Trump administration suspends DACA applications and renewals

Sam Dalton

On Tuesday, July 28, Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced a new round of attacks on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. He declared the agency would not accept new applications and would only grant one-year extensions to the current recipients on a case-by-case basis. Some 66,000 children and young people who would have been eligible to apply this year are now facing deportation.

Wolf said the program “presents serious policy concerns that warrants its full rescission” (i.e., its complete destruction), a step that requires “additional careful consideration.” Wolf went on to absurdly frame the vicious attacks as a cautious move while the DHS considers its next steps. In reality, the DHS is only postponing mass deportations of tens of thousands of young people, most of whom have lived nearly their entire lives in the United States, until after the November 3 election.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf speaks with the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security regarding the FY21 budget. (Credit: DHS/Tara A. Molle)

Instituted through an executive order by Barack Obama at the end of his first term in 2012, the DACA program offered limited rights to around 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children. In order to qualify, immigrants must have been under 16 at the time of arrival, have lived in the US for the previous five years, have been enrolled in or graduated from high school or served in the military, and not have committed any serious crimes.

The program provides eligible youth a temporary immigration status that protects them from deportation and gives them the right to hold a job or go to college. Depending on the state they live in, DACA recipients could be eligible for drivers’ licenses, pay tuition rates charged to in-state residents, and receive state-funded educational grants and loans, as well as state-subsidized health insurance. Once obtained, DACA status has to be renewed every two years.

At its inception in 2012, the program was cynically conceived as a vote-catching device for the Obama re-election campaign, giving a pro-immigrant veneer to a reactionary Democratic administration that had accelerated anti-immigrant policies, as Obama deported more undocumented immigrants than any previous president. Significantly, DACA offered no pathway to citizenship and meant that the 700,000 youth who registered with the federal government were at the mercy of the capitalist state. Under the impression they were forging themselves a future in the US, the recipients of DACA status had to supply the government with their address, employment status, and other basic information, to be used against them when a new administration took office.

After initially declaring support for the program in early 2017, President Trump sought to use DACA as a bargaining chip in his wrangling with the Democrats over funding for the border wall and other attacks on immigrants and refugees. In September 2017 he rescinded Obama’s executive order, but immigrant rights groups filed suit, claiming, among other things, that the DHS had violated federal administrative procedures in its haste to put DACA recipients in jeopardy.

Currently 450,000, or 2 percent, of students in the US are undocumented, and around half of those are eligible for DACA. Without these protections, many students might be deported before they finish their studies. It is also estimated that around 15,000 educators in the country are able to work on account of their DACA status.

During the pandemic many undocumented students and workers, including applicants and previous recipients of DACA status, have been illegible for government relief. The latest coronavirus relief package proposal unveiled by Senate Republicans on Monday will continue to exclude undocumented students from aid.

The administration’s latest move against DACA also leaves many immigrants fearing separation from their families. Many of those who are currently on the DACA program have children or partners who are citizens, and without a renewal of their status they face the prospect of being forcefully stripped away from their loved ones.

The latest attack comes little over a month after a Supreme Court ruling nominally protected DACA from the administration’s attacks. In June, the Supreme Court blocked the DHS’s plan to “immediately end” DACA in a 5-4 majority opinion. However, the majority opinion, authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, despite describing the DHS’s plan as “arbitrary and capricious,” rejected the move primarily on the basis of administrative mishandling. This meant that the Trump administration could revisit the issue and make a new attack on DACA as long as it followed the proper procedures.

At that time the WSWS warned:

“Far from using these cases as an opportunity to expand the struggle for democratic rights, the majority opinions are framed in such a way as to block the most reactionary aspects of the Trump administration’s policies in the narrowest possible fashion.”

With the Supreme Court’s limited administrative ruling opening the door for the fascistic Trump administration to ramp up its attacks, the DHS has wasted little time. Despite the fact that the ruling should have compelled a return to running the program as it had been in early 2017, the Los Angeles Times reported the government continued to reject applications in the days immediately following the decision. Since July 22, nearly a week before Wolf’s announcement, the DACA website declared that the program “is not accepting requests from individuals who have never before been granted deferred action under DACA.”

Under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic and with the crucial support of the Democratic Party and US legal system, the Trump administration continues its unrelenting assault on immigrants’ rights in the US. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Trump administration attempted to deport international students who were unable to attend in-person classes this fall, suspended applications for H1B work visas and Green Cards, a Supreme Court ruling that left asylum seekers with no right to habeas corpus or due process, and continued attacks on Chinese students.

The right of all immigrants regardless of the circumstance of their birth to full citizenship in any country, including full rights to education and work, must be defended. DACA recipients should not only have their status protected but should be given full citizenship rights immediately.

At least 735 COVID-19 deaths confirmed in US prison system

Sam Dalton

As of July 28, throughout the US incarceration system, including all federal and state-run prisons and jails, at least 735 inmates have died from COVID-19 and there have been over 82,000 confirmed cases. On any day in the US, there are estimated to be 2.3 million incarcerated individuals.

Approximately 12,000 cases were added in the last week alone, a 16 percent increase from the total on July 21. This is nearly double the worst week during the April peak of the virus and an increase of nearly 10,000 compared to the week of June 16.

The exponential growth of the infection and death-rates in prisons is intimately tied to COVID-19’s spread in the wider community. The states which have experienced the deadliest resurgences following deadly economic reopening overseen by Republican and Democratic governors have seen the highest number of deaths and infections in their prisons and jails.

In the last three days alone, as the state passed 450,000 infections overall, 10 inmates in Florida prisons died from COVID-19, bringing the state’s total to 46 prisoner deaths. At the Columbia Correctional Institute in Lake City at least three men have died. The Florida Department of Corrections refused to publicly recognize any inmate deaths before a local medical examiner leaked them to the News Service of Florida. Cynthia Cooper, whose husband is incarcerated at the facility, told the Tampa Bay Times, “I never thought I’d see the day when I was afraid of something more than him just being in prison. But it’s come to that.”

The accelerating crisis in the state is a product of the criminal response of state authorities to the virus. Despite a population of over 96,000 inmates, statewide only 43,272 COVID-19 tests have been administered since the beginning of the pandemic. Furthermore, health and prison experts’ recommendation that all non-violent and at-risk criminals be immediately released has been ignored. On April 2, Republican Governor and Trump acolyte Ron DeSantis responded to desperate pleas to reduce the prison population to slow the virus’ spread, stating, “I don’t see how in a time of pandemic, where people are on edge already, [that] releasing felons in society would make a whole lot of sense.”

The reluctance is undoubtedly tied to the profitability of Florida’s prison labor. Every year, 3,500 inmates in the state perform unpaid work, logging 17.7 million hours in the last five years and generating around $450 million in value according to the Florida Times-Union. This does not take into account the state’s thousands-strong share of the US’s “paid” prison workers who typically earn between $0.14 and $1.50 an hour.

In California, where there have now been over 475,000 confirmed coronavirus infections, prisons have also seen an intensifying death rate. The California Institute for Men in Chino has 1,047 confirmed cases and 19 deaths. While at the infamous San Quentin prison, at least 19 inmates have died from the virus, including 10 who were on death row. Despite Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s March 2019 moratorium on executions, the state has allowed the virus to do its dirty work.

In response to the outbreak at the prison, the state has converted a building at the prison into a 110-bed alternative care site. An external vendor has also been hired to give the prison a one-time deep clean. This is too little, too late. Of the prison’s 3,800 inmates, 2,185 have tested positive for the virus.

The hardest hit section of the prison system in the country is in Texas, which has seen over 100 deaths at just state-run facilities. The state now has over 400,000 confirmed cases, and in recent days revised its death count up 12 percent after changing its reporting. The federal prison at Fort Worth has also seen 12 deaths. State authorities continue to refuse to release more specific data on the numbers of deaths and infections at individual facilities.

Ohio, which now has at least 88,000 cases, is home to the Pickaway Correctional Institute, where 36 inmates have died from the virus. Also in the state, Marion Correction Institute has seen 13 deaths. Two other prisons in the state, Belmont Correctional Institute and Franklin Medical Center, have had over 10 deaths each. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP)-run Elkton Correction Institute, has also had 10 deaths. These deaths mostly occurred during the April/May peak. With the virus again surging in the state and daily cases now exceeding their April peak, a second spike in Ohio prison deaths is on the horizon.

Although the information coming out of prisons is often sparse due to heightened restrictions on visitation and phone access nationwide, it is clear that prisoners are beginning to fight back. On July 23, prisoners at the Whetstone Unit in Tucson, Arizona, staged a walkout following the spread of COVID-19 in the facility. At the Tucson facility, over 100 inmates have tested positive for the virus. Cases in the state surpassed 168,000 on Thursday.

In the past week, BOP facilities passed the grim milestone of 100 deaths. The federal prison system had over 129,000 inmates before the pandemic. Despite an order from Attorney General William Barr for the mass release of federal prisoners, the BOP has released just 7,000 inmates since the beginning of the pandemic. Similarly, well-publicized executive orders for prison releases from both Democratic and Republican governors have not resulted in necessary releases.

There are many reasons to believe the current figures are a huge underestimate of the actual toll of the virus. In one recorded incidence, a prison staff member died from COVID-related symptoms but was only tested post-mortem. Despite the positive result the death was not classified as a COVID-19 death. Across all facilities in the US, at least 59 prison staff have died from the virus.

There also seem to be huge statistical anomalies when states’ prison death-rates are compared. It remains unclear how, for example, the gulf between the death rates of New York and New Jersey is so large. These two adjacent states were among the hardest hit during the April/May peak, and while New Jersey has a death rate of 27 per 10,000 inmates, New York has just four per 10,000. This came despite Rikers Island Jail in New York City having the highest rate of infection for any defined population worldwide during April. Other states that were hit hard during the same period have death rates comparable to New Jersey; for example, Ohio and Michigan both have 18 deaths per 10,000 inmates.

The unabated spread of the virus in prisons is a violation of inmates’ basic rights to quality medical care and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. The vast majority of those incarcerated are non-violent and should never have seen the inside of a prison cell. Nonetheless, they now face a death sentence. The failure to take basic measures to fight against the virus in prisons has also allowed them to become vectors for the disease’s spread, leading to an incalculable acceleration and expansion of community transmission throughout the US.

These deaths have no innocent explanation. They are a product of the ruling class’ conscious subordination of human life to the profit system. In the case of prisons, the need for the continued incarceration of prison laborers, the use of prisons as a deterrent to keep the working class in check, and the deliberate decision to not provide adequate resources to combat the virus in prisons—as in the country at large—has led to otherwise preventable deaths. Without immediate emergency measures, thousands more lives both in and outside of prisons will be lost.

Report backing Johnson’s ending UK lockdown concludes: More “deaths and misery” are inevitable

Robert Stevens

Figures were released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that England had the “the highest levels of excess mortality in Europe” from January 3 (Week 1) to June 12 (Week 24) of the pandemic.

The ONS analysed all-cause mortality patterns during the first half of 2020 for 29 European countries. It found that although Spain and Italy had the highest “peaks” at one singular point, England endured the longest continuous period of excess deaths. The three countries with the highest cumulative excess mortality after England were Spain, Scotland, and Belgium.

The response from Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaking to the press in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, was to claim that his government had achieved a “massive success” in reducing the number of deaths. Even as he acknowledged a surge of cases in UK, which he described as coronavirus “bubbling up” in up to 30 areas across the UK, he boasted that “we’ve got it under a measure of control. The number of deaths are well, well down. But I have to tell you that we’re looking at a resurgence of the virus in some other European countries. You can see what’s been happening in the United States.”

Johnson wants everyone to look at what is happening everywhere but the UK, and to forget what happened over the past six months.

Behind his stonewalling are definite economic calculations. Mentioning the danger of a second wave, Johnson said this would have “real, real consequences, not just medical, but also for the economy. …”

The naked commercial concerns animating Johnson’s response to the pandemic are underscored by a document published Wednesday by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). The NIESR is funded by “government departments and agencies, the research councils, particularly the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), charitable foundations, the European Commission, and the private sector.”

The report "Living with covid-19: balancing costs against benefits in the face of the virus" by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research

“Living with covid-19: balancing costs against benefits in the face of the virus,” is published in the August edition of the National Institute Economic Review. It is authored by David Miles, a professor of financial economics at Imperial College Business School, a member, between May 2009 and September 2015, of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England and Chief UK Economist at Morgan Stanley from October 2004 to May 2009; Mike Stedman, of the RES Consortium; and Adrian Heald of the University of Manchester’s School of Medicine.

RES Consortium describes itself as a “Performance improvement organisation working in partnership with industry and the NHS [National Health Service].” Stedman was previously a “supply chain director for large FMCG [Fast-moving consumer goods] company working across Europe. Focus on real world data modelling, online systems, commissioning systems, online care pathways and business frameworks.” His CV notes 16 years at the Unilever conglomerate (revenue in 2019 nearly $52 billion), including being supply chain director at Unilever Turkey.

The study outlines the economic rationale for the Tory government’s ongoing policy of herd immunity—i.e., doing nothing to seriously combat the spread of the coronavirus.

The report addresses the March 23 lockdown, which Johnson was reluctantly forced to impose due to a massive public backlash at the escalating spread of the virus in Europe and the UK. Just days before the lockdown, leading epidemiologists, including Professor Neil Ferguson, warned that if a lockdown wasn’t put in place “in the order of 250,000 deaths” could take place in Britain, with up 500,000 deaths a possibility.

The paper’s preamble states bluntly, “This paper analyses the costs and benefits of lockdown policies in the face of COVID-19. What matters for people is the quality and length of lives and one should measure costs and benefits in terms of those things.”

With the Tory government already ditching the lockdown, “the paper considers policy options for the degree to which restrictions are eased.” It declares, “There is a need to normalise how we view COVID because its costs and risks are comparable to other health problems (such as cancer, heart problems, diabetes) where governments have made resource decisions for decades. The lockdown is a public health policy and we have valued its impact using the tools that guide health care decisions in the UK public health system.”

This section concludes, “The evidence suggests that the costs of continuing severe restrictions in the UK are large relative to likely benefits so that a substantial easing in general restrictions in favour of more targeted measures is warranted.”

Every mention of the lockdown in the report in accompanied by a statement about its grave economic costs in order to insist that there must never be another. One reads, “This [the UK lockdown] served both to slow the spread of the virus and to signal in a very clear way that people needed to change behaviours quickly; but it also generated great costs.”

The report adds, “But whether keeping such tight restrictions in place for three months (until restrictions began to be eased substantially at the end of June) was warranted, given the large costs, is very far from clear.”

Even as the need for any further national lockdown is rejected, the report is forced to acknowledge the effectiveness of lockdowns in halting the disease’s spread.

“New measured cases of the infection and of deaths ascribed to the virus were significantly lower within a few weeks of restrictions being introduced.” It adds, “The slowing in new infections and in deaths has been marked in all countries during late March and into April 2020, though the severity of restrictions and the timing of those restrictions differs.”

It also acknowledges, “While there are reasons to believe that the spread of the infection may have slowed short of a lockdown which kept most people at home, it remains highly likely that this level of restriction did bring the spread down faster than it otherwise would. …

“The fall in deaths soon after lockdowns is so clear across many countries [64 are cited] that it is very unlikely that those severe restrictions had no significant impact at all on lives lost.”

Despite this, in the section, “How effective was the lockdown in the UK?”, the authors state, “There is contradictory evidence on the effectiveness of the three-month lockdown strategy in the UK.”

They assert, “It is hard to be sure of the precise scale of the health benefits: they range from very few lives saved to a high of perhaps 450,000 lives saved (that is the difference between the 500,000 or so deaths projected by Ferguson et al…on the basis of no change in behaviour and the 50,000 or so deaths that might have resulted in the UK by early June 2020). Figures for lives saved in the UK at the extreme ends of that spectrum (near zero or as high as 450,000) seem implausible.”

This conclusion is inserted only to undermine the assessment of Ferguson’s team of researchers at Imperial College and others who backed its findings, as well as from the World Health Organisation, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis and the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics.

Miles, Stedman and Heald add that “estimates of net saved lives that are effectively zero…seems very unlikely.” But this is immediately followed by the declaration, “We set the lowest estimated net saved lives well above that and use (rather arbitrarily) a ‘lowest’ estimate of 20,000.”

This is simply nonsense. The authors’ admission that they plucked “rather arbitrarily” a figure of 20,000 lives saved by the lockdown (much closer to zero than a high of 450,000) is worthless from any scientific criterion. It reflects only their prejudice, rather than any actual research.

In calculating the cost of the lockdown, the authors use a formula called the “Quality-adjusted Life Year” (QALY). They note, “The guidelines in the UK…are that [National Health Service] treatments that are expected to increase life expectancy for a patient by one year (in quality of life adjusted years, QALYs) should cost no more than £30,000.”

What follows is a series of calculations and graphs in which the author state, “Our low-end estimate of the (narrowly defined) cost of the March to June lockdown was 9 per cent of GDP—a figure of £200 billion.” They conclude, “For every permutation of lives saved and GDP lost the costs of lockdown exceed the benefits. Even if lives saved are as high as 440,000, each of which means an extra ten years of quality adjusted life—and when the lost output (assumed to be a sufficient and comprehensive measure of all costs of the lockdown) is simply the likely shortfall in incomes in 2020—costs are still over 50 per cent higher than the benefits of a three month lockdown (benefits = £132 billion; costs = £200 billion).”

In backing a “more rapid easing of restrictions” in the coming months, the authors outline three possible scenarios in all of which mass deaths are contemplated—including a scenario that sees deaths “steadily increase back up to levels seen at the height of the UK pandemic.”

This is justified by the ghoulish statement, “These are macabre thought experiments and many will feel uneasy at such calculations. But there are implications in terms of deaths and misery on both sides of the ledger from any policy. To think such comparisons are distasteful is to not face that reality.”

What this number-crunching in fact signifies is that the value of life is determined solely by the interests of the major corporations. If profits are to be made, then the population must get back to work. If lives are lost, including thousands more elderly people, then so be it.

What the report does not say is that the real cost of the lockdown was shouldered by the very working people who are now expected to get back to generating profit. The major corporations were handed over hundreds of billions in loan guarantees, even as the taxpayers footed the bill for 80 percent of the wages of workers employed by these corporations.

Now that this smash-and-grab raid has been accomplished, the ruling class, and its academic lackeys, rail against the “cost” of the lockdown—but only those related to saving the lives of working people. Naturally, if it cost £30,000, £300,000, or £3 million to save the life of just one of Britain’s super-rich oligarchs, this would be considered money well-spent.

Record heatwave in Siberia and the burning danger of climate change

Daniel Jakob

The year 2020 is the hottest in Siberia since measurements began 130 years ago. Russian cities across the polar circle recorded record temperatures. In Nizhnyaya Pesha, a temperature of 30 degrees Celsius (86°F) was measured and in Khatanga, which usually has a daytime temperature of around freezing at this time of year, the temperature reached 25°C (77°F) on May 22. The previous record was 12°C (54°F).

In Verkhoyansk, a Russian city in eastern Siberia, the situation is even more extremer. The small city in the state of Sakha was considered the coldest city in the world. But Twitter posts of meteorologist Mika Rantanen have announced that at a hefty 38°C (100°F), Verkhoyansk has set a record high temperature. Records have been kept since 1885. At least 11 other Arctic weather stations recorded temperatures over 30°C.

According to announcement of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the May surface temperatures in parts of Siberia were up to 10 degrees Celsius above average. Freja Vamborg, a leading scientist at C3S, said: “It is undoubtedly an alarming sign, but not only May was unusually warm in Siberia. The whole of winter and spring had repeated periods of higher-than-average surface air temperatures.”

Scientists explain that the record heatwave in Siberia is an extreme consequence of global climate change. Martin Stendel of the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the uncommon temperatures in May would occur once in 100,000 years without anthropogenic contributions to global warming.

According to geomorphologist Anna Irrgang of the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, extreme weather occurrences in this region are not uncommon. What is novel is the frequency of their occurrence. Mika Rantanen likewise warned that the Arctic is warming three-to-four times faster than the global average. Climate scientist Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research stated: “The novel aspect of this ‘phenomenon’ is that the warming of Siberia is not a short-term observation and as such cannot be explained by the wind system of the jetstream, which can last one or two weeks, but not for five months.”

The thawing of the permafrost ground layer is especially critical. Permafrost covers about half of the Russian landmass and has been warming for some time. A comparative study of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost showed in 2019 that across the board, the temperatures at 10 meters depth rose on average 0.3°C from 2007 to 2016.

Siberia comes in at the high end: There the temperature of the frozen ground measured at individual bore holes warmed 0.9°C. In the Antarctic, the researchers measured an average rise of 0.37°C. According to experts, regions with permafrost, especially in Alaska, Canada and Siberia, are more strongly affected by climate change than are other parts of the world. Based on statements by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the temperatures of permafrost have risen to record levels in the last 40 years, and that after millions of years of maintaining freezer-like temperatures.

The consequences for mankind and nature are dramatic. For years, wooden houses in the east Siberian Yakutsk have been sinking into the softening ground or slowly falling over. On the Yamal peninsula, reindeer have begun bogging down in swamps. The herders complain that they no longer know how to move their animals from winter to summer pastures. In Scandinavian Lapland, reindeer have begun starving because ice, instead of snow that they can scrape aside with their hooves, has prevented them from accessing nourishment.

In December, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on the unusual warmth: “Some of our cities were built north of the Arctic Circle, on the permafrost. If it begins to thaw, you can imagine what consequences it would have. It’s very serious.”

This, however, is hypocritical. The fact is that the Russian government is doing almost nothing for climate protection, but rather, like its international rivals, sees the warming of the Arctic as a strategic opportunity to access raw materials and open new trade routes. In August 2019, as part of its new “scramble for the Arctic,” the Russian government launched a floating nuclear power plant in the Arctic Sea, raising the danger of a nuclear catastrophe.

The above-average warming in Siberia is also being blamed for the catastrophic oil spill near the city of Norilsk. This is just one more example of how Russia disregards climate protection for the sake of profit. On May 29, an accident at a power plant belonging to the mining company Nornickel near the northern Siberian city led to a massive oil slick. Some 21,000 tons of diesel were released into the environment and contaminated the regional water system, prompting the declaration of a state of emergency.

Another concerning result of the warming is that thawing permafrost will release huge quantities of greenhouse gases that would contribute to further warming. As such, these heat waves are catalyzers for climate change. Among other gases, methane, an exceedingly potent greenhouse gas, would be set free. “Viewed over 100 years, methane affects the climate about 34 times more strongly than CO2, and 86 times more strongly viewed over 20 years,” said Guido Grosse of the Helmholtz Center.

Not only carbon dioxide and methane captured in permafrost will be released, but also the neurotoxin mercury. The polar regions of the Earth harbor huge quantities of heavy metals, transported there on wind currents. Chemical reactions with bromide salts “scrub” the poisons from the atmosphere and deposit them on the surface.

This is how mercury, over thousands of years, has accumulated in the marine food chain, first in aquatic animals and then in seals and polar bears and ultimately to humans who rely on fishing for sustenance.

This is demonstrable in blood samples of seal species that live in the Arctic. How fast this accumulation occurs will depend on how fast the climate warms in the next years. “Predictions range from 30 percent up to 99 percent of permafrost will thaw before the turn of the century. What would take thousands to millions of years in the natural cycle is now happening in a human lifetime,” said Paul Schuster of the US Geological Service.

As a result of the record-setting temperatures, wildfires have consumed hundreds of thousands of hectares of Siberian forest. It is common for farmers to burn their fields in spring to clear vegetation, but a combination of high temperatures and strong winds stoked some fires out of control. Thus, on June 27, an area of 1.4 million hectares, an area larger than Austria, burned. In the previous year, according to estimations of the environmental organization Greenpeace, 150,000 square kilometers burned, an area twice the size of Ireland. For weeks on end the residents of many Siberian cities suffered toxic smoke.

The problem of the subjugation of climate protection to profit interest is not limited to Russia. It is the trademark of all capitalist governments. In order to fast-track construction projects and supposedly to create jobs, President Trump signed an executive order on June 5 to loosen the environmental restriction in the US. Another example are the tragic wildfires in the Ukraine that on April 4 came within 1 kilometer of the infamous Chernobyl nuclear plant, massively raising the levels of radiation near the fires for the first half of April.

Natural catastrophes caused by climate change and reckless destruction of the environment by big business are occurring ever more frequently. The record temperatures and forest fires in Siberia follow just a half-year behind the catastrophic fires in Australia.

At the beginning of the year, the WSWS warned in an important statement: “The last decade was marked by the continued and increasingly rapid destruction of the environment. Scientists have issued ever more dire warnings that without urgent and far-reaching action on a global scale, the effects of global warming will be devastating and irreversible.”

The only hope of limiting global warming and putting an end to the reckless exploitation of nature lies in the fight of the international working class against capitalism. Only by means of a socialist planned economy, focused on human need, rather than private profits and national control of resources and raw materials, can the dangers of climate change be surmounted.

Japan raising tensions with Beijing in the East China Sea

Ben McGrath

As the United States accelerates its war drive against China, the government of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is similarly ramping up its own confrontation against Beijing. On July 22, Tokyo denounced Beijing for sending vessels near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea for 100 straight days, longer than any time in the past. The islands claimed by China, but administered and controlled by Japan are located in strategic sea lanes. Chinese ships actually entered waters claimed by Japan for a total of eleven days.

Tokyo also announced on July 18 that it would immediately scramble fighter jets to respond to any launch of Chinese planes from the latter’s airbase in Fujian Province. Previously, Japan only scrambled fighters when Chinese planes approached airspace claimed by Tokyo. However, Chinese war planes operating in the region had previously flown out of Zhejiang Province, a greater distance from the disputed islands. From Fujian to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, it is a 20 minute flight, while it takes approximately 25 minutes for Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force (ASDF) planes to reach the islands from their base in Naha, Okinawa.

Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force (Credit: Destroyer Squadron 15)

Japan will also now send four fighter jets for every Chinese fighter rather than two. In addition, ASDF planes are flying daily patrols over the East China Sea. All of this raises the risk of a military encounter occurring that could escalate into a larger conflict.

Tokyo is attempting to portray its measures as defensive. “The repeated activities are extremely serious. Japan Coast Guard patrol ships have issued warnings and we have protested to the Chinese side through diplomatic channels over and over again,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga stated at a news conference last week. Tokyo also claimed that in the 2018 fiscal year, Japan scrambled jets against Chinese military planes 638 times and 675 times over the same period ending this past March.

In another sign of rising tensions, Defense Minister Taro Kono on June 23 took the rare step of announcing the nationality of a Chinese submarine supposedly detected near waters off Japan’s Amami-Oshima Island, which is home to missile batteries. The submarine did not enter Japanese waters and Kono described it as moving “in the direction of China.”

In deciding to announce the submarine’s nationality, Kono stated, “In addition to conditions in the East and South China seas, we’ve seen various events (regarding China), including its rapid military budget increase, rising tensions with India and pressure on Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems,’ so we need to infer clearly the intention of the Chinese Communist Party amid these situations.”

Japan’s annual defense white paper released on July 14 accused China of “continuing to attempt to alter the status quo in the East China Sea and the South China Sea” and for the first time describing China’s actions as “relentless.”

An anonymous expert on China in the Japanese government told the South China Morning Post, “It is easy to see a strong determination on the part of the Chinese to change the status quo surrounding the Senkaku islands. This is a long-term strategy, but the present situation is an opportunity for Beijing because the United States, Japan and other countries in the region are focused on dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.”

The US and Japan, however, bear primary responsibility for upending the status quo in the East China Sea. Under US President Obama, longstanding, but minor territorial disputes between China and various other countries in the region were inflamed and turned into pressure points on Beijing.

In 2012, while the Democratic Party of Japan was in office, Tokyo “nationalized” the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands by purchasing them from their private owner, which sharply raised tensions with Beijing.

Furthermore, Tokyo has militarized the region in the past five years, dispatching a radar station to Yonaguni Island and constructing bases with missile batteries on Ishigaki, Miyako, and Amami-Oshima, all of which surround the Senkakus/Diaoyus.

The statements from Tokyo and Washington are dripping with hypocrisy. China is regularly denounced for supposedly attempting to prevent “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, with the US conducting operations in waters claimed by China since 2015 under the Obama administration. When Chinese vessels or aircraft sail near Japanese waters, however, it is deemed a threat.

Last week, warships from the US, Japan, Australia, and India (the Quad—Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) held co-ordinated naval war games in the region. The US conducted exercises in the Philippine Sea with Japan and Australia, which neighbors the South China Sea, while also holding joint exercises with India near the Malacca Strait, a key sea lane and “choke point” for shipping.

Patrick Cronin, the Asia-Pacific security chair at the Hudson Institute, stated: “The international naval exercises underway in the Indo-Pacific are just the latest demonstration of India, Australia, and Japan shedding prior inhibitions about multilateral military maneuvers.” In other words, the three countries are more and more falling into line with the US war drive in the region against China.

Washington has also perpetuated the lie that Beijing is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic by releasing the virus from a Wuhan laboratory; provocatively ordered the closure of China’s Houston consulate with unproven claims of Chinese spying; backed India in its recent border dispute with China; and drawn closer to Taiwan, threatening to overturn the “One China” policy that formally recognizes the island as a part of China.

The danger of conflict breaking out is growing. Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the case for war with China, stating “we can never go back to the status quo.” The “old paradigm of blind engagement with China” had to be replaced with a new strategy in which the “free world” ends China’s “new tyranny,” he declared.

Washington and Tokyo mix their condemnations of Beijing with professions of concern for regions like Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Their aim has nothing to do with human rights, but is to isolate Beijing and prepare for war as a means of subordinating and undermining a potential rival and deflecting from the immense social and economic crises they face at home.

Millions face economic and social disaster as Wall Street celebrates

Jerry White

The United States economy contracted at a staggering annual rate of 32.9 percent between April and June, the sharpest fall in US history. The actual three-month decline, of 9.5 percent, dwarfed the worst single quarter since such statistics were first collected more than 70 years ago.

It would be difficult to overstate the scale of the economic calamity that has devastated the lives of tens of millions of working people and their families. CNBC noted, “Not the Great Depression nor the Great Recession nor any of the more than three dozen economic slumps over the past two centuries have ever caused such a sharp drain over so short a period of time.”

The only comparable economic disruptions in modern history are those caused by world war or societal collapse. If one calculates the overall drop in US GDP for the first six months of 2020, it comes to 14.75 percent—roughly the amount of the decline in the Russian economy in 1993, the worst of the depression years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The claims of the Trump administration about a “V-shaped” recovery have no more validity than the US president’s ravings about treating coronavirus by swallowing bleach. There are significant signs that after an easing of the downward curve in June, due to widespread state-ordered reopenings, the ensuing resurgence of the pandemic means a new plunge.

On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that 1.43 million new claims for unemployment benefits were filed last week, the 19th straight week that new claims have exceeded one million. After declining for months, new claims have risen over the last two weeks.

The number of workers claiming continual unemployment benefits also rose from 16.1 million to 17 million for the week ending July 18. In addition, 830,000 new claims were filed for the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which covers self-employed, gig workers and others who do not qualify for tradition jobless benefits.

Under these conditions, the $600-a-week federal supplement to state unemployment benefits is running out today for an estimated 20 million workers. Overnight, millions will see their incomes cut by two-thirds, from an average of $921 a week in May to about $321 a week. In some states, the theft of this lifeline will be even worse. In Oklahoma, jobless aid will be cut by 93 percent to $44 a week.

It is a measure of the precarious situation American workers faced even before the pandemic, that the weekly supplemental assistance and the paying out of a one-time $1,200-per-person “stimulus” check led to a 45 percent increase in personal income in the second quarter. Seventy percent of those who returned to work in June suffered an income loss.

Last week, the moratorium on evictions expired for about 18 million renters—more than a third of the 44 million total US renter households—who live in buildings with mortgages backed by the federal government. With rent bills accumulated over the last four months now due, housing advocates predict a “tsunami” of evictions, with half a million households in Los Angeles alone threatened.

Millions in the US are also going hungry. According to a US Census Bureau survey, food insecurity last week reached its highest reported level since May, with almost 30 million Americans reporting they had not had enough to eat at some point in the seven days through July 21.

After handing trillions to Wall Street and major corporations through the bipartisan CARES Act signed by President Trump in late March, the US Congress is denying the most basic necessities to millions of people. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are deliberately using the specter of poverty, homelessness and starvation as a means to force reluctant workers back into dangerous factories and workplaces in order to resume the flow of corporate profits.

While the economy collapses and tens of millions face hunger, homelessness and destitution, the upper crust of American society have never had it so good. Fueled by the massive injection of money from the Federal Reserve, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by 42 percent since its low point in late March, and the Nasdaq by 54 percent. Wall Street largely shrugged off the news that the US economy shrank by $1.8 trillion in the second quarter, with the Dow off slightly while the Nasdaq was up.

Even as the death toll surpasses 155,000 in the US and the pandemic rages out of control in Florida, Texas, California and other states, the ruling class is gorging itself. US billionaires, whose wealth increased by 80.6 percent between 2010 and 2020, are seeing another windfall, with another 20 percent increase—a rise of at least $565 billion—since the pandemic began.

The world’s richest man, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has seen his net worth rise $74 billion since the beginning of 2020 to an estimated $189.3 billion. On a single day last week, his personal fortune rose $13 billion after a positive Wall Street forecast led to a rise of his 57 million shares of Amazon stock to $3,232.49 per share. Bezos, who could become the world’s first trillionaire at this rate, is now personally worth more than the market valuation of giants such as Exxon Mobil Corp., Nike Inc. and McDonald’s Corp.

Due to the $200 billion increase in the value of Tesla stock—selling at $1,487.49 per share at the end of the trading day on Thursday—Elon Musk’s net worth has tripled since the pandemic, pushing past the $74 billion mark and making him the fifth-richest person in the world. On July 21, Musk qualified for a stock option payout worth a record $2.1 billion, his second jackpot since May due to Tesla’s 275 percent rise in share values this year.

Both Bezos and Musk have been at the forefront of the drive to force workers to work in their warehouses and factories without basic protections, even as the number of workers who die and are infected in their facilities continues to rise. There is a brutal logic to this: the working class must be forced to pump out the profits needed to pay for the massive increase in government and corporate debt that has been used to fuel the irrational stock market bubble and their personal payouts.

The billionaires have escaped to their private islands, luxury apartments and yachts while the US records one COVID-19 death every minute, and the vast majority of the population faces unprecedented social distress. Last Saturday night, the super-rich partied in The Hamptons, less than 100 miles from New York City, where nearly 23,000 people have perished from the deadly disease. Partygoers spent between $2,500 and $25,000 per person for a concert featuring Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, “who, in addition to running one of the largest and most powerful investment banks in the world,” CNN reported, “is also a part-time electronic dance DJ who goes by the name D-sol while spinning records at clubs in New York and Miami.”

The social catastrophe produced by the pandemic is not a failure of modern medicine, but a failure of capitalism as a social order. COVID-19 did not pose a challenge unfamiliar to medical science; on the contrary, it had been predicted for decades and the necessary countermeasures studied and refined. But the outbreak of the pandemic posed a challenge that the profit system proved incapable of addressing in a humane and rational way. Capitalism has led the working class, and all humanity, into disaster.

The first half of 2020 was characterized by the incompetent, negligent and criminal response to the pandemic by the ruling class. The second half will be dominated by the response of the working class in the US and internationally. Millions of workers, including teachers opposing the reckless rush to reopen schools, are coming into direct political battle against the Trump administration and both capitalist parties. This struggle must be armed with a clear understanding that the protection of lives and livelihoods requires a revolutionary struggle to expropriate the private fortunes of the super-rich, establish workers’ power and carry out the socialist reorganization of economic life to meet the needs of the vast majority, not the wealthy few.

‘Rotational’ Deployment of US Troops: Implications for Regional Security

Sandip Kumar Mishra

On 21 July 2020, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that the Pentagon is considering “readjustments” to US’ military presence across the world. They are seeking a “rotational” deployment of forces for “strategic flexibility,” and would like to discontinue permanently stationing them in any one location. The Wall Street Journal had reported just a few days prior that the US Department of Defense had been pondering this option since at least December 2019. The US announcement in June 2020 to withdraw around 10,000 troops from Germany could be part of the new plan. Although the US Congress has proposed in the 2021 National Defense Authorisation Act that troops would be reduced only if it does not adversely affect US national interests, and is based on sufficient consultation with allies, the Trump administration’s intent is quite obvious.

The US readjustment plan is justified on the grounds that it is meant to deal with an ‘assertive’ China, who, apart from its dubious role in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, is trying to take advantage of the global crisis and change the status-quo in the South China Sea, East China Sea, Hong Kong, China-India border, and so on.

In fact, over the past few weeks, the US has made several strong pronouncements along with a few moves to demonstrate resolve in response to China’s assertiveness. However, this show of resolve cannot be separated from the Pentagon’s proposal for ‘rotational’ redeployment of forces. At least two important questions must be asked. One, does the readjustment plan means more, or less, US  commitment to counterbalance China in the region? Two, will the plan be beneficial or detrimental to emerging collective counter-balancing efforts against China?

The moorings and unfolding of the readjustment plan reveal it to be an abandonment of the US commitment to allies across the globe. Since he became president, Donald Trump has insisted on allies paying more for the presence of US troops in their countries. He seems incapable of appreciating the US’ long and multilayered relations with these allies, and has been asking for an unreasonable increase in cost-sharing, failing which, as per his threats, US troops would be withdrawn.

Although the plan only suggests moving US troops from one location to another, this will largely mean their partial or full withdrawal from current locations. It is important to note that it will not be easy to re-locate these troops to other areas without formal agreements with new host countries.

This will lead to a further reduction in trust between the US and its time-tested security allies in various regions. These allies would be concerned about the Trump administration’s unilateral decision-making on the reduction or readjustment of troops that were initially stationed in these countries through bilateral agreements. For them, it will mean a US that is not as committed to their security needs as before. As per a recent survey by the Pew Research Centre, most US allies find the US under Donald Trump less reliable. New US partners will not be able to ignore this perspective as they work to forge long-term strategic relations. If the US can unilaterally dilute commitments to old allies, it may do so with new partners as well.

In such a scenario, any emerging collective contestation with China will ultimately be weakened. US troops were deployed to partner countries in the region as a bulwark against challenges to the status quo. The US role in maintaining this status quo was operationalised by fully committing to protect a few frontline states, rather than promising to protect all. The new strategy to dilute the commitment to a select few by spreading it thin without much specificity or binding security guarantees is, in effect, a dilution of the commitment. The US is basically trying to delegate to others its primary role as counterbalance to China, and offer non-committal security assistance in a crisis situation. Washington thus intends to play second-fiddle by renouncing its erstwhile role as the prime security guarantor.

This is indeed a decisive time for international politics. China is resolutely revising the regional order, and the existing superpower is trying to delegate its own work to other frontline states. The US plan for the readjustment of its troops must be seen in this context—that it essentially means an abandonment of the country’s commitment to regional and global security.

Big Google and Facebook are Watching You!

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

Today, the Internet is everywhere. Well over half of the planet’s entire population either likes to be on the Internet or has to rely on the web for business, work, and social engagement. People read the news, send notes to loved ones, birthday cards, do their job – increasingly via Skype and Zoom. Others seek answers to an urgent question. More than four billion people see the Internet as central to the way how they communicate, learn, study, go shopping, participate in the business, and organise themselves socially as well as politically.

Among the big five or what the French like to call GAFMA – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple – two corporations stand out: Google and Facebook. They are euphemistically called “social media”. In fact, they are hardly social. Instead, they are profit-making multinational corporations. In some countries, Facebook has become synonymous with the Internet – a dream of every monopolist. Simultaneously, Google occupies the largest share of all online searches. Search engines are a crucial source of information, and monopolist Google accounts for around 90% of all searches. These two monopolists complement each other. One holds the monopoly of Internet searches while the other holds the monopoly over social engagement.

As much as we like Google and Facebook, these Internet platforms come at a substantial cost. Both corporations apply what a recent Amnesty International report describes as a “surveillance-based business model”. It turns people – users – into sellable products who are sold to advertisers. Facebook and Google users get free services but are sold for a profit. It follows what the economists say – “There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”. This means someone has to pick up the tab.

In the case of Facebook and Google, it is the advertisers who pay Facebook and Google to provide the services many like and rely on. In the language of managerialist CEOs, it is “we don’t monetize the things we create, we monetize users”. Click on to Facebook and Google, and you instantly become a product to be sold.

To perfect their business model, Facebook and Google seek to know as much about their product –you – as possible to sell advertisers what they want, namely a cohort for targeted marketing. It is the opposite of Coca Cola’s marketing. Advertisers don’t want what to target a massive amount of people who don’t use their product. To those, Coca ads are useless – a waste of money for Coca Cola.

Instead, advertisers want to target their ads more precisely. As a consequence of this system, a minute after you have searched for baby food on Google or Facebook, for example, the first ad for baby food comes to you. This is how it works. Except that Facebook and Google have created a gigantic surveillance apparatus to spy on their customers to be able to sell to advertisers what they most want. And this is where the problem comes in.

Facebook and Google collect a huge amount of data on what we search, what we look at, where we go on the net, who we talk to, what we say and write, what we read, what we buy, etc. This is not just an intrusion into the lives of billions of people globally, but an outright assault on privacy. The abuse of privacy is part – actually “the” core – of Facebook and Google’s business model. It engineers profits.

One of the most noted and perhaps most severe cases remains Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica. The scandal involved data from 87 million people’s Facebook profiles. These were harvested and used to micro-target and manipulate people for political campaigning. It was the application of Facebook’s business model to the political advertisements that supported Donald Trump.

Much of this can occur because Facebook and Google operate in a still mostly unregulated area or as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt once said, “the world’s most ungoverned space.” So much for the neoliberal myth that business is drowning in red tape. For Facebook and Google, there is no tape, never mind red tape.

Lacking regulation and oversight, Facebook and Google became giants. Google makes 84% and Facebook makes 98% of their profits from advertising. Appropriately, both corporations should be called marketing corporations and not social media. On the Internet, Facebook and Google hold a duopoly – a world that sounds so much nicer than what they really are: monopolies. Again, and again, reality disproves neoliberalism’s claim – there is a free market. In the world of Facebook and Google, there is no free market. To them, neoliberalism is nothing but a useful ideology to con the public, great public relations – nothing more.

Typically for monopolists, Facebook and Google have cartelised social networking and searching the Internet. Facebook moves towards the three billion-member margin, while Google runs 90% of all searches. For many, without Facebook and Google, there would be no Internet. To perfect their system, both corporations increasingly rely on state of the art artificial intelligence (AI). Additionally, both are serious hoarders when it comes to collecting and storing data. Facebook and Google hold very serious data vaults furnished by a speedy decline in the cost of data storage.

Beyond AI and data hoarding, Facebook and Google are ready to apply their monopoly to the next two Internet frontiers: the Internet of things (IoT) as well as understanding (read: entering) the human brain. In the not too distant future, Facebook’s Portal and Google’s Home Assistant will be able to link your iPad to your phone, your TV, your fridge, your heating system, and your automatic sprinklers. To pay for all this, Facebook has moved into a new global currency called Libra. In other words, your money is no longer safe and nor is your health. Facebook has been given access to patient data in the UK already. These are only the things we know about. But as Donald Rumsfeld who once said,

“there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know”.

In other words, there is an awful lot we do not know about Facebook and Google. Just as the author of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff says about Facebook and Google, “they know everything about us; we know almost nothing about them.” The same could be said about the CIA, Gestapo, KGB, MI5, NSA, Stasi, etc.

Facebook and Google also hoard metadata. This is data about data. For example, the data your computer saves behind each picture you store: date, time, location, etc. For Facebook and Google, this includes email recipients, location records, and the timestamp on emails and photos. In other words, Facebook and Google know about the juicy photos you received from your partner last night! The myth of privacy is only for those who still believe sending something via the Internet is not like sending a postcard – everyone can read it.

It is also for those who mistakenly believe “I have nothing to hide!” IT security experts like to reply, “give me your credit card and pin number and drop your pants”. Of course, we have all have something to hide. Private security experts talk about rings of privacy we have around us. These privacy rings become successively more private, the closer they become.

Much of this has very serious implications. The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights suggests that when Facebook and Google analysed metadata, they create insights into people’s intimate behaviour, social relationships, private preferences, and identity. Unlike the CIA, Gestapo MI5, and Stasis, they are not so interested in your as a petit-bourgeois revolutionary, but as a consumer. And for that, it is helpful to predict patterns of behaviour. Facebook and Google know that you need contraceptives before you know it.

To understand our sexual identity, political views, personality traits, or consumption patterns, Facebook and Google use sophisticated algorithmic models. As the aforementioned, Eric Schmidt says, “we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”. In that the old PR dream comes true: we cannot tell you what to think, but we can tell you what to think about. We make you think about Pizzagate and Hillary Clinton’s child pornography ring, and you vote Trump! It may not be that simple for some people, but propaganda has always worked for some. Beyond that always lurks the intrusion into privacy, violating three basic principles:

1) the freedom from intrusion into our private lives;

2) the right to control information about ourselves; and

3) the right to a space in which we can freely express our identities.

The surveillance-based business model of Google and Facebook undercuts each one of these three elements. The fact that Facebook and Google are harvesting, analysing, and most importantly, monetisation our data remains absolutely central to their business model. This has a grave impact on our three privacy rights. Not surprisingly, the above mentioned UN commissioner emphasises that Facebook and Google’s analytical power of data-driven technology carries very serious risks for people and societies. This can hardly be overestimated.

For Facebook and Google, this colonisation of privacy remains imperative. Facebook and Google use fine-grained, sub-conscious and personalised algorithmic persuasion technologies which significantly impact on the cognitive autonomy of individuals and their right to form opinions and take independent decisions. Machine learning is now able to scan Instagram posts for signs of depression more reliably than human reviewers. Facebook told advertisers, it could judge when teenagers were feeling insecure, worthless, or needed a confidence boost. Link this to TikTok, and you realise that they know more about your teenage daughter than you do.

Teenagers might like to appear on TikTok and Facebook, but that is likely to lead to social isolation. Facebook, despite the promises of Mark Zuckerberg, easily leads people to become isolated from one another as each individual engages with their own highly personalised experience of Facebook. This increases as Facebook provides information that is ever more uniquely tailored to them based on algorithmically driven profiling.

Such tailoring can easily manipulate people’s political opinions. It is the micro-targeting of political messaging, which is able to limit people’s freedom. Paradoxically, the more people express themselves on Facebook; the more Facebook creates and fosters a worldview that is actually inhospitable to pluralistic political engagement. It creates echo-chambers and polarises people into an us-vs.-them groups. These are rabbit holes of toxic content.

On the one hand, Facebook has already admitted that it is intentionally making people addictive. On the other hand, it systematically privileges extreme content, including conspiracy theories, misogyny, accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation, as well as racism. This keeps people on their platforms for as long as possible. The sensational eliminates the rational. Perhaps Facebook more than Google, spreads anti-refugee sentiment, for example. It fosters anti-refugee sentiment online. This can easily lead to hate crimes. It is not surprising to see that in many countries and, in poll after poll, people overestimate the level of foreigners in their country. This was to be expected because of Facebook and Google’s algorithm privilege false and incendiary content.

In sum, their unique position as the two prime gatekeepers to the Internet has allowed Facebook and Google to have a significant influence over people. People are more or less stuck with two monopolists because for many leaving Facebook and Google is no longer a realistic option. Even when this means that Facebook and Google have quietly erased privacy, the unavoidable conclusion is that Facebook and Google can afford to abuse privacy because people have no choice but to accept their dictate.

This phenomenon is known as network effect – the more users a platform has, the more valuable it becomes. The value of Facebook and Google is undeniable. In the case of Facebook, it is even worse. Many people join Facebook because their friends are on Facebook. This makes it harder for them to leave. At a corporate level, Facebook and Google have created an area surrounding them in which competitors can no longer take root. It kills new entrees, and it kills competition. This is known as Facebook and Google’s kill zone.

As a fig leaf, the state can never grow tired of pretending to uphold one of neoliberalism’s fundamental ideologies, the free market. The liberal state also pretends to protect individuals. As a consequence, in June 2019, for example, the US Federal Trade Commission levied a record $5bn penalty against Facebook. At this time, Facebook was valued at $140bn. In other words, it is a fine of 3% of Facebook’s value – it’s a bit like a $3 speeding fine to ordinary people. Not surprisingly, when the Mickey Mouse fine was announced, Facebook’s share price went up – perhaps because the FTC did not impose a significant enough fine. A $3 speeding ticket is not a meaningful fine.

Even more laughable was a French court’s €50 million ($58 million) fine against Google. Google is a multinational corporation with a net worth of $280bn. A $50m fine translates into 50,000,000. Google’s $280bn represents 280,000,000,000. Put differently and not to confuse millions with billions; the French fine represents one 5,600^th of Goggles value. Rest assured, Google was shaking with laughter. Inconsequential fines like these tell corporations one thing: carry on! There is no corporate criminality.

Fines against corporations of the size of quantum particles for which you need to Hadron Collider to find them in their corporate reports are possible, in part, because powerful lobbying has made these corporations untouchable. Corporate lobbying assures that Facebook and Google pay next to no taxes – unlike us – but it also assures such corporations that they get off the hook easily.

Like many other corporations, Facebook and Google run extensive corporate lobbying operations. This is part of the business just as it is for the Mafia to pay off a police officer or judge or both. Google spent more money than any other company to lobby the EU, followed by Microsoft, Shell and Facebook. In 2018, Google spent $21.2 million in lobbying the US Government (up 17.6%). By comparison, Facebook had spent $12.6 million (up 9.6%).

Apart from this, Facebook and Google also engage in propaganda – or public relations as it is called nowadays. Propaganda just sounds bad. As the Godfather of US public relations, Edwards Bernays once said,

When I came back to the United States … “propaganda” got to be a bad word because the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other words, so we found the words “public relations”.

To make its “corporate propaganda work” (truth) or “engage in public relations” (PR-talk), Facebook and Google fund a wide range of think tanks to bolster their arguments and to make these arguments public. For example, both corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tanks foster the argument that tech companies cannot be regulated – utter nonsense, but it works.

In the end, two multinational corporations virtually run the Internet as monopolists raking in tremendous profits. The business model they use turns users into products. These are then sold to advertisers. Best of all, we are made to believe that these corporations are social media. In reality, they are monopolists that have made serious inroads into people’s privacy.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, this will only get worse. AI is most likely to advance the fastest and furthest on Facebook and Google. Both have the funding and, more importantly, the drive (read: profits) to push AI. Once they have linked AI to IoT (the Internet of things), Facebook and Google might become not only more powerful but also more indispensable. With that, an all-new Super-Google-Facebook-Big-Brother will be watching you!