media, an increasingly desperate and disoriented layer of the middle class seeks salvation in technological solutions to the many crises of capitalism; solutions that require no fundamental change in society, nor even any discomfort for the comfortable. Reeling from the blows of the pandemic, social unrest and economic turmoil, this layer is looking for a capitalist messiah.

According to the Time profile of Musk: “This was the year we emerged from the hundred-year plague only to find there was no normal to go back to, a year that felt like the cusp of a brave or terrifying new world, with nobody in charge and everything up for renegotiation.” It would surely surprise the families and loved ones of the 1,200 Americans dying every day from the pandemic that “we” have emerged from the disaster, but this is the claim that underpins the writers’ quasi-religious ecstasy.

“Musk is our avatar of infinite possibility,” they gush, “our usher to the remade world, where shopworn practices are cast aside and the unprecedented becomes logical, where Earth and humanity can still be saved.” Potential barriers to this paradise like public health or democracy should not get in the way: “Perhaps this vision of the greater good comes with a human cost. But if many never voted or signed up for Musk’s wild zero-gravity ride, that is of no consequence to him.”

Time ’s sentiment is echoed by the arch-imperialist Thomas Friedman in a recent New York Times column: “Want to save the Earth? We Need a Lot More Elon Musks.” Describing the development of vaccines against COVID-19, Friedman wrote, “We fought back with the only tools we have that are as big and powerful as Mother Nature—Father Profit and New Tech.” In Friedman’s view, climate change will only be solved “when Father Profit and risk-taking entrepreneurs produce transformative technologies that enable ordinary people to have extraordinary impacts on our climate without sacrificing much—by just being good consumers of these new technologies.”

It is striking that in the second year of the pandemic Time did not do the obvious and give their award to the frontline health care workers who have saved so many lives across the world, nor the scientists and technicians that developed life-saving vaccines. If such awards must be given, an appropriate candidate would be the Chinese health care workers, who by putting the zero-COVID policy into practice and eliminating local transmission have saved millions of lives.

In sharp contrast to those fighting the pandemic, Elon Musk demonstrated his genius at the beginning by predicting there would be “zero new cases” by the end of April 2020. Throughout the pandemic he has tweeted anti-vaccine claims and defied public health orders, leading to widespread outbreaks at the Fremont, California, Tesla plant. His tweets daring the government to arrest him were met with praise from then President Trump and California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom.

He regularly uses his social media accounts to manipulate stock and cryptocurrency prices, which resulted in a slap on the wrist from the SEC. When Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tweeted that Musk should pay income taxes, the man of the year retorted with a juvenile obscenity.

The financial markets don’t care one way or the other about Musk’s vulgarity, but they are drawn to his promise of a future where “shopworn practices” like safety standards are “cast aside” and where wealth never needs to pay lip service to democracy.

US Congress approves massive $770 billion war budget

Patrick Martin

By an overwhelming bipartisan margin of 88-11, the US Senate voted Wednesday to approve the largest military budget in history, nearly $770 billion, some $25 billion more than the Biden administration had requested.

The legislation passed the House of Representatives last week by a similar bipartisan margin, 363-70, and it now goes to the White House for President Joe Biden’s signature.

The bill sets policy for the Pentagon and authorizes countless military programs, ranging from nuclear weapons development to a pay raise of 2.7 percent for military personnel, both uniformed and civilian. Congress must still pass appropriations bills, but in the case of the military these are largely a formality.

A National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has been passed every year by Congress for more than half a century, and there has always been bipartisan support by huge margins. Whatever disputes there are between the Democrats and Republicans, the two parties are united in their support for the military machine that carries out the predatory policy of American imperialism.

Soldiers fire an M1 Abrams tank during Exercise Winter Shield at Camp Ādaži, Latvia, Dec 3, 2021. (defense.gov)

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) praised the Democrats and Republicans who joined forces to pass the bill. “For the past six years, Congress worked on a bipartisan basis to pass an annual defense authorization act without fail,” he said. “With so many priorities to balance, I thank my colleagues for working hard over these last few months, both in committee and off the floor, to get NDAA done.”

The bill authorizes spending of $740 billion for the Department of Defense, $27.8 billion for the Department of Energy, which builds and maintains US nuclear bombs and warheads, and nearly $400 million for activities by other government agencies considered “defense-related.”

Besides the vast personnel costs of a military establishment comprising more than 1.3 million uniformed troops and 1.1 million reservists and civilian Pentagon employees, the NDAA calls for staggering amounts to be poured into the procurement of more warplanes, warships, tanks, armored vehicles and artillery, as well as the development of new weapons systems and technologies.

The single highest hardware expenditure is an additional $6.8 billion to buy 85 F-35 fighters built by Lockheed Martin, adding to the most lucrative weapons contract ever awarded by the Pentagon.

Congress approved 12 more F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters than the Pentagon requested and five more Boeing F-15EX jets on top of the 12 requested, as well as increasing the number of new Navy ships from 8 to 13, added to the existing fleet of nearly 500 vessels, the world’s largest.

The US Navy is larger than the navies of the next 13 countries combined, according to a 2015 estimate, when considering total tonnage of the ships it deploys, including 11 huge aircraft carriers and nine helicopter carriers—as many as the rest of the world combined.

The strategic orientation of the huge military bill is to prepare for war against Russia, China or both. As the New York Times acknowledged, “The legislation’s main focus—shifting attention from ground conflicts in the Middle East in favor of a renewed concentration on Beijing and Moscow—aligns with the foreign policy vision Mr. Biden outlined this summer as he ended America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan.”

The main changes in the NDAA from the White House request were to add even more funding for the build-up against China and Russia. The bill authorizes $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), a cross-services effort directed against China, $2 billion more than the Pentagon initially sought. It authorizes $4 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative, directed against Russia, $570 million more than requested, and increases military aid to Ukraine from the $250 million sought by the Pentagon to $300 million.

The NDAA directs the development of a classified “Grand Strategy with Respect to China” and several additional reports on Chinese activities in relation to military technology, military modernization, and in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The PDI includes $500 million to address “unfunded requirements” (essentially a slush fund for anything the military wants to do in the Indo-Pacific) and refocuses the PDI on activities “primarily west of the international dateline,” according to one analysis. The language of the bill suggests that the PDI will grow far above the baseline spending level it spells out.

The NDAA pledges to maintain Taiwan’s military capacity and includes a “statement of policy” that the United States will “resist a fait accompli” against the country—language that suggests US intervention in any military conflict between Taiwan and China.

“We’ve lost a lot of ground to the Chinese while we’ve been focused over the last 20 years on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and they’ve caught up in AI machine learning, hypersonics and a lot of other things,” said Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on emerging threats. “It’s important to me that we can regain the ground we’ve lost.”

Congressional leaders rode roughshod over the objections of “progressives” in the Democratic Party who claimed that a Biden administration would begin reducing the bloated US military budget and make funds available for social needs. Instead, Congress has passed the largest military budget in history, while the social spending in Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation is unlikely to pass this year, if ever.

The main opposition to the NDAA came not from the “progressives,” but from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who was seeking to reform the process by which the military adjudicates the thousands of sexual assaults taking place each year in its ranks. Under the current procedure, commanding officers have complete control over the court-martial procedure, deciding what charges should be brought, if any, who will be the jurors, and who will be allowed to testify.

The final bill incorporated limited concessions on this issue, but Gillibrand was demanding a completely independent set of military prosecutors outside of the chain of command, which the Pentagon adamantly opposed. She and several Senate supporters voted against the final bill.

The bill also establishes an independent Afghanistan War Commission to “examine” the 20-year US intervention which ended in this summer’s debacle, the collapse of the US puppet regime, and the restoration of the Taliban to power. The bipartisan panel, with equal numbers appointed by the two parties, would exclude any members of Congress or officials involved in US policy for the entire length of the war.

Passage of the NDAA Wednesday followed Tuesday’s vote to raise the federal debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion, necessary for the continued funding of the federal government and regular payments on its debts, a vital step in reassuring the financial markets.

The Democratic-controlled Congress has thus done the bidding of its two main constituencies, Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. While the Democrats profess themselves powerless to enact any increase in domestic social spending, safeguard voting rights or provide legal status for immigrant workers and youth, Congress acts like a well-oiled machine when it comes to the interests of the ruling class.

For both the Pentagon authorization and the increase in the debt ceiling, congressional leaders devised bipartisan shortcuts that enable swift passage of both pieces of legislation.

The debt ceiling was raised after a deal between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell which permitted the bill to pass by a simple majority without a filibuster.

The NDAA passed under an expedited procedure devised by Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and House committees responsible for the military, which brought the legislation to the floor of both houses without permitting amendments or any extended debate.

The two parties agreed to shelve a range of tactical disputes and amendments offered for the purposes of political posturing by one or another senator. Several significant policy shifts were set aside at least temporarily, including imposing sanctions to block the construction of the Nordstream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, repealing the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq, passed in 2002, and extending draft registration requirements to include women.

At least 77 dead and dozens injured after gas tanker explodes in Haiti’s second largest city

Alex Johnson

Relatives bury a woman who died in the hospital from her burn injuries caused by a gasoline truck that overturned and exploded, killing dozens in Cap-Haitien Haiti, Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)

A fuel tanker exploded in Haiti’s second largest city early Tuesday morning after overturning in the neighborhood of La Fossette, letting loose a massive fireball that has resulted in at least 75 deaths and dozens of injuries, according to local authorities.

The explosion took place in the northern city of Cap-Haitien when a tanker transporting gasoline crossed into the Semarie district at the eastern entrance of the city. After crossing a bridge into La Fossette, the driver lost control of the tanker while trying to avoid hitting a motorcycle taxi, causing the truck to flip over and erupt in flames. Hours after the blast, surrounding buildings and overturned vehicles were engulfed in the blaze as firefighters desperately tried to put out the fire and find survivors.

Most of the deaths happened as a result of passers-by rushing to the tanker moments after it tumbled over to collect the escaping fuel, a rare commodity as the entire country has been wrecked by severe fuel shortages. Early reports indicate onlookers rushed to the scene with buckets to scoop up what they could of the tanker’s valuable cargo, likely for resale on the black market, as the fuel spilled toward a nearby pile of trash before the entire tanker imploded.

Monday saw demonstrations in major cities across the country against the government’s decision to raise fuel prices, with truck drivers leaving their vehicles parked blocking major roadways.

The grave shortages of gas and the gruesome explosion resulting from it is the latest manifestation of widespread social suffering gripping the Caribbean nation and its working class. Haiti continues to reel from a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that killed more than 2,200 people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes this past summer. This was on top of the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moise, a killing that has left the political structure of the country in near-shambles and which has paved the way for evermore rampant violence by gangs connected to the government and its security forces.

Local officials indicated that the death count from the tank disaster is expected to rise significantly as rescue efforts are still ongoing, and patients with massive burns are being treated in hospitals. Federal and state authorities said they have deployed two field hospitals to Cap-Haitien to help treat burn victims. Numerous people had been airlifted from Cap-Haitien to a hospital specializing in severe burns in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, according to Doctors Without Borders, the France-based international humanitarian organization that runs the hospital.

Hundreds of local residents looked on from rooftops in utter disbelief at the colossal loss of life from the inferno. “It’s horrible what happened,” said Patrick Almonor, deputy mayor of Cap-Haitien. “We lost so many lives.” He stressed that the situation remained “critical” and also extended an appeal for blood donations, with many survivors sustaining life-threatening wounds in need of urgent treatment. “The city will need a lot of help to come out of this tragedy. The central government is offering to help but we are waiting to see it,” he added.

Interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry visited the scene on Tuesday, saying his heart was “broken” after meeting some of the injured in hospital. He later tweeted that emergency funds had been released to help survivors, although no additional details were provided as to the amount of funds allotted or to what costs related to the disaster the funds would cover.

The heads of the country’s Civil Protection forces and public health system said the biggest worry is the people who survived but were burned by the blast. “Our biggest concern is that a lot of those who were burned are in serious condition, and we could have more deaths in the coming days,” Dr. Laure Adrien, director general of the health ministry, told the Miami Herald .

In addition to the estimated 60 who perished immediately from the fires and the 40 injured, several other residents died from their injuries in Justinien University Hospital, the city’s largest medical facility. Cap-Haitien Deputy Mayor Almonor told the media Tuesday that nearly 50 houses were impacted by the fireball, and at least 42 homes were destroyed. Speaking on the latest tragedy to befall the impoverished and suffering nation, he described a ghastly scene, saying he had seen dozens of people literally “burned alive” and that it was “impossible to identify them.”

Dozens of victims of the initial explosion were quickly rushed to hospitals where bandaged patients clustered next to each other on overcrowded floors, with doctors and nurses facing a shortage of both beds and supplies. Scenes of panic unfolded in the courtyard of Justinien University among dismayed and saddened family members as news of the explosion spread.

One of the survivors, Riche Joseph, spent hours on the floor of the hospital connected to an IV while waiting for a bed. In grim testimony on the events that transpired, Joseph’s sister, Bruna Lourdes, relayed that Joseph stepped out of the house late at night with their mother to look for a meal. After hearing the explosion, Lourdes rushed down from the hillside shantytown in panic. “I’m praying to God that he won’t take his life,” Lourdes said. Authorities said hospitals in Cap-Haitien seemed so dilapidated and ill-equipped to handle patients that 15 victims had to be evacuated by air to hospitals in Port-au-Prince.

The largest contributor to the enormous death toll is the desperation facing millions of poverty-stricken people who have been forced in recent months to scramble for gasoline amid dire shortages of fuel that have sent prices on the black market spiraling, forcing many businesses to close and shuttering countless gas stations. “Following this accident, civilians took the chance to collect the gas by filling up makeshift receptacles—causing a terrible explosion that led to numerous victims and major material damage,” Haiti’s civil protection director Jerry Chandler told AFP.

Prime Minister Henry, a figure deeply implicated in the murder of Moise himself and who represents a faction of Haiti’s venal ruling elite, said that he was “sad and overwhelmed by this tragedy” in a tour around Justinien University Hospital. Presiding over a nation that is one of the most socially unequal in the entire world, the prime minister feigned sympathy for the victims of the tragedy, saying “this considerable loss of human life and all this pain is the result of people living in misery and in a precarious situation.”

In a staggering display of hypocrisy and cynicism, Henry sought to cast blame for the catastrophe on the Haitian people themselves and not on the backwardness and social misery that is the outcome of centuries of capitalist oppression and neo-colonial exploitation, with the Haitian bourgeoisie doing the bidding of the imperialist powers. Henry pontificated, “the lack of education has resulted in people exposing themselves to danger.”

Nothing has been done on the part of the government or official parties, much less US imperialism, to alleviate the social and economic crisis confronting millions. In fact, the entire political structure remains deeply unstable following the assassination of Moise as nearly all the seats in the government’s parliament are vacant and no firm date has yet been set for long-delayed elections, though Henry said he expects them early next year. Less than a dozen elected officials are currently representing a country of more than 11 million people.

Not only is poverty ravaging the country, Haiti faces the prospect of a civil war as rival gangs continue to exert greater damage over the country’s infrastructure and overwhelm the government’s makeshift police forces and seize control over the country’s streets. Thousands of Haitians along the southern entrance of Port-au-Prince have been made homeless in recent weeks after being displaced from their homes by warring gangs.

Gangs have also aggravated the ongoing fuel crisis by blocking tanker access to the two ports in the capital where deliveries are made. The country is also seeing a surge in for-ransom kidnappings. In October, 17 missionaries from the US-based religious charity, Christian Aid Ministries, were abducted and taken hostage by the violent gang known as 400 Mawozo. Authorities have said the gang was demanding $1 million per person, or they would kill each hostage if this payment was not met. Twelve of the hostages remain in captivity after five were released by their captors.

The spike in gang-related violence and kidnappings has led the US government to recently urge its citizens to leave Haiti, citing deep insecurity and the severe lack of fuel attributed to the gangs blocking gas distribution at terminals. Last month, Canada also announced it was pulling all but essential personnel from its embassy. Moreover, the fuel shortage has forced hospitals to turn away patients despite the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic and paralyze transportation systems.

Combined with the severe fuel shortage, Gang-related kidnappings and shootings have prevented aid groups from visiting parts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and beyond where they had previously distributed food, water and other basic goods. “It’s just getting worse in every way possible,” Margarett Lubin, Haiti director for the non-profit CORE, told AP news. “You see the situation deteriorating day after day, impacting life at every level,” Lubin said, adding that aid organizations have gone into “survival mode.”

More than 460 kidnappings have been reported by Haiti’s National Police so far this year, more than double what was reported last year, according to the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti. In one of its recent reports, the agency said Haitians are “living in hell” under constant threats from armed gangs. “Rapes, murders, thefts, armed attacks, kidnappings continue to be committed daily, on populations often left to fend for themselves in disadvantaged and marginalized neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince and beyond,” the report said.

The explosion in Cap-Haitien has exacerbated all of the political, economic and social maladies afflicting Haiti’s working class and poor peasantry and demonstrates once again why a struggle against the entire capitalist system is an existential necessity.